*Hello! and welcome to my new series, The boy from the Sea.
All characters are 18+
One of my pet peeves is annoying exposition, so to avoid confusion, this series takes place in a world similar, but not equal, to Victorian Great Britain. I do this because I am not historically accurate, and that is my other pet peeve.
Please Enjoy!*
The township of Haven was small, and only had one noble family. It was a small fertile valley at the end of a rich delta that fed into the Ocean. If you were born in Haven, you would most likely become a tobacco farmer, an oat farmer, or a fisherman, or you would marry someone in those professions.
There were advantages to such a small township. The royal tax collectors came only one year in five, and the youth were allowed more freedom then the youth in the cities. Young women rarely wore corsets or stockings, especially in the summer. Young men only bothered with their stockings on formal occasions. Wigs were laughable, not status symbols. And a man could take his shirt off in the field, and a woman could take off her shoes to wade in the surf without breaching etiquette.
Not to mention, the parties were Fantastic!
---
Christopher Angler was on fire. The band, a collection of young men; one with a fiddle, one with a hand-drum, two with mouth-harps, and one with an accordion, played faster and faster, trying to keep up with the frantically clapping hands.
The young men and women of the town had formed a ring on the wooden dance floor, clapping their hands and whistling for the young man in the middle. The dance floor was set in the patch of scrubby land that the sheep had eaten bare behind the only tavern. During the day it was a dusty wooden floor in the middle of a patch of dirt, but at night it was magical. Lanterns covered with brightly colored shades hung from poles, the beer flowed freely and the air was filled with laughter and music.
And in the center of it all, sweating and laughing and gasping for air as sixty-two people and the band cheered him on, was Christopher Angler.
He had stripped down to only his open-throated white linen shirt and his calf-length breeches. His leather shoes were kicked aside and his bare feet thumped on the wooden floor. His chest was half-bared to his audience and the sweat-slickened expanse of muscular skin and hair had the girls in the crowd gasping for breath. His brown hair flopped around as he twirled faster and faster, his bare feet a blur.
His hands were on his hips and he was the last contestant in the contest. He had been dancing crazy-fast for nearly twenty minutes and was only now starting to flag.
With a theatrical cry he lifted his arms in a V and shouted, "Oh my good friends, if I dance anymore you will have to tear up some of these boards for my grave-box!"
They screamed with laughter and enfolded him into the fray. The band gave a flourish and started a fast foxtrot. Laughter and music floated up into the night and dissipated like smoke.
---
"May I have the honor of this dance Dear Fellow?"
Max Tailor looked up, startled into the solemn, twinkling eyes of his adopted brother. Chris was doing his 'snooty gentry' voice, with his nose in the air and his mouth in a slight sneer, but he couldn't stop himself from breaking out into gales of laughter.
Max snorted and broke into a snobby falsetto. "Oh my, is that entirely proper?"
Chris snorted with laughter, "Who gives a shit, come away my love!"
Max coughed on his mouthful of beer as Chris grabbed his arms and forced him to do a clumsy dance with him, both trying to lead and laughing like jackals. Anna, Max's wife clapped her hands on the bench, giggling so hard that she had to clutch her swollen stomach.
Her scream of pain and surprise cut through the laughter like a cold knife. The music died with a wheezy cough from the accordion and a screech from the fiddle. Anna was clutching her pregnant stomach and crying out with pain and surprise, gasping for air.
Max was there in a moment, the light gleaming in golden lines on his mussed sweaty hair, his blue eyes wide with panic and excitement.
"It's here Precious! Oh Lord in Heaven it's here! Come quickly, and we'll get you to the Spaewife right away!"
He looked up, deliriously happy and scared at the same time.
"I'm going to be a Father!"
Everyone cheered and Max led his gasping smiling young wife along to go to the Spaewife. For a moment, Chris stood there, looking strangely lost, like a puppet with the strings cut. Then he forced his face back into a smile and followed along, bending his shoulder for Anna to lean on and murmuring encouragement into her ear.
---
The Spaewife was a woman healer. She was a midwife and a surgeon and an apocrathy all in one, and far from calling her witch, the town of Haven loved and respected her. Anna was gasping and panting on the one bed, and the only people allowed in her one-room hut were Anna's mother and Max.
Christopher sat on a worn white rock near the surf, scowling at the waves. Under the angry look, he fought against the overwhelming frustration and confusion and sadness.
Christopher had never lusted after women. He liked women, he had several friends who were women, but he had never felt anything for them other then a platonic light.
Who he had dreamed of, masturbated to, cried into his pillow for, was Max.
Chris had been born about four months after his fisherman father had died in a storm. When he was four years old, his mother had died of a wasting disease that had grown a tumor in her womb the size of a man's head. The Tailors had taken him in, and he had grown up with Max as brothers and best friends.
He had never done anything with his adopted brother but jerk off together, and then he had married Anna and knocked her up.
Christopher rubbed his eyelids with his fingers and spoke softly to himself.
"Don't get angry at them you dumb pile of pigshit. Let them be happy, and wish them well on their child, and their life. I bet you're just angry because you lost a net today."
He frowned sourly. Not only was that a lie, but it just reminded him that he had lost a net and made him even grumpier.
He sighed, slapped himself lightly and got back to the entrance of the Spaewife's hut with the other friends and well-wishers.
---
It was a short healthy birth. Shortly after moonrise, the waiting friends outside the hut heard the loud wailing of a healthy infant. The Spaewife, a petite curvy woman with tired eyes and a triumphant smile opened the door.
