I know all their favourites. I know what they want, although I’d never tell. That would be too dangerous. Anouk is eleven now, and on some days I can almost feel it, that terrible knowledge, trembling inside her like an animal in a cage. Anouk, my summer child, who in the old days could no more have lied to me than she could have forgotten how to smile. Anouk, who used to lick my face and bugle – I love you! – in public places. Anouk, my little stranger, now grown stranger still, with her moods and her strange silences and her extravagant tales, and the way she sometimes looks at me, eyes narrowed, as if trying to see something half-forgotten in the air behind my head.

I’ve had to change her name, of course. Nowadays I am Yanne Charbonneau, and she is Annie – though she’ll always be Anouk to me. It’s not the actual names that trouble me. We’ve changed them so many times before. But something else has slipped away. I don’t know what, but I know I miss it.

She’s growing up, I tell myself. Receding, dwindling like a child glimpsed in a hall of mirrors – Anouk at nine, still more sunshine than shadow, Anouk at seven, Anouk at six, waddling duck-footed in her yellow wellingtons, Anouk with Pantoufle bounding blurrily behind her, Anouk with a plume of candyfloss in one small pink fist – all gone now, of course, slipping away and into line behind the ranks of future Anouks. Anouk at thirteen, discovering boys, Anouk at fourteen, Anouk, impossibly, at twenty, marching faster and faster towards a new horizon—

I wonder how much she still remembers. Four years is a long time to a child of her age, and she no longer mentions Lansquenet, or magic, or worse still, Les Laveuses, although occasionally she lets something slip – a name, a memory – that tells me more than she suspects.

But seven and eleven are continents apart. I have done my work well enough, I hope. Enough, I hope, to keep the animal in its cage, and the wind becalmed, and that village on the Loire nothing more than a faded postcard from an island of dreams.

And so I keep my guard on the truth, and the world goes on as always, with its good and bad, and we keep our glamours to ourselves, and never interfere, not even for a friend, not even so much as a rune-sign sketched across the lid of a box for luck.

It’s a small enough price to pay, I know, for nearly four years of being left alone. But I sometimes wonder quite how much we have already paid for that, and how much more there is to come.