To the Hessian Hills

This is chapter one of six chapters of a completed work, which will post by the second week in May, 2020.

Germany

Johann heard her, singing in a low, sultry tone, as she moved to the shower house behind the lean-to he slept in. Christina wasn’t exactly being quiet, but Johann was sure he knew that getting his attention was her intent. She had been doing whatever she could to arrest his attention and interest since Rudolf had married her and moved her into the rooms above the pargeting workshop and office.

Rudolf wasn’t that old, and when his first wife, Louisa, much older than he was, died, it was natural that he would take another wife. But he was at least twice Christina’s age. She was no beauty, but her father owned the gypsum quarry in Kalkberg, on the outskirts of Lüneburg, the seat of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in the Saxony region of north-central Germany. And everyone knew how important gypsum was to the art of pargeting. Pargeting was the fancy molded plaster work—popular in Brunswick-Lüneburg because it was so popular in England, whose current ruling family had come from Brunswick-Lüneburg—used as decorative features on both the exterior and interior of plastered buildings. The mix going into the molds of such work was made of gypsum, marble dust, and paste. Marrying the daughter of the gypsum quarry owner had halved Rudolf’s costs for raw materials for his tradecraft.

But Rudolf hadn’t shown any more interest in his new wife than he had shown in his first wife, who had come to him with considerable money rather than looks, which means to say that Rudolf was childless and likely to remain so. What this had meant was that Christina had to look elsewhere for comfort, if she dared. Just because he didn’t tend to his wife in bed didn’t mean that Rudolf wasn’t a jealous and possessive man.

It was the fate of Rudolf’s young pargeting apprentice, Johann Jansen, that Christina had cast her eye and interest on him. That was natural enough. He was much the same age as she was, barely eighteen, and was a well-formed, comely blond, blue-eyed lad—much more comely than she was, as a matter of fact, which wasn’t lost on Rudolf.

Johann had good reason to know why Rudolf wasn’t showing interest in Christina. All of Rudolf’s interest and attention was going to Johann, and, as an apprentice with no family background of his own, Johann had to accommodate that. Not that accommodating the muscular and handsome man that was Rudolf was all that onerous.

Although Johann’s lot was cast, at least for now, in the area of sexual release, he had not fully made up his mind about his ultimate desires and he was open to possibilities. This is what caused him to rise from his pallet in the lean-to attached to the back of the pargeting shop and move to where he could eye the privy and shower shed through a knothole in the wooden wall.

No doubt Christina knew—or hoped—that he was watching. She didn’t close the door to the shower room when she entered and let down the shift she was wearing before pulling the chain that would tip the water bucket over, causing water to douse her to prepare her to soap her body and then again to rinse it off. Although there was nothing much appealing in the young woman’s face, which had made her marriage as good a bargain and a relief for her father as well as for Rudolf, there was nothing to snort at concerning the voluptuous nature of her blonde-haired body.

The young woman soaped up and hummed to herself, paying particular attention to her pendulous breasts and private recesses, as she chanced furtive looks toward the shed where she knew Johann was to rise within moments. It was just after dawn, coming early at this time of year in the northern German climes, and her hope, of course, was that he was watching her bathe. It was quite evident that she sought a rise of another sort from the young apprentice than just him leaving his pallet to face the day.

Johann watched her carefully except when she turned her eyes toward the wall of the lean-to, as if she could see him there, spying her through the knothole, although of course she couldn’t. When her eyes turned toward him, Johann would draw back into the darkness of his narrow room, not wanting her to see even a glimpse of his eye.

He thought he should be aroused and should show the signs of this, but, strangely and somewhat disappointingly, he wasn’t. There was no feeling of tightness, and quick breathing, and hardening of his cock as happened when Rudolf touched him and held him close, entered him, and moved inside him. This somewhat distressed Johann. Was it just that Christina wasn’t the right woman or was it that she tried too hard to interest him? He was still struggling with his sexuality. He wanted to desire to lay with a woman. That certainly was the norm, although there was more of man laying with man going about Lüneburg than anyone in the city wanted to talk about. There even were rumors about the duke himself.

But this was not the acceptable way in the public attitudes of Lüneburg. Johann let Rudolf fuck him because the master-apprentice arrangement was sacrosanct, with the master being the master and the apprentice being little more than a slave, and the sex was far better than the beatings that many other apprentices had to endure. And Rudolf was one fine figure of a man. But Johann had always assumed that this—his urges—would change when he no longer was an apprentice and was set up in the pargeting and interior wood-carving trade himself. Then some woman like Christina might be in his future. Christian’s father, after all, owned a gypsum quarry.

