Dear Joanna

23 May 1890

Southampton Docks, England

Joanna, My Love:

How I miss you, even after only three days since having been by your side—and more. And especially I regret not letting you come to see me off on my journey of establishing our future.

My traveling companion, the Heyward Company representative, David Paxton, is spending our last evening in port with his wife and children, who have come to see us off, and my heart aches that that could not be you here as well. I realize that seeing me away was a good excuse for going to London privately to see a doctor without your family suspecting what we suspect, but I regret being so impetuous as to have caused this reason we cannot be together here on my last night in England. Oh, how I miss you. I will send for you to join me in Cape Colony and to be my wife a soon as possible regardless of the results of your London trip. We will be together sooner than later if it is as we fear, and your family and friends will never need to know of the timing involved.

Take care, love. I intend to establish myself well in the colony—and now can better do so with the discovery of gold as well as the earlier finding of diamonds on the Heyward Company Orange River holdings. You father will have reason to be proud of my prospects yet. The hearsay he speaks of is just that—vicious gossip. I cannot help it if my aspect and the company I once kept at Oxford are as they have been publicly described to be. We will overcome all of this and establish ourselves proudly in this world, come what may.

Your loving fiancé,

Peter

* * * *

I embarked on the royal steam mail ship, the RMS

Dunottar Castle

, for the eighteen-day run from Southampton, England, to Cape Town in south Africa to seek my fortune in south Africa and to establish a life there for Joanna and me. Joanna would join me sooner than later, if, as feared, she is with child following our impetuous act—well, acts.

Unknown to me before I embarked, Trevor Heyward, the president of the holding company that had hired me to go to south Africa, was on the same ship. I had thought that I would be accompanied only by David Paxton, who was overseer of the company that resupplied farms northwest of Cape Town. The company’s business had been expanded following the discovery of mineable diamonds there in the Orange River some twenty years earlier and now gold had been discovered in the river bank as well. With the expansion of business had come the need for more administrative staff and, following an especially favorable interview I received from Trevor Heyward in London, I had been hired on as an accountant. This had transpired despite rumors that had begun to float on activities of my circle of friends at Oxford the previous year—rumors I could best face by acquiring a wife and distancing myself from England for a period.

I should have realized, however, that the interview with Heyward was more because of those rumors rather than despite them. But I was so concerned about what the results would be from Joanna’s consultation with a physician in London that I did not focus on the nature of Heyward’s interest in hiring me. In many regards news from Joanna that we would need to press ahead with our nuptials and retire together away from England for at least a few years would be the most welcome. I had gritted my teeth and striven hard to woo and then to find opportunity to bed her repeatedly to counter the rumors from Oxford—as well as to reassure myself that I was able to accept tradition. My mind was occupied with thoughts of this situation when I met with Heyward; they were not with his easy familiarity and unexpected eagerness to hire me for the Cape Colony operations.

David Paxton came as even more of a surprise for me.

Paxton was a riddle. If I hadn’t seen him with his family—a wife and a young boy and girl—in Southampton, I would have drawn a different conclusion with him. I also would have seen him as a threat to my plan to redeem myself far sooner than I did. He seemed to show a certain familiar interest in me, and I must admit that he was a man to give rise to speculation and arousal. Paxton was a florid Scott, tall and muscular, robust and exuberant of both body and personality. He was red headed, with the burnished skin toning of such a man who spent considerable time outdoors under the sun. He was a handsome, square-jawed man with mutton-chop whiskers, bravado, and a loud, boisterous voice. He had a piercing, assessing, and knowing stare, and this he turned on me starting from the moment the RMS Dunottar Castle took sail from Southampton.

We were traveling second class, with Trevor Heyward in first, so Paxton and I didn’t enter into the realm of the company officer until we had cleared the sighting of the Rock of Gibraltar and entered the waters of Africa. So much changed on that day, it was like we entered another world, a more primitive and primeval world, a world of stripping away convention and social limits. I could see it in Paxton—and eventually in Heyward, as well—and I could feel it in myself. I could sense an increased sensitivity to contact with those men, to the expressions on their faces—their eyes and their smiles—and to the effect on my own body of having them brush up against me in passing—at first by accident and later not by accident at all.

