“I had learned no trade but found work at an inn, some twenty miles from home. Three weeks I lasted, then the innkeeper sent me on my way. ‘You are scaring away the customers,’ he said. ‘One cannot trust a man who does not sin.’ His wife packed me lunch and gave me a pair of socks in parting. When I walked out of their gate, I saw her cross herself against my curse.

“By the time I was twenty, I had learned that it was best to hide my condition. I kept to myself, moved from town to town every few months. The Wandering Jew. Condemned to be good. Though not good, not really. Lukewarm. There is a line in the Bible, in Revelation, about God spitting out the lukewarm. He loves the hot, the cold. I am not welcome at his hearth.”

FARMER

He frowns, but then his wife is there, resting her hands on Grendel’s shoulders. Her eyes are on Thomas and Livia, daring them to add to her husband’s woes. But this is not the time to be bashful. Grendel is a miracle, or else a man with a crippled soul. It is important to understand which.

“So you don’t feel anything?” Thomas asks.

“Oh, I feel,” Grendel says quietly, mournfully, reaching up to brush his wife’s arm. “I feel sadness and irritation; feel grateful to have steady work and fearful every morning when I set out across the city; relieved when the day is over and my good wife welcomes me at home. But my heart does not boil with it, and I do not forget myself. It’s as though my blood runs thinner than other men’s.”

“Don’t you listen to him,” Mrs. Grendel interjects, her face flushed dark and a hint of a shadow darting from her nostrils. “He is the best man that’s ever lived.”

“I believe you,” Livia says into her anger. She is different now that they are with Grendel, hopeful and composed, the afternoon’s terror banished from her face. “If my father weren’t ill, he would make him famous up and down the land.”

It’s only Thomas who fails to chime in but simply sits there, twirling a crayfish leg, the stump of his ear itchy with fever and sweat.

FARMER

The boy comes to my door. A young man really, ginger fluff on his cheeks. You don’t see many of his colour. Deep copper red, with copper skin. Like a ginger Tartar, but prone to blushes, hale cheeks filling with a darker hue.

Somehow it isn’t a surprise to hear his accent. His clothes are dirty but there is something to his bearing. I’m no friend of toffs but you have to like the way they hold themselves. No slouching, shoulders squared, the eye resting comfortable on yours. And for a rich sod, he’s awfully polite.