Thyme II Thyme (15 page)

'The winner!' she cried into the microphone. 'Master Julius proves once again that he is a true master and now he can claim the prize, if he so wishes. Andrea, up on your feet, you darling little slut, and show Master Julius what he has won.'

As Julius pulled back, his glistening erection swaying impressively before him, Andrea lurched uncertainly up onto her feet and turned away from the audience, bending at the waist to present her backside for all to see. Her tight little cheeks were separated by the strap from the restraint and beneath them was visible the rounded flange base of a dildo that had been inside her all along.

Carmen reached out, unbuckled the strap and eased the rubber shaft out, tossing it disdainfully into the wings. Then she looked at Julius and grinned. 'Up to you,' she said invitingly. 'She'll be the tightest fuck you've had in a good while, I'll bet.'

Everyone seemed to find this comment very funny and I gathered from this that Julius had possibly never had another man, even one with Andrea's mostly feminine appeal, but if that was the case, he certainly was not about to allow it to put him off.

'Is she well lubricated?' I heard him ask over the sound system, and Carmen nodded. 'Then why the hell not?' he roared. A moment later he was forcing himself into Andrea, gripping her hips so she could not avoid him even if she wanted to. He penetrated her slowly, until he was fully sheathed inside her tight hole, and then, in an almost comic little dance, he moved her around so the audience could see her face. To my amazement Andrea's expression was ecstatic, and as Julius began pumping slowly in and out of her, I saw her eyes glaze over and her jaw slacken as her mouth feel open. Her strapped cock was bulging between the leather bands and I could detect a glistening of her juices in the tiny eye in the centre of the dark purple mushroom.

'Oh, she loves every minute of it,' I heard Anne-Marie whisper. 'Little exhibitionist that she is, she'll remember this for months to come and my strap-on will be a poor substitute after a real cock!'

I couldn't tell whether or not Andrea was trying to fight the inevitable in an effort to spin it out but if she was, her efforts were a notable failure. Only a few moments later she came, the creamy liquid spurting two or three feet and much of it splashing back onto her while some of it sprayed the front row of the audience in a quite spectacular display. Sensing rather than seeing this, Julius joined her, and a yell of triumph from him accompanied by a shriek from Andrea signified that his own ejaculation was by no means any less formidable.

'Well, she'll be a bit subdued after that little performance,' Anne-Marie said, turning away and grasping my arm so that I followed her, 'but I doubt it'll last. Give her half an hour and she'll be ready for just about anything, our little star turn that she is!'

We stayed for a few hours but not, as Anne-Marie had threatened earlier, right through until the following day or evening. It was just as well, for although I did little more than follow her about as she mingled and chatted, the high-heels and the tight corset and collar became increasingly more uncomfortable as time passed. My feet, especially my toes, burned painfully, the backs of my legs ached, and by now I was growing thirsty, a problem which my gagged mouth prevented me from communicating to my mistress for the evening.

I was much admired by all. My height, and the posture that my outfit imposed upon me, made me the object of great interest and many comments were made on how this person and that person would love to borrow me, male and female alike. I half expected that at any moment Anne-Marie might accede to one of these requests, but she simply smiled and made little jokes that diverted her listeners from the subject.

Eventually, however, when Carmen joined us with a leashed and very subdued looking Andrea trotting obediently behind her, Anne-Marie decided that perhaps I should experience something myself. I looked down at Andrea, surprised to see that her male organ was once again as hard as ever, and wondered what was going through her head as she stared up at me.

'Andrea's tongue is as useful on females as it is on cocks,' Anne-Marie declared, and immediately the people around us in the bar area began to retreat, forming a tight little circle in which we were the centre of attention. My mistress then turned me around, unbuckled the back strap of the gusset and allowed it to fall forward between my legs. Immediately, the butt-plugging dildo began to slip out from inside me and there was nothing I could do to prevent its exit. The main dildo, however, remained firmly lodged within me even after Anne-Marie unbuckled the front of the strap and passed it to someone behind her. She looked up into my eyes and I stared back at her, silent and anonymous behind my mask and gag, my head held proudly erect by the stiff collar.

'I want to see you come, Teenie dear,' she said softly, 'and so do all these other people. I know you've been near to it most of the evening so it shouldn't take you long, but I'm going to make sure Andrea has you weak in the knees before she stops and then, I think, we'll let her actually fuck you.'

And so I found myself the centre of attention as Andrea stepped forward and knelt in front of me, reaching out to grasp the flanged base of my dildo between her teeth to pull its glistening black length slowly out of me. A hand reached out to take it from her and she began working on me with her lips and tongue, sucking and licking until she had coaxed my clitoris into proud attention, by which time I was already well into a continuous orgasm pattern. Only support from strong hands at my back kept me upright and I heard myself moaning through my gag as that wicked mouth and rough little tongue worked remorselessly on.

'Enough!' I heard Anne-Marie cry. 'Get those straps undone and then Andrea can finish her off properly.

I could barely see by this time and I had lost all sense of direction and perspective, but I knew well enough when that hard knob began to thrust inside me. I looked down, unable to believe Andrea could have managed this while my boots held me at such an impossible height. I learned afterwards that a small box had been pushed forward and that she had been helped up onto it in order to equalise our difference in heights, but at the moment it seemed like a miracle, like she must be floating just as I felt myself floating. I was so lost in my surrender that I barely felt her coming inside me. Even after she had pulled out I continued to shudder and buck, trembling and moaning as my climaxes went on and on and on...

6.

'How are you feeling?'

