Raven had reasoned that if he wished to have a successful medical practice, it would be expected that he marry and have children, and that he take a respectable wife from a good family. If he were to marry a housemaid, it would be assumed that this was because he had got the poor girl pregnant and was doing the honourable thing by her. Even if no child was forthcoming, it would simply be assumed that she had lost the baby, and subsequently it would be expected of him to fade from prominence as a matter of decency. Marrying a housemaid would be the thing that defined him in the eyes of medical society, and he would not be permitted to rise far beyond it.

If he were being honest, had Sarah not been a housemaid, he still could not imagine her as the kind of obsequious and compliant wife of which society approved. That, after all, was what had drawn him to her in the first place. In fact, since meeting Sarah, he had found such obsequious and compliant women to be insipid and dull. The very reason he had struck up a rapport with Gabriela in Berlin was that she was a woman who would not meekly accept her place.

Raven had just begun to lay out the instruments he would require when Sarah walked in unannounced, as though his thoughts had summoned her.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, surprised. Surely she knew what he was about to do.

‘I’ve come to assist,’ she answered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘I am about to perform a post-mortem. You cannot be here.’

‘How am I to learn otherwise?’

Raven indicated the shape on the table, shrouded beneath a sheet.

‘But this is Mrs Glassford,’ he told her.

‘This was Mrs Glassford,’ she replied. She was calm and dry-eyed, in contrast to the day before.

Raven found this change in her demeanour disconcerting. He didn’t want her here. Her presence would be a distraction, and if he was honest, he feared a sudden dissolution of this new-found composure as soon as the sheet was removed.

‘Does Dr Simpson know you are here?’ he asked, thinking it unlikely that the professor would have sanctioned this.

‘Dr Simpson says I should grasp every opportunity to increase my knowledge.’

Raven noted that she had not answered his question and was thinking he was going to have to manhandle her out of the room, when she walked over to the desk in the corner and picked up a piece of paper.

‘I will sit over here and make notes,’ she said. ‘Simply tell me what you find.’

Raven stood with his hands on his hips in front of the examination table, trying to think of a way to dissuade her.

‘You knew this woman,’ he implored. ‘Only yesterday you wept for her.’