And in any case, I did relish Mrs Johnstone’s death at the time, in and of itself. It could be said that we made each other famous, so it was appropriate that we should have had our intimacy, our exquisite coupling.

I recall the warmth of her body against me. How her breath hastened as our limbs entangled beneath the sheets. A perversity, you would no doubt say: a forbidden kind of love. But my God, the things I felt as she died in my arms, knowing it was by my hand.

TWENTY

aven took a deep breath of the cold, clear sea air through the open window of the carriage and imagined the soot and the smog of the city being swept from him. They were on their way to Portobello to visit a patient there: a child who had a recurrent problem with her ears, attributed to bathing in the sea too late in the season. Raven was enjoying the journey as a welcome respite from everything else that was going on, and a distraction from the pain of a sore tooth that had begun to trouble him.

He rarely accompanied the professor on home visits, his time being taken up with his other duties. Most days he saw patients at Queen Street in the morning and attended the Maternity Hospital in the afternoon. He mainly saw Dr Simpson at mealtimes, though he had declined an invitation to participate in the doctor’s ongoing post-prandial inhalational experiments. He decided that he had no stomach (or head) for such things and marvelled at the professor’s enthusiasm for persisting with such a risky undertaking. Raven agreed with Jarvis that the professor was unlikely to find anything better than ‘chlory’.

When on occasion he was invited along, Raven enjoyed the novelty of a change of scene, be it a Princes Street hotel or a jaunt further afield. He had ceased trying to impress the professor with the knowledge he had accumulated on his travels and was rediscovering the value of listening to his mentor hold forth on any number of topics.

He felt a little guilty that he had refused Sarah’s request, and found himself seeking reassurance that he was right not to get involved.

‘Pay no heed to idle chatter,’ Simpson said. ‘I have more important things to occupy my time. I remain busy in the defence of chloroform. Pockets of opposition still persist, and I am determined to root them out.’

Raven wondered if his own reservations about its indiscriminate administration were being referred to. And although Simpson’s reply regarding the Johnstone case ought to have comforted him, paradoxically it had the opposite effect. It was often the things that Simpson did not want to talk about that were preying hardest upon his mind. Everything else was a pleasing diversion.