Christina took far longer in her toilet than she needed to, but then she wasn’t there just for the cleansing. If she dawdled longer, though, Rudolf would be coming out to see why Johann wasn’t in the shop and, if he found that it was because Johann couldn’t come out of the lean-to as long as Christina was on naked display, who knew what the result of his anger would be?

Still, she lingered for a moment at the door of the lean-to, holding her shift to her, her body still wet from the washing. Both of them held their breath—the young, unfulfilled wife of an older man and the equally young, comely and virile young apprentice—while she lingered outside his door.

Could she chance it? What would be his reaction?

Johann equally wondered what his reaction would be. And at this moment, his loins did begin to stir. Perhaps there was a chance.

But the chance wasn’t now. Both of them understood that. Daylight was flowing. Christina was past having a breakfast on the table for Rudolf, and Johann already should be in the shop, preparing the molds and mixing the plaster for the day’s work. His breakfast would not come until later—not until he had the materials prepared for the master craftsman to begin his work when he appeared after his breakfast. And, although Christina would be preparing Johann’s breakfast, she would be leaving it on a table at the top of the stairs and Johann would have to fetch it and return to the shop to eat it. Rudolf would not be permitting any contact between these two young people.

This wasn’t entirely because he didn’t want to share Christina with Johann or any other man; in this particular case, it was mostly because he wanted all of Johann’s attention focused on himself, Rudolf, alone.

* * * *

“What’s that? What’s happening?”

“I’m fucking you. That’s what’s happening,” Rudolf Muhl answered with a laugh. And indeed that’s what he was doing. His apprentice, Johann, was lying, belly to featherbedding in the pargeting master craftsman’s bed on the third story of his shop and residence in the upper quarter of Lüneburg. Christina was away for the night, visiting her family at the quarry in Kalkberg. And this was what happened most of the nights Christina was gone—Johann being fucked in Rudolf’s own bed.

“No. I mean the glow beyond the window there. There’s a fire.”

That got Rudolf out of Johann and off the bed right quickly. He raced to the window, still in erection. Fires in the town were very serious matters.

Johann couldn’t help but admire the cut of his employer’s body from the rear. Although he could not have denied Rudolf anyway, he was almost ashamed to admit—to himself, at least—that he may not have denied the man even if there had been no question of control.

In fact, even the first time there had not been a question of who was in control. Rudolf had come upon Johann walking on the side of the road in a fringe of forest land between Lüneburg and Kalkberg. Rudolf had been driving his wagon, loaded with gypsum, from the quarry, and was filled with mixed emotions, as he had just settled on his marriage with the quarry owner’s older daughter. The quarry owner would not give him the younger, prettier one, saying the older daughter had to be married first. Rudolf cared more for his favorable supply of gypsum than what woman was in his bed, as long as she cooked and kept house for him. There wasn’t much he was going to do with a woman in his bed anyway. But having a woman under his roof again would curtail his pursuit of younger men that he had been enjoying since his Louisa had died.

He was keyed up as he drove slowly along, jarred by the deep ruts in the dirt road his wooden wheels bounced in. Under the circumstances, when he saw Johann walking along the road, barefoot, sunny blond, only wearing tight breeches, and on his way to work in a nearby potato field, Rudolf was not only smitten—he also was driven. Rudolf was a muscular, powerful, and handsome man. He wasn’t used to being denied when he was in high heat.

He didn’t give either himself or Johann an opportunity to think further than his unbridled lust. He had Johann on his back and his cock in Johann’s channel, in the foliage just beyond sight of the dirt road, almost before either one of them had time to think. Johann’s struggle was desultory, the young man disposed to other men being aroused by his good looks and ardor of the man, and wholly unsuccessful in the beginning. As Rudolf dug deep in the saddle and began pumping, the young man slowly gave way.

When Rudolf was finished and rose off Johann, the younger man just lay there, panting, looking up at the older man submissively as if what Rudolf had taken was by right. Rudolf didn’t apologize. He offered Johann an apprenticeship.

