[v-day] Ghosts of Old Dreamers
0
Spoiler:
Memories prey on the mind; in our season most of all, old men. Into the harsh and frigid air of the anglo-saxon mountains emerge plenty a young lover; men, women, even children. Every nineteenth day of this purest of months they brave the cold and emerge to weave impressions into the wrinkled foreheads of old men such as ourselves.
There is nary a February that passes that does not provoke in me such memories fond, nor is there a day passes that I feel such long woven regret.
It is on nights like these the winds fall from the highlands into our sleepy little villages and rap at our windows and doors, the forlorn ghosts of lovers past. When those winds blow they hold a ghost for me, I see it every night within my dreams.
The first estate my parents bought me was a horrid mansion that sat amidst the Fens to the north of Cambridge. My father had made up his mind, on a suggestion from my dear wife; a wise women of noble upbringing who had made the best of a situation, that is after being forced upon me by our families, and announced we should oversee my father’s farming businesses in the east. As a strict member of Liverpool nobility, my father seemed to relish the idea of testing his son amongst the hardships of the world, and the closeness of the malaria-infested marshes seemed to encourage his hopes of taking heat to the brittle iron spine I had.
It was set forth from then upon that I, at the age of 25, with my Wife Eloise, of a tender 22, would oversee all the planting, harvest, and draining that took place within Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. My wife had made a crucial miscalculation as she arrived six months to the date of our wedding to the Wanderley Estate. For Eloise had managed not only to carry us but also our child; the product of our only consummation, into the middle of the Fenlands during the heat of summer, with only three months to go until the hottest day of the hottest month of the year.
How I survived the first five years remains a complete mystery, but I proved my mettle and gifted my wife another child; the fruit of our second and final frigid copulation. It was within her own mind that she formed that summer of 1913 a steel born idea to hire a maid. With the brain of a schoolmarm my wife had decided that men had no place around her children, and I was for one ready to agree with her for it was nary a week later that she sent off to Cambridge for a girl, experienced with childrearing to assist us in this most challenging endeavor. Her note called for a plain girl, not to kind to the eyes for she knew far too well the ways of husbands and she was not about to become some cuckolded wife whose husband had been willed away by a specious mistress.
It was by some miracle that we came to acquire the services of Anne. She was an old maid at the age of thirty but came from a well respected family. Her soft and shy demeanor that led her to be far more interested in children then adults, a weakness that left her single many years after her siblings had married. She handled our children better than either of us could, with an innate ability to sooth them in a nearly supernatural manner, taking the appearance of a fairy godmother with her wise face and large spectacles.
Soon it was not only our children who were entranced by her gaze, for even my wife soon came to trust Anne as if she were her sister. I myself had allowed her special privileges not provided to any of the other staff on the estate. Her kind demeanor soon broke the barrier of my soul.
If it hadn’t been for the Lanning Contract I probably would have never broke down. Nevertheless, in the legendary summer heat of 1914 I lost all sight of myself. The Lanning Contract was a simple agreement between me and the local Lanning Family whose property included a large amount of undrained fens with the largest being Wicked Fen, a supposedly cursed marsh that lay between three of my families farms and adjacent to a spring that seemed impossible to stop. As much as my contractors had tried to drain the area it kept refilling causing disaster after expensive disaster and leading me to lose my head. I had long since passed the phase of anger, as our drainage attempts failed for the fifth time.
As I sat on the floor of my office papers spread around me, weeping in complete childlike hopelessness the door opened quite slowly. Anne entered the room with a surprising quickness, her long skirt fluttering behind her as the door closed. Her shyness soon resurfaced once she saw who was crying.
“M-Master Daniels?” Her childrearing mode had clicked off and a flustered blush seemed to creep across her cheeks.
“Wha-what do you wa-want?” I sputtered as I wiped tears from my face.
Within moments, I was swept in between two arms and was clasped between two soft heaving bosoms. My tears were gone, as I attempted to regain composure I tried to move away.
