The Baby

The first thing Kathyn saw when he opened his eyes the next morning was Willym's dick. He blinked at it with as much disdain as it was possible to muster while half-asleep.

It came nearer, the red shiny head like an apple with the stem plucked out, nudging at his upper lip and leaving its savoury-salt taste on his tongue. Willym wrinkled his nose and turned away, burrowing his face into the pillow.

It moved to the cavity of his ear and prodded that instead, as if Willym was planning to literally fuck his brains out.

Kathyn opened his mouth, prepared to give Willym an earful (though also prepared, and not entirely unwilling, to be given a mouthful of cock). Then he noticed the colour of the light and realised with a start it was already afternoon. He'd returned to bed sometime after midnight. Must have slept right through. Late as it was, he didn't feel like getting up.

Willym was kneeling on the bed beside him with his elbow propped on the windowsill, smoking and quite nude. `Morning, kittlin. I sorted me own breakfast, for I didn't like to wake you. You sleep so beautifully.'

`You were going to come on my face, weren't you?'

Willym only smirked.

Kathyn dug the heels of his palms into the hollows of his eyes. 'I can't believe this. You should be the one sleeping in after last night. I hope you remember how you behaved.'

Willym's eyes smouldered with divers fires, but contrition was not among them.

`Aye. An I remember how you behaved an all.' Kathyn pinkened. He remembered hitting his head on a bannister, then hitting Willym when he stopped screwing him to see if he was all right. Perhaps it was best he let it be. Drat him if he wasn't going to confiscate whatever was left of those bottles, though.

He started to lever his upper body of the pillows and was riven by pain. His legs by no means felt solid enough to support even his slender weight, and he decided that he was entitled, for once, to spend the day in bed.

`Don't get up', Willym said softly. `I'll get ye whatever ye want, sweetheart.'

Kathyn settled back on the pillows and smiled slowly up at him. `What do I want, Willye?'

An answering smile spread over Willym's face. `I reckon I can guess.' He tenderly slid Kathyn's shift up his belly, parted his legs and penetrated him.

Kathyn tensed up, then relaxed, the pain spiking as he was breached and subsiding as Willym settled deep in his core. It was the sex that hurt him. But it was the sex that healed him too, inside and out. And he needed it, as much as Willye did, though he was less showy about it. They had so much making up to do.

Once he was lodged deep within Kathyn's womb, Willym gently flipped them round so he was on his back and Kathyn on top of him. It was the position that put the least strain on him. Willym pulled the blankets over them both.

Kathyn smoothed his hands up and down Willym's bare chest as he rocked gently back and forth on his brother's cock. Willym grabbed one and brought it to his mouth.

`Such lovely hands', he mumbled. `Like flower petals.' He licked a finger and circled it round Kathyn's palm, making him squirm on Willym's cock and let out a noise half-gasp and half-giggle.

`Still can't believe I've got you. You're a miracle, Kath. My own miracle.'

Kathyn wrapped his arms around Willym's trunk and laid his head on his chest, letting his brother take over the thrusting. There were drops of sweat shining on Willym's smooth pectorals. They were in range of Kathyn's tongue, so he stuck it out and lapped them up. Willym groaned, and Kathyn felt his cock throb against his inner walls.

`You're not—are you?'

`Not yet.'

Kathyn felt more awake and stronger now, so he didn't object when Willym re-positioned them once more. He arranged Kathyn on his side with his lower leg straight and the top one drawn up to his chest, supported by a pillow, while he knelt behind, straddling Kathyn's extended leg, holding his shoulder and upper thigh.

This was one of Willym's favourite positions, for it allowed him, he said, to go as deep as possible, direct to Kathyn's womb, hitting his pleasure bumps along the way, while giving him unfettered access to all of his body.

Kathyn lay passively, looking out the window, watching seagulls careening across the square of pale sky, while Willym worked his prick in and out, worked himself into a furious rhythm, squeezing his shoulder, slapping at his arse, and grunting as if he were harpooning a whale.

It felt like it, too. Kathyn was used to being dicked deep, but in this position there was a sharp sting every time Willym bottomed out, as if he really were about to fuck a hole in some fragile inner organ. He wasn't hard; the sensation was too intense. After a bit he felt like he had to urinate, but then a long pulse of spend squirted up his leg, as if forced out by Willym's relentless assault. For a moment the world blinked out of existence.

When it returned Willym hadn't paused, and was muttering, as if to himself, `Why cannot I have meself a little baby?'

He put his hand down to pinch Kathyn's arselips. `Here's a little cunt. Up in here—' he put his hand where the head of his cock pressed so far out under the flesh of Kathyn's belly it looked ready to burst clean through `—'s a little womb. Why can't I put a little bairn up in there? You know I could.'

`You know why', Kathyn said, pained that Willym was bringing it up again. He thought—he'd hoped—he might have let it go in three years. `You know well you know why.'

`If it's the marriage, I've got a mite o money now, and we could be off to the kirk tomorrow, and get that little slip o' paper yer so fussed o'er.'

`You know it is not that, Willym.'

`Then what? What is it? Don't you want children?'

Kathyn turned to look his brother straight in the face. `Aye, and a fine upbringing for a child it would be, with his father gone for most of his life, and each day never knowing if he'll come home at all. And what if you didn't come back? Then how would I keep a bairn? The way Mam kept us?'

Quick as a knifing there was a hand at his throat, not holding him, not yet, but there. `Are you trying to make me angry, love', Willym said, soft as a panther. `You know it won't work, not yet. I'm still too giddy at the sight of you.'

`I'm not trying to make you angry, but ding me down if ye have not made me so', Kathyn said, his frustration bringing out the brogue he'd worked so hard to bury. `How many times have we talked this over? And you bringing it up as if just to spoil my happiness.'

Willym looked stricken.

The problem was that Willym liked the idea of a baby. He liked the idea of Kathyn all round-bellied and breasted and scarce able to move. So did Kathyn. But he had thought about what it would mean to actually have a child. Willym had not.

Willym stroked his collarbone, the sudden menace gone. `Then why don't you come with me, Kath? They let wives on board, now. Oh, my love, you should see the new linesemen the Sea Lords aw come out wi—why, the smallest of em's big as Commonwealth Square. I swear, when you're in the guts of her you can't even feel her rocking, be it the highest seas there ever there was. You needn't even know you were at sea, Kath.'

`You know my feelings, Willye, as well you know my answer.'

Willym only snarled at this, punching the pillow near Kathyn's head and pouring all his frustration into the fuck. Kathyn's burgeoning erection wilted again under the withering force of Willym's fury. It was annihilating.

He wanted to shut his eyes and let himself be washed away by the pounding wave, but he could tell by the pattern of his breaths that Willym was near to it.

`Willym. Pull out.'

Willym made no move and no reply, but when Kathyn tried to roll away he held him fast. He swung Kathyn's crooked leg up and around his waist, shifting him on his back, and falling onto him, trapping him against the mattress. He pressed in as deep as he could without slipping his balls in as well, his cock a slick hard weight against the taut ring of his hole, bending his body around it. Kathyn imagined the prickhead knocking at the gate of his womb, only a few seconds from swamping it with teeming, virile sperm.

`Willym!' Kathyn beat on his back with the heels of his feet and hands, and finally, when this failed to dislodge him, sunk his teeth into Willym's shoulder.

At last Willym wrenched himself out of Kathyn with a snarl, and jerked away, onto his back. His cock, which had been in full-fuck only moments before, was red and twitching over his stomach like it thought it was still inside Kathyn. The firm muscles of his abdomen rippled and clenched for a few seconds before his climax burst in creamy white geysers over his stomach and chest. Willym, hands fisted by his sides, hardly seemed to notice. His jaw worked for a bit, then he ground out, glowering at the covers, `It's a damn load of fuckin bullshite. Stupid fuckin whore-bitch-son-of-a-slut.' The foul words cut the air between them like knives.

