Man Ticking Chapter One

Okay, so I'm putting this up more to see if this is a workable system than anything else. It's real rough first draft, so no nits please, but general comments would be appreciated.


Man Ticking
by Steve Jeanes






© Rolling Doughnut 2007

CHAPTER ONE

“Woo, woo.”
An owl, somewhere in the shadow space of the roof-beams, read my mind.
“Woo, woo,” I mouthed back, “woo, woo you too.”
Pinned down in a square of friendly sunlight, I stretched a slow stretch and yawned. Time stretched with me as, around the barn, timbers creaked and ticked to the pulse of a summer afternoon. I felt like a cat, fat with cream and honey, ready for the fireside rug. I yawned and stretched again, squirming with pleasure.
Far, far away, prickles of straw squeaked a protest and jabbed my bare ass.
Katrina stirred to my grunt. She smelled of strawberries and vanilla.
“Corin, you are such a stallion,” she muttered without opening her eyes, “my lord.” She burrowed into me, and her thigh, still damp from our exertions, brushed across my ballocks. The little grenadier trembled and came to attention, instantly ready to go into battle again. The rest of me didn’t want to spoil the moment, though. It was too perfect, too soporifically blissful. I tightened my grip round her and wondered if she could be persuaded to do the honours. ‘My lord,’ I liked that.

As summers go, this one would take some beating. One glorious sunny day followed another until it seemed they would go on forever.
His lordship had spent much time on private business away from Sandford Hall, and left the domestic staff with little more to do than keep the place free of dust, damp and infestation.
Lady Sandford required little attention as she had her own retinue of servants. She rarely left her rooms anyway, apart from brief constitutionals in the shadier parts of the garden and the odd visit to the summer house, where she would sometimes take tea.
Their son, Hector, cared not for matters domestic either, and spent most of his time hunting, or in the town, gaming with friends.
As it is my good fortune to have no formal title or position, and mostly act as his lordship’s general domestic, this happy situation left me free to pleasure myself as I chose. Pleasure myself I most certainly did, and I can confidently state, the pleasure was not all mine.
There must have been more than a thousand working the estate at the time, plus a good fifty or more in service at the hall. The farm land provided well for all, Lord Sandford saw no advantage in depriving his people of their comforts, and we had escaped the plagues and poxes that had persecuted the towns. As a consequence, the summer’s crop of beddable wenches were as plentiful and as plump as any 19 year-old with time on his hands and an itch in his breeches could wish for. So many, I made a list. And as most of my peers were bent-back farm workers, who laboured in the fields from dawn to dusk and stank of sweat and horses, I had a pretty clear run at the best of them.
Milkmaids and tweenies and lady’s maids and chicken-pluckers, I seeded them all. I had under-cooks in the pantry, kitchen-gardeners in the potting sheds and shepherdesses just about everywhere. The milky river of female flesh washed through my days. I spent my evenings pressed against hot skin in doorways and hedges and on the backs of hay-wagons. In my leisure hours, when I left the estate to carouse with male companionship, I could always find the odd harlot and her friend plying their wares in the town or at the Harmsway Inn to entertain me on the journey home. I had no end of willing partners. The list grew and grew. But of all these robust beauties, Katrina Peabody, the flame-haired blacksmith’s daughter, remained my favourite.
I ticked Katrina off my list in May, and had been ticking her ever since. Katrina had something none of the others had in such abundance – enthusiasm. Not for her the post-coital guilt, only the giddy anticipation of the next fumble behind the kitchens or tumble in the hay. I swear, given the opportunity, Katrina would have christened his lordship’s Brougham or desecrated the Sandford’s private chapel. I have never met a woman who raised her skirts or dropped her drawers so quickly and so unselfconsciously.
And more than that, Katrina laughed. She laughed with the joy of giving herself. She laughed the laugh of somebody who knows the world is full for sure with happiness, and in doing it, made me believe too. Her laugh made me laugh. Her laugh made me think nothing could spoil our pleasure, that God celebrated our coupling and the rest of the world couldn’t do otherwise.
Of course, in the cold light of day, it wasn’t so easy to forget her father, a humourless man of turnip head and marrow arm, who ran his lordship’s smithy. I tried to, though. And when Katrina’s earthy laugh rumbled in my ear, or her pork-fed loins straddled mine, the clump-haired face of the blacksmith evaporated from my thoughts as easily as the mist that clings to the river dissolves in the morning sun.

