‘Oh John, oh Lord save you, John. Oh Lord . . . John . . .’

Some of the crowd were praying. Others were shielding their children from the sight, pressing their faces into their clothes. Most, though, were staring in grim fascination.

‘Lucifer’s work,’ said wide-eyed Walter Earnshaw, the knife-grinder. He was standing next to me. Stinking of hops and what we would now call halitosis.

John Gifford was still now, lying face up, except for a shaking in his arms, which became less and less. And then he died, right there on the green, on the black, blood-sodden grass.

While Alice collapsed on top of him, the sudden grief convulsing out of her, the villagers just stood there, by and large, in a numb kind of silence.

It felt wrong, being witness to such private pain, so I turned away.

But, as I walked past the familiar faces, I saw the baker’s wife, Bess Small, staring right at me with accusing eyes.

‘Yes, Thomas Hazard, mind you stay away now.’

At the time the words confused me. But, not long after, I would remember them as a warning.

I turned, once, and saw John Gifford, still as a mound, his large dead hands shining, then I kept walking, watched by the moon, which stared from the sky like another horrified face.

London, now

‘Witches,’ I say, in the voice of a teacher. That is, a voice that isn’t really heard.

So, this is the life I have chosen above all others. The life of a man standing in a room of twelve-year-olds ignoring him.

‘Why do you think people four hundred years ago wanted to believe in witches?’

I survey the room. The faces are smirking or embarrassed or checking their phones or all three. It is 9.35 a.m. We are only five minutes into the lesson. It is going badly. The lesson, the day, the job. It is all going badly.

Maybe being a teacher wasn’t a new beginning for me. Maybe it was just the newest in a line of disappointments.

I had – right up until Sri Lanka – spent eight years in the north of Iceland, ten miles north of the fishing village of Kópasker. I had wanted Iceland because before that I had spent a few years in Toronto. Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that – maybe because of that – it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that had made me want to go to Iceland. And all that living alone in Iceland had done was make me want an ordinary life.

But an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness. And, of course, this – being a teacher – was just a pretence. Maybe everyone was pretending something. Maybe every teacher and pupil at this school was pretending something. Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

And, right then, staring at those smirking twelve-year-olds, I think: this is the wrong lie.

‘Why did people believe in witches?’ I repeat. Daphne walks along the corridor outside. She gives me a smile and two thumbs up as she passes by at a busy pace. I smile back, acting as if this is great fun and I am doing it well, like a natural, like someone who had done this before, many times, and not like the oldest of dogs learning a new trick.

I repeat my question.

‘What made people want to believe in witchcraft?’

At first it looks like a girl on the front row is putting up her hand to answer, but it is just a yawn.

So I answer my own question. I try my best not to remember what this topic makes me remember. I try to cement over the cracks in my voice.

‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it’s often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?’

‘Stupid people,’ someone says. It is a mumble, hard to locate.

I smile. There are fifty-five minutes left of the lesson.

‘You’d think so. But no. It was all kinds of people. Queen Elizabeth the First passed a law against them. Then the one after her – King James – he considered himself an intellectual and he even wrote a book about them. The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press. Books solidified the superstition. Almost everybody believed in witches. And there were witchfinders who travelled around the country, finding . . .’ There is a sudden sharp pain, an intensifying of the headache, radiating from my inner brain, causing me to hesitate, dangerously, mid-sentence.

The yawning girl on the front row now looks concerned. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘Yes, I’ve just got a bit of a headache. I’ll be fine.’

Then someone else. Another girl, near the back: ‘So how did they find out if someone was a witch or not? What did they do?’

And the question flaps around my head like a crow in a dark room.

What did they do?

What did they do?

What did they do?

Suffolk, England, 1599

My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also tough and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. ‘There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,’ my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England. ‘That is what Monsieur Cauvin says.’