Some weeks later, at dusk, I found him leaning on the wall at the foot of the garden. “It’s a nice evening, Dad,” I said pleasantly.

“What’s nice about it?” he muttered angrily.

I worked away inside his head, trying to improve his mood. As I did so, I put my idea to him.

“This is quite a big garden,” I pointed out. “You could grow vegetables, and Mam could sell them at the market.”

He shook his head dismissively. “There’s not enough land to make it worth the while.”

“Then why don’t you take one of those allotments the village council is offering?” I persisted. “The rents are low. After a few years, you might even have grown and sold enough stuff to buy a small field of your own.”

Recently a farmer had died and bequeathed to the council a large gift of land. They’d decided to parcel it up and make it available to the villagers for a nominal rent.

“That’s pie in the sky.” He snorted. “Do you think I’ve strength left in my body to do that after working my fingers to the bone for others all day long?”

“Mam could help you. I could help you a bit too. There are times when things are slack and there’s no farmwork. That would give you the chance to till your own bit of land, wouldn’t it?”

He snorted again and went inside without a word. But I could sense the change in him. My idea had gotten him thinking. Within the week, he’d taken on an allotment.

As I’d promised, I did help out from time to time. Having the allotment made him a lot happier. He was still a grumpy old devil, but he now had something to work for. He had a dream. He had hope.

That’s all most people need.

He never beat me again.

As my powers developed, I began to wonder what other uses I could put them to. Would it be possible for them to provide me with a living in some way?

Above all, I longed for independence; I wanted to make my own way in the world—not just be married off to some man my adoptive parents deemed suitable.

But I feared that if I used my skills to help people, I might be seen as a witch. They hanged witches at Caster. Even worse, witch finders sometimes visited the County and tortured the witches they found. They swam them in ponds: if the women sank, they were declared innocent; those who floated were considered guilty and were burned at a stake. They died either way. It was too dangerous to sell my skills, I realized.

Then one afternoon, about eighteen months after I met my true mother, I witnessed something that pointed to the answer to my problem.

I had a wanderlust that by now took me all over the County, much farther afield than my first journeys. Sometimes I stayed away from home for over a week at a time. Far to the south of Priestown, I was exploring a small town called Salford when I saw a big man dragging a small skinny woman through the market by her hair. She was shrieking and screaming and it was terrible to watch, but not one person from the busy market interfered.