Once again, Brother Aelred was at his daily chores of housework between the hours of Prime and Terce. After he finished dusting the banisters on the first floor this morning, he paused to dust the frame of a painting which hung two or three steps down from the first floor to the mezzanine. The library was through the tall heavy doors off this landing. The painting was the portrait of a man dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman of wealth, and presumably, as it occurred to Aelred, one of the early owners of Ashton Park before the monastery was built, and maybe, even the owner of the original house. There was gold lettering at the bottom. It was a name, but many of the letters had faded. He could decipher the word ‘Duke’.
But it was the small boy who knelt in a decorative manner at the duke’s feet who held Aelred’s attention as he wiped the glass and dusted the goldleaf of the frame. He was a black boy. As Aelred dusted and wiped the frame his mind wandered and his imagination mused as he stared into the wide open face of the black boy. He lost himself. He was Jean Marc again.
‘Jeansie, Jeansie, come boy, come nuh man, come and play cricket in the savannah, nuh man!’ It was Redhead from down in the village near Malgretoute. Ramnarine from the barracks was running behind him, pitching the cork ball into the air. He was bowling it up the gap to the big estate house. ‘Throw it, Jeansie,’ Redhead called.
After play, he waved goodbye. They hung back to talk at the bottom of the gap. He didn’t invite them up to the house.
‘Ei, Jeansie, let us come and play nuh man?’
He kept on walking up to the house. He waved from the high verandah.
‘I’ve got to go in. My mummy’s calling me.’
‘You mummy calling you?’ Redhead and Ramnarine sneered.
Aelred stared. The portrait drew him into its world. It was a triumphant landscape of fields, lakes and mountains, dark and sombre, unfolding behind the figures, through arches and the rich folds of drapes. There was a town in the distance with towers and spires. This was England. There was a port from which a tall ship was setting sail. As he stared, he saw this little black prince, for so he seemed to Aelred, smiling up to the duke. The little black boy was dressed in red satins and gold silks. His coat and pants were made of blue taffeta. He mirrored and mimicked his master. He was a diminutive, his master’s doll. The boy was offering the duke a purse of jewels, or a purse encrusted with diamonds or pearls. The duke was accepting it nonchalantly. He was not even looking at the boy; he looked out over the world beyond the frame of the painting.
The admiration in the boy’s eyes was the same as that in the face of the master’s dog which knelt at his feet on the other side of the painting. It was looking up plaintively.
Aelred stared and wondered. Then he saw his own face reflected in the glass of the portrait. His face was superimposed upon that of the boy whose face shone from beneath, so that the black face seemed to be his own. ‘Who all you white boys think you is?’ It was Espinet at Mount Saint Maur. He was sitting in the pavilion alone. They weren’t letting him into the game of cricket. ‘All you think all you superior. You think this make a difference.’ He was jabbing at his face pointing to the colour of his skin. ‘And you, de la Borde, all you French creole!’ It was then that Aelred saw that the boy in the portrait wore a collar. Or was it a trick of the light? It looked like a dog’s collar. Then he thought it was a reflection of the light in the glass. It was tightly fastened like a choker. Now it seemed like a thick iron sphere. It seemed it encircled his neck and glinted above where his satin cloak shimmered and fell in folds like those of the duke above him. ‘Why all you so, eh de la Borde? One minute you nice nice, the next you with the others on your high horse.’
Aelred continued to stare. And as the boy’s face grew in his mind, so did the voice of Toinette, his nurse and his mother’s old servant grow in him, so he spoke to himself in her voice. ‘Dou-dou, come let me tell you a story.’ And she told a story she had heard from her great-grandmother. ‘This is what my great-granny tell me right up here in these cocoa hills overlooking them same sugarcane fields.’ The breeze whispered through the serrated leaves beneath the cool hills. Aelred looked down from the steps of the Malgretoute house to the village of Felicity. Aelred had heard this story from Toinette many times. ‘Tell it, tell it, Toinette, the one about the little boy.’
‘His name is Mungo and he come from Africa,’ Toinette began.
‘From Africa.’ Aelred heard his own boy’s voice repeat.
‘And they bring him here to Malgretoute.’
And so the story always started.
Aelred was behind in his housework. He saw Brother Patrick climbing the stairs with the hand bell in order to give the signal for the end of manual work. ‘Now, don’t you go and fall, brother,’ Brother Patrick warned as he passed by. Aelred stretched to dust the top of the picture frame and was intent on returning to his duty. He missed those friends: Redhead, Espinet, Ramnarine and Mackensie.
