Dragoon Hall: Curse or Cure?

I did bear guilt. They kept telling me I shouldn’t feel any, but I couldn’t get out from underneath it and I couldn’t tell anyone why. The loving had been intense and among the best we’d ever had, provided the most satisfying release I can remember us as having. But it had also ended in sobs. That should have given me a clue, because it wasn’t joyous. It had been tortured. I should have realized it would be the last—that Matt intended it to be the last. All the signs were there. Before we went upstairs, Matt leading me by the hand, he wanted me to hear the tune of a new composition he was working on and made me stand behind him, my hands on his shoulders, as he played.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I’d answered—truthfully. “It’s a haunting tune.”

“Remember it for me,” he said before turning and saying, “Take me upstairs now, please.”

He was calm on the surface, but so morose, and, I knew even then by how intensely he had ridden me, that he was teeming below the surface. He was still agreeing with me that all would work out, all would be well, as I lay on my bed, watching him dress, wanting him again. I was minimizing the seriousness of what seethed between us, undiscussed, but he lied to me about how serious it was. It wasn’t until I heard the car start up that panic set in. He shouldn’t be driving; it was my car; he’d walked here from the village. I leapt out of bed and pulled my jeans on. I heard the crash before I’d raced out of the front door—and then seen the car wrapped around the tree on the road beyond my driveway. And Matt slumped over the wheel, lifeless.

I fell apart. I don’t think I have pulled much of anything together yet. They told me that there wasn’t anything I could have done and I shouldn’t be taking it so hard, that they should have known how badly Matt was taking the diagnosis. How bad a diagnosis, I’d asked, and I’d blanched when they told me. They’d asked if anything had gone badly with the tutoring session, and I couldn’t tell them what really was happening, so I just said no, that there had been no problem, no warning. They apologized about my car being wrecked—and I fell apart—and I couldn’t even tell them why.

“Uh, sorry.” I came back into the present standing there next to the baggage carousel in the Birmingham airport, people having to jostle around me to get to their bags and me, with my suitcase right in front of me at the carousel. I heard the mumbles about just standing there in the way. I couldn’t disagree. I felt I had gotten in the way with Matt’s life, although intellectually I knew that was nonsense. I hadn’t made him ill. There had been too many flashbacks to that day. Fewer as time went by and after I’d left the rehab center. But they were still there and they probably would be as long as I couldn’t talk to anyone about the guilt. I couldn’t do that to Matt, though. I hadn’t even been able to talk to the therapist about it, and he was a complete stranger.

Sighing, I left baggage claim and took the long walk to the car rental pickup. It had been the therapist’s idea to leave entirely for a while. God, I hoped he was right. I couldn’t take too much more of this being bottled up inside me. And I hadn’t been able to even think about sex since that day—or, rather, I’d thought about sex frequently but hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

“Get out of Weston. Leave Vermont for a while. Get out of the country. You can do your writing anywhere,” Doctor Quinn had said. “And find someone you can unload on,” he’d added. I think he was hurt I hadn’t been able to talk to him about it.

So, here I was in Birmingham, England, about to get into a rental car and head south, past Gloucester on the A48, into the Forest of Dean on the border with Wales, to Dragon Hall, wherever that was, to steep myself in English history and maybe get a long-dormant novel out of it—before I went mad. The chances were quite good I’d go mad from not being able to talk to anyone about Matt. No one else in the world had taken the path I had, or was saddled with the needs and wants I was.

I’d been tutoring him in English. He was a gifted student—and musician. I’d been sure he’d be a famous composer someday. He was sure of that too until his confidence—and his future—were stolen from him. But he needed help in expressing himself in writing. He’d come to my house outside of Weston, Vermont, twice a week, walking from his house in the village. As he became more comfortable in opening up in his writing, the more apparent it was what we secretly shared in our lives and wants. I didn’t think anyone his age would want what I wanted from someone his age. But it showed forth in his writing that he did.

We’d work on English composition, more at the start than later. I’d told him that had to continue. He had to have something he could show to his teachers and parents of what he was writing, although, certainly, not all of his writings could be shown to them.

Later he’d spend time at my piano, composing and chatting with me as the tunes poured out of him. I urged him to show those to his parents and teachers too, acknowledging that creativity in the writing aided in the other interest as well—and produced something that made his continuing to come to me justified to those paying for it.

And even later, after his writing had become more expressive and revealing, much of our time together would be spent upstairs, in my bedroom under the eaves, me stretched out on top of him, his fingers playing tunes on my shoulder blades and his heels rubbing on my calves as I moved inside him. He was fully open to me, wanting all of me, moving with me, from the very first time we lay together. I had never imagined this could be, but it was.

And then when he’d gotten the diagnosis the time with me was more frenzied. He’d compose on the piano furiously as if there wasn’t time to get it all out, and in bed I’d be on my back and he’d be riding my cock hard, as if there were no tomorrow. He lied to me, though. The leukemia was worse and more advanced than he’d acknowledged to me. And he was less prepared and inclined to take it all slowly than he owned up to. I, smitten with him and absorbed in myself and my own pleasures, had overlooked the signs of how serious he was about not going on. Others missed them too. But no one else was as intimate with him as I was. No one else, to my knowledge, was fucking him. So, I should have listened more carefully, not just to what he was saying but also to what he wasn’t saying, to what he was signaling with his body.

And then when he did it and I fell apart, I couldn’t tell his parents—the world—why I was taking it so badly that I had to be institutionalized and, eventually, banished across the ocean. I couldn’t do that to Matt. How could I tell his parents—the world—under the circumstances that I, a thirty-four-year-old writer, had been fucking their eighteen-year-old son?

* * * *

“No, that would be Dragoon Hall, not Dragon Hall, Mr. Peterson,” the caretaker who let me into the house said. “Tis a common misunderstanding. It is a recent name, no older than the seventeenth century—which is new for a house whose foundations go back to the Normans and the fifth century—and some say back to the Romans and even to the time beginning. Named after the king’s Dragoons who were housed here in the English Civil War, it were, and who were murdered right here in the entrance hall when the Roundheads rode their horses right into the house. You can see the marks of the horses’ hooves still gouging the floor planking, and it be said that for a hundred years you could see the stains of the Dragoons’ blood spilled there. But that would be long past worn away.”

