Thyme II Thyme Read online

  'So, what have we here?' Hacklebury asked loudly as I straight-legged my way through the door at the end of my leash. The four men all turned to squint in my direction as the woman lifted an eyeglass on a silver stalk.

  'My word!' she exclaimed, and I could see from her change of expression that she was genuinely surprised. 'My word, but what a creature!'

  'This is Sheba, sirs, ma'am,' Meg announced, leashing me to a halt and dropping into a half curtsey. 'She's the thieving little wench we caught trying to climb in through the pantry window,' she lied. Obviously, my true identity was not for this public's consumption. 'She was offered either the courts or service,' Meg continued, probably making the story up as she went. 'Of course, they'd have hanged her if she'd gone the other way, this being not the first time she's been caught trying to steal from the house.'

  'Indeed, they would have,' the oldest looking of the four men agreed. 'Always thought that was a bit of a waste myself, but then maybe you've started something here, eh, Hacklebury? Tell me, do you reckon she'll make anything of a guard dog? I doubt she'd move fast enough for the hunt.'

  'Indeed not, my lord,' Hacklebury replied, smiling, 'but she moves fast enough for our purposes here, I'll warrant. Guard dog I don't know, but house dog most certainly.' He stepped forward and carefully walked all around me, stopping to flick at my proudly curled tail and to stroke the sleek hide of my flanks. He came around again to stand before me and then squatted down to peer into my face, particularly fascinated, it seemed, by the mouth in my mask. 'Quite remarkable,' he muttered, extending two fingers to probe the opening. If the artificial mouth had possessed teeth and been under my control, I think I should have snapped the intrusive digits off, but of course it did not and neither did I have any such control over the inanimate extension to my face. 'This is very good work, Pottinger,' he said.

  Behind him, I saw a portly little fellow step forward, his face wreathed in satisfied smiles. 'As I told you, Sir Gregory,' the man who I assumed to be the architect of my latest shame said smoothly, 'my usual clientele require nothing less than perfection and this is not the first such mask I have made. In the East they even have their creatures hunt and draw carts and they are kept for years in stables and kennels just like the real thing.'

  'Well, this creature has her kennel all right,' Hacklebury said, standing upright again, 'and by all accounts she is becoming very quickly accustomed to it, eh, Meg?'

  'Indeed, she is, sir,' Meg confirmed. 'Unfortunately, however, the bitch seems to be permanently in season.'

  'Ah, very interesting,' said another of the men. He was quite thin, with hawkish features and nothing to particularly commend or distinguish him though his accent suggested he was from the upper classes and had probably never done a day's decent work in his life. 'The bitch requires a dog? Or do you already have one for her, Hacklebury?'

  'A Great Dane, you might say,' Hacklebury answered, and laughed at his own wit. 'A veritable giant of a dog quite capable of satisfying a dozen such bitches, but if you feel the urge to give it a go yourself, Mellam, then by all means, be my guest.'

  The woman, who had been listening to these exchanges with an amused expression flickering across her features, now stepped forward. 'What say you, Mellam?' she demanded, prodding at his shoulder with a long finger. 'Fancy giving us all a show, do you?'

  Mellam seemed somewhat flustered by this latest turn of events, but the woman did not appear to be about to let him off the hook on which he had unwittingly impaled himself.

  'I mean, just look at the poor little bitch,' she said. 'Why, she seems to be panting for it. Doesn't she, Gregory?'

  'She seems to be panting for something, I agree.' Hacklebury turned and grinned at Mellam. 'But I think our friend here is just a little put off by your presence, Margaret, or maybe he thinks his weapon may not be up to the job. Here, Mellam,' he continued, grasping the thin man by the arm, 'come around here and see what awaits you.' He led his guest behind me and I knew without looking that he was pointing down at my exposed and shaved quim, the lips of which were being forced into a tight moué by the V-strap. 'Look, they're blowing you a kiss of welcome, Mellam.'

  Margaret and the other men all chuckled at this and promenaded around me so they could see this degrading sight with their own eyes.

