Chapter 6 #2
It took all of my self-restraint to hold myself back from telling William that he was being horribly self-pitying and dramatic, though I dearly wished I could say it.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have a huge amount of sympathy for him – of course I did.
Everything that had happened to him was so crazy, no one would believe you if you told them.
I cared deeply for William, and I wanted him to be safe.
But there was an undeniable ego in William, and a sense of entitlement that was hard to fight against. It wasn’t his fault; William had been lord of the manor all of his life.
He’d grown up with staff who cooked his meals and ironed his clothes and shoed his horses.
He’d lived with being deferred to, being respected and being heard, whatever he said – no matter how stupid or ill-informed.
He’d spent time in the Navy, and I thought that had taught him something about real life, but even so, he was William De Vere Trevarron, and that came with such a wedge of privilege that he wouldn’t ever really know what it was like to be a normal, everyday person.
That meant I couldn’t scold him out of that cell, and he was too proud to want me to see him like this: beaten, bowed, imprisoned like a common brawler.
I knew that he had feelings for me. I was his woman, and his masculinity was torn and aching, having me see him like this.
William was a good man – kind, strong, loving, brave – but he was still a man.
So, I knew that I had to appeal to a different emotion to get him out of that cell.
‘William. Please. I need you.’ I sighed. ‘Please. I need your help. You can’t leave me. I’m alone out here. This is the wrong place for me, too.’
The thing was, I wasn’t lying. And as the tears sprung to my eyes, I knew that I did need William.
I was terrified, being in 1867 with no idea of what I was going to do next, or how to get home.
All of the fear and loneliness that I’d felt since I’d got here – and before then, being in 1755, away from home and everything that was familiar – spilled out of me, as tears ran down my cheeks.
And, I was afraid for William, and for me.
What if he ended up in the workhouse? What then?
Would I be sent there too if anyone found out that I didn’t belong in this time?
Unlike William, I knew what the Victorian workhouses were, and I had no desire to end up in one.
‘You seem to be in a better situation than I am…’ he grumbled. ‘At least you are on the right side of that door.’ He kicked it. ‘Damn you, Tegan! I am furious with you.’
‘William. I need you,’ I repeated. ‘This is not the world that I intended to come back to. I’m as lost as you are – more, even…
I’m a woman here, and women have no rights, no freedom.
You may not be a lord in this time, but you are, at least, a man.
I need your protection. And we need to figure out together how we can get home. To your time, and to mine.’
He met my eyes with his for a long moment.
‘Is this time so much worse for women?’ he asked, gruffly, but I knew that I had him.
William was, at heart, a hero, and he’d spent his life in the Navy, and protecting his sister, Edith – although I knew that he felt that he hadn’t protected her as much as he could have done.
He was protective of me, and he’d spent his whole life as the figurehead of a noble family that people would come to with their problems.
‘Yes. It is,’ I replied, truthfully. Things hadn’t been particularly emancipated for women in 1755, but I knew a lot about the Victorian era, and it was a time when women’s freedoms had taken a significant nosedive.
With the creation of a new middle class and