And it had done the trick. A wall had come up, protecting them both. Adaline’s face was quite composed, her hand quite steady. The danger was passed. Soon she would get up to leave. Eleanor would not speak to Alasdair, and Alasdair would not speak to Leon Jellicoe, who had been his friend. And in all likelihood neither of them would see Adaline Jellicoe again, for she had a passage booked, they had heard, to England.

In the meantime, Mrs Jellicoe’s tea was undrunk. It grew cooler and cooler as the moments passed. A moment would come, quite soon now, when she would be gone and the teacup would be removed and washed up and put away. Eleanor thought about this moment. She clung to it.

The letting agent for the house at Woolloomooloo was a man named Orange whom one might imagine would sport bright red hair and fiery red whiskers or perhaps heralded from Ulster or the Low Countries, but in defiance of his name Mr Orange had an olive complexion and fine glossy black hair and dark lashes over eyes that had no more rested on the floodplains of Holland than they had the moon.

‘This is a respectable establishment,’ the agent said, searching among a ring of keys to select the correct one and, like the establishment which needed to proclaim its respectability, Mr Orange, who was not quite a gentleman, needed to wear an expensive suit of clothes and gloves made by an Italian tailor.

Alasdair stood behind him and stared with loathing at the little man, the letting agent, who was not little at all, who was in fact a fine specimen of manhood, but who must proclaim his position in the world through his ownership of this large ring of keys and hence anything and anyone behind the door he might open. Alasdair waited impatiently while the man found a key and fitted it into the door. It proved to be the wrong key and Alasdair turned away rather than watch the man forage again for the correct one. He ought to have taken this step days ago, he realised, struck by his own intransigence, but until last night he could not really believe in Verity’s disappearance. He was not entirely sure he truly believed it even now, when they were at the stage of breaking into her rooms, when his life and hers were about to be thrown wide open for the world—for this man, at any rate—to see. They were about to see the room emptied of her things, Miss Trent gone, the walls echoing to her silence and to his folly. His loss.

It was intolerable to stand here, waiting.

The correct key was at last located and fitted smoothly into the lock and the door swung open. The man, Orange, went first into the room and Alasdair held back, delaying the moment he must enter, delaying the moment of his loss. His folly.