Thyme II Thyme (17 page)

'Old Jacob Henley, I reckon,' Norman replied. 'He's in his nineties and is the oldest person in these parts except for old mother Redford, who lives with her granddaughter and can't even remember her own name, so I doubt she'd be of much use to you.'

'And where might we find Mr Henley?'

He grinned. 'You can find him right here at about six o'clock when we reopen. Never missing, never late. He lives just up the hill, but I wouldn't go knocking on his door at this time of day. He likes to nap for a bit in the afternoons and he gets right crotchety if anyone disturbs him. No, you come back after six if you can and I'll introduce you proper, like. Mind you,' he added, 'better have the price of a couple of pints of Old Oakleys with you, for him, I means. Old Jacob always reckons everything has to have a price, and that's usually it.'

'This would be quite exciting,' Anne-Marie said, 'like a treasure hunt, only there's no treasure we know of and we don't even know what we're looking for anyway.'

'I'll know it when we find it,' I muttered as she pulled the car into a muddy track entrance at the side of a road that was scarcely any wider. I opened the door, climbed out and sniffed at the air. 'We're close, I know we are,' I said. 'I can feel something.'

'Like a tingling in your bones?' Anne-Marie said mischievously, smiling.

'A feeling in her waters, as my granny used to say.' Andrea swung her legs inelegantly out of the rear door and swore as she snagged a stocking on it. 'Fuck it!' she growled, her voice dropping an octave. 'These were new on this morning. And why do I always have to sit in the backseat anyway?'

'It's just a sort of sense,' I added vaguely, ignoring her outburst as I walked a few yards along what remained of an old hedgerow and found a place where I could climb up to look across to where the woods began. It was a poor sort of coppice, nothing like the grand acreage I had been walked around at Great Marlins, but it was one of the few growths of trees that went on for as far as the eye could see in every direction. 'It's definitely the place,' I said firmly. 'But why doesn't it show up on any of the maps we looked at?'

'People made mistakes years ago same as they do now,' Anne-Marie said, 'and if it was bombed out during the war, the mistake wouldn't have been worth correcting, would it?'

'That must be Meg's Mount over there,' I said, pointing away to the east to where a hill rose up, its crest gleaming white in the late afternoon sun at one end of the ridge. 'It's close enough to have been part of the old estate, though I never saw it when I was back here.'

'The place was all woods then,' Anne-Marie reminded me, 'so you wouldn't have been able to see very far. Which way do you want to go first? I don't fancy trying the car up this track. The mud's as hard as iron and I can't afford to lose my suspension.'

'Let's walk,' I decided. 'I need to see what's left of the old house. Maybe I'll recognise something.'

'And maybe you won't,' Andrea snapped, 'or did you write your name on a special brick?'

We both pointedly ignored her and set off, carefully picking our way over the hard mud ridges. Progress was slow but at least it was progress, which is more than would have been possible had it rained in the past few days. And as we gradually approached the trees, I felt a curious tingling in my spine that told me we were on the right track, though to what, where, and for why, I still had no real idea.

In many ways, the site of the old house was a complete disappointment, for whatever the repair men from the RAF base had left behind during nineteen forty-four had long since become overgrown. Yet with every step we had taken towards the woods, that feeling of mine had become stronger and stronger, so that when I finally stood where the house had once been, an area where the trees had not yet encroached, I knew this was indeed the place.

'There's a funny smell everywhere,' Andrea said, sniffing.

'That's mint, I think,' Anne-Marie hazarded a guess. 'It grows wild near nettles and dock leaves and there's plenty of both of those around here, so watch your legs and fingers if you don't want to get stung. This is a right wilderness.'

'It is,' I agreed, 'but you can see from the different growth where the foundations must be. See that line of scrubby little stuff along there, that must have been... the front wall, I reckon, because it's facing south and most houses were built facing south in the old days.' I walked across to the line I had spotted and stooped down, making sure there were no nettles before I started tugging at the straggly growth. 'Yes, here you are!' I cried. 'Look, bricks just at ground level, or where ground level would have been. This is the old foundation, all right.'

