Running from what? I didn’t know then, but I could already see it in my reflection; in hotel-room mirrors and shiny shop-fronts. I’d always worn red shoes; Indian skirts with bells on the hems; second-hand coats with daisies on the pockets, jeans embroidered with flowers and leaves. Now I tried to blend with the crowd. Black coats, black shoes, black beret on my black hair.

Anouk didn’t understand. ‘Why couldn’t we have stayed this time?’

The perpetual refrain of those early days. I began to dread even the name of that place; the memories that clung like burrs to our travelling clothes. Day by day we moved with the wind. And at night we’d lie side-by-side in some room above a café, or make hot chocolate over a camping-stove, or light candles and make shadow-bunnies on the wall and tell fabulous stories of magic and witches and gingerbread houses, and dark men who turned into wolves, and sometimes, never turned back again.

But by then, stories were all they were. The real magic – the magic we’d lived with all our lives, my mother’s magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods – had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell or charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there.

Still we ran ahead of it: picking cherries in season and apples in season and working for the rest of the time in cafés and restaurants, saving our money, changing our names in every town. We grew careful. We had to. We hid ourselves, like grouse in a field. We did not fly; we did not sing.

And little by little the Tarot cards were put aside, and the herbs went unused, and the special days went unmarked, and the waxing moons came and went, and the signs inked into our palms for luck faded and were washed away.

That was a time of relative peace. We stayed in the city; I found us a place to stay; I checked out schools and hospitals. I bought a cheap wedding ring from the marché aux puces and gave my name as Madame Rocher.

And then, in December, Rosette was born, in hospital on the outskirts of Rennes. We had found a place to stay for a while – Les Laveuses, a village on the Loire. We rented a flat above a crêperie. We liked it there. We could have stayed—

But the December wind had other ideas.

V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent