The Paragon, Bath

The Paragon, Bath, is an eighteenth-century terrace whose grand Palladian frontage becomes the setting for Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves’s visit to Miss Chilmark. The address brings together the formal public face of Georgian Bath and the surprising domestic arrangement behind one of its doors: Miss Chilmark lives below street level, though her rooms open onto the ground floor and garden at the rear.

Setting and historical associations

The Paragon is identified as an eighteenth-century terrace in the area Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves had visited earlier that morning. Jane Austen stayed there when she first came to Bath, giving the street a literary association alongside its architectural character. The address is also close to Rupert’s shabby home on Hay Hill, placing Miss Chilmark’s residence near another location relevant to the investigation.

The approach

Peter Diamond proposes walking to the address rather than arranging immediate police transport. He and Julie set out on foot, and, because Diamond is not a quick walker, their arrival is carefully timed: they reach a white-painted door two minutes past the hour. The Palladian terrace curves away in a pleasing perspective. Traffic rushes past, but a broad pavement and a triple-stepped curb keep the vehicles from intruding too conspicuously on the street’s Georgian formality.

The basement entrance

The first person to open the door is a frail, white-haired woman in a lavender suit, who tells the detectives they have the wrong entrance and points them towards the basement. From the railings, they see that the lower-level approach is orderly: the walls are whitewashed, the area is free of litter, and a dwarf conifer stands in a pot beside the door. The basement setting initially contrasts with the terrace’s impressive exterior, but the scene complicates that impression when Miss Chilmark explains that she has the ground floor and garden as well.

The interior and narrative role

Miss Chilmark’s entrance leads into a narrow hallway, where china plates are clipped to the walls, and then into the room she calls her drawing room. The interior feels dry and subdued beside its owner’s colourful dress and jewellery: faded Indian carpets cover a wood-block floor, pale-blue walls hold portraits of Victorians and tweed-suited figures, and two old armchairs and a settee stand near a 1960s gas fire. Books and rock specimens rest on the mantelpiece beneath a large cathedral print. The shift from the terrace’s stately curve to the basement rooms makes the Paragon more than an address: its divided levels stage the detectives’ discovery that the outward impression of a residence does not fully describe how it is inhabited.