Kathyn wished he could credit his brother's command of colourful language to the navy, but unfortunately he'd acquired it much earlier than that, at the mouths of Mam's good-for-nothing `guests'. Normally he didn't around Kathyn, though. That is, he never had before (during sex was different; Kathyn classified that as onomatopoeia). But three years is a long time in anyone's life, and the three years between sixteen and nineteen might as well be thirty, for the difference they make. The boy who'd blushingly kissed him farewell at Lammastide was not the young man now eviscerating the air with more hideous sailor imprecations that Kathyn was glad he could not decipher.

`You talking about me, Willye?'

Willym, after a simmering moment, said, `No', though shortly.

He brooded in silence for a bit, absently wringing the last drops of come out of his cock, wiping his fingers on the covers. Then he said, `I'll be twenty come next week. I ought to have one by now.'

`You ought to have twenty wives and all', said Kathyn in a rare tart tone.

Willym tried to give a warning look, but ruined it by snorting. `Why would I want them when I've got you?', he asked, seeming restored somewhat to good humour now he'd vented his spleen (and his spume). `You're as good as twenty all together. Aye, and as pretty too.'

`Not hard in this town', Kathyn said, though he too was pleased despite himself. Willym worked out far too young that compliments were an easy way into Kathyn's good graces.

Willym laughed properly this time, a full, merry sound. `Christ, are you ever right. I felt like covering me eyes climbing up Cromwell-street. Never seen so many single women in a seatown. And aw wi hard windbit faces like they was wood-carved. Most of the boys get houses in other ports soon as they can, just to have somethin sightly t'screw.'

He scooped the come off his chest and spritzed it over Kathyn. Kathyn squawked and tried to shield himself, but Willym trapped his arms behind his back with one of his own, and with the other gathered up more of his spend to smear all over him, working it into his skin with firm, ungentle strokes that chafed Kathyn's soft flesh.

Then, before Kathyn had even fully caught his breath, he was back inside, hoisting Kathyn's leg over his shoulder in a scissor-fuck.

Kathyn's man was strong and tireless, and his manhood was so hard and so big, beating Kathyn's poor insides into a tingling mush. Kathyn put his hand down just to feel the girth of it pistoning under his fingertips, the slight indentations on either side the fat middle vein, running up from the base like the fluting of a Grecian pillar. This is mine, he thought. Nobody else'll ever touch this.

He sort of strummed it like the neck of a mandolin, and Willym kissed his foot. Not a chaste kiss, either, but a proper pash, slobbering over the toes and nipping at the heel. Kathyn squealed from the ticklish sensation and tried to push him off. Willym laughed. He dropped Kathyn's leg and then dropped on top of Kathyn, puffing as he rammed in even faster than before, the room filling with the sound of sharp wet slaps that made Kathyn cringe. `Good God, am I lucky to have you, eh? So sweet, so willing and eager, such a good cook, so neat and tidy, so soft and wet and—Oh, cunting Christ, Kathyn, I want to die with my dick inside you.'

`Don't you take His name so, heathen boy! I'm sure it was never I taught you such blasphemy'.

`No. You taught me better. And then I was your obedient pupil, but now I am grown and am the man of this house, and it is you must mind me. For I tell thee, Kath, I'm getting too big to be contradicted.'

`You're getting too big to be coped with is more like. Help, I feel like I've been split in two.'

He was actually starting to go numb. That sometimes happened when Willym went at him too hard or for too long. He supposed it was his body making it easier on itself, letting Willym have his pleasure without causing Kathyn too much pain.

`Aren't boys supposed to stop growing when they're teens? I swear you were as tall at four-ten as you are now. But you wurren't so thick--or so thick-headed!'

`Which head'ye mean?' Willym chuckled. He slipped out again, scrambling up to straddle Kathyn's chest. He skimmed his prick over and about his face, then held it tantalisingly out of reach. Kathyn opened his mouth to try to catch it, but Willym withdrew and slapped him.

