“How does he get down? It might be said that he’s gone mad. Only a madman would risk the windmill’s ladder while his body is shivering with cold and shock; would walk the hundred yards clothed only in a coat of Soot; would crouch, naked, over the broken body of his man and christen it, gape-mouthed, with his snot. Our friend loses his balance when he tries to blow his nose; he falls in the dirt, faceup, and watches starlings dance dark clouds into the sky.

“The coach, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a steep ravine. He looks down at it, sees a threesome of figures disappear into the woods. They may have seen him, recognised him. Hence he must follow. But how? He is naked and dirty and left his horse in the stable so no one knows he ever left. Something else holds him back, a discovery. He finds that, without the mask, he is once again a schoolboy, a coward. There’s a creek on the way home where he washes his hands, his neck and face with soap of lavender and lye. Only then does he step into his clothes, the Soot so thick on his thighs and knees that it chafes raw his skin on the three-mile jog home. He slips inside through a back gate and then makes sure he is seen to emerge from his room late-morning, his usual time. Kippers for breakfast, and a potful of strong tea.

“Do you know something? Tea tastes better, the thinner the cup. The china is so fine in this house, if you hold it up into the light it shines right through. And so she finds him, distracted, his empty cup raised into the morning sun: a servant girl, replenishing the toast.

“‘Is everything all right, sir?’ she asks in her simple way.

“Is everything all right? Have you ever tried to picture the moment, my friends, when a moth first slips the confines of its pupal prison and wonders at the colour of its new-grown wings? Sitting wet and sticky in the wind, waiting to take flight. I imagine it is terrified at first. It is only later that it begins to see itself reborn.

“‘Never better,’ I say, and surprise the girl with the shy twitch of a smile.”

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And so it passes, our evening, the jug making its rounds, the liquor churning in me till I get up and vomit half-cooked rabbit. They tell me about leaving Ireland. The father who gambled; the sister they buried; the Englishman who cheated them out of shop and land. Talk is like Smoke, I discover: once in the air, it breeds with abandon. I tell them many things. My plans and secrets; my life and dreams. I talk and talk.

It does me the world of good.

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