It was in Paris, appropriately enough, that Ellini relearned desire.

But it wasn't in the patisseries, with their sweet, gilded confections—their swirls of chestnut cream, chocolate lattices, and sugared almonds. Nor was it in the wine shops that stretched along the Pont Neuf, where the sounds of accordion music and Baudelaire's poetry crept out and infiltrated the night. It happened to her in the library. That was where everything happened to her these days.

She didn't know how busy people ever made love. The mood only seemed to steal upon her in moments of idleness. She'd had none of that at Pandemonium, between her kitchen duties, and her restless, night-time scampering. But here she was... well, if not quite a lady, then certainly a woman of independent means—which was to say, Val had independent means, and wouldn't hear of Ellini doing chores, in case they should provide her with a pretext for talking to men.

So they had a maid to go to market, buy Ellini's clothes, and dress her hair. And, to make sure the maid didn't pass love notes to Ellini from male admirers, Val conducted a strip-search every time she entered or left the house. Few servants were prepared to tolerate this sort of thing for long, so there was quite a high turn-over of staff at their apartment on the Champs Elysees. Ellini was fluent in French apologies by the time she'd been there a week.

Still, Val was a nicer gaoler than Robin. The worst Val ever did was stare at Ellini in an unsettling way. She was too honourable to touch her and run the risk of crushing her bones the way she had crushed her mother's. Perhaps that was why Robin hadn't come after them. If his aim was to ensure Ellini remained celibate, he could achieve it with a lot less trouble by leaving her where she was.

It was liberating. Although of course not literally.

At any rate, she had no sense of wasting time, or of life passing her by, because she didn't want to do anything except avoid more bloodshed. She didn't want to be anything except forgetful.

And yet she healed. She wasn't being molested. Her liberty was being restricted, but when had that ever not been the case?

Granted, there were moments—hours, for all she knew—when she stood on the balcony overlooking the Champs Elysees and felt as though she was on the precipice of a vast cliff, looking down into a valley of darkness and fire and smoke. Waves of heat swelled beneath her, shimmered in the air, blurred all the little fires into one solid mass of orange. There was darkness and desolation wherever she turned her eyes. There was nothing else. It was always waiting for her. And she wanted to leap into it—to get it over and done with.

Once or twice on these occasions, Val had even risked physical contact to pull her inside. Ellini would turn around and see the fires of hell reflected in her breastplate, as though it was studded with gems.

But mostly, Ellini healed in Paris. And this was because there was so much time for reading. She pursued her interests in demons and magic, of course, but she also read—or, in most cases, reread—novels.

A novel was a very special thing for Ellini, because it was an extended ride in someone else's skin. Provided you had a decent stock of empathy—and, if you didn't, a week's reading-practise would soon set you right—you could hear what the characters heard, experience their pangs and delusions and heartache. You could swim in the shallows of their mind like a bright, tropical fish.

Most importantly, it was a safe space to experiment with lust again. She didn't necessarily have to feel guilty for wanting, or dread the outcome of flirting, because she was not the cursed girl from Camden any longer. She was Jane Eyre, or Becky Sharpe, or Catherine Earnshaw. There was a space for her to feel these things, as long as she only acknowledged to a limited extent that she was the one doing the feeling.

On paper, she was safe.

And so, on paper, she started to be bold.

She wrote to Jack, although her first few letters—quite commonplace letters, involving nothing more than the news from Paris, and a few polite enquiries after his health—went unanswered.

And she couldn't imagine a situation in which he would ignore her letters and still be Jack. Even if he'd met a dark-eyed, Sicilian beauty—even if he'd become so embroiled in his training that he had no time for anything else—he was Jack. He was the talkative, idealistic boy who'd followed her around at Pandemonium. He needed to talk to people. Even if he no longer loved her, he would answer her letters. He would answer illegible doodles from a six-year-old, just because he couldn't stand being out of the loop—any loop, anywhere.

And it didn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think that Robin might be intercepting her letters.

She tried several tricks. First of all, she tried writing to friends of Jack's at Pandemonium, in the hope that they could be persuaded to pass on her letters when they next saw him. But there was no one at Pandemonium who wasn't terrified of Robin, even if they were also terrified of Jack.

She tried addressing her letters to Gargotha—or to other people she knew to be living in Sicily—but Robin seemed to have blockaded the entire island, and no post got through without it being first opened and read by his people.

She tried hiding coded messages in very dull letters to Sicilian sheep-farmers—which might have got through, for all she knew, but which were perhaps too cunningly encoded to come to Jack's attention.

After a while, she gave up, and started addressing her letters to Jack Cade at Gargotha's Halfway House on Mount Etna. And these were the letters which contained the most overtly sexual messages, because, now she knew Robin was intercepting them, she thought she might as well make him furious. She had no other way to attack.

She would write: Dear Jack, I wish you were here to touch me; or, Dear Jack, I wish you were here to fuck me, depending on how direct she was feeling at the time.

It wasn't really true to say that this wasn't like her. She had been filled with desire before meeting Robin, but then, quite understandably, it had shrunk back—the way your cravings for a certain food might shrink back, if it had made you violently and debilitatingly sick. But she relearned it again from books.

When she wrote to Jack, she was not a cursed and damaged girl from Camden, but Jane Eyre finally giving in to her passion, writing words of comfort to Mr Rochester after she'd run away. There was something very exciting about having the power to end a man's misery like that. She imagined him drinking up her kisses like parched desert earth, clutching her body as if it was the only thing keeping him afloat.

It was like the 'Don't despair' of the messenger dragons. Somewhere out there, she knew, Jack was wanting her. In writing these things, she felt as though she was soothing him—satisfying him—as well as herself. It was a kind of narrative logic—the same logic you found in fairytales when someone threw a precious ring into the sea, and it turned up, years later, in the belly of a fish that was being served for their supper. Things with meaning found their way to the people they'd been meant for.

Whatever the answer, she felt powerful when she was writing the letters. Things long buried in her rose up and tingled beneath the surface of her skin. She felt as though, if they just encountered the right touch, they would detonate, and spread golden, glorious life through every inch of her body. Then perhaps the whole woman would be resurrected, and not just her desires.

Maybe it wouldn't be that simple. Maybe it would take a long time. But, for the moment, she was obedient to the workings of narrative necessity, and waited.