“Interesting, David,” I said. I’d met him for the key to the house and a tour down in the village of Newnham on the banks of the Severn River on the A48 that I’d taken south from Gloucester. He was the one who was to take care of anything that went wrong in the house while I was there.

“Crowders have been caretakers here for hundreds of years,” he had said proudly.

My publishers had arranged for me to stay here, steeped in English history, while I attempted to pick up on the writing of the novel I’d dropped when Matt died. And, indeed, the house was interesting—beyond interesting. The latest house on these foundations dated from the Jacobian period, David said. The foundations went back to the Normans, and there were even remnants of something here from the Romans. It was a solid red-brick house with two principle rooms, a living room to the south and the dining room to the north of a center hallway on the main floor, the lower floor being where a kitchen, keeping room, and storerooms were located. All of the rooms were of large proportions. Above the main floor were two large bedrooms, each now with bath, and there was a library over the center hall. Another, quite atmospheric, bedroom was in the attic, under the eaves. The house was set remotely in its own park, with stables and outbuildings that predated the current house and even included the ruins of a Roman temple.

“I suppose there are stories of the ghosts of the murdered Dragoons walking the floors at night,” I said in amusement. David Crowder, an older, gnarled, but solidly built, assuredly once handsome and strapping man in worn work clothes—obviously a hardworking, simple, close-to-the soil man of the fields—was not amused, though. He might have been any age from fifty to sixty-five. When men of this age were still in trim, I didn’t shy away from them. Crowder had charisma and a solid body.

“Aye. Those unfortunate king’s men and many more besides. This may be the most haunted house in England. It certainly stands as one of the oldest ones. Many momentous and tragic events have been seen by these old walls. Besides those Dragoons, a family named Racine be in residence here in the mid seventeen hundreds. One master of the house of that family was murdered in his bed by his manservant for buggering a stable boy, the manservant’s brother, up in the attic room, all while the master’s wife slept in the room below—during both the buggery and the murder. And the Racines lost the house when two brothers fought a duel over ownership up in the library room and both fell mortally wounded. A coven of witches is said to have burned out on the lawn for not being Catholics, and there’s talk more recently of a woman in yellow being seen in the house, but no one knows the meat of the legend of that one.”

“Luckily, I can sleep through any creaking and apparitions flitting about,” I said, with a smile. That wasn’t true of late. I’d only slept in starts and stops since I’d lost Matt and any sound or irritation was enough to wake me. But I was sure that any sounds at night could be explained by the house’s age. “As long as the ghosts aren’t literary critics,” I added.

“Won’t be no one living to disturb you here, Mr. Peterson,” Crowder said. “No one close by. I was told you will want your privacy. I live down in the village. I was told you’re writing a novel on the empire in the middle eighteen hundreds. You’ll find help on that—and most every other period in England—in the library. For light shopping, there are shops down in Newnham, but you’ll probably want to go up to Cinderford to lay on most of your stores. I was told you’re booked for three months.” He looked at me appraisingly. I suppose that an American novelist was quite a novelty for him.

“That’s how long my publishers took the house for, yes,” I said. But I didn’t add that I had no idea how long I’d be here. I had no idea how long I’d be anywhere. I was just drifting along—with everything that was hurting me and that I couldn’t let out weighing me down.

After Crowder left, I wandered around the house and then sat in the window of the upstairs library and stared out over the landscape. There wasn’t another house to be seen anywhere. The lawn and foliage were so fervently green that I had to rub my eyes and look away. The waning light later in the evening would soften the effect. I settled down at the writing desk facing the massive window in the library, which was located directly over the front entrance. The framing was in wood-separated diamonds and the edges were in ancient, wavy glass, but the center panel was in clear glass, giving a magnificent view over the verdant lawn and the wooded hills in the near distance.

Tired from the journey, I dozed—or, more accurately, went into a daydream such as I had been subject to in recent weeks. I woke, startled, with the sensation of the saddled roundheads riding their horses into the entrance hall below, their swords slashing away at the king’s Dragoons. But, fully awake, I saw that it only was a wagon, being pulled by two horses, that was driving past the house on the drive. It was only then that I saw that the shaved-word-bedded driveway continued on past the side of the house and into the woods. Two figures were on the wagon bench, one large and one small. Both were male. The larger figure was a robust older man, muscular and large of frame—not fat, just large and muscular. The other was a berry brown young man. What caught my attention as they passed and focused it was the notion that the man had pronounced graying sandy-blond mutton chops. The scene hit me as one separated from the present and I briefly felt myself in an earlier century.

I reached for my laptop and entered my observation in my file of short story notes. One never knew when something seen or sensed could be used in a short story. Indeed, the legends of this house that David Crowder had already told me could easily get the creative juices going. I’d have to invite him up to the house for further discussions. I found David interesting, and, in keeping with my history with older men, of a familiarity that aroused me. And, as he suggested, I’d have to mine the shelves of this library for ideas.

I couldn’t face a major shopping trip just now, so I decided to take the harrowing ride down the hill and into Newnham to check out what David had described as a couple of mom and pop convenience stores. I should be able to buy enough provisions to tide me over to the beginning of the week and then I’d go up to the larger town at Cinderford for some serious grocery shopping. The road down the hill was a narrow, winding lane, bordered closely by hedgerows. It was a breath-holding, prayer-producing challenge to navigate. But the road continuing on up to Cinderford didn’t look any more inviting.

Newnham was just a small collection of buildings with the Severn River slowly flowing beyond. But there were a couple of pubs, one, set off from the other buildings, curiously called The Buggerman—English pub names were always something to ponder and try to decipher—and there were, as David had promised, a couple of hole-in-the-wall convenience stores.

The one I entered appeared to be run by a South Asian family. I found what I wanted, but as I shopped, I was aware I was being watched. I looked, casually, to see who it was, and my heart—and another part of my anatomy—went all aflutter. A late teens young man, dark complexioned and so handsome that he could almost be described as pretty, was closely watching me with a little smile on his face.

For the first time since I’d been with Matt, I felt myself stirring inside. The young man was perfectly formed and sensual in the way that had always moved me and that I couldn’t talk about and had only rarely acted on. I’d acted on it with Matt, though, and that had ended in tragedy. I couldn’t afford that anymore—that stirring in my life had to be repressed. It would break my heart to go there again, I was sure.

I quickly paid the woman—the beautiful young man’s mother?—for the small basket of groceries I’d bought. I couldn’t resist taking another look toward the counter where the young man was standing, though. I nearly hyperventilated when I saw that he was still looking at me with a small smile on his face and that he was fingering a packet of Trojan condoms hanging on a wall of hooks at the drug counter.

I moved as rapidly but unobtrusively as I could out into the village street. It couldn’t be possible. I must have imagined it. He couldn’t have intentionally been signaling anything. This was what Doctor Quinn said might happen with nerve-calming medicine he had subscribed for me. He’d said the illusions might be the side effects.

“It might give you an overactive imagination—from time to time confuse you a bit and make you think you see what’s not there,” he’d said. “Of course, as a writer you may find that gives you an edge professionally. It might help you weave your stories. The medicine can get addictive, though, so we mustn’t let you become dependent on it.” We’d both laughed at that, but I had been having flashes of this overactive imagination even before he’d prescribed the medicine. It had been like urges and wants were anxious to bust out of me—my inner self yearning to stop holding onto what I knew should not be released.

It was growing dark as I returned to Dragoon Hall, mercifully not having met another car on the narrow, hilly lane. I quickly opened packets and wolfed down some food without even warming it up. Figuring out the appliances in the lower-floor kitchen could come in the light of the next day.

I went back up the library and opened up my laptop. I’d taken some notes on research I’d already done on England’s colonial empire in the nineteenth century and, suddenly energized, I immediately started drafting text. As some point, however, weariness overtook me, and I lowered my head onto the desk in front of the library window and went to sleep.

* * * *

I woke up and lifted my head off the desk facing the library window. I was in a pool of light cast by a desk lamp but otherwise darkness was everywhere—in the library and out on the lawn down to a pond, the surface of which was shimmering in moonlight. My attention went to a hint of light among the trees off in the direction where the drive going past Dragoon Hall disappeared into the woods off to my right.

David Crowder had said that there weren’t any other houses in sight of the hall. If these lights were coming from a building, it wasn’t at that great a distance—just over the top of a hillside to the north of the house, beyond the Roman temple ruins Crowder had shown me. But it would be in a wooded area.

I felt stiff and there was a stitch in my side from having been hunched over the desk while I slept. I felt restless and not sleepy now that I’d dozed—for how long, I didn’t know. I checked my watch, and when I realized I hadn’t changed the time on that since I’d gotten on the plane in New York, I looked around for a clock. There was one on the mantel over the fireplace, but it was in the shadows too much to see the time from where I was setting, or even if the clock was working. There was a flashlight on the desk by the desk lamp. David had warned me that the electricity wasn’t always that reliable here and the wiring was ancient in some of the rooms. Not all of the rooms were used that much.

The flashlight worked. I stood and went to the mantel. The clock was ticking. It was after midnight here. I went back to the desk and looked out the window. The pattern of lights in the wood had changed. There weren’t as many points of light seen between the trunks of trees as there had been before. I stretched and yawned.

I should go to bed, but I felt restless. What I really needed was to take a short walk. It was a warm night for October. I had a flashlight in my hand that worked. I was curious about the light in the woods. It didn’t appear to be far away, and the narrow wood-shavings-bedded road seemed to run right to where the lights were. I decided to take a short walk and explore.

If there hadn’t still been a light on in the cottage, I would have missed it and walked on by. This could have been because it was nighttime, although the moon was full enough that, until I entered the copse of trees, I didn’t need the flashlight. Indeed, I didn’t turn it on even when I got into the woods because I had the light ahead to guide me and kept to the track of the drive. The wood shavings crunched softly, almost silently, under my feet as I walked the drive. I might have missed the cottage even in the day. Except for a clearing before the cottage door, the foliage around the small building was overgrown; it was built of stone, with a slate roof and ivy growing up the sides; and it was set into a hillside of like-colored rock and moss.

There had been more lights on, I was sure, when I’d first noticed them from the library window. Now there was only one, and I was drawn to it.

It was a bedroom, the furniture rustic wood, the floor and walls rough stone. They were on the double bed, the man and the young man I had seen riding on the horse-pulled wagon into these woods earlier in the day. They were both naked. The contrast between them was startling. The young man, lying on his back on the bed, was berry brown. He was small, perfectly formed, both his features and his proportions delicately balanced. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. I judged him to be South Asian—jet black, silky hair dipping down to his shoulders, dark eyes, hard, well-defined pecs, slim waist and hips, and a young man’s cock and balls. He was bound, his arms stretched over his head and tied with rope to the bed’s headboard. His ankles were tied together with rope too, but with a play of several inches. His legs were raised and his ankles were hooked on the man’s shoulders, the rope lead running between the ankles behind the man’s neck. Although bound, he didn’t seem to be in distress, which was a surprise, considering how stretched he was by the older man’s shaft.

Compared to the beautiful young South Asian young man—Hindu or Urdu, I thought—who made me go hard with my first sensation of sexual need since Matt had died, the man was monstrous. He was tall and solid, heavily muscular and so hard bodied that his veins popped out on his body. He had nearly three times the body weight of the young man he was fucking, and he was protectively cradling the young man’s body under his. He was well into his forties, giving the impression of having been a soldier who had seen serious combat. His skin was rough in contrast to the smooth silkiness of the young man he was fucking. There were marks as from sword slashes on his torso and one wound, in particular, on his leg was deep and had set into a deep crease across a thigh. His facile features were rugged, yet handsome and sexy, in a thuggish way. His most distinctive feature other than how pronounced the bulges of his muscles were his sandy-blond mutton chop sideburns.

But of course the mutton chops weren’t the man’s most prominent feature. A man that large couldn’t help but have a large cock. But also when a man was that large of frame, a large cock wasn’t as noticeable. But the cock on this man, hard, thick, and long as it moved in and out of the widely stretched hole of the diminutive South Asian youth, was definitely noticeable and attention getting.

The young man appeared to be in ecstasy, lying in the older man’s cradling embrace, docile and quiet, his pelvis moving slightly, in the rhythm of the fuck. The expression on his face was both beleaguered and beatific. There was every evidence that he was luxuriating in the size and feel of the shaft working inside him.

Mesmerized, I stood outside the pool of light streaming from the cottage’s bedroom window and watched the man, hovering over the young man and taking him in a missionary position, the young man’s pelvis raised high off the bed, his legs, the ankles bound together, rising up the man’s massive, muscular, scared chest, slow fuck the young man into heaven. The youth’s hole was being stretched impossibly wide to take the thickness of the man, but they must be experienced lovers as, with low moans that I could hear from outside the cottage and murmurings in some foreign language that obviously were terms of want and acceptance, the young man was taking the cock, in long, deep strokes, well.

Eventually, when I was inside the young man myself and heard the same murmured foreign phrase in what I learned was Hindi—“Han. Han. Is tarah. Bhad men jao mujhe gahari”—I was to request and receive a translation from the man—“Yes. Yes. Just like that. Fuck me deep,” the youth had said to his older lover.

I stayed, with my cock out and stroking it, until both bodies on the bed tensed and shuddered and both released their seed and I had done so as well in the ivy under the window. Then I withdrew as quietly as I could manage and stumbled back to Dragoon Hall. That had been the first time after Matt’s death that I had been in heat enough to go hard and masturbate myself. The second time was later that night, on my bed on the upper floor of Dragoon Hall, when, unable to sleep or to get the sexual coupling I had observed in the hidden cottage out of my mind—moving from images of being fucked by the rugged man with the mutton chops to fantasies of fucking the delicate Hindu youth—I stroked myself to completion again and sank into the sleep of the dead.

I swam back up into a dream-like state in the darkness of the night cradled in the arms of Mutton Chops, held loosely, but securely, incapacitated, as my wrists were tied to the headboard overhead and my ankles, hooked on the massive man’s shoulders, were tied together, with the connecting rope running behind Mutton Chops’s thick neck. He was working his monster cock inside me. I couldn’t take it; there was no way I could sheath him. I moaned and panted as he patiently moved into me. And then I was sheathing him. My walls were spreading open for him. I was panting hard, willing my channel to open to him. He penetrated me slowly, deeply. When he started to pump me, I writhed under him, crying out, “Yes! Yes! Just like that! Fuck me deep!” The fucking went on and on and on. I went from initial shock and struggling against him as I was bound and penetrated to moaning and moving with it as it started to pump and sink inside me to lying docilely, concentrating on opening to it, wondering if it would, if it could, reach into the core of me, and then, when it did, panting and murmuring my surrender and acceptance. I came in a great arc of pent-up cum. And then again . . . and again.

I woke in the morning, naked and stretched out on the bed on my back, a puddle of cum on my belly, the sheet under me sticky with ejaculate. I felt, first my wrists and then my ankles, for burn marks, but there were none. Nor was my channel torn or even sore. But it had seemed so real. Had I taken the medicine Doctor Quinn gave me—the medicine that he’d said might give me hallucinations? Yes. The packet was empty on the night stand.

I heard the clearing of a voice. I looked toward the door to the corridor, which was open. David Crowder was standing in the doorway, a slight smile on his face.

“The door was left open. I was just checking to make sure we didn’t have an intruder,” he said.

There I was, stretched out on the bed, naked. There was every reason to believe that I had masturbated in half sleep before I had become conscious—more than once, I thought. I don’t know how long he had been standing at the door, though. I had awakened with my hand grasping my cock and with morning wood and cum on my belly and I’d felt my wrists and ankles. What could he have thought?

Whatever Crowder thought, he wasn’t quick to leave the doorway, and one of his hands was hovering over his crotch. I took another look at him. He was old, yes, probably in his fifties, and he was chunky. But it was more muscle than fat. He wasn’t a handsome man and he had the look of a coarse field worker about him. But for the first time since we had met, I found myself wondering if he was hung. If he was experienced. If he preferred women or men. In many ways he’d been like the man in the field near the Vermont high school’s prep school I’d gone to who had been the first one to lay me in my senior year there—there between the rows of waving corn stalks in the field—when I was eighteen. He’d been old in my perspective, but he had been a strong, muscular, big-cocked man experienced in taking young men for the first time.

The farmer hadn’t forced himself on me. I had wanted it and he’d known that. He’d been old, but hung and experienced, and he had slowly given it all to me. And I had opened to him, taken him deep inside, and moved with him, begging for more of it. I couldn’t get enough of him; he did it all—and then did it again. He went on doing it for months. Even when I started in college, I came back to him.

Could it be? Could I be coming back to life sexually for the first time since Matt and I had fucked that last time months ago? Doctor Quinn had said that what I may have needed was a complete change of setting.

I looked back in Crowder’s direction to imagine him, conceivably a strapping, masterful man in his prime, without the baggy farming clothes he was wearing, but he was gone. He had reminded me of someone—someone from my past. That farmer, my first. But I couldn’t think of that. I was here to forget more than to remember and to work on finishing my novel on the period of the decline of England’s empire. It was time to mine Dragoon Hall’s library material. I rose and padded, naked, to the adjacent bathroom. As I past the door to the corridor, I saw that Crowder had not withdrawn all that far. He was standing in the corridor, watching me—and smiling knowingly.

Did he know? How could he know?

* * * *

I had a productive morning and early afternoon pouring through the rich resources of the Dragoon Hall history collection, dragging dusty tome after tome over to the desk facing the library window and interlacing periods of intense reading with productive hours of making notes and actually drafting paragraphs that progressed the plot of my novel. I also snatched interludes of looking out over the lush shades of green of the Forest of Dean landscape on the edge of Wales. I was concentrating on the unrest in India in the mid nineteenth century in my research. I wondered who was in residence here at Dragoon Hall during that period and what, if any, connection they’d had to India’s colonial empire. Among the treasures gathering dust throughout the house were items connecting the manor with the rest of the world—China, Egypt, and India.

To my surprise, I caught myself humming a tune. It took me several minutes to realize where I knew the tune from. It had been the one Matt had composed that last day—the tune he’d asked me to remember. I was in the best of moods this morning, and I smiled to myself with pleasure at realizing that I had, in fact, remembered the melody line.

As I had done the previous day, I worked myself into a pleasant exhaustion and, at length, pushed my laptop to one side, lowered my head on my folded arms on the desk blotter, and dozed off.

The first sensation of wakefulness was the sound of a flute playing a soft tune in a mere whisper on the wind. What brought me to attention, though, was a rasping grating of the iron door knocker on the front door in the entrance hall below me.

