Authors: Jennifer Jane Pope
Meagre or not, the food seemed to have the effect of stimulating my brain into some sort of logical action and, for the first time since my unexplained arrival here, I began to sort out a few things into sensible order. The conclusions this exercise led me to were not promising, to say the least.
Ordered thought number one and pretty obvious, I know, was that somehow or other I had been moved back through a hundred and thirty odd years and was now in the body of a young woman who had almost certainly been my ancestor. Number two, this ancestor was up shit creek without a visible paddle, which meant that, for the time being at least, so was I.
Thought three - and this one I liked less than any of the others - was that up until now I had been sort of braving it out and managing to throw off everything except that thrashing at Meg's hands, solely because I had made an assumption that if what goes up must come down, then what goes back must surely come forward again. And this was where the ordering of thoughts ground to a rather unpleasant halt, because I suddenly realised that I had no proof whatever for this theory.
What if I was stuck in eighteen thirty-nine? Stuck for good, that is? I dropped the final crust back onto my plate and turned to stare out of the window. Expressions such as 'surely not', or 'no, that can't possibly happen', flashed through my mind, obviously, but the little nagging voice grew louder by the second.
'Why not?' it seemed to sneer back at me. 'You're not just in Angelina's body, as far as this time period is concerned you
are
Angelina.' I shuffled across and stood, leaning against the window, my forehead pressed against the cool glass for a long time and those minutes, however many they finally were, were possibly the blackest ones of my life, either before or since. And that's saying something, I promise you.
'Okay,' I eventually sighed. 'So, if I am stuck here permanently, then am I just going to sit back and take it?' Thoughts of sitting at all made me wince, but I forced the image out of my head and made a fierce effort to rally my spirits again. The problem was, rallied spirits or not, just what options did I have?
I knew who I was - who I had become, anyway - and I knew the year. I also knew that the world outside probably now considered me to be Gregory Hacklebury's legally wedded wife and that disproving his little charade would be difficult enough, even if I had a full measure of freedom, which I didn't. What I also didn't have was the first idea of where I actually was.
Fair enough, the house was probably Hacklebury's mansion, but I didn't even know that for sure. I didn't really know how big it actually was, basing my assumption as to its size on the fact that the one room I had seen so far was a damned sight bigger than any bedroom I'd ever slept in before and had a very high ceiling, not a feature usually associated with your average cottage.
The house was also rural rather than urban; the view of hills and woods beyond the beautifully manicured lawn and gardens was proof perfect of that, but which bit of rural old England it was in was yet another to add to the list of unknowns. But then, I thought ruefully, even if I discovered the location of the house, would I be any better off?
No.
So, what to do? I needed some sort of plan of campaign, but another long period of cerebral punishment came up with nothing, apart from the vague idea that I should perhaps try to get myself - Angelina - back into dear sweet Greg's good books. If I could convince him that I'd had a change of heart, maybe we could lose the chains and loosen the corset a bit. After that, I didn't know, but I had to start somewhere.
I made my way slowly back to the mirror and practised my best selection of winsome smiles and fluttering of eyelashes. Combined with my tiny waist and almost vacuous looking features, they should have been irresistible to any man with his sexual organs still connected to a warm blood supply.
Should have been.
Yes, well... Greg Hacklebury's tackle was certainly well plumbed in, as I would shortly discover first hand, but the mechanism that governed what he did with it was in turn regulated by the sort of personality you tend to think of as not existing outside really bad horror movies, or maybe the Third Reich. I could probably get down my thesaurus now and give you a list of thirty or forty adjectives that would have been applicable to Hacklebury, but one word alone sums him up in the end.
Evil.
Oh yes, and you can add cunning, suspicious and ruthless in whatever order you fancy, because Gregory Hacklebury was already one step ahead of me, as I was about to discover.
8
.
The next traumatic chapter began shortly before sunset. Apart from Polly reappearing to replace my empty water jug, I had been left undisturbed and, in truth, was rapidly becoming bored by the overwhelming inactivity. I'd found and used the commode chair - twice - and I'd spent a couple more interludes staring out of the window, but that was the extent of the diversions available to me. Not that my own time had yet encountered it, but if I'd known about daytime television and cable channel repeats I'd have viewed them in an entirely different light to the way most of us do now.
The door opened, as I said, just as the sun was dipping towards the far hills. I turned from the window expecting to see Polly again, but instead found myself confronted by the sight of Hacklebury. And a drunk Hacklebury, at that.
'Ah, my sweet, darling little wife,' he slurred, holding the doorframe for support. 'How do I find you today, eh? Not as obliging as your little substitute, I'll warrant, but then I haven't promised to pay you fifty guineas, have I?'
So that was it - he'd been drinking and getting his money's worth from the poor fool he had persuaded to play my part in the sham wedding. Fifty guineas? I did a rapid mental calculation and almost gasped out loud. That was worth something like three or four thousand pounds in my own time, and nearer thirty thousand in early twenty-first century terms.
He was playing serious. Unless...
Unless he had no intention of paying the woman at all. Depending upon where he had found her, what her background was and who, if any, her relatives were, I had the nasty feeling that the substitute Lady Hacklebury might not see the colour of the Hacklebury gold. For that matter, she might not be seeing the colour of anything else for much longer.
However, I told myself firmly, that wasn't my problem. I didn't know her, nor did I know anything about her, save that she had to look at least something like me. Like Angelina, I corrected myself. Call me a hard bitch, but I was more concerned about myself.
'You look a little tired, sir,' I replied, affably enough. 'Come, won't you sit down a while?' Okay, okay, so it was hammy, but you come up with a better line. Better still, come up with a better line when you're perched on tiptoe, being steadily squeezed to death by a corset and with your arse still feeling as if someone's been using it for a griddle pan.