The fire in his cheek spread through the rest of his face, through the rest of his body, down to his loins, which always got twitchy when Willym got handsy. Willym forced a thumb inbetwixt his lips, and Kathyn suckled it earnestly, hoping if he did it well enough, Willym would give him the real thing. But his brother held his mouth shut while he rubbed his fat, oozing cock all over Kathyn's lips, eyelids, nose, cheeks, forehead.

`Aboardship we played a game called penny-prick. Each man had to take out his yardarm, get it hard, and then he had to put down a penny, see, all the way from his hairs to his bell-end. It went round in turns—or ye could do it wi just two of yer—and he that took the most pennies took the lot, to keep. And who do ye think won?'

`Do I get three guesses?' Kathyn said, rolling his eyes.

Willym grinned, and came. `Tell thee summat—I grew three inch when I was yon, one for each year, and a lyk extra. The quartermaster had to have me special trousers made, for I kept tearing mine. I never touched meself, but at night I would come dreaming about you. I took to sleeping nekkid so's to keep from ruining me britches, but then the man in the hammock neath me complained, cos I was raining on him, ee said, so they put me on the bottom. Then they said I was floodin em, but that's just talk.'

`You sure about that?' Kathyn asked drily, or rather wetly, for with the amount of come Willym was pumping out he felt like he'd gone for an impromptu dive. It was all he could do to keep his nostrils clear, and keep breathing, as his brother's seed flowed over the hills and valleys of his face like a river of warm milk-honey, before cascading in little rivulets onto the already sopping pillow. He snorted, and coughed, swallowed all he could, and little bubbles frothed up in the flow, which was yet unabated, and Willym almost felt he could come again, right then. Dear God, but the noises his Kath made were the most adorable—at the same time the cutest and the filthiest—he wanted to shove his cock right down into Kath's belly and come till he drowned in it, and then bring him back to life by shoving his cock up his gut and fucking it all out again.

Kathyn looked down at his stomach, which was ever so slightly rounded, as if he'd just had a good meal. Which, he supposed, in a way, he had. He made no comment, but his eyes sparkled daringly at Willym.

Willym reached down to caress the taut mound of skin, evidently pleased with his handiwork. His handstaff was finally flagging, relaxing into the lovely half-way state where it was still long and plump, but also soft and malleable, and flopped about as he moved. Kathyn wanted to grab it with all the blinding desire of a cat or baby with a toy dangled under its nose, but forbore, since he knew it must lead to another round, and he wasn't ready for that till morning at the soonest. Now that the feeling was coming back it was like he'd fallen arse-first down a flight of stairs. A long flight of staires. But he blessed the pain, for it was the proof of Willym's love.

`It's the family way, Kath. You should know how our men are.'

Kathyn did know. Theyfolk were earthfolk, they said, born in the sheltered inland of the island. It was a mystery, even to themselves, where they had come from in the beginning, if they had not been born from the soil or the stone beneath, but they had been there before the English came in their tall ships from the bigger island across the seas.

Their very name, Meadowbrookes—their mother's, for, Kathyn discovered after she died, she had not been married to their father—was a sign of their belonging to the land. Their grandsire had been Bryne Brookes, and their granddam Mary Meadows (island names always matched like that. It was a quaint custom--one their mother had not continued, which was a shame, for to Kathyn's ears they had a lovely music).

Unlike the men of other lands, Island men came in two kinds: the first tall and strong and long of cock, and the second small and submissive and with insides that worked like women's. And though the islanders had long since blended with the incomers, by some chance of birth in Willym and Kathyn the two strains each ran almost true.

Yes, there was something of the Meadow man in Willym. Now and again Kathyn would catch him rolling his r's the way Grandam had. And he had moreover the same maisterly manner.

`Sometimes I swear you're a shade of Grandam. You don't remember our grandmother, do you, Willye? She was the best woman in all the worlds. Such a pity you never knew her. And such a pity she had no more children.'

`Why?'

`Why? If she had, we should have relations.'