I opened the door—to Mutton Chops. It was the same brutish, sexy older man I had observed fucking a bound Hindu young man in the cottage down the road and tucked into a hillside the previous night. I had nearly convinced myself that last night’s observation hadn’t happened at all, that it had just been an illusion created by Doctor Quinn’s nerve medicine and that had given me a highly pleasurable wet dream in the night. But here he was, standing in front of me—nearly naked. He was bare-chested, his torso Zeus like, magnificent despite his apparent age and display of old combat wounds. He was wearing only tight, tan-colored linen breeches that took his appearance back a hundred and fifty years. The tan of his body was deeper than that of his breeches. The breeches were form fitting; low rise at the waist, showing the creases of his armor-plate-like underbelly, taking the eye to his crotch; and ending just below the knee. The breeches had a lace-up codpiece pouch that more pronounced the generous endowment he enjoyed, as I had seen the previous night, than hid it. He was barefoot, his feet large and long, sensuous, his toes straight, long, and plump.

“I believe you lost your torch last night,” he said to me in a deep baritone voice when I opened the door and had been standing there, speechless, for a long moment.

“My torch?” I asked, dumbly. I looked down at the beefy, calloused hand he was holding out to see that he was holding the flashlight I’d taken on my nocturnal adventure the previous night. Until then I hadn’t realized I had lost it somewhere along the way in my stumble back to the house.

“Oh, thank you,” I said, reaching out for the flashlight he held in his left hand only for his right hand to reach up and grasp my hand instead. He held my hand cradled in his strong, yet gentle grip and I couldn’t help but think of how tenderly he had been cradling the South Asia youth the previous night despite how heavily he was taxing the young man with his penetrating shaft. I should have pulled my hand away, but I didn’t. I was captive to him there on the threshold of Dragoon Hall. He laced his fingers between mine, creating a close, entwining connection that I didn’t try to withdraw from.

“You watched us last night.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had been told there weren’t any inhabited houses near the manor. I hadn’t expected to see . . . I’m sorry.”

“You stayed there and watched to the end,” he said, his eyes boring into mine. “You took yourself in hand and spilled your seed on the ground.”

“Yes.” There was no use denying it.

“You give and take a man’s cock.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I answered. How in the hell had he made that leap? How did he seem to know I would go both ways?

“Come back to the cottage with me. Now.”

“Yes,” I answered. There was nothing else I thought I could say. There was nothing else I wanted to say.

As we walked into the woods, his hand still holding mine in thrall, I noted that he had a pronounced limp, favoring the leg I’d seen the scar of a grievous wound on. I also noted the whisper of the flute music in a tune I recognized but, maddingly had not heard well enough to try to identify, continued on the breeze, growing louder as we approached the camouflaged stone cottage.

As we drew close to the small clearing in front of the cottage I saw that the young Hindu man—who I would learn was a Hindu—was lounging on a bench off to the side. He was the one who had been playing the flute, which I identified as a bamboo South Asian flute called a Bansuri. He continued playing, softly, although no longer the tune that had seemed familiar to me, as Mutton Chops ushered me to another bench on the other side of the cottage door from the young man, where we sat, side by side.

I was trembling, knowing this was leading to sex. The fingers of our hands were still entwined, and I knew our bodies would be melded that close before I returned to the manor house. I could tell that Mutton Chops wanted it. I Wanted it too. I was deep in heat now, that having built up over the past day.

“Madan,” Mutton Chops said.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“The Indian young man. His name is Madan. He’s eighteen. He’s a Hindu.”

“Ah.”

“And I am Thomas. And you are Paul Peterson, the writer. Here to recover from a trauma. To seek assurances and absolution.”

“I don’t really think—” I started, flaring up.

“You want to fuck Madan, don’t you?” Thomas interjected. He had gripped my leg above my knee as I had started to rise to leave. That’s all it took to hold me in place. “You watched me fuck him last night and you want to fuck him too. He’s eighteen and you have a fetish of wanting to fuck eighteen-year-old young men. Don’t fight it and say no. That’s a guilt you feel and need release from. We are brothers in that, you and I. You aren’t alone. I fuck eighteen-year-old young men who want to be fucked. You must not feel guilt for wanting to give them what they want and both of you take pleasure from that. You want to fuck Madan. Admit it. Let this guilt you do not have to feel float away from you. You want to fuck Madan.”

“Yes,” I admitted. And, miraculously I did feel a burden flowing away from me.

“And so you shall. After I have fucked you.”

“Excuse me?” I blurted out and halfheartedly tried to rise from the bench, but once again a slight pressure from his strong, calloused free hand above my knee and our still entwined hands were enough to hold me in place.

“You want to fuck Madan, but you want me to fuck you. Covering young men is only half of the guilt you feel, isn’t it? You have loved an eighteen-year-old young man and covered him and then lost him, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you feel guilt for that. You feel you stole something from him and from others and somehow are responsible for him dying before he had a chance to live.”

“Yes.”

“But it wasn’t your choice that he leave.”

“No.”

“It was his choice to lie under you. It was what he wanted. And it wasn’t your choice that he sickened and didn’t want to face a life of pain and withering away. He had a chance to live and love and be sexually satisfied before he left—by his own choice.”

“Yes,” I answered but not before a few moments of contemplation. How is it that this man knew so much about me—much of which I’d never told anyone before? Again, I felt a burden floating away from me.

“You haven’t properly mourned him until now,” Thomas said. “You weren’t with anyone who understood, anyone you could be fully open to, anyone else who covered young men who wanted what you could give and what you craved to give. You are not alone. You are no different from me. You are among those who understand. You can unburden yourself now—to me.”

It was like a dam bursting. I broke down into tears, heaving sobs. Thomas released my hand, put an arm around me, and drew me close to him. He embraced me close and kissed me on the cheek and throat and lips. Even while tears streamed down my face, I returned the kisses. He drew me over onto his lap, facing away from him. Watching us from the other side of the doorway, Madan continued playing his Bansuri softly. Strong, calloused hands unbuttoned and unzipped my shirt and trousers, gently pulling them from my body.

Reaching under my buttocks, Thomas unlaced the fastenings of his codpiece. His cock, thick, long, throbbing pressed into the small of my back as he held me close and kissed me on the throat. I turned my face to his and our lips and tongues met.

