Sometimes Father would be too drunk to notice. That night, though, I sensed a quiet focus about him. It was not the drink that had put him in this mind. The rage was already there, and the ale gave it fuel. But nothing fed the flames of it like the beating he had suffered and the laughter of his fellow drinkers.

He wrinkled his nose as he reached the door to our room, an expression of distaste swiftly becoming something deeper. Then he walked across the threshold, and here the curtain closes upon the stage, for there are scenes that the Lord Chamberlain would not pass as fit to be performed.

I do not know if this is because I looked away in my fear, or if it is truly that my mind will not permit me to remember.

What I do know is that the next morning, though the blood on her face had dried, my mother woke to find she was bleeding from below. She dragged herself to the hospital, where the stillborn child had to be drawn from her. By nightfall she was dead.

ELEVEN

arvis had not killed the cook.

As Raven stood by the window in the professor’s study, he thought about the events of the previous evening. Following the panicked entreaty from the butler, they had risen instantly from the table and hurried down to the kitchen, to discover that Mrs Lyndsay was not dead but merely anaesthetised. Encouraged (and quite possibly misled) by Jarvis, the normally abstemious and rigidly decorous woman had taken a large glass of the doctor’s special champagne, shortly after which she had collapsed onto the floor. It took several hours for her to fully return to her senses, during which time Jarvis had required several glasses of the doctor’s brandy.

Raven had never seen him shorn of his impermeable equanimity and wondered if his upset was primarily over Mrs Lyndsay’s well-being or the ramifications of his own culpability. Raven noted that the latter would have been simple enough to conceal. Jarvis often gave off an air of detachment, but this indicated that there was something warmer beneath the surface.

More troubling to Raven was the question of how Dr Simpson reconciled his certainty that chloroform was safe if administered properly, with his practice of serving it as a recreational beverage. He was concerned too by how quickly Simpson had dismissed John Snow’s advocacy of precision in chloroform’s dispensing. Simpson’s passion and enthusiasm for anaesthesia was invaluable to a cause that required such an indomitable champion, but Raven questioned whether the professor might be cavalier to the point of reckless in his defence of it.