“But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall—frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. ‘She wanted to warm herself,’ people said.”

There was a silence in the shop.

“What?” said Phoebe. “You are kidding me.”

“Where has the girl gone?” said one of the boys.

Pippa’s face was full of dismay. “Could you read to the end please, Auntie Carmen?” she said in her usual polite way, but there was a trembling edge to her voice.

“She dies?” burst out Phoebe, tears already threatening.

“Oh goodness, she does die,” said one of the blond women. “I had completely forgotten that.” Then, more quietly: “Shit.”

“I didn’t . . . I don’t know this story,” said one of the other mothers. “It doesn’t sound remotely appropriate.”

“It’s the greatest children’s writer of all time,” said Carmen, then cursed her quick tongue.

“So . . . she really does die? In bare feet in the snow in a corner all by herself with no mummy or daddy?” whispered a tiny girl Carmen hadn’t noticed before, whose eyes were now bigger than her entire face.

“Well . . . I mean, she does get to go with her grandmother?” said Carmen hopefully.

“Her dead grandmother? That definitely means she’s dead then,” said the same boy who had had something to say about naked feet. At this, the girl brimmed over uncontrollably and, as is often the case, it proved rather infectious, until there was a clutch of sobbing infants at Carmen’s feet, mothers tutting at her, and she suddenly wished that she too had conveniently frozen to death in a corner the previous evening.

“Well!” she said, glancing quickly through the rest of the book. Her eye alighted on “The Snow Queen,” but as soon as she picked it up and read a line about shards of ice entering people’s eyeballs, she decided that on balance discretion was the better part of valor.

“Thank you all so much for coming.”

“BUT! SHE’S! DEAD!”

“I think on balance,” said Carmen desperately. “I’m going to give the candy canes to your mothers and they can decide what to do with them.”

This earned her several looks of sharp enmity from the other parents, of which Sofia was acutely aware but Carmen was not.

“Aha!” said Sofia. “Here’s another page! I just found it! Where she wakes up and she was only sleeping.”

“Let’s see the picture,” said the boy.

“There’s no picture,” shouted Phoebe, who was nearest. “She’s dead. She’s really, really dead!”

Another storm of sobbing commenced.

“I’ll take one of those candy canes,” said one mother desperately, backing out of the shop.