I didn’t mind. Kitchen and stable, courtyard and storeroom, those were my domain. I didn’t like to venture up the stairs too often, on to the wooden balcony that surrounded the central yard, where the rooms were. If I did, it was only to collect chamber pots or laundry. I wasn’t fond of the sickly stab of violet perfume, covering the reek of men’s sweat and cologne, or the way they always forgot that the inn leaked sound like a sieve and we could all hear their noises, even through a closed door. I thought they were foolish, the men. Still, I couldn’t help but watch as they strolled uncaring along the corridor, their trousers half-buttoned and their jackets over their shoulders. Something made me want to follow them, to walk as they did, out into the night. There was a power in their lifted chins, in the way they paused at the edge of the street to light a cigarette, and though I imitated them in secret, I knew it was a power that could never be mine.

Elena spent more time upstairs than me, especially during the day, before business started. Then, she would let the girls fuss over her and make her up with waxy lipstick and powder, while I played with the kittens in the warm stink of the stables, or helped Ifrahim among the old cooking fat and fresh peelings of the kitchen. But at night, the pair of us shared a bed, in the smallest wedge-shaped room under the eaves, lulled to sleep by the creaking of the gate, the snorting of horses and the noises of the girl working the room next door.

It went on like that, slow winters and busy summers, morning lessons and chores and the smell of Elena’s hair against my nose at night, until my thirteenth year. That was when everything changed.

It happened during the feria, the festival of our Señora de la Salud: Our Lady of Health. Morales always laughed and said we should rename her Our Lady of the Health Inspector. It was May, our busiest month, and the city was overrun. People came in from all over to drink and dance at the festival; farmers, miners, factory workers, even people from as far away as Extremadura.

As a child, I’d been excited by the feria. Elena and I would run to the river to see the old, striped canvas tents go up, to watch the gitanos arrive to entertain the crowds with their wailing, roaring songs and their feverish guitars and clacking heels.