“Woo, woo,” the owl puffed from its hidden perch again.
A touch of urgency coloured the call. I wondered what an owl would find urgent at this time of day. I wondered what an owl was doing awake at this time of day. Lead eyelids dulled the thought. Then a cool zephyr wafted scents of jasmine and pig wafted past my nostrils and, for the barest second, chilled the sweat on my lower parts. I shivered. The movement broke my serenity like a sudden fart in church. The little grenadier slumped to an at-ease position. Katrina pushed closer and smacked her lips. Her eyelids flickered and she muttered something unintelligible as I reached down to pull up my breeches.
Something thudded into the straw next to my head. I drew away and squinted up into the rafters. No sign of the bird.
“Woo, woo. Woo, woo!”
“Ow!”
I grabbed my neck where the stone had hit. I sat up, wide awake now. Katrina stirred and rubbed her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Shhh!” I put my fingers to my lips. Her eyes widened.
“Woo, woo! Woo, woo!”
And I was back in Farmer Anderson’s orchard with a sack full of his prize apples, hearing Mickey give the warning signal, then leaping the wall seconds before the purple-faced farmer got his hands on my collar.
Another stone thumped into the straw.
“Mickey!” I hissed.
“What’s got you so spooked, my lovely?” Katrina pouted, “Why don’t you relax?” She shoved her chest at me, but I pushed her away. Her pout deepened.
“What’s got into Mr Grumpy all of a . . .”
“Where are you, you fornicating bastard?” The bellow from downstairs stopped her dead and had me buttoning my breeches with shaking fingers.
“Oh, my lord! My father!” Katrina flushed prettily, “If he finds you here . . .”
“Whoever you are, if I find you’re prodding my daughter, I’ll rip you apart with my bare hands and nail your old man to the stables door!”
Katrina bit her lip and looked at me with an expression that made me want to rip her clothes off.
“You’ve got to go!” she said. I couldn’t help adoring the innocent way she had of stating the obvious. I quickly kissed the corner of her butterfly mouth. She sighed.
“Woo, woo!”
Keeping down, I scrabbled my way to the hayloft window. Below, half hidden in a juniper bush, Mickey cupped his hand to his mouth, then saw me waving. He grinned, then fumbled for something on the ground. A ladder! God bless his big stupid heart! If Pa Peabody caught him he’d be in almost as much trouble as I would.
I looked back over my shoulder and nearly clashed heads with Katrina. She’d crept up on me and now peered over my shoulder, grinning and waving at Mickey. In the barn below, I could hear the thump of a pitchfork ramming into straw, accompanied by roars of fury and streams of unintelligible abuse. I pushed Katrina away.
“Pretend to be sleeping,” I whispered, “there’ll only be trouble if he catches us together.”
“What kind of trouble would that be?” she grinned and winked and slid her hand up between my thighs.
“Stop it, Katrina!” I pushed her hand away and kissed her hard on the lips before she had time to complain, “I’ve got to go!”
She sat back on her haunches, and gave me that famous pout again, then laughed like a schoolgirl. Beneath our feet an angry bull raged, bent on turning the barn into matchwood.
“Woo! Woo!”
I blew a final kiss to my succulent sex-pot and slid my legs out onto the ladder.
“Hurry!” Mickey’s head jerked from side to side at the foot of the ladder, like he expected the bellowing blacksmith to crash through the side of the barn at any moment. Hands and feet on the ladder’s supports, I slid to the ground, tumbled into my friend, and knocked him flying. The ladder swayed and crashed into the bushes.
“You little slut! Where is he? I’ll kill him!”
Sounded like the Katrina’s father had worked out how to use a ladder himself. I grabbed Mickey’s arm and pulled him to his feet. We dived for the juniper seconds before the great swollen face appeared at the window. Pressed hard to the ground, I peered up through the cover of leaves. Peabody’s head swung this way and that, his brow wrinkled like his daughter’s had been, but there the similarity ended. His eyes bulged and his nostrils flared, and a thin stream of saliva foamed from one corner of his mouth.
“There’s nobody, poppa. I was up here getting straw for the horse.”
The head disappeared briefly.
“Shut your mouth, Katrina. I’ll deal with you later.”
We ducked as he looked out again, a florid jack-in-the-box.
“You won’t get away for ever!” The thunder of the blacksmith’s voice echoed round the landscape. In a field half a mile away, bent figures stopped and stared in our direction as Mickey and I huddled to the ground, “Maybe this time, but I’ll get you, and when I do, you’ll stay got, you little bleeder!”
I giggled. Mickey shoved my face into the dirt. Somewhere near my ear a grasshopper sawed its simple tune as the echoes died away. Under the bottom leaves of the bush I saw the distant figures turn to one another before bending to their work again. Mickey let his hand off my neck.
“He’s gone. Let’s get out of here.” His urgent hiss faded as he scuttled away, bent double, in the direction of the topiary garden. I stopped for a moment to listen to the muffled voices arguing in the barn. Katrina would be all right. Her father didn’t hold with beating women, only with tearing their lovers limb from limb. A simple soul at heart, he often gave second best to his womenfolk. I could already hear his anger flounder in the face of Katrina’s righteous, female outrage. I stood and blew a kiss in the direction of the barn before hurrying after Mickey. I tucked my shirt in as I ran.

