‘She is thin because she doesn’t eat!’ snapped Louisa. ‘I hope you don’t think that we are starving her.’

Mr Fortescue was due at two thirty and in deference to the occasion Louisa had ordered coffee and even a plate of digestive biscuits to be sent to the drawing-room.

‘I wish Bernard could be here,’ she said. ‘But he never will miss giving a lecture.’

‘Perhaps it is as well, Louisa; it might be a little painful. After all, if the diagnosis is what we expect, it will virtually be a statement that his daughter is—’

A shrill peal of the door-bell brought both ladies to their feet and out into the hall.

Mr Fortescue was as well dressed as they expected and the gleaming Rolls-Royce in which his chauffeur waited was evidence that this Harley Street specialist was in the top rank, but he was surprisingly young.

‘I have come to see Harriet Morton,’ he announced, handing his hat and gloves to the maid.

‘Yes, indeed. We were expecting you,’ said Louisa, all affability. ‘It is good of you to come all the way from London. We have naturally been very much concerned — my poor brother has been distracted — but we really feel that an institution of some kind is the only answer. Though of course it is for you to say after you have examined her.’

Mr Fortescue did not appear to be a man of many words.

‘Perhaps you will take me to her?’ was all he said and Louisa, explaining the sad circumstances, her niece’s inexplicable depravity and the course which on the advice of Dr Smithson they had been compelled to take, led him to the top of the stairs, where she took a key from the bunch at her belt.

‘You keep her locked in?’

‘Oh, yes, Mr Fortescue. Yes indeed! We would not be willing to take the responsibility of leaving a girl of that sort unguarded.’

She inserted the key in the lock — only to find that the specialist’s lean brown hand had closed firmly over hers.

‘Give me the key if you please. And be kind enough to wait for me downstairs. I always examine patients of this kind alone.’

‘But surely that is not customary?’ Louisa was distinctly flustered. ‘Surely another person is always present when—’

‘Are you telling me how to do my job, Miss Morton?’ The voice was silkily polite but the glint in his eyes sent Louisa scuttling back downstairs.

He waited until she was out of sight and then turned the key.

The room was bare, cold, scrupulously clean. In the narrow bed Harriet lay on her back and did not turn her head.

Rom walked over to her.

He had imagined this meeting a thousand times: the happiness, the love that would flow between them, the joy with which they would laugh away their misunderstanding. Now there was none of that. A red mist covered his eyes; rage savaged him: he thirsted to kill — to take hold of the woman he had just seen and beat her head against the wall — to press his fingers slowly, voluptuously into the jugular vein of the man who had done this to Harriet.

Harriet opened her eyes. For a moment she stared unfocused at the figure bent over her. Then over the face of this girl he had believed to value her career above his love there spread a look that he was never to forget as long as he lived.

Next came a desolate whimper of pain, a fractional movement of the head.

‘No,’ said Rom quietly, ‘you’re not dreaming. I’m here, Harriet! In the flesh — very much in the flesh.’ Aware that she was on the edge of the abyss, that he must call her back very gently, he laid only the lightest of hands on her hair. ‘You’ve led me the devil of a dance! I went to St Petersburg first! Simonova’s in fine fettle, I may say.’

She could not speak yet. Only her eyes begged for the power to trust in this miracle.

‘I must say that I find that a perfectly detestable nightdress,’ said Rom cheerfully. ‘Your Aunt Louisa can certainly pick them!’

It came then. Belief. He was real, he was here. She sat up and threw herself forward into his arms — and among the frenzied words of love and agony and longing Rom caught, surprisingly, the name of a well-known London suburb.

‘You want to live in St John’s Wood?’ he asked, startled. Later it occurred to him that this salubrious district had probably saved Professor Morton’s life, for the passion with which Harriet now pleaded to be set up as a kept lady so intrigued him that he forgot his murderous rage.

‘It is an entrancing prospect, certainly,’ he said. ‘Especially the Gothic windows. However, I am not going to install you in a villa in St John’s Wood. I am going to install you at Stavely, where you will be my love, my companion and also — by tomorrow afternoon — my wife.’

‘No.’ Harriet had had her miracle. She needed no more, and lifting her face a daring inch away from his, she informed him that he was going to marry Isobel.

