Teena Thyme (9 page)

Fumbling awkwardly I managed to slip the catch and the two halves came open in my hands. Two faces greeted me, two pairs of eyes looked up at me.

'Well, hello there,' I said quietly. 'Nice to meet you both. I'm Teena Thyme, lady of this manor. Now, I wonder who you two are - or were, should I say?'

I looked at the woman first. She seemed to have been quite pretty, in that slightly full-faced way peculiar to Georgian and early Victorian ladies. Her face was very pale - powder, no doubt - and her elegantly coiffeured hair would almost certainly have been a wig, but her eyes were gentle and I suspected that she must have been a very nice person.

The man also seemed to radiate a nice aura. He was dark-haired, with quite thin features and a slightly overlong nose, but I could see that he would have been considered handsome in his day. I could just see the high collar of his jacket and the lacy cravat that seemed to have been tied just a fraction too tightly and I had a feeling, looking at the way in which his eyes seemed to twinkle, that he had not really taken his portrait sittings as seriously as the pose suggested he might.

I closed the locket again and turned it over in my hands a few times. I could make out a definite indentation inside the loop through which the missing chain must have passed and, as I examined it closer, I saw it was an irregular oval shape, rather than the circle one might have expected. Enter Sherlock Teena.

'Someone yanked this off the chain,' I said to myself. 'Either that, or it got caught up on something and the strain distorted the link before it finally broke.'

The inscription on the back of the locket was so worn that I almost missed it and at first I thought maybe I was mistaken, that it was just some deeper scratches, but no, when I held it up closer I could definitely make out letters. It was an ornate and very old-fashioned script, I saw, but what did it say?

'A.I.,' I read. 'Nope, not I,' I corrected myself. 'That's a T. So, A.T., whatever that means.' I blinked and looked closer still, my nose now nearly touching the warm metal surface. 'Eighteenth December, MDCCCXX,' I read. Eighteen-twenty.

'A.T., eighteenth December eighteen-twenty. A wedding date? Birthday? Well, it was certainly my birthday, though not the eighteen-twenty bit. That was more than a hundred and thirty years out.

Perhaps, I thought, there might be further clues inside, maybe tucked away behind the two tiny portraits, but here and now wasn't the time to investigate further. It would require daylight and steady hands, unencumbered by gloves and alcohol and even then there was a risk of causing damage, which I most certainly wanted to avoid.

'Thyme,' I whispered suddenly. 'The T stands for Thyme.' Don't ask me how I knew that, but I just did and I knew it with an overwhelming certainty that took me quite by surprise. Somebody whose first name had begun with the letter A and whose last name was Thyme. Another ancestor. A relic of a Thyme in the house of a Spigwell.

Intriguing. But how could I find out more? The births and deaths records would be useless, thanks to Herr Goerring and his merry airmen, as I already knew, but maybe there would be other records somewhere. Maybe either the Spigwells or the Thymes had been important enough to appear in old parish documents, or even under land registry records. I resolved to make further enquiries, maybe even travel up to London and scour the main public records. After all, I could afford to go wherever I wanted now and a few days off from schoolwork wasn't going to hurt any.

But first, though, there was the locket itself. I bent down and looked under the drawer space again, though I didn't really expect to see the chain there. Something told me that the two had parted company a good while before the locket found its last resting place. However, upstairs in my jewellery box I had the gold chain that mum and dad had bought me for my sixteenth birthday.

Locket clutched firmly in hand, I renegotiated the steep stairs and went into the bedroom. My jewellery box lay in the top drawer of the dresser and sure enough, there on top of my various cheap bits and pieces of junk, lay the chain. Awkwardly, because of the gloves still, I threaded it through the loop in the locket, held it up to my neck and, after a couple of abortive attempts, managed to clip the fastener in place.

'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 always 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.