‘Every farming family now and again throws up a son who doesn’t have it in him to make a farmer. Maybe he’s simple or dreamy or lacks the steadiness for work. Joseph Smith was one of those. He was a fool for farming, but he had a special head for other things.’

A muezzin’s call from a nearby mosque punctuates MacGahan’s speech and is met with answering echoes across the city. The sleeping girl stirs and then subsides back into unconsciousness.

‘I’ve seen his portrait: a tall brown-haired man with the radiant blue eyes of a virtuous prophet. Handsome too. He was the kind of man that other men will follow. And women.’

MacGahan straightens up on the cushions, soberer now; perhaps she was never as drunk as she seemed. She’s not one to drop her guard, ever.

‘No one was more serious on matters of conscience than those Yankee farmers. Marx calls it the idiocy of rural life, but out there in the darkness, those men had commerce with the stars. In my childhood, our blacksmith was an alchemist, you know. At the symposia of our cider press, the topics under discussion were salvation, and infinity, and the right way to God. We loved a talker. And Smith had a story for everyone.

‘You’ve got to know something else. The way I’m telling you this is not as a believer would. It’s cost me most of my youth and pints of my own blood to understand this story in this way.

‘The country of the United States was different then. The past was bigger and nearer. Vermont, where Smith was born, was dotted with big tombs, holy to the tribes who’d lived there, and people naturally believed they had precious things hid in them. Smith got a name as a treasure-finder. He claimed he had sticks or jewels that would find out treasure wherever it was hidden. But the only thing he got as a result of his seeking was a pile of trouble and a name for being unreliable.

‘Now you and I might pause there and decide to knuckle down, try to make a sober living for a while, but it’s tough to go against your nature. Sometime in his twentieth or twenty-first year, Joseph was visited by an angel. Yes, he was. That’s what he told his friends. The angel led him to some golden plates that were the rarest kind of treasure of all: a gospel, written in an old Egyptian tongue. Over the next few years, he Englished them and found a publisher. He called his gospel The Book of Mormon.

‘Given that Joseph was unlettered, you must be wondering how he read the plates, especially in a language not his own? Well, luckily the angel had seen to that, bestowing on him two magic stones which gave him the power to understand the ancient writing.