Authors: Jennifer Jane Pope
No, I couldn't let myself think like that. All I had to do was make the best of things until it happened. Marry Greg, shag Greg, try to be nice to Greg, stab Greg in the guts if I ever got the chance... no, not that. Even if I did whiz back to the present before the wheels of justice turned full circle, I couldn't leave Angie to dangle on the end of a hangman's rope, which she surely would do if I killed Greg, whatever the provocation. Women tended to get a rough deal in this century and there would be a big crowd to watch pretty Angelina Thyme dance the Tyburn Jig, I knew.
So, I'd play along with Greg and keep him sweet and who knew, maybe I'd even get out of this corset and into something a little less punitive. Good idea - that is until I realised just what it was that had finally caused Angelina to turn wildcat on him. Meg let it slip - or rather, she didn't so much let it slip as paint it in big bright letters a couple of feet high. Master Greg wasn't so much interested in my tight little front of house purse as he was in the rear doorway, to put it as euphemistically and politely as possible.
And if that doesn't paint the picture big enough for you, let me put it more bluntly. In simple terms, Gregory Hacklebury was more interested in buggering me than he was in simply having normal sex with me and whilst I'm quite happy to be a bit adventurous these days, back then, both in nineteen seventy-five and in eighteen thirty-nine, I wasn't at all keen on
that
idea.
Okay, I reasoned with myself, so you don't like the thought of it, but then, nothing's changed. It's not your body still, is it? No, I told myself, it isn't, but it's still me inside it, so no way. Now you're being hypocritical, I argued. You were quite happy for him to have his wicked way the other way, but now...
Who says I was
happy
with it, I retorted indignantly. I just said I could bring myself to tolerate it, just to ease the other problems. So? Tolerate this then. No, I can't let him do this to her body.
You'd have let him do the other.
Yes, well, but...
The argument was quickly forgotten and, if I was still entertaining any ideas that I could have any say in the fate of my temporary body, I was quickly disillusioned and given a very painful insight into just what sort of vicious, depraved creatures my captors really were...
6
.
It was intended to be the day of my/Angelina's wedding to Sir Gregory, but there was no wedding breakfast, no languorous bath, no fussing and primping and absolutely no ceremony. The bedroom door banged open and in strode the two maids, Meg leading the way and carrying a long cane, Polly following close behind, rope coils dangling from her arms.
I knew immediately that I was in big trouble and they lost no time in proving me right.
'On your feet, you idle trollop!' Meg bellowed and dealt me a swift backhanded cut from her cane, which fell across my thighs, the pain deadened by the layers of material in which I was still cocooned, but still sharp enough to draw a yelp of protest from me. 'Get up and let's get you out of that dress. You smell to high heaven now.'
I couldn't argue with her on that point. How long exactly Angelina had been wearing the dress and how long before that she had been given the opportunity to bathe, I had no idea, but I'd been in the thing for two days and nights and much longer and it was liable to walk off me of its own accord.
I was soon on my feet, thanks more to Meg's efforts than my own, and stood between the two of them, dwarfed even by Polly, with Meg a good two inches taller still. It was something I was not at all used to and, as they set about removing the dress, I calculated that Angelina could have been little more than five feet tall, five one at a push.
Tiny, slender and not very strong, as I quickly discovered. Not at all like Teena Thyme, seventies girl and sportswoman wannabe. I closed my eyes and wished to have my old body back, if only for thirty seconds. Big and powerful as Meg was, I reckoned I could floor her in a moment and as for Polly, she was too oafish, slow and clumsy and once her mentor was out of the way she'd probably run a mile, like any other bully would, once they realise the game's up.
However, it was not to be.
