'There you are,' I announced to my reflection, in a satisfied tone. 'Just perfect. Back where you belong, around the neck of a Thyme female.' I raised my right hand and gently fingered the soft curves of the gold and felt a warm feeling spread through me. Yes, I was right, the locket belonged there all right. I raised my eyes to the mirror again and suddenly all the warmth vanished, to be replaced by a numbing chill that started at the back of my neck and spread upwards and downwards like a tide of ice.
'What the...?' I began, but then my tongue seemed to thicken and my heart seemed to stop in mid-beat and, as the black curtain came sweeping up towards me, the last thing I remembered in the two or three seconds before I finally passed out, was the face that stared back at me from the ancient glass; blonde hair, pale skin, large blue eyes. Just like me, except it wasn't just like me at all.
The hair was longer, curlier, thicker, the eyes wider and larger, the cheekbones higher and more sharply defined. There was something familiar there all right, but it wasn't my face. It wasn't my face at all!
5.
The dress the maids brought for her was of deep red satin, with even darker red inserts, the bodice cut low to leave her elevated breasts visible almost to her nipples, and tailored so that it followed every contour of her newly reduced waistline to perfection. The skirts were full and kept out by several layers of stiffened petticoats beneath, the whole of which fell to within an inch of the floor, so that only the very tips of her booted toes were still visible.
Satisfied that this was the case, Meg ordered Polly to gather up the folds of fabric and hold them clear, while she stooped down and carefully locked a pair of delicate ankle fetters in place, fetters that were joined together by just a handful of links, so that now Angelina could take paces of no more than a few inches at a time.
'Not that you'll get the chance to run anywhere, missy,' Meg grinned, standing upright again, 'but they're there to remind you.' Angelina regarded her with total distaste, for the maid was making no attempt to disguise the satisfaction she was getting from being able to treat her so disdainfully.
'Be careful you don't end your own days in chains, Meg Watson,' she warned. 'Boots have a habit of changing feet, given time enough.'
'Well, don't you go worrying your empty head about time, missy,' Meg laughed. 'You'll have plenty enough time to enjoy your new fetters and finery, though it won't be satins and silks for much longer. The master is even now preparing a new nest for you - somewhere where you won't be able to cause anyone any trouble, too.'
'Down below in his accursed cellars, no doubt,' Angelina snapped. 'Well, as I've already told him, you can all do your worst. You cannot cause me any further pain and humiliation than you have already.' Meg gave out a small snort and her top lip curled back.
'You think not, eh?' she said. 'Well, you just wait, my hoity-toity madam. You just wait and see.'
How long I was unconscious I had no idea (I've since realised it was almost certainly only milliseconds, or else it was a hundred and thirty years, or both, depending upon which way you look at these things), but the moment I opened my eyes again I knew something was very wrong.
For a start, I knew that people just don't come out of a faint all at once. First you get that groggy feeling that you're coming to the surface, then you get a groggy feeling that follows awakening, then perhaps there's some nausea, disorientation, blurred vision. Then there's usually some residual grogginess.
Tick none of the above in my case. No grogginess whatsoever.
One moment I was passing out, the next I was wide-awake again. Wide-awake and lying on a bed, except it wasn't my bed - Amelia's bed, whatever. This was a huge bed, high, wide and most definitely handsome, with ornately carved posts at each corner and a heavy canopy over the top. A four-poster if ever I saw one, which I was just doing!
I looked down at myself next and saw that I was dressed in a deep red gown, similar in style to the one I had struggled into earlier, but definitely not the same one. I could feel the pressure of a corset underneath everything, but what a corset and definitely yet again not the one I had laced myself into. It was tighter - much, much tighter - and my waistline seemed to have disappeared somewhere.
As soon as I tried to move my head I felt the hair, brushing my cheeks, my neck, my bare shoulders. I raised a hand to touch it and it was then I realised I couldn't use my fingers or thumbs individually.