'Terrific.' Andrea folded her arms across her chest. 'We've come all this way to see a line of buried bricks. If I'd known that, I could have buried a few new ones in our garden for you.'

I looked up at her, frowning. 'What's the matter with you today?' I demanded. 'There's no talking to you, is there?'

She made a face, and turned away.

'She's having a mood on because I'm punishing her for being a right selfish little bitch,' Anne-Marie informed me. 'But if she thinks acting like this is going to do her any good, then she's got another thing coming.'

'Punishing her?' I echoed. 'How?'

'Show her, you sulky little tart,' Anne-Marie ordered.

Andrea hesitated, but then turned back towards us. We were all wearing jackets even though the weather was mild enough for us to keep them open, and Andrea reached down and grasped the hem of her skirt, raising it with a defiant pout.

'Ah, I see,' I said, and I certainly did, for beneath the slightly flared skirt she was wearing the white leather restraint that strapped her male organ tightly against her lower belly. 'Oh, poor you.'

'Yes, poor me,' she retorted, letting the skirt fall again. 'This thing is bloody uncomfortable and I can't even wear any knickers with it.'

'Then you should learn to act in a more considerate fashion.' Anne-Marie sounded less than sympathetic. 'All you've done these past few days is complain, other than when you've been getting what you want, so I've put you in that nice cock harness to remind you just who, and what, you are.'

'Well, I'm hardly likely to forget that now, but it's not fair. This thing makes me feel randy as hell, you know, and there's not much chance of me getting any relief just now, is there?'

'Well then, why don't you do it yourself while we watch,' Anne-Marie suggested. 'That'll make for a pleasant diversion, won't it, Teenie?'

'Um, yes, I suppose so,' I agreed.

Andrea looked downcast. 'I can't,' she said. 'You know I can't. I've never been able to, have I?'

'Then maybe now's the time to start learning,' Anne-Marie said firmly. 'Poor little Andrea has never been able to wank herself off, you see,' she said to me by way of explanation. 'She either needs someone else to do it for her, or else she needs to fuck properly. She's been spoiled, if you ask me.'

'Well, maybe I could...' I began. I hated seeing Andrea so miserable and we certainly weren't going to get any sort of cooperation from her in this state.

'No,' Anne-Marie insisted with an air of finality, 'she can do it herself or she can stay all strapped up and randy until tomorrow. Go on, Andrea, take your skirt off and give us a show.'

'You're a wicked bitch!' Andrea wailed, but all the same began unfastening her waistband. 'You know this isn't going to work.'

'Shut up and do it,' Anne-Marie snapped. 'You can undo the top three straps, but the bottom one and the ball clincher stay where they are. You can do us a little dance first, if you like. Or shall I find a length of twig and whip your backside for you?'

'No, don't do that!' Andrea all but sobbed. 'I'll try, honestly I will, but it's not my fault!'

'Let her try,' Anne-Marie whispered to me as Andrea began tugging at the restraining buckles, 'and then I'll toss you to see which of us finishes the silly tart off. There's no way she'll come by herself, same as she says.'

It was actually me who lost, or won, depending upon your point of view, when we tossed the coin. Astonishingly, given that Andrea had spent a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to masturbate herself without any joy, it took only a few strokes from my hand to have her spurting forth like a fountain. Anne-Marie was all for leaving the restraint in place and re-buckling the other straps afterwards, but I prevailed upon her to relent and, after waiting a few minutes for Andrea's erection to finish subsiding, we left her to remove the device while we began walking away from the line I estimated was the rear of the old house.

'The place where they kept me was definitely at the back of the house and down a hill through the trees,' I said. 'Look, the ground slopes away here and there are still a few old trees, so this could be the way, though stuff will have grown and died all over the place since then.'