‘Harriet, do be quiet about Isobel. I never had the slightest intention of marrying her and if you had not been so obstinate and blind you would have seen that at once. I don’t even like her any more — the way she treats Henry would put me off for a start. In fact, in the month I’ve spent with her I’ve grown quite sorry for my brother. Now listen, I must get hold of the necessary documents and go and find your father, but I’ll be back—’

No. She was not able to be left. Her eyes grew wide with fear. ‘If you go, they’ll find some way of separating us. They’ll lock me in again and tell you I’m mad and—’

‘All right then, we’ll go together,’ he said, cheerfully matter-of-fact. ‘You can wait in the car. Get dressed and—’

‘I can’t. They’ve taken away my clothes.’

Rom gritted his teeth against a renewed attack of fury. ‘Never mind.’ He pulled a blanket off the bed, wrapped it round her, picked her up. ‘Poor Harriet, I’m always abducting you in unsuitable clothes.’

‘Good heavens, Mr Fortescue!’ Louisa, with Mrs Belper hovering behind her, was waiting in the hall. ‘Whatever does this mean?’

‘It means that I am taking away your patient immediately,’ said Rom. ‘I have diagnosed pernicious anaemia, tuberculosis of the lung and an incipient brain tumour. It is possible that I can save her with instant treatment at my clinic, but there is not a moment to lose.’

‘But that’s impossible… I must consult my brother. This is not what we expected at all…’ Louisa was entirely at a loss. ‘And the fees at your clinic would be quite beyond us.’

Rom took a steadying breath. ‘If you want a corpse on your hands, Miss Morton, and a court case, that is your affair. You have called me in; I have given my diagnosis. Now, please fetch the patient’s birth certificate at once: it is required by the governors of my clinic as a condition of admission.’

‘I told you she was too thin,’ bleated Mrs Belper.

Totally flustered, Louisa made as if to go to the telephone, only to find the extraordinary surgeon standing in front of it while still holding Harriet in his arms.

‘Her birth certificate,’ he said implacably. ‘At once.’

The Rolls had driven off and the ladies were trying without success to calm themselves in the drawing-room, when the doorbell rang again.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the obese, grey-haired gentleman standing on the step. ‘You are expecting me, I know. My name is Fortescue…’

Professor Morton was lecturing, pacing the rostrum, his gown flapping, his voice managing to be both irascible and droning; while in the front row Blakewell, a fair-haired, good-looking young man destined for holy orders, wondered if boredom could kill and kicked Hastings, who had gone to sleep and was sliding from his chair.

‘And this man who calls himself a scholar,’ rasped the Professor, ‘has the effrontery — the unbelievable effrontery — to suggest that the word hoti in line three of the fifth stanza should be translated as—’

The door burst open. An agitated College servant could be seen trying to restrain a man in an extraordinarily well-cut grey suit who pushed him aside without effort, closed the door in his face and proceeded to walk in a relaxed manner to the rostrum.

‘Professor Morton?’

‘I am Professor Morton, yes. But how dare you walk in here unannounced and interrupt my lecture. It’s unheard of!’

‘Well, it has been heard of now,’ said the intruder calmly, and the students sat up with a look of expectancy on their faces. ‘I came to inform you that I have removed your daughter firmly and finally from your house and to ask you to sign this document.’ He laid a piece of paper with a red seal on the lectern. ‘As you see, it is your permission for my marriage to Harriet.’

The Professor grew crimson; the Adam’s apple worked in his scraggy throat. ‘How dare you! How dare you come in here and wave pieces of paper at me! And how dare you kidnap my daughter!’

‘I think the less said about that the better. I found Harriet half-starved and confined like a prisoner because she tried to have a life of her own. If you would like me to tell the students of the state in which I found her, I should be happy to do so.’

‘How I treat my daughter is none of your business. Harriet is sick in her body and sick in her soul—’ But he took an involuntary step backwards, aware of a sudden menace in the stranger’s stance. ‘Who are you anyway?’ and rallying: ‘I won’t be blackmailed. Harriet is underage—’

‘Professor Morton, it is only because you are Harriet’s father that I have not actually throttled you. Anyone else who had treated her as you have done would not have lived to tell the tale. I choose to believe that you are misguided, pompous and opinionated rather than sadistic and cruel. But unless you sign this document without delay I will take you out into the courtyard, debag you and throw you into the fountain.’