“Anne..that’s quite enough…of that.” I coughed midsentence feeling clearly uncomfortable. Anne quickly let go, confused and scared at her own actions.
“I’m sorry Master…I don’t know what came over me…” She blushed and looked down, placing a hand on her warm cheek.
“It’s just for a moment there you reminded me so much of a child…” She took a few steps backwards and I slowly adjusted my suit.
“Well...” I said, frozen awkwardly unable to think how to respond to that.
“Just forget about it…” I said as I bent down slowly to pick up the papers that lay scattered around the room.
“Here let me help with that.” Anne leaned down, slowly picking up the papers from the floor. I took them from her and immediately returned to my desk.
“Yes…well if there’s anything else I can help you with, don’t hesitate to ask…” I turned around slowly looking out the window of my office, pushing back the uneasiness that slowly crept into my mind.
“But sir…I’m here to help you.”
Her soft voice washed over me like the waves of a hurricane, my heart seemed to explode at those very words.
“Well...Um…yes…ah. You see Anne.”
I turned around only to see her face, a few inches away from mine; her eyes filled with genuine concern, her hand moving up to my head, coming down, and petting me.
I stood there frozen for what seemed like a eternity, my modern British upbringing crashing down around me. Everything I had been taught since I was a child, my prim and proper upbringing being torn away from me, leaving me as naked as a babe. In that moment and the moments after I let all my troubles and worries fall out, crash to the ground like a sack of boulders thrown from the White Cliffs of Dover, exploding into the sea as a million bits of grey essence. I cried as Anne held me.
I let out everything I had held in the back of my mind for the past thirty years of my life, the rigid upbringing and high expectations my parents pushed on to me as a child, the unhappy and sexless marriage I shared with Eloise, the fear I had of failing to follow in my father’s footsteps. All these things I told to Anne and she accepted them with a gentle kind and loving grace as if she were listening to a child, and I began to adore her for that.
Anne seemed to hold a natural grace whenever I found myself in her presence. Every fleeting moment with her seemed to echo within my heart as an eternal and inescapable seductive drone. Every shape made within her frame seemed to enchant me, from the shapes her lips took to the way her hands curled back underneath each other, and from the way her eyes looked at me to the way her voice echoed in my mind, searching and piercing the very fabric of my brittle shell.
If it were not for Eloise our story would have been one of a simple summer passion, furnished by two glowing hearts amidst the humid swamps of the fenland. Eloise nonetheless had always maintained a steady eye upon me when it came to dealing with Anne and despite the past year of uneventful activity, precedence never seemed to build for her any trust in me.
It was with her watchful serpentine eyes Eloise spotted the ever increasing amount of time spent in our conversations, and she had soon made up her mind to have Anne replaced. Eloise informed me that Anne would be let go with all the accusatory tone of a priest speaking to his congregation. Eloise had set it in her mind that she herself would travel to Cambridge to find a replacement.
For three days I argued with the cold head of our frozen mansion, I pleaded and begged her to leave Anne be. Initially I denied all wrongdoing; then I admitted to only a minor misgiving, finally I demanded that Anne not be punished for my own wrongdoing. Nothing I could say would change Eloise’s mind, and that Friday she set out to Cambridge.
In a feverish rage I locked myself in my own room, weeping like a baby for a entire day. The punishment of being disconnected from the only humane bond I had experienced in my entire life quickly became a conscious ailment of my own making. Upon the second day my door opened, cut from the outside as if some great and wise creature had chosen to mark upon me a great plan for the remaining days of my sad little existence.
Standing in the doorway; with blinding light flooding around her frame, was Anne. The light and the figure behind it burned its way into my brain, cutting into the narrow cave I had dug. She entered, the door swinging close behind her, and she held me with a caring softness. In a sweat-drenched passion I embraced her, in a way that was far apart from her motherly care. If I had not sinned before then certainly I was prepared to now.
