‘And when have you heard her?’

‘The night that my baby sister died. I heard something. And I knew at once that it was Melusina.’

‘But how did you know it was her?’ the other maid whispers, afraid of being excluded from the conversation.

I shrug, and Joan smiles in recognition of truths that cannot be explained. ‘I just knew,’ I say. ‘It was as if I recognised her voice. As if I had always known it.’

‘That’s true. You just know,’ Joan nods. ‘But how do you know that it comes from God and not from the Devil?’

I hesitate. Any spiritual questions should be taken to my confessor, or at the very least to my mother or my great-aunt. But the song of Melusina, and the shiver on my spine, and my occasional sight of the unseen – something half-lost, sometimes vanishing around a corner, lighter grey in a grey twilight, a dream that is too clear to be forgotten, a glimpse of foresight but never anything that I can describe – these things are too thin for speech. How can I ask about them when I cannot even put them into words? How can I bear to have someone clumsily name them or, even worse, try to explain them? I might as well try to hold the greenish water of the moat in my cupped hands.

‘I’ve never asked,’ I say. ‘Because it is hardly anything. Like when you go into a room and it is quiet – but you know, you can just tell, that someone is there. You can’t hear them or see them, but you just know. It’s little more than that. I never think of it as a gift coming from God or the Devil. It is just nothing.’

‘My voices come from God,’ Joan says certainly. ‘I know it. If it were not true, I should be utterly lost.’

‘So can you tell fortunes?’ Elizabeth asks me childishly.

My fingers close over my cards. ‘No,’ I say. ‘And these don’t tell fortunes, they are just for playing. They’re just playing cards. I don’t tell fortunes. My great-aunt would not allow me to do it, even if I could.’

‘Oh, do mine!’

‘These are just playing cards,’ I insist. ‘I’m no soothsayer.’

‘Oh, draw a card for me and tell me,’ Elizabeth says. ‘And for Joan. What’s going to become of her? Surely you want to know what’s going to happen to Joan?’

‘It means nothing,’ I say to Joan. ‘And I only brought them so we could play.’

‘They are beautiful,’ she says. ‘They taught me to play at court with cards like these. How bright they are.’

I hand them to her. ‘Take care with them, they’re very precious,’ I say jealously as she spreads them in her calloused hands. ‘The Demoiselle showed them to me when I was a little girl and told me the names of the pictures. She lets me borrow them because I love to play. But I promised her I would take care of them.’