“I am going to fuck you now,” he murmured.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You want me to fuck you. That is the other half of your secret torment. You want to be fucked by older men.”

“Yes,” I answered again.

I groaned and started to pant as he slowly, deeply entered me. Taking one hand from my waist which he had been holding between his hands, he pressed gently on my back between my shoulder blades, and I leaned over, forward, placing the palms of my hands on the dirt in front of the bench. Rising over me, covering me on top and from behind, mounting me, he grasped my waist between his hands again and started rocking me back and forward on his cock, as he thrust and thrust and thrust, fucking me deep, thickly, and long. He spread my channel wide, causing my passage muscles to shimmer over the shaft, sank into my core, and played me like a violin.

Still sobbing, letting all feelings of guilt and loss flow out of me, I rocked back onto the cock, murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes.”

On the bed in the stark second room of the cottage later, with Madan sitting on the floor, back to wall in the corner, watching us, Thomas came a second time in a missionary fuck and rolled off of me to the side, still embracing me and holding me close to him. Turning toward him, I let my right hand glide over his body, tracing the scars on his torso.

“You opened and took me without hesitation,” he murmured. “It’s not just eighteen-year-old young men, is it? You want to fuck them, but you want to be fucked by older men, men like me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Your first was an older man, a coarse, man of the earth, as I am—someone far different from the protected, wealthy life you were raised into, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He was a farmer. An older man, nearly fifty, I think.”

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Ah, yes, of course. Tell me about it—about him.”

“I was in my last year at a residential prep school in Vermont. I was a virgin. As a program to promote the school in the rural area the school was located in, students were matched with local people for visits and work projects. I was sent to a farmer and his wife. We became quite friendly, especially the farmer and me. He fucked me in his corn field that first time and then he continued to fuck me in the fields for the next two years.”

“And you enjoyed it?”

“I wanted it, yes. I ached for it. Not just to be fused with and used by a man. I ached for that farmer to cover me and be inside me. It was the most exciting two years of my life. Even after I went to college, I came back to be covered by him.”

“And did you leave the relationship with regrets?”

“Only that he unexpectedly died. He was old. He had a heart condition before we met.”

“So, there is no reason to feel guilt about it, is there?”

“No, I suppose not.” And strangely, more of the burden faded away.

“It’s natural. There are others who do it. I fuck Madan. You are going to fuck Madan. He wants it. He’s told me he wants it from you. You are not alone. It happens. You are far younger than I am, and I have fucked you, and it was all good.”

My hand had gone to his flank and then to the crease of the deeper wound on his leg. He winced.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “How did you get this? Where have you and Madan come from? This cottage. What—?”

“The mutiny. I nearly didn’t make it out of Lucknow alive,” Thomas answered after a period of silence. “The Welsh Cavalry. The First Queen’s Own Dragoon Guards. Madan was there. All of his family. Gone. I couldn’t leave him there. He was an orderly, taking care of his assigned soldier—me. Of my needs. All of my needs. I couldn’t leave him. I brought him back. My father and his father before that. My son and my son after that. All Crowders are in the church registry as caretakers of this estate. This cottage our home. There is nothing more to say. You wish to fuck Madan now?”

“Yes,” I answered, simply, honestly, suddenly urgently. Free now. Free to do as my nature called me to do. Without guilt. Without regret.

“Must he be—?” I started to ask as Thomas bound Madan, face down on the bed, spread-eagled, his wrists bound to the corners of the headboard and his ankles loosely bound to the corners of the footboard. He left plenty of give in the ropes for me to raise Madan on his hands and knees and mount him from above.

“He prefers it this way,” Thomas said. “He is not completely free of the feelings of guilt. He prefers being captive to it, having it taken from him, being accorded the feeling that he cannot prevent it. It’s all in his mind. It is fascinating how our minds control and guide us as his does with him—as yours does with you unless you chose to master it; as it does with me too. He can free himself of the bonds easily. The bonds are more than just rope and physical control. Remember, no guilt or regret on your part. Fight the bonds that try to restrict you. Take Madan fully. Master him and use him. Give him everything. You want it and he does as well.”

I heeded his advice as I climbed over the back of the small, berry-brown Hindu young man, wrapped an arm around his slim waist, lifting him up on all fours. He sighed as I pressed my face into the inner curve of his pert buttocks and tongued his hole, which responded by telescoping open to me. As I mounted and penetrated his ass, he cried out in Hindi, “Han. Han. Is tarah. Bhad men jao mujhe gahari.” I turned my head and looked expectantly at Thomas. “He said ‘Yes, Yes. Just like that. Fuck me deep,’” Thomas translated.

And I did just that. I went back to humping the young man, luxuriating in the supple smoothness of his brown skin, the flexibility of his small body, the sensation of his spongy channel walls surrendering to me, spreading for me, the muscles of the passage undulating over my shaft. I was thick and long, but nothing like Thomas was. But Madan had the youth and talent to expand or contract for a man internally, making the fuck tight, providing the sensation of deflowering the virgin. He emitted sighs and low moans as I stole the remnants of his youthful innocence from him, conquering his freshness, debauching his youth. His cry of “Han! Han!” as I released, seeding him deep, cut through the air. From off to the side, Thomas laughed.

I sat up beside the young man, running my hands over his body as he turned his eyes, swimming in my cum, to me, staring at me in awe, panting low. He sighed and moaned as I glided my hands over his curves and into his crevices, memorizing the silky feel of his small, supple body. At length, wanting to know that he wanted it—that he wanted me—I reached up and down and released his wrists and ankles. “If you want me again, commit to me,” I said. And then, when Madan gave me a confused look, I turned to Thomas to translate.

“Agar tum use apane andar hona chahata hoon, veh nahin chahata ki tum bandhe,” Thomas said to the young man.

Madan turned his eyes to me. He maintained eye contact as he stripped the ropes off his wrists and ankles, laid back on the bed, spread and bent his legs, and opened his arms to me. When I pulled him into my chest, he didn’t resist. He murmured “Han, han” again and “Bhad men jao mujhe fir.” From the side, Thomas said, “He wants you to fuck him again.” I raised and spread the young legs to me, as I moved my knees between his thighs, holding him in front of me, facing me, in my lap.

