I aided in the pounding of boiled clothes; I translated dull tags; I daily ran my fingers through Mr. Sharpe’s hair, greasing it and feeding his graying queue into a bag. So the days passed in Greek fragments and chores.

I missed my studies with Dr. Trefusis inveterately; for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one’s familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

There being an intemperate storm one evening, I sat by the fire, recalling that just a few months before, such a night, the rain savage upon pane and sash, would have found me by the library fire reading ancient bestiaries: stories of the military endeavors of the crane, the violence of certain monkeys, and the peculiar blood of the hoopoe, who feeds on filth and whose gore, when spread on the human body, was said to cause visions of demons strangulating the dreamer with twine.

That evening, a small company, consisting of Bono; my mother; the cook, Aina; and Nancy, the laundry-maid, sate by the fire in my mother’s room. There was a time when I would have cowered for fear that some adult should speak to me, that Mr. Gitney should badger me with questions, and so break my reverie, draw me back from Africa, Persia, or Muscovy; now, without books to leaven the evening, I sat listless.

“What’s hypped the Prince?” asked Bono.

My mother answered, “He misses his books.”

“Prince O.,” said Bono. “Those books — you don’t need them. They’re madness without one lick of sense. Mr. Gitney told me I should read from the library. He tells me to read some romance; he wishes I should give him my opinion. I read it. Sweet Jesus. There was flying peoples and horses underground and trick swords and bosoms heaving. And there was battlements and the walking dead and oboes. It’s a game for the idle. Forget the books. You han’t need for children’s stories anymore. Leave them for the rich, Little O.”

In that moment, my spirits rallied against him — stifled — agitated — vexed and bound — and I discovered dislike even for he who commanded so much of my reverence; I could not brook his slander upon learning.

I must have glowered.

Bono took a bite of an apple. “That child,” said he, through a mouth full of pulp, “could melt a liver with his eyes.”

The next day the rain abated and commenced a silent drizzle. All the houses of the town were green in the mist. Figures in tricornes walked through the streets, gathering by carriages with curtains closed, and the smell of the docks hung over the squares.

That evening, chilled to the bone, I prepared for bed near our fire. Bono sat upon his pallet.

“O.,” he whispered, “how would you fancy the Something Fiddle-Faddle Histories of Tacitus?”

I turned to him, smoothing my shirt.

“Lift up your mattress.”

I did; the book was there: Tacitus’s Annals of Rome.

“There’s some good to be had in being a known cretin,” said Bono. “I been granted full reign of the library.”

I picked up the book. I held it in both hands, the leather boards pressed between my palms.

“Bono . . . ,” said I, deprived almost of speech — eager already for the plumes, the charges, the palace intrigues.

“Don’t let them find it, or we ain’t walking straight for some days.”

“Bono,” I began again.

“You know there’s a price,” said he, reaching under his mattress and pulling forth another volume. “Before you read to yourself, you needs read to me.” He handed it to me.

I looked through the book he had given me; it was a collection of old tales in English, so far as I could discern. “Why can you not read it yourself?” I asked.

“It ain’t all in English,” he said. He took it from me, turned the pages rapidly, and passed the volume back to me. He thumped upon the page. Bono explained, “They put some of those passages in Latin so the ladies couldn’t read them. I got a most acute interest to know what they say.”

I scanned the words, and, seeing their content, blushed.

I informed him, “It is regrettably impossible that I should render these lines into English. I am sorry, Bono, and I hope that this in no wise diminishes your sensibility of my gratitude for the hazard in which you have —”

“Octavian,” he said, “you translate, or I take Mr. Tacitus back to his own bedroom.” He tapped the cover of his fable-book. He said, “Miscreants got to hang together. Do wrong for me so I can do more wrong for you.”

I watched him, burning with shame at my complicity; but there was no way out of this arrangement, should I wish to continue my education. And so I began reading — without joy — my tongue sunken in my mouth. “The monk . . . was of so great a girth . . . that the girl would have been crushed beneath him. . . . Thus she mounted atop him . . . and he penetrated her from beneath. . . .”

This became a feature of my evenings. I read in secret volumes from the library, and, in return, once a week perhaps would translate filth or chirurgical surveys of the womb and parts of reproduction; and so, through these crimes, my studies continued in secret.