Nor, fortunately, did he live to see his son, Robert, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, shot down at the height of his career, on the altar of a church, where he had apparently tried to murder his own young son, shortly after the tragic and inexplicable suicide of his beloved wife.

***

No one knew how much Damien remembered of that gray afternoon in London seven years earlier, when his father had dragged him, kicking and screaming, into a church in order to drive a cluster of daggers into his small, wildly beating heart—only to be stopped dead by a British constable's speeding bullet.

Although Damien seemed to remember nothing about it, the experience had obviously been traumatic, and Richard refused to allow any discussion of the topic. Richard's second wife, Ann, was a parlor child psychologist. She was convinced that the event was buried deep within Damien's subconscious and that it would only be a matter of time before the memory surfaced again, taking who knew what form of abnormal behaviour when it finally did. Richard would hear none of it when she expressed these fears to him. After all, didn't the boy have everything his heart desired?

Mark had been told nothing except that Damien's parents had both died in a terrible accident, and that the subject was so painful to Damien that he should never bring it up.

The only member of the family who was convinced that Damien remembered everything clearly and distinctly, as though it had happened the day before, was Marion Thorn. Aunt Marion, as everyone called her, was the sole surviving sibling of Reginald Thorn. She was a rare and strange old bird, disliked by all for her crotchety and stubborn ways, as well as for her tendency to meddle in other people's affairs. She had never married, having rejected all suitors on the grounds that they were after her money, and she had concentrated her attention on her nephews and their families. She had always preferred her nephew Robert, largely because he had left the family business in order to try something on his own. She had been devastated by the news of his sudden and tragic death, and she had never forgiven Damien for it. She knew that he was somehow responsible, although she did not know how or why.