He made love to her slowly. The enamelled clock on the mantelpiece seemed to jump whole hours. She opened her eyes every now and then, and felt as if she had been dozing, and dreaming, and dozing again. There were moments of languorous pleasure, when she lay back on the bed while Collis caressed her and touched her. There were moments of intense exertion, when they were both panting and sweating and clutching each other. Collis made her do things that she had never done before, and had never thought possible, and the sensations of that evening, as they passed, were like the charcoal-grey leaves of one of Mr Figgis’s private albums, illustrated with potent and erotic memories. She would treasure them for years to come.

At last it appeared to be over. His anger and his passion were both subdued. He went to the chair by the window and sat there naked for nearly ten minutes, watching her in silence. Sometimes she looked back at him, and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she closed her eyes and felt nothing but the kisses he had given her, and the contented, spent feeling between her thighs. For some reason which amused her, she thought she was probably pregnant. She laughed out loud, without really knowing why.

Collis said, ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing,’ she told him. ‘I’m just laughing.’

‘Good.’ He smiled, and stayed where he was, while the moon suddenly appeared at the edge of the window behind him.

On 12 April, Confederate mortars opened fire on Fort Sumter. Three days later, after Fort Sumter had surrendered, President Lincoln called for troops. It was war at last.

The call to arms took days to reach San Francisco, but when it did, the response was aggressive and immediate. From the same city, and sometimes from the same street, men packed their trunks and went off to fight for the Union or for the Rebels. In the Bank Exchange Saloon, two young men from South Park, friends since school, toasted each other in champagne and wished each other well. The next day, they both boarded the same steamer for Panama City, and they played cards on the train together all the way to Aspinwall. They shook hands for the last time on the quay, in the soft tropical rain, before one embarked on a ship headed for Charleston, and the other for New York. Both died — one at Chancellorsville and the other at Fredericksburg. Both were twenty years old.

John Frémont and William Tecumseh Sherman both sailed east from San Francisco to join the Union Army; and the Frémonts’s house was requisitioned for the defence of San Francisco Bay, so Jessie had to pack her bags, too. The glass veranda on which Collis had argued with John Frémont and Laurence Melford was demolished, and brick cannon emplacements were put up in its place.