An apprenticeship in a tradecraft in a Hanseatic League city—the cities of the former Hanseatic League being still an economic power even though that major economic consortium of northern Europe had broken up a century earlier—was far beyond the reach of most peasants such as Johann. All Johan had going for him was his sensual magnetism. And Johann was a realist. Anyone interested in surviving in the loosely assembled scheming German principalities in the latter two-thirds of the eighteenth century was a realist—and an opportunist. He had been quick to accept Rudolf’s offer—and Rudolf’s demands beyond the offer.

That didn’t mean that Johann had closed out on his sexual preferences yet—only that he had remained in touch with the realities of his station in life and any opportunities that came his way, even if momentarily.

When Rudolf got to the window to check out Johann’s report that there was a fire in the town, he let out a deep-throated laugh.

“Why do you laugh?” Johann asked. “If there is fire in the city, we must go help.” He was already struggling to rise from the bed and reach for his breeches. “Fire could destroy the whole city.”

“Not this fire,” Rudolf said. “And stay in that bed. I’m not finished with you tonight. Not by a long shot. The fire is at the duke’s palace down on the banks of the Limenau. Only one of the wings is in flame. There are no other structures nearby for the flames to spread to, and the fire already is nearly out. There are enough men there to fight it. Men tumble to serve Duke Wilhelm.”

“Still, why is the fire amusing?” Johann asked.

“Why do I laugh? I always laugh at the prospect of good business. Tomorrow Duke Wilhelm’s architect will be at the door of my shop wanting to commission me to replace pargeting in the fire-damaged rooms of that wing.”

Rudolf spoke true about not being finished with Johann that night. He returned to the bed, pushed his knees under the younger man’s buttocks, and slid his hard and thick cock inside Johann’s channel. Grabbing the railings of the headboard overhead with both of his fists and locking his ankles at the small of Rudolf’s back, Johann arched his back, set his mouth in an gaping yawn, and moaned his surrender to a cock working deep inside him, while Rudolf grabbed Johann’s waist and pulled his channel on and off the cock in an ever-faster rhythm until both cried out their mutual release and collapsed into the featherbedding.

Rudolf also spoke the truth—with one day’s delay—that Duke Wilhelm’s man would be at the shop door with a commission for Rudolf—and Johann—to work on the restoration of the interior of the palace.

* * * *

Rudolf left immediately with the duke’s architect to assess the damage in the palace and to make his estimates of what he could do in the restoration. He was gone for three days and two nights, not returning to the shop in that time even though the palace was just across the city. In that time Johann trundled back and forth from the shop with the tools and materials Rudolf needed, but, prophetically, Rudolf worked nearly nonstop at the palace, with only brief periods for sleep in a room provided by the architect—and Johann didn’t. Johann remained at the pargeting shop. And Christina returned from visiting her family in Kalkberg the first day of Rudolf’s absence.

“Will Rudolf be home tonight?” Christina asked as she was putting away the produce her family sent her home with. She smiled a secret little smile when Johann said no and that he didn’t suppose the master would return to the shop house for the next couple of days.

Rudolf’s skill was in high demand. There was plenty of business for him in Lüneburg. Despite the demise of the Hanseatic League of connected economy-rich cities across northern Europe in the late seventeenth century brought on by the rise in the India trade, Lüneburg had held its own and even prospered so that, in 1776, it was still a rich city. Its economic strength had rested mainly on the dome of salt it sat on and its ability to mine and market that.

Another strength was its special ties with England and the trade that provided. This stemmed from the turn of the eighteenth century, when the elector of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg rather unexpectedly also became King George 1 of England, the founder of the House of Hanover. George was a distant cousin of England’s Queen Anne, the last of the House of Stuart monarchs. Although there were some fifty candidates ahead of him in the English succession, by the Act of Settlement of 1701, the new monarch had to be a Protestant. Everyone in line before George was Catholic. Upon mounting the English throne, George retained his hold on the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and, although there were dukes in residence there in subsequent generations, the ties between the two states were firm.

The importance of the current duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, residing in the palace on the River Limenau in Lüneburg, also was firm. Thus, although there was plenty of wealth in the city to provide a master pargeter and interior wood carver plenty of business, no one in the city was a more important client than the duke was.

If Rudolf had a moment to think for himself while working out the needs for his services in the restoration of the burned wing of the duke’s palace, he might have given a thought or three to the wisdom of leaving his young, voluptuous, and neglected wife alone in his residence with his equally young and more comely apprentice. But he evidently didn’t give the wisdom of doing so a thought, or he might have kept Johann with him at the palace for those two nights. He might have anyway, if he hadn’t been assigned a bed in a dormitory rather than a private chamber.

