Teena: A House of Ill Repute Read online

  TEENA - A HOUSE OF ILL REPUTE

  by

  JENNIFER JANE POPE

  Teena - A House of Ill Repute first published in 2002 by Chimera Publishing. Published as an eBook in 2011 by Avid eBooks, an imprint of Chimera eBooks.

  ISBN 9781780800745

  www.chimerabooks.co.uk

  Chimera (ki-mir'a, ki-) a creation of the imagination, a wild fantasy.

  New authors are always welcome, so if you'd like our guidelines, or you're a published author of erotic fiction and have existing work, the eBook rights of which remain with or have reverted to you, we'd be delighted to hear from you.

  This novel is fiction - in real life practice safe sex.

  This eBook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The characters and situations in this eBook are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  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.

  Prologue

  By Christeena Felicity Spigwell-Thyme

  Hey, look! They've given me proper accreditation here, and about time, too. Which, of course, is what my story is all about - time.

  For those of you who haven't met me before - and to refresh the little grey cells of those who have and who might have forgotten me, shame on you - I'm a time traveller and have been one since the tender age of eighteen, back in the mid nineteen-seventies. Yes, I'm sure you can do the arithmetic and, yes, that now makes me forty-six years old, although if you met me face to face (and no, that's not the real me on the cover of the book, silly) you'd think I was only about twenty-three.

  No, I haven't had a lifelong addiction to plastic surgery, either. The secret of my apparent eternal youth lies somewhere in the phenomena of time travelling, as I explained in my second book. Don't ask me how it works... no, I can tell you how it works - the result, at least - but what I can't tell you is why, and what actually goes on. The results pan out something like this. Lucky old Teena gets whisked back in time at irregular intervals, spending irregular amounts of time in the bodies of my various ancestors. So far I've spent periods of time back in the past varying from little more than a few minutes to, as far as I've been able to calculate, several weeks.

  However, no matter how long I seemingly go back for, whenever I return to my present day body, only a matter of seconds, minutes at most in the extreme cases, have actually elapsed. And that's not all. If I travel back for, let's say, a total of six months in any one given year, those six months apparently get credited to my physical account. In other words, and to make this more obvious, in the past twenty-seven years I've spent what must be a total of thirty one years back in antiquity, and so not only have I not aged physically in that time, but, and I'm guessing a bit here, I've already worked up a bit of credit.

  I still don't look any older than I did when I was eighteen, and am unlikely to do so, at least for the foreseeable future. Okay, yes, I did say you would think I was twenty-something, but I can explain that, too. For a start, I'm well above average height for a girl, which tends to add a couple of years to the image. In addition, it's gotten to be impossible for a girl to live more than a quarter of a century in this world - let alone even more than that in various older worlds - without picking up a little je ne sais quoi that adds to her aura and gives her a special sort of maturity that has nothing whatsoever to do with age.

  But back to my time travelling, which began one evening just after I had moved into the little cottage in Rowlands Castle, which had been left to me by a great-great-great aunt none of my immediate family had ever been aware I had, but of whom I turned out to be the eldest surviving female relative. In the loft, I discovered several boxes of clothing, underwear included, which although they clearly dated from some time in the Victorian era, appeared to be as fresh and clean as the day they were first made.

  Tall though I am, I am not exactly heavily built, and thanks to one of the corsets I dug out of my trove, I was able to squeeze myself into one of the antique dresses. I was also able to fit my feet into the bootees, which at the time I hardly gave a thought to, but which as my story unfolded, I realised was, to say the least, quite odd. Being tall I have feet that are not exactly tiny, and footwear made for a lady more than a century earlier should not have had a prayer where they were concerned. Call me thick, if you dare, but it was several weeks before I even considered this anomaly, and a while after that before the significance began dawning on me. But more of all that later, for the stage at which I left my adventure was prior to this...

  Dressed in my old but new finery, I was prepared to settle into a night of relaxation, or as much relaxation as a tightly laced corset would allow, together with a bottle of wine, but whilst searching the kitchen for a corkscrew, I came across a gold pendant hidden at the back of a drawer. It was unremarkable as were the two tiny miniatures it held of a man and woman I guessed must have lived sometime at the beginning of the nineteenth century. That pendant was to prove the catalyst, and although its continued proximity was not, and is not, necessary for me to go for a jaunt in time, I remain convinced it was the initial trigger to something I cannot explain.

  In the batting of an eyelid, I seemed to pass out and return to consciousness in a body that clearly was not mine, and in a time and place I quickly deduced was not my own. I had, in fact, journeyed back to some time late in eighteen thirty-nine, and the petite little blonde-haired frame in which I awoke had belonged to one Angelina Spigwell, now supposedly married to an archetypal dastard in the form of one Gregory Hacklebury, although in fact he had employed a doppelganger for the actual ceremony, as Angelina had steadfastly refused to say 'I will' and I wasn't about to gainsay that, I can tell you.

