Authors: Jennifer Jane Pope
The four of us sat around the kitchen table, warmed both from the solid fuel stove in the corner and by the excellent coffee. John and Brenda were kind and polite, intrigued to meet up again with Anne-Marie, whom John last remembered seeing when she was a toddler, and also both amused by the coincidence of our meeting. However, I felt slightly crestfallen, the anticipation of the past few days now crushed and lifeless, for there was nothing about John Hacklebury to suggest he - and probably any of his immediate family - were in any way related to the Hacklebury I had 'met'.
And then Angelina walked into the room and I almost choked on the final mouthful from my mug.
Except that she wasn't Angelina, of course, she was John and Brenda's eldest daughter, aged fifteen and she was called Janice. But to me, as I stared at her, open-mouthed in astonishment despite my every effort not to show myself up, I was looking once again at the reflection I had seen in the mirror in that bedroom in Hacklebury Manor, or whatever the house had really been called. I had to explain, of course, though I didn't dare venture the truth as such. Instead I improvised and added a few outright porkies as necessary.
'This portrait,' John asked, when I'd finished my stuttering monologue. 'Where is it now?' He grinned, half in apology. 'Sorry,' he said, 'that was just a bit rude, only if you say our Jan looks so much like this ancestor of yours, then obviously she must be an ancestor of ours, too, and I'm sure we'd all love to see her picture.' I mumbled something about my dad's cousin having taken the portrait for restoration work, but added that I would do my best to let them see it in due course, which seemed to satisfy them.
Young Janice parked herself on a spare stool and looked straight at me. There was something behind those pale eyes, something I couldn't quite put my finger on, but something that was pulling away at taut nerves deep inside me. She smiled and I had to give myself a good mental shaking to remind myself that I wasn't looking at Angelina's reflection at all.
'You have another daughter?' I asked. John and Brenda nodded.
'Yes, Katie,' John said. 'But if you're looking for another look-alike, I'm afraid you'll have to look a lot further. She takes after Brenda's family - dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes... oh yes, and she wishes she'd been born a boy,' he added, with a smile that spoke of some very special fatherly love.
'She does her best to act like one, too,' Janice said. 'She climbs trees faster than any boy I ever knew and now she's moaning because they won't let her play for the village youth football team. Mind you,' she said, smiling at me, 'she is better than any of them at that, too.'
We managed to visit three more Hacklebury households before we returned to Portsmouth that evening and by the time the car was purring its way back through the outskirts of the New Forest, I knew I had definitely found the link. It also told me that Hacklebury had most certainly fathered a child by Angelina and that the line had not stopped there.
Susan Hacklebury - now Susan Fanshawe - also bore a passing resemblance to our common ancestor, though not as markedly as Janice and her son, eighteen-year-old Paul, had something of the terrible Greg himself about him, though only in a physical sense. Otherwise, it seemed, he was a studious boy, awkward with girls, to judge from the way he acted in our presence.
Joanna Hacklebury - now Mrs Desmond Blaine-Hawkins - who lived in a big house on the other side of the village, halfway to the next village, in fact, but still not Hacklebury Manor, was definitely a Hacklebury; darkly brooding, very handsome and with an air of superiority about her that I found slightly chilling. However, she made us adequately welcome and displayed a certain interest in my reasons for being there.
'I have a friend who is a member of the local history group,' she said, just before we parted company. 'I'll ask her if she can dig around in the old parish records and stuff and let you know if she turns anything up. Never been much bothered with all that family tree stuff myself,' she added, 'but ought to help, I suppose. After all, family's still family, no matter how distant, eh Teena?'
George Hacklebury was still a bachelor, somewhere in his middle thirties, another one losing his hair steadily and as fair as the original Gregory Hacklebury and his own sister Joanna were both dark. He was something in the City, apparently, and as innocent looking and sounding as could be, except when I caught a glimpse of those eyes watching us both and me in particular and then I knew, even if nothing previous had been sufficient to settle my mind.
Yes, he was a Hacklebury all right, and there was plenty of the old Greg hiding behind that bland face and slightly pallid cheeks. If eyes could really undress, I'd have been down to my knickers and beyond within two minutes of entering his sitting room!
'Funny sort of bunch, aren't they?' Anne-Marie said. 'Never really knew any of them much when I was a kid, though mum kept in touch with Joanna and John for a while and they still do the birthday and Christmas card stuff.' She changed gear, cursed a van driver who had suddenly cut across us and grinned in the darkened interior, her face illuminated only by the inadequate streetlamps outside and by the glow from the instruments on the dashboard.
'Of course, this means we're also family, aren't we?' she continued chirpily. 'Very distant, same as Joanna said, but family all the same.' She paused, frowning over something.
'What's up?' I asked. The frown became a half smile and she turned towards me.
'Nothing, not really,' she replied. 'It was just a silly thought, but then it's legal for first cousins to marry, so I can't see it counting as incest, can you?'
'Can't see what?' I said, though I knew immediately what she was getting at. She shook her head.
'No matter,' she said easily. 'You'd probably hate the idea anyway, so drop it, eh?'
Except that, as I peered across to her in the near darkness, I wasn't so sure that I would hate either the idea or the reality of it. My mouth opened and started forming and expelling words before I could stop it, or so it seemed.
'You mean you'd like to sleep with me?' I heard her stifled giggle and wondered if I might have misread the signs after all, but her next words dispelled any such doubts permanently and forever.
'
Sleep
with you?' she echoed. 'Well, maybe later... but I was thinking more of something a whole lot more interesting than sleeping!'
Anne-Marie's house stood on the side of Portsdown Hill, not far below the top, with an uninterrupted view out over Portsmouth, the Solent and the Isle of Wight beyond, a myriad tiny twinkling lights by the time we pulled into the short driveway. It was actually her father's house, she explained, but her father was currently away working in the Middle East and her mother had long since departed for pastures new in company with an American financial consultant, so we had the place to ourselves.
