Blitzed

Chapter Five

Moving Past It

15 April 1941

Back to Stedham Hall

Neal was standing outside the Italianate Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas again, on a Saturday morning this time, in nearly the same spot he’d stood two weeks earlier, leaning against Jocko’s Alvis Speed 25 Roadster. He put his hand out as if to stroke the sleek bonnet of the roadster, but pulled it back as if burned. It wasn’t there. There was no car sitting there; he wasn’t leaning against anything tangible. Of course it wasn’t there. And, although still beautiful, unusual, and arresting, the façade of the church didn’t have the effect on Neal now that it had had on him two weeks prior. He doubted he’d ever again have the feelings of comfort and peace he’d had then. It hadn’t anything to do with the church service then and it didn’t have anything to do with the service he’d just attended. Two short weeks and so little had changed in the world, while, at the same time so much had changed. Neal was older, wiser, more cynical, certainly sadder—most certainly angrier.

Sir Neville Chambers came out of the front of the church, much the same as Jocko had two weeks before, again with the local citizenry being deferential to him. He rarely crossed the threshold of the church, Neal was sure, but as the leading citizen of the area, now a senior civil servant in London in an important war ministry, whenever he was in attendance, the locals bowed and scraped to him.

They didn’t approach and converse with him now, though, as they had done with Jocko two weeks earlier, wide smiles on their faces. No one was smiling now. When Chambers emerged from the church it was at the side of a coffin—the coffin of Jack Temple, Jocko—to help guide the coffin down the steps and into the church’s graveyard, where Jocko would be buried with centuries of Temples.

They never had had the opportunity to try out their communications system or to meet again after that weekend at Stedham Hall. Less than a week after that, Jocko had died in his flaming Hawker Hurricane fighter plane. It hadn’t been by being shot down from the night sky by a German Messerschmitt. He’d been just a tad too slow in taking off to go in defense of London from the RAF Charmy Down airfield, and the plane behind him had plowed up his tail, bursting both planes into flames and denying London the services of the Charmy Down airflight that night. That didn’t mean that Jocko was any less dead—or any less a hero in the eyes of Neal and the entire village of Wilton. They were giving him full honors in his burial, full attendance at his service, and all of the grief they still could muster in this long, draining war.

Neal had found out in the worst possible way. No one had told him. As far as he knew no one knew he and Jocko had connected. Now, now that Jocko was gone, that was a good thing—good for all of those who grew up with Jocko and saw him as a village hero.

There was no one to soften the blow, to find the best time to convey the news. Neal had found out at work, doing his job, late at night, when he was exhausted but had just a few more wartime action stories to read, digest, and then make as palatable as possible to the public. Jocko’s death had come across in a brief action report from Charmy Downs, which focused on the airstrip’s inability to put planes in the air that night and the need to find alternate return fields for the planes already up. The first sentence to go in that report had been the acknowledgment that only a third of the planes launched from RAF Charmy Downs before Jocko’s plane had been burned on the ground had returned from over London in search of a clear airfield to land at. He’d almost overlooked the names of the two pilots who had been lost on the ground. He’d skipped right over the “James Templeton” at first. When he’d seen it—and processed it—he had collapsed in sobs, with no one else there at the Ministry of Information to give him solace.

When he’d told Phillip, admitting that he and Jocko had hooked up at Stedham Hall, the man had consoled him but had also directed his grief and anger to the job that they were doing—what they had to do—toward the German apparatus that was making all of this destruction work. In its own way, that had worked, but Phillip had also told him not to let his anger overcome his cunning—to continue doing the job, and to continue doing it well.

“If there weren’t those here, in England, selling us out to the Krauts,” Phillip had said, “there wouldn’t still be the need to send aviators like Jocko up into the sky every night with a better than even chance of just spinning on up to heaven rather than returning to base.”

That—the channeling of grief and anger—would severely tax Neal on this day. He had come knowing who would be here—even knowing he would be called to duty again. But he had come anyway. Jocko deserved that.

Neal followed the coffin out into the cemetery in the church yard. He followed at some distance, though. Jocko’s fiancée had returned from Scotland for the burial. She was lovely and tragic in her grief. There was no question what she thought of Jack Temple and what she had every right to think that Jack thought of her. Neal held back so as not to detract from any of that. Of course, no one there knew of Jocko’s other—desperate—life and what he had done to get the most pleasure and satisfaction he could from the life he was given in too small a portion.