Two onto one isn't fair, as anyone knows, and either of these hefty wenches could have handled me in that body. However, I was only too well aware that the word 'fair' wasn't in their vocabulary and besides, they seemed in a hurry. No sooner was I out of the dress than they seized me between them, flung me face down upon the bed and then, as Polly sat astride the small of my back, Meg took the rope lengths and began expertly tying my limbs to the four corner posts, so that by the time she had finished I was spread-eagled like a human cross of St Andrew.
I groaned and bit into a mouthful of bedcovers, for I knew only too well what was coming next. Meg, however, seemed in no hurry whatsoever, not now she had me helpless before her.
'We'll leave your drawers on, I think,' she announced, prodding at my left buttock with the tip of her cane. I flinched automatically and this set her to laughing. 'Time to get some blood stirring again, I think,' she said. 'I told the master I thought you were just malingering and that a good thrashing would liven you up. He'd have been here to witness this himself, but of course, he's otherwise occupied in the chapel right now, marrying you, ha-ha!'
Marrying me? But I was here. Me and Angelina's body, so how could...? And then the penny dropped. Good old Angie must have convinced him that there was no way she was going meekly to the altar to say 'I will', nor anything like it, so Greg Hacklebury had brought in some sort of doppelganger. Private chapel, witnesses from among his own trusted minions, bung the vicar a backhander to ask no questions and keep shtum afterwards and all it needs is a decent forgery of the bride's signature and lo and behold, Angelina Thyme becomes Lady Hacklebury and Sir Gregory Hacklebury becomes an even more wealthy man than he is already.
And who would ever know different? Only if the real 'Lady Hacklebury', or Angelina Thyme as she still legally would be, popped up and started shouting the odds. And Greg was surely too wily a bird to chance that happening, which meant one of two possible alternatives.
Either 'Lady Hacklebury' would meet with an untimely accident - fatal, of course - or she would never see the light of day again. Not civilised light, at any rate. I'd suddenly seen the future and it didn't look orange. Black, more likely, and the more immediate future was scarcely any better.
'Can't think why the master would want to bother with such a scrawny rump as this,' Meg taunted me, tapping my buttocks lightly in turn. 'Little more than a horse's collar, whichever way he chooses to go in. See this, Polly?' she cried, this time dealing me a slightly harder cut, which made me wince and bite the soft fabric harder. 'I've seen young boys with better arses than this. More meat on a butcher's apron!
'Well, my lady,' she continued, bending close to my right ear, 'I can tell you this is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me and a lot more than it would if you had a bit of natural padding. Twelve cuts you're going to get and you can count every one.
'Miss one, or jump one and I'll give you an extra two for every one you get wrong. Polly, you can count as well, at least as far as ten. I know you can manage that, 'cos you've only got to count on your fingers and thumbs and it'll be good practise for you.'
She stepped back away from me and I heard the faint rustle of her uniform skirts as she adjusted her stance. Desperately, I bit down and only just in the nick of time. I heard the cane scythe through the air with a dreadful whooshing sound and then my backside exploded in agony. I screamed into my voluntary gag and bucked like a mad thing and only at the last minute did I remember.
'One!' I gasped, and ducked my head to bite again.
'One,' Polly intoned, somewhere in the far distance. Meg waited for what must have been just a few seconds, though they seemed like an eternity of suspense. At last the awful hissing came again.
'Yeooow! Bitch!' I shrieked.
'Two,' Polly's voice came from afar again.
'Two!' I sobbed in agreement.
Swish!
Crack!
'Three.'
'Three-ee-aarghh!' Oh ye gods, Angie baby, come back all is forgiven. Except, as far as Meg was concerned it certainly wasn't. Her arm swung again and she was certainly sparing no effort now.
Shlack!
I writhed up, ropes cutting into wrists and ankles, but those pains fading into insignificance in comparison to my burning buttocks.
'Four.'
Oh hell's fires, another eight to go! 'Four,' I wept, and almost bit through my tongue as number five arrived before I could get the now spit-sodden wadge of bedding back between my teeth.
Shlaa-ap!
Five. And on.
Whi-ick!
