“Look,” said Max with force. “I don’t give a damn if it’s a satanic ritual. They can get on with it as far as I’m concerned. I’m walking around this orchard, then I’m going to bed. I advise you to do the same.”

They walked on a little farther, the dogs racing back and forth among the trees. They had picked up the fox scent, Rowland thought, and remembered the lights he had glimpsed earlier. He paused.

“I might just investigate. Walk up that way. Clear my head. I don’t feel like sleeping just now.”

“You never do,” Max replied grumpily. “It’s one of the many things wrong with you. Your unnerving energy, at dawn. I’m off to bed. I’ll leave the door unlocked. Bolt it when you come in.”

Max returned to the house, the dogs snuffling at his heels.

Rowland crossed the orchard and opened the gate into the fields.

He liked walking, especially at night, and especially alone. Silence, he thought, and the night air, would clear his mind. He might never have admitted it to Lindsay, but some of her remarks had struck home. A bear in boxing gloves? Some Neanderthal throwback? Was that how he seemed? Was that, worse, how he was? He shook himself impatiently and lengthened his stride. There was a good path here, he remembered, once he had crossed the first two fields.

As he walked, all the events of that long evening reassembled in his mind. One minute he was thinking of Lindsay’s remarks, the next of the odd, silent, and disconcerting Genevieve Hunter. Then he was swooping back to his own childhood, and the farm he had described to Max’s boys. Why there? he thought. Why go back there? And for an instant he saw a different place, one unsuited to the simplicities of fairy stories, an ugly, cramped, damp homestead where generations of his father’s family had scraped an existence. It had four damp, tiny rooms, no hot water, no bath, an outside lavatory. There was a yard, a cowshed, three sties, and four fields. Rowland loved it and also hated it. There, his parents toiled; they rarely spoke to each other. The rooms smelled of resignation and delusions and hopelessness. Sometimes, when his father had been drinking, silent hostilities would flare into violence, outright war.

Why did he alter and sentimentalize that world for the benefit of Max’s sons, Rowland thought now, walking faster. Why return to that place, in fictional form, when it was one he avoided at all other times? His mother, forty when her only child was born, had been dead a decade; his father, crushed beneath a borrowed tractor, had died when Rowland was seven and a half years old. He had not set foot in Ireland, let alone his childhood home, in almost thirty years—so why return there now?

There was a mystery, of course, a family romance. Why had his mother, the least impulsive of women, married a man eight years her junior, without a penny to his name, a feckless, sweet-natured, heavy-drinking Irishman who could barely read, though he could talk like an angel if he chose? She had been a thirty-eight-year-old English spinster with a two-room flat in a cheap area of Birmingham, and a job teaching literature in a grim inner-city school, a job she had embraced with zeal and come to loathe. She met his father when he was briefly in England, working for a builder, trying to scrape some cash together, and had come around to fix some gutters.