Still, what then transpired might not have done so if Johann had been given access to any but the crudest ale in this life thus far—or if he hadn’t been as naïve as he was.

Christina’s expressed fears of being alone in the house without Rudolf and her opinion that it would be easier just to serve Johann dinner at the table in the second-floor dining room rather than leaving it for him by the stairs and retrieving the plate from the first-floor workshop later seemed so reasonable—especially after the first heady stein of ale she brought down to him before dinner.

During dinner, she busied herself about the kitchen and small dining room, moving everywhere, always seeming to be close to Johann and brushing by him. And refilling his stein constantly. For several moments when he woke in the night, with a splitting headache and buried in the featherbedding in the third-floor bedroom, Johann assumed that it was one of those nights Rudolf was alone at home and that it was the master who was in the bed beside him.

But of course it wasn’t Master Rudolf who was in bed beside him. His eyes opened wide when one small, plump hand spread its fingers and palm on his chest and the other glided down his belly and into his bush and grasped his cock. Christina was the one in bed with him, gazing at him with loving and slitted eyes and cooing softly to herself.

“Please, let’s do it again,” she cooed.

Do it again? He had already fucked her? He already was undone.

He couldn’t remember, even days later, whether he had enjoyed the first fucking, but he had no doubt that he enjoyed the next—when Christina, seeing that he was awake, rolled over on top of him, impaled herself on his erect cock, pulled his face up between her pendulous breasts, and began to ride him to an ejaculation—not his first that night, if Christina was to be believed, and certainly not his last.

This was all new to Johann—and not at all unpleasant. Christina kept him well-oiled with smooth, strong ale for the next two days. If, on the occasions that Johann attended Rudolf at the palace, the older man hadn’t been engulfed in the work that the duke wanted to have done and he had paid the least attention, he would have seen that Johann couldn’t walk straight and had a sloppy grin on his face when the young apprentice visited the palace restoration site. But in these early days on the palace project, Rudolf was all business.

Christina couldn’t get enough of Johann. They fucked in the shower shed, shivering under the trickle of cold water, Johann fucking Christina against the wall. They fucked on one of the shop tables and on the kitchen table and on the dining table. And they fucked in the featherbed at night.

It was only when the ale gave out that Johann began to realize and consider what they were doing—and when Christina’s plain face hove into view as often as her plump breasts and buttocks and the mysterious slits, crevasses, and knob of her womanhood. Her insatiable demands and the increasing possessiveness of her sharp tongue also built to the point where Johann began to feel trapped and to where his mind started to drift more to Rudolf’s muscular body and cock than to Christina’s curves and cunt.

It was with great relief that, summoned to the palace to start work—with bed and board—there alongside and under Rudolf on the third day, now that Rudolf had been assigned a private sleeping chamber, that Johann fled the house in a rush of blushes and awkward speech.

* * * *

En route to the palace, Johann paused at the town square, where a small troop of newly recruited soldiers was mustering and where other young men were gathered around a recruiting table. This was where Johann had been destined to be if Rudolf had not offered him the apprenticeship. There were days when Johann wondered if he would not have been better to go with the Hessian troops—called this because this entire region of German was known as Hesse—for adventure in the New World.

Great Britain was at war with its colonies in America and the region around Lüneburg still held a certain allegiance to the English monarchy, now embodied by George III, the great-grandson of the George I, originally the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. England was taking advantage of this link to employ Hessian troops in putting down the rebellion in America. A good many of the young men of Johann’s age and circumstance in Lüneburg were enlisting, as much for the wanderlust call of the New World as for any allegiance to one side or the other in the war.

Johann stood, briefly, to watch the seasoned soldiers introduce the new recruits to the famous Jäger rifle, the rifle used exclusively by the Hessian troops. The young men were being recruited for the light infantry at present. Johann’s friends, August and Claus, had already enlisted in the artillery and were off in intensive drills and had been so since before Johann contracted with Rudolf as an apprentice. Johann had lost track of them. Both August and Claus were better off than Johann was. Johann had worked on the farm of August’s family, who were builders. Claus’s father had been a physician, and although the father was dead and Claus also was reduced to working in the fields of August’s family farm, he’d had a higher-class upbringing than Johann had had.

