‘I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,’ said A. G. Harriman crossly, twisting his hand free.

‘I wish I knew,’ said Collis, and for the first time since he had heard of Hannah’s death, he felt amused. He wondered what his sister, Maude, was doing, and decided that she was probably living in a row house on Second Avenue with a stiff-collared Episcopalian husband and complaining bitterly about the influx of poor immigrants into the avenue during the war. Maude had always had plenty of faith, but very little hope, and no charity at all.

Back at the bridal suite of the St Nicholas, he found Theodore sitting at the bureau, writing a long letter to Annie. Theodore covered the letter with his hand when Collis came in.

‘You look cheerful,’ Theodore had said. ‘Did you do well with A. G. Harriman?’

‘I did badly with Harriman,’ Collis told him, pouring himself a drink. ‘But I did particularly well with my mother.’

‘You saw your mother?’

‘Yes, but she didn’t see me. And that was just the way I wanted it.’

Theodore scratched his beard with his pen. ‘You’re an odd one, Collis. If I didn’t distrust you so much, I think I could even learn to love you.’

They returned to Sacramento in August — weeks of steaming down the East Coast under a glaring sun, days of delay in the jungle of Panama, and then more weeks of steaming northwards on an ocean the colour of pewter plates. Five passengers died of yellow fever; one went mad and threw himself overboard. A dark-haired Mexican girl kept eyeing Collis through the black tracery of her shawl, but he ignored her. He was keeping his thoughts for Hannah.

Jane McCormick and Mary Tucker were waiting for them on the levee when their paddle steamer docked in Sacramento. Annie arrived a few minutes later, breathless and apologetic.

‘I’m sorry, Collis. I can’t tell you how sorry I am,’ she said.

Collis took her arm. It was midday, and the sun was so bright and hot that nothing seemed to have any colour or substance. Even the shadows shrank out of the sun. ‘You gave her a Catholic burial, I hope?’ asked Collis.

Annie nodded.

Later, Collis went to the Catholic church on J Street, swinging open the white paling fence and walking across the baked soil of the graveyard under an afternoon sky as black as a Bible. He found the marker around the back of the church, under the scant shade of a small tree. There were some wilted flowers lying on the mound, and an empty urn. Collis knelt down and straightened the urn, and then slowly reached out and traced with his fingertips the letters that had been carved in the wood of the marker.

Hannah Amelia Edmonds. Beloved Wife of Collis. 1862.

Underneath, already curled from the sun and the rain, somebody had pinned a text from Revelation. ‘And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.’