For some reason, Mark was never bothered by losing to Damien. While he hated losing to other boys his own age, and he hated it when anyone else beat Damien, where he and Damien were concerned, losing really didn't matter. Perhaps it had to do with Mark's constant, albeit unconscious, awareness of Damien's tragedy-ridden past. Mark had always been unusually sensitive, even as a small child, and now he looked after Damien, in his own fashion, and seemed eager to cheer his cousin on to bigger and better things—sometimes at his own expense.

The two boys sat in front of the large open fire in the enormous brick hearth and rolled the dice. The only sounds were the roar of the fire and the clack of the playing pieces as they were moved around the board. High up on the wall above the boys hung the head of a sixteen-point buck which Richard had shot the year he built the lodge, back when his first wife, Mary, was still alive. His greatest pleasure then had been to come to the lodge and walk in the woods with her. However, the head of the great deer brought Richard pain whenever he looked at it now; Mary, who could not bear the death of any living thing, had been horrified the night he returned from the woods with the buck's dead body strapped across the hood of his Land Rover. His killing of the animal, and his stated intention of having its head stuffed and mounted over the fireplace, had led to their only serious fight. Mary's mortification led her to break their unspoken rule about quarrels: that the argument be limited to whatever had caused it. That time, though, she had brought up years' worth of petty and imagined slights. And for a week, Thorn had almost been afraid she might leave him. Even so, his pride would not allow him to back down, and he had had the deer's head stuffed and mounted over the fireplace, just as he said he would.

When Ann had seen the deer's head for the first time and asked about it, Thorn had simply told her it was the head of a buck he had shot and killed in the woods. The quarrel was one of the few incidents of his first marriage he had never wanted to discuss with her. Moreover, he knew that he never would. Occasionally, he wondered why, since Ann, whose love of blood sports was one of the few masculine things about her, would almost certainly have sided with him.

The boys were so intent on their game that they didn't notice when Ann came into the living room. She stood in silence and watched the two for a while. They really are such a wonderful pair, she thought. Finally she broke in on them. 'Hey, you two, it's late. Big day tomorrow.'