“Are nahin. Are Nahin!—Fuck me. Fuck me!” he cried out as, pressing the palm of my hand into the small of his back, I pulled his channel onto my cock again. He clung to my breast as I worked my way into him—panting, moaning, writhing, wanting, accepting, opening, surrendering, melting, bucking. Madan worked with me as I fucked him from heaven to hell and back. As I grasped his waist between my hands and started to pull him off and on my shaft, I let his torso fall back onto the bed, streaming onto the bed, him bunching up sheeting and stuffing it into his mouth to stifle his sobs and cries and writhing under me.

The first time I was making tentative love to him, treating him like he was spun glass. This time I fucked him. I reached into him deeper the second time than I had the first and fucked him more vigorously. As I sink deeper and deeper inside him, he opened up to my conquering cock more . . . and more . . . and more. Both of us crying out and bucking wildly against each other, we came together.

Sitting off to the side, watching us and stroking himself, Thomas came too. He laughed, came over to the bed, slapped me on the rump, and said, “Well done. The young man is yours now. And you are mine. More important, you are free.”

Exhausted and half in delirium, I stumbled back to Dragoon Hall, alone, after I had lain with Thomas and Madan. The young Hindu man had returned to playing the Bansuri softly when I was done with him and Thomas had returned to the bed and fucked me again. It was only now as I moved away from the cottage and the music became softer with distance, that I realized that the tune he had played that drew me to the cottage was the same as the one Matt composed on my piano in Vermont the day he took his life.

I made it as far as the desk in the library at Dragoon Hall before collapsing into sleep. I woke later with a jerk and a burning question in my mind. Books from the library on the British colonial period were at hand on the desktop and I feverishly turned to one, checking references.

I found that The First Queens Own Dragoon Guards served in India in the middle nineteenth century. The regiment was nearly wiped out in Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny—in 1857. The regiment was retired then. There was no more recent scenario as Thomas had depicted it since that time. And Crowder. He had mentioned the Crowder men as long-time caretakers of Dragoon Hall. Hadn’t it been Crowder that he’d said? David was a Crowder. Even as I said that out loud, I started to discern the similarities in physical appearance of the current caretaker David Crowder and of the grizzled soldier with the monster cock who had just covered me, Thomas—Thomas Crowder.

Feverishly, I rose from the desk at the library and nearly ran back up the driveway and into the woods to the stone cottage—or what was left of it. It looked deserted now in ways it hadn’t looked when I was here before. It didn’t look like anyone had been here in years. The slate roof had collapsed over one side of the larger room, and the cold stone chambers were bare of furniture—save a double bed in the bedroom, rub marks of what could be rope restraints discernible on the top rungs of the wooden head- and footboards. The exterior was nearly overgrown with foliage, turning the stone walls to the stone of the hillside.

I left confused and more than a bit groggy. But I no longer felt the burdens dragging on me of guilt and regret that I had brought with me to Dragoon Hall.

And when I returned to the desk in the manor’s library, all thoughts except for those pouring out of me on the progress of my novel’s plotline sloughed off my mind and I wrote feverishly—and productively and with inspiration—into the late afternoon and early evening.

* * * *

Looking up from the laptop, I realized that it was nearly dark in the library and I’d been squinting at the computer screen, using just the light coming back at me from the monitor. I also realized that I was ravenously hungry. I stood and went down to the basement kitchen, it dawning on me as I did so that I hadn’t been grocery shopping yet. As I surmised on the way downstairs, there was nothing to be found in the kitchen to assuage my hunger. I got in the car and drove the treacherous, hedge-enclosed, winding, and narrow lane down to Newnham. I actually preferred driving the lane in the dark, as people would use their headlights than and I’d have the chance of notice that someone was coming at me on the one-lane road that wasn’t given in the daylight.

The convenience stores were all closed. Cars were parked at The Buggerman pub, though, and lights were on in its windows. Entering the pub, I discerned immediately why it was called The Buggerman, and, inwardly, I laughed, happy with the thought that it was a lighthearted feeling I was getting, with no burden of guilt whatsoever. Happy that my first impulse wasn’t to withdraw from the pub, trying not to accept that I belonged here.

The Buggerman obviously was a gay male venue. All of the patrons were men and many of them were openly showing affection—some graphically and blatantly—toward each other. There were a few empty tables, and a beefy man—the bouncer?—beckoned me to an empty one near the front window. I sat, facing the room and ordered a ploughman’s lunch from a mincing waiter who gave me a big, come-hither smile, and then I looked around. David Crowder was sitting near the back of the room, at a table. His eyes were on me, and there was a slight smile on his lips. My eyes went from him to a staircase leading up to the upper levels, where the young Hindu man I had seen in his family’s convenience store the day before was coming down the stairs in front of another man, whose beefy body towered over the diminutive South Asian youth. The man had a possessive hand on the young man’s waist and it was quite clear, in a place like this, what the two had been doing above stairs. The man left the pub and the young Hindu man sat at David’s table. Both of them looked over to me and watched me eat my meal.

It struck me that this South Asian youth had an uncanny resemblance to Madan, who either I had fucked in the flesh that afternoon or was a very vivid gift from Doctor Quinn’s nerve medicine. The resemblance was close enough that I’m afraid the balance was tipping toward the pills.

When I was done and before I could leave, the young man came over to my table, smiled at me, and said, “You are Mr. Peterson, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, looking up into his smiling face, lost in the beauty of him. David came over then and slid into the bench I was sitting on beside me. His hand went to my leg, above my knee. I didn’t try to move away from him. Two days earlier, I probably would have, but after last night I was comfortable with myself—no guilt, no reluctance. I also realized that the resemblance between David Crowder and Thomas as close enough that my daydreaming had tried to tell me I coveted the attentions of the caretaker of Dragoon Hall. He looked not as old and gnarled to me tonight as I remembered him being when we encountered each other before. He looked muscular and capable. He looked much like I remembered of the farmer who had initiated me sixteen years earlier.

“You have come into the pub,” Crowder said. “Did you know what kind of pub this was?”

“I do now,” I answered.

“And you have stayed.”

“Yes, I have stayed. And you come here, knowing what kind of place this is.” There was no reason to be coy with this.

“Yes, I do. I did consider you might be a gay lad when I first laid eyes on you.”