“Jesus you’re going to come to a sticky end if you don’t learn to keep that thing out of where it don’t belong,” Mickey sucked on his pipe and blew out a great cloud of smoke. It swirled into the shape of a rabbit, then the wind caught it and made it disappear as quickly as the magicians in the town square. “Or at least keep it away from them with a father that would rip it off for you.”
I grinned at him and scratched the offending member.
“Got a mind of its own,” I said, “I just follow where my master leads.”
“Then you better be ready to go places you can’t get back from. You’ll get caught out in the end, I promise you.”
I’d stopped in the shade of a box-hedge bear to let Mickey berate me. It seemed the right thing to do considering his mood, and how he’d helped me out of a tricky situation. His scolding was all chaff in the wind, anyway. Nothing he said could wipe the smile off my face or stop me wanting to whistle. A beautiful day, a tumble with the pneumatic Katrina and getting the better of her oaf of a father, I couldn’t have felt better if I’d won a pig at the annual Stanford fair.
“You should be thinking of the future, Corin. It’s all fine enough putting yourself around when your young, but it’s soon past and then where are you?”
“Shagged out and happy,” I said. He didn’t hear me, or pretended he didn’t.
“I’m telling you lad, get yourself a good woman and start a family. That’s the way to go. Look at me.”
I looked at him. I saw a grubby eight-year-old getting a larruping from his pa because he’d eaten all the cream put out for Sunday tea. I saw a spotty thirteen-year-old turning purple when Claudia Dalmiston caught him down by the old mill winning one of those speed competitions popular with boys that age. I saw the polished up eighteen-year-old reprise the colour as the same Claudia Dalmiston marched to the altar in chapel, clear proof he’d lost none of the thirteen-year-old’s proclivity or speed. I saw the wet-eyed nineteen-year-old staring down at the tiny bundle in his arms like he’d just been crowned king of the world. Most of all I saw my best and oldest friend, and a total idiot.
“What about you? Married with a kid at nineteen, and likely another on the way.”
“Eh?”
“Let’s face it, Mickey, you only had to look at Claudia and she started swelling like dough on a hot plate. That oven isn’t going to stay empty for long.”
“Well if she does, I’m not complaining,” he tapped out his pipe and tucked it in his waistcoat pocket, “a man’s not a man without family. Best thing I ever did. You should try it.”
I stood and brushed down my jacket and breeches.
“It might be what you want, but I’ve still got plenty of balls in my musket, my friend, and there are pigeons everywhere.”
Mickey heaved himself to his feet and shaded his eyes as he looked toward the sun.
“I’ll be expected back at the stables. Don’t want any awkward questions from the boss.”
I clapped him on the back.
“You’re a good friend, Mickey. I owe you.”
He grunted. “A quart of good ale would set fine with me.”
“I’ll see you better than that. I’ll see you rolling, old mate.”
His eyes twinkled and the frown slipped from his face. Once more, I saw the sixteen-year-old, game for anything. Then his weather-beaten features clouded.
“I’d appreciate that, Corin. But you be careful what you aim that musket of yours at. The odd pigeon may do you no harm, but hit a pheasant and the gamekeeper will be after you.”
I winked at him.
“I’ll be careful.”
He grunted, nodded and set off for the stables, smoke trailing from his waistcoat pocket.


