the day, except that now my arm ended in a piece of wood and not even a mitten of leather.
He understood and patted my head. 'Sleeping now a short time should you be,' he murmured. 'Wanting you walked the afternoon altogether she was, but good girl you are for Erik, so resting you shall be, but for long not, for searching for us she will otherwise be.'
'Woof,' I mumbled, and laying my head on his thigh, closed my eyes. I drifted into a shallow sleep, a sleep filled with dream images of me and Erik, Meg and Greg and Anne-Marie and Andrea, all of us romping through woods and all of us naked with our unnaturally white flesh covered in big black spots. All of us, that is, except Meg, who wore a full-length coat with a high fur collar and smoked a cigarette through a long holder as she sneered at us through darkly made-up eyes.
All too soon it was time to be on the move again. This time Erik made me walk ahead of him and I shivered at the thought of the picture he was now getting, my bare arse and my still wet quim jutting out behind me framed by the dark leather. When he reached forward and patted my damp pussy, I knew he was not entirely unappreciative of the spectacle.
By now I was beginning to get some idea of the size of the Hacklebury estate. Even allowing for my slow progress in the all-fours mode, we had been walking, following the perimeter fence, for maybe four or five miles in all, and the curve of the boundary was so slight that I calculated it would take us several more hours at the very least before we had covered even one quadrant. History was my strong subject, much more so than maths, but even I was able to work out that, unless there were some sharper corners in the fence, the woods within the wall had to cover a good few square miles.
As I plodded on, I was thinking.
If Gregory Hacklebury had owned such a large-sized plot of England as recently as the eighteen thirties, he and his family must have been pretty powerful, or at least well known, and yet I had been unable to unearth any record of the bastard in my research. How, or why, should that be? Had something happened that prompted local historians to expunge all trace of him from their histories?
It seemed unlikely, not so far forward in time, relatively speaking. By the nineteenth century, records were being kept in something approaching a modern form and often with a zeal that would otherwise only be found in train spotters, and it would have required more than just a local conspiracy to bury all traces of a man and a family who must have ranked pretty high in the league of landowners.
I felt another pat on my bottom, but it barely interrupted my latest train of thought. I considered other possibilities, some of them promising, others falling more under the category of idle speculation.
Perhaps Hacklebury himself did not actually own the land. Perhaps he was some sort of minor relative, a nephew or a second cousin, something like that, and the real owner was away helping to conquer the growing empire. Maybe he was nothing more than an employee, a steward keeping the place going for a travelling master. Maybe Hacklebury wasn't his real name at all... but no, that would never do, and besides, most of these possibilities made his determination to marry Angelina somewhat strange and improbable. An heiress would not be permitted to marry a mere steward, and neither was it so likely that her guardian would permit a wedding with a minor relative. And besides, I knew he was a Sir, or at least all the staff I had met so far seemed to believe he was.
It was all very curious, I thought as the hard-baked ground with its smattering of browning grass continued to pass beneath me. Could he have won this estate in some game of chance? That may have sounded ludicrous at first, but I knew that sort of thing went on between young men in this century. The modern day equivalent of millions of pounds changed hands on the turn of a single card. If Hacklebury had won the
He understood and patted my head. 'Sleeping now a short time should you be,' he murmured. 'Wanting you walked the afternoon altogether she was, but good girl you are for Erik, so resting you shall be, but for long not, for searching for us she will otherwise be.'
'Woof,' I mumbled, and laying my head on his thigh, closed my eyes. I drifted into a shallow sleep, a sleep filled with dream images of me and Erik, Meg and Greg and Anne-Marie and Andrea, all of us romping through woods and all of us naked with our unnaturally white flesh covered in big black spots. All of us, that is, except Meg, who wore a full-length coat with a high fur collar and smoked a cigarette through a long holder as she sneered at us through darkly made-up eyes.
All too soon it was time to be on the move again. This time Erik made me walk ahead of him and I shivered at the thought of the picture he was now getting, my bare arse and my still wet quim jutting out behind me framed by the dark leather. When he reached forward and patted my damp pussy, I knew he was not entirely unappreciative of the spectacle.
By now I was beginning to get some idea of the size of the Hacklebury estate. Even allowing for my slow progress in the all-fours mode, we had been walking, following the perimeter fence, for maybe four or five miles in all, and the curve of the boundary was so slight that I calculated it would take us several more hours at the very least before we had covered even one quadrant. History was my strong subject, much more so than maths, but even I was able to work out that, unless there were some sharper corners in the fence, the woods within the wall had to cover a good few square miles.
As I plodded on, I was thinking.
If Gregory Hacklebury had owned such a large-sized plot of England as recently as the eighteen thirties, he and his family must have been pretty powerful, or at least well known, and yet I had been unable to unearth any record of the bastard in my research. How, or why, should that be? Had something happened that prompted local historians to expunge all trace of him from their histories?
It seemed unlikely, not so far forward in time, relatively speaking. By the nineteenth century, records were being kept in something approaching a modern form and often with a zeal that would otherwise only be found in train spotters, and it would have required more than just a local conspiracy to bury all traces of a man and a family who must have ranked pretty high in the league of landowners.
I felt another pat on my bottom, but it barely interrupted my latest train of thought. I considered other possibilities, some of them promising, others falling more under the category of idle speculation.
Perhaps Hacklebury himself did not actually own the land. Perhaps he was some sort of minor relative, a nephew or a second cousin, something like that, and the real owner was away helping to conquer the growing empire. Maybe he was nothing more than an employee, a steward keeping the place going for a travelling master. Maybe Hacklebury wasn't his real name at all... but no, that would never do, and besides, most of these possibilities made his determination to marry Angelina somewhat strange and improbable. An heiress would not be permitted to marry a mere steward, and neither was it so likely that her guardian would permit a wedding with a minor relative. And besides, I knew he was a Sir, or at least all the staff I had met so far seemed to believe he was.
It was all very curious, I thought as the hard-baked ground with its smattering of browning grass continued to pass beneath me. Could he have won this estate in some game of chance? That may have sounded ludicrous at first, but I knew that sort of thing went on between young men in this century. The modern day equivalent of millions of pounds changed hands on the turn of a single card. If Hacklebury had won the
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