'What the—?' Hell's teeth and little jumping tiggers, some stupid fool had sewn all the fingers together, which meant that my fingers, inside them, were now all but completely useless. I discovered the ankle fetters the moment I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed, which was just as well, for if I'd tried to take even half a normal step without realising, I'd have been pitched headlong.
Really frightened now I sat up, though 'up' was a relative position, for the corset prevented me from bending my waist very far and the best I could manage was to prop myself halfway, supported by my elbows. In that position I paused, looking desperately about me, my bosom rising and falling in time with my rapid breathing. Even there, something was wrong, but it took me several seconds to realise what it was.
'You're not my boobs,' I said to them, stupidly. 'I may not have overmuch up top, but mine are bigger than that. Were bigger than that,' I corrected myself, without even thinking about it. I paused, closed my eyes and took as deep a breath as that damned vice of a corset permitted. It wasn't very deep. I took another breath and opened my eyes again, raising one hand for closer inspection.
'You're not my hand, either,' I muttered, and it wasn't. My hands aren't large, but these hands were much smaller, the dainty fingers not as long in proportion.
I swung both legs around together and lowered my feet to the carpeted floor and then extended my legs out straight and gathered up the layers of skirt and petticoats, affording myself a closer inspection of what I was now expected to stand on. Surprise, surprise - not my feet, either. They were tiny, and cramped into the most impossibly high-heeled boots I had ever seen.
'The ankle chain's a bit of a waste,' I muttered. 'Standing up in these shoes is going to be hard enough, let alone walking anywhere.' I let the billowing material fall back again and sat there silently pondering, and it was at that moment that the bedroom door swung open and a freckle-faced maidservant, dressed in just the sort of uniform you'd expect to see on a Victorian maid, entered. She had reddish blonde hair and pale hazel coloured eyes and was quite pretty - pretty, but nonetheless quite squarely built and surprisingly tall, even allowing for the heels on her shoes.
'Ah, I see you're already awake, Miss Angelina,' she said. Observant girl, I thought to myself. Well spotted. I had opened my mouth to make some sort of snappy reply, to ask this ginger Amazon what the flaming Norah was going on here, when I suddenly realised what she had called me. My hand flew instinctively to my throat, but the locket was no longer there. I hesitated, but I had to ask the question.
'What's your name?' I demanded. She looked at me a bit stupidly, I thought, but the answer came quickly enough, nevertheless.
'Polly, of course, miss,' she said. 'Same as it's always been. You're not trying to tell me you've forgotten that, are you?' Her expression became darker. 'You ain't trying some new trick, are you?' she said. 'I shouldn't, not if I was you. Meg's just looking for any excuse to flog your arse, in case you hadn't realised.'
'Meg?' The name meant nothing to me, of course. Polly looked even more confused than I felt. 'No matter,' I amended hastily. 'Yes, of course you're Polly.' An idea was already beginning to form in my mind, an idea that was just too preposterous to even contemplate, but I had to ask the next question.
'You called me Angelina just then,' I reminded her. She nodded without hesitation, so I plunged on in. 'So, Polly, do you happen to know my last name?' The perplexed look deepened in her pale eyes, which were now taking on a green tint.
'Of course I do, miss,' she asserted. 'I'm not the brightest sixpence in the bag, same as my mum al
ways used to tell me, but I'm not that stupid.'
'Well then,' I persisted, 'what is it? My last name, that is? And what year is this?'
'Why, it's Thyme, of course. Angelina Thyme.' She paused, wrinkling her forehead. 'And this is eighteen hundred and thirty-nine. December, in case you'd forgotten.'
That did it for me. Angelina Thyme - A.T. - and December eighteenth, eighteen-twenty was my - her - date of birth. And this was eighteen thirty-nine. I was nineteen. I was Angelina Thyme. I was about a hundred and thirty-four years in the wrong place and I was also, if those ankle chains were anything to go by, a prisoner here.
I fainted.
It's a peculiar thing, shock, and even more peculiar is the way it affects different people in different ways and even the same people in different ways and never with any sort of logic involved.
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 nervous 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.
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