To the Hessian Hills

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This is chapter one of six chapters of a completed work, which will post by the middle of May, 2020.

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Johann heard her, singing in a low, sultry tone, as she moved to the shower house behind the lean-to he slept in. Christina wasn't exactly being quiet, but Johann was sure he knew that getting his attention was her intent. She had been doing whatever she could to arrest his attention and interest since Rudolf had married her and moved her into the rooms above the pargeting workshop and office.

Rudolf wasn't that old, and when his first wife, Louisa, much older than he was, died, it was natural that he would take another wife. But he was at least twice Christina's age. She was no beauty, but her father owned the gypsum quarry in Kalkberg, on the outskirts of Lüneburg, the seat of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in the Saxony region of north-central Germany. And everyone knew how important gypsum was to the art of pargeting. Pargeting was the fancy molded plaster work—popular in Brunswick-Lüneburg because it was so popular in England, whose current ruling family had come from Brunswick-Lüneburg—used as decorative features on both the exterior and interior of plastered buildings. The mix going into the molds of such work was made of gypsum, marble dust, and paste. Marrying the daughter of the gypsum quarry owner had halved Rudolf's costs for raw materials for his tradecraft.

But Rudolf hadn't shown any more interest in his new wife than he had shown in his first wife, who had come to him with considerable money rather than looks, which means to say that Rudolf was childless and likely to remain so. What this had meant was that Christina had to look elsewhere for comfort, if she dared. Just because he didn't tend to his wife in bed didn't mean that Rudolf wasn't a jealous and possessive man.

It was the fate of Rudolf's young pargeting apprentice, Johann Jansen, that Christina had cast her eye and interest on him. That was natural enough. He was much the same age as she was, barely eighteen, and was a well-formed, comely blond, blue-eyed lad—much more comely than she was, as a matter of fact, which wasn't lost on Rudolf.

Johann had good reason to know why Rudolf wasn't showing interest in Christina. All of Rudolf's interest and attention was going to Johann, and, as an apprentice with no family background of his own, Johann had to accommodate that. Not that accommodating the muscular and handsome man that was Rudolf was all that onerous.

Although Johann's lot was cast, at least for now, in the area of sexual release, he had not fully made up his mind about his ultimate desires and he was open to possibilities. This is what caused him to rise from his pallet in the lean-to attached to the back of the pargeting shop and move to where he could eye the privy and shower shed through a knothole in the wooden wall.

No doubt Christina knew—or hoped—that he was watching. She didn't close the door to the shower room when she entered and let down the shift she was wearing before pulling the chain that would tip the water bucket over, causing water to douse her to prepare her to soap her body and then again to rinse it off. Although there was nothing much appealing in the young woman's face, which had made her marriage as good a bargain and a relief for her father as well as for Rudolf, there was nothing to snort at concerning the voluptuous nature of her blonde-haired body.

The young woman soaped up and hummed to herself, paying particular attention to her pendulous breasts and private recesses, as she chanced furtive looks toward the shed where she knew Johann was to rise within moments. It was just after dawn, coming early at this time of year in the northern German climes, and her hope, of course, was that he was watching her bathe. It was quite evident that she sought a rise of another sort from the young apprentice than just him leaving his pallet to face the day.

Johann watched her carefully except when she turned her eyes toward the wall of the lean-to, as if she could see him there, spying her through the knothole, although of course she couldn't. When her eyes turned toward him, Johann would draw back into the darkness of his narrow room, not wanting her to see even a glimpse of his eye.

He thought he should be aroused and should show the signs of this, but, strangely and somewhat disappointingly, he wasn't. There was no feeling of tightness, and quick breathing, and hardening of his cock as happened when Rudolf touched him and held him close, entered him, and moved inside him. This somewhat distressed Johann. Was it just that Christina wasn't the right woman or was it that she tried too hard to interest him? He was still struggling with his sexuality. He wanted to desire to lay with a woman. That certainly was the norm, although there was more of man laying with man going about Lüneburg than anyone in the city wanted to talk about. There even were rumors about the duke himself.