  Gregory Hacklebury was a 'Sir', but he had little money, whereas Angelina had shed-loads of the stuff, all of which, by the laws of the day, would have become his upon their marriage. What would then have become of poor Angelina was anybody's guess, but to judge from her, and my, experiences in the short space of time following the mock wedding, I didn't think either of us wanted to be around to find out.

  However, getting clear of Hacklebury was easier said than done, for if he was a bad'un, his so-called maid and housekeeper, Megan Crowthorne, was even worse. 'Mad Meg', as I thought of her, had her own designs on either Hacklebury or the estate he was after. She was determined to ensure that whilst he might have 'married' Angelina, he would not think of her as any sort of real wife. Rather, Meg was cunningly reducing Angelina, me, to the status of an animal, lacing me into an awful leather dog costume complete with snout and ears, and forcing me to walk around on all fours with cunning extensions inside the sleeves holding my forearms and paws fashioned at the end of each limb.

  I was forced to live in a specially built stable-come-kennel in the grounds, and was watched over by a huge Viking type named Erik (I kid you not) whose chief duties - other than to make sure I didn't escape and that I was adequately fed and watered - consisted of walking me, whipping me and screwing me, the latter activity courtesy of just about the biggest rogering implement I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

  Now, I'm ashamed to say that, despite my predicament, I enjoyed Erik's dedication to that latter duty, initially blaming Angelina's body for betraying me, but gradually coming to realise the fault actually lay somewhere inside m
e, as Angelina herself had a tendency towards her own sex rather than the male persuasion. She had grown up in India with a native serving girl, Indira, who became her lover, but whom Hacklebury sold off to a bunch of soldiers heading back to the sub-continent.

  Meanwhile, back in my own time during the periods when I reverted to my then present, I met up with Anne-Marie and her sort of stepbrother, Andy. They were an odd couple in every sense of the word. She was heavily into bondage scenarios with men and women alike, and he was just as heavily into dressing as a female, a role in which he was more than convincing as the sluttish Andrea.

  Teena - or Teenie, as they preferred to call me - quickly became inveigled into their little game-playing, whilst at the same time the pair set about helping me trace my ancestral line back in time to see if I really was a descendant of the dreadful Hacklebury, or whether perhaps some other person may have fathered Angelina's eventual offspring, from which I was now certain I was descended. To further complicate matters, it seemed Anne-Marie was a Hacklebury descendant, though whether from the same Hacklebury or a different one we could not at first be sure. A visit to some of her distant cousins made me suspect she was indeed come down the line from the Gregory version, which I assumed quite probably accounted for most, if not all, of her curious sexual predilections, which she seemed determined to introduce me to at a breathtaking rate.

  Coincidence? Fate? Either, both, or neither? Make up your own mind, for the gods do move in ways mysterious, and although I've met a good few historical figures during the course of my travels, I've yet to encounter a genuine deity face to face, so I make no claim to knowing myself either way. However, there was definitely more than a hint of good fortune in forming my new friendships, for Andy, having claimed to have fallen in love with me in nineteen seventy-five, suddenly turned up in eighteen thirty-nine in the body of the aforementioned Indira, and thanks to his/her intervention, we were both able to affect an escape, leaving a seething Megan trapped inside the dog suit and taking Erik with us at pistol point to drive the carriage in which we fled.

  The final details of our getaway remain a mystery to me, other than snippets I gleaned from Erik later, for as we drove towards the gate, both Andy and myself found ourselves back in the present, doing what it was we had been doing at the moment we time-hopped. I'll leave you to guess what that was, reader...

  And that was where we left things at the end of my last volume, but it was not how the story was going to leave me, nor me it, of that you can be as certain as I was then myself. There was unfinished business to be resolved, both in the past and in the present, and neither I nor the mysterious power transporting me back and forth in time was going to be satisfied until a resolution was achieved.

  Believe it or not, as I lay back on the bed, perspiring and exhausted, I wanted to go back again. No, I needed to go back again, for my researches in my own time had more or less ground to a halt and I knew the answers to all my questions, all those answers which I knew I had to have, lay back in the first half of the previous century.

  In nineteen seventy-five, during the space of a few short weeks, I had gone from being an arguably mature ex-sixth former to what most people would regard as a totally amoral slut, and I couldn't lay all the blame for that at Anne-Marie and Andrea's feet, any more than I suspected it was anything for which I was wholly or consciously to blame. Either it was something genetic, or else it was something that had lain dormant through the decades and re-emerged in me to help steel me for the rigours I would have to endure in order to try to save Angelina. Or maybe it wasn't any of that and maybe we were all just bad at heart. Maybe there was nothing I could do to help Angelina, yet maybe there was and I had actually already done it. That's one of those things about every time travelling story I've ever read - when the time traveller goes back, is it merely to act out something he or she has already done, or is it to change the course of history?

