The Handyman

 The gentlemen, the three principles of the expedition, Peter Cushing, Daniel Hobart, and Addis Shern, were conversing at the rail when Captain Lynch sidled up to them from out of the darkness. He always felt so inferior--and, he thought, was treated as such--when he approached their counsel. But he was the captain of this vessel, not any one of the three of them, and that meant something, even if they did not act as if they countenanced it. They were not in command until they reached land. Out here on the sea he was in command.

The men grew silent as he approached, and Lynch heard a seaman sing out from the rigging a melodious “Land ho.” He’d been doing so periodically all evening and into the night more as a warning that they may be moving into shallow waters than as a first sighting of terra firma after the forty-eight days they’d been on the waters from England to this new world.

They had first landed at Plymouth, to the south, and were now sailing north, working on identifying and putting in at the land grant Charles I had given to the lords Cushing, Hobart, and Shern.

That must be the young sailor, Thomas Cole, singing from the mainmast, Lynch thought. And he couldn’t keep himself from licking his lips in arousal. Nice fresh piece that, he thought. He’d intended to get to that on this voyage--and sooner than now, when they were close to their destination. Clear tenor singing voice. Almost angelic. It would be--no, will be--a pleasure, he thought. He couldn’t think of any better pastime than debauching angels.

As the three principals came to realize that Lynch was not going to leave his position at their elbows--and decorum required that they not snub him noticeably, at least in the presence of the deck crew--they picked up their conversation again, albeit an entirely different discussion than the one they had been conducting. Now it was focused on the cry of land that they’d heard from the rigging. All three leaned forward and looked intensely into the dusk as the form of twin bluffs, one of which was a curved spit out into the ocean, began to take shape to port of the vessel as it cut through the waves headed north along the North American continent.

“That may be it,” said Shern.

“Yea, it is described as that appears,” agreed Hobart. “A natural harbor, nearly circular, abutted by two sharp-cliffed headlands, one of which is likened to an arm curving out into the ocean. That do look like our land grant.”

“And not too soon,” chimed in Cushing. “It be positioned between Plymouth to the south and Boston to the north and we left Plymouth not long after sunrise. I afear that if this be it not, we have overshot and will be in Boston by tomorrow’s dawn.”

“Captain,” Hobart said, turning toward the hunch-backed, rat-faced Irishman nosing in at their elbows at the rails. “Heave to here, if you please. In the morning’s light we’ll send out a party to determine if this be our destination.” He was doing what he could to hold back his distaste for the ship’s captain, who looked the part of a highwayman and who he and his fellow noblemen highly suspected of unclean and un-Christian practices.

“As you please, M’Lord,” Captain Lynch said in a deferential manner, lowering his eyes and bowing slightly. He would be pleased if this were the proper spot and he could be rid of these fopperies forthwith. But his mind wasn’t on them. If this was the spot and they all made land, he no longer would be in command--at least until he could get back to his ship.

This meant that the intentions he’d long had for the seaman Cole should be brought to fruition tonight, for he had heard Addis Shern sweet talking the lad and was afraid he would pirate Cole away to the land once they had arrived. Lynch wanted the first taking, the deflowering, to be highly entertaining--and to be his to enjoy. He thought Shern would lose interest once Cole was debauched by another, and then he himself could savor the conquest with follow-on fuckings of the lad on the sail back to England.

Calling out to the master of the watch, the captain set into motion the anchoring of the ship. Then he called up into the rigging, “You, sailor Thomas Cole. Shinny down here and fetch a bottle of rum from the stores and bring it to my cabin.”

Then, with almost a celebratory leer of having outfoxed them at the three land grant gentlemen at the rails, which made all three of them wince, he turned and strode to his cabin.

Although technically innocent--at least of the ultimate sin--the young, blond sailor, Thomas Cole, was not stupid. As he was descending slowly from the rigging, much more slowly than if it had been a rations call, his mind was racing. He had known other young sailors who were told to deliver rum to the captain’s quarters and who came back to the forecastle bowlegged, sniveling, and half out of their minds. And he had known he had had the captain’s eye for most of the voyage already.

