‘He’s a bully,’ Agathe warned her. ‘Why would you marry him? Listen to the way he speaks to you, Fleur, ordering you about, even before you’re married.’

‘He’s a man of means,’ returned Fleur. ‘He has a good business and he owns his apartment. I’ll have a home of my own. This is the best chance in life that I’ll get, Agathe, and I mean to grab it with both hands, so don’t you dare tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.’

Yves Bastien was a butcher whose family had owned their shop and the three apartments above it for generations. When his elderly sister who’d kept house for him died, it was clear to Agathe, if not to Fleur, that Yves was not looking for a wife but an unpaid servant to replace her.

‘But,’ Agathe said, ‘you don’t love him.’

‘What has love to do with it?’ demanded Fleur. ‘If we marry it will suit us both. He’s looking for a wife and I’m looking for the security that he can provide.’

‘You will never be safe, married to a bully like him!’ cried Agathe in a last bid to make her sister see sense. ‘You’ve seen what he’s like when he’s drunk!’

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ snapped Fleur. ‘Just mind your own business!’

Within the month Fleur and Yves were married and from then on the sisters had hardly spoken.

Agathe had been proved right, and though she never admitted it to her sister, Fleur found herself trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage, from which there was no escape. Yves dominated her in every respect, making her life a misery, until, that was, coming home one afternoon already reeling from midday drink, he staggered out in front of a coal merchant’s waggon. The horses reared in fright, knocking him to the ground, and their hooves came plunging down on his head, killing him instantly. Her husband was dead, and when they came to tell her of this tragedy, Fleur’s only emotion was profound relief. With no other family to lay claim to his possessions, everything he’d owned was now Fleur’s, and she dealt with her new prosperity shrewdly. She rented the ground-floor shop to Yves’s erstwhile apprentice and continued to live above in the apartment that had been her married home. The rents from the apartments on the two floors above provided further income. At last Fleur had the security she had so longed for; she had the apartment and enough money to live on, and with no children, she had only herself to please. Her relief at her new-found security she shared with no one, not even her estranged sister.

Now, reluctantly, Agathe set out to visit her, but before knocking at her door, stood outside in the street. She peered in through the window of the butcher’s shop. The apprentice, now a master butcher himself, seemed to be doing a brisk trade. Chickens, their wrung necks dangling, hung above the counter; a butchered sheep swung from a hook on the ceiling and even as she watched, the man sharpened a large knife and sliced meat from the carcass for his waiting customer.