  If I went back and killed Hacklebury, would that mean I would then cease to exist back in my own time, assuming he had fathered the original child? If he hadn't, and I killed whoever was supposed to father it, would that alter things and kill off the line from which I was ultimately descended?

  I lay back on the bed, closed my eyes and gently stroked Andy's naked shoulder. How the hell was I supposed to know any of the answers? I didn't even understand most of the questions. And then there were a lot of other things I wasn't even close to understanding and coming to believe I never would.

  I sighed and opened one eye to peer across at my sleeping lover. He made a pretty girl, it was true, but he also made a lovely lad, and whilst he wasn't quite in the Erik league when it came to endowment, he hadn't been behind the door when that part of his anatomy was being given out. I sighed again and settled back to let sleep try to claim me, for I was totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally.

  The questions could wait for now; they would come again in the morning, and with them, in time, would hopefully come at least some of the answers.

  In time...

  1.

  Time was beginning to drag now for Maudie Taylor. As she sat at the bedroom window, looking out over the expanse of lawn running behind the back of the big house, she wondered just how much longer she would be expected to continue with this charade, and just how soon she would be able to collect the promised money and get back into the outside world again. An outside world that now, thanks to the hundred guineas she would pocket when she left, looked to hold far more prospects than it had only a few short weeks ago when Miss Crowthorne approached her in the market square in Salisbury.

  Maudie turned away from the window at last, and as she did so, she caught sight of her reflection in the long dressing mirror standing in the nearest corner. She paused, and then took a step closer, unable still to resist the little thrill that passed through her every time she saw the picture she now presented to the world. No, not the world, she told herself as she stared into the glass, just this tiny fragment of it; a world that had constricted first from the house and garden down to the house, and then, these past two days, to just this one room with its adjacent dressing area.

  And what a dressing room it was! Maudie, accustomed to a life where to own even two dresses - and those patched and darned - was a luxury, could hardly believe the wardrobe now at her disposal. Of course, she had known the upper classes owned clothes in abundance, but this was riches beyond anything she had ever expected, a dress almost for every day of the year, or so it seemed, for Maudie was not too good at counting above any number exceeding the number of fingers, thumbs and toes she possessed.

  But it had to be close to that many dresses; there were three hundred and sixty-five days in the year and three hundred and sixty-six days every four years, that much she did know from the old rhyme, and that was lots and lots, and there were certainly lots and lots of dresses, so there had to be close to that many hanging in the wall closets, folded in the heavy trunk, or even hanging from the wheeled rail that stood across the narrow window of the dressing room.

  And it didn't stop just with the dresses, for there were all the under-things - corsets, chemises, drawers and stockings, as well as drawers filled with gloves, chokers with little jewelled motifs, shoes and bootees enough to take care of a whole army of women.

  Maudie stood before the mirror now, grinning at the way her bosom thrust out from the low neckline of the heavy velvet gown she was wearing; forced up and out by the strictures of the corset one of the two maidservants laced her into daily. A fresh corset every day, wicked boned garments forcing the very breath from her lungs as they presented her soft treasures for all to admire. Why, but even her nipples were all but visible - at least the darker brown circles that bounded them. She pouted her painted lips at the girl in the mirror that was really her, and winked at herself.

  My, but it was incredible what the right clothes could do for a girl, she thought to herself. Dressed like this, she looked every inch the fine lady, certainly as much a fine lady as the
one who was supposed to be ill and whose place Maudie had taken for that silly wedding ceremony. She still didn't quite understand why they had needed her to do that, but then, she reasoned in her uncomplicated way, she didn't have to understand. All she needed to think about was the hundred guineas, and maybe, just maybe, they might let her keep one or two of these fine dresses, and perhaps an odd corset and a pair of shoes. After all, she told herself as she looked across towards the dressing room door, they had so many of them here, and the real lady of the house would probably buy herself so many more long before she ever got around to wearing even half the things she already owned.

  Maudie hoped the lady would be better soon, for the thought of her hundred guineas was beginning to wear on her. She had so many plans for all that money, so many ideas, so many hopes. No more working in the marketplace for Maudie Taylor, that much was certain. Oh no, there were so many other options for a pretty girl with money and the right clothes.

  She turned again, relishing the swishing sound her petticoats and skirt made, and let out a little sigh of contentment. Time was dragging now, it was true, but she could afford to be patient. After all, she was only twenty years of age and she had plenty of time - all the time in the world, in fact...

  'Time you two lazy buggers were stirring yourselves, or have you shagged yourselves silly all night?'

  I opened one eye with some difficulty at the sound of Anne-Marie's voice, hoping my face didn't look as red as it was feeling, though why I should have felt any guilt at being found in bed with Andy I had no idea. It wasn't the first time we'd had sex, though perhaps it was the fact that this had been my first time with Andy, rather than with his alter ego Andrea, which made things seem so different.