I looked at the stranger opposite me. An ordinary woman of fifty or so, looking rather older, perhaps, with her heavy hips and pencilled brows. A woman I might have passed a thousand times in the street without thinking for a moment that there could be any possible kinship between us, now standing there with that look of terrible hope on her face, and this is the trap, I know it is, and my name is not my soul, I know.

But I can’t, I just can’t let her believe—

‘Please, Madame.’ I smiled at her. ‘Someone has played a cruel joke. Zozie’s not your daughter,’ I said. ‘Whatever she may have claimed, she’s not. And as for Vianne Rocher—’

I paused. Roux’s face was expressionless, but his hand found mine and held it tight. Thierry’s eyes were on me too. And I knew at that moment I had no choice. A man who casts no shadow, I know, isn’t really a man at all, and a woman who gives up her name—

‘I remember a red plush elephant. A blanket with flowers. I think it was pink. And a bear with one eye made from a black button. And a little silver cat charm tied with a piece of red ribbon—’

Now Madame was watching me, eyes bright under her pencilled brows.

‘They travelled with me for years,’ I said. ‘The elephant went pink with age. I wore it down to the stuffing inside and still I wouldn’t let her throw it away. They were the only toys I really had, and I carried them in my backpack with their heads sticking out so they could have a chance to breathe—’

A silence. Her breath, a rasp in her throat.

‘She taught me how to read palms,’ I said. ‘And Tarot cards, and tea-leaves, and runes. I’ve still got her pack in a box upstairs. I don’t use it much, and it isn’t quite proof, but it’s everything I have left of her—’

She was staring at me now, lips parted, mouth drawn in a grimace of some emotion too complex to identify.

‘She said you wouldn’t have cared for me. She said you wouldn’t have known what to do. But she saved the charm with her Tarot cards, and she saved the newspaper clippings, and before she died, I think she meant to tell me, but I couldn’t quite believe it then – I didn’t want to believe it then.’

‘There was a song I used to sing. A lullaby. Do you remember?’

For a moment I paused. I was eighteen months old. How could I remember such a thing?

Then suddenly it came to me. The lullaby we always sang to turn aside the changing wind; the song that soothes the Kindly Ones—

‘V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent,

V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle.