Ashton Sims had arranged everything with quiet care, ordering champagne for his French author, and treating him with the utmost courtesy. Guy Mollinet demonstrated at once that he spoke quite passable English, but Ashton chose to lace the conversation with French, to show Mollinet his fluency in the language, and Julietta’s as well.

Jane watched Julietta, dressed in a lilac satin dress with a low décolleté, flirt with Guy Mollinet and she observed how easily he seemed to let her reel him in. Most of what she said to him Jane was unable to understand, but Julietta appeared quite unconcerned about this and hardly looked in her direction. The goal of Signóra Sims seemed to be to seduce the author, at least to the point where he would agree to sell his work to Kirkwall & Sims, and to forget about everything and everyone else.

Although this was troubling, Jane resolved not to feel any jealousy. Mollinet, aged about fifty, was not in the least handsome. His mouth was sensual and his hands very fine, but Jane couldn’t imagine that Julietta was attracted to him. What she was doing was play-acting. It was play-acting of a very convincing kind, but Jane knew that it was not real and she suspected that Ashton knew it, too.

Ashton explained to Jane that Mollinet’s novel had for its principal setting the Paris Morgue. ‘The novel reminds us,’ said Ashton, ‘that this is the place to which we all come in time. In Paris, it is a public place and the dead are laid out for inspection behind a glass partition for the living to gawp at. So what a profoundly enabling and original setting this makes for a book! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other French writers don’t try to steal it and make it their own, and I think it will be read by thousands in an English translation.’

‘What story does it tell?’ asked Jane. ‘I do think Miss Austen understood the importance of story so very well, didn’t she, Ashton? For what is the impact of any setting, even one as macabre and original as a morgue, compared to it? All we beg to know is will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr Darcy or not? Will Marianne Dashwood be betrayed by Mr Willoughby? Compared to these questions, everything else pales, doesn’t it?’

‘You are right, of course,’ said Ashton. ‘And we publishers are ever beseeching our authors to hook their readers with mysteries and unknowings, and remarkably few understand how to do this. But Monsieur Mollinet tells a marvellous story: to escape a murderous lover, a young woman feigns death and is put on show at the morgue – a place the vile man is in the habit of visiting every Wednesday afternoon, to gloat over his victims.

‘Cold water is sprayed upon the bodies, to keep them from decaying too fast. The heroine of the story has to endure this without moving for several hours. And of course she has to starve herself, to appear emaciated and dead. All this is made possible by her connivance with the Keeper of the Morgue, who places an iron cage over her chest, so that her breathing is concealed. He falls in love with her, of course, and helps her to take up her life again. Then she’s persuaded by the Keeper to take a job at the morgue and both of them slowly become aware that the dead are playing tricks of their own!’