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“Ah—no,” Yannick said. “I was planning to donate them to charity. But you’re welcome to wear them, if you like.”

I glanced back at the scarves. Banshee had hopped onto the table and was kneading one patterned with some sort of aristocratic hunting scene, dogs baying at a fox in a tree. “Charity,” I repeated.

And with that, our blanket shortage was solved.

Absolutely nothing strange or magical happened that morning. As expected, we struggled to find the supplies we needed, for they were still packed away or stored in unfamiliar places. As we cleaned and organized, though, the shop seemed to brighten, as if it were waking up. The uncanny shadows weren’t banished, but they retreated farther into the corners. Banshee followed me from room to room, yowling as if another apocalypse were nigh, though I knew she was merely protesting the size of her breakfast.

“You’re on a diet,” I scolded her. Banshee, despite my careful rationing of her food, gained a pound with each passing year, and her white stomach had reached a queenly circumference. I suspected His Majesty was abetting her somehow, perhaps by allowing her his leftover mice. The black-and-white cat killed for sport, not sustenance.

We hung the sign upon the door and decided we might as well open for the day. Though I hadn’t yet worked out how to use the cash register, I doubted our new neighbours would be beating down the door with donations.

It wasn’t long before we had our first visitors, a young couple with a child who fell instantly and irrevocably in love with a pair of Clowder’s kittens. Delighted by this unexpected success, I waived the fee, which was more of a suggested donation anyhow, and they left the shelter with a delighted child and two additions to their family, while Clowder seemed only too pleased to have her burden lightened.

“Back down to forty-eight,” I muttered to myself with a smile. I wasn’t just happy that the kittens had found a good home; two fewer cats meant two fewer mouths to feed. Given the state of our finances, it would come as a great relief if we could reduce our charges to a more manageable number.

The sky cleared after lunch and golden light streamed through the windows. The rumble of horse-drawn carts and the occasional automobile outside formed a pleasant backdrop—this part of the city was much more bustling than Rue Sainte-Roseline. Banshee claimed a patch of floor lit by a sunbeam, rolling onto her back and generally behaving as if she’d forgotten she’d changed locations, which was entirely possible. The shelter cats had nestled into their new blankets with pleasure, and looked entirely ridiculous set against the gold thread and costly wool, though naturally they displayed only self-entitlement and had already put rents in more than one scarf. The only exception was Thoreau, who had sniffed the glittering scarf I offered him with suspicion before returning to his well-worn flannel bed.

I began, for the first time, to feel optimistic about our prospects. Had all my anxieties been nothing more than an overactive imagination, fuelled by my recent brush with destructive magic? Perhaps my mysterious landlord was simply an inept businessman.

Unfortunately, my success that morning was proven an anomaly rather than the start of a run of luck; the few visitors we had after lunch were more curious about us than interested in bringing home a pet. I spoke to an elderly couple who lived above the library, then a young waitress at La Fin. While we exchanged pleasantries, I noticed Yannick speaking to a small, elegant woman by the counter, who wore a cloak lined with luxuriant fur. Her hair and eyes were dark against a pale face, and there was something about her that drew my eye, though I couldn’t put a name to it.

Banshee, meanwhile, had worked herself into one of her panics. She paced about, howling silently at me, her spine stiff with tension.

“Hush,” I told her, a ridiculous admonishment from my perspective, but certainly Banshee seemed to think she was clearly communicating her feelings. “Go find His Majesty, if you’re in that much of a state.” The large cat often had a calming influence on Banshee, even if he did sometimes respond to her panic by repeatedly swatting her on the head.

The waitress left and the woman in the fur approached me. “Cats, hein?” she said, smirking at them, then at me, as if I were in on some joke. “That’s a new one. What happened to that uptight woman? The one with the scarves?”

“She—decided to change locations,” I said. Something about the stranger made me uncomfortable. “Without notice, I was told.”

The woman nodded, seeming unsurprised. I couldn’t guess her age, nor could I tell which animal her coat had been made from. Without another word, she turned and strode to our back room, closing the door firmly behind her.

This was odd, but because I’d seen her talking to Yannick, I assumed she was some associate of his, who must have therefore felt she had special dispensation to wander about as she chose. This annoyed me, but when I went to see what the woman was up to, I found the little sitting room empty. So she had gone out the back door, then, choosing to use the shelter as a shortcut between Rue des Hirondelles and Parc Saint-Aimé. I tripped over the Persian rug as I turned to go—the corner had a habit of folding over on itself.

Élise and I turned our attention to my afternoon checklist, which primarily consisted of grooming tasks—nail trimming and checking the cats for matting. Thoreau required regular bathing due to his age, and one of the other adults had an allergic rash I was attempting to treat with a lotion I’d purchased from a sheep breeder.

“How many checklists do you have?” enquired Yannick, who for some reason was still hanging about.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” Élise muttered as she expertly manhandled Fantôme, a pale Siamese who disdained nail trimming more than most.

I rolled my eyes. “Morning, afternoon, and evening,” I replied. “Hardly a vast number. And it prevents us from overlooking any chores.”

“You’re forgetting the weekly checklists,” Élise said. “One for the shelter, the other for the accounting.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And the monthly checklists,” she went on. “And the monthly inventory. And all those diagrams of our donations and expenses you keep in the filing cabinet.”

“Those are charts, not checklists.”

“Ah, charts.” Élise gave Yannick a knowing look—he was beginning to smile. “Agnes’s second-favourite occupation.”

I threw a comb at her.

“It must be hard,” Yannick said slowly. He was sitting at one of the wooden tables, which still had several scarves scattered across it, petting little Marmalade, who’d fallen asleep in his lap. Yannick had initially reacted to the cats with polite puzzlement, but he had warmed to them quickly, which had improved my opinion of him.

“Running this type of charity, I mean,” he elaborated. “Most folks don’t see much value in the creatures, do they?”

He looked immediately stricken by his own bluntness, seeming to assume I’d take offense. I merely replied, “We’ve had our ups and downs. Our income has always been small—we’ve survived this long because we’re organized. We don’t have the funds to be wasteful or sloppy.”