Truffles are the simplest to make, she tells me. Annie could make them when she was four, and now it is Rosette’s turn to try, solemnly rolling out the truffle balls across the cocoa-dusted baking sheet, face smeared, a bright-eyed racoon in melted chocolate . . .

For the first time, I hear Yanne laughing aloud.

Oh, Yanne. That weakness.

Meanwhile, I’m practising some tricks of my own. It’s in my interest for this place to do well, and I have worked hard to enhance its appeal. In view of Yanne’s sensitivity, I have had to be discreet; but the symbols of Cinteotl, the Ear of Maize, and the Cacao Bean of Lady Blood Moon, scratched under the lintel of the doorway and embedded into the front step, should ensure that our little business thrives.

I know their favourites, Vianne. I can read it in their colours. And I know that the florist’s girl is afraid; that the woman with the little dog blames herself; and that the fat young man who never shuts up will be dead before he is thirty-five if he does not make an effort to lose some weight.

It’s a gift, you know. I can tell what they need. I can tell what they fear; I can make them dance.

Had my mother done the same, she would never have struggled as she did; but she mistrusted my practical magic as ‘interventionist’, and hinted that such misuse of my skills was at best selfish, and, at worst, doomed to bring terrible retribution on both of us.

‘Remember the Dolphin Creed,’ she said. ‘Meddle ye not, lest the Way be forgot.’ Of course the Dolphin Creed was awash with this kind of sentiment – but by then my own System was well under construction, and I had long since decided that not only had I forsaken the Dolphin Way, but also that I was born to be a meddler.

The question is, where to begin? Will it be with Yanne or Annie? Laurent Pinson or Madame Pinot? There are so many lives here, intertwined; each one with its secrets, dreams, ambitions, hidden doubts, dark thoughts, forgotten passions, unspoken desires. So many lives just there for the taking; there for the tasting, for someone like me.

The girl from the florist’s came in this morning. ‘I saw the window,’ she whispered. ‘It looks so nice – I couldn’t help just looking in.’

‘It’s Alice, isn’t it?’ I said.

She nodded, looking round with small-animal wariness at the new displays.

Alice, we know, is painfully shy. Her voice is a wisp; her hair, a shroud. Her kohl-rimmed eyes, which are rather beautiful, peep out from beneath a mass of white-bleached fringe, and her arms and legs poke out awkwardly from a blue dress that might once have belonged to a ten-year-old.