Four ornate skull designs with a spade

The tables at the Harbour Arms are still tacky with last night's ale when I come down for the early shift, and Mr Fenwick has already laid out the decks. Four packs, each card printed with the same black ground and cream ornament, the sort of fancy work the mainland sends over when it wants the island to know it has taste. He calls them his skull decks. Every spade has been pressed into the middle of the deck like a seal, and I have stopped looking at the pattern for too long, because when I do the grinning jaws seem to be counting the chips.

Last night a net-mender called Tobias Rook sat across from me and bet the deed to his mother's cottage on a pair of threes. He was sure of himself the way men are sure before the cards are turned. The frame around the table is painted on, a border of curled leaves that stops short at each corner, and I kept thinking of it as a fence that nobody had bothered to finish. Tobias lost. He didn't shout. He just looked at the skull in the corner of the card, the one with the fern-work crawling out of its eye socket, and said, "They always look like they're laughing at you, Maud."

I wanted to tell him the cards don't care. Mr Fenwick says it is the ornament that makes the house edge look respectable, and that the skulls are only there so the losers feel they've been robbed by something grander than a man with a pencil. This morning I shuffled the four decks together and dealt a hand for myself, out of habit, the way you'd test a bridge before crossing. The last card was the spade in the centre, alone, nothing around it but black.

I folded it face down on the wet wood and walked out to the quay. Come home before the next boat, Ines. Bring the good scissors.

Your loving sister, Maud