Willym had finished wiping himself down, and threw the cloth—Kathyn's kerchief, the saucy boy—at Kathyn's face. Kathyn huffed in the heady scent of Willym's come for a moment, then pulled it off and threw it back. But Willym was already flouncing down on the bed beside him, his weight bouncing Kathyn several inches off the mattress. Willym caught him in sturdy arms and pulled him over onto himself like a living goosedown.

`'I think we just had them, love.'

`No-o. Relatives, I mean.'

`And what would we want them for?'

Kathyn's head was pillowed on Willym's chest, which was still rising and sinking rapidly from their sex-session; his legs were draped like jungle climbers over Willym's furred tree-trunks, while his privates were nestled into Willym's much larger organ, which he could feel sort of stretching, already firming up again. But he was determined to ignore that—this was a serious conversation. And he would give a serious answer, if he could just think for half a minute. And if Willym would stop blimmin pawing him.

`What for? For fie! What does anyone want a family for? If Grandam Meadows had had more children, we should have had one—uncles and aunts and cousins and the like.'

`And what then?' Willym's hands roved restlessly over Kathyn's body, patting, pinching, probing, as if afraid Kathyn would disappear if every inch of him wasn't touched every few seconds, like the opposite of an engraving. Kathyn thought about catching them and shoving them between his thighs to keep them still, but that would probably make things worse.

`Then we might have friends in the world besides ourselves. We might not be in such a state.'

The hands stopped. `What's wrong with our state?'

When Kathyn said nothing, not knowing where he could even begin, Willym tugged his head up by his hair and made him meet his eyes, which were earnest and troubled. `Kath. Are you unhappy?'

This, at least, he could answer. `Silly duffer—how could I be unhappy when I've got you?' However, because Kathyn was honest, and a lie by omission was still a lie, after a wavering moment he continued, talking softly, scoring a slow figure-of-eight around Willym's nipples with his nail. `But I am unhappy that—that I could not do better for you. That I could not give you more than what—' He sighed. `You were a keen child, you know, though lazy as a lizard. I taught you all I could, when I could, but I had not much learning myself.'

Willym's response was to flip them over, so Kathyn was on his back beneath him. He pinned Kathyn's wrists to the mattress above his head with one hand (how casually he held them—as if he didn't even realise he was doing to Kathyn...) and held his cheek with the other.

`Kathyn, my dearling, I swear on my life—you were the best parent anyone could have asked. You were my mother and father both, and dearer to me than either. It was because of you that I never knew—whatever evil or want there was in our house, I never felt it. Thy love covered me from it all, Kath.'

Kathyn felt his breath thicking beneath the certitude in those burning blue eyes. How simple was the world in which his brother seemed to live. As if their bliss now erased the misery that had been before. But that's not how it works, sweetest, dearest boy. You can't just kiss me and cure me of guilt.

His thoughts were cut off when Willym, gently, but not slowly, pushed himself inside him. Not for sex, not now, but Kathyn's comfort and his own reassurance. For the communion that is deeper than words—for, silly as it might sound to those who have not known the allburning madness of such a love, there are some things that could only be said, and believed, when he had his penis buried in Kathyn's body.

`Even when we had no food, no friends, no fire...I knew that you loved me, and that was all that mattered. And now for the rest of our lives I must do the same for you.'

Kathyn had to squeeze his eyes shut to keep the tears from coming.

Thank God he loves me like that. My heart would break if he were to leave me. Thank God I feel the same way, otherwise this thing between us would be a horror beyond reckoning. And beyond retrieving, for if I wished to leave he would never let me. He would sooner see me drowned in his own spend than happy with another. So thank God I never could be. Because otherwise--

But he stopped himself there. Thinking about the other ways the world might have wended did no good and brought no happiness.

`Kath, why do you look anxious.'

`Just thinking.'