The three once had declared that they would go into the army together and see the New World through each other’s eyes. There had been a budding relationship there between August and Johann, but it had always been complicated by the presence of Claus. Johann hadn’t completely understood why he gravitated toward August more than Claus—or at least he hadn’t understood before he had experienced the enlightenment of the attraction men could have for each other that Rudolf had given him. The truth was that Johann and Claus would enjoy the same thing from August—and that Claus had received that attention first.

Johann wondered if he’d ever see August again.

For now, though, he realized he was late to report to Rudolf at the palace, so, after taking one more interested look at the Jäger rifles being assembled and used in the salute in the muster on the square, he moved down the hill toward the river and the duke’s palace.

Rudolf was too busy with his work to remark either on how much later Johann arrived at the palace than he expected or why Johann exhibited the afterglow of two days of sex. Rudolf certainly had every reason to know what Johann looked like after good sex.

“Take these sketches and these plaster medallions to the room above this one and start applying them to the fireplace mantel, the cornices above the windows, and the crown modeling,” Rudolf said absently, as he shoved the parchment pages and box of medallions at the just-arrived Johann.

The interior of the wing where the fire had been was in better shape than Johann expected. Of course, this was the home of the duke. Everyone was working at double pace to bring the rooms back to life. Rudolf was busy trimming and burnishing the wood panels that less-skilled workers were nailing to the walls of the first-floor ballroom.

Johann had trouble not dropping the materials Rudolf had pressed into his arms as he climbed the curved staircase in the outer foyer to the next level, as other workers were scurrying up and down the stairs around him, some carrying wide loads.

“Mark the carving on the staircase railings as you go up the stairs,” Rudolf had said. “The carving of the crown molding in the upper foyer will have to match that. I will leave that job to you.”

Johann was glowing with the responsibility that Rudolf was assigning to him. He had been apprenticing for not quite a year, but he had been a quick learner and had a talent for the work. He hadn’t been sure that Rudolf recognized the talents he had beyond those in the featherbed.

All was in chaos in the upper room, which obviously was a music room. The walls had only been scorched slightly here. Most of the damage was from smoke. There was an ornate white grand piano in the center of the room, around which an army of workers swirled. It was the first such musical instrument Johann had ever seen. The raised decorations on the case of the piano were gilded in gold, and, with his trained eye, Johann could see immediately that the pargeting that was to be done on the walls and fireplace of this room were meant to match the raised designs on the piano.

The piano was producing music, which was incongruous in the construction activity bustling around it—and the young man calmly playing the instrument was equally incongruous. He obviously was a member of the duke’s household, if, indeed, not from the duke’s immediate family. He was young, as young as Johann, and was a sultry, sensual, dark-haired in contrast to Johann’s outgoing blondness. He also was willowy and of delicate construction to Johann’s slight construction but muscular virility. His clothes also were a contrast. Johann wore scuffed and split leather boots, breeches reaching just below his knees and tied at the waist with rope, and a simple jerkin of the coarsest-weave cotton. The young man at the piano, in contrast, was dressed in silk, wore what looked to be ballet pumps on his feet, and had a frilly, billowy shirt of the finest white cotton.

He stopped playing when Johann was passing the piano, and, despite the swirl of other workers moving around the piano, reached out, touched Johann’s arm, and arrested the apprentice’s progress. Johann felt a chill run up his spine at the soft touch on his bare arm.

“You are loaded down with finer material than the other workmen. Are you the master craftsman who is going to bring this room to life again?” The voice was a silky tenor, the language refined, the thick, curly eyelashes batting at Johann invitingly.

“I am just an apprentice, my lord,” Johann answered, keeping his eyes averted—or trying too. The young man was just too exotic and sultry to be ignored. “But, yes,” he continued, proud to be able to say it, “I will be doing the finishing work on this room.” He drew the young man’s attention to the sketches and box of medallions as if he needed to offer some proof of what he had boasted.

He was rewarded with a smile for that. “I will love watching you work with those,” the young man said. “It won’t embarrass you for me to play the piano in here while you work, will it? I must practice a lot and this, after all, is the music room—and this, alas, is the only piano we have.” He’d said it as if anyone else in the town owned one piano, not to mention two.

“No, my lord, it will not embarrass me.” But, of course, Johann’s blush belied that.

“These other workers will be finished soon, won’t they? And then it will just be you—applying the decorative elements and gilding them?”