While he was in an awkward position to reach the top of the large portrait he became stuck for a split second. He noticed the intense silence of the abbey and himself there in this early hour of the day with Toinette’s story going in his mind. ‘Mungo was a runaway.’ He turned from stretching up and prepared to place his foot securely on the step to return to the first floor. As he turned, he saw the door off the mezzanine into the library closing. He heard it click shut. It closed softly, clicking in its brass mortise.
In the light which had poured from the partially open door, he noticed the back of Benedict and the door closing behind him. It startled him. It was like an apparition. He immediately thought of a childhood fancy. It was a sudden déjà vu. He thought he had had a vision when he was fourteen. It was Our Lady of Grace, dressed as if she was in the parish church next to his school in the old rusty racatang town of San Andres. She wore her blue veil and a white and gold mantle over her shoulders. Grace, like light, poured from her hands. She appeared to him just as he was waking from sleep and disappeared down the corridor to his mother’s and father’s bedroom in a flight of light. He remembered crying out, ‘Mummy.’ She came and comforted him and together they said the Hail Mary. ‘There, now, dear, Hail Mary, full of grace.’
He had to finish his chores on the first floor and still had to continue up to the second floor. His mind began to play back what he had seen.
It was as if, now, he wasn’t sure what he had seen, so powerfully did the image of the small black boy stay in his mind with the accusations of Redhead, Ramanrine, Mackenzie and Espinet, with the story of Toinette being told to him again. Mungo carried a scar on his neck. He now wondered what it was that had startled him the most: the image of the black boy or the image of Benedict disappearing behind the library door. It seemed as if he remembered that on turning, in that fraction of a second, taking his eyes off the black boy, he saw Benedict standing in the open door of the library staring at him. It was not as Benedict would do normally, smile and say something. He was lost in his staring. Then he turned and closed the library door behind him.
Aelred went over the scene several times. He was convinced that when he first turned around he saw Benedict staring at him, and what he was staring at were his legs, which were exposed because his light denim smock had ridden up his leg, exposing his naked legs in his effort to dust the top of the picture frame. He had been unaware because of his concentration on the face of the black boy in the portrait.
Aelred became agitated. The black boy’s face, Benedict’s disappearance, and then the distinct sense that Benedict had been staring at his naked legs distracted him.
‘Brother Aelred. The bell has gone for the end of manual work. You need to get ready for Terce.’ It was Father Justin. He felt that he had been caught doing something wrong.
As he stripped off his denim smock in the washroom he saw de Leger. He was a boy whom he had once caught staring at his legs in the chapel at Mount Saint Maur. When he looked back at him he saw the blue of his eyes, which were like the blue of the veins which ran in his legs, the blue in marble, the blue in the veins of Dom Maurus’s arms, blood like Quink ink. Then the bell for the consecration tinkled. ‘Hoc est corpus meum.’ They all looked up at the host and then bowed their heads. When he screwed up his eyes he kept seeing the boy with the blue eyes who had stared at his naked legs.
Aelred felt worried but excited by the realisation that Benedict had been staring at his naked legs. But he was also a little embarrassed about how he would be next time he spoke to Benedict. Perhaps Benedict would tell him to check that his smock did not ride up when he was working, because it could be a distraction or embarrassment to others. Maybe he would tell him that he should have worn his overalls. Perhaps he was himself embarrassed.
Aelred washed his hands and face in the washroom of the novitiate. He stared at his wet face. He could not get the face of the black boy out 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. Then once, 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 and that 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 Antigua, near to Ashtown, a small coastal town on that island.
‘You’re very absorbed, brother?’
Aelred looked up from his reading. It was Benedict. ‘Oh, yes. I’ve found something really fascinating about Ashton Park. You know that portrait on the staircase? Just outside the library. Where you saw me this morning?’
‘Did I?’ Benedict looked embarrassed. But at that moment the bell for None startled them.
‘Anyway, I’ll tell you about my discovery some time.’
Benedict pulled on his hood and left the library first. Aelred put back the book he had been reading on the shelf. It was a reference-only book. He would have to come back. As he passed the portrait on the staircase, he heard Toinette’s voice: ‘Mungo is his name and he come from Africa.’ He watched the bright young face of the boy and his heart first rose, but then fell.