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by a spring which never dried up, where the sun rarely reached. At the back of the pool was a big, upended sandstone slab with a hole which the water had worn through the soft stone, around which a head surrounded by leaves had been carved, the hole serving as the mouth. This was not a carving done at his father’s behest, but by some much older, unknown directive …it was an object of speculation, said to have existed long before the arrival of the monks at Belmonde, a strange, pagan symbol to be found in the grounds of an abbey. There was a similar head carved on the lintel of the Green Man in the village. In the way the open mouth curved, as if in a laugh, in the pointed ears, the curling hair, Sebastian was always, irresistibly, reminded of Harry.
    Leaving the dogs to a seventh heaven of hopeful rabbiting, and turning his back on the pool, he sat on the grass looking over the view, which from here extended well beyond the Abbey grounds and over the fields. The Bonhommes, a small religious order, had chosen well when, in the fourteenth century, they had picked the site where their little community could settle, and where it had quietly flourished for two hundred years until Henry the Eighth’s troopers had arrived, sacked the abbey and dispersed its holy inhabitants to find shelter and sustenance wherever they could. And there it had lain in ruins until the first Chetwynd, an enterprising wool merchant, had purchased the land from Queen Elizabeth and built a modest manor house with the scattered stones, thereby beginning two hundred years of habitation by the same family. On the whole the Chetwynds had been fair-minded, responsible landlords and employers, and the tenor of life had remained peaceful and undisturbed. Somehow, the goodness of the Bonhommes seemed to have filtered down the centuries so that it lay like a benevolence over the estate, running through it like a length of silk.
    Sebastian, the last of the line, loved Belmonde deeply, but he had long come to realise that theirs was increasingly regarded as a life of privilege, and the radical in him wasn’t sure whether such privilege was right, or whether, in the long run, it could last.
More than that, he was terrified, not of possessing, but of becoming possessed by Belmonde, as it possessed his father. Trying to come to terms with the mixture of emotions his inheritance always aroused in him – his family and his love for the place, the spell it exerted, his obligations against his inclinations – Sebastian could only pray he would one day be worthy to face up to it. But, like St Augustine, not yet.
    Certainly not now.
    Very recently, a young man he’d been at school with had, in Sebastian’s rooms, come across one of his sketchbooks, leafed through it with interest and asked casually why he’d never thought of becoming an architect.
    â€œWhat?”
    And there it was, flashed upon his consciousness in an instant like a lightning bolt, seared upon his soul for ever – the realisation that this was always where his life had been leading. Since childhood he’d carried a sketchbook with him wherever he went. Natural scenes didn’t leave him cold: the loved, familiar view of the gardens now spread below him where he sat, the abbey ruins, the silver snake of the Severn winding on the flat plain below, the series of hills on the other side rising to a melting blue on the horizon, the church steeple and the roofs of the village just visible through the trees could hardly do that. But it had always been buildings that caught his imagination more. Fascinated by the way they were constructed, his sketchbooks became filled with details of the line of a roof, the ornamentation of a corbel, the proportions of a house. Even as a child in church on Sundays in the shelter of the big family box pew he would furtively draw and try to understand the construction of the springing vaulting of the stone roof or the exact proportions