  'If I were a man and possessed of the necessary,' Margaret said evenly, 'I don't think there is any way I could ignore such an obvious invitation. Go on, Mellam, give the bitch a little of what she wants, there's a decent chap, and don't mind me. Why, I'll even help you get your pole up, if it needs help.'

  Mellam was not at all keen, that much was easy to tell, but the others were now set upon having him take me. Although the chiding and protests went on for several more minutes, perseverance aided by further quantities of brandy soon had Mellam stripped below the waist. Margaret was indeed as good as her word in rendering assistance and stepped forward to grasp his drooping tool, but her ministrations weren't really that necessary for within seconds, now that the die was cast, Mellam proceeded to grow an erection that would have done almost any man proud - almost any man who wasn't Erik, that is.

  For my own part, I knew I was already wet and I could feel the now familiar heat spreading out from my sex long before Mellam was ready for me. He himself sounded quite surprised when he placed the head of his weapon against me. 'Damn it, but she's certainly hot and ready enough!' he exclaimed, as much in a show of bravado as anything else, I guessed. I felt him push forward and, despite the compressive factor of the V-straps, he entered me easily enough, sliding his full length into my proffered pussy with a single thrust.

  'How is she, Mellam?' Margaret enquired. 'Is she good and tight?'

  It has to be a tribute to the elasticity of vaginal muscles the world over that Mellam announced to the little gathering that I was indeed tight enough for his satisfaction despite my recent experiences at Erik's hands, or rather at that other part of his anatomy.

  'Take her nice and slow, Mellam,' Hacklebury advised. 'Make it last while we all have ourselves another drink.'

  I heard Mellam grunt as he thrust in and out of me and I was glad once again of the anonymity afforded my own facial reactions by the mask. I was not surprised when I found my body yet again reacting of its own volition, my hips pushing backwards to meet his penetrations as little gurgling noises emanating from deep within my throat emerged from my gaping dog's mouth.

  'She's an obliging bitch, I must say,' Mellam declared breathlessly. His hands grasped my hips to steady himself and I realised he was no Erik; he would probably discharge into me quite soon despite Hacklebury's warning for him to take it steadily. As I panted and groaned in rhythm with his hips, I supposed that the sight I presented would have been too much for the self-control of most men, so it was no surprise at all when I felt him erupt inside me with a choking cry.

  'You need a drink, sir,' Hacklebury said, strolling back across the room with a glass held before him.

  Without withdrawing from me, Mellam apparently accepted it because I heard him gulp the fiery liquid down hurriedly. Only then, with his shaft already beginning to wither inside me, did he have the courtesy to remove it, leaving me with a feeling of emptiness and, much as I hate to admit to it, disappointment. But as I ground my top teeth down onto the clamps that held the gag strap across my tongue, I doubted I would be left unsatisfied for very long...

  'Eventually, after they had all had their fun with me, Pottinger included, Meg took me back outside, handed me over to Erik, and he took me back to my stall,' I concluded my story. 'I thought maybe he was going to have one last dip at me for the night, but it must have been the early hours by then and I reckon he was pretty whacked out himself. He gave me a drink of water poured down a metal funnel, of all things, and then told me to lie down, threw a blanket over me and left me to sleep. I dropped off pretty much straightaway, and then... well, then I woke up back here.'

  'What an ordeal!' Anne-Marie exclaimed. 'It must have been horrible to be
treated like that.'

  'It was,' I admitted, 'and yet something was happening inside me that made it all seem quite surreal, and even...' I hesitated. 'Well, it was almost enjoyable, though in a quite impersonal way,' I added hurriedly. 'After all, it wasn't really my body and that funny crew mostly didn't even know who I was supposed to be, let alone who I really am.'

  'I think I know what you mean,' Anne-Marie said slowly. 'That's part of the whole bondage and submission thing. Once you're tied up and you've given over all control to someone else, you can just go with the flow. Of course,' she said by way of qualification, 'in normal circumstances, that control is surrendered willingly, whereas you weren't given any choice in the matter. And what am I thinking of?' she exclaimed suddenly. 'There you are still sitting there in that tight corset. It must be killing you by now.'