He was afraid. Not so much afraid of the act, which he had seen and heard the sailors performing with each other in the darkness of the night in the far corners of the forecastle, but more of the captain, who was a cruel and gnarled monster. In whisperings when other sailors had come back from the captain’s cabin and sat alone and unresponding in the shadows, rocking back and forth and whimpering until the necessities of life before the mast enveloped them once more in the daily chores and challenges of a sailor, he had heard tales of the captain and of his cruelty. But mostly, he had heard tails of a cock that could split a man in two.

This brought fear into young Thomas Cole’s mind. But it brought arousal and curiosity, as well.

Thomas had always been too curious for his own good--and too angelic of face and willowy of body. Back in his village in Dorset, although he had done nothing to earn the reputation, he came to be known as a tease to a certain type of older man. These rumors had reached the ears of his parents, who, in consternation, had seen him shipped off to sea--as much to save the family reputation as to protect his virtue.

His first voyage was this one, on the ship captained by Mortimer Lynch.

Truth be known, Thomas hadn’t minded the attentions of the older men of his village--the tentative touchings and special attentions in the rectory by the cleric of his church had been particularly interesting to him. But there was nothing definite that Thomas could identify as being the reason. Just being himself--an angelic-looking, lithe-figured young man with a mop of golden hair and fair of face--seemed to be all that would explain why he had to be so secretly and quickly whisked to the nearest seaport.

He had begun to understand what it was all about when he was warned upon embarking on Lynch’s ship to pick a hammock near the door into the forecastle, which was, he was told, perhaps the least private and noisiest spot, but also the safest for him.

It wasn’t long before he learned why, as the noises of the night in the forecastle slowly informed him of happenings in the shadowy corners--and the types of low guttural moans and sighs that were mildly similar to what he remembered hearing in the rectory when the cleric was helping him put on his alb before services.

There was another young man on the voyage, though, who had caught young Cole’s interest. Edward Geer. He wasn’t a sailor. A brawny, dark-haired, hirsute young man with brooding good looks, Geer was a carpenter’s apprentice in the entourage of the gentleman, Peter Cushing. He didn’t bunk in the forecastle, which was reserved for the ship’s sailors. But there were other, remote, dark places in the ship. Places where, after Thomas and Edward had taken up a friendship in bantering and shared mirth on the deck, the two could repair to more quiet--and, eventually, more intimate discussions.

The ship was no more than a week out of Weymouth before Edward and Thomas were exploring each other’s bodies with trembling hands, eventually each, while lips found lips, finding the other’s cock with their hands and providing mutual relief--and, somewhat to their surprise, mutual pleasure.

Thomas might have gone farther with Edward, but a week out of Plymouth Landing in the New World, he was taken with affright at the danger that might be putting Edward in. The longer the voyage, the randier the sailors got--and the braver and more demanding.

A bruiser of a muscle man they all called the Greek and who, rumor had it, was determined to debauch his way through all of the “taker” sailors ere the ship reached land, grabbed Thomas from his hammock one night and was forcibly carrying him to the rear of the forecastle, telling a trembling Thomas in no uncertain terms what he was going to do with him. But before the Greek could carry through with his plan, the coxswain, summoned by another sailor, had come down into the forecastle with a belaying pin in his hand and commanded that the Greek not manhandle Thomas, with the statement, “Captain Lynch has declared this one not be touched.”

The effect on the Greek was frightening in and of itself. He immediately let Thomas slip to the floor and slunk away.

Thomas thanked the coxswain, only to be told that there was no real thanks to be giving--that the captain was making such a declaration because he intended to have Thomas himself. From the look that accompanied this declaration, Thomas understood that he was being pitied--but more than that, that the coxswain was trying to save his own ass.

“Ye still be a virgin to the cock of man, be ye not?” the coxswain had bluntly asked.

“Yes,” Thomas answered, being truthfully able to answer that, as his fondlings with Edward had not yet gone that far--if he caught the coxswain’s meaning well enough--even though he had hopes of it.

“Then keep it that way. I have put the word out. If another man takes what the captain wants from you, you must tell me. The captain should not find this out for his own. It would be worth the hide of all of us. And, for that man’s sake, give him fair warning of the captain’s privilege before he do touch you--if you have any mercy in you. Because if he do touch you, he is a dead man.”