'How far was it?' Anne-Marie asked after we had walked a good ways and were already approaching the farther edge of the coppice.

'I'm not sure,' I admitted, 'but it was further than this, quite a bit further, in fact.' We walked on and came out into the open again. 'It's all so different,' I said. 'There was a path through the trees and we walked for quite a ways, but then... yes, the ground levelled out again and then it was about another two or three minutes... somewhere over there,' I said, pointing across what was now an overgrown meadow boasting a few scrubby bushes.

'I wonder where all the trees went?' Anne-Marie mused out loud.

I shrugged. 'They were still building ships mostly from wood right up until eighteen sixty and even after that, for merchant ships, anyway. Maybe whoever was in the hot seat here sold off all the timber; it would have fetched a fair price.'

'Sounds like vandalism to me,' Anne-Marie said sourly. 'But then that's men and their wars for you.' She turned to me. 'Are you sure we're going the right way?'

'No,' I admitted, 'but I'm still getting a feeling, so let's move on a bit further.'

The best way to explain the way I felt as we continued walking might be to compare the tingly sensation I was experiencing with the clicks from a Geiger counter - the closer we came to where I knew we had to go, the faster and stronger grew the little electric tremors in the base of my skull and the tips of my fingers. And if we began to stray away from the line, the sensations began to dull. Eventually, several hundred yards from the site of the house, I stopped and squatted down on my haunches. 'Here,' I said simply, running my fingers through the long grass.

'Here what?'

'This is where that shed, stable, kennel, whatever you want to call it, was. It was right here, right where we're standing. The feeling is very strong here.'

'It just looks like flat ground to me.' Anne-Marie slowly turned three hundred-and-sixty degrees. 'Not even any sign of old foundations like there is up at the house.'

'They may not have put in any proper foundations,' I said, standing up again. 'It wasn't much of a building and only one storey, so they may just have built on the surface. The floor inside was only hard earth with straw on it and I got the feeling the place had been constructed in a bit of a hurry especially for me... for Angelina, that is.'

'Well, if this is the place, what now?'

'I don't know,' I admitted. 'This is definitely the place, but I don't know what comes next. I just knew I needed to come here, perhaps just to convince myself it really did exist and that it wasn't just a figment of my imagination.'

'And you're convinced now?'

'Yes.' I nodded emphatically and scraped at the earth with the toe of one shoe. 'Yes, now I'm sure, though why I should be convinced because of a tingly feeling, God only knows. The whole thing is... well, it's mad, and so is everything else that's happened to me since.'

'You mean me?' Anne-Marie asked quietly.

I looked at her and shrugged again. 'Well, I mean, think about it,' I said. 'A few weeks ago I was just an A-level schoolgirl leading a perfectly normal life with a perfectly normal family and perfectly normal friends. Now I've been back over a hundred years and... well, we both know what happened there, and when I get back here to nineteen seventy-five, we spend half our time playing kinky games with a boy who seems to want to be a girl except for the fact he's got a very active cock, and I end up being fucked in front of an audience of total strangers. I'm beginning to wonder if I might not have gone mad,' I said, running a hand through my hair. 'Maybe none of this is real, maybe this is all just a dream and I'm going to wake up somewhere in a straightjacket.'

'It's real enough,' Anne-Marie assured me, moving closer and gently taking my elbow. 'Poor Teenie,' she whispered. 'We've rushed things too much and not really thought about what must be going through your head. I'm a selfish bitch. I can't even begin to think what this must be like for you here and now, let alone when you went back in time.'

'To be honest, I'm not even sure how this is for me now myself,' I confessed. 'There's the tingly feeling, but otherwise I feel sort of numb. I don't know what I expected to find here, but it wasn't absolutely nothing, which is precisely all we
have
found.'

'We ought to look around a bit. Maybe we could still find something.'