I wish I could describe Thomas, capture him. He is neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor slight; his hair is neither curly nor entirely straight. But I am making him sound like a nonperson, when he is everything but. Thomas is someone you notice when he comes through the door. It’s a kind of intensity. Like he is walking around with a keg of gunpowder strapped to his chest. It’s in his face, partially. He looks at things, really looks. At people, too. Evaluates them. Not judging them exactly but rather taking them in for what they are; trying to see the truth of them. It is not something most people like. I think I may be his only friend here, and there are close to two hundred boys all told, though some live in a separate building across the yard and a handful are day students who come in from the village; rich burghers’ sons who are here for the schooling and not for the other stuff. The “moral education.” Burghers may smoke, once in a while. One does not expect better of them.

You’d think I’d hold it against Thomas. That his soul is bad. That, unless he reforms, he is bound for hell. It is true, after all. The Smoke does not lie. There is evil in him the way there are maggots in a cut of rotten meat. But you see, all that exists on one level somewhere, the level of adult reason and truths, where science lives, and theology, and the laws of the courts. But there is another level, one I have no name for, and on this other level, I am his friend. It’s as simple as that.

As for myself, when I look in a mirror I see someone tall and sort of angular; bony, my sister calls it. Red hair. Not ginger but a deep shade of copper, cropped very short. My skin is quite dark too. Some say I must have foreign blood, that hair and skin like that come from east of the Black Sea, where there are still tribes riding the endless steppe. It’s nonsense though, because my family is as English as they come. We’re an old family, actually, and rather grand. I mean very grand. There are pictures of Father going hunting with the Queen’s sons. But enough of this. Whether girls find me handsome or ugly you will have to ask them. I know I don’t like my nose very much — too big — and cannot get fat even if I eat nothing but pudding. I am hopeless at rugby but can run cross-country all day. Thomas says I am more than half deer. If so, he must be a badger. When the dogs come for him, he turns and shows his teeth. Unlike me, he does not know when to take to his heels.