I had never seen Penny happier than she was with Evelyn. In fact, I didn’t think I had even seen Penny happy at all before, although there had been a series of women, even in her miserable days at the blokey bindery.

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.

‘Seeing you,’ Cassie yelled triumphantly.

I swung her off the floor and she sat astride my hip. She was wearing a zip-up fleece over Tellytubby pyjamas and smelled of warmth and soap. ‘Why?’

‘Because you are silly.’

I reached for my duster and dropped it over my head and face. ‘How about now?’

This was greeted with hoots of laughter. She twitched the duster off my face and rubbed her boneless button nose against mine.

I cleared a space on my bench and gently sat her down. I didn’t really like seeing Cassie in the bindery. There were too many instruments of harm in here, too many long-bladed knives and mallets and jars of glue and size. The sight of her anywhere near the big old hand-operated guillotine with its grinning, curved metal blade made sweat break out down my spine and in the hollows of my hands. I blew a raspberry against the back of her plump, pale-brown neck and told her to sit still.

I never worried about my own two when they were small the way I feared for Cassie. It was only when I got older and Lola and Jack didn’t need and certainly didn’t welcome my physical protection that I started to.

But Evelyn didn’t worry about Cassie either. She let her play on the bindery floor, where she chewed strips of discarded goatskin and banged her head on the iron legs of the guillotine. ‘Let her play, Sadie,’ she would say with a shrug.

Penny came in with a tea towel over her shoulder.

‘Pen …’ I began.

She held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. But she wanted to come and see you on her own. You’re here and I was watching her all the way.’

Penny was incapable of refusing Cassie anything. She loved the child with an absorbed, half-unbelieving passion. I loved her too; the familiar weight of a baby in my arms, the softness and tenacity and scent of her. I missed my own children’s infant selves – Lola was already overtaking me in the adult pecking order and Jack was angular and rejecting – and Cassie filled some of the space they had left empty. So she moved between the three of us women, bathed in the constant light of our adoration.

‘I’m just finishing,’ I capitulated. ‘Do you want to stay here with me, Cass, and then I’ll carry you up to bed?’

‘No bed.’

‘Yes bed.’

‘No.’

‘Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyessss.’

‘We’ll see,’ she suddenly bargained and I could hear her mother’s sweet cajoling voice. Evelyn seemed other-worldly, but she always got exactly what she wanted.