Well, that wasn’t completely true—not the part about no one else there knowing.

Once the graveside service had begun, Sir Neville dropped to the back of the crowd and stood next to Neal. He dipped his head and whispered, “You came. I didn’t know if you would. If I’d known, I would have offered you a ride from London.”

“Yes, I came,” I said. “Of course, I didn’t know him well.”

“Come, Neal. You knew him very well. Very well indeed—if only briefly. You are doing well. Keeping up appearances well. Good for you. Jack deserves that.”

“You knew?” Neal asked, surprised and not the least bit pleased.

“Nothing goes on in my house that I don’t know about, Neal. Jack and I have hunted in parallel for years. I applaud his taste in men. You should know that I don’t begrudge other men screwing you as long as I take precedence. In fact, I’d enjoy seeing you and Phillip going at it. I regret not seeing Jack cover you. I know he was very good at it.”

Neal said nothing and fought to control the fists bunched up at his sides. There didn’t seem to be anything appropriate to say.

“Come back to the hall with me after the service. I have a guest. You can help me—can help the ministry and the country—with him. We must go on in this war. And then tonight—the two of us. You must buck up and carry on. We all must. Otto will drive us back to London tomorrow. You won’t have to take the train.”

“If you wish, Sir,” Neal said. It took all the constraint he could muster to agree to those wishes, though. As he did, his thoughts went to Jocko. Jocko deserved it.

* * * *

Chambers’s guest was a Swiss munitions manufacturer named Friedrich Klingenschmidt, who, Sir Neville said, he was trying to woo for Winston Churchill’s War Ministry to gain contracts at favorable discounts.

“He is such as I,” Chambers had said, which told Neal all he needed to know in terms of why he was being brought into the equation. If he had not been told, he still would have known. Klingenschmidt, who Chambers referred to as Herr K, had the same lustful, predatory look about him as Chambers did when eying Neal from the first time they were introduced.

The Saturday afternoon was spent on the estate, the three of them shooting for birds, Klingenschmidt oblivious to the reason Neal had come down from London that day, and Chambers apparently able to put Jocko’s funeral behind him and to concentrate on the task at hand. Neal was in a funk, fighting to control both his grief and his anger, and barely able to do so, withdrawing into himself so that he appeared to be a bit sulky, certainly taciturn. The Swiss manufacturer, though, apparently was drawn to the silent, sulky type of young man. Neal was certainly Aryan enough for him, and his small size was pleasing. Herr K didn’t avoid opportunities to smile at Neal and touch him here, there, and everywhere else.

It was clear to Neal that he was supposed to let the gross—because he was large as a walrus and was a noisy breather—fuck him for, as Sir Neville put it, “God and country and a chance to help end this dreadful war.”

Neal dutifully played the courtesan at the dinner for three, with two serving men and the silent butler, Otto, floating around the table as if royals were present—or at least the young man did the best he could under the circumstances. He knew he should feel privileged to be at the table at all with Sir Neville and his guest. The two of them carried the conversation, which was about travel and the safety of routes during the war to accommodate the travel. But while the two men conversed with each other, both were looking at Neal and eating him alive. It was clear that it would be Herr K early in the evening and Sir Neville later.

Which it was, starting immediately after the dessert was dispensed with and the three had retired to the library for brandy and cigars. Neal wasn’t offered a cigar. It became clear that he had a cigar of his own to smoke.

“Neal, I believe Herr K is in the need of attention,” Chambers said when all were settled in wing chairs fanned around a flickering fireplace, with an opening as tall and wide as a man.

Looking over at the Swiss arms merchant, Neal saw that, indeed, although the man was holding a brandy snifter in one hand and a lit cigar in the other, the fly of his trousers was unbuttoned and his upcurved erection was unleashed.

“Neal, if you please,” Chambers said, and Neal dutifully sank onto his knees in front of Klingenschmidt’s chair, took the man’s cock in his mouth, and serviced him.

When he had taken the Swiss manufacturer’s cum in his throat, Neal rocked back on his heels and looked at Chambers, not knowing what came next. Would Chambers want to be sucked off too?

“Herr K and I have a bit of business to conduct, Neal. Perhaps you could go to your bed chamber and prepare yourself for a visit, if our business here goes well.”

