‘Why don’t we go out for ice cream?’

‘There’s already some in the fridge’

But David learned to sense when he’d pushed Hugh’s good humour to its limit, and David was afraid of him. Hugh was a large, strong, grown man. David was an underweight, bespectacled ten-year-old.

Diana wasn’t as blatant in her dislike of Hugh Bacon. Her practice of staying out of David’s way was useful to her in staying out of Hugh’s. Neither did she share David’s fantasy that they had power enough to prevent Hugh from taking a permanent place in their lives. Also, when Hugh was around, David was too busy laying traps for him to pay much negative attention to his sister.

In that way, Hugh seemed something of a relief to her.

Their mother never paid as much attention to Diana as she did to David, though David didn’t feel certainly her favourite. Diana didn’t demand attention simply for its own sake. Though David could squirm under his mother’s pleading little lectures about trying to be kinder to his sister, kinder to Hugh Bacon (whose first name David pronounced as if it were a bad smell, whose last name inspired David to grunt and squeal), any attention was better than none.

What small tenderness David allowed in his ten-year-old heart was reserved for his mother. She seemed to understand that, though gestures of affection were taboo in front of other people, David could be petted like a cat before he went to sleep at night. He hated the thought that anyone but he could bring that look of bright pleasure to her face when he surrendered a treasured stone or wild flower to her. David had no notion that he could protect and care for her because he didn’t see her need—a grown woman, his mother, whose role in life was to protect and care for him … and his sister. Even when she married Hugh, David understood it as a quite unreasonable punishment for his own worst misdeeds.

What shocked David even more than Hugh’s presence in his mother’s bed was her sharing of Hugh’s name, that awful name, when she had before been so nobly called, like her children, Crown, a gift from their mythically careless father. Hugh, the pig man, was turning her into a pig woman, disenfranchising her royal children. David’s two-year-long rebellion turned into stunned mourning, a mood Hugh could misinterpret for a while as something more positive and civilized than defeat. His mother knew, but David turned away from the apology in her eyes.