It had to have all been just a dream, that was the most obvious and rational answer. How else could it be that I had spent something around a week back in eighteen thirty-nine and yet, according to what my dad just told me and the evidence of the clock in the cottage, barely five minutes had elapsed back here in nineteen seventy-five? No wonder I hadn't looked undernourished and no wonder nobody had worried about my protracted absence - in this era I hadn't been gone anywhere!
Back in my bedroom I slowly divested myself of my clothing and slipped into a comfortable nightdress, pulling my thick dressing gown on over the top, and then another peculiarity struck me. I fingered the locket and gave it some thought, but nothing suggested itself to me other than the obvious.
When I had 'awoken' back in time, I assumed that the locket and clothing I was wearing in my own time had played some part in my transportation and then assumed that both locket and clothing had at some time had some association with Angelina, my poor ancestor. However, now, as I stared at the clothing I'd just removed, I realised that if the locket had been hers, the clothing could not possibly have been.
Fair enough, allowing for age and nature and waistlines thickening and bosoms maturing and the like, sure, the Angelina I had been might well have developed into a different looking woman eventually, but no way did or could anyone of around twenty manage to grow another eleven inches during her remaining lifespan. No, those clothes had fitted me closely enough and yes, maybe the skirts were a trifle on the short side, but whoever had originally worn them had to have been at least six or seven inches taller than Angie.
So whose clothes were they? I shook my head, suddenly feeling very tired and confused and decided it wasn't worth taxing my brain any further that evening. Tomorrow was, after all, another day, and daylight often made the most complex problems seem so much simpler than they were during the hours of darkness. I drew back the covers, slipped between the sheets and, still wearing my dressing gown over my nightie, was asleep in the twinkling of an eye.
17.
A dream?
So, was that all it had been after all? A vivid dream; a dream so realistic that... whatever, it certainly made more sense than believing I actually had travelled back over a century, no matter how flawed the theory might be when examined closer.
For a start, research shows that there's a definite correlation between dream time and real time, apparently with some sort of average of twice as fast in dreams as it is in the reality of the dreamer's outside world. Believe that, and I'd have to have slept at least three days, and I knew for certain I hadn't done that. On the other hand, research is one thing, real proof is another and so many solid theories in so many fields have been exploded later by further investigations.
I decided, after a morning of proper pondering, to try to forget the whole episode. Yeah, like I could forget I had two legs, that my new shoes pinched, that it hurt if you put your hand under scalding water. In other words, easier said than done. But I did try.
That afternoon I took a decision; not a mind numbing, life altering decision, but one I thought was sensible in the situation. Whilst it was highly unlikely that I could ever prove whether I had actually time-travelled, or whether the entire experience had just been some sort of dream or hallucination, there were some things I could do, starting with a little project which, although it might require several days at least of my time, would not be entirely wasted as the results could likely be incorporated into my various history projects and maybe, ultimately, a university thesis, assuming I did manage to get the uni place I was working towards.
I considered, therefore, embarking upon a little family tree investigation. We nineteen-seventies Thymes knew next to nothing about our ancestors much beyond the age of my grandparents, and where Hacklebury and any other Hackleburys sat in the equation was an even greater mystery.
However, we don't live in the dark ages and there have been layers of paperwork and entire tribes of bureaucrats bent on documenting our every move since even before the first guy thought of dipping an ostrich feather into sooty oil, so what I didn't know had to be out there and available somewhere.
Given my recently inherited wealth, the possibility of upsetting my tutors at school wasn't as daunting as it might otherwise have been and besides, a quick letter saying I was somewhat under the weather with an unspecified bug would be sufficient to earn me at least two weeks' breathing space.
I started with the local libraries and the copies of various parish registers and then progressed to the Registrar of Births and stuff, trailing around all the immediate offices and filling out numerous request forms and paying over more search fees than you would believe possible. If anyone starts harping on about the good old days, they ought to try searching for information through a system where just about everything was 'handraulic' and sweated over by a myriad late middle-aged ladies in faded cardigans and with permanent bad hair days.
After ten days my original two week estimate was more than just beginning to look woefully inadequate. I'd managed to obtain copies of my grandparents' marriage and birth certificates - on both sides of the family - and gone one generation further back on my mother's side, tracing my great grandmother Wilhelmina back as far as her marriage to one Gerald Locke and then Gerald Locke back as far as his parents, Wilfred Thyme and Anne Smith, a surname which promised little in the way of random records fishing.
However, this was interesting in itself, in that there were Thymes on both sides of the family tree, which meant I was a pure Thyme descendant with some Smith in me somewhere. Of course, various wars, epidemics and suchlike had carried off various twigs and even entire branches of families during the period I was researching, so rooting out a comprehensive family history was always going to be unlikely, and so a different tack was now required and I turned my attention towards the name of Hacklebury.
