A brooding young man with wavy blond hair gazed out from the painting. He was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt tucked into high white trousers, and he held a longbow in one hand. Leather braces adorned his wrists while a quiver of arrows hung from a belt at his waist. He had my mother’s eyes. “Your grandfather was a fine archer,” Grandmother said, “especially with a longbow. This was shortly after we were married in 1953. Back when he was president of the Wolvern Archery Club.” It was an ominous scene. In the background stood Carrick Hall, gray and eerie as if awaiting a storm. And in the darkened woods beside it, a glimmering creature, a great white stag like the one in the tapestry downstairs. The young man’s expression held both fear and determination, as if he didn’t want to hunt the stag but was duty bound to destroy it. “Mum says he was kind,” I ventured. Mum had told me little else about him, in fact, other than that he’d died before I was born. The topic always seemed fraught with a tension I didn’t understand. “He was.” I could read nothing from Grandmother’s expression. She kept…