I shared a cabin with Paxton, a small one that was almost entirely taken up with two tray beds, with lips all around to prevent the sleeper from rolling off onto the decking in rough seas, not that there was much area of decking between the beds to roll off to. The quarters were close in atmosphere too, with only one small porthole to the outside. The weather was warm and grew warmer the more south we sailed.

As soon as we left European waters into the sweep of Africa, Paxton stripped down to his lower undergarment skivvies and slept on top of the sheet at night. As we sailed southward I was forced to do the same to be able to sleep. The man’s musculature was magnificent, his red, curly chest, arm, and leg hair rampant. He didn’t hesitate to flaunt himself and to give me meaningful looks, although he said nothing forward until after we had cleared Europe and entered African seas. That didn’t mean that he didn’t touch me seemingly casually but, to me, increasingly intimately even as we moved about the deck during the days we were passing by France, Spain, and Portugal.

We had been sailing for a week and a half and Paxton was a virile man, at the height of his manliness. I should not have been surprised, and indeed wasn’t really, that he took to masturbating himself at night, and, given that he was sleeping nearly naked on the top of the sheets, it was not surprising that I could not avoid knowing what he was doing and being able to glimpse it even in the darkness of the cabin. I must admit that after the second night of this, when he would commence, I would pull a sheet over myself, watch him, and stroke myself off in the rhythm he set. On the fifth night, I saw that he was watching me, and I slipped the sheet off my body so that he could watch me as I watched him.

Fool that I was, I intended that it go no further than this. I kept reminding myself that I had seen him in a state of affection with a family and that my purpose for leaving England was to leave the rumors of Oxford behind me. I might have been able to contain myself—and Paxton—if Trevor Heyward wasn’t entering the equation as well.

We were two weeks out of Southampton and six days past clearing the lights of Gibraltar when the invitation arrived to dine with Mr. Heyward in the first-class dining room to celebrate the crossing of the equator. Luckily, I had brought appropriate dinner attire for the occasion. Paxton hadn’t, but he comported himself as if that didn’t matter—that he was as good as anyone else dining in the chamber—and he was imposing and handsome enough to pull it off.

In contrast, Heyward was a man of first class, elegantly dressed and with the look of wealth, comfort, and command. He was heavy set, which just supported his aspect of authority and being a wealthy man, but he was also a handsome man in his early fifties, with a healthy head of salt and pepper hair and expensive suit, waistcoat, and shiny leather shoes. A gold watch dangled from his waistcoat pocket and he had an impressive diamond ring on the middle finger of his right hand, descending to just above the knuckle, no doubt one extracted from his own land holdings near Cape Town.

“How good of you to join me,” he said to us as we were ushered to his table. The conversation tone around us was refined and hushed, a far cry from what Paxton and I were used to in the second-class dining room. We didn’t complain, though. Steerage passengers had to take their meals from a kitchen window and find their own place on the lower decks to eat it. “Our paths haven’t crossed until now,” He continued.

Of course our paths hadn’t crossed, I thought. There is a locked gate keeping the loser classes away from the first-class deck. Heyward had said it as if it were Paxton and I who had been shunning him.

“I had hoped to have seen more of you before now,” Heyward said, turning hooded eyes to me that seemed to bear a heavier, more suggestive meaning than the words might otherwise if he hadn’t put a hand my knee under the table as he said it. A chill went up my spine, causing a tightening in my groin that I was unable to control. I looked at him with a new understanding of why he had hired me, and I let myself think of what he would look like undressed—with a paunch surely, but he looked muscular enough—to wonder about the size of him between his legs.

“We thank you kindly for inviting us here,” Paxton said. “We are, of course, ready and willing for whatever is your pleasure, eh, Peter?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” I answered, very much aware that both men were looking directly at me, assessing me. Was I still on sufferance for this position in the company, I wondered. Was I still to be tested—and in a way that was becoming increasingly obvious? Later I was to understand that wasn’t a question at all.

