He turned to Henry, who looked at him but did not speak.

‘He wrote a story, not a plan,’ Minny said.

‘Yes, but if you think about the war, or speak to those involved, or even read about it, I’m sure there are more interesting stories, ones that are more true to life.’

‘But this wasn’t about the war,’ Minny said. ‘It was about a girl’s heart.’

‘Are there not plenty of girls who can write such stories?’ Gray asked.

Holmes put his hands behind his head and began to laugh.

‘We cannot all be soldiers,’ he said.

The talk between the three visitors and the Temple sisters returned again and again to the war. Since the girls’ brother and their cousin Gus Barker had been killed, the two soldiers had to be careful not to gloat too much about their survival, or their bravery. Nonetheless, it was difficult to avoid discussing specific exploits and the extraordinary phenomenon of injured soldiers such as Henry’s brother Wilky and Holmes himself and Gus Barker who insisted, once recovered, on returning to the fray. Holmes and Wilky had lived to receive more injuries and survived them too. Gus Barker, however, had been killed by a sniper two years earlier, when he was barely twenty, at the Rappahannock River in Virginia. All of them grew silent now as his name and the place where he died were mentioned.

Henry had seen him on return trips to America during his childhood at his grandmother’s house in Albany, where he had also met the Temples, and later at Newport. As the others started again to talk about him, Henry’s mind wandered back to five years earlier when the Civil War seemed an impossible nightmare and the James family had returned to Newport from Europe so that William could study art.

One day in the fall of 1860 Henry had come into the studio to find his cousin Gus Barker standing naked on a pedestal while the advanced students sketched him. Gus was strong and wiry, red-haired and white-skinned. He stood immobile and unembarrassed as the five or six students, including William, worked on their drawings as though they did not know the model. Gus Barker, like the Temples, had lost his mother, and his orphanhood gave him the same mystery and independence. No mother could arrive to tell him to cease this display and put on his clothes forthwith. His form was beautiful and manly, and Henry was surprised by his own need to watch him, while pretending that his interest in Gus Barker, like that of the other students, was distant and academic. He studied William’s drawing closely so that he could then raise his eyes and study at some length his naked cousin’s perfect gymnastic figure, his strength, and his calm sensual aura.

It struck him all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell Gray or Holmes or even Minny, that his mind during these few minutes had wandered over a scene whose meaning would have to remain secret to him. He simply did not suppose that Gray’s mind worked like that, or the mind and imagination of Holmes, or the Temple sisters. He did not even know if his brother William’s mind moved into areas that would always have to remain obscure to those around him. He thought about the result if he spoke his mind, told his companions as truthfully as he could what the name Gus Barker had provoked in his memory. He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all. For a second as he thought about this, he caught Holmes’s eye, and he found that he had not been able to disguise himself fully, that Holmes had seen through his social mask to the mind which had strayed into realms which could not be shared. Both of them shared something now, tacitly, momentarily, which the others did not even notice.

Gradually, then, over the days, Minny Temple made a choice. She chose subtly and carefully so that no one saw at first that she had done so, but what was not apparent to Gray or Holmes or her sisters became clear to Henry because she wished it to be clear to him. She chose Henry as her friend and confidant, the one she trusted most, could speak to most easily. And she may have chosen Holmes for something too because she never ignored him, or shone her light on the others more than on him. But she chose Gray as the one on whom she could have most effect, who most needed her. She paid no attention to his military talk and his gruff, practical comments and his clipped witticisms. She wished to change him, and Henry watched her gently cajoling him, without allowing herself to become offensive.

One day when she handed Gray lines of Browning to read, he held back and asked her to read them aloud.

‘No, I want you to read them to yourself,’ she said.

‘I can’t read poetry,’ he said.

Henry and Holmes and her two sisters did not speak; this, Henry knew, was a decisive moment in Minny’s fight to mould John Gray into a shape acceptable to her.

‘Of course you can read poetry,’ she said, ‘but you must first forget the “read” part and the “poetry” part and concentrate on the “I” part and find new credentials for it, and soon you will be a changed man and your youth will return. But if you really want me to, then I will read the verse aloud.’

‘Minny,’ her sister said, ‘you must not be abrupt to Mr Gray.’

‘Mr Gray is going to be a great lawyer,’ Holmes said. ‘He is learning to defend himself, I feel, so that he will in time learn to defend others more worthy of defence, perhaps.’

‘I long for you to read it aloud,’ Gray said.

‘And I long for the day when you will read it too, quietly and with emotion,’ Minny said taking the book.

HENRY BEGAN to imagine an heiress, recently orphaned, who had three suitors, a young woman whose patient intelligence had never been fully appreciated by those around her. He did not want to make her as beautiful as Minny was that August; instead, he made his heroine positively plain but for the frequent recurrence of a magnificent smile. He made two of the suitors military men; the third, who gave his name to the story, Poor Richard, whose manner was that of a nervous headstrong man, brought close to desperation by unrequited love, was a civilian. Richard adored Gertrude Whittaker, but she did not take him as seriously as she took the two Civil War soldiers. One of them, Captain Severn, was himself a serious and conscientious man, who was discreet, deliberate and unused to acting without a definite purpose. And Major Lutrell, on the other hand, who could play the part of Gray, was both agreeable and insufferable. All three began a siege to win Miss Whittaker’s love and marry her. In the end, she accepted none of them.

The story began for him in a small single moment in which Richard watches Captain Severn sinking into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own as they observe the progress of a lively dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Lutrell. So too at North Conway had this become for Henry and for Holmes a daily routine, as Minny continued her battle to soften Gray, to make him more conscious of his soul than his uniform, of his deepest fears and longings rather than of his self-protective army talk, suitably censored for ladies. Holmes began by believing that Minny did not like Gray, which pleased him, and then became aware with flashes of alarm that Gray was winning. Holmes’s alarm made a sound that Minny and her sisters and Gray were too distracted to hear, but which Henry picked up easily and stored and thought about when he was alone.

He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines – would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time: the two ambitious, patrician New Englanders, already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Minny, fresh and open to life, so inquisitive, so imbued with a boundless curiosity and charm and intelligence. And between them much that would have to be left unsaid and a great deal that would never be known. Already, on that lawn beside the house where the Temple sisters stayed that summer, there were secrets and unstated alliances, and already a sense that Minny Temple would escape them and soar above them, although none of them had an idea how soon this would happen and how sad it would be.