THYME II THYME
by
JENNIFER JANE POPE
Thyme II Thyme first published in 2002 by Chimera Publishing. Published as an eBook in 2011 by Chimera eBooks.
ISBN 9781780800714
www.chimerabooks.co.uk
Chimera (ki-mir'a, ki-) a creation of the imagination, a wild fantasy.
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This novel is fiction - in real life practice safe sex.
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Copyright Jennifer Jane Pope. The right of Jennifer Jane Pope to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Prologue - Time Travel
Epilogue
Prologue - Time Travel
Even after more than a quarter of a century doing it, I still don't know how it works, but then the fact that I also still don't really understand how a couple of manmade wings can lift a jumbo jet to the upper reaches of the atmosphere doesn't mean that doesn't happen. Just take my word for it - jumbo jets fly and people can travel through time. I'm not the only one who does it, I'm just one of the very few people prepared to talk about it, let alone write it all down like this.
The few really close friends with whom I've discussed my various adventures, and whose encouragements finally led me to begin documenting them, have expressed a certain... well, I'm not quite sure what the best words are to describe what they say, but they all tend to wonder how and why it is that wherever I turn up through the ages it tends to be in the midst of a bunch of what I politely describe as perverted lunatics. Again, politeness not withstanding, I know that my friends - being aware that most, if not all, of the bodies I find myself in are in some way physically related to the 'me' of the twenty-first century - must also be wondering as to my own, shall we say, stability.
Well, for those of you similarly disposed, let me assure you that I'm as stable as the next girl and more stable than most. If I have a propensity for enduring the bizarre without going to pieces, and questioning the morality of minds and bodies that can derive a certain amount of gratification from situations many might describe as less than so-called normal, so what? I didn't ask to be thrown back and forth like this, and until my very first adventure I had no real idea of the sort of kinks that exist within so many people.
Given the choice between being swept off my feet by a modern day Mister Darcy, all champagne and chocolates and just a hint of dark brooding to keep me on my toes, and being harnessed up like a race horse and having the arse screwed off me whilst champing on a foul tasting gag, then the chocolates and champagne would win every time. But it's not even a case of beggars not being choosers we're talking about here. Believe me, I've begged, been made to beg, crawling on all fours with an artificial tail plugged into my bottom for added effect and humiliation, and I can tell you that begging never did me any good whatsoever.
No, my philosophy, if you can call it that, has been very simple from the start - don't beat yourself up over something you can't do anything about. And, given the opportunity, take the best out of everything going, even if the best means surrendering yourself to the treacherous leanings of whatever body you happen to find yourself in, and of whatever situation that body itself happens to be in.
I guess you probably think that makes me some sort of kink? Well, okay, I suppose you probably have a point there. Yes, maybe it does, but then perhaps you're also confusing me with someone else, someone who gives a flying fuck, perhaps? Don't knock what you haven't tried, and don't even think of sitting in judgment on me or anyone else who might be out there like me. Being plucked from the present and sent back through the centuries at random intervals and without so much as a second's warning is more than enough for us to have to worry about. Besides, as I've already said, why should I get all moral about bodies that aren't my own?
It's my lot, that's all, and I can't fight it, so I go with the flow and, if I were really brutally honest, I'd have to say that it hasn't been all bad. I've seen things, been places and met people I know many of my contemporaries would give their eye teeth to have seen, been and met, and I've learned stuff about history you almost certainly won't find in any history books, at least not in the history books you get in schools and public libraries.
And then there's the other up side to all this, which are my own body and my own life in the here and now. Yes, this body, that's the one I'm talking about, the tall one with the very long legs, nice firm breasts and, even if I do say so myself, not unattractive face, a twenty-something girl's face, in fact. It comes as just a bit of a shock to most people when I tell them that it's more than a passable face for someone who's knocking on the door to join the Over Fifty's Club.
Yes, it's true, but as I explained in the first volume of my little memoir, it's some sort of side effect of time-travel and I can't explain how it works any better than I can explain the rest of it. No, that's not true, I can explain how it works but not why, at least in basic mathematics. For every minute, hour, day, or whatever span of time that I spend back in some other age, my body in the present gets awarded some sort of credit to the equivalent. In other words, if I go back into the past for a week, then for the next week that I'm back in my own time my real body won't age.
And that's a better deal than it might sound at first hearing, because when I say I go back in time for a week, that week is seven days in time then but only a matter of seconds in the present, or in real time. In any one week of my own time, I could spend maybe as much as several months back in the past and thereby have earned myself half a year or more of non-aging in the process. At least that's the way it seems to work. If I'm right, I've now racked up a credit of around five or six years that I haven't even touched yet. So even if, for whatever reason, my time hopping adventures were to stop tomorrow, it would be another five or six years before my body, which I think of as my real body, started back onto the normal process of deterioration.
I hope.
As explanations go, the above may not rank in the Top Twenty, but it's about as good as it gets when it comes from me, so maybe it would be better to leave it as it stands and get back to my story.
You do remember my story, don't you?
Okay, it's been a while, so I won't hold it against you if you don't, and there'll be people out there reading this who may well have missed out on my first tome, so let's just refresh ourselves, shall we?
I'm Teena Thyme, eponymous heroine, as they would have it, of the book Teena Thyme and now of this book, which we have wittily entitled Thyme II Thyme. To be really accurate, I'm actually Christeena Felicity Spigwell-Thyme, but the grand sounding name doesn't make for a grand pedigree, at least not through the most immediate layers and branches of my family tree. Christeena I got because my dad is dyslexic and was drunk when he went to register my birth, and Felicity was from my late grandmother. I'm just grateful that dad somehow got Felicity right even if he screwed up on spelling what was supposed to be Christina, otherwise the gods alone know what combinations I might have ended up with.
Spigwell-Thyme being a bit of a mouthful, m
y parents had tended to drop the first bit and stick with good old-fashioned Thyme, as in sage, rosemary, etc. I'm also grateful that the brilliant idea my dad had to call me Rosemary was given a very firm knock on the head by the rest of the family. A joke is a joke and a pun is a pun, but Rosemary Thyme? I don't think so!
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, well, we weren't a very posh family. Dad had a well enough paid job as an engineer in sewage, and mum was a part-time teacher in the local infant's school right up to the day when they closed it and merged it with a bigger place about six miles up the road. Home for wee Teena was a modest house at a place called Sandy Point on Hayling Island, which for the uninitiated is a lump of land sticking out of the south coast just slightly to the east of Portsmouth, in Hampshire.
I won't bore you with any more geographical details here. If you want to find out for yourself, get an AA road map and look it up. On second thought, spare yourself the expense and effort, it isn't worth it, believe me.
Life for me up until I reached my majority, as they call it, was pretty much uneventful, just the usual kid stuff, going to the usual schools and doing the usual things. Much like your own early years, I suspect, so we'll gloss over those and move forward to when I turned eighteen, by which time the most remarkable things about me were that I had grown to the unusual height, for a girl, of five-feet-eleven. Because I was fit and strong in addition to being tall, I had represented my school and county at netball and had half-a-dozen silver-plated trophies along with a drawer full of silver-plated medals to prove it. I might not be proud of a lot of things I've done in my life, but at least I can be proud of that.
But I digress...
My birthday is the eighteenth of December, precisely one week before Christmas. When my eighteenth birthday arrived, late in nineteen seventy-four, it was accompanied by a letter from a firm of lawyers in relatively nearby Chichester asking me to present myself at their offices, whereupon I would learn something to my advantage. They weren't kidding.
It turned out I'd had a great aunt, maybe with a few extra 'greats' thrown in for good measure, a Miss Amelia Spigwell, who had just died, but not before living to the age of one-hundred-and-three. She had never married, as her one true love had been killed in the Boer War, and none of us Spigwell-Thymes had ever been aware of her existence even though she had lived in a small cottage in a village called Rowland's Castle only a hop, skip and a jump from Hayling Island.
We'd also had no idea, therefore, that she had been quite rich, so it came as a bit of a surprise to one eighteen-year-old Teena to discover that she was the sole heiress to an estate worth nearly half a million quid, and this back in early nineteen seventy-five, when half a million went a hell of a lot farther than it does today.
To cut a long story short, I moved into the cottage to do the independent miss bit, though I was determined to continue with my studies. In particular I was into history, but was totally unprepared for just how into history I was to become. I had barely time to consider my newfound wealth when I stumbled over several old trunks and cases left by, I presumed, the late Amelia. Well, stumbled over isn't exactly accurate as they were up with the spiders' webs in the loft, but I did find them. They seemed to be mostly full of old clothes, dresses, underwear, shoes, boots and even some costume jewellery all dating back at least seventy years and possibly even further. None of it was valuable, other than possibly attracting a few quid from memorabilia collectors, but it was all in remarkably good condition, nearly new, in fact, presumably because the trunks were all but airtight.
Now, you show me a girl who isn't attracted by a heap of glamorous gowns and who doesn't have just a teensy hankering for days when ladies were ladies and men were men - or rakes, or cads, or whatever - and I'll show you a girl who's either a liar or who doesn't have a scrap of romanticism or imagination in her body. Hot pants and miniskirts may have been considered sexy back in the sixties and seventies, but silk and taffeta are the stuff of dreams...
Corsets, on the other hand, are the stuff of nightmares, whatever they may do for your figure, and wouldn't you just know it, there was no way I was going to get any of those dresses hooked or buttoned without first submitting myself to the tortures of the boned underwear selection I found with them. So I huffed and I puffed and I damn nearly passed out, but eventually down the stairs came one Lady Teena, all rustle and bustle, high-heels and long gloves, heading straight for the medicinal properties of a bottle of wine.