“I’m not a lad,” I said, and we both laughed.

“It isn’t just something you dream of? You lay with men?” he asked. I was quite aware of the grip he had on my thigh.

“Yes, I lay with men,” I answered. I had absorbed Thomas’s point. I wouldn’t bother to deny it anymore.

“I did mark that you have a handsome body when I spied you this morning. You lay under men? Sometimes older men?”

“Yes.”

“And young men?”

“I lay young men,” I answered, giving him a direct look. No reason not to reveal it all.

“But older men? Men as old as I am? What do you do for them?”

“I lay down for older men, if they’re well equipment and can stay with it.”

“And, you? Are you well equipped, Mr. Peterson?” His hand went to my basket. I made no move to move away from that either. He could feel that I was hard. There was no hiding that—even if, now, I wanted to. I turned and looked into his eyes. I knew and he knew too. The banter was just striking the deal. I don’t know how he knew I would accept him. But that no longer mattered. He knew and so did I. “Yes, yes, you are,” he said, looking satisfied.

He took one of my hands with his free hand and placed it on his crotch. He was hard—and hung. I didn’t remove my hand when he pulled his away. I traced the contours of his dick through the material of his baggy trousers. He was as many inches as I could want, and he was proving he could get it hard.

“I am Ajoy,” the young Hindu man, standing by the table, said, and I looked into his face. David’s fingers pressed in, fishing for, grasping, and squeezing one of my balls through the material of my trousers and briefs. I winced but did nothing to stop him. He would be a rough lover. “The first time will be for free,” Ajoy continued. He dropped a condom packet on the top of the table.

“And I will use a condom too, if you want me too,” David murmured.

How did they know I would so readily accept topping Ajoy and being topped by David? Did it really matter that they knew? I knew we would arrange it that way.

I fucked Ajoy in a small room under the gables of the pub that was barely large enough to hold the double bed and a chair in the corner in which David Crowder sat and watched us fuck.

I fucked the Hindu youth with abandon, an enthusiasm he returned. I gathered him under me, his arms wrapped around my torso, his fingers pressed into my shoulder blades, and his heels rubbing my calves, as I mined his channel deep, sensing his initially tight passage opening to me, the muscles of his channel walls undulating over my hard cock, pulling me into the core of him, where I fucked and fucked and fucked him as his head lolled to the side, his tongue hanging out, and his eyes watching David Crowder masturbating himself off in the corner of the room.

Ajoy came for me, releasing his flow up my belly and then turning us so that he was on top of me, draped over my body, facing the ceiling, and raising and lowering his small, slim, berry-brown body on mine until I too had filled the bulb of my condom deep up inside his channel.

He rolled off me then and exchanged positions with David, who gathered me up, cradled under his massive body, in his arms. I hooked my knees on his hips and wrapped my arms around his head as his mouth went to my nipples and he entered, entered, entered me with a thick, hard, long cock and began to pump.

* * * *

I woke in the morning in the attic bedroom of Dragoon Hall, where Ajoy had insisted we come the night before rather than my own bedroom. “I want it to be our special place,” he had murmured before we’d entered the small bedroom under the eaves and I had gathered him under me, mounted his slim hips, penetrated him, and fucked him again.

But when he said “our special place,” he was being more inclusive than I was thinking, because when I woke in the morning, it was to David on top of me, deep inside me, and stroking, stroking, stroking rather than me on top of Ajoy.

David tensed, jerked, and, as I cried out, “Oh, fuck. Shit. Fuckin’ shit you’re huge. Yes, Fuck, yes!” as he ejaculated, creaming me deep. With a sigh he rolled off to the side of me, continuing to hold me in his arms. I hadn’t told him he had to use a condom, and he hadn’t.

“Not bad for an old man,” he murmured. “Right?”

“Fuck, you’re good,” I whispered, still panting. Letting all of my sensations go to pleasure. Not wanting anything to dispel this sense of full satisfaction—inside Ajoy and now David inside me. Fending off all questions of how we could have gotten here. “You’re a master,” I said.

“Not too much of that,” David said. “Mustn’t stir the ghosts. As I told you, this is where a Racine buggered his stable boy and was offed by the young man’s brother.”

I heard the strains of a tune being played on the piano two stories below, in the living room. It again was the same tune Matt had been playing the day he died—but I forced thoughts of that into the back of my mind. I was moving beyond that. I wanted to move beyond that.

“Who? What?” I murmured.

“That’s Ajoy down there. He fancies himself a budding composer.”

“How old?”

“He’s eighteen,” David answered.

“Of course.”

David was playing his fingers on my belly, tracing little circles. They went lower. I moaned as he took possession of me and began to stroke. His lips went to mine and we kissed. Then he moved his lips down my throat, lingering at my nipples and again at my navel and then he was going lower, taking me inside his mouth, sucking and teething and licking until, with a cry and a jerk, I came. He rolled on top of me again, gathering me into his arms again, sliding inside me again. Fucking me again—thick, long, masterful. I went with older men rather than ones near my age, because older men had more experience—and some of them were thick and long and could still keep it up.

“Who is Thomas Crowder?” I asked when we were stretched out beside each other afterward.

“Who? I don’t know him.” He was hesitant, though, looking a bit concerned. My impression was that he very well knew who Thomas Crowder was.

“The man living in the cottage down the drive and in the woods.”

“There’s no man living in that cottage,” David answered. “That cottage was the caretaker’s house, but it fell into disarray some time ago. I live in Newnham now. No one lives there. It’s derelict.”

“But the Crowders have been caretakers of Dragoon Hall for generations, haven’t they?”

“Where did you hear that? But of course they have. Back into the seventeenth century. There were Crowders in service here before the current house was built. Before it got its name. The stable boy and manservant of the Racine legend. They were Crowders, both. Who is this Thomas Crowder you speak of, though?”

“He’s one of the ghosts of this place, isn’t he?” I asked, revelation creeping in. David didn’t answer. “Never mind,” I whispered. “It makes no difference.” And it didn’t. It made no difference the pathway I took to get to my present state of satisfaction.

“Could you go downstairs and bring Ajoy up again?” I asked. No questions. No pursuing of history, legend, or ghosts. Only the pursuit of guilt-free pleasure now.

The Dragoon Hall cure.