“Yes, my lord. The other workers will be finished soon, and then it will be less of a distraction for you to practice your music in here. I will make as little distraction as I am able.”

“Some distractions are very welcome,” the young man said, giving Johann a meaningful look that Johann could not avoid understanding. In embarrassment, Johann pulled the sketches and box of medallion into his body as if he needed protection from something—and, indeed, he didn’t want the young noble to see the effect he was having on the involuntary response of his body.

“I will just start on my work then,” he mumbled, as he started to back away from the piano.

“My name is Werner,” the young man said in the silky tone his voice had.

“Johann; I am Johann,” came back the answer, but in such low volume that Werner made him repeat it.

Werner, Johann thought. The people of the city knew who was in the duke’s household even if they rarely, if ever, cast their eyes on them. Could this Werner be the duke’s second son?

* * * *

“Wait. Let me do it. The ends of these branches under here are like knives.”

Werner dutifully lowered his buttocks to the soft, damp soil under the ancient boxwood bush in the Lüneburg palace formal gardens and let Johann control the fuck.

Johann and Werner had waltzed through their dance of teasing interest for nearly a week as Johann tried to concentrate on his pargeting and gilding work in the second-floor music room and Werner at least pretended to practice his piano. To Johann’s ears, although he’d never heard piano music before, Werner didn’t need all of the practicing he did. The music he produced was stirring—sometimes in ways that Johann was fighting.

As the basic wall plastering work was completed, the ranks of the less-skilled workers thinned out until the two were alone in the room for long stretches of time. Werner took the initiative, asking Johann to come over to the piano to pick up some sheet music he dropped and then, when Johann hesitatingly complied, pulling Johann down on the piano bench and insisting on showing the apprentice how to play a few simple tunes.

Johann couldn’t have said who initiated the first kiss, but he felt sure it must have been Werner. Johann was too much in awe of a young member of the duke’s household and in fear of Rudolf finding out that someone other than him was tasting the delights of his young apprentice to have made the first overt move.

It would have been better for Johann to worry more about the duke.

Terrified that someone would discover them, Johann nonetheless could not stop the embracing and kissing and roaming of hands that first time as they sat, side by side, on the piano bench. In the days following, Johann tried to protect himself—protect both of them—by insisting that another worker help him with the setting of the medallions and other decorative plaster work—claiming that time was of the essence and someone else needed to help with the gilding. But Werner was just as inventive in devising reasons this helper should run errands outside the room. Whenever they were alone, Johann could not resist the call to approach the piano.

Werner whispered to Johann what he really wanted from the well-formed blond hunk, and showed no fear of what Johann might tax him with. Indeed, more than once he’d taken Johann in hand, and, in his arousal and sense of danger, Johann had quickly come from Werner’s close attention. But time and again Johann declared that it was much too risky for him to give Werner what the sultry, dark-haired, willowy man wanted. Besides, Johann wasn’t sure he could take the role that Werner was suggesting he take, as heretofore he had taken the same position Werner wanted to take with him.

But Werner was persistent—and inventive. He waited until Johann needed to make more plaster medallions and was setting them out on a makeshift table out in the palace’s formal gardens on a sunny day. Werner decided he needed to be writing a letter that day rather than practicing his piano, and he sat on a bench near to where Johann was working to do so. Johann could work under the sun only wearing his breeches, but Werner couldn’t. He could, however, open his blousy shirt to expose his chest, turn toward where Johann was working, surreptitiously untie and drop his codpiece, and expose himself to Johann. His need was quite obvious.

The boxwood bushes in the garden had been there for a couple of hundred years already. Although the leaf coverage was solid at the surface, if one pushed between the branches, a cave-like cavern formed of thick trunks and soft earth underneath could be found inside. It was here where Werner pushed Johann when it appeared no one else was looking.

And it was here that Werner stripped off Johann’s breeches and unloosed and shed some of his own clothing as his mouth found Johann’s hard cock and the young, blond artisan apprentice was lost to the control of the equally young, dark-haired nobleman.

They wrestled symbolically for ascendance, but it was clear from the beginning that Werner wanted Johann to master him, which was a new role for Johann. But it was one that the week of teasing and the buildup of sexual need had prepared Johann to step up to. He had just done it with Christina—the basic principles were the same with a man.