But this was not the acceptable way in the public attitudes of Lüneburg. Johann let Rudolf fuck him because the master-apprentice arrangement was sacrosanct, with the master being the master and the apprentice being little more than a slave, and the sex was far better than the beatings that many other apprentices had to endure. And Rudolf was one fine figure of a man. But Johann had always assumed that this—his urges—would change when he no longer was an apprentice and was set up in the pargeting and interior wood-carving trade himself. Then some woman like Christina might be in his future. Christian's father, after all, owned a gypsum quarry.

Christina took far longer in her toilet than she needed to, but then she wasn't there just for the cleansing. If she dawdled longer, though, Rudolf would be coming out to see why Johann wasn't in the shop and, if he found that it was because Johann couldn't come out of the lean-to as long as Christina was on naked display, who knew what the result of his anger would be?

Still, she lingered for a moment at the door of the lean-to, holding her shift to her, her body still wet from the washing. Both of them held their breath—the young, unfulfilled wife of an older man and the equally young, comely and virile young apprentice—while she lingered outside his door.

Could she chance it? What would be his reaction?

Johann equally wondered what his reaction would be. And at this moment, his loins did begin to stir. Perhaps there was a chance.

But the chance wasn't now. Both of them understood that. Daylight was flowing. Christina was past having a breakfast on the table for Rudolf, and Johann already should be in the shop, preparing the molds and mixing the plaster for the day's work. His breakfast would not come until later—not until he had the materials prepared for the master craftsman to begin his work when he appeared after his breakfast. And, although Christina would be preparing Johann's breakfast, she would be leaving it on a table at the top of the stairs and Johann would have to fetch it and return to the shop to eat it. Rudolf would not be permitting any contact between these two young people.

This wasn't entirely because he didn't want to share Christina with Johann or any other man; in this particular case, it was mostly because he wanted all of Johann's attention focused on himself, Rudolf, alone.

* * * *

"What's that? What's happening?"

"I'm fucking you. That's what's happening," Rudolf Muhl answered with a laugh. And indeed that's what he was doing. His apprentice, Johann, was lying, belly to featherbedding in the pargeting master craftsman's bed on the third story of his shop and residence in the upper quarter of Lüneburg. Christina was away for the night, visiting her family at the quarry in Kalkberg. And this was what happened most of the nights Christina was gone—Johann being fucked in Rudolf's own bed.

"No. I mean the glow beyond the window there. There's a fire."

That got Rudolf out of Johann and off the bed right quickly. He raced to the window, still in erection. Fires in the town were very serious matters.

Johann couldn't help but admire the cut of his employer's body from the rear. Although he could not have denied Rudolf anyway, he was almost ashamed to admit—to himself, at least—that he may not have denied the man even if there had been no question of control.

In fact, even the first time there had not been a question of who was in control. Rudolf had come upon Johann walking on the side of the road in a fringe of forest land between Lüneburg and Kalkberg. Rudolf had been driving his wagon, loaded with gypsum, from the quarry, and was filled with mixed emotions, as he had just settled on his marriage with the quarry owner's older daughter. The quarry owner would not give him the younger, prettier one, saying the older daughter had to be married first. Rudolf cared more for his favorable supply of gypsum than what woman was in his bed, as long as she cooked and kept house for him. There wasn't much he was going to do with a woman in his bed anyway. But having a woman under his roof again would curtail his pursuit of younger men that he had been enjoying since his Louisa had died.

He was keyed up as he drove slowly along, jarred by the deep ruts in the dirt road his wooden wheels bounced in. Under the circumstances, when he saw Johann walking along the road, barefoot, sunny blond, only wearing tight breeches, and on his way to work in a nearby potato field, Rudolf was not only smitten—he also was driven. Rudolf was a muscular, powerful, and handsome man. He wasn't used to being denied when he was in high heat.

He didn't give either himself or Johann an opportunity to think further than his unbridled lust. He had Johann on his back and his cock in Johann's channel, in the foliage just beyond sight of the dirt road, almost before either one of them had time to think. Johann's struggle was desultory, the young man disposed to other men being aroused by his good looks and ardor of the man, and wholly unsuccessful in the beginning. As Rudolf dug deep in the saddle and began pumping, the young man slowly gave way.

