‘All right,’ I say. I can see no way of getting out of it. ‘But I am not dngea full spread.’ This at least cuts down the possibility of a series of pessimistic prophecies. ‘I will do just one card. You take the cards, and shuffle them.’

Her little hands stretch around the thick cards; she interleaves them, and then puts them down.

‘And cut.’

She cuts them and then puts the deck together. I spread them out before her in a fan, their faces down, their beautifully painted backs gleaming on the woollen covers of the bed. ‘Choose one,’ I say. ‘One will tell you enough.’

Margaret’s red-gold hair falls forwards and she leans across, her pretty face grave, trailing her finger along the pack, and then takes a card and holds it, without looking at it, to her heart.

‘Now what?’

I sweep the untouched cards into a pile and then say to Margaret, ‘Show it.’

She puts it face up.

It could have been an awful lot worse.

It is the card Joan the Maid saw in my hands, all those years ago: the Wheel of Fortune.

“La Roue de Fortune,” she reads. ‘Is that good? Is that very good?’

The card shows a wheel with two beasts balanced on either side of it, one climbing up, the other tumbling down as the wheel turns. The handle for the wheel is extended beyond the card, so one cannot see who is turning it; perhaps it is spinning at random. Seated at the very top of the card is a funny little blue animal, crowned and holding a sword. My great-aunt told me this little animal shows that it is possible to watch the wheel turn, and feel neither pride nor regret. One can stand above it, and see one’s own life both rise and fall with the real indifference that comes from true greatness of spirit. One can look at one’s own ambition as if it were all a masque of vanities, a dance for fools. It could not be a more unlikely card for Margaret: she is not at all a girl of indifference.

‘It’s good and bad,’ I say. ‘It’s a kind of warning that you can rise very high and fall very low. It says that fortune’s wheel can take you, by no merit of your own, by no grace of yours, very high indeed. And then it can throw you down very low.’

‘So how do I rise again?’ she asks me, as if I am some old hedgerow witch who tells fortunes for a groat.

‘The whole point is that you can’t,’ I say impatiently. ‘The whole point is that you can’t make it happen. The whole point is that you cannot make your own fate. You are on fortune’s wheel just like this poor monkey animal in the smart livery who is going to fall down; he can’t help himself. You can’t help yourself.’

She makes a sulky little face. ‘That’s not much of a foretelling,’ she says. ‘And anyway, doesn’t the other animal rise up? This little cat thing? Maybe I am the cat thing and I am going to rise and rise.’