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A short time later we left Hannah’s house and walked, cloaked against the rain, along canal side and pavement towards that part of the city where the house in which I was to live was located. My lovers, my erstwhile servant girl Anya and a youth purporting to be her brother accompanied me, the youth pushing an iron strapped chest before us, clattering upon a wheeled handcart.

Our path lay rough paved for the first part of the way, muddy here and there and not a little fouled with household wastes and animal dung, then, after some time, upon gaining the shelter of a broad, tree lined avenue the quality of the way changed considerably. Now the properties bordering the streets were set back from the common areas and protected along their frontages by the most elaborate ironwork set atop sturdy stone walls.

A carriage passed us, its windows curtained closed, the coachman hunched and hooded against the rain. Obsessively angular and sharply iron wheeled, grey-black and somehow strangely macabre.

In a league and a half we saw no one. Not a single soul had greeted us or challenged us, nothing and no one had so much as acknowledged our existence, yet for some reason Hannah appeared to be worried.

I saw Anya sign her a couple of times, though saw not what signs they were and whilst Anya’s eyes remained steadfastly downcast throughout our journey I managed, surreptitiously on two occasions to catch those of the boy.

Of the four of us, he had the most work to do and the most dangerous, though he had in all probability, no way of knowing it, for it was the chest he bore on the handcart rather than my person that was the custodian of my secrets.

His eyes glowed with a dogged determination as she pushed though whether that determination was more to get out of the rain as quickly as possible rather than risk his life, all unbeknown, for the sake of me I could not tell.

Then the carriage was past us, wheels grating on the cobbles as it turned at the junction of an adjoining street.

At my side I heard Hannah murmur softly, more to herself than anyone else, some words in a language I did not recognise and certainly did not understand.

“Now we are here” she said shortly, indicating with a wave a rather unnoticeable iron gate, deeply set and, contrary to my expectations, somewhat insignificant, into a featureless stone wall bordering the walkway and the street.

“Quickly now!” she urged, as the gate was opened from within by two shadowy figures “Ere the coach returns!”

Before I could reply she shoved me unceremoniously forwards, through the gateway and into the courtyard beyond. The girl followed then Hannah and the boy, hurriedly manhandling the handcart between them.

I saw then that the courtyard extended not only across the front but also along both sides of the sombre stone building which stood at its centre. As I stared I was aware that the iron gated doorway through which we’d entered was being shuttered and barred. To my astonishment I saw that, where moments before the open arch had afforded, through the iron gate, a view of the street along which we had lately walked, now the broad timber boards of a sturdy door blocked both the view and any possible entry even so far as the gate.

Airlock doors sprang to mind of course and the sealing of a ships hold in readiness for flight. Indeed I supposed, there have been many similarities and parallels throughout history. The Marguerite, upon whom I had earlier sailed had watertight doors and hatch covers made of elm planking sealed with oily sheepskins, my own ship had airtight doors made from laminated aluminium sealed with some kind of rubber and this front gate had an iron bound door which closed firmly inside it. Not much difference really, except in the materials used.

Of course all this happened in a shorter time than it takes me to relate, or so it seemed when I looked back on it, no more than about thirty seconds.

“My apologies!” Hannah offered graciously. “I meant not to hurry you nor cause you to stumble! However……”

She grimaced. “One cannot be too careful”

“That coach” I asked “was it anything to do with them?

“I think not” she replied “But then it was not local to these streets either!”

By way of explanation she displayed the cowrie she wore beneath her cloak on a leathern string.

“The coachman ignored the sign” she told me.

“Maybe he didn’t see it?” I suggested.

“He saw it alright” Hannah assured me “Sure enough, for I saw his eyes flicker……but the Lady protects her own, thankfully. And while few indeed know more than they need, all without exception know the first three signs”

“The boatman told me……” I began.

My companion smiled.

“In your country both the words and the signs differ. In both language and symbolism we have, in a few short years, grown apart. Thankfully in other ways our gestures mean the same!”

“Yet Her secrets remain?”

“They do! Remain and grow ever more secure! Which is, in many ways, where the dangers lie!”

“Dangers?”

Grimly my companion nodded.

“In your country a man named Nicholas Owen died for his secrets. He did not reveal them though he was terribly tortured. In this country too there are many such men. Hidden in chambers and towers, attended by a trustworthy, dedicated few, working towards a common end”

“Nicholas Owen was the man who designed and built those so called priests’ holes, wasn’t he?”

“Indeed yes! Hannah said “A Jesuit by all the stars but a dedicated man nonetheless!”

“I have no quarrel with Jesuits!” I said boldly.

“Nor they with thee,” she agreed “however……”

If anything I had much more and larger a quarrel with the weather, some moisture having by then found a way into the cloak on my back. Still my new house was warm and welcoming and those servants I met immediately most eager to please. In no time at all we were taken to rooms which were by anyone’s standard, quite splendid. And if I’d thought my own cloak something close to leaky then that of Anya might easily be likened to a sieve. In short she was wet through, right through to her skin and that included her legs and her feet.

