William, in response to Henry’s provocations, made clear his indignation at being treated like a small child who did not understand his own motives or interests. He made many insulting remarks about London and Henry’s flat, and had attempted to break ranks on the plan to make up to Wilky for the injustice their father had done him. Then he had returned to Cambridge before his sabbatical in Europe was over, whereupon Henry had informed him that he would make his own share of the estate over to his sister Alice, and would allow William the control he desired by leaving the family finances in his hands. He was going to apply himself, he had told his brother, to his work in the very London which William so despised, from which work he, in any case, derived sufficient income not to have to bother with any further discussions about his father’s estate and its management.

The death of Wilky the following year, followed by the death of Herman, William and Alice’s baby boy, and then the death of their sister Alice, brought respite from their disputes, and the many sweet and healing letters, full of kindness and emotional generosity, written to Henry over the years by William’s wife helped to restore tenderness to the relationship between Henry and William, as indeed the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean between them managed to pour calming waters on both sides.

NOW, HOWEVER, two decades later, it was as though an afterglow of the rancour of those months after their father’s death continued to burn at Lamb House. Henry could continue his routine; he had his work, his servants, his books, and constant messages from friends and publishers. William was away from home. When William left his house in Cambridge to walk to Harvard Yard, he would be observed with a respect bordering on awe and greeted warmly, his fame gathering like a large protective shadow. This fame did not stretch to Rye; and its failure to do so, it seemed to Henry, appeared to depress William even further so that eventually he did not wish to go out at all. Yet staying indoors day after day made him behave like an animal in a cage who had lost none of the ability to snarl.

One evening as he was preparing to go to his room for the night, and in search of the book he had been reading, Henry found his niece in one of the downstairs rooms. She seemed disturbed; he wondered if her father’s mood had affected her and this made him concerned. As her warmth and delight at the Christmas season had managed to lift some of the gloom that hung over Lamb House, he had come to view her as a young figure of charm and intelligence, a source of much amusement for him as well as pride. When he asked her if anything was wrong she was at first unwilling to tell him why she appeared so listless and almost despondent. When he asked her if she were missing her brothers and her friends in Cambridge, she shook her head. When he was weighing in his mind whether he should allude to William’s state of mind, his niece suddenly asked him if he intended to write a second volume, a sequel, to The Portrait of a Lady. She told him that she had, less than one hour before, finished the book. Henry told her that he had written the book twenty years earlier and had long forgotten it; he did not think he would write a sequel to it.

‘Why did she go back?’ Peggy asked.

‘You mean, return to her husband?’

‘Why did she do it?’

Peggy seemed almost angry. Henry sat down opposite her and tried to think, knowing that, above all, he must not say to her that when she was older she would come to realize how such decisions, matters of duty and resignation, were often more easily made than other decisions which might appear right to an imaginative young girl.

‘It is very difficult for anyone in their lives,’ Henry began, ‘to make leaps into the dark. Isabel’s going to Europe from Albany, leaving all her family behind, and then against everyone’s advice and her own better judgement marrying Osmond, were leaps into the dark. Making such leaps requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so also may freeze any other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery rather than to be brave over and over. It could not, in her case, be done again. The will and the nerve needed for such actions do not come to us often, any of us, least of all Isabel Archer from Albany.’

As Peggy took her time to consider what he had said, a noise came from the room above them where William and Alice were sleeping. It sounded as though one of them had fallen out of the bed. Then they heard William’s voice shouting and moaning and Alice’s voice pleading with him and further sounds as though one of them were banging something against the floor. Peggy stood up and moved towards the door as Henry gestured to her to wait, to hesitate.

‘No,’ she said, brushing him aside. ‘We must go upstairs now.’

She glanced back at him, her expression set and firm, her mouth and her chin an exact image of his mother’s face. Her eyes were different, however, almost kindly, as she reached and caught his hand.

‘We must go upstairs now,’ she repeated.

Peggy led him upstairs to her parents’ room and she opened the door without knocking. William lay on the floor in his nightshirt, his bare legs white in the lamplight. He was calling out and hammering the floor with his fists. Alice stood above him, fully dressed, motionless, her face like a mask.

‘You have seen it and it is gone,’ she said to William as though she desperately needed her words to be heeded and believed.

‘It came to you and now it has left and we will all hold you, we will all stay with you. You will never be alone.’

She repeated these last words but nothing would calm William as his moaning went on.

Henry did not speak but when Burgess Noakes came down the stairs was brisk in directing him to return to his quarters. He was careful to remain in the doorway in case his presence distressed William further. Soon he stood back into the shadows as he saw Alice helping William to his feet and leading him to the bed and pulling back the blankets.

‘We will stay with you all night, William,’ Alice said, ‘and if you wake, no matter what time it is, you will find one of us here.’

William called out quietly and softly and curled up under the blankets.

‘All of us are here, and all of us will stay here,’ Alice said. ‘Peggy will fetch a chair from her room and she will sit with us until you are soundly asleep. But I will not leave you. And Harry is watching you too.’

She moved to turn off the lamp on William’s side of the bed.

‘Sleep, now, sleep.’

She kept her hand on his head, exuding an unruffled kindness and a determination mixed with sadness. When Henry sought to capture her attention to ask if she wanted anything from the kitchen, she did not respond to him. Eventually, when William appeared to be asleep, she walked over to an armchair in the corner of the room and, once she sat down, did not take her eyes off her husband. Peggy had found a chair and was sitting close to her parents’ bed. Henry withdrew, but did not close the door; he went noiselessly downstairs where he attempted to rekindle the fire. He found his book and kept it on his knee, but did not read, waiting instead for some sound to come from upstairs.

William had seemed to him in a state of rage as much as in a trance. He wondered, since William wrote of such matters, what name he would give this state and in what terms he might describe his wife and daughter’s response to it. He wondered when William recovered whether he would remark on what happened.

Some time later, he heard footsteps on the stairs and he sat up, having fallen into a half-sleep. His sister-in-law came into the room.

‘Peggy has fallen asleep and I have made her comfortable there. If he needs me, I will go to him quickly. But he will not need me, he will sleep now for hours and hours, nothing will wake him.’