The dinner was excellent. Not much less than I was used to in the confines of my own family, of course, but as my family had disowned me, I could not count on rising to this level for the foreseeable future—at least until I turned my life around and made a success of it. I thought of Joanna. As a vicar’s daughter, she certainly was suitable enough for the rise back to where I had started. She was so central to my future plans.

“Shall we withdraw to the men’s salon?” Heyward asked, breaking into my contemplation. It wasn’t really a question, though. In the salon, both the cigars and the liquor were excellent and free-flowing. Paxton heavily indulged in both as if this was a rare treat for him, which I’m sure it must have been. For me, it was a memory of all that I had lost and needed to work hard to regain. It seemed like Paxton was a bottomless pit, a sponge soaking all of it up without effect. I’m sorry to say that it had rather more of an effect on my control of myself. Neither Heyward nor Paxton, however, let up on plying me with more. Heyward himself was very limiting in both his smoking and drinking, while being the generous host for Paxton and me.

The conversation also became less formal than it was in the dining room and increasingly pointed. At length, Heyward leaned over to me where the three of us were sitting in a tight circle in high-backed chairs that had the effect of separating us off from the rest of the salon. He placed a hand on my knee again, which I looked at in some distracted sense of familiarity with some connection to my past but one that I was a bit too cloudy from the drink to directly identify. Then he put the other hand on my other knee. He coaxed my thighs apart and boldly looked down at my crotch. Because of the styles of the time, I knew he could see the line of my cock in my trousers and knew that I was hard. He looked up into my eyes and smiled.

“I asked you two to dinner this evening because I always feel so free when the ship has cleared the influence of Europe and moved into the realm of Africa—and especially so as we cross the equator as we did late this afternoon. I feel I am in a whole new world, with customs and rules so much freer than those of Europe. Do the two of you feel it too?—the sloughing off of convention and restriction to something more basic, closer to pleasure and desire, when we enter the different world.”

“Yes, always feel it too,” Paxton echoed. “It’s like I feel I am a new man, a freer, separate man from when I’m in England. You too, Peter?”

I was confused. I hadn’t felt anything of the kind until then, but now that they mentioned it . . . and because I knew it was what they wanted me to say, I answered. “Yes, I think I can feel something of that too. Although it’s my first time out of Europe, so I guess it will come more in time.”

“Yes, I think you’ll feel freer, more adventuresome in Africa,” Paxton said.

“You know there were several young men interested in this position we are offering you, don’t you, Hansen?” One of his hands left my knee and his fingers brushed across the line of my cock in my trousers before returning to gripping and squeezing the knee.

Offering me, I wondered? The sense of still being tested roared in to face me with reality. I didn’t necessarily have this position locked in. “I am grateful for being given the opportunity,” I answered.

“I wonder just how grateful,” Paxton murmured from his corner of the triangle. “I would think very grateful.” Now it was his hand moving over to my basket, his fingers more intimately tracing me through the material of the trousers than Heyward’s had. With a shudder, the muscles of my legs gave way, and my thighs opened wider and my buttocks slid toward the front of the chair. The grip of Paxton’s hand became more intimate still.

“Yes, I’m very grateful,” I added, for emphasis.

“It is quite a gamble to give you this chance, considering some of the talk going around about you and the Oxford Squires Club.”

That’s what we’d been called—the Oxford Squires Club. A group of young, privileged men who experimented in silliness, a bit too openly so it proved. Not that there was any grounds for pretense now, with Heyward’s hands gripping my knees and Paxton feeling up my cock, making it harden more, but it was obvious now what they wanted—and that I would give it to them.

“The rumors were rather more encompassing concerning those involved, I’m sorry to say,” I answered. It was an evasion and I could see that they both saw through it. Rather too many young men were whispered about in conjunction with the activities of the Oxford Squires Club, to be sure, but I couldn’t honestly claim to have been maligned.

“I would rather prefer that the rumors were true,” Heyward said in a quiet voice, giving me a meaningful voice. “It would be much in your favor if they are.”