I was in my hotel bed, my eyes heavy from sleep, barely yet awake even though the sun was streaming in through the windows and I knew it had to be afternoon by now. I yawned and looked up at Anne-Marie where she stood beside the bed, a cup of something I guessed was coffee in her hands. 'I ache,' I said flatly. 'I ache and I'm tired and I think I ought to hate myself, and you.'

'And do you?'

'No, I don't think so. I ought to, though.'

'What makes you think that?'

'I would have thought that was obvious.' I struggled up into a sitting position. 'All
that
, last night...'

'That wasn't you, though,' she said, passing me the cup. It was coffee, hot and sweet. 'That was no more you than it was you back with Meg and company.'

'But it
was
my body this time,' I pointed out and sipped at the coffee, burning my tongue.

'No, it was
my
body,' Anne-Marie said bluntly. 'You surrendered it to me and I enslaved it, which means you can't accept blame or responsibility for anything that happened after that. Hate me, by all means, but don't hate or blame yourself.'

'Sounds like an easy way out, if you ask me,' I muttered.

'It is, and I'm not,' she retorted. 'Now drink your coffee, have a shower and let's go and get something to eat. We've lost the morning, but we can still get a couple of hours more research in.'

When Andrea appeared in the foyer, I found myself wondering just how she managed it. Dressed in a cream two-piece outfit, albeit with her usual too-short-to-be-decent skirt, she looked smart, fresh, feminine and alert. She had not joined us for the late lunch Anne-Marie and I had shared in the hotel restaurant, but this was not on account of any diet. She ate much earlier, she assured us, and had even been out for an hour looking around the shops.

The taxi delivered us to our destination within a few minutes and we returned to our studies, but now it was slower work for we had to delve back through old copies of parish records, many of which were incomplete and, in some cases, missing completely. However, piece-by-piece, we managed to construct the outline of a family tree and gradually began to get some idea of the history of both the Hackleburys and the Carpenters, although we came no closer to discovering Gregory Hacklebury's final fate.

The original Hacklebury family had come down from the north from three villages around the Manchester and Liverpool areas, Daisy Hacklebury's brother moving south with his own family after her husband purchased Great Marlins. From tax returns, it appeared he had taken up the position of estate manager, but Gregory himself disappeared from the scene early on and only reappeared much later after Saul Carpenter's death with his freshly purchased title under his belt. As to whether he brought Megan with him or not, we had no idea, but Andrea, setting off on her own line of investigation, came up with a startling piece of information. One George Crowthorne had worked for Saul Carpenter as assistant to his brother-in-law, and a further check of the records revealed that Megan Crowthorne had been born eighteen months after George's arrival on the estate, her mother, also named Megan, dying in childbirth.

'What are the odds that Saul was actually her father?' Andrea asked.

I pursed my lips. 'There's nothing there to suggest it,' I answered.

'No, but it might explain a few things about mad Meg,' Andrea suggested. 'If she was Saul's daughter, then maybe she thought she ought to have some claim to the place.'

'It wouldn't hold up,' I said. 'Apart from being female, even though there were no sons to dispute title, she was illegitimate, and whilst a male bastard might possibly have had some claim worth chasing, even that would have been dodgy. As a girl born on the wrong side of the blanket, she would have expected nothing.'

'Maybe not legally, but she obviously expected
something
judging from what you've told us about her.'

It was a good point and would certainly have gone some way towards explaining the curious relationship between Greg Hacklebury and his supposed maid, but there had to be more than that - we just didn't know what it was.

What we did know was that the estate would have passed to Daisy Carpenter upon her husband's death, probably with a bequest in there somewhere for the surviving daughter, Ruth, and possibly also with something in there for Gregory, who appeared to have taken over for his father when the older Hacklebury was killed in some sort of brawl with footpads, a fact we learned from a newspaper cutting Anne-Marie found just before we called it a day.

'Funny sort of crowd,' Andrea remarked. 'People coming and going and dying all about.'

'Life was a lot riskier back then,' I reminded her. 'No telephones, bad roads, and the railway still covering only the main routes. Somewhere like the area around Great Marlins would have been a different planet from the big cities, and there were always thieves and muggers on the roads.'

'And nasty bastards like Gregory running their own little empires,' Anne-Marie added. 'Poor little Angelina had no chance, did she?'

'Well, we still don't know what happened to her,' I said. 'Funny we can't find any record of her death.'

'Maybe she moved away or went abroad,' Andrea suggested.

'Or maybe Hacklebury or Meg killed her and
claimed
she'd gone abroad,' I reasoned darkly. 'And maybe there's only one way to find out.'

'No, you can't!' Anne-Marie exclaimed. 'Not yet, not until we know. If you go back there and they kill her... well, we still don't know what would become of you. There's no need, anyway. All this stuff happened well over a century ago, so nothing you could possibly do is going to change any of it.'

'Not so far as we know,' I agreed, 'but then we know squat about how all this works, and I reckon I was sent back there for a reason. I can't believe finding that locket and all those clothes wasn't meant to happen in some way. I mean, even inheriting the cottage was a bolt out of the blue.'

'That's because you're the only surviving female relative,' Anne-Marie reminded me. 'That wasn't fate, just your good luck.'

'Wasn't it? What do we know about fate and how it works?' I insisted.

'We don't even know if there
is
such a thing as fate.' Andrea looked back to where the spinsterish assistant curator was pointedly making a show of clearing her counter. 'But I reckon it's about time we were going now.'

'No clubs tonight,' I said firmly as we gathered our notebooks and pens. 'I want an early night and an early start in the morning and then, when we've finished here, I want to go back down to Dorset and see if we can't find out what's left of Great Marlins. I also want to see if anyone around there can recall any old stories that might help us get to the bottom of all this.'