Teena Thyme (10 page)

I mean, when old man Swann told me I was well on my way to being a millionairess, which has to be classed in the 'good' column of the shocks inventory, I'd very nearly lost it on the spot, as you know. A few days later - or a hundred and thirty years earlier, whichever way you want to look at it - I come round in someone else's body to find I'm a prisoner in a supposedly long gone era and what happens?

For several minutes I act almost as if it's the most natural thing in the world, a sort of curiosity, maybe, but so what? Instead of panicking straight off and screaming the place down like a demented banshee, I take the time to examine myself, note all the little idiosyncrasies, including the fact that someone had wasted a perfectly good set of ankle chains on someone who would have trouble walking anyway, and greet the arrival of a perfect stranger with at least a modicum of dignity.

And then, of course, everything hit me at once and the initial shock gave way to the real shock and my poor old brain went into overload and tripped all the safety circuits.

I met the sinister Meg not long after I came back round again and I met her even more sinister employer, Sir Gregory Hacklebury, a little while after that, and I didn't need to get all the background and history to know that I was in deep trouble. For a start, although Gregory was handsome enough in his way, it didn't need a genius to figure out that he was 'not a nice person to know', as my gran was fond of saying about certain people of whom she didn't approve.

I could tell there was something about him that was actually evil, even before he opened his mouth and certainly before I began to understand my/Angelina's relationship towards him. Forget the chains and tight corset stuff, it was in the eyes, that certain something you see staring out of the faces of newspaper photographs of mass murderers and rapists. It made me shudder just to look at those eyes.

The senior maid, Meg, was only marginally better, and it was plain as the nose on her rather square face that she hated Angelina with a burning intensity that could only have come from one thing. Maidservant or not, Meg Watson was madly in love with the vile Gregory and that had also gone further than just the hopeful stage and puppy-dog eyes. Without a shadow of a doubt, our Meg and our Greg were shagging the daylights out of each other behind the scenes.

Things were not looking too promising, to understate the situation by several leagues. Whatever had been going on here before I arrived, Angelina Thyme had been in a pretty desperate situation and whilst
I
knew I wasn't really her, there was no getting away from the fact that the real Angie - in spirit form at least - had done some sort of cosmic runner and I
was
the patsy who was currently inhabiting her uncomfortably garbed, if somewhat pretty body, and there was absolutely no point in trying to explain the truth to this triumvirate, even if Meg and Gregory were considerably brighter than the dim-witted Polly.

After all, what was I to say and what was their reaction likely to be?

'Sorry about this, Sir Greg, but my name's really Teena. I might be a Thyme, but I'm not the Thyme of your life, nor even the Thyme of your century and I just happened to have dropped into this body by mistake.' I could see that going down well - not. On top of anything else that might be going on here, I would simply be giving them all the ammunition they needed to whisk poor old Angie's body off to the nearest loony bin - Bedlam, I seemed to remember they called one of them - and with me still trapped inside it. Not a favoured option.

So, even though my head was still reeling from all this, I decided I'd have to play along, at least for the time being, but that was much harder than you might imagine. For a start, I knew nothing whatsoever about Angelina, aside from her date of birth and the fact that she was almost certainly an ancestor of mine. Where were her parents? What was she doing here? Why was she being kept chained and confined in this truly vicious corset and crazy shoes?

There was only one way to find out and that was to bide my time. Bide my time, act a bit vague and try to pick it up as I went along. And hope to the powers of time that had brought me here that I came up with a way to get me, or Angelina, or both of us, out of this right royal mess before things got any worse than they already were, and I suspected it might not be too long before that started to happen.

Time was the culprit and time was the key. I needed to buy myself some time and delay them as long as possible, while I meantime started to collect together a bit of data that might help throw a light or two on all this. How could I buy that time?

