‘I always dreamed of living in Florence,’ Constance said.

‘And now you do,’ Miss Broughton said. ‘And now you do. How lucky you both are to have such a beautiful house.’

Miss Broughton sipped her tea as Constance stared sharply into the distance. Henry wished he were writing now, feeling that he would be able, in the privacy of his room, to come up with a proper reply. He needed to think quickly and did not know if he could manage a complete denial.

‘Of course, Miss Broughton, I am merely visiting just as you are. Miss Woolson is the lucky one.’

When he looked at Constance, he saw that his remark did not seem to have interested her.

‘Where are you staying?’ Rhoda Broughton asked.

‘Oh, I’ve been wandering a great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Venice, as you know, and may go on to Rome. Florence is marvellous, but there is too much society for a poor writer.’

‘I was not even aware that you had come to Florence,’ Rhoda Broughton said again.

Henry thought that she sounded even less convincing the second time and felt that they had discussed the topic of his whereabouts quite enough. Miss Broughton had now, fortunately, left him an opening. By bowing to her drily he was able to intimate that her not being aware may have, in fact, been part of his plan. As she was absorbing the implications of this, Constance changed the subject.

SINCE HE did not wish his new story to be read directly as the story of Claire Clairmont and her great-niece, and did not feel that moving the scene from Florence to Venice was sufficient, he made the dead writer American, one of the pioneers of American writing. He knew as he set this down that he could have been referring to James Fenimore Cooper, and as he concentrated on his American adventurer, he realized that he was using moments of his own return visit to Florence, his own intrusion, also. He began to understand, as he drafted the story, the irony of the case. If he were looking for an exiled spinster who kept papers and was related to a pioneer of American writing, then he had one upstairs, albeit one of great independence.

He wondered what would happen if he abandoned the spinster’s offer of marriage, if he could make the story’s denouement true to the strange, nuanced, open-ended and infinitely interesting life he was sharing now with Constance Fenimore Woolson, if he could make his adventurer begin to need, or half-need, the domestic life of a lodger with an intelligent and reserved woman who was lonely, but not willing to be preyed upon. She would ask him for nothing as obvious as marriage; what she wanted was a close and satisfying and, if necessary, unconventional attachment with loyalty and care and affection as well as solitude and distance.

ONE MORNING in Florence, when the maid had come, and he had opened a letter from Katherine Loring about the health and general welfare of his sister Alice, he began to discuss Alice with Constance.

‘Life has been difficult for her,’ he said. ‘Life itself seems to be the root of her malady.’

‘I think it’s difficult for all of us. The gap is so wide,’ Constance said.

‘You mean between her imagination and her confines?’ Henry asked.

‘I mean between using our intelligence as women to the full and the social consequences of that,’ Constance said. ‘ Alice has done what she had to do, and I admire her.’

‘She really has done nothing except stay in bed,’ Henry said.

‘That’s precisely what I mean,’ Constance replied.

‘I do not understand,’ he said.

‘I mean that the consequences get into the marrow of your soul.’

She smiled at him softly as though she had uttered a pleasantry.

‘I’m sure she would agree with you,’ he said. ‘She is blessed in having Miss Loring.’

‘She seems to be a ministering angel,’ Constance said.

‘Yes, we all need a Miss Loring,’ Henry said.

As soon as he made the last remark, he regretted it. The very sound of the name Miss Loring suggested a spinster skilled only in the art of caring for others. He had meant it as a joke, or a sign of gratitude, or a way of reducing the intensity of their exchange, but he knew, as it hung in the air, that it had come out as a flippant expression of his own need, as though that was what he required from Constance. He turned to her now, preparing a statement which would take the harm out of what he had just said, but he observed that she did not seem to have noticed it, or taken it on board. He was sure, nonetheless, that she had heard him. She remained placid as she resumed the conversation.

BETWEEN HIS departure from Florence and her death, they continued to correspond and meet. Once when they were both staying in Geneva, living on opposite sides of the lake but meeting daily, Alice James began to detect their familiarity. Henry is somewhere on the continent, she wrote to William, flirting with Constance. When he returned, he found his sister more truculent than usual, difficult, almost angry, accusing him of neglecting her while he gallivanted with a she-novelist.

Constance left Florence, having found, or so she said, the interruptions and invasions of Florentine society too much for her. She moved to London once more where she established herself with her customary zeal, placing solitude and hard work high on her list of needs. She travelled in the east with spirit and independence and sent him regular accounts of herself, using a tone both playfully ironic and distant. When she returned to England to live in Cheltenham and subsequently in Oxford, her power of lonely industry, Henry wrote to Francis Boott, was as remarkable and admirable as ever.

They remained close, aware always of each other’s whereabouts and preoccupations. When Alice James began to die and Constance was in Oxford, Henry kept her in touch with news of his sister’s condition. Both ladies, in the early months of 1892, sent one another short, brittle, witty messages. Constance stayed in England for a year after Alice ’s death before finally deciding to return to Italy and live in Venice.

By that time, the two novelists had developed a strange, unstructured and contented way of remaining close. They became connoisseurs of the twenty-four-hour meeting in provincial English places, staying in separate small hotels, taking walks together and having supper with each other. She could, on these occasions, be brilliantly difficult and combative, begging to differ with him on books of the day or sights they had seen, and ready to tease him about his addiction to refinements. He wondered if they were to be studied by a disinterested spectator how they would emerge. They were both Americans who had been away from America for many years. Neither of them had known the compromises which marriage brought, or the cares of parenthood. Neither of them had attended to a child crying in the night. They might, he felt, be mistaken for a brother and sister. But then he watched her delighting herself with the workings of her own wit, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories into which she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals, and whole buildings and cities, and her memories and his observations. And he knew, as she smiled at him, that nobody would imagine that his friend, so darkly ebullient now and funny and charming, was in the company of her brother. Just as they were a mystery to each other, he felt, they would remain a mystery to the thin slice of society that managed to notice them.

Henry met her in Paris as she moved with her belongings from Oxford to Venice. Packing and preparing to leave had taken her months. She was tired and bewildered, and a pain in her left ear was causing her immense misery. She made clear, on her arrival, that she would not be able to see a great deal of him. He could do the city alone, she said, and perhaps she could spend some time with him in the evening. But she was not sure, she added, that she would be able to see him at all.