I checked both ways as I emerged from the topiary menagerie onto the main drive. No sign of the blacksmith. He’d have finished dressing down Katrina by now and be on his way back to the stables. I crossed my fingers Mickey made it back first, then chided myself for being a fool. Nobody would ever suspect hard-working, married Michael Alsop of getting involved in my libidinous frolics, not even Katrina’s paranoid father. That they worked together day by day made it even less likely. No, Mickey was fine. I forgot about him and strode along the drive toward the house. The sun had hardly passed the meridian, and I had no pressing duties. His lordship was away on one of his trips and wasn’t expected back until the following day. I wondered what small thrill I could conjure up to pass the afternoon.
By the time I passed the first of the rose gardens, I had narrowed the possibilities down to two. A lazy swim in the lake that formed the southern boundary of the estate, or a round of hide-and-slap with Monica and Kelly, the twin chambermaids who are always game for fun when the master’s away, and often when he isn’t. In the end, I decided on both, maids first.
On the upper drive, the shadows of the flagpoles barely reached the grass verge. The servants would be sitting down to table and I felt the first twinkle of hunger. A good lunch would stoke me up for pleasures to come. I straightened my neckerchief and increased my stride in the direction of the kitchens.
The gravel sounded loud beneath my feet as I marched past the fountain in the central drive and headed for the lower ground entry to the kitchens in the east wing. Water twinkled in the sunlight, and I turned to admire the marble and coppered brass of the fountain’s Venus and playing dolphins. As I did, another flash of light in the distance, near the gatehouse, caught my attention. Something had entered the estate and was making speed toward the house. I stopped and shielded my eyes. The afternoon breeze brought the thunder of horses hooves. A cloud of dust accompanied the approaching carriage.
Somebody’s in a hurry, I thought, they won’t be best pleased when they find his lordship’s not here.
The carriage had already covered half the mile from the gatehouse, and from behind me the shouts of Camineux, the butler, and his footmen echoed round the courtyard as they gathered on the doorstep to greet the visitor, when I recognised the Sandford flag fluttering on the dashboard of his lordship’s Brougham.
I roundly cursed my bad luck. Why had my lord and master decided to return early? What had curtailed his business so unexpectedly?
I edged away from the drive. If Lord Sandford had any mind to put yours truly to some menial employment, that would put a stop to my afternoon’s pleasures. My imagination had already suggested a few unusual divertissements to amuse the twins, and the thought of having to abandon my plan at this late juncture had me grinding my teeth with frustration.
I tried to appear engaged on a previous mission, and at the same time to remove myself from the general vicinity in a way that didn’t give the impression that that was my only intent. I ended up half walking, half jogging in a strange sideways gait away from the front of the house. I’d covered maybe twenty yards before the matched greys thundered into the circle and steamed to a halt before the main entrance. I stopped and turned as Camineux, a slight figure with a permanent look of surprise on his wan features, hurried forward to lower the carriage steps.
He’d barely bent to his task before the Brougham door flew open and narrowly missed decapitating him. The butler stumbled back, clutching his wig to his head. The look on his face changed from surprise to astonishment, as though the sensation of feeling his head still in place came as a total shock. As Camineux struggled to regain composure, Lord Sandford, the twelfth Earl of Hampton, climbed down the steps with all the concern of a horse that’s just batted a fly away with its tail. Along with the other assembled staff, I dipped my head in deference.
Nobody would call his lordship a large man. He is of medium build, if not slight. He stands not much more than five foot eight inches in height, but appears taller, possibly because he holds himself rigidly upright at all times, even when sitting at his desk, or relaxing in his bath.
Even though he will soon be forty years old, his lordship moves like a cat, with muscles tensed, ready to spring on his victim. Combined with his renowned ice-cold stare, it makes anybody in his presence feel the need to take a step backward, lest he should choose to focus his attention in their direction, and maybe devour them. Luckily, he is more often than not pre-occupied with affairs that concern the running of the estate or in matters political, so his gaze is not a subject for daily concern. All of us staff have come under his scrutiny at one time or another, though, and it’s not an experience to be sought gladly.
I lifted my head in time to see Camineux regain some kind of balance. Without a word, his lordship handed him cane and white-gloves and commenced to climb the steps to Sandford Hall. Even as the carriage pulled away and Camineux hurried to catch up with his master, Lord Sandford pulled a pair of spectacles from his jacket and focused his attention on a small piece of paper he had retrieved from the same pocket.
I breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t noticed me, and had other things on his mind. I didn’t trust to luck, though. I decided to remain stationery until he and his escort gained the shelter of the building. I followed their ascent of the steps then noticed a black-clad figure waiting at the top and looking at me.
My heart thumped. Mr Barnes. His lordship’s very personal servant. Or, as was whispered, his lordship’s spy. Nobody knew his first name. Nobody knew what purpose guided his movements. All we knew was that he had the twelfth earl’s ear, came and went as he pleased, and rarely spoke to anybody beside his lordship. Those on the estate of a more religious inclination than myself, Katrina amongst them, would cross themselves at the mention of his name. Mr Barnes, in contrast to his employer, stood tall and wide, like a rain cloud threatening destruction by flood and lightning.
I shivered, and turned my gaze away. Attracting Barnes’ attention scored even lower in my personal ratings than being fixed by his lordship. It felt like a chill wind had slithered down from the north and cut through the soft glow of summer.
When I looked back, Barnes, Lord Stanton and the others had gone. I stood for a moment, letting the warm sun drive away the uncomfortable sense of foreboding that had iced my blood. I ran my hand through my hair. Something scratched it and I pulled out a length of straw. Looking down I saw my jacket was crumpled and there were stains on my breeches. I headed off for my room at a smart pace. Should his lordship summon me, I didn’t want him catching me like this.