My main problem now was where to begin my search. Wilfred Thyme had most likely come into the area from farther afield and Amelia, my late benefactor, had apparently been a cousin, but her records led back into a void too, so the Spigwells of that generation were a mystery, other than the fact that they seemed to have been related to the Thymes by various marriages and things. The Hackleburys and the Thymes of Angelina's generation were several years back before even them, way back in the days before any real semblance of centralised records let alone computer technology, and I hadn't the faintest idea where they had lived in the country, accept that I had an unexplained certainty that it was somewhere in the south of England. Whether the Spigwell connection went that far back, of course, I couldn't tell.
American readers will look at a map of England and then at the south of England and wonder at how it could be so difficult to find anything in an area so small; there are small counties in Texas which would swallow our entire south and still have room for afters and yet it's far more than geographic size that causes problems for anyone playing history detective.
Thousands of small parishes kept meticulous records of hatches, matches and dispatches, but these dusty old ledgers lived hundreds of years in even dustier old vestries and Mr Goerring's flying landscape consultants weren't always as choosy or as accurate as they might have been. The consequence of this, and of other less warlike disasters meant there were more holes in Victorian family record keeping than in a pair of fishnet stockings, holes into which entire family trees had plunged without ever looking forward, if you get my meaning.
I took the bus into Portsmouth and made my way to the main library, where I sat and studied whole reams of old maps, land sales documents, biographies and autobiographies, and by now I was well into the third week of my sabbatical and pushing my luck to its limit where school was concerned. What was worse, although I'd turned up some fascinating stuff and was pushing my learning curve concerning local history ever upwards, I was getting no closer to finding what I needed to know.
I discovered several sets of Hackleburys during this time, but the references were vague and all th
e people concerned apparently had roots way up north. I did find a reference to a George Hacklebury from Devon, but he had been a merchant adventurer and died at the hands of some seriously irate Punjabi rebels back around the time of George II and at best could have been no more than Gregory Hacklebury's granddaddy, always assuming he did manage to father any offspring before his untimely demise.
I'm not, nor have I ever been, the sort of person who gives up on anything without a fight, but by now I was beginning to despair. Another part of the problem was, I knew, the fact that I was fishing blindly for clues during an era when Britain was expanding its Empire faster than any other empire in history had ever expanded and men - women too, in some cases - were taking off to all points of the compass in search of fortunes, taking with them the ends of family lines and the beginnings of new dynasties that would appear in every corner of the world in the years to come.
I had not, of course, let either of my parents in on my quest; as far as they were concerned Teena was doing her dutiful stuff, attending lectures, writing essays and all that stuff and they were, as long as I went home for Sunday lunch and a couple of hours at the family hearth afterwards, seemingly happy to let me continue to demonstrate my independence.
But to be quite truthful I was actually neglecting myself quite badly, so obsessed was I becoming and, the harder things got in the search, the less attention I was paying to my own well being. No, I wasn't a smelly, dirty heap of rags, neither was I becoming an undernourished skeleton, but I was surviving mostly on a diet of snacks and convenience food and I was definitely not sleeping well, even when I did finally make it back to the cottage.
The dreams weren't helping in that direction, either.
They weren't very clear, those dreams, neither were they of the epic proportions of my possible time-hop experience, but I kept waking up with snippets of vividity seared into my mind, little 'video clip' extracts of scenes I could not explain logically.
There were whips, chains, men, women, horses, black coaches in the night, terrible eyes burning in the darkness, screaming, shouting, wailing, all manner of horrible things, but nothing that came in any form that might give me a solid point of reference. After a while I began to wonder if I might not be going mad and I spent many hours late into the night sitting on my bed, staring at that dress, where it now hung against the door of my wardrobe.
Several times I started up, intending to dress again as I had done on that first fateful evening, but each time, as my hands reached for the dress and I turned to where the corset still lay across the back of the small easy chair in the corner by the window, I first hesitated and then stopped altogether. The memory of that bizarre whipping post, the image of Polly falling to the ground, her terrible cries echoing my own shrieks of lust fulfilled - I couldn't risk returning to that, even though I knew now that it had never really happened.
'Are you all right?' I opened my eyes at the sound of her voice and looked up, startled, into a pair of deep lilac coloured eyes. Blinking away the fatigue I recognised the woman as one of the regular library staff and realised I had fallen asleep at the reading table, my head in the middle of an open volume by some little known West Country historian.
'Oh, I'm sorry,' I blurted out. 'I must have dropped off.' Nothing like stating the obvious, I guess. She smiled, revealing lovely even white teeth and for the first time I took proper notice of her. She was quite tall, though not as tall as I was, but more heavily built with a generous bosom and much more in the way of curves all round. She was also about five or six years older than me and very, very pretty, a fact that her thick framed spectacles had somehow managed to disguise to an extent before now, or perhaps I just hadn't really had cause to really look at her in that way.
'As long as you're okay,' she said. 'Only we'll be closing in a few minutes and the boss lady will be along to do her final rounds.'
Her name, I discovered as we returned the book I'd been reading, was Anne-Marie and she had been an assistant librarian for four years, but also moonlighted as a go-go dancer at a club. All this she told me as we walked together across the Guildhall Square towards the coffee house that had remained unchanged and almost unscathed for decades, even though Luftwaffe incendiary bombs had gutted the adjacent Guildhall itself.
