I write with tragic intelligence. Late today, Mrs Edmonds was found expired in her carriage on the outskirts of the city, after a search by deputies and by friends for the greater part of the morning and afternoon. She had not returned home last night after taking the carriage and telling Juno that she would be spending the evening with Mrs Weiss. At midnight, Juno alerted the neighbours, who immediately initiated a search. Mrs Weiss had not seen Mrs Edmonds, nor did she have any arrangement to meet her. Dr Gizzard has already inspected Mrs Edmonds’s remains, and is of the opinion that she passed away as a result of blood loss following the miscarriage of a child.

To return to New York after all the years he had spent in California was, for Collis, a moving but also an unexpectedly depressing experience. As the steamer Ariadne paddled her way slowly in through the misty reaches of New York harbour, and he saw once more the rooftops and spires around Battery Park, he had to turn away, and walk the length of the deck, with Kwang Lee following a little distance behind him.

He came across Theodore leaning on the railings and staring out towards Governors Island.

‘Are you pleased to be back?’ he asked Theodore.

Theodore shrugged. ‘You don’t look as if you are.’

‘It was about here, about this far out of the harbour, that I first saw Hannah,’ Collis said. ‘Before that moment, there was nothing worth having in my life at all. No purpose, no merit, nothing.’

‘Is there now?’ asked Theodore sharply.

Collis stood beside him, looking at him with an expression of regret. ‘Do you really have to hate me?’ he asked. ‘After all, we’ve got everything we wanted. You’ve certainly got everything you wanted. As soon as we’ve collected enough iron and steel together, we can start to build a railroad.’

‘It wasn’t worth the price.’

After they had docked, and collected their baggage, they took a cab to the St Nicholas Hotel. Collis said nothing as they were driven to the corner of Spring Street and Broadway, but simply stared out of the window at passing streets.

Time, and the war, had changed New York more than he could have imagined. Maybe his memory was playing him tricks, but the streets seemed to be far more crowded than they had ever been before, and the gutters were piled even higher with rotting garbage. The buildings seemed meaner, and closer, and in worse repair than before; although several new hotels and bars had materialised from nowhere, and there was a magnificent new store not far from the St Nicholas Hotel.

If Collis had driven uptown he would have seen more change. House-building on the East Side had reached as far as Fifty-ninth street, where he had ridden his horses with Delphine and Alice Stride; and the potter’s field on Park Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets had been broken up for the building of the Women’s Hospital. It would later become the site for the Waldorf-Astoria.