‘Ben Hailey – your Knight of Cups,’ she asked again, ‘did he applaud?’

‘He wasn’t there,’ I told her. ‘He was out on a field trip with the Eldest Girls.’ I resisted the urge to ask what she was implying; I shied from it.

Margaritte dealt a small cross of cards onto the green.

‘I like those girls very much,’ she said.

‘So do I,’ I replied – a lie, and not the first time I’d told it, if only by omission.

When Ben and I had sat alone in the chapel, reunited in that pew, he’d expressed worry for the Eldest Girls. They seem fearful of what life will be like for them now that they are almost grown-up, he’d explained to me.

‘I am just as protective of them as you are,’ he’d said, squeezing my hand, and I didn’t correct him, didn’t admit that I had, in recent weeks, wished those girls away. This would have been too terrible a thing to say out loud and too easily misunderstood. It wasn’t that I hated them or wanted any misfortune to befall them, only that I could hardly bear the way they made me feel – like I did not understand my own mind, not just about Ben, but about Lark, about life. It was as if these girls, who should know nothing compared to me, knew everything.

‘They’re our future, the Eldest Girls,’ Margaritte went on, as if she could see my thoughts and was nudging them into line. She tapped each of the cards in my spread, neatening the cross. ‘They’ll be the ones to save us, you mark me.’

I snorted. Save us from what? was the question that rose within but I pushed it down; I hid from it.

‘So…’ she looked down at the spread ‘…you have decided to put your unquestioning faith in Ben.’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Yet here you are with questions nonetheless.’

I opened my mouth to object, closed it.

When I eventually spoke, I did so quietly. ‘It will be the last time,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ I didn’t know who I was promising this to – myself, Margaritte, the forces that made the cards land the way they did. ‘Just let me know that I am right to trust him.’

She gave me a sympathetic glance, said, ‘He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed’ – quoting from the Epistle of James. Then she started turning those cards face-up.

First came the Eight of Cups, telling me what I already knew: that I must turn my back on a way of being, a way of feeling, liberate myself but not lose hope.

Next, the Lovers, marking the challenge that would cross my path: a choice between the holy and the temporal, the teachings of my youth or the possibilities of the future.