by DJ Black
The girl was well secured at her wrists in the small of her back as she lay face down on the bed with her bare bottom elevated by two pillows. She was naked, her white skin stark in the morning light that streamed in through the window.
The bindings at her wrist were at her own request as she had a habit of reaching back during a thrashing and clutching at her bottom. She was a young and stupid girl at the best of times, but he had to admit that she never displayed the least resistance during a correction, save that is for the habit of reaching, and always accepted the harshest of birchings.
Today he was birching her for persistent laziness and a frustrating lack of application to her studies. Not that she even made that link. As far as she was concerned, she had put herself in his hands and had disappointed him in some manner. Ipso facto she had to be birched.
Ipso facto; a phrase drawn from the Latin he had so far failed to teach her.
The array of vivid finger width welts in red and purple that he scored over and over on her bare bottom made her gasp and then scream until she was a sobbing wreck.
"Forgive me master," she wailed.
He had been about to, but she was too accepting and too stupid, so taking up a fresh bundle of rods he set about her again and again until they were both exhausted.
Usually he would have let her rest, but today he had her kneel at the kneeling bench with the book he had set her and bid her learn the chapter on pain of being unseated for a month.
He had found Jane selling flowers in Covent Garden in 1876. There was something about her eyes that had drawn him to her. She was just the type he was looking for; bright-eyed and uneducated.
He had brought her a meal and enquired about her full name and family history before slipping forward in time. Various censuses for the years between 1881 and 1911 had her down as a huckster, but after 1921 there was no record of her at all. At first he had just assumed she had died of old age, after all by 1921 she would have been 65, but after checking the records he found that the great flu epidemic had taken her in 1919.
Returning to Victorian London he had asked her, "Tell me, would you like an education and to make something of yourself?"
That had been the beginning of her tuition, but after two years she had showed no sign that she would ever be anything but a stupid flower girl.
He had been born so far in time from Victorian London that sometimes he forgot where he was from. In his long years of time travel he had visited many human eras, some great ages of mankind's journey and other black holes of lost potential.
London between 1850 and the Edwardian era had been like no other place he had ever seen. Capital of a great empire that threatened to span the globe, it had been at once a golden age of human development and a pit of squalor with a million lost souls devoid of their full potential.
He had hoped to prove this by taking Jane out of her destiny and resetting the balance through direct intervention. Now after almost two years in subjective time, it was obvious that he had failed.
Maybe it was some immutable law that one could not alter time, but that argument was too mystical for him. To time travel was to change time, the universe did not care anymore for the lives of kings and presidents that it did for the existence of a blade of grass. The pollen innocently collected on his coat would wipe out billions of plants from the time stream just as surely as if he had emerged next to Lee Harvey Oswald and shot him in the head before he could assassinate Kennedy.
He was either a part of the time stream or he was not, and what had happened could not be undone for those who had already lived. Only for him could it change as he saw it, a player in his own alternate reality.
He had often wondered if time just reverted once he stepped out of any given time stream as if he had never visited it? Or if a parallel universe was created to follow on from changes he caused just by his presence?
From long experience, he knew that time travel had no consequence for the universe and the only permanent change he could ever make was on himself and the knowledge he gained.
Replacing his coat after birching the girl he sat in a chair to watch her read. Her lips moved as she earnestly applied herself, an attitude he knew would not survive her sore bottom.
Perhaps the change is too subtle, he thought. Maybe 80 years from now, or a hundred, her descendants will rise above their station as a result of something he had done?
As he thought on this he became excited. He could follow the time line to 1976 or perhaps 2021 and see? He knew that such linear shifts had to be done quickly in subjective time or the time-line realigned itself and it would be as if he had never interfered. In such cases, even if it were as he hoped, being unanchored in time he had no way of knowing which time stream he had rejoined or if he had ever made a difference.
"You had better learn it this time or you will be in the corner all Sunday," he growled as he got to his feet.
"Yes Sir," she said meekly, redoubling her efforts with the book.
The Time Traveller swept out of his suite of rooms and down the stairs to the street. From the back of his mind he activated the procedure and by the time his shoes hit the pavement outside he was more than a hundred years hence.