Neal withdrew only as far as the corridor outside the library door. He wanted to know more about what business these two were conducting. He presumed that it would be about munitions contracts and would involve negotiations. It didn’t. From what he could hear, it involved the exchange of information on military movements and homeland defenses—and, shockingly, the information was going from Chambers to Klingenschmidt. Neal wanted to hear more, and, in a state of high agitation over the war fodder death of Jocko, he wanted to burst into the room and choke Chambers. He was blindly angry that on a day like today, when they had buried a brave aviator trying to protect London, he was gathering confirmation that Chambers was a traitor. He heard stirring down the hall, though, so he pulled away, trying to hold himself in check, and moved toward the stairs to his bed chamber. As he moved down the hall, he passed the butler, Otto, who gave him a piercing, suspicious stare.

A half hour later, Herr K and Neal were in Neal’s bedchamber, with Neal, naked, on his hands and knees at the foot of the bed, Herr K on his knees on the floor behind Neal, hands grasping Neal’s hips, and his face in Neal’s crack. Klingenschmidt was trouserless, but he had kept his billowy white cotton shirt on. Neal was grateful for this, because he had been worried that the obesity of the man—his ponderous pouch and what surely were women’s floppy breasts would prevent Neal from becoming aroused and doing his best to please the Swiss man.

He needn’t have worried, as Herr K introduced him to mild degradation, which was new, and, shockingly arousing, to Neal. Neal’s wrists were bound together and Herr K used his belt, standing behind Neal’s kneeling, tail raised, body, to beat Neal’s buttocks for several minutes—not with force but with enough strength to redden the orbs that Herr K proceeded to kiss and lick while he snaked a hand between Neal’s spread thighs and fondled the young man’s balls and stroked him to an ejaculation. As the man prepared Neal for his pleasure, Neal could see the man’s cock hardening and lengthening. This—the switching and eating out—was evidently what the man had to do to become aroused.

Having come when he was afraid he would not be able to do so, Neal lay there, bound arms raised about his head, chest pressed into the mattress, and tail raised on bended knees, while Herr K saddled up behind him, penetrated, grasped his hips between his hands again, and, swinging the young man’s buttocks back and forth on the shaft, fucked Neal to his own release.

Not finished with Neal and the evening still young, Herr K had Neal draw him a bath in the en suite bathroom, Neal moving around in the nude and now. Herr K also naked, looked like a beached walrus. Though gross, though, the situation was not beyond Neal’s arousal. The man brought variety to the technique of fucking and Neal had found that the man could—and did—bring him off. Neal could do as Chambers wanted him to do—to satisfy the Swiss man sexually.

Neal moved around the tub, with Herr K inside, and scrubbed the man and stroked his cock when and as bade to do so. And when Herr K pulled Neal into the tub on top of him, Neal settled on Herr K’s erection and rode the shaft and continued doing so until both had climaxed again.

Later, in the night, Sir Neville entered Neal’s bedroom. Neal was lying on the top of the coverlet, naked, knowing that his host would come—and would want to come, probably more than once.

Chambers was wearing just the same silk robe he had two weeks previously, and when he undid and dropped the sash, he was as much in erection as he had been before, which still was the thickest shaft Neal had ever seen and once more caused him to take his breath in and tremble.

Neal lay on his back on the foot of the bed, his legs raised and spread, held by Chambers’s fists grasping the young man’s ankles while the older man ate out his ass, preparing him to take the mammoth cock. The position pained Neal’s wounded leg, but he persevered, his anger and newly acquired disgust with his boss fueling his determination not to give his true feelings away. When Chambers readjusted their positions, him sitting at the foot of the bed and starting to pull Neal over into his lap, Neal whispered, “The man, your guest, aroused me with bindings. I’d never—”

“You want me to bind you and fuck you?” Chambers asked.

“Yes, if there’s a way—”

Chambers laughed. There was a way. It was a fetish of his. He hadn’t gone to that level with Neal before. He had so much he wanted to do with Neal and that he wanted Neal to do for him. He just had been moving at a slower seduction speed.

What he couldn’t know was that Neal now would find it easier to respond to sex if he felt it was forced—if he were restrained during sex. He didn’t think he could get it up very well voluntarily for Chambers anymore such was Neal’s anger, hatred, and disgust for the man.

For the first fuck, Sir Neville leaned down, picked the sash for his robe up from the carpet, bound Neal’s wrists together behind his back with the sash, and put Neal on his cock in his lap, with Neal arched back, bound arms dangling toward the carpet, and Chambers’s hands gripping the young man’s waist, pulling him on and off the cock.

