The Wreck of the Horstfels - Sex Stories

The Wreck of the Horstfels

CHAPTER TWO Call me a hopeless romantic, but what I really needed was a reason to worship not my step-mother Adalind, but Adalind the woman, a female Viking wearing a horned helmet in the shield-ring. The wind plucking at her skirt, her figure braced against it: her voice heroic, shrill and commanding. There had to be something reborn in her out of the ages, some ancient power of domination which would awaken in me the ancestral response to her call. After lunch my barrack-hut buddy Rob collected me in his car for our return from leave. Curfew was not until ten and so we had plenty of time for tea and scones in Worthingthorpe, and a visit to the local lighthouse. The Worthingthorpe lighthouse stood on a high cliff above marshes. The sea never came there now, for big dykes had been erected to keep it out. The three former lighthouse keepers inhabited the cottages alongside it at a peppercorn rent and eked out an existence on their pensions and money gifts from tourists. It was a pleasant sunny afternoon and we lingered. When I asked our guide if we might see the interior of his cottage he was quite amenable. It was a charming and neat little place with gilt-framed oleographs of ships in storms with inky-black clouds. A portrait which interested me more stood above the mantlepiece and showed a grain ship wrecked in a terrible winter gale. Its title was: " The Wreck of the Horstfels at Worthingthorpe, 13 December 1938 ." I asked our guide for more details if he had them. "A ...

... routine shipwreck with no loss of life," he commented. "On the stretch of shoreline below, long before the dykes were put up, perhaps once or twice in a generation the sea came raging in over the marshes with the incoming tide, submerging everything before it. I was on duty that day. was first to see the plight of the Horstfels. and I raised the alarm. It was sunset after the worst day of storm in living memory, towards six that evening. "Two of her masts were down, her spars and tackle wreckage on her decks. She was heeling over, her cargo having shifted, and seas swept the hull from stem to stern. She hit the shingle bank over there-" at this he gestured to the northwards, "- and several village people and the lighthouse crew hurled themselves into the swirling waters and waded out chest high to the wreck. They brought back six passengers and crew, including the captain with a broken leg, unconscious with a head injury, and also his eight-year old daughter. Germans they all were, and all saved. The cargo of wheat spilled out and could not be salvaged." So the Horstfels was just a routine maritime casualty meriting no more than a couple of hundred words in a newspaper and the painting hanging in my guide's living room. We got back to camp ten minutes before curfew. A couple of weeks later, my Company commander ordered me to attend in civilian clothes at a legal office at Viking Moos. Mr. Robertson introduced himself as the family solicitor and explained that Adalind Rosenhagen ...