“Better that the rumors are true, yes. Several good candidates for this position, I have been told,” Paxton said in a voice perhaps a bit too loud for our little circle, considering the topic. I looked around to see if anyone was listening to us. The gesture was more to avoid answering what they were suggesting. In truth, I didn’t know what to answer. I had been sorely tempted by the maleness and lack of inhibition of Paxton in our small confined cabin the previous two weeks out of Southampton. It was only the specter of his leave taking from a family that had acted as a barrier to possibly misinterpret that he had an interest in me and was signaling for me to reciprocate. There too was my resolve to use this second chance in south Africa to turn my life around.

But I had been sorely tempted. Here, though, the signaling seemed to be from Trevor Heyward himself—and thus more challenging and demanding. I looked down at his hands on my knees and then up into his eyes. He was challenging me to make a gesture to have him remove the hands. That I wasn’t doing so was producing a gleam of victory in his eyes—and a feeling of surrender to my baser desires in my own mind. I relaxed back into the chair, Heyward moved his hand higher on my thigh, I let my legs go totally limp and my stance to spread to the limit, and Heyward’s hand moved to the inner thigh, the pad of his thumb touching where the head of my cock was nestled in the basket of my crotch. Paxton put his hand on Heyward’s and moved it over to cup my basket.

“But in your case, the rumors were true, were they not, Peter?” Heyward said in a low, hoarse voice. “I want them to be true. It’s in your best interest that they are true.”

“Yes, they are true,” I answered, surrendering all pretense.

“Am I to understand that you took the shafts of other men in his Oxford group of yours? Say, young Adrian Barstow, for instance. They say he has one of the thickest cocks in England. Did you lie under young Lord Barstow.”

“Yes, I have been covered by Adrian Barstow,” I acknowledged, the words escaping me like air from a leaking balloon. It’s what he wanted me to say—what I needed to say to keep this job offer open. And it wasn’t more than the truth—not the part about the thickness of Adrian either.

“Mr. Paxton,” Heyward said in a low voice, his eyes not releasing mine, “I have wondered how the two of your are faring below, whether you are being badly inconvenienced by being in second class.”

“Not badly inconvenienced at all, Mr. Heyward,” Paxton said, his eyes staring into mine, willing me to cooperate, not realizing that I had already surrendered. “Would you like to see our cabin, sir? I’m sure you can arrange to have a key to return to the first-class deck.”

“Would that be convenient for you, Peter?” Heyward asked me. Paxton had withdrawn his hand, leaving Heyward’s there. Heyward had two fingers on my crotch now, bracketing the head of my cock, tracing and rubbing it. I was releasing precum and shuddering. And I was surfacing old sensations, old desires. It wasn’t just the liquor that had weakened my resolve. I looked over to Paxton, frankly wishing it was him who was rubbing my cock again through the material of my trousers. I had hardened with Paxton more in mind than Heyward. Paxton’s eyes were turned to what Heyward was doing with his hand. And Paxton’s hand was on his own crotch. “Would you like me to see your cabin?”

“Whatever he wishes, isn’t that right, Peter?” Paxton asked.

“Yes, Mr. Heyward,” I answered. “Whatever you wish.”

“And in your cabin, you will lie under me? I will cover you as Lord Barstow did?”

“Whatever you wish,” I answered.

Paxton and I were stripped down naked. Heyward remained dressed with only his fly unbuttoned, and his cock and balls free. After I had knelt in subservience to Heyward, almost having to unhook my jaw to take the thickness of him inside my mouth to engorge him to the maximum, Paxton was crouched down on his haunches, his back pressed against the side wall of my bed. He was holding my head between his hands and guiding my sucking of his cock. Heyward was behind me, hands gripping my hips, and fucking me in the ass.

I felt guilt, certainly, but more than that I felt that freedom the two had talked about in moving from Europe to Africa. I felt I was in a new, more open and permissive, less-restrictive world. I was on the high seas, off the coast of Africa, below the equator, beyond the confines of Europe and my old life. No one was to see or judge me here. And I wanted this job . . . and securing this position obviously entailed pleasing Trevor Heyward, who was letting me know in no uncertain terms what he wanted and expected from me.

And it brought me pleasure too. I found out why Heyward had asked about the thickness of Adrian Barstow. He too was extraordinarily thick.