At eight-fifteen, the doorbell rang downstairs and there was a commotion in the hall as the rest of the theatre party arrived. Knickerbocker Jane was fussing around them in a tiered dress of plum-coloured silk, a tiara of yellow ostrich plumes bobbing on top of her coiffure. Collis, as he came downstairs, thought she looked like an exotic bird. Apart from Collis and Knickerbocker Jane, the party included Charles Tucker, who was dressed in an old-fashioned evening coat with immensely wide sateen lapels, and who carried on his arm, almost as if she were a decorative umbrella, a short, angelic-faced girl with a ridiculously overdecorated bonnet and a gown of bottle-green silk; and there was Samuel Lewis, a Brobdingnagian man with wavy white hair and a crimson weather-corroded face that hung over every gathering of his more diminutive friends like a bloated harvest moon, portending things but never quite coming out with them. Sam Lewis was the president of the Bullion & Marine Bank, and the most influential member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, but his ageing bachelorhood and his habit of smoking particularly foul cigars had never endeared him to the South Park Chivalry. He was going to escort Knickerbocker Jane, and he stooped over to kiss her when he arrived as if he were bending over a plate of Italian noodles.

Collis was to go with the Brazilian girl, Ursula, who was dressed like the fifth prize in a South American church lottery, in shiny orange silk, her black frizzy hair covered by a cowl-shaped bonnet with ruffled white ribbons woven through the crown and a large floppy white bow at the neck. She bobbed a curtsy as she took Collis’s arm, and afforded him a waft of thick patchouli perfume.

The girl on Charles Tucker’s arm, Collis found out, was called Elsie, and she was the daughter of a joiner and carpenter called Billings, whose premises were on Market Street, and whose greatest claim to professional fame was that he had boarded over the ship Niantic after she had been dragged ashore from the Bay, so that her owners could open her up as one of San Francisco’s first hotels. Elsie had a simpering, irritating voice, and Collis couldn’t listen to her for very long, but Charles assured him that she knew a great deal about knurled prick punches, and adjustable spokeshaves, and ball-bearing breast drills, and anything and everything to do with a joiner’s trade.

‘It’s not often you meet a girl who can tickle your fancy one day and build you a combination bookcase the next,’ Charles told Collis, as they went outside on to the boardwalk to meet their carriages.

Charles Tucker’s down-at-heel phaeton was waiting at the curbside, with Billy on the box in a heavy brown overcoat of marled tweed. Charles helped Elsie aboard and then climbed aboard himself. Billy tipped his tall silk hat and inquired, ‘The Empire, Mr Tucker?’