Our lips met in a clashing shock, my fiery, passionate, reddened state against her pale calm assuring aura. She lifted me up in her hands, gently embracing me as a babe to her gentle bosoms. It set my soul on fire and my heart burned like the sun.
“Anne…” I drenched my lips in her name savoring it like a sweet wine.
She only stroked my cheek and shushed me, her hands moving down the pitiful childish form I had taken, pulling off sweat stained pajamas and undergarments, grabbing and squeezing my tender flesh, molding me into a greater man. Growing as I did in such a state she stared, that gentle and constant tender smile upon her pale lips, her dimpled cheeks shaking as I trembled under her touch. She pulled at me, over and over, her hands lapping at me like tender waves, and I could no longer hold myself back.
“Anne..oh..God…” I let myself go, unable to be controlled or delayed any longer. My sweaty frame stretched under hers, my white seed splattering into her hand and past it, against the bright blue dress she wore. Lifting her fingers, she slowly swallowed all of my childish filth, and a great sorrow came over me as I leaned forward to her breasts, heaving as tears fell through my eyes, forming rivulets along my cheeks, and burying themselves into her collar.
“Be quiet my dear boy, don't cry.”
She consoled me with tender kisses as I slowly undid her dress, her slender fingers moving up my own chest, teasing my bones, running slick across my sweat drenched exterior.
“You can't leave...Anne.”
I choked out a solemn admission, a childish acknowledgement she soon answered with her tongue. She moved up to my mouth, slowly suckling it to her own, tenderly petting it with her soft and rigid muscle.
“Shhhhh...”
She whispered as she slowly pulled off her underwear, laying in front of me, her naked figure illuminated only by the soft glow of the moon that streamed through my window. I descended, my mouth slowly kissing and tasting every part of her frame. I licked up my tears from her collar as I descended to her breasts, with sucking that caused her soft figure to shake underneath me. My hands soon descended into her depths, plunging beneath her silky flaps, remerging wet beneath the moons rays. I prepared myself fully, plunging my prick deep within her, her body pressing up against mine as her lips opened to softly moan. I gave myself into the utter ecstasy that was her tenderness, my hips rocking into her again and again as she pushed up to meet me. Our tender kisses burned with each stroke, becoming stronger, her snatch turning tighter, and my prick harder. As I placed my head to her bosom, and stroked her hardened nipples her body began to shake in ways that It could not stop from shaking. I myself begin to tighten up as my bones jerked, snapping in pleasure as I came inside of her.
We collapsed in our tangled spider web, our slick sweaty bodies grabbing one another for heat. In my final minutes of consciousness I heard her tickling voice flow into my ears as a gentle whisper.
“I love you.”
When I woke up the next morning Anne was gone and Eloise had returned from Cambridge with a new maid. In the nights that followed, I often entertained the thought of hiring a private investigator to search for Anne but a mere week later the Great War started. My father received a contract to provide food to the troops, and Eloise soon became a well to do figure amongst the nobility in no small thanks to that.
In the years that followed, we must have moved a hundred different times, and lived in 50 different homes. The horrid mansion in the fens was demolished in the winter of 1926, replaced by much needed crops that helped feed our nation during the horrors of the great depression.
I never once stopped thinking about Anne, and in the 1938 when my wife died I decided to go searching for her. The little I found about Anne Helmsway was word of mouth, passed on from her friends and parents. After leaving Wanderley she spent a couple of weeks working odd jobs, never being able to find one she enjoyed again. So in the Winter if 1914 she joined the army and begun to train as a nurse. She attended wounded soldiers in the French trenches for four years, only to be killed when her motorcade ran over a undetonated mortar while traveling.
It’s been two years since I searched for Anne, and not a night does not pass that I do not remember her. And on nights like these, when the winds fall from the highlands to bring ghost to the fine citizens of London I always imagine I will be visited by her again. I’m an old man, and far too tired for such superstitions. It is far too late for me to wait for a glance of a wisp. Instead I should sleep, for I hear the wind coming already, the buzz of planes in the sky and the sirens all around. What is better then to dream of what is lost? Moreover, should I be so lucky to not wake up in the morning, I am certain that the beyond holds better images than the ghosts of old dreamers.
