Genevieve is a teller and a collector of stories. In the orphanage, she whispers her tales at night. In her place as maid to Madame Patin in the cafe next to the sea, she becomes the breathless audience for her mistress's alarming folk stories, beginning with the one about the mermaid - the beauty who is also a monster - who must be killed. In these harsh, mesmerising tales, cunning and malignity and doom are hidden under beauty, 'meanings sealed under a skin of silence, as you seal pâte under fat.'Genevieve happily falls into the patterns and ways of Madame Patin and contentedly cooks, cleans, gardens and serves the customers alongside her. Until, that is, Genevieve's own comeliness and cunning ripen to siren beauty. To avoid the mermaid's fate she must take flight.And she does - to another word-spinner - a poet who has the hearts of all his women: his mother, his mistress, his niece, his niece's governess - and before long, his new maid's. Kind the poet may be, but he too is a collector of stories, and when you speak your story 'when you smooth and flatten and straighten the story out, make it exist word by word in speech, you lose that heavenly possession.' You give away more than words.