The cab pulled up outside the hospital and Alasdair gave the driver a large sum without once looking at him. The man’s gaze was a torment to him. He instructed the man to wait here, with his bags, until his return. It would be a short visit, but the moments on which a man’s life turned were short—for how long did it take to fall in love, to propose marriage, to receive a firstborn in one’s arms, to fall out of love?

Miss Trent was in a women’s ward on the second floor and he wondered if he might be prevented from seeing her but no one questioned him. A nurse bid him a good morning and another offered a smile and pointed out to him a bed at the far end. ‘There is a chair,’ the nurse said. ‘You may sit if you wish.’

Alasdair walked towards her. On each side tall windows looked out on colonnades that ran the length of the ward, dappled in the sunlight, like a viceroy’s residence. The ceiling, distantly high to catch the breeze in summer, made him reel. And here, finally, was Verity. She made a still, slight figure barely distinguishable from the large hospital bed and the coarse hospital sheets that trapped her. Her face on the pillow was white and as contemplatively still as an angel on a tomb.

He thought, She has died, and no one even noticed!

But her face slowly turned towards him.

He stumbled. Those final few yards that separated him from her were infinite and terrible, her eyes on him as he crossed that unimaginably vast space made him feel his nakedness, and he crossed the remaining few yards quickly, coming to her side, pulling up the chair and taking her hand.

‘Verity,’ he said. His voice came from some deep place.

Now all the hours and the days that he had not sat with her at her bedside, that he had spent in other places and in other towns, in hotels and trains and town halls, all the mementos of her that he had scoured his drawers for and burned, all of this was manifest in his face for her to see. His shame laid bare.

‘Will you forgive me?’ he whispered.

She frowned at this, her brow creasing, the eyebrows arching, as though she did not understand what it was she must forgive, as if she had thought it was she, not he, who must ask for forgiveness—for their baby that she had destroyed.

Or this is what he thought, for she said absolutely nothing. He squeezed her hand.

At last she spoke. ‘You know, of course, why it is that I am here?’

He did. He could not unknow it.

‘I told them it was a miscarriage,’ she said, her voice very low and quite without emotion. ‘Though it was not.’ And she turned her face away and towards the window.