There is nary a February that passes that does not provoke in me such memories fond, nor is there a day passes that I feel such long woven regret.
It is on nights like these the winds fall from the highlands into our sleepy little villages and rap at our windows and doors, the forlorn ghosts of lovers past. When those winds blow they hold a ghost for me, I see it every night within my dreams.
The first estate my parents bought me was a horrid mansion that sat amidst the Fens to the north of Cambridge. My father had made up his mind, on a suggestion from my dear wife; a wise women of noble upbringing who had made the best of a situation, that is after being forced upon me by our families, and announced we should oversee my father’s farming businesses in the east. As a strict member of Liverpool nobility, my father seemed to relish the idea of testing his son amongst the hardships of the world, and the closeness of the malaria-infested marshes seemed to encourage his hopes of taking heat to the brittle iron spine I had.
It was set forth from then upon that I, at the age of 25, with my Wife Eloise, of a tender 22, would oversee all the planting, harvest, and draining that took place within Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. My wife had made a crucial miscalculation as she arrived six months to the date of our wedding to the Wanderley Estate. For Eloise had managed not only to carry us but also our child; the product of our only consummation, into the middle of the Fenlands during the heat of summer, with only three months to go until the hottest day of the hottest month of the year.
How I survived the first five years remains a complete mystery, but I proved my mettle and gifted my wife another child; the fruit of our second and final frigid copulation. It was within her own mind that she formed that summer of 1913 a steel born idea to hire a maid. With the brain of a schoolmarm my wife had decided that men had no place around her children, and I was for one ready to agree with her for it was nary a week later that she sent off to Cambridge for a girl, experienced with childrearing to assist us in this most challenging endeavor. Her note called for a plain girl, not to kind to the eyes for she knew far too well the ways of husbands and she was not about to become some cuckolded wife whose husband had been willed away by a specious mistress.
It was by some miracle that we came to acquire the services of Anne. She was an old maid at the age of thirty but came from a well respected family. Her soft and shy demeanor that led her to be far more interested in children then adults, a weakness that left her single many years after her siblings had married. She handled our children better than either of us could, with an innate ability to sooth them in a nearly supernatural manner, taking the appearance of a fairy godmother with her wise face and large spectacles.
Soon it was not only our children who were entranced by her gaze, for even my wife soon came to trust Anne as if she were her sister. I myself had allowed her special privileges not provided to any of the other staff on the estate. Her kind demeanor soon broke the barrier of my soul.
If it hadn’t been for the Lanning Contract I probably would have never broke down. Nevertheless, in the legendary summer heat of 1914 I lost all sight of myself. The Lanning Contract was a simple agreement between me and the local Lanning Family whose property included a large amount of undrained fens with the largest being Wicked Fen, a supposedly cursed marsh that lay between three of my families farms and adjacent to a spring that seemed impossible to stop. As much as my contractors had tried to drain the area it kept refilling causing disaster after expensive disaster and leading me to lose my head. I had long since passed the phase of anger, as our drainage attempts failed for the fifth time.
As I sat on the floor of my office papers spread around me, weeping in complete childlike hopelessness the door opened quite slowly. Anne entered the room with a surprising quickness, her long skirt fluttering behind her as the door closed. Her shyness soon resurfaced once she saw who was crying.
“M-Master Daniels?” Her childrearing mode had clicked off and a flustered blush seemed to creep across her cheeks.
“Wha-what do you wa-want?” I sputtered as I wiped tears from my face.
Within moments, I was swept in between two arms and was clasped between two soft heaving bosoms. My tears were gone, as I attempted to regain composure I tried to move away.
“Anne..that’s quite enough…of that.” I coughed midsentence feeling clearly uncomfortable. Anne quickly let go, confused and scared at her own actions.