The boy had fared rather better it seemed, having only managed to saturate his legs up as high as his knees as he walked but he began to strip off his garments anyway, declaring that a good hot shower straight away was the remedy for a good many ills.

Oh Sweethearts it is always a joy to watch my lovers undressing, though in this instance Anya soon encountered some difficulties. Saturated as they were her undergarments clung doggedly to her skin and no amount of hem tugging would, to begin with, dislodge them.

Ultimately it became a task similar to that of skinning a rabbit, the hilarity of the situation not diminishing until a giggling Anya staggering nakedly fell over a twisted mess of wet clothes on the floor.

The boy and her have a thing going together, did I tell you about it once before? Appropriately he finds large breasted women almost attractive as I do!

No, I’ll rephrase that statement, abolish it entirely. The boy is almost pathologically attracted to Anya’s tits. Oh he might be her brother for all I know. Its possible certainly but I don’t think he is. More like a ruse he’d invented to get closer to her. No matter, the bald fact is both he and I are drawn inexorably to the same two bounteous things.

It follows then, as surely as a suckling calf will follow, lowing pitifully the fully laden, low hanging udder of its mother, that we, as mere men should exhibit similar tendencies regardless of the fact that the female in question was neither in milk, nor, thankfully, either of us’s mother.

……………

Hannah came up to see us not long after the events which I have described took place. To see if everything was alright, she said, and to kiss the three of us a happy goodbye.

We were in bed by then, not surprisingly, trying out the curtains, comfort levels, periscopes and lighting.

Well it was a large bed and an unusual one so we had to investigate its complexities. Nothing would have been worse than finding it to be a disappointingly inadequate place in which to sleep.

You’d have called it a four poster I suppose, if you’d seen it. It was one, sort of, except it had six, the top four forming a three sided panelled enclosure which was, by itself larger than most normal beds while the remaining two stood at the foot in the usual four poster configuration.

“We could easily get lost in here!” Anya chortled.

There were eighteen different pillows on the bed, each of a slightly different colour, all exuding a slightly different scent and enough quilts and coverlets to hide a full size cricket pitch – except that nobody had invented one of those yet so we could not see if they’d fit.

We enticed Anya onto the bed with promises of chocolate, by coaxing, catcalls and by tickling her bottom and thighs with a long pointy stick. She got on her hands and knees eventually, whereupon we told her she looked like a sort of small eared pink elephant.

“Don’t make fun of me or I’ll cry” she whimpered, playing up to our fantasies magnificently. We took a tit each and enjoyed it immensely and had both sucked her and fucked her by the time Hannah came in.

“I can see you’ve settled in quickly” she said with a grin. (Its easier by far to say it that way) A few seconds later the situation really got out of hand. Because Hannah herself likes large breasted women as well. That’s how her and Anya originally came to meet. In the end we all had to say hello and goodbye in the usual manner all over again and after about five and twenty minutes I was so exhausted I hadn’t the strength to crawl out of the way. When I opened one eye later all I could see were four little cowrie shells hanging from a watch stand on the bedside table.

……………

It wasn’t all wild sex and debauchery however. A couple of days later we got involved in some more serious things. An Man, some leader or other I believe, came to see us, to pass on some good news and lumber us with some bad. He spoke well, even eloquently, without saying who it was who’d written his speech. Knowledge was what he spoke about and the gist of it was this:

“……the fact is that some knowledge might be beyond common man’s comprehension, but that same knowledge, once learned by them, cannot be unlearned, merely corrupted and distorted by the ways of unappreciative other parties and thereby diluted and rendered worthless. Knowledge becomes then no more than ignorance, turned from a priceless tool into a cumbersome weapon fit only to kill the unwary. Likewise the magic of which we speak, this knowledge, may be considered such a weapon to be used against us…...”

He went on rather more than that of course but that was his message in a nutshell. No one told us whether to clap or cheer at the end. So we offered him tea and biscuits instead, which he gratefully accepted, saying he’d neither eaten nor drunk one single thing since the previous Wednesday. He may have exaggerated I suppose but if this stated abstention was true I wondered how long ago it had been when he’d last enjoyed sex. He looked away when I asked him that, out of a window, far away, before telling me in a whisper that he didn’t think he ever had.

He left the specifics to our imagination, the statement capable, as you may see, of being read a number of different ways.

Anya wanted to take him to bed straight away when she heard the news.

“Oh the poor, poor man!” was what she said. “Never enjoyed it or never had it? He i’nt a virgin, surely?”

“You could easily get lost in here!” An Man gasped when he saw the size of our bed. He was in for a bit of a shock as well, when he lay down because not only did he suddenly discover that the breasts he’d been staring at for hours and hours really were frighteningly huge when he got close to them but, in his haste to escape suffocation he’d banged his head on the lawnmower which some thoughtful person had abandoned under the quilt.

“That’s a bloody stupid thing to write!” Anya declared scornfully. “What was Aahlu thinking about when he put that paragraph in……?”

No of course it wasn’t all wild sex and debauchery. Sometimes we had to get down to the more serious business of earning a living……

© Aahlu. 131010