‘I think you will be a very famous man one day,’ she said, with great earnestness. ‘My hope is that you won’t forget me, and that you won’t forget the reason I said I must stay.’

‘I won’t forget,’ he said. He opened the door wider for her. ‘Will you call by later and tell me how Hannah is?’

‘Of course.’

He stood by the door and watched her walk through the garden. Her coif disappeared behind the plants like a low-flying seagull. Then he turned back to his bare white rooms, and he was frowning like a man who realises he has just failed to do something important, but isn’t quite sure what. The bell on the hospital roof struck for morning prayers, and disturbed three huge black buzzards that had been perched on the terra-cotta coping. They circled, with rustling wings, and then settled again.

In the middle of the night, Anthony, the Jamaican porter, came to knock at his door and call Collis to the ward. Sister Agnes was there, and Sister Rosa, and Father Xavier. They were standing by Hannah’s bed, exhausted and sweaty by the light of an oil lamp, and it was clear that Hannah’s condition had deteriorated even further. She was a terrifying livid yellow, and she was shaking and mumbling in the throes of a freezing fever.

‘She’s conscious,’ said Sister Rosa, a middle-aged nun with a vast bosom and a distinctive limp. ‘That’s why we called you. You may wish to say your goodbyes.’

‘She’s dying?’ asked Collis, looking down at Hannah’s drawn, waxy face. It hardly seemed like Hannah at all, but some grotesque death mask poured out of tallow. Only the flickering eyes and the softly gnashing teeth told him that she was still a real living being; and only the wedding band on her finger reminded him that she was Mrs West.

‘She’s very bad,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Unless this fever breaks, she may go before morning.’

‘It hardly ever breaks,’ added Father Xavier. ‘In a few lucky cases, perhaps. But you can see for yourself how sick she is.’

Collis looked around at their faces, and then knelt down beside Hannah’s bed. She was murmuring and muttering, and throwing her head from side to side on the pillow, and she was glistening with sweat. Every now and then she coughed, and the coughing brought up dark spatters of blood, which Sister Rosa dabbed away with a muslin cloth.

‘Hannah?’ said Collis.

She moaned, and reached out as if she were trying to seize something out of the air, but she didn’t answer.

‘Hannah?’ he repeated.

This time she simply tossed her head, and snarled and dribbled under her breath.

Collis waited for a moment, and then he stood up again.

‘I think she’s too—’