  I peered down at myself. I was still dressed in the elaborate Victoriana garb I had donned for our earlier games. I shrugged. 'To be honest,' I admitted, 'it doesn't really feel that tight any more, not after being laced into that damned dog suit thing. That really was tight, believe me.'

  'I think we should get you out of it, all the same,' Anne-Marie insisted, 'and then I reckon we'd all be better off at my place. Your cottage is really quaint but there's no denying the plumbing here leaves a lot to be desired and the sleeping space is limited. Besides, so far you've been here when you've been whisked off on your travels, and while we don't know for sure that's a factor, the fewer chances we take, the better, at least for the moment.'

  'I agree,' I said. 'I'm not saying I don't want to go back and sort that bitch Meg out, but not just yet. I feel as knackered now as if it was this body that was going through all that and my head's starting to throb. Plus, there's a few other things I need to get straightened out.'

  'Like finding out a bit more about Gregory Hacklebury, for instance?'

  'Yes, that for one, but then there's been these other things... I didn't mention them before, but I have these sort of half remembered images floating around up here.' I tapped my temple. 'Some of it is Angelina stuff, but there's other things as well, and I need to try to focus on them.'

  'Well, tomorrow you can focus all you want,' Anne-Marie said, rising. 'But for now, we'll get you into something more comfortable and I'll drive us all back. Then in the morning, dear Andrea here can do us the biggest fry up in history and sod our waistlines.'

  I slept alone for what remained of the night and well into the following morning, waking only when the smell of bacon frying penetrated the jumble of my dreams through the half open bedroom door. I sat up, shook my head to clear it and swung my legs over the side of the bed knowing I needed the toilet before anything else. I stopped only to snatch up a terry cloth robe that was hanging over the back of the bedside chair.

  Downstairs, still heavy-eyed and clad only in the borrowed robe, I found Anne-Marie about to pour coffee and Andrea, neat and precise in a white mini dress and opaque white stockings, turning bacon and sausages in one giant pan while several eggs sizzled in another hardly less impressive skillet.

  'Hungry?' Anne-Marie asked, tipping hot liquid into the first of three mugs.

  I nodded, pulled out a chair from beneath the kitchen table and eased myself down onto it. 'Starving,' I confessed, my mouth watering. 'I feel like I could eat a horse.'

  'Well, we've got the best part of half a pig over here,' Andrea said cheerfully, 'but no horses, I'm afraid, so you'll have to make do. Baked beans and mushrooms okay for you?'

  It really was a dietician's horror of a breakfast, complete with buttered toast, fried bread and even fried tomatoes, the whole laid out on plates that were huge in comparison with anything we'd ever had at home. But within minutes the feast had been devoured, leaving only greasy traces and not a guilty expression in sight.

  'That's the way to start a day,' Anne-Marie sighed, and reached to replenish the coffee mugs. 'So,' she continued as we added our individual sugar and milk quotas, 'what's on the agenda for today?'

  'I'm really not sure,' I confessed. The fry-up and coffee had brought me fully awake but I had no more idea of where I should try to go next than I'd had the previous evening. 'Like I said, we've found no Hacklebury references to do with large estates, so there has to be a reason for that, and perhaps that's where we should try to start.'

  'Except we don't have the name of the estate, nor even where it was,' Andrea pointed out. 'Don't you have any idea at all, Teenie?'

  I shook my head. 'I had the feeling that it had to be in the south of England, quite possibly in either Hampshire or one of the adjoining counties, but I never saw anything much that would offer a real clue and it could just as easily have been somewhere up north. It was fairly warm, but then it was summer and even Yorkshire has warm days in summer. It's not all Bleak House and snow drifts, you know.'

  'Well, given that my family Hacklebury connections are all in Dorset,' Anne-Marie said, 'then I reckon it would be reasonable to assume that your first guess is fairly close to the truth. Whether it was a Hacklebury who owned this place or not, we should start with the estate itself and work backwards from there. It's a shame you didn't think to try to get something more out of that lot while you were back there. Even a village name might have been a start.'