It was after this scene in the forecastle that Thomas paid increased attention to the sailors staggering back from their rum delivery to the captain’s quarters and whisperings were made to him of the captain’s cruelty and the fearsomeness of his manhood.

Upon arrival in Plymouth Landing, when Edward Geer sought Thomas out to go to an aft storage locker with him, sighing of his need for Thomas before they must be parted, Thomas told him that he could not. He said that Geer would be arriving at his own destination on land soon and Thomas would be sailing away with the ship--and that he had enjoyed his private moments with Geer, but that it should get no more serious than it had. What he didn’t tell Edward was that he was afraid of what the captain would do to both of them if he heard they were being intimate.

Geer was hurt and avoided Thomas for the rest of the journey. But there wasn’t much Thomas could do about that but mark his own regret.

It was thus that, on the night before the landing upon the shores of what was, indeed, the land grant given to Hobart, Cushing, and Shern, Thomas Cole had few illusions about what it meant for the captain to summon him to his quarters with a flagon of rum.

As Thomas entered the captain’s dimly lit cabin, illuminated only by a few candles in sconces upon the walls and the small panes of glass at the stern of the ship looking out into the starry night, he arrived as any other sailor on the vessel would--burned bronze by the sun, hard bodied, bare-chested, and barefooted and with only straight-legged, once-white cotton breeches held up with a rope belt. He was far from the angelic boy who embarked on the journey, looking far younger than his calendar years. He was now a beautiful, curly golden-haired young man of ripe body.

Thomas found the captain sitting behind a wooden desk facing the door. He was writing something on paper with a quill pen and continued to do so, head down, for several minutes after Thomas entered the room. The scratching of the quill was only heightening Thomas’s apprehension.

“Place the flagon on the desk and step back.” Captain Lynch didn’t look up.

Thomas did as was he was bidden and escaped to stand near the door, which he’d left open, hoping he would be permitted to withdraw.

“Shut the door and come closer into the light.”

Thomas complied.

“Unknot the rope at your waist and hand it to me.”

“But then my--”

“Yes, they will. Do you question my orders young man?”

“No, no sir,” Thomas answered in a stumble. His trembling hands went to the knot at his waist, and he struggled to loosen the rope. When he’d accomplished that, Thomas was only able to hold his trousers up by grabbing the waistband with his hands.

“Take your hands away.”

With a sigh of the inevitable, Thomas did so, and his trousers fell to the floor. He stood naked in the flickering light, he moved his hands to cover his manhood, but a low growl from Lynch stopped him in mid swing.

“Leave your hands at your side.”

Captain Lynch then looked up and gave Thomas a hard gaze.

“This is your first sea voyage, is it not, Sailor Cole?”

“Aye, sir. Aye, Captain, it is.”

“But ye know of the law of the sea, don’t ye?”

“Aye. Yes sir.”

“Ye know that on a vessel on the water, the captain is king?”

“Aye, sir.”

“And that all on board serve at the captain’s pleasure.”

“Aye, sir.” This time not so smartly answered.

“And, more important, to serve the captain’s pleasure.”

Thomas didn’t answer; he just let his head tip forward and his eyes raced over the worn boards at his bare feet, as if some escape hatch would magically appear. But the captain didn’t really require an answer. He was just enjoying the affirmation of his power at sea. “Even to a judgment of death if the captain be not pleased?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Ye have heard, no doubt, of what pleases this captain.”

Thomas couldn’t bring himself to answer this.

“Do ye?”

“Aye, sir,” Thomas managed to voice in a low tone.

“Ye will pleasure me.”

It wasn’t a question. Again, it prompted a somewhat reluctant, “Aye, sir.”

“Good, then.” Captain Lynch dropped the quill on the paper and stood up from the desk.

Thomas gasped. Lynch was wearing nothing below his jacket, and his cock was monstrously prepared for sport.

He walked around the desk, circled Thomas twice, and stopped behind him--very close behind him. Thomas could feel the man’s hot breath on his neck. Then he felt the palm of a hand at his waist, which moved around and up his heaving belly to his chest. Thomas gasped as a nipple was tweaked. Edward had never done this to him. But thinking back, he vaguely remembered the cleric having touched him there in the village in Dorset.

The captain’s other hand went to Thomas’s quivering butt cheeks, and Thomas jerked and gave a little surprised grunt as a thick finger breached his channel hole.