There was only one immediate way I could think of. Unsteadily, I rose to my feet, shuffled awkwardly around to face Meg, who had brought in a tray containing a jug of water and two slices of plain bread, threw my uselessly gloved right hand up to my forehead and, with a carefully staged whimper of alarm, threw a mock faint. No Victorian maiden ever swooned as convincingly as I did right then, but I did make sure that I fell backwards and sideways across the bed. Carpet or no carpet, that floor looked hard.

'Very interesting,' Hacklebury said. He picked up the soft leather and held it to the window, grinning as the afternoon sunlight reflected off the dark brown surface of the curious garment. 'Made for a Turk, you say?'

The little man sitting on the long settle nodded, removed his spectacles and proceeded to polish them vigorously on his coat sleeve.

'Yes indeed, Sir Gregory,' he said. 'I have made several for the same gentleman already and several more for the gentleman who was kind enough to recommend my work to him.'

'Your workmanship is indeed excellent,' Hacklebury observed. He turned and carefully laid the garment down on the table again. 'And what do you say it's called, sir?' The tailor smiled, replaced his spectacles and ran a nerv
ous hand over his balding pate.

'A confinement suit, sir,' he replied. 'The wearer is laced into it, as you can see, and is thereby protected from the worst elements in whatever place you choose to confine her. Depending upon the degree of cold likely to be encountered, the suit can be made from thicker hide, of course.'

'Of course,' Hacklebury agreed. 'Perhaps two or three different versions, interchangeable in keeping with the changing seasons?'

'As you wish, Sir Gregory.' The strange tailor coughed and cleared his throat. 'I presume then,' he said, 'that you are thinking of utilizing a facility that would not be heated as such? Or are you considering an open air confinement, only if you are—'

'No, not outdoors,' Hacklebury interrupted. 'Not as such, anyway, but I need the subject to be kept well away from any chance of being seen by the public. I have a suitable place in mind, somewhere she can be almost forgotten, until or unless I have further need of her.'

'I see,' the little man nodded. 'Well, in that case, the hood extension will be quite valuable. As you can see, it disguises the identity of the wearer totally and there is also a facility for closing the mouth over, thus preventing speech.'

'Yes, I had noticed,' Hacklebury smirked. He paused, reached down to touch the soft hide again and appeared to reach a decision. 'Very well, Pottinger,' he said, 'we'll have six of these suits in total. Light weight, medium weight and heavy, two in each. The light weight ones are the most urgent, but we could do with at least one of the medium weights as soon as possible, in case the weather should suddenly change, you understand?'

'Indeed.' Mr Pottinger stood up and walked across to join Hacklebury beside his creation. 'If you can furnish me with the exact measurements, I can have the three items to you by the end of the week. Will you be enclosing her corseted, or uncrossed, may I ask?'

'Ah, corseted, of course!' Hacklebury exclaimed, without hesitation. 'Can't have the wench losing her figure or becoming slovenly. May have to produce her again and besides, she'll still have her uses. I see the suit provides for such, too.'

Pottinger smiled faintly. 'Yes indeed, Sir Gregory,' he tittered. 'We do try to think of all eventualities.'

There's an old saying: Least said, soonest mended. I decided to adopt that as my watchword and kept my mouth shut as much as possible, not least because I was afraid that my way of speaking might arouse their suspicions. At school we had read Shaw and Oscar Wilde and I'd acted in
Lady Windermere
, so I had a rough idea of how I was
supposed
to sound, but as the means to record speech never arrived on the scene until a few years after the period I now found myself in, there was no way of being sure, so mum was the best word, for now at least.

My swooning act worked fairly well, at least to begin with, for the two maids lifted me squarely onto the bed and, though they then stuffed a bottle of something evil-smelling under my nose and I coughed and spluttered and had tears streaming from my eyes, that was all they bothered with for a while, apart from Polly occasionally materialising to dab my forehead with a cold, wet cloth. I didn't push it too far and decided to lay there with my eyes open for most of the time, but in response to their occasional verbal promptings I just looked vaguely up at them and remained silent.

