She thought of Mrs Glassford’s words: You are young yet. You do not know what your life will become. It cheered her to imagine other possible lives beyond what was about to happen. Her immediate future seemed to portend little but difficulty, loss and pain. But perhaps there would be better days to come.

She looked at Archie and felt guilty for contemplating life without him. But this kind of introspection brought with it other unanswerable questions. Would Archie be suggesting these things if he were well? It would be highly irregular for a medical man with any social pretensions, however modest, to allow his wife to work. Would he have married her if not facing a life-threatening illness? Such thoughts threatened her very sanity.

As she stood up, she glanced out of the window, and the sight of the grey November streets jolted her back into the coldest reality. She saw all these musings for what they truly were: the consoling fantasies of a dying man. This was a city where his fellow doctors were conspiring to do down no less a man than James Young Simpson. What chance had a woman of ever taking them on?

‘Eat your breakfast, Dr Banks,’ she commanded, indicating that the conversation was at an end.

THIRTY-THREE

r Johnstone entered the room with the look of a man unmoored. He seemed uncomfortable in the heart of his own house, a disoriented look in his eye as though his surroundings were strange to him. Raven recognised it. This was someone to whom familiar spaces no longer made sense. A vital part of the equation by which he understood the world was missing, and now nothing added up.

Raven could not help but think of Sarah and what lay in her near future.

But perhaps these were not so easily compared. Dr Johnstone and his wife had been married for more than twenty years. Sarah and Archie had been married but a matter of weeks. When he learned that, he had wondered whether he ought to have returned from his travels sooner, but he couldn’t fool himself into thinking that would have made a difference. The time to change something was before he left, and back then he had been too concerned with what people thought.

Too meek. Too cowardly.

Perhaps weeks or decades made no odds in matters of the heart. Perhaps he merely wanted to tell himself Sarah and Archie’s love was a lesser thing. He ought to admit to himself that it was surely otherwise. They were happy together, despite knowing they would not be together long.

Was it different if you knew in advance that your spouse’s life was limited? Did that make it easier to prepare yourself for his loss? Or did that make it more painful, seeing him every morning, perhaps looking upon him for a joyful moment before remembering?