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of his mind. He could not get the face of Benedict out of his mind. Benedict had been so absorbed. Later de Leger had waited for him by the woodwork shop behind the college. ‘I want to kiss you as if you were a girl.’ But he never did and he kept himself in a state of anticipation whenever he saw him. Thenonce, very quickly with only the dim night light in the dormitory, he came to his bed and kissed him on his mouth, as in the pictures, while the other boys slept in their beds in rows.
    Ted and he had never kissed when they were small. They had been small when it started. It seemed as if it was as far back as he could remember that he and Ted used to play games which were to do with touching and other things. They used to undress together.
    ‘Rub my totee.’ He heard their boyhood word.
    ‘Suck me now.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Put it in.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘In my bottom.’
    ‘My finger?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Come. Come. Push it in. Push it in.’
    He remembered when their first orgasms started. ‘Let’s jock together.’
    ‘You break yet?’
    ‘Yes, yes.’ They held each other, hardly breathing. It smelt like the smell of swimming pools.
    Then they had to go to confession. It was impure, a mortal sin. They would go to hell. ‘Lick, suck,’ Aelred heard those words from far away. He could not settle down to his Lectio Divina. ‘Break’, another word of childhood, threaded itself through his thoughts. Le petit mort, someone had once told him it was called when he was grown up. He wanted to tell all this to Benedict.
    He was alone in his cell. He would not see Benedict till he looked across at him in choir. He drifted and nodded.‘His name was Mungo and he come from Africa.’ He heard Toinette’s voice. He was roused by the bell for Terce.
     
    After Terce and the Conventual Mass Aelred decided to go to the library to look up any books he could find on the history of Ashton Park. He could not get the face of the black boy out of his mind. Toinette’s story which had lain buried for so long, now came back to him with a peculiar force. He took comfort in her voice.
    Dom Gregory, the librarian, directed him to a section of the library on local history. ‘There are one or two books which discuss the history of the house,’ Dom Gregory explained. Aelred promised himself that he would come back to the library after dinner and spend the siesta time there. There were other books on great houses of the West Country.
    Maybe Benedict would come through the library and he would stop and talk to him. He could tell him of his interest since seeing the black boy in the portrait on the staircase. How would he explain his own disappearance through the library door?
    Aelred went to the library straight from the refectory. He would have until the bell went for None. ‘Take your time, brother.’ It was Father Abbot, whom he met on the staircase as he bounded up three at a time. Aelred smiled, lowered his hood as was customary when you greeted the Abbot, and slowed down his ascent to the library.
     
    The house was once called Ash Wood. Aelred remembered Brother Stephen telling him one afternoon when they were working in the wood behind the cemetery that ash was very common on the estate andthat it was a nuisance. There was a house at Ash Wood. There had been the original medieval house, which had had the medieval chapel that still existed in the cemetery. It was built by a printer to the King, a Mr Walter. He had the King’s head carved above the door to the great hall. But that house no longer existed. Another house was built, but that was burnt down at the end of the seventeenth century. The Ash Wood which interested Aelred was the house which first existed in the early part of the eighteenth century. This house was owned by a merchant, a Mr Dewey who had a son named Master Walter Dewey who went out to the West Indies. Mr Dewey had made his original fortune in the ‘South Sea Bubble’. Mr Walter had an estate on the island of