The Handyman Ch. 03: 1740–50

Cole took that as a hopeful sign. He was nearly salivating at the sight of the dark brown giant standing before him, legs proudly spread wide, low-hanging manhood and balls looking just as proud, naked, but for the wrist irons connected with a chain. He was wearing leg irons too, but there were no chains down there.

"Did you see me through the window the other evening?"

"Yas, Mas."

"Do you understand what I was doing?"

"Yas, Mas."

"I could find a hammock for you in the forecastle. You would not need to go back to the hold. Do you understand that? I can do that if you please me. Do you want to please me?"

"Yas, Mas." Hubbard could actually understand Cole quite well, and he also had a larger vocabulary in English than he had exhibited. But he wanted to keep it simple. There were not many choices here. He still could possibly obtain a better choice than Cole had in mind. He would have to play this carefully.

Cole came around his desk and approached the magnificent African. He circled Hubbard, poking and prodding and gliding his hands here and there. Thus far it was no more than any slaver had done on several occasions, starting at the river in Ashanti. Hubbard understood what would please Cole, though, and he thought whatever thoughts he had to think to make his member start to harden.

Cole gave a little pleased gasp, as Hubbard began to have some success with that.

The slaver's hands were trembling as they glided over Hubbard's muscles now, and he went down on his knees almost as if they'd given way. Hubbard grunted as he felt the wet mouth open up over the bulb of his cock. He stood there, for several minutes, lost in whatever thoughts were needed to give Cole the response he wanted.

Hubbard was guided over to the desk and shown that he was to bend over it on his belly and spread his legs. He grunted again, now genuinely in an arousal of his own, as Cole's tongue and lips moved between his butt cheeks and began giving his opening wet attention.

The African giant waited until Cole had risen, stripped, and was approaching his quarry's back with a hand holding his dick steady. And then, lightning swift, Hubbard rose, turned, and twisted Cole around and down on his belly on the desk top.

Cole would have cried out—if he could. But Hubbard had the chain running from one wrist to the other around Cole's neck, and although he wasn't choking the slaver hard, he was applying enough pressure to cause Cole to care about nothing but the next breath—and trying with his own frantic hands to pull the chain away from his throat.

He would have screamed if he could when Hubbard's cock began to invade his channel, but once it was past the sphincter and well lodged and Cole had time to adjust to the length and girth of it, Hubbard slowly pulled the chain away and Cole's gurgling noises turned to little yips of ecstasy.

Cole, who never before had been the one taken, was now completely taken. He had had no idea that his arousal and satisfaction was greater with another man's cock inside him than it had been with him doing the fucking. And this slave, this Hubbard Semple, had a magnificent black cock that sent Cole into waves and waves of satisfaction. Thornton Cole had moved into a whole new world of desire fulfilled.

That night Hubbard did not sleep either in the hold with the other slaves or in a hammock in the forecastle. He didn't sleep much at all. He spent the night in Cole's bed in the captain's cabin, giving Cole what he now realized he wanted more than anything else in sex and what would help Hubbard survive.

By the time they reached the coast of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hubbard was a fixture in Thornton Cole's cabin. He was out of his chains, washed regularly, and dressed as well as any of the crew whenever there was a reason for him to be dressed at all—which Cole did what he could to keep at a minimum.

He had also successfully signaled to Cole that he also needed to wash more regularly to realize the most satisfying servicing from Hubbard.

Standing off of the harbor at Shernhaven and waiting for the sloops to arrive to take Cole's precious human cargo to the wharf and the slave market, Cole stood beside Hubbard at the rails and worked with him to identify and name the steadily moving improvements being made to the town.

"That's a lighthouse up there—or will be when it's finished—on the Lower Head spit," Cole said. "And opposite to that on that bluff over there, the Upper Head, is my house. Not the one right on the bluff, but the next one down toward the town. And look how much has been built in the town since last time I was in port. Edwin Geer has been busy. I hope that he has been as diligent with adding to our tavern at the corner of Hobart and Cole. Yes, I own a tavern—along with Edwin Geer—on a street with my name on it. Geer has a street named for his family too—on the other side of the common. See where that is? See the shipyard in the shadow of Upper Head? Look to the right of that. To where you can see tree tops. That's the common. Aiken Shern wants that named for him. But we shall see about that."

While Cole was rambling on, the crew was in the hold trying to make the surviving slaves as presentable as possible for market. Already buyers were gathering on the wharf. Cole wanted to dispose of his goods as quickly as possible. He was lucky. Only five of them had died on the sail up from Barbados.

Hubbard was thinking lickety-split while Cole was talking even though he was trying to pay attention to and follow what Cole was explaining. If there was any hope of escape when they got to the town, what was pouring out of Cole's mouth was useful information.

The African feared what would happen. Who would buy him; what would be expected of him.

He needn't have worried, though. Thornton Cole had no intention of selling his big African stud. He didn't even have him landed on the wharf where buyers could see him. Two crew members took him—once more in chains, but dressed, to the south of the Lower Head spit, where Cole had horses sent to bring them around the Lower Head Road to Hobart Street and then to the corner of Cole and Hobart.

Hubbard saw that the biggest building in evidence on the street was the place Cole had told him about, the tavern Coles and Geer owned together, the tavern named the Landho, having inherited it from three generations of ancestors. The Landho had always been much more than a tavern.

Here, Hubbard was chained to a bed by an ankle and kept there for two months, earning Cole the money he had planned to get out of such a fine specimen of a slave.

Eventually, Hubbard became a fixture at the bar in the tavern. He was chained to the rail on the service side of the bar to act as a bartender and as a visual threat to troublemakers whenever he wasn't unchained and led upstairs with a customer—where he was chained again.

By night, he lived in the loft of the carriage house of the Cole home on the Upper Head bluff. He never entered the Cole house, where Thornton Cole's wife held sway, with her four children, three boys and a girl. But when Thornton Cole ordered a fancy mattress brought down from Boston, it was destined to go in the loft above the carriage house, not in the main house.

Thornton Cole spent few nights in his own house during the periods when he wasn't at sea building his slave trade business.

Cole didn't come back from one of these voyages; neither did his ship, the Thomas.

After a few months, Mrs. Cole, who didn't believe in slavery and who sold her husband's other two slaver ships, let Hubbard go free. She also freed the female kitchen slave Thornton had brought into the house. Hubbard continued to work in the tavern, another business Mrs. Cole divested herself of by selling it to Edwin Geer. Mrs. Cole didn't believe in what she knew was going on there either.

Hubbard and the kitchen maid produced six children before Edwin Geer caught Hubbard Semple trying to produce a child on his wife too.

Then Edwin Geer shot Hubbard Semple dead. That didn't make a ripple of concern in the town of Shernhaven, and Judge Aiken Shern dismissed all charges against Geer.

Hubbard Semple had been a popular figure in the town. Truth be known, Geer was the laughing stock of the town's men because his young wife was cuckolding him with far more than Semple and the townsmen liked to live vicariously in Semple's sexual exploits. But he was, after all, little more than a savage slave, and Edwin Geer was from a founding family, a family that had built the town almost with its own hands—although perhaps more with the Shern- and Cole-family brains.

There was some talk of burying Hubbard Semple in the corner of the commons, but by that time there was already a movement under foot to remove all of the graves there and rename the commons Shern Park.