None of them would help us even if we asked them to.

Elise and I cannot continue this way.

He won’t touch her again.

This morning the scent of tobacco seeps into lavender that the maid liberally doused on our pillows. I have a white rage in me. It is still as a great lake untouched by the wind or even the ripple of a fish. I imagine a great white lake that is the shape of a giant tear. In the middle of it, a single drop of blood unfurls and disappears.

I bury my face into Elise’s hair and breathe deeply.

She sleeps beside me, fitful and tear-stained.

Mr Udnam keeps his eyes trained on Elise at all times now.

We eat dinner in silence each night.

It has been three years.

He is so very far from good and it will never be in him to see that remotely – let alone closely.

Mr Udnam has a truly terrible sense of his own greatness.

He has the serenity of a man entirely without conscience.

There is no end of other people for Mr Udnam to blame. That is all he does. He will pay, bribe, bully, cajole, he will tell people anything they want to hear about how great they are – so they will like him, or he will do them favours so he can get as many people as possible to owe him publicly. The more he can hold over other people and the more publicly he can masquerade as a decent human being, the better. His self-wonder borders on psychopathic. It leaves no ripple in the water. I can see that great tear-shaped lake in my mind’s eye and it has a coffin bobbing at the side of it.

The police do his bidding.

Lock doors for him.

Make sure people do not go down corridors he does not want traversed.

Elise has pleaded with him to not make me leave so many times now and my daughter screams like she is opening a portal to hell each time I am sent away. If they send me away I’m pretty sure Hope will open a portal to hell. All the creatures I have chosen not to call upon would come to her aid.

There is no nursemaid who can soothe her when I’m gone.

She is mine.

Nothing can change it.

I kiss my daughter’s forehead.

Close the shutters.

Select an ornate umbrella from the hat stand.

The maid has clicked the front door shut. I ease it open quietly.

No sound from the consulting room.

Mr Udnam is passed out.

In the hall mirror my horns shine now.

Rubbed with oil.

So pretty.

They have neat ivory rings all the way up them.

Deepened into a blue-black shade at the base.