When Rudolf was finished and rose off Johann, the younger man just lay there, panting, looking up at the older man submissively as if what Rudolf had taken was by right. Rudolf didn't apologize. He offered Johann an apprenticeship.

An apprenticeship in a tradecraft in a Hanseatic League city—the cities of the former Hanseatic League being still an economic power even though that major economic consortium of northern Europe had broken up a century earlier—was far beyond the reach of most peasants such as Johann. All Johan had going for him was his sensual magnetism. And Johann was a realist. Anyone interested in surviving in the loosely assembled scheming German principalities in the latter two-thirds of the eighteenth century was a realist—and an opportunist. He had been quick to accept Rudolf's offer—and Rudolf's demands beyond the offer.

That didn't mean that Johann had closed out on his sexual preferences yet—only that he had remained in touch with the realities of his station in life and any opportunities that came his way, even if momentarily.

When Rudolf got to the window to check out Johann's report that there was a fire in the town, he let out a deep-throated laugh.

"Why do you laugh?" Johann asked. "If there is fire in the city, we must go help." He was already struggling to rise from the bed and reach for his breeches. "Fire could destroy the whole city."

"Not this fire," Rudolf said. "And stay in that bed. I'm not finished with you tonight. Not by a long shot. The fire is at the duke's palace down on the banks of the Limenau. Only one of the wings is in flame. There are no other structures nearby for the flames to spread to, and the fire already is nearly out. There are enough men there to fight it. Men tumble to serve Duke Wilhelm."

"Still, why is the fire amusing?" Johann asked.

"Why do I laugh? I always laugh at the prospect of good business. Tomorrow Duke Wilhelm's architect will be at the door of my shop wanting to commission me to replace pargeting in the fire-damaged rooms of that wing."

Rudolf spoke true about not being finished with Johann that night. He returned to the bed, pushed his knees under the younger man's buttocks, and slid his hard and thick cock inside Johann's channel. Grabbing the railings of the headboard overhead with both of his fists and locking his ankles at the small of Rudolf's back, Johann arched his back, set his mouth in an gaping yawn, and moaned his surrender to a cock working deep inside him, while Rudolf grabbed Johann's waist and pulled his channel on and off the cock in an ever-faster rhythm until both cried out their mutual release and collapsed into the featherbedding.

Rudolf also spoke the truth—with one day's delay—that Duke Wilhelm's man would be at the shop door with a commission for Rudolf—and Johann—to work on the restoration of the interior of the palace.

* * * *

Rudolf left immediately with the duke's architect to assess the damage in the palace and to make his estimates of what he could do in the restoration. He was gone for three days and two nights, not returning to the shop in that time even though the palace was just across the city. In that time Johann trundled back and forth from the shop with the tools and materials Rudolf needed, but, prophetically, Rudolf worked nearly nonstop at the palace, with only brief periods for sleep in a room provided by the architect—and Johann didn't. Johann remained at the pargeting shop. And Christina returned from visiting her family in Kalkberg the first day of Rudolf's absence.

"Will Rudolf be home tonight?" Christina asked as she was putting away the produce her family sent her home with. She smiled a secret little smile when Johann said no and that he didn't suppose the master would return to the shop house for the next couple of days.

Rudolf's skill was in high demand. There was plenty of business for him in Lüneburg. Despite the demise of the Hanseatic League of connected economy-rich cities across northern Europe in the late seventeenth century brought on by the rise in the India trade, Lüneburg had held its own and even prospered so that, in 1776, it was still a rich city. Its economic strength had rested mainly on the dome of salt it sat on and its ability to mine and market that.

Another strength was its special ties with England and the trade that provided. This stemmed from the turn of the eighteenth century, when the elector of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg rather unexpectedly also became King George 1 of England, the founder of the House of Hanover. George was a distant cousin of England's Queen Anne, the last of the House of Stuart monarchs. Although there were some fifty candidates ahead of him in the English succession, by the Act of Settlement of 1701, the new monarch had to be a Protestant. Everyone in line before George was Catholic. Upon mounting the English throne, George retained his hold on the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and, although there were dukes in residence there in subsequent generations, the ties between the two states were firm.

