The notion of having a second child seemed utterly foreign at that juncture, but Jane did not care to dispute the claim. They had, after all, recorded a glamour. She poured a cup of coffee to distract herself. ‘I thought I might go for a walk today. Do you need anything from town?’

‘I want a new ribbon!’ Miette danced away from her mother, undoing her bow in an instant. ‘For my crystal.’

‘You shall have one.’ For that blessed, beautiful crystal which had delivered such elation that Jane could hardly contain herself. One ribbon? Why, the child should have a dozen, and still it would not be thanks enough.

Jane found that, though her appetite had returned, her excitement was too great to allow her to sit still for long. She took her leave with her errand in mind, and began the walk to the centre of town. Out of doors, the spicy scent of early geraniums mingled with the earthiness that marked the passage of carriages. Her feet rang against the cobblestones paving the street, and everything seemed scrubbed clean just for the purpose of giving her walk pleasure.

The town buzzed with life. Women in neat linen leaned out of their windows to converse with their neighbours on the street. A boy ran past with a wood hobby-horse, toy sword held over his head, shouting ‘Viva Napoleon!’ For a moment she thought it was young Luc Chastain, but it was another child with similar colouring. A pack of boys chased him, so intent on their game that they bumped willy-nilly into the pedestrians.

As Jane approached the centre of town, she became sensible of a change in the knots of people lining the street. There was, in their general carriage, a tension that ignored the beauty of the day. Jane stepped into the notions store and found it astonishingly thronged with customers, but with a sharp line down the middle of the crowd. It took her a moment to comprehend the difference between the people standing on opposite sides of the divide. She noted that one group held red, blue, and white ribbons and the other held only white, but nothing else unified the sets, save for a clear animosity of each toward the opposite group. In all other ways, it was a cheerful space. The spools of ribbons lining the shelves caught the light from the street, and a glamour arched overhead to create the illusion of a ceiling full of fluttering ribbon and lace.

In the space between the groups, two women stood, pulling a single white ribbon between them. They shouted insults at each other, tugging the ribbon back and forth while the crowd jeered them on. The woman on the left had red and blue ribbons dangling from her grasp, while the one on the right had only the shared white ribbon.

‘You are a traitor to your nation!’ the one with white ribbon shouted.