No, Hacklebury didn't buy it, either. He stared at me, struggling to persuade both his eyes to look in something like the same direction and then a weird smile spread across his face.
'Such solicitousness,' he said. Well, that's what he
tried
to say, I think. What came out sounded like an advert for a particularly nasty mouthwash. 'Does my dear wife wish me to believe that she is really concerned about my condition?'
He staggered inside the room another step or so and slammed the door hard behind him.
'I - I've been thinking, Gregory,' I tried again. 'This is all so - so unnecessary. Just a misunderstanding. Mayhap I reacted a little...' I ran out of appropriate words about then, but it wouldn't have mattered.
'Misunderstanding, is it?' he bellowed, and then threw back his head and guffawed - not a word we see much nowadays, I know, but very appropriate just then.
'You stupid bitch!' he cried, tears streaming down his alcohol-flushed cheeks. 'You think you can wheedle your way back with a few solish... solishy... dammit, clever words? I'm drunk, not bloody stupid, girl!'
'I merely meant,' I began, 'that now I've had time to consider—'
'You don't fancy being left to rot in your bedroom, eh? Of course you don't, you tight-arsed little mare! Well don't worry; you won't have to languish here for much longer. Oh no!' He leered at me and took another step closer. How I wished there was something I could have used to hit him with; in that condition I could have sent him to the land of Nod before he had time to react.
'No, madam, I have a far better plan for you,' he sneered. 'I have most of what I want from you already, thanks to that stupid whore downstairs. Now all I have to do is make sure that the pair of you are stabled somewhere safely out of the way and do something about procuring a hostage to your good behaviour if ever I do need to show you in public.'
'What can you mean?' I demanded, but from the look in his bleary eyes now, I suspected I already knew. There's one certain way of making sure a woman will do your bidding and only one sort of hostage whose well being she can be almost guaranteed to put well before her own!
'Why don't we just sit down and try and talk this through?' I suggested. My quaint Victorian diction was out the window now, but he was too far shot to realise that. He was listening to the meaning, rather than to the form of what I was trying to say.
'Listen, Greg... Gregory, perhaps I was a bit hasty before, but there's no need to go to extremes, really there isn't.'
'Ain't there, egad!' he exploded.
'No, there ain't,' I said. 'No need at all. Look, I'll go along with you if that's what you want. You've got my signature on your marriage lines thing now and a couple of witnesses you've probably bribed well enough to make sure they'll swear black was white, if it ever comes to it. Look, I'm a realist, okay?'
'You're a cunning, scheming little vixen,' he retorted. 'And what manner of words you use, too. Okay, you say?'
'That means yes, I agree,' I tried to explain. 'Um, old Romany thing, I think.' Good lie, on the spur of the moment. Old American thing more like, but not old then, unfortunately. Probably not even first uttered, I wouldn't think. Hacklebury had already moved past that though, and now he was steaming.
'You silly little bitch!' he snapped, spittle whistling dangerously close to my left ear. 'You think I don't know what you're trying to do?'
'Listen,' I said, holding my hands up in a placatory gesture, 'all I'm trying to do is offer a truce, eh? Sort of time out for reconsideration and maybe start at the beginning again?'
'Too late for second thoughts,' he said. 'Far too late.'
'No, really,' I blustered. 'It's never too late. Look, I'll show you I mean it,' I offered. I began furiously trying to pull at the ribbon drawstring that held my drawers about my waist, but my hands were all but useless. I looked up at him again, smiling encouragingly.
'Here, you help me,' I urged. Dammit, it wasn't my body, was it? And it wasn't as though it was anything I hadn't done in my real life. I had to try to win him over, convince him in some way that I was regretting my earlier actions, even if they'd been Angelina's actions anyway.
'Come on,' I said, softer now. 'Help me out of these bloomers, will you?' He looked at me a bit strangely then, but it was more my choice of word, I realised. Amelia Bloomer had died somewhere near the end of that century, as far as I could remember, and though I had no idea how old she was when she finally shuffled off, the odds were she was still a bit of a youngster now and the name she coined for baggy knickers probably took a few years to cross the Atlantic in any case.
'Oh, come on,' I said. 'Just help me with this damned ribbon and then I can manage the rest. I think,' I added, looking down at the awkwardly shaped little boots. Ah well, I thought, it wouldn't be the first time I'd done it with my knickers round my ankles!
'What devil has got into you?' he demanded, narrowing his eyes. I realised maybe I'd gone in just a bit hard, but then that was what he was going to do to me, so why pussy-foot around? 'What manner of change is this I see and hear?'
Oops!
'Look,' I said, 'I'm just trying to show you I'm sincere, that's all. You're a handsome man and far more worldly than I, so I'm trying to bridge that gap between us, that's all. I just panicked before, that's all. Now I'm trying to make it up to you. Or don't you fancy me any more?'
'Fancy you?'
Careful with your terminology, Teena
. 'You speak like a street whore,' he muttered, but I could see he was beginning to come around to my way of thinking a bit.
'Would you like me to be a street whore for you?' I whispered, and hoped it was a seductive whisper. I placed my hands on my hips in a suggestive pose. 'I could be anything you want, if you just tell me,' I offered. He smiled at me, very lopsidedly, but now I knew I was starting to win some points.
'You look like a little street whore,' he nodded. Hmmm, well of course he'd know about that. 'Your titties are too small, though.'
'Perhaps they'll grow some,' I suggested. 'I'm still young, after all. Besides,' I added coquettishly, 'it isn't the size that's important, is it?'
He ripped the drawers off me and the thin fabric made such a noise over its departure that I knew they'd never be good for anything other than cleaning rags again. I expected to find myself flying through the air and gritted my teeth at the thought of my bruised backside landing on the bed, but instead he stepped back and planted his hands on his hips.