‘I want to confess that when I saw you, Collis, I fell in love with you. I had never known such a sensation. I was standing on the deck, and you raised your hat to me, and the feeling I had was so devastating that I couldn’t speak. Then I saw you again, when you came to introduce yourself, and what I felt then was indescribable. Mrs Edgeworth kept telling me to control myself, that I was infatuated, but I couldn’t think about anything or anybody else but you. Don’t you understand how difficult it was for me to turn you away, the night you came to my cabin? Don’t you understand how hurt I was when I saw you with that girl?’

She turned her face away from him. ‘I love you,’ she said miserably. ‘I love you so much, and now I have to die. All I have to confess is my disappointment in the Lord, that He would not spare me long enough to know you.’

‘Hannah,’ Collis said softly.

She turned back towards him, her face wet with tears. ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, God, I could have loved you.’

He nodded, wiping the tears from his own eyes with his fingers. ‘Hannah, I could have loved you, too.’

They both cried, separated by the gauze screens. Not for what they had lost, nor for the times they had spent together, but for what might have been, and now would probably not be. They cried silently, in the gloom of Gethsemane Ward, with the dusk gathering in the gardens outside, and the nuns fluttering to and fro in the way that had earned them the name of ‘God’s geese’.

Eventually, Sister Agnes approached and laid her hand on Collis’s shoulder. ‘You must leave now, Mr Edmonds,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to risk infection any more than necessary. Gastritis can be very severe.’

‘Mrs West knows that she has yellow fever,’ Collis said. ‘You don’t have to keep up the pretence any longer.’

‘She knows?’

‘She overheard the nuns talking, that’s all.’

Sister Agnes looked towards Hannah, and Hannah nodded.

‘I see,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘Then you know you are gravely at risk.’

Father Xavier came along the ward on his soft-soled shoes to stand a little way behind Sister Agnes, his eyebrows genuflecting towards the bridge of his nose, his beady eyes bright.

‘Have you renounced your thoughts for each other?’ he inquired.

Collis gave Hannah a last smile through the screens, and she managed a weak smile in return. He was pleased, for her sake, that she was religious, because at least she believed that when she left him she was going on to someplace better, where she would be cared for and contented. He couldn’t imagine what Hannah’s vision of heaven was like, but he was sure that it would, in some mystical way, include him.