Willym rubbed his thumb around his eye. Kathryn closed it and Willym stroked the lid. Just a little harder and he could put it out. Then I would be truly his slave. Deaf and blind. And if he broke my limbs I could not move unless he—

'Don't think, love. Don't make yerself unhappy. You've been thinking too much, alone in this dreary room with nowt but yer own head for company. I'm home now. I'll be gangin naewhere fast. That's all that matters. Don't fret yerself with the future.'

What is wrong with me? Maybe being on his own so much for so long had turned his head. Or maybe it was not being alone that'd done it. Willym had his own kind of unearthly gravity. Just being in his orbit made Kathyn's mind run in strange paths and turn in unwholesome patterns.

Willym was all in now. He lay full on him, the way he'd learnt to do as a boy when Kathyn had his fits of panic. He was like a blanket, a living shield, his weight somehow releasing Kathyn from the weight of the world and its troubles, the steady pressure of his body for the moment letting Kathyn breathe free.

Kathyn relaxed, the way he could only when Willym was inside him. It wasn't just that it felt good, though it did, despite the ache, and Dear Lord had he missed it. Even when he wasn't moving, he set Kathyn's body afire with warm flutters and his heart singing out of his breast. But it was so much more than merely sensual. It was, Kathyn felt sure, what the Scriptures meant when they spoke of knowing. Nothing was like it, this feeling of being connected to Willym in the most intimate and most real way two people could be connected. Having Willym inside him stilled all fears and banished all cares. It made the world feel smaller, and safer, while it lasted, just big enough to hold Kathyn and Willym, and Willym's big cock inside him. Not big enough for wars declared or rents due or storms at sea or a baby Willym only fancied he wanted.

`You fret too much, dearling. It kills me to see it. You must learn not to, sweeting. Now I'm home, and grown, and fee'd, I mean to take care of everything. So you mustn't worry any more about things.'

`I'll try, Willye.' For now, it was the only promise he could make.

Willym started to fuck, slowly. 'Ah, Kath,' he groaned, `I'll never get tired of this.'

`You'd better not', Kathyn retorted, and tilted up his hips so his brother's dick went deeper.

Willym, as he moved on him, chest to chest and belly to belly, twined their fingers together, wrapped his legs around Kathyn's, and put his mouth by Kathyn's ear, where he whispered all the sweet, silly things lovers are glad to forget by morning, for the feeling behind them is all that counts.

It was too much and almost not enough.

They were as close as two people could be, but still Kathyn yearned. He longed to sink into Willym's body, to cleave completely unto him, that their two fleshes might verily become one, like Hermaphroditus and the nymph. It frightened him, at times, how red and ravenous was this desire.

Little fool, he thought. Talking about him letting you go. Could you let him go? Could you see him with another, with a woman or a boy, whichever would be worse? What would you do, if that was what it came to? Not potions, no, nor poison neither. Not those fine arts for you, little Puritan.

I would hang myself outside the door of wherever they lay together, and pray with my dying breath to ruin their happiness forever after, and haunt his every dream till he came down to me.

Willym kept it slow and gentle, now focussed entirely on Kathyn's needs. This was what Kathyn thought of as comfort sex, what came after the shattering kind: soothing and tender, Willym's prick massaging his passage, as if apologising for its earlier battering, lighting his insides up with pleasure as he moved steadily back and forth in deep, rolling thrusts, lips locked to Kathyn's, hands squeezing his arse or his flank or tweaking his nipples. This was Willye the wooer, a bedside master Kathyn had but rarely met before, for boys made passionate, but not very sophisticated, lovers.

Willym took more than an hour to reach his climax, but Kathyn had three in the meanwhile, all on Willym's cock and two without touching himself--not thunderous, but deliciously drawn-out--before he finally felt himself dissolving into a treacly sleep, Willym still moving inside him, regular as the rocking of a boat.

Kathyn's sleep was deep. He dreamt he lay under trees, with moss beneath his head and green leaf-mellowed sunlight on his face, amid the scent of grass and bracken and the sound of birds singing. One of them flew down and dropped a seed in the earth between his legs. A vine grew from it and its shoots went up inside him and fruited in his womb.

