He resisted the thought that came to him when he had written the letter and was alone. It had a heavy crushing force, and he held it from him for as long as he could. He allowed himself to think that Constance had not lightly taken up his time, nor had she lightly allowed her own emotions to become so focussed. She had been subtle enough and nervous enough to make her demands silently, but they were all the clearer and more emphatic for that. He now had to face the idea that he, in turn, had sent her powerful and subtle signals of his need for her. And each time it became apparent to him what effect they were having, he retreated into the locked room of himself, a place whose safety he needed as desperately as he needed her involvement with him.

She had been caught, as it were, in a large misunderstanding, not only in the snare of his solitary, sedentary exile, but also in the idea that he was a man who did not, and would not ever, desire a wife. Her intelligence surely should have warned her that he would, under the slightest pressure, even out of fear, pull back; but her need and the quality of her sympathy came to outpace her intelligence, he thought. Nonetheless, she had been careful: she had acknowledged his needs and his reticence and was ready to make space for them, but when she moved too close, became too public, he rejected her.

He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone; his imagination, however, had stretched merely as far as his fears and not beyond. He had exerted control; what he had done made him shudder. Had he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself. If she had appealed to him to visit and he had refused, it might be easier for him now to feel simple guilt. But her appeals were all over and they would be for ever. He had let her down. He did not know if her friends in Venice, and friends of his, understood that this was the case and discussed it in the days after her death.

He could not face the idea that Constance ’s suicide had been planned for a long time. He wrote to others, to Rhoda Broughton, to Francis Boott, to William, saying to each in turn that Constance ’s last act had been rash, a form of madness, a demented moment. He did not fully believe what he wrote, although each time he set it down, it seemed to become more plausible and definitive. He did not express to anyone his reservations about this version of how she ended. However, as some part of her spirit brushed through his rooms in the weeks after her death, he had a sense of her as the only person he had ever known who was fully skilled at deciphering the unsaid and the unspoken. There was no need even to whisper the words, or let them form fully in his mind; her fresh ghost understood that he knew, he knew well that she was not given to moments of insanity or sudden abrupt gestures, no matter what the pressures. She was a woman of great determination who made decisions carefully and rationally. She had an abiding dislike for shrillness and theatricality.

Once night fell and the fire was blazing and the lamps glowing and he was alone, he came face to face with what had happened to his friend. She had planned her own death, he came to believe, having calculated for some time the possibilities. Her novel was finished and he knew that often, when she had completed a book,she did not think that she would write again. The winter was sad and damp in Venice where she moved between dark solitude and people she could easily begin to dislike.

And for the sake of something hidden within his own soul which resisted her, and because of his respect for convention and social decorum, he had abandoned her there. He was the person who could have rescued her, had he sent her a sign.

She planned her death, he thought, as she would plan a book, full of uncertainty and nerves, but also with ambition and a relentless physical courage. The influenza she suffered in those weeks, which he heard about from her doctor, would merely have added to her strength of will. She had decided, he knew, that she would be happier at rest, and she was prepared to do extreme violence to herself, to smash her bones and her head against the hard ground, to achieve her aim. Her restless curiosity, the pure honesty of her response, the practical nature of her imagination, all these came to him now, as what she had been powerfully visited him in the London winter, when her death had ceased to be news, until he knew that he would have to go to Venice where she died and from there travel to Rome where her broken body lay in the ground.

She came to him forcefully, palpably, in the days before he travelled. The woman he had kept at arm’s length was replaced by a woman of possibilities, a phantom he dreamed about. His parents were dead, his sister had been dead two years; William was far away, and he cared very little about the London society to which he had once paid so much attention. He could do as he pleased; he could have lived at Bellosguardo sharing a household with Constance, or he could have encouraged her to find adjoining houses for them in some English coastal town.

Now he thought about her dead body, and the rooms she had filled with the passion of her aura, her books, her mementoes, her clothes, her papers. She preferred these rooms to most people; rooms were her sacred spaces. He began to imagine her rooms in Venice, at Casa Biondetti, and those at Casa Semitecolo, and her rooms at Oxford before she left England. He longed now for those spaces as though he had known them and had reason to miss them. He saw her figure, so tidy in its movements, flitting across these rooms, and as he did so, he came to understand something of his initial resistance to going to Venice when she died, or going to Rome for her funeral. He would have had to walk away from her, he would have had to enact their separation. From a relationship that had been so tentative and full of possibility, he would have had to face her absence in all its finality. She had no further use for him.

This feeling that he had been brusquely and violently rejected somehow brought him closer to her. Now the prospect of seeing her rooms in Venice, looking at her papers, staying in the atmosphere she had created, began to intrigue him. He longed for her company and wondered, as the day of his departure for Italy came near, if he had always longed for it, but if only now, when it had no implications, could he allow himself fully to indulge the idea.

In Genoa, as he waited for Constance’s sister Clara Benedict, he wrote to Kay Bronson and asked her to secure for him the rooms which Constance had occupied the previous summer at Casa Biondetti at the same terms. He wished also that the padrone would cook for him as he had for Miss Woolson, remembering how happy his friend had been with the fare. He was not surprised when he received word that the rooms were free. Somehow, with Constance guiding him, he had been sure all along that they would be. She was now two months dead.

THE AMERICAN consul came with them to break the seal which the authorities had put on her apartment at the time of her death. Tito, who had been her gondolier, waited below for them. Mrs Benedict and her daughter stood in silence as the door into the house of death was unlocked. They seemed to Henry hesitant about stepping in. He stood behind them, trying to believe that her spirit was not in these abandoned rooms, merely her papers, her belongings, her left-overs, her gatherings, for she had been a collector of objects. He felt more sharply now that she had planned it all and foreseen it. In her love of detail, she would have been able to predict the arrival of the consul to break the seal, the boat waiting below, and she would have been able to imagine also the three others waiting to enter her room – her sister Clara Benedict, her niece Clare and her friend Henry James.

This, he thought, was her last novel. They all played their assigned roles. He watched as the American women stood in her bedroom afraid to approach the window to the small balcony from which she had jumped. Constance would have been able to conjure up their stricken faces and would have known, too, that Henry James would have studied the women, observing them with cold sympathy. She would have smiled to herself at his ability to keep his own feelings at a great distance from himself, careful to say nothing. Thus the scene taking place in this room, each breath they took, the very expression on their faces, each word they left said and unsaid, all of it belonged to Constance. It was pictured by her with wry interest during the time when she knew she would die, Henry believed. They were her characters; she had written the script for them. And she knew that Henry would recognize her art in these scenes. His very recognition was part of her dream. No matter where he looked or what he thought, he felt the sharpness of her plans and a sort of sad laughter at how easy it was to manipulate her sister and her niece and how delicious to direct the actions of her friend the novelist who, it seemed, had wished to be free of her.