“Before long the whole village realised something was wrong. The children noticed it first. They started teasing me, trying to get me to lose my temper, get into trouble, smoke. But I couldn’t. It’s not that I didn’t try. I’d go to bed thinking about it, planning out some piece of mischief: how I would take a swing at someone, or steal Granny’s hat and feed it to the pigs. Sometimes I even went through with my plan, hit a boy over the head with a log, or ripped the sleeve on the blouse of an aunt. But my heart wasn’t in it. I did it like I did my chores. The Smoke never rose.

“By the time I was eleven, the children in the village had started avoiding me. The adults too. A rumour got around that I was sick somehow, gone funny in the head. My parents tried to quench it. I was just like a gentleman, they said, an angel, a proper little lord. The village should be proud. It calmed things down for a while, but the suspicion did not cease. I was different. Separate. Not part of the fabric of life. An angel, maybe. But who wants to go fishing with an angel?

“One day, they took me to the vicar. Our village was small and isolated; we had a church but no priest of our own. He came on Sunday mornings to read us our sermon, good and salty, as the villagers liked to say, to last us the week. A thickset man with a marvellous head of curly red hair.

“He examined me in the little shed at the back of the church that served as a sort of office. I have a memory of standing before him, stripped to the waist, and his counting up the moles on my chest. ‘Dost the devil live in thee?’ he asked. I told him I did not know. One of the moles, he told me, looked like a cloven hoof. A witch’s mark, a most evil omen.

“He wrote a report, they say, and even sent it to the bishop. There was no answer. Perhaps he decided against posting it in the end. The vicar was a simple man. He did not want to invite trouble.

“In any case, it got out, the thing about the mole. The whole village took against me then. It was said that I was cursed. The Wandering Jew they started calling me. Bearing the mark of Cain. I did not even know what a Jew was then, but I’d heard about Cain. I left the village the day I turned fourteen.