Once Johann, lying on top of Werner in the inner recesses of the mature boxwood bushes, was mounted, Werner went into a frenzy of wanting, raising his hips to counterstroke, locking his ankles over the small of Johann’s back, raking Johann’s back with his fingernails, and trying to cry out the joy of the taking, the latter only stifled by one of Johann’s hands being clamped over his mouth. It appeared that Werner did not care if anyone heard them, while Johann cared all too much.

Werner arched his back and moaned deeply, as Johann moved his cock ever farther up into the channel, his strokes increased in intensity, and the two set into a rhythm that would not abate until both had ejaculated, which, because of how keyed up they were, came quickly.

Johann’s fear was that someone had seen them roll under the bush. And his fear was well-founded. One of the palace servants—one far more loyal to the duke than to his fickle second son—had seen them and had come close enough to be able to hear them thrashing about.

“What was that? Did you hear something?” Johann hissed in abject fear of being discovered.

“It is nothing. You can’t stop now. Fuck me again—harder,” Werner murmured.

Johann responded, but his fear increased as he thought he caught a glimpse of the motion of light-blue material through the leaves of the boxwood. Was someone close by, he wondered.

He wasn’t sure he had seen someone, though, until later, after the two young men had satiated their lust and carefully moved back to their previous positions in the garden—Johann checking the drying of plaster medallions on the makeshift table and Werner writing his letter.

Then Johann saw the men talking and gesturing toward him over by one of the entrances into the palace. Rudolf was red as a beet, and had turned a hard gaze in Johann’s direction. And there was the architect of the palace. But more ominous, there, standing between them, pointing to where Johann stood and Werner sat, looking very pleased with himself, was one of the palace servants. His torso was covered with a light-blue cotton jersey. Johann had remembered seeing him before Werner had pushed him under the bush, but he had thought the servant had moved out of sight. Obviously he hadn’t.

Rudolf started to trudge toward Johann, his fists clenched and his jaw set. But Johann didn’t wait for him. He turned and fled out of the back of the palace garden. He ran as quickly as he could, up the hill; past the city square, where the Hessian troop muster and recruiting was still going on; and on to Rudolf’s shop and home.

Christina met him at the door, looking distraught. She seemed to have positioned herself there to catch the men when they came home, although this was much too early for them to come home.

“Where is Rudolf? Is he with you?”

“No, and I must go,” Johann said, as he brushed by her. She clutched at him with her hands, but arrested his forward progress by only a fraction of a second.

“It’s good he’s not here. We must . . . go? You must go where?” she asked.

“Anywhere. Rudolf will beat me to death. Or the duke will. I must be away!”

“Away where?” But then she stopped. He had moved through the shop, to the lean-to shed where he slept. He had few belongings, and what there were he already was stuffing into a sack. “Indeed, you cannot go,” she said, her voice stronger now, more strident. “You must stay. We must figure this out together.”

“Figure what out?” Johann asked, stopping his packing and turning to look at her.

“I am with child.”

“With child? What child? Where?”

“Here in my belly, Johann. You put it there.”

He looked at her aghast, the magnitude of the problem sinking in.

“It can’t be mine. You have a husband.”

“A husband who has not touched me. There will be no question in his mind that the baby is not his.”

“We can’t, Christina. I can’t . . . you must go back to your family. I will not be here.” There was scant room in his panic—in one sudden tragedy piling on another—to feel responsibility. Christina had gotten him drunk. It had been Christina who had taken advantage of him. His week working in the palace had cleared his mind on that score. And it had not been long enough for her to know she was with child—surely not long enough. What sort of dunce did she take him for? She’d been gone recently. Who was to say that she hadn’t lain with another man while she was away in Kalkberg? She might know she was with child from the time of a previous visit to the quarry but not from the recent nights Johann had been inside her. No, he would not take the word of the scheming little vixen so easily.

But what would Rudolf believe? What would Rudolf do? He couldn’t publicly reject a baby. He wouldn’t want it known that he lay with men rather than his wife. But he could do something terrible to Johann and no one would lift an eyebrow. A master was a god to his apprentices and treated them however he liked. That’s what put Johann in Rudolf’s bed to begin with.

“Will not be here?” Christina cried out. But already Johann was pushing by her, headed back through the shop and out on the street.

He had no idea where he would go, where he would try to hide. But his feet seemed to know. They carried him back to the city square, and before he could have the bad fortune of catching a glimpse of either Rudolf or Christina again, he was recruited for the Hessian infantry to go fight for the British in the New World, and he was being marched out to the bivouac area on the edge of the city.