But the person they kept staring at was Jane. Perhaps some of them whispered to each other that they’d never in their lives seen a woman so tall and a few of the women may have wondered how much extra material had to be ordered for her skirts and petticoats and what the cost of this might be.

Jane Adeane was used to the gaze of strangers falling on her and remaining there. She had grown impervious to this kind of intrusion. It had often been said to Jane that nobody knew where this exceptional stature ‘came from’. Her mother, who had died giving birth to her, had been a small, neat woman. Her father – a thin man of ardent countenance and abundant grey hair, whom one might have mistaken for the conductor of an orchestra – was not particularly tall. Portraits of the Adeane grandparents and relations on her mother’s side had often been taken out and examined afresh, in the expectation that some mighty ancestor would be spotted, trying to conceal his or her tallness by sitting in a low chair, but Jane had always known that none would be found. The six feet and two inches were hers and hers alone.

And the true fact was that she actually doted on them, these improbable extra centimetres of flesh and bone. They were at the heart of what made her exceptional in her own eyes. She sometimes imagined that the people around her – the very ones who stared at her so impolitely – were all struggling not to drown in the surging sea that is human life, but that she was quite safe from the dark deep. She was her own lifeboat, or her own small island. Her head and shoulders would always ride above the waves.

Clorinda Morrissey returned to Valentine Ross’s table to take his order for tea. She saw Miss Adeane looking anxiously at him, quite as though she thought he was about to ask for the wrong things, and Mrs Morrissey was aware that when he requested his ‘usual Assam’, together with two rounds of hot-buttered toast and some slices of lemon cake, his voice was shaking.

Perhaps he was ill? It was known in Bath that the doctors, who had to spend so much time among the diseased and the dying, were prone to sudden sicknesses. Clorinda Morrissey had been told that arguments still raged between the Contagionists (who believed that disease spread via ‘animalculae’ brought into England with imported food produce) and the Anti-Contagionists (who thought that illness was generated spontaneously from filth and decay and then transmitted through the air as vapour or ‘miasma’) but little was truly understood about how infections spread from person to person, and so few precautions could be taken to prevent this. But why, Mrs Morrissey asked herself, if Dr Ross was ailing, had he invited Miss Jane to tea?

She hurried to make the toast and cut the cake. She then took everything to the table, setting the cake stand in the middle of it and retired with another of her little bouncy curtseys.