The importance of the current duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, residing in the palace on the River Limenau in Lüneburg, also was firm. Thus, although there was plenty of wealth in the city to provide a master pargeter and interior wood carver plenty of business, no one in the city was a more important client than the duke was.

If Rudolf had a moment to think for himself while working out the needs for his services in the restoration of the burned wing of the duke's palace, he might have given a thought or three to the wisdom of leaving his young, voluptuous, and neglected wife alone in his residence with his equally young and more comely apprentice. But he evidently didn't give the wisdom of doing so a thought, or he might have kept Johann with him at the palace for those two nights. He might have anyway, if he hadn't been assigned a bed in a dormitory rather than a private chamber.

Still, what then transpired might not have done so if Johann had been given access to any but the crudest ale in this life thus far—or if he hadn't been as naïve as he was.

Christina's expressed fears of being alone in the house without Rudolf and her opinion that it would be easier just to serve Johann dinner at the table in the second-floor dining room rather than leaving it for him by the stairs and retrieving the plate from the first-floor workshop later seemed so reasonable—especially after the first heady stein of ale she brought down to him before dinner.

During dinner, she busied herself about the kitchen and small dining room, moving everywhere, always seeming to be close to Johann and brushing by him. And refilling his stein constantly. For several moments when he woke in the night, with a splitting headache and buried in the featherbedding in the third-floor bedroom, Johann assumed that it was one of those nights Rudolf was alone at home and that it was the master who was in the bed beside him.

But of course it wasn't Master Rudolf who was in bed beside him. His eyes opened wide when one small, plump hand spread its fingers and palm on his chest and the other glided down his belly and into his bush and grasped his cock. Christina was the one in bed with him, gazing at him with loving and slitted eyes and cooing softly to herself.

"Please, let's do it again," she cooed.

Do it again? He had already fucked her? He already was undone.

He couldn't remember, even days later, whether he had enjoyed the first fucking, but he had no doubt that he enjoyed the next—when Christina, seeing that he was awake, rolled over on top of him, impaled herself on his erect cock, pulled his face up between her pendulous breasts, and began to ride him to an ejaculation—not his first that night, if Christina was to be believed, and certainly not his last.

This was all new to Johann—and not at all unpleasant. Christina kept him well-oiled with smooth, strong ale for the next two days. If, on the occasions that Johann attended Rudolf at the palace, the older man hadn't been engulfed in the work that the duke wanted to have done and he had paid the least attention, he would have seen that Johann couldn't walk straight and had a sloppy grin on his face when the young apprentice visited the palace restoration site. But in these early days on the palace project, Rudolf was all business.

Christina couldn't get enough of Johann. They fucked in the shower shed, shivering under the trickle of cold water, Johann fucking Christina against the wall. They fucked on one of the shop tables and on the kitchen table and on the dining table. And they fucked in the featherbed at night.

It was only when the ale gave out that Johann began to realize and consider what they were doing—and when Christina's plain face hove into view as often as her plump breasts and buttocks and the mysterious slits, crevasses, and knob of her womanhood. Her insatiable demands and the increasing possessiveness of her sharp tongue also built to the point where Johann began to feel trapped and to where his mind started to drift more to Rudolf's muscular body and cock than to Christina's curves and cunt.

It was with great relief that, summoned to the palace to start work—with bed and board—there alongside and under Rudolf on the third day, now that Rudolf had been assigned a private sleeping chamber, that Johann fled the house in a rush of blushes and awkward speech.

* * * *

En route to the palace, Johann paused at the town square, where a small troop of newly recruited soldiers was mustering and where other young men were gathered around a recruiting table. This was where Johann had been destined to be if Rudolf had not offered him the apprenticeship. There were days when Johann wondered if he would not have been better to go with the Hessian troops—called this because this entire region of German was known as Hesse—for adventure in the New World.