Inside, it’s dark and cold with a shaft of moonlight falling upon the stairs from the window. The clouds have drifted, and the night is clearer than the day. She does not know how to stoke the boiler. She pulls her father’s heavy dressing gown from the hook on the back of his bedroom door and wraps it around her, rolling up the sleeves in wide folds. The end trails behind her like a cape as she walks.

Up in her bedroom she lays her tarot cards out on the bed. A draught creeps across her shoulder blades and, for a moment, she gets a strange feeling of a hand, reaching out of the darkness. She shakes her head and shoulders and shuffles the dog-eared cards. She flicks three across her bed, face down, then puts her hand over the first card and asks it to tell her what is going on. The next one she asks what is getting in the way. The third she asks what will fix the problem.

Lauren takes a moment to clear her mind and push thoughts about time and school away, as best she can. She turns the first card over on the bedspread. The High Priestess stares back at her with blank eyes, her face placid under a strange horned crown. She sits between two pillars, one black and one white. These, Lauren knows, stand for the bad and the good, the dead and the living, the end and the beginning. Meanings refract through symbols like sunlight. The woman’s necklace is shaped like a ‘plus’ sign, showing she is like both of the pillars she sits between, two opposites in one person. There is a wall of red split fruit and dense leaves behind her. A sliver of yellow moon lies at the woman’s robed feet, like the joined horns of a Highland cow. Lauren props this woman up on the windowsill.

She turns over the second card. It’s the Hermit: the obstacle. He is a thin, white-bearded man with stooping shoulders under a long, hooded cloak. In one hand he holds a tall yellow staff, and in the other a lantern. Inside the lantern is a pointed, shining star. It’s as if he has taken it from the sky and imprisoned it there. He walks over craggy grey ground.

This is a card Lauren doesn’t know very well. She flicks through the spaewife’s book and finds an old, shaky note written in the section on tarot:

The Hermit: his right haund holds the Lamp o’ Truith, its star guidin those who dinna ken the way. His left haund holds the patriarch’s staff to bide by dern, saicret paiths, using his lanesome nature and knawledge to find his way. His cloak signifies he is unseen, discreet, cannie. His saicrets are no for awbody.