The second fuck went all the way. Neal was spread-eagled on his belly on the bed, wrists and ankles spread out and bound to headboard and footboard with leather leads and restraints that Neal only then came to know had been tucked away under the corners of the bed, and Chambers’s saddled on his ass, riding him hard and slapping him on the buttocks.

In this position, Neal could think of the exotic nature of the act. He could reason with himself that he was bound and helpless to the lust of the man. It didn’t matter how much Chambers now repelled him. He was a captive and the man was fucking him really, really well. He was free to enjoy it and to come for the man.

Chambers stayed the night, the two of them stretched out against each other’s bodies, in an embrace. Chambers had clearly moved to the stage with Neal that he knew he could do what he wanted sexually with the small blond—that Neal would give him what he wanted without balking. The conquest was complete.

Before they slept, Neal tried to advance his agenda. “As you probably know, I’m living in the basement of Phillip Talbot’s mews house on Starcross Street now,” he murmured.

“Yes, you don’t have to remind me that you’re sleeping with Talbot.”

“I’m not sure he’s the man I want to be sleeping with, though. And if not, I think it best that I find somewhere else to stay.”

Chambers rumbled deep in his throat, but didn’t say anything.

“If there was a man I’d prefer sleeping with—being fucked by—it probably would be best if I went to live with him.”

Chambers snorted. “Perhaps moving would be best, yes.”

“Your wife is gone now. You can have whoever you want living in your Russell Square house.”

Chambers emitted another bodily noise, but this one sounded suspiciously like a snore.

“Sir Neville?” Neal asked, and he turned his face to the man. Chambers was asleep. Neal’s plan to move into the man’s house would have to be pursued later.

* * * *

“I want to kill him. I want to choke him with my own hands.”

“You can’t, and we have to be careful it isn’t the other way around.”

“Why can’t I kill Chambers?” Neal asked. “He’s a German spy. He’s giving away our military secrets to the Germans—and he’s using people like me and you to do so. And, worse, he’s helping to get good men, like Jocko Temple, killed.”

“You can’t kill him because our mission is to find who is at the head of this cell in England. We need that man, or woman, alive and being interrogated. It appears to be Chambers himself. It will defeat our mission, just make someone else take over the cell, if he dies. We need him alive. We need more proof of his guilt. We need to get you in his house, in his bed, full time so that you can know his every move.”

Neal and Phillip were at the Starcross Street house, in Phillip’s bedroom. Chloe, a member of Phillip’s MI5 team, but not his wife or sexually linked to him at all, was in the cellar, in the reinforced room, which was the best they could manage when they couldn’t get to an air raid shelter. The night bombing of London had already begun, earlier than usual. Phillip and Neal hadn’t headed for the shelter yet.

“I tried to get him to invite me to come live with him, but he went to sleep before he could do so,” Neal said.

“Well, we must think of another way to get that done,” Phillip declared.

They had fucked, starting before the bombing had commenced, and had been so high in heat that they had continued there.

The bomb that went off made the walls shudder and the windows rattle, with one cracking.

“What the hell?” Phillip bounded off the bed, pulled his robe on, slipped his feet into his slippers, and was down the stairs and out the house’s front door. Neal wasn’t far behind him, and Chloe emerged from the basement entrance into Neal’s flat and joined them across the street. As the sirens revved up and drew closer, they turned and looked just down the street. The second row house from theirs was now simply gone. In its place was a tangle of bricks and a tower of fire that was lighting up the sky, making day from night.

“Oh, my God. Are—?” Chloe exclaimed.

“No, the people who live there have evacuated,” Phillip answered. “There shouldn’t be anyone in there.”

“How terrible anyway,” she said.

“Not entirely,” Phillip said. “It gives me an idea?”

“An idea about what?” Neal asked.

“An idea on how we can get you living in Neville Chambers’s house,” Phillip said.

Neal remained standing across the street watching the walls implode on the bombed row house while the firemen came and immediately went, seeing that the bombing had been so efficient that the adjacent houses were not in danger, there not being anything that could be done here, and there being many other bombings gifted by the continued swirl of German planes overhead that they had to check out. Phillip and Chloe went back in the house. Neal was alone on the street when the next bomb hit, knocking him back, onto his ass, and into arms of blackness.

TO BE CONTINUED