Edward had done this--although only this, not going any farther. And Thomas was suddenly worried that Edward had gone too far. That this was enough for Thomas not to be able to claim to be a virgin.

The hand on his chest moved down his belly, cupped his balls briefly, and then grasped his cock hard. Thomas gasped again, and his whole body began to shake. The captain laughed a low laugh.

“Ye do respond as a virgin,” the captain murmured. Thomas was flooded with gratitude that the captain would think that, and his body relaxed.

“Yes, it’s best that ye do lose the tension,” the captain said. “It will go much better for ye if ye are not tight in ways that tightness does not please me. Aye, ye can tighten on that. And draw it in. Aye, like that. Ye declare that ye be virgin to a man’s cock inside you?”

“Aye,” Thomas whispered.

Thomas sphincter muscle had capitulated to the pressing of Lynch’s finger, and the captain had deepened his penetration of the channel--helped, as he said, by a natural response of the channel now to draw the finger in. Thomas was surprised and gasped and tightened up briefly again as a second finger was inserted.

The captain was sucking on Thomas’s neck and working Thomas’s cock with fast, long strokes of his fist.

Edward had stroked him off more slowly and with less pressure. Thomas came with a little cry. His knees tried to buckle, but the captain’s hand left his cock and palmed Thomas’s belly to hold him in place.

The captain had three fingers in Thomas’s ass channel--deep--and Thomas moaned and felt his channel slackening.

“Ye want me now, don’t ye?”

Thomas didn’t answer.

“Don’t ye?”

“Aye,” he whispered, and, in fact, he did want it now. That he wanted it from Edward rather than this old, grotesque monster was beside the point.

“Aye, who? And I don’t mean captain. I mean to be acknowledged as much more.”

“Aye . . . Master,” Thomas whispered. And he must have guessed right, as the captain laughed at the hearing of his control being acknowledged.

The captain lifted Thomas up with an arm around his waist, swiveled him toward the stern, and slammed him down on the desk on his belly.

Thomas’s sensations were the loss of breath at the sudden, brutal movement and the feel of the quill shaft and feather on his sternum, both of which were overwhelmed immediately by a scream--his--and the searing pain of his ass channel being penetrated and stretched to the limit.

Purchase inside Thomas having been achieved, the captain pinned Thomas to the desk top with his chest, reached out and grabbed Thomas’s wrists with his fists. He held Thomas’s arms out wide and latched onto the skin between the young man’s shoulder blades with his teeth. He pulled Thomas’s arms together again and used the young man’s own rope belt to tie his wrists together and to an iron ring over the edge of the far side of the desk.

Then, as Thomas wailed his pain and violation in tones that eventually subsided into gurgles of surrender and moans of the advent of pleasure and acceptance, Captain Lynch pounded his ass hard and deep.

After the captain had come, he untied the semiconscious Thomas, lifted his body up as if Thomas was of no weight at all, and pushed him down on his knees. Turning his body to him and perching on the desk, the captain took Thomas’s head in both hands, moved Thomas’s face to his dripping cock, and said. “Clean it.”

After doing so, Thomas learned the rudiments of cock sucking, gagging and sobbing all the way.

When the captain was hard again, he picked Thomas up and slammed him down hard on the desktop on his back and slapped his legs wide.

“Please,” Thomas pleaded. “Yes, again. But, please. Can we do it on your bed? And in the dark?”

The captain laughed, but he complied. And he soon found out that Thomas was a quick study in learning how to please a man, not knowing that Thomas could take it much better without seeing the captain’s ugly countenance.

Thomas stumbled back to the forecastle, bowlegged, and sobbing, and staggering as much as any before him had. But unlike most before him, possibly all, Thomas came back with the revelation that, as long as it was done in the dark, he loved having the captain’s cock working inside him--and determined that he would have as much of that, from as many a well-hung man as possible--as he could get.

* * * *

“This would be a natural place for the repair of our ships. The channel is deep right near here. We can easily dredge the rest of the distance.”

Cushing, Hobart, and Shern were standing on the short beach at the north of the natural harbor. Hobart, who had spoken, was holding charts and already planning in his mind where construction would begin. Cushing was calculating the actual construction needs for the first of the buildings they would need. Shern was lost in the dream of the boatyard he would found in this spot. That purpose had already been conceded to him within the wording of the king’s land grant.

