“So, at the end of this, what ought we to call you?” I ask, thinking to break her out of such dreadful sentimentality.

“You really want to know?”

I nod.

“Loot,” she tells me, passing bashful. Another shrug. “After a while, you become your function, Abel. I am the lieutenant, so they call me Loot. I have become Loot. It is what I answer to.”

“Lute, with a U?”

She smiles. “No.”

“And before that?”

“Before?”

“What were you called before?”

She shakes her head, snorts. “Easy.”

“Easy?”

“Yes. I used to say, "Easy, now," a lot. It got shortened.” She inspects her nails. “I'll thank you not to use it.”

“Indeed; the jibes that suggest themselves would be… eponymous.”

She regards me, narrow eyed for a moment, then says, “Just so.” She yawns, then rises. “And now I'm going to sleep,” she announces, stretching her arms. She stoops to gather up her boots. “I thought we might the three of us take a walk, later on; into the hills,” she says. “Maybe do some hunting, this afternoon.” She passes me by and pats me on the shoulder. “You two make yourselves at home.”

I regret I am impressed with our lieutenant, if mildly. She has a sort of uncut grace, and I find her lack of beauty (as she does, not unthinking) beyond the point. I do not like people who make me notice what they fall to find impressive in themselves.

You rise and walk round the table, straightening the flag as you approach, then stand behind me, hands on my shoulders, gently pressing, kneading, massaging. I let you work my tired muscles for a while, my body rocking slightly, my head moving slowly back and forth. I do believe sleep may be coming at last; my eyes half close, and a sleepy focus brings my gaze to the surface of our flag, spread upon the table. Dried mud lies scattered on the flag, a souvenir of the plains delivered courtesy of the lieutenant's boots. No doubt their soil lies sprinkled over most of our rooms, corridors and rugs by now. My gaze, filtered through the blurring eyelash veil of my half-closed eyes, stays fixed upon that caked dirt lying on our colours, and I recall our second tryst.

I threw you on this same flag once, though not on this table, not in this room. Somewhere higher than here; an old attic, dusty and warm with the day's soaked in sunlight. On the other side of those slates we had used as a prop to our pleasure the night before, we crept while the rest of our party, still recovering from the night's excitement, lunched on the lawns or soaked away hangovers in baths. I wanted you immediately my desire stoked but smothered, banked for the rest of that night first by your too proper concern for our absence being noticed, then by the sleeping arrangements, which meant we each had to share a room with other relations but you demurred at first, in some recollected aftermath of shyness.

And so, like the children we no longer were, we investigated old boxes, trunks and chests, our declared pretext become real. We found old clothes, moth eaten fabrics, ancient uniforms, rusted weapons, empty boxes, whole crates of hard, heavy phonograph records, forgotten urns, vases and bowls and a hundred other discarded pieces of our history, recent and antique, risen here like light detritus upon the swirling currents of the castle's fluid vitality, deposited at its dusty, unused summit like dusty memories in an old man's head.

We tried on some old clothes; I brandished an age spotted sword. The flag, unfolded from a trunk, made a carpet for our shoes and discarded clothes, then after I grew bolder, taking off more, helping you with your assumed attire, letting my hands and fingers linger, then kissing it became our bed.

Within the arid calm of that dark, abandoned place, our passion took and shook the flag, rumpling and creasing it as though to a slow storm it had been exposed, until I dampened it with a sparse rain more precious than air and storm clouds ever have to offer.

I recalled those offered moon pearls of the night before, and on the flag it was as though they now lay returned, memento vivae unstrung upon a sewn on and now crumpled shield, with swords and some mythic beast shown rampant.

You drained me, sequentially; our pleasure became pain and I discovered that you suffered in silence, and screamed quiet, hoarse, bitten off for satisfaction only. We fell asleep eventually in each other's arms, and on our family's.

You took your repose like your pleasure, sleeping one eye half-open, above an embroidered, fading unicorn. We slept an hour away, then dressed and luckily unseen hurried down apart; you to a bath and I to a hillside walk we each pretended had begun long before.

You continue, working my shoulders, stroking my neck, pressing into the top of my back. My gaze remains fixed upon the mud the lieutenant's boots have left. When I was young, just a child and you were away, held from me by that family dispute our mating somehow sought to mend I remember that for my early years I hated dirt and mud and grime more than anything else I could imagine. I'd wash my hands after every contact with something I thought unclean, running in even from sports and games outside to rinse off under the nearest tap what was no more than honest earth, as though terrified that somehow I might be contaminated by that mundanity.

I blame, of course, my mother, an essentially urban woman; that excess of fastidiousness which she encouraged served me ill for those young years, bringing down upon my head a shower of insults from my friends, peers and relations more filthy than anything I thought I might pick up from wood, ground or park.

It was a horror of the common; something Mother thought was ingrained, indeed genetic, within both our class and particularly our family, but insufficiently so by her strict standards; something which required reinforcement, feeding, bringing on and bringing up, like a carefully trained flower or a well bred and well groomed horse.

My fanatical cleanliness was the symbol of my worship of my mother, and the acknowledgement, the very expression of our superiority compared to those beneath us. It was a” belief which Mother was perfectly appalled she could not effectively evangelise to others of our station. I knew of people of our kind as well connected, as ancient in their lineage, as abundant in the extent of their estates who, as far as my mother was concerned, entirely let down the side by living as meanly or at least as grubbily as any peasant with bare feet, an earth floor and a single change of clothes. I knew people who owned half a county who habitually packed more dirt beneath their fingernails than my mother considered decent in a window box, whose breath and person smelled so that it was possible to detect their earlier presence in a room for half a day subsequently and who, save for the most special of occasions, dressed in old clothes so tatty, torn and holed that each new servant brought into their employ had to be carefully instructed, should they come into contact with these rags on the rare circumstance when they were not being worn by their owner, not to pick them up between finger and thumb and at arm's length take them promptly to the nearest fire or outside bin.

Mother regarded such laxity with disgust; of course it was easy to live as one wanted when there was no one to tell you otherwise and one possessed an income independent of external sanitary sanction, but that was precisely the point; the poor had an excuse for their grubbiness while the better off had none, and to reveal oneself as being happy to live in conditions which might unnerve a pig was an insult both to those like my mother who clove to the true faith of immaculate hygiene, and indeed to those less fortunate as well.

My thoughts on such matters matched those of Mother perfectly; they were the very image of hers, and I remained her disciplined disciple in all this until one day in early spring, at the age of nine, when I was walking alone in the woods to the north of the castle. I had had an argument with my tutor and my mother and, when my lessons had concluded for the day, had stormed from the house, not noticing the rain that was approaching from the west. The wind surprised me underneath the still bare trees, a loud commotion shaking their tops, and only then did I turn back towards the castle, clutching my thin coat around me, seeking in the pockets for gloves that were not there.