Page 11 of Kidnapped by the Pirate
His tutor had tried to shield him from the world as best he could, but there was no preparation for this. Nathaniel missed him desperately, aching for his reassuring presence, his kind, thoughtful answers and advice.
They hadn’t the money to buy Nathaniel’s way into Cambridge or Oxford, and Mr. Chisholm had warned Walter that he simply “did not possess the aptitude” for academics or law, his generous way of saying Nathaniel was too stupid.
Even the church wasn’t an option, since reading was too important a requirement. Not that Nathaniel had a whit of desire to be a clergyman. He’d considered the navy, but Walter had insisted Nathaniel would marry Elizabeth first.
His studies had been a struggle for as long as he could remember. While Susanna was well pleased to while away hour upon hour reading, Nathaniel had always longed to be outside—to run and climb and swim. To move.
Words on a page didn’t unfold and flow for him the way they seemed to for others. When Susanna read aloud to him, she didn’t stumble or become confused. The words streamed out like water, with meaning and inflection. Nathaniel understood everything he heard, but when ink was put to paper, words confounded him.
When they were children, she’d helped him memorize words, explaining what they meant and teaching him better than any tutor, even dear Mr. Chisholm. She’d be a wonderful mother, patient and kind, with a mischievous streak he hoped would remain all her days.
Once, as a lad, Nathaniel had confessed to his tutor that he envied the servants and their physical tasks. Mr. Chisholm had given him an uncharacteristically stern look and said, “Spoken like a boy of privilege who will never serve.”
He was right, and shame still pricked Nathaniel that he was so discontent with his lot in life when many others had it very much the worse. He just wished he didn’t feel so…wrong. In so many ways.
Mr. Chisholm had then softened and ruefully said the stork had delivered him to the wrong house before drilling him on his pathetic Latin conjugation again, a useless endeavor if ever there was one.
He laughed humorlessly to himself now. The stork. By the time Mr. Chisholm had determined Nathaniel old enough to be informed of the true manner of how babes were born, Susanna had already told him in great detail. He still wasn’t sure how she’d learned, since prim Jane had never been one to gossip.
Susanna. Was she all right? He was powerless to comfort her, and despair welled up again, along with a wave of loneliness that would have laid him low if he hadn’t already been huddled on the floor. He closed his eyes again, memories filling his mind.
When he’d questioned the stork theory, Susanna had whispered that they could watch when the stud horse came to impregnate their new mare, and that would explain everything.
On that rainy, gray day, they’d squirreled themselves away around the corner of the barn, flat on their tummies, coats soaked through, taking turns with Father’s ornamental—yet entirely functional—spyglass. In the paddock, the mare had whinnied and run this way and that, before finally being cornered and mounted.
“That’s what Father did to Mother?” Nathaniel had whispered in horror.
Susanna had huffed. “No, that’s only how animals do it. Women lie on their backs. But otherwise it’s the same.”
Watching the stallion have its way, Nathaniel’s blood had stirred in ways he couldn’t comprehend. When he’d eventually begun waking with wet sheets, and his prick stiffened seemingly with a life of its own, he’d often take himself in hand, the image of that stallion filling his mind time and time again.
Coat black as pitch, hind legs thick and powerful as it mastered the quivering mare.
Its cock when it cornered her had hung impossibly huge and thick, and Nathaniel had imagined how that hot, iron flesh must feel inside. When he’d heard from one of his older cousins what sodomy meant, it had stirred something deep and unsettling in him.
While his friends from neighboring estates fantasized about lifting a lady’s skirts or touching her creamy, delicate breasts, Nathaniel had remained unmoved by women’s charms. Not only was he feeble-minded, he was a deviant to boot.
He wanted cock—hard and thick and unrelenting. At times just rain or mud and a brisk wind could conjure vivid memories of that stallion on that spring day. Living in England, it had rather been a hazard.
He cringed at the thought of dooming an unfortunate girl to a life with not only a dunce who could barely read two words before stumbling, but a sinner with unnatural defects. He knew he should strive to overcome his nature, but any attempts had left him despairing of the hopelessness.
Perhaps it would be better for poor Elizabeth Davenport and him alike if the scurrilous pirates were his doom. His sinful desires to rut with men, to be consumed by them, had only grown stronger the more he tried to quell them. There had been several times when he’d desperately wanted to confide in Susanna, but he had feared her rejection too much.