The street he saw was no shock to him. He had seen the 21st century many times and knew it well enough to know that no one would give him a second glance even in his Victorian dress.
The air was fresher, but slightly sourer with chemicals than it had been a few moments before. Each century had its own smell he had found, which for most of history was usually dominated by manure and stale sweat. For a moment he wondered if the history of smells might not be a more fruitful line of research.
"Focus," he chided himself.
As he spoke, a man passed him with a dog and glanced in his direction. Perhaps because of the frock coat and the winged-collar the man stared for a moment before hurrying on. At most points in human history, eccentric behaviour tended to draw a lot of attention, but in the scheme of things, early 21st century London was more tolerant.
Confident that he had made the correct transition, the Time Traveller turned his attention to the task in hand. There were procedures for arriving in an exact time and place, but they were difficult. This time he didn't need them and merely stepped forward to the Millennium, give or take a decade. Looking at a newspaper stand he ascertained that he was in 2012, a much more useful time than 1976, as the Internet was well developed in this London and he would have no trouble in looking up Jane's descendants.
Kimberly kicked the vending machine and swore. It had just swallowed her last 50p and the damn coke can had got stuck. The noise of her assault drew glances from the other library users and for a moment she felt guilty and self-conscious. Then her usual belligerent self asserted itself and she glowered back at the librarian behind the desk who studied her with disapproving eyes.
Kimberly liked the library and hated that she liked it. At school she had thrown books at teachers and screamed that only dummies read stupid books. But in private when her mates were not around she devoured books by the shelf. Now school was over. It had been over for almost four years and she was still without a job.
The librarian had not stopped watching her. The clean but torn dungarees worn over a non-matching green and white striped top suggested a person more likely to steal or vandalise a book rather than read it. The scruffy top-knot of straw-coloured hair and the ancient cracked white trainers did little to soften the image.
In years past Kimberly would have given the bitch the finger, but her heart wasn't in it these days. Did 20-year-olds even still do that? So instead she returned one last sullen look and trudged angrily back to her seat and the open book.
"Victorian London: Death, Disease and the Underclass," she read as she turned the cover back to look at it again.
The cover was a photograph of a startled boy looking straight at the camera against the back drop of a squalid brick house somewhere in Seven Dials. A man passing by was out of focus like a ghost, too busy back in the day to even pose. Only the boy was clear, his sad empty eyes staring back at her from another time.
But it was the word underclass in the title that made her the most uncomfortable. It was way too close to home. Usually Kimberly liked history. She consumed books on the past like another girl might read romantic novels. But her stories were way better, because they were true.
Recently she had been taken with Victorian England, although in point of fact it had been a book on 19th century Edinburgh that had first got her attention. Until she had read that book she had been hardly aware that Scotland was a different country. Sometimes she had the feeling that there was an awful lot that she did not know.
She remembered once back at school how everyone was laughing at some girl on TV who had said that she thought France might be in Paris. From their mirth, she gathered that it wasn't and it bothered her somehow that she did not know. However, her discomfort had not been enough to overcome her rage at her stupid teachers and go and find out.
Turning back to her book she opened it again and found the page with pictures of Victorian dress. The men looked so stern and sexy somehow and the women were divine. For a moment she imagined herself back in time, but the happy feeling quickly passed to be overtaken by a sense of loss. That world was dead and as closed to her as her own.
The Time Traveller, having ascertained that he had arrived in 2012 was struggling to find somewhere to access the Internet. It had been a while since he had last been in this time frame and he had forgotten some of the nuances of the age. A decade earlier and there would have been Internet cafés on every corner, but now he remembered that although Wi-Fi was commonplace, most people had their own portable devices.
"Damn and blast it," he cursed. "Surely I don't have to buy..." His eyes fell upon a sign for the public library and he smiled. "Ah yes of course," he sighed.
The library was easy to find and it seemed to have whole floor devoted to PC use and Internet access. He was about to mount the stairs when he caught a glimpse of the books on the main floor.
"The end of an era," he sighed. "Oh well, I have nothing but time."
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