Six.
And on.
And on...
I've already tried to give you some idea of my overall mental state during the first hour or so after I arrived back in those final months of early Victorian England and I know I probably haven't conveyed it very well, but the truth is, there aren't words that can accurately sum up everything that was going through my head right then.
In the intervening years I've tried discussing how I felt and my subsequent actions, but even face-to-face it's just impossible and, if you want the unvarnished truth, I don't think even I know how I didn't just fall apart and end up as a gibbering loony. There's only one explanation I can think of that even halfway works, but I'm willing to listen to suggestions if you can come up with a better one.
Survival instinct, that's my best guess. Animals will gnaw off their leg to escape slow death by starvation in a gin trap and there are well documented stories of otherwise delicate looking mothers who have lifted cars off their children or husbands and sweet little old ladies who have taken on and beaten hulking great thugs. Adrenaline comes into the equation somewhere, I know, but every equation has two sides and in my situation it had to be the opposite of adrenaline.
Nowadays they have things called beta-blockers that suppress nerves and help calm hyper-activeness in people whose bodies don't provide the wherewithal naturally. My body, it seems, is one of those that doesn't require that sort of outside help and a weird sense of detachment, coupled with a sudden ability to view things almost from the outside, though with crystal clarity, provided me with the mental armour I so obviously needed.
Unfortunately, the one chink in that armour was that while I was mostly able to move my psyche one step aside, my physical presence remained well and truly rooted in the centre of the action and the pain part of what they were doing to me was all too real.
I lay on the bed face down, still in my rigid underwear, my poor bottom burning and throbbing like it would never stop. Tears soaked the pillow in which I had buried my face and my entire body now started trembling uncontrollably. No one had ever treated me roughly before, let alone inflicted such a terrible punishment on me, but it was more than that, as I began to realise when the sobbing finally subsided and that awful pain slowly began to turn to a sort of numbness.
The problem, I suspected, was this body itself; it wasn't my own body, after all, and as such it and my mind were somewhat at loggerheads. My own body, apart from being much taller, was pretty obviously a lot fitter and tougher, thanks to my sporting prowess. In my own body, ankle chains or no ankle chains, I'd have deposited the bullying Meg on her fat arse, complete with a bloody nose and split lip, but this delicate little flower of a framework wasn't used to such niceties.
Angelina, for all her personal tragedy regarding her dead parents, had led a pretty soft life, it seemed. I hadn't seen the hands inside the gloves, but I was willing to bet they'd never done a day's work in their life, let alone engaged in a bit of rough and tumble with teenagers of the opposite sex. Angelina had been used to being treated like a lady because that's what she was - me, well if I wanted respect I earned it with a combination of my wit and the fact that I was as tall as most of the boys I'd grown up with and, while probably not quite as strong as most of them, certainly strong enough to let them know they'd been in a fight.
This was just too frustrating and eventually the tears of pain gave way to moist eyes of self-pity and anger in a roughly equal mix. Eventually, however, the anger started to win and, as it did, it cooled into a tempered determination to avenge myself and Angelina on these vicious bastards.
Gingerly I managed to slide off the bed and stand up. The effort left me panting for breath, so I was forced to wait for a minute or so before trying to walk again and then I almost forgot about the ankle chain and was lucky not to pitch headlong onto the pretty face that eventually confronted me in the mirror.
I stood staring at this new self for a long time and I suspect now that somewhere at the back of my mind was this little compartment, or voice, that was refusing to fully accept that all this was anything worse than a really lucid nightmare, even though my poor bottom's continued throbbing was all too real.
'You're not much to work with, are you?' I whispered to my reflection at last. 'Little Dolly Delicate, that's what you are - less use than ornament, my girl.' No wonder the men in this era were so bloody macho and chauvinistic, I thought. This pretty little creature wouldn't normally dare say boo to a goose, let alone stand up to someone like Gregory Hacklebury.