All of Ifrahim’s lessons were like that, two-faced as a conjuror’s coin. He taught me how to gild bad fish with pimentón, how to hammer horsemeat and soak it in wine until the stallion-loving bastards who slummed it at the inn would have made their own mothers swear it was beef. He taught me how to pilfer more than I paid for at the market, how to protest my innocence if I was ever caught being light-fingered and swear that it was a mistake, that it was only ‘the sun in my eyes’.

Four years of those lessons. Milk puddings and how to cheat at Nap. Fish ‘à la française’ and how to tell a person’s wealth by what they ordered to drink.

‘Watch what comes out of their mouths, as well as what goes in,’ he told me, ‘and you will know them for what they are.’

One January day, Ifrahim’s heart finally came loose, and he died. It left me terrified; I was seventeen, and that alone would surely be enough to make Morales rethink her decision – to give me the choice once more of a room upstairs, or the road.

I would choose the road, I told myself fiercely in the night, as the cats whirred against my belly. I would take my chances outside the inn. But in reality, the prospect was unthinkable. The world was not kind to girls like me, with no money and no name. Even taking what Morales offered might be better than being forced into the same thing miles away, where no one, not even the cats knew me.

So I tried to do what Ifrahim had instructed. I tried to make everyone forget that I was a young woman and become instead a kitchen-thing, a witch of cook-smoke and cleaver, of red face and blistered fingers and saffron-stained nails: desirable to no one, useful to everyone.

I hid beneath the kitchen smock, wore Ifrahim’s rough work trousers and kept my hair tight beneath a scarf, so that if anyone did look at me, they might see a sullen, grubby boy, rather than a woman to be bought.

It was the same with Morales. Whenever she saw me, I made sure my hands were full of something, red to the wrist with blood and gristle or slick with fish tripe and scales. I kept the kitchen ledger as regular as Ifrahim had, the columns of numbers neat. I blagged and bartered and stole more from the market than ever, to make her see that I could be economical, that I could run the kitchen better than anyone else.

I asked for nothing, and Morales seemed to accept my presence. So long as I was more valuable at the stove than I was on my back, so long as I charmed and conned the clients with food and drink and kept the accounts straight, I would be safe.