'So, you're tracing your family tree,' Anne-Marie said as we slid into one of the high-backed wooden cubicles. I glanced at my watch: we had maybe an hour, for this place seldom stayed open late, not with the 'strip' of pubs favoured by the shore-running sailors only a few hundred yards to the south of where it stood. Besides, there was a lot of development work going on around this area and the screens of scaffolding and ply-boards formed a sinister system for walkers once the evening began to age towards night time.
'Well, I'm trying to,' I replied. The espresso coffee was hot and more than welcome to my tired system. 'Trouble is, I keep hitting brick walls.'
'It must be very interesting, all the same,' she said. I looked sideways and past her, to what I could see of our fellow coffee drinkers. There weren't many and those I could see looked mostly to be students, probably late evening researchers from the nearby polytechnic library.
'I'm beginning to think I'm wasting my time,' I said. 'I've been looking for one name, but I'm getting nowhere slowly.'
'Must be an unusual name?' Anne-Marie suggested. I shook my head.
'Not especially,' I said. 'In fact, I've found dozens of references to it, but none tie in to the person I'm actually looking for.' I grinned. 'Well, perhaps I should say the person I think I'm looking for.'
'Ah.' She nodded in turn. 'Bit of a mystery man, is he?'
'You could say that,' I conceded. 'Only the real mystery is that I really don't have anything more to go on than his name and the feeling - don't ask me to explain that, please - the feeling that he probably lived in the south of England somewhere and the year would have been eighteen thirty something or other.'
'Oh.' A short pause, during which we both sipped froth again. 'What's the name you're after?'
'Hacklebury,' I replied. 'Gregory Hacklebury.'
'Ohhh!' I looked up at her soft exclamation. The lilac eyes seemed a deeper violet under the lights in here.
'What?' I said. Anne-Marie sucked on her lip.
'I have cousins by that name,' she said carefully. 'Hacklebury, that is, not Gregory, though there may be a Gregory somewhere, for all I know.' She pondered for a moment. 'No, there's Joanna, Susan, George, Philip, Doreen, James and Paul. Mind you, the last three are all married with kids and I haven't seen any of them for yonks, so they could have a Gregory at the sprog stage.' She laughed. 'Not that you're looking for a baby Gregory. Your man would be long dead, of course.'
'Of course,' I agreed. 'But tell me, how much do you know of the family history - your cousins' family history, that is?' Anne-Marie shrugged her shapely shoulders and looked apologetic.
'Not much, I'm afraid,' she said. 'They're all on my mum's side and none of us has been down that way since I was quite little.'
'And where is "that way"?' I prompted. 'Is it far?'
'Well, depends on how you look at it,' she said annoyingly. 'Do you have a car?' I shook my head.
'Not at the moment, no.' Not that it would have mattered if I had; there was also the small matter of a driving licence. Anne-Marie appeared to think for another moment.
'I've got a car,' she said brightly. 'I could run you down to meet some of them this weekend, if you like. How very exciting and what a coincidence it would be if your family and mine were all related back in the mists of time.'
Yes, what a coincidence. There was still one unanswered question.
'Where exactly do they all live?' I asked.
'Dorset,' she replied. 'Originally they were all in or around a little village called Melbury Osmand, but I think some of them have moved to neighbouring villages. I expect my mum has some of the addresses - and phone numbers. I'll phone around tomorrow and let you know if it's okay for the weekend, always supp
osing you do fancy driving down, that is. I never even asked you, did I?' She giggled. No, she hadn't asked me, but then she didn't have to. There was only one possible answer and I leaned across the table and kissed her full on the mouth in appreciation.
As I sat back the look in those deep eyes and the expression that now adorned her features was not quite the simple surprise I might have expected. I reached, fumbling, for my coffee cup and almost jumped out of my seat when her hand reached out to cover mine.
'Oh Teena,' she cooed, 'what a marvellous piece of luck this meeting up like this has been.' I swallowed, not daring to look into those eyes again, not trusting myself to make anything like a sensible reply. That first look had said everything there was to be said and, if I wasn't very careful, I had the certain feeling that Anne-Marie would end up driving more than her car where I was concerned.
18.
Melbury Osmand.
It wasn't much, at least not back in nineteen seventy-five, but what there was of it was probably preferable to whatever havoc progress has wreaked on it since. The houses then were a mixture, ranging from cottages that looked to my semi-experienced eye as if they had probably first risen from the ground in Elizabethan times, through the centuries following, into the Georgian, the Victorian and finally a few early twentieth century offerings that the builders had tried not to make too conspicuous in their then modernity.
The first of the Hacklebury clan we were due to visit was cousin John, who lived just outside the village proper in a renovated Georgian cottage that was all that apparently remained of an entire terrace that had once housed the families of several farm workers. If I'd expected to see a Hacklebury Manor, I realised I would have to go further and, if I was hoping for any family resemblance, I was quickly disappointed.
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