“Mr Barnes, walk with me.”
“My lord.”
Barnes dipped into his characteristic, slightly twisted bow. The black dress coat tightened across his shoulders.
“Your lordship had a good journey?”
Stanford waved his hand as he marched through the front doors of the house, signalling both his disinterest and that he wished the servants gone. Camineux clapped his hands. The two footmen remained where they stood after closing the doors. The butler himself stood to one side and bowed deeply.
Stanford ignored him and continued at speed across the chequered tile floor. Barnes, hands behind back, kept pace with ease.
“The thing is, Barnes, you were right. Absolutely right. No doubt about it.”
“I try not to mislead, sir.”
“Don’t come the facetious sycophant with me, Barnes. I know how that mind of yours works.” Stanford turned into the grand corridor. Sunlight pouring through the windows twinkled off a dozen gilt chandeliers spaced along its vaulted ceiling.
“Indeed you do, sir.”
“Indeed I do. So save your deviousness for your contacts. We’re going to be busy.”
“Excellent, sir,” Barnes’ avuncular face eased into something resembling a smile, “May I ask what you are planning?”
“You may, but not now. Meet me in an hour. We have much to discuss. Meanwhile send a couple of servants to my room. I need a bath and a change of clothes. Can’t think when I’m itching.
Barnes bowed as Sandford continued to his private quarters, then turned and set off in the opposite direction. The echoes of their footsteps reverberated the length of the corridor even after they’d gone