From snippets I overheard of the muttered conversations - between Meg and Gregory and Meg and Polly, as the high-and-mighty Greg never seemed able to bring himself to address the ginger-haired younger maid directly - I gathered they'd decided that my present condition was due to the extreme tightness of my corset. Apparently, poor Angelina had been laced into it for the first time only a few hours before I drew the short straw to take on the actual long-term suffering.

Well, their diagnosis suited me fine. The longer they left me undisturbed, the better and further snatches of conversations began to give me at least an outline of the situation, if not the entire picture, but then, outline or picture, it wasn't pretty either way.

Angelina's parents had apparently been killed by bandits whilst travelling in India, some years previously, when Angie herself had been a little girl. They had been fairly wealthy, I guessed, and that wealth was left to Angie in trust. Or rather, it had been left to whichever man she ended up being married off to, because that was the way things worked back then. Or back now, as it was for me.

And that was where dear Gregory came in.

Angie had a guardian, some lord or other, but the lord had only a title and not much else, so he was quite willing to go along with Greg's scheming, just so long as he got a share of the action, no matter how small it was in comparison to the whole thing. He turns a blind eye, Gregory marries Angelina, Gregory gets her money, his lordship gets himself a pension to go off and get drunk on. End of story.

Except for one thing - poor Angelina had evidently loathed Gregory on sight, something we shared in common, apart from our family name. Even then, it might have worked and he might just have worked his way around her, but that wasn't our Greg's way. No sir. Neither was he a patient man in other ways and, unable to contain his lust till the wedding night, he'd thrust himself upon Angie in her bed one night and tried to force her into a game of Hide Mr Porky. But he'd got more than he bargained for, including aching balls, a set of teeth marks in one shoulder, some deep scratches all down one side and a pair of thighs that remained more firmly shut together than the gates of Mafeking when the Boers came a-calling some sixty years in the then future.

For her pains - and I could still feel some of them - poor Angelina had been trussed up in one of the cellars and given a flogging that, though it had been perhaps a bit tame by, say, the navy standards of the time, was nevertheless terrible by the standards of anything she had known before and her punishment was continued in the shape and form of the very corset that was now threatening to give me a split personality.

Even worse, Angie's brave resistance and subsequent suffering were really only delaying the inevitable, as Meg was only too willing to keep reminding me. The wedding was set for later that very week and then my unwanted groom was going to take great delight in finishing what he had previously not quite managed to start and Meg, as she assured me, was going to be on hand to make sure the maidenhead Angelina had cherished until now and which had now been given over into my unsolicited keeping became history with the least amount of fuss and, undoubtedly, with the least amount of consideration for its rightful owner.

In short, Gregory Hacklebury intended to have me and Meg was going to hold or tie me down to make sure his wedding tackle didn't end up on the wrong end of a swift knee again. Well, I reasoned, that wasn't as bad for me as it might have been for poor old Angie. I'd lost my own virginity in Copsey's Woods at the ripe old age of sixteen years and three days and though it hadn't moved the earth for me, I have to say it wasn't as bad as women in Angelina's day were wont to crack on.

Of course, I'd still have to go through the physical bit all over again, but then I could and would adopt the female maxim of the day and lie back and think of England. After all, this wasn't really my body and, while I felt sorry for my temporarily absent ancestor, I'm afraid it was a case of 'not my problem', as far as I was concerned. I was more interested in getting back to my own body in my own time and whatever I left behind here would have been sorted, sifted dead and long buried come nineteen seventy-five.

Always assuming I ever made it back to my own time and body, of course. Up until this moment I had been assuming that I would somehow retrace my unexpected leap through time, but now, as I lay there considering the options and alternatives, an awful thought occurred to me. What if I ended up stuck here as Angelina forever? After all, I had nothing to suggest that the process was reversible, did I?