“Hobart will be a fitting name for this place. The siting is almost ideal. The harbor will be both snug and safe. The wharves will go at the other end of the curve there. We can call the bluff above this boatyard location the Upper Headland. And that curve of cliff running around the spit to the south end of the harbor the Lower Headland.”

Ye can give the names as you please, Daniel Hobart, Shern thought for now. That were a privilege granted ye by King Charles. But we shall see what we shall see. And I do rightly know that my own dwelling will be built at the top of what ye named the Upper Headland. Overlooking the boatyard and whatever town we build. And it will be built higher on the headland ere yours ever will be.

What he said aloud, though, was, “The town will need a common. We must mark it as English.”

“Yes, yes,” Hobart answered, almost with irritation at anyone else but him plotting the town. “First, though, we must blaze paths to Boston in the north and Braintree to the west. We must establish our links with the other settlements and begin providing for the goods we need--both for ourselves and with Mother England.”

“Yes, we’ve discussed the need for more help once we’ve put down roots here,” Cushing said. “We must ship back to England almost immediately. With Captain Lynch, regrettably. I do not like the idea of a return sea voyage with him, but if we let him go, there is no telling when the next ship will be able to take us.”

“Yes,” Hobart said, almost absently, already looking out over the land rise from the harbor for the best placement of the common ground Shern had mentioned. “But one of us will need to stay. The town will not build itself.”

“Yes, one of use will need to stay,” Shern answered. He smiled grimly to himself, determined who that one would be.

Cushing bustled off then to attend to the longboats arriving from the ship with the last porting of the supplies to help get the town started.

Captain Lynch and his coxswain were overseeing this operation as well as the unpacking of the tents. They would stay on land too, until all of the provisions were stored where they needed to be and the tent city was erected.

The carpenter, young Edward Geer, was leading a group of men into the fringe of trees to the west of the town plot. He would identify trees for felling, and they would start construction of wooden buildings almost immediately.

In his group, at the behest of Addis Shern, was another young carpenter who was secretly tasked to look only for trees appropriate for building boats. Shern was fully determined to make the boatyard the first--and premier--economic enterprise of the new town.

Out beyond the mouth of the harbor lay the ship languidly at anchor. A crew of ten had been left on board to ensure that the ship could be safely sailed should an expected squall arise. The Greek was left in charge of the crew. Young Thomas Cole was one of the sailors on the ship, because the ship’s captain could not risk having him on land under the authority of Addis Shern. Neither Captain Lynch nor the coxswain would be back on board for at least a day.

There was little to do as long as the ship was resting peacefully at anchor.

Thomas Cole wasn’t angry about what the captain did to him the previous night. He had been expecting it, and, in various ways he had been building up to it. What was unexpected was how much he had enjoyed having a man’s cock working inside him--to have that much control of another man’s desires and to be desired by another man so much that the man lost total control in his lust. Being with the captain in the dark enabled Cole to concentrate on his cock and his ability to use it. The ugliness of him melted away in the dark. And having tasted what a man could receive from another man, Thomas was itching for a repeat helping of it.

The Greek was snoozing, naked, in his hammock. He was having a wet dream, and Thomas became mesmerized at watching the brute of a man’s cock harden and the sailor’s hand go to it and work it even though he was asleep. The man awoke to the sensation of Thomas practicing what the captain had taught him the night before in cock sucking.

With a bellow and a heave of Thomas’s body over his, Thomas was skewered and was dancing his ass on the Greek’s staff. The Greek wasn’t as large as the captain but he was more vigorous, and Thomas’s endurance was pushed to the edge of glorious endurance as, the Greek gripping his waist between two rough, calloused hands, he was slammed up and down hard time and again on that thick rod until he was flooded in the Greek’s victory.

The other eight men gathered around, fascinated and aroused. And when the Greek finished, Thomas took on anyone else who wanted him for the price of two coppers. After all eight of the others were exhausted, Thomas had twenty coppers he’d never had before.

It was almost too easy, especially since he had enjoyed himself.

The captain and coxswain didn’t return to the ship for three days, and Thomas was suddenly one of the richest men between Boston and Plymouth.