Willym, for the first time in a long time, slept fitfully. He dreamt of storms at sea.

 

⎈

 

The next day Kathyn woke with a gasp. Something was wrong—something was hurting.

For a confused, panicky moment he thought somebody was stabbing him in the stomach—but how...?

Then he realised—Willym was still balls-deep in his guts.

It was just such a large thing to have inside him. He could feel his hole helplessly clenching around it, as if trying to expel the foreign intrusion. It still felt amazing—it always did, but, he had come to realise, it would never be entirely comfortable. Willym was just too massive for that. And anyway, the discomfort was somehow part of the pleasure.

He started to shift his body forward, biting his lip as the bruised walls of his rectum scraped over the broad, veiny stalk. Every inch of Willym's cock was a mile of pillow-biting agony leaving his arse. Finally, it fell out, the head tugging painfully at his ring as it did so.

Willym gave a deep sleeping-dog whuff, and shifted on the bed, his prick thrusting forward in search of the cocooning warmth of which it had been deprived. It scraped over Kathyn's sphincter and slipped up his crack. The shaft ploughed between the marshmallow hills of his buttocks, and Kathyn clenched them around it automatically. His cheeks were large and lush enough that Willym could use them almost like a second cunt, just like his thighs, which he used to do whenever Kathyn's hole was too tender to take any more. That was when he still occasionally took no for an answer.

After a little bit Willym came, but did not wake up. Part of Kathyn would very much have liked to stay right where he was, and keep Willym's cock right where it was. But it was already light, and there were things to do. They'd spent enough time rollicking between the sheets.

The first thing he did, even before he dressed, was to take out of the beside drawers the small blue bottle without a label that was the other thing he'd bought the day before, at the little chemist shop that had no label either, tucked away in a dark corner at the end of the arcade.

He always took a dose when he'd fallen asleep with his brother inside him. Although he trusted Willym to pull out when he used him while he was unconscious (though yesterday's events had shaken that trust), there was no telling what might have happened while Willym was asleep. He often did that— screwed him in his sleep. And no wonder when, as he'd told Kathyn, that was what nine out of ten of his dreams were about. Not very imaginative, but Kathyn supposed it was nice that his brother was faithful even in the land of slumber. And his nocturnal emissions went way back—from about eleven he'd been drenching Kathyn every night, just about, and all without once waking up. It had almost been a relief once he'd started sleep-fucking Kathyn, since it meant fewer sheets to change in the morning. That was when it had started, properly. He'd taken to draining Willym dry each night, often swallowing several loads in a row, just so Mam wouldn't have a screaming fit over the soiled sheets. He'd known—of course he'd known—it wasn't right, though he'd told himself it wasn't anything to do with sex, just him saving his hide. But he'd been desperate. And it had all spiralled from there.

He measured out a dose from the bottle, the colour of water but slightly thicker, and swallowed it. This wasn't right, either. But once again, he was desperate. One couldn't be too careful about these things—about this thing, in particular. Especially now Willym had this mad idea about a baby in his head.

There came into his mind a verse he once heard an old redheaded coster sing in an Irish whine, and now replayed every time he took what he thought of, grimly, as his secret medicine.

The farmer's wife had children ten

and she didn't know what to do,

But the sailor's wife had children none,

but she knew what to do.

There was a stirring from the bed. `Ka-ath,' a sleepy voice whined, `where are you?'

`I'm right here, Willye, don't worry.'

'What you doing?'

He put the stopper back in the bottle. `Just getting a drink, love.'

There was a pause, then, again, `Ka-ath.'

`What, sweetheart?'

`M'cock's cold', his brother grumbled, sounding exactly the same as when he was small. Dear Lord, hadn't he heard that before, and before all kinds of company, too. Night, day, in the kitchen, in the parlour, in shops, in the streets—even at kirk. The little rascal had had no shame. Not that the big one had any, either.

Kathyn tossed his eyes up toward Heaven, but crawled back under the covers.