“I’m sorry Master…I don’t know what came over me…” She blushed and looked down, placing a hand on her warm cheek.
“It’s just for a moment there you reminded me so much of a child…” She took a few steps backwards and I slowly adjusted my suit.
“Well...” I said, frozen awkwardly unable to think how to respond to that.
“Just forget about it…” I said as I bent down slowly to pick up the papers that lay scattered around the room.
“Here let me help with that.” Anne leaned down, slowly picking up the papers from the floor. I took them from her and immediately returned to my desk.
“Yes…well if there’s anything else I can help you with, don’t hesitate to ask…” I turned around slowly looking out the window of my office, pushing back the uneasiness that slowly crept into my mind.
“But sir…I’m here to help you.”
Her soft voice washed over me like the waves of a hurricane, my heart seemed to explode at those very words.
“Well...Um…yes…ah. You see Anne.”
I turned around only to see her face, a few inches away from mine; her eyes filled with genuine concern, her hand moving up to my head, coming down, and petting me.
I stood there frozen for what seemed like a eternity, my modern British upbringing crashing down around me. Everything I had been taught since I was a child, my prim and proper upbringing being torn away from me, leaving me as naked as a babe. In that moment and the moments after I let all my troubles and worries fall out, crash to the ground like a sack of boulders thrown from the White Cliffs of Dover, exploding into the sea as a million bits of grey essence. I cried as Anne held me.
I let out everything I had held in the back of my mind for the past thirty years of my life, the rigid upbringing and high expectations my parents pushed on to me as a child, the unhappy and sexless marriage I shared with Eloise, the fear I had of failing to follow in my father’s footsteps. All these things I told to Anne and she accepted them with a gentle kind and loving grace as if she were listening to a child, and I began to adore her for that.
Anne seemed to hold a natural grace whenever I found myself in her presence. Every fleeting moment with her seemed to echo within my heart as an eternal and inescapable seductive drone. Every shape made within her frame seemed to enchant me, from the shapes her lips took to the way her hands curled back underneath each other, and from the way her eyes looked at me to the way her voice echoed in my mind, searching and piercing the very fabric of my brittle shell.
If it were not for Eloise our story would have been one of a simple summer passion, furnished by two glowing hearts amidst the humid swamps of the fenland. Eloise nonetheless had always maintained a steady eye upon me when it came to dealing with Anne and despite the past year of uneventful activity, precedence never seemed to build for her any trust in me.
It was with her watchful serpentine eyes Eloise spotted the ever increasing amount of time spent in our conversations, and she had soon made up her mind to have Anne replaced. Eloise informed me that Anne would be let go with all the accusatory tone of a priest speaking to his congregation. Eloise had set it in her mind that she herself would travel to Cambridge to find a replacement.
For three days I argued with the cold head of our frozen mansion, I pleaded and begged her to leave Anne be. Initially I denied all wrongdoing; then I admitted to only a minor misgiving, finally I demanded that Anne not be punished for my own wrongdoing. Nothing I could say would change Eloise’s mind, and that Friday she set out to Cambridge.
In a feverish rage I locked myself in my own room, weeping like a baby for a entire day. The punishment of being disconnected from the only humane bond I had experienced in my entire life quickly became a conscious ailment of my own making. Upon the second day my door opened, cut from the outside as if some great and wise creature had chosen to mark upon me a great plan for the remaining days of my sad little existence.
Standing in the doorway; with blinding light flooding around her frame, was Anne. The light and the figure behind it burned its way into my brain, cutting into the narrow cave I had dug. She entered, the door swinging close behind her, and she held me with a caring softness. In a sweat-drenched passion I embraced her, in a way that was far apart from her motherly care. If I had not sinned before then certainly I was prepared to now.
Our lips met in a clashing shock, my fiery, passionate, reddened state against her pale calm assuring aura. She lifted me up in her hands, gently embracing me as a babe to her gentle bosoms. It set my soul on fire and my heart burned like the sun.