Which was when I discovered the pendant, hidden away, probably lost, in a dark recess in the kitchen. It was a locket, and inside was a miniature of a lady and a gentleman, a nice and very proper looking pair, vintage Georgian or early Victorian. There was nothing special about them and nothing special about the pendant either, I thought, other than the fact it was most definitely gold. How wrong could I have been?
I have since discovered that the pendant, thought not de rigeur for my time hopping, almost certainly was the initial catalyst. Exactly what it triggered in me and in the cosmos I have no idea, but trigger something it most certainly did.
I put the pendant on.
I fainted.
I woke up back in eighteen thirty-nine and, more to the point, I woke up in a corset even tighter than the one I had just struggled into and in a body that was most definitely not my own. I knew this for a fact because, other than being blonde like me, this girl had been barely five-feet tall in her stocking feet and had breasts you could have fit into one fair sized hand as a pair. I may not have been overly endowed but I had more up top than that!
Her name, it transpired, was Angelina and she was an ancestor, but that bit was less important than the fact that she was about to be forced into marriage with a particularly nasty piece of work called Sir Gregory Hacklebury, and that she was being held prisoner by a man to whom being called a bounder would have been a compliment. His chief maid, a demented female called Meg who was undoubtedly shagging his lights out, had been put in charge of the poor wench and was delighting in taunting and torturing her at every tip and turn.
Of course, it was all about money; Gregory had little and Angelina had lots, and in those days when a woman married a man everything she had became his property, including her body. Oh dear, what a shock to a modern lass like myself.
The rest I'll fill you in on as we go, but for the moment I should also add that when I finally returned to my own body and my own time, I met up with and befriended a girl slightly older than myself called Anne-Marie. I should also mention that she had several cousins by the name of Hacklebury who came from in and around a little village called Melbury Osmand in the neighbouring county of Dorset. She also had a sort of stepbrother named Andy, although Andy, it transpired, preferred to dress and act more like an Andrea, except when it came to exercising his little Percy department. I suppose you would call Anne-Marie bi-sexual and you would call Andy... well, you would call him unusual, at the very least. The same could be said of Anne-Marie, for she quickly introduced me to a combination of lesbian sex and bondage games, although not bondage in the true and cruel sense I'd experienced more than a century earlier.
We did a bit of research together. I had carefully explained what had happened to me to Anne-Marie and, wonder of wonders, she believed me and we went and met her cousins under some pretext or other. However, whilst there was a sort of Hacklebury resemblance in some of them, especially bachelor cousin George, there was nothing conclusive other than that we returned from Dorset with the certainty in our minds that Hacklebury must have fathered a child with Angelina, and that the line had continued. As to where that line had led and what direct or indirect links it had with me in the present, I had no idea. And to be honest, as the psychological scars began to heal quickly, I resolved to drop the whole thing once and for all and forget the past. Unfortunately, the 'thing' refused to drop me. Right in the middle of Andrea giving me the screwing of all time, I was whisked back once more...
1.
'Jeez, Teenie, you had us both reall
y worried there for a couple of minutes!'
Anne-Marie's voice penetrated the mists and I forced my eyes to open. I saw their two faces, Anne-Marie's to my right, Andrea's to my left, consternation on the former, sheer fright on the latter.
'No, don't try to get up.' Anne-Marie pressed gently against my shoulders. 'Take it easy... there's a love. You passed out, in case you didn't guess already, and you look terrible.' She stroked my forehead and I realised the gag and harness were gone, as was the ribbon that had bound my wrists earlier, though my hands were still encased within the disabling gloves.
'Here,' Andrea said, turning away, 'try a sip of water.' Her hand hovered back into my field of vision and I saw she was holding a half filled glass.
I shook my head, but Anne-Marie already had her arm beneath my shoulders, lifting me and steadying me. I sipped indelicately; the cold liquid spilled out onto my chin but I didn't care.
'Better?' Andrea asked gently.
I nodded, grateful when I was allowed to fall back and sink into the softness of the pillow Anne-Marie had pulled beneath me with her free hand.
'A bit too much too soon, I think,' she said soberly.
I looked up into her eyes and shook my head again. 'No,' I managed to say, my voice half croak, half whisper. 'No, it was quite...' Mere words could not have gone even halfway down the road to describing what I had felt, but it was more than that, and something else, that I had to tell them. 'It was good,' I said lamely. 'Better than good, but...' I hesitated, once more at a loss for words. 'How long was I out for this time?' I asked instead.
I saw Anne-Marie's expression changing as understanding dawned in her eyes. 'Oh, my God!' she exclaimed, her hand rising to her mouth. 'You mean you went back there again?'
I heard a half strangled gasp from Andrea but my attention was now fixed firmly on Anne-Marie. 'Yes,' I said, 'I went back there again. How long have I been unconscious?'
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