Longboats did, however, go back and forth between the ship and land, and on the evening of the third day, a sailor who had been to the quickly rising town that day took Thomas aside and told him that one of the other sailors had informed the captain what Thomas was doing and that he could surely expect a flogging or worse when the captain was back on board.

That night, tying his new fortune in a canvas bag around his neck, Thomas slipped into the water and swam to the Lower Headland spit. When he reached the town, he sought out Edward Geer, who had already built a lean-to shed opening to the back of his tent.

Edward was on his back on a pallet, naked, and sleeping the sleep of a man who had put in a hard day’s work. Thomas stretched out beside him, took Edward’s lips in his, and moved a hand down his body to encase the young carpenter’s cock. Edward moaned and came to life as Thomas’s mouth followed the path his hand had opened up, ending by closing his lips over Edward’s now-erect cock.

Edward came then. And later he came as Thomas rode his hips with his pelvis. And then again before dawn when Edward asserted himself and pushed Thomas’s back down on the pallet, spread Thomas’s legs, and fucked his new-found lover hard and deep.

The next morning Thomas showed Edward the bag full of coppers, informed him how they had been acquired, and told him of his plan for establishing both of them in this New World and new town.

Edward was not pleased at first, but when Thomas said the other alternative was for Thomas to return to the ship and fuck the captain all the way back to England. Edward liked that plan even less and didn’t question Thomas more. Thomas, of course, had no intention of following such a plan as that at all. He knew that once he and the captain were back on the ship together on the high seas, he would be completely at the captain’s whim, and that it very likely would not go well for him at all.

Thomas was also aware that there was another alternative for him now that he was on land. Addis Shern had already made advances and offers. If Thomas could not lie under Edward, he surely could do that for Addis Shern. Although Shern was a figure of higher authority, though, Thomas did not prefer him, as he had heard that Shern had a mean streak in his taking that included a whip.

But there was no particular reason for Edward to know either that the threat to return to the captain was a ruse or that Thomas had a backup plan with Addis Shern. Edward was a big, arousing bear with a fine fucking technique. But he certainly wasn’t the brighter of the two.

Edward hid Thomas in his tent and lean-to, which in the next few days he added to as he could to make it serve Thomas’s plans, until Captain Lynch returned to his ship--along with Peter Cushing and Daniel Hobart--and the ship had sailed. Lynch had too much on his mind to think of his sailor, Thomas Cole, until his ship had sailed too far from the coast to return for the simple pleasure of punishing a young tease like Thomas.

Edward Geer was left in charge of the construction of the town, which gave him status and certain privileges. One of the first establishments he finished off--rising out of the tent and lean-to he himself had first occupied--served not only as his home but also as a male brothel. This business at first was “manned” by Thomas Cole only, but later, when it became established as a tavern, it employed other willing men and, when women started to arrive, them as well.

But for the first settlers, all men, Hobart having died on the voyage home followed by Cushing on the voyage back, arrived with new settlers and more provisions, there were only men. Men had to be serviced. And when there were only other men available for that, most men made do--and eventually grew to enjoy it.

It wasn’t long before Thomas Cole and Edward Geer were almost as rich as the owner of the boatyard, one of the original land grantees, Addis Shern. Almost. This “almost” could be clearly seen from the town. To the south of the town, on the bluff overlooking the harbor that Hobart had named the Upper Headland, was--at the very apex, the expanding mansion of Addis Shern. A bit lower on the bluff, to the west of the Shern house, was the Cole house. To the west and a bit lower than that was the Geer house. These three families owned the entire top of the bluff. From this time forward, those living in these houses were recognized as the preeminent citizens of the town.

Before the resupply ship returned to the New World, too, there had been a change in the name of the new town. It was now named Shernhaven. Addis Shern had known the advantage of being the one to stay behind. Cushing and Hobart weren’t forgotten, though. The street curving around the harbor at the water’s edge was named Wharf Street, but the one parallel to that, inland, from Wharf Street, was Hobart Street. This connected at its south end to the Lower Head Road, leading out to the end of the Lower Head spit and on its north end to the Boston Road. The next parallel street to Hobart, with the commons running between them on Main Street, was Cushing Street.