  'I did have other things on my mind,' I pointed out just a little too tersely, 'and half the time I wasn't able to speak, even if I'd thought of it.'

  'No, of course not,' she replied quickly. 'But it might be worth trying to keep that in mind for next time... always supposing there is a next time, of course.'

  'Oh, there will be,' I said, and somehow I knew, with an unshakeable conviction I could not explain, that my time-travelling adventures had only just begun.

  4.

  Quite what I hoped to gain from identifying the true position I had fallen into at the Hacklebury estate I was not quite sure, except that I had always been brought up to believe knowledge means power and the next time I came face-to-face with Gregory and his mad henchwoman I would need every scrap of power I could muster.

  Besides, I reasoned as we drove along the coast road towards Dorchester, if I could identify the estate I might also be able to discover why it was that Hacklebury's name was no longer to be found anywhere in association with any large area of property. In this fact I felt sure lay at least part of the key to all this. The longer I thought about it, the more positive I grew that the land had probably never been rightfully his in the first place and that he had usurped the title to it as surely as he had usurped poor little Angelina's dowry along with everything else that should rightfully have been hers.

  Gregory Hacklebury, I was now convinced, was a form of Victorian land pirate, totally unscrupulous and completely without any human principle or compassion, but still weak enough to be manipulated by a female psychopath whose hunger for wealth and position was probably fiercer even than his own. Meg was the true mistress of the estate, as I should have seen from the beginning, her maid routine and public obsequiousness no more than a sham, and even Gregory knew that, I now suspected, though for some reason or other he found himself unable to break free of her spell.

  'It's almost like she was a witch,' I muttered as we crossed the county border into Dorset and began climbing a hill from which the view out over the English Channel was as spectacular as it was peaceful under the surprising winter sun. 'She was definitely the boss in that set-up.'

  'Yes, only presumably Hacklebury assumed she was his faithful hound in much the same way as she tried to turn you into her obedient little dog girl,' Anne-Marie sounded distracted; she was squinting against the glare from the chalky deposits that covered the asphalt road here.

  'Yet every dog must have its day,' I murmured, repeating the thought I'd had some one-hundred-and-thirty years back in time. 'Only a sensible dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, not until...' I slapped the dashboard with such violence that Anne-Marie swerved sharply towards the centre of the road. It was lucky there were no vehicles approaching in t
he opposite direction or my enthusiasm might have ended our quest right there and then.

  'What the—?' she gasped.

  'That's it!' I cried. 'Um, sorry,' I muttered as an afterthought. 'But that's the answer, the reason why Greg's name isn't down on any title deeds we've been able to find. The land was never truly his and he never succeeded in getting it, not legally or any other way.'

  'You mean—?' Andrea began from the backseat.

  'Meg! Yes! She got it all in the end.'

  'And what happened to Hacklebury?' Anne-Marie asked, half turning her head towards me while concentrating on the road.

  I shrugged. 'Who the hell knows?'

  'Or cares?' Andrea added.

  'It might explain a lot, certainly,' Anne-Marie conceded. 'But unless I'm mistaken, we don't happen to know anything much about this Meg, aside from the fact that she was a psycho.'

  'And a hell of a lot cleverer than Hacklebury, who seems to have done most of his thinking with his penis,' I said. 'Like most men, as it happens.' There was a slight cough from behind us. 'Present company excepted,' I added, turning to look at the demure female figure sitting with her long legs elegantly crossed and her dark Cleopatra-style wig as immaculate as a coiffure could ever hope to be. 'Besides,' I added, grinning, 'I thought you were in girl mode today?'

  'I am,' Andrea pouted, 'but a girl has to defend her roots.'

  'Huh,' Anne-Marie snorted, 'I always dye mine.'

  'Let's get back to Meg,' I suggested. When I get an idea I like to pursue it hard and fast and this was a good strong line to follow.

  'She never mentioned a surname, I suppose?' Anne-Marie prompted.