“Anne…” I drenched my lips in her name savoring it like a sweet wine.
She only stroked my cheek and shushed me, her hands moving down the pitiful childish form I had taken, pulling off sweat stained pajamas and undergarments, grabbing and squeezing my tender flesh, molding me into a greater man. Growing as I did in such a state she stared, that gentle and constant tender smile upon her pale lips, her dimpled cheeks shaking as I trembled under her touch. She pulled at me, over and over, her hands lapping at me like tender waves, and I could no longer hold myself back.
“Anne..oh..God…” I let myself go, unable to be controlled or delayed any longer. My sweaty frame stretched under hers, my white seed splattering into her hand and past it, against the bright blue dress she wore. Lifting her fingers, she slowly swallowed all of my childish filth, and a great sorrow came over me as I leaned forward to her breasts, heaving as tears fell through my eyes, forming rivulets along my cheeks, and burying themselves into her collar.
“Be quiet my dear boy, don't cry.”
She consoled me with tender kisses as I slowly undid her dress, her slender fingers moving up my own chest, teasing my bones, running slick across my sweat drenched exterior.
“You can't leave...Anne.”
I choked out a solemn admission, a childish acknowledgement she soon answered with her tongue. She moved up to my mouth, slowly suckling it to her own, tenderly petting it with her soft and rigid muscle.
“Shhhhh...”
She whispered as she slowly pulled off her underwear, laying in front of me, her naked figure illuminated only by the soft glow of the moon that streamed through my window. I descended, my mouth slowly kissing and tasting every part of her frame. I licked up my tears from her collar as I descended to her breasts, with sucking that caused her soft figure to shake underneath me. My hands soon descended into her depths, plunging beneath her silky flaps, remerging wet beneath the moons rays. I prepared myself fully, plunging my prick deep within her, her body pressing up against mine as her lips opened to softly moan. I gave myself into the utter ecstasy that was her tenderness, my hips rocking into her again and again as she pushed up to meet me. Our tender kisses burned with each stroke, becoming stronger, her snatch turning tighter, and my prick harder. As I placed my head to her bosom, and stroked her hardened nipples her body began to shake in ways that It could not stop from shaking. I myself begin to tighten up as my bones jerked, snapping in pleasure as I came inside of her.
We collapsed in our tangled spider web, our slick sweaty bodies grabbing one another for heat. In my final minutes of consciousness I heard her tickling voice flow into my ears as a gentle whisper.
“I love you.”
When I woke up the next morning Anne was gone and Eloise had returned from Cambridge with a new maid. In the nights that followed, I often entertained the thought of hiring a private investigator to search for Anne but a mere week later the Great War started. My father received a contract to provide food to the troops, and Eloise soon became a well to do figure amongst the nobility in no small thanks to that.
In the years that followed, we must have moved a hundred different times, and lived in 50 different homes. The horrid mansion in the fens was demolished in the winter of 1926, replaced by much needed crops that helped feed our nation during the horrors of the great depression.
I never once stopped thinking about Anne, and in the 1938 when my wife died I decided to go searching for her. The little I found about Anne Helmsway was word of mouth, passed on from her friends and parents. After leaving Wanderley she spent a couple of weeks working odd jobs, never being able to find one she enjoyed again. So in the Winter if 1914 she joined the army and begun to train as a nurse. She attended wounded soldiers in the French trenches for four years, only to be killed when her motorcade ran over a undetonated mortar while traveling.
It’s been two years since I searched for Anne, and not a night does not pass that I do not remember her. And on nights like these, when the winds fall from the highlands to bring ghost to the fine citizens of London I always imagine I will be visited by her again. I’m an old man, and far too tired for such superstitions. It is far too late for me to wait for a glance of a wisp. Instead I should sleep, for I hear the wind coming already, the buzz of planes in the sky and the sirens all around. What is better then to dream of what is lost? Moreover, should I be so lucky to not wake up in the morning, I am certain that the beyond holds better images than the ghosts of old dreamers.