Nothing further had been said and no actual arrangement had been made for me to stay the night, but I guess there was something in the air that made it both inevitable and an unspoken agreement between us. Anne-Marie cooked off some very appetising and probably totally unhealthy Cumberland sausages, apparently about the only food in the house, outside of a few eggs and a lump of cheese, explaining that she usually ate out during the evenings and didn't usually 'do breakfast'. Drinks, on the other hand, were in plentiful supply and we were soon making inroads into a large bottle of Bacardi. I was therefore pretty drunk by the time things started to progress and I offer this not as an excuse, but as some sort of indication of my state of mind, for sober I think I should have run a mile.
I've already told you that I'm very tall for a girl and slim, too, thanks to my sporting activities, but I did, even then in my late teens, go in and out in all the right sort of places and I definitely didn't present a picture of the stereotypical gym mistress lesbian type. However, beside Anne-Marie I found myself feeling gawky and angular, for she had the sort of figure that where it went in, it went in a long way, forming a waist that was almost ridiculously slender for her hips and bust, for where her figure came out, it came out with a vengeance, and it was not until she removed the loose flowing blouse that I realised just how well endowed she was.
As a seduction scene it was not as subtle as some I can recall, but it was very effective and to the point. One minute we were sitting on the rug in front of the roaring log effect gas fire, the next she was gone, leaving me adding additional alcohol to my system and staring into the mesmerising flames. Another minute or so and she was back. I stared up at her in something akin to awe, for any lingering resemblance to the librarian image had been banished to the farthest corners.
She stood there smiling down at me, the firelight shimmering against the black lustre of her stockings, her breasts fighting to free themselves from the half cups atop a black and red satin basque. I looked down at her shoes and gulped: how she could manage to stand let alone walk in those steepling, needle-heeled things was beyond me.
'You like the outfit?' she asked, purring like a cat that knows it's about to get the double cream. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. 'I always prefer stockings,' she said. 'Much healthier and definitely a lot sexier, don't you agree?'
'Er-um, yes,' I managed, breaking my silence at last. 'Very sexy.'
'I've laid out something for you up on the bed,' she said, reaching down with a hand that indicated she expected me to rise. 'I can't promise a perfect fit, but I think what I've chosen should do okay. The shoes might be a bit tight, but they're sandals, so you can adjust them a bit if you need.'
'Um...' I began, clambering unsteadily to my feet. Her fingers brushed lightly across my cheek.
'Just pop up and try it on, there's an angel,' she said, sensing my embarrassment and reluctance. 'Give me a shout if you need a hand, but it's quite simple really.'
Simple, yes - and not much of it. I picked up the black and gold satin waist cincher and held it against myself. It would fit all right, but it was going to be a bit of a squeeze, from what I could see. On the other hand, I smiled to myself, that was supposed to be its purpose and after the corsets I'd worn at Hacklebury Manor, it was scarcely a challenge. A sudden tingle crept up my spine as I remembered once more and I almost tore my own things off in my eagerness to try it on.
The stockings were black, with microscopic tracers of silver thread running through them, reaching all the way to the tops of my thighs and fastening to the lower edge of the cincher by means of three suspender straps on each side. The panties matched the cincher, but as I stepped into them and began drawing them up my legs, two thoughts occurred to me: one, they were so small and flimsy that they hardly seemed worth bothering about and two, the cunningly concealed slit meant they were, in effect, crotchless, so no time was going to be wasted in having to remove them again. Basically, I thought, as I stepped into the high-heeled gold sandals, I was dressing myself up as a sexual offering and the goddess was even now probably licking her lips in anticipation.
For a very long minute or two I stood there, wondering just why I was allowing myself to be manipulated so easily, why I was letting myself get drawn into something that was really and truly well beyond my experience. Should I just submit to all this so easily? And why had I just simply stripped and dressed in this modern day equivalent of a sacrificial robe?
I hesitated, teetering on the unaccustomed heels, for my feet were not as used to such extravagant contortions as Angelina's obviously had been. Did I really want to go through with this? I stared down at my boobs, firm and unfettered, my nipples already stiff with anticipation. Compared to Anne-Marie's they seemed tiny now, but I knew they weren't and more than one lad had been satisfied with the contents of my bra.
'You are drunk, Teena Thyme,' I said to myself as I walked across to stand in front of the mirror. It was not so much a statement of fact as an excuse voiced out loud. A brazen sight confronted me in the glass and alcohol, for all it could be blamed for a lot of excesses, was surely not the sole culprit in all this. 'Drunk and a slut,' I whispered, and let my tongue run along my top lip. At the same time my eye fell upon the nearby dressing table and, when I finally turned towards the door a few minutes later, my lips shone red and glossy and my eyes peered out from beneath lids I had shadowed far darker than was normal for me.
I grinned as I turned the door handle. My would-be seductress obviously wanted me parcelled up appropriately and the packaging now was as sexy as I could make it. My head still tried to tell me this was stupid and foolish, but my heart, or something else somewhere in my body, was urging me on with all flags flying.
Anne-Marie's smile told me I had done the right thing, but she was as yet not happy with the waist cincher. Tight as it was, there was still spare in the laces and she was determined to remove that before we proceeded further. I gasped and puffed as she began drawing them in, not believing she could really manage it, for I was certain the garment had been designed for someone much smaller than me.
Wrong. That person smaller than me was me, or at least it was once she'd finished. I stared down, quite unable to believe the effect. My waist seemed almost to have disappeared and my hips appeared to have grown wider as a result. I let my hands explore the results and, whilst I couldn't span myself with my fingers, it wasn't that far off being possible.