As he rang the bell, he thought about who might answer, the faces he was about to see. He thought about Jarvis, Simpson’s redoubtable butler, whose very politeness towards Raven was itself a means of conveying how much he would like to turn him out onto the street for a wretch. He thought about Mrs Simpson, perpetually in mourning for the young children she had lost and vigilantly dedicated to the care of those who survived. He thought of her unmarried sister, Mina, left heartbroken after she mistakenly believed her search for a husband had finally come to a happy end. Foremost in his thoughts, however, was Simpson’s housemaid, Sarah Fisher.

Hers was the image he had most tried to conjure throughout his travels: her pale complexion, her honey-coloured hair, the soft touch of her hand as she administered ointment of her own making to salve his wound. He remembered the smell of her – lavender and fresh linen – the way she carried herself, her smile. He remembered also her withering disdain, her sharp intelligence and her tendency to let her frustrations talk her into trouble. Most of all he remembered the kisses they had shared, the swell of feelings he had not known around a woman before – or since.

He shook his head in an attempt to clear his mind. Such reminiscences had been in equal parts a comfort and a torment over the past year. They had been thrown together by circumstance, but propriety dictated that to pursue any kind of relationship would have been damaging to both of them. There had been no contact between them since he left. Deliberately so. He had written letters to her during his time in Paris, and again in Vienna, but they had never been sent. He was a doctor, a physician. She was a housemaid. Anything other than a professional relationship was surely out of the question. What possible future could there have been for them? None that he could see. He had tried to explain as much to her before he left, but she had been reluctant to accept the intractable realities before them; strong-willed and argumentative to the last.

He had been sure that a period of separation would cool his ardour for her, and there had been interludes during his travels when she seemed far distant in time as well as space; a treasured step on his journey, but one he had been ever progressing away from. However, as he stood on the doorstep, he was conscious of an increase in his heart rate, an excitement of the body in defiance of anything his mind might wish to deny.

It was more than an excitement: it was a longing. And the closer he drew to seeing her again, the more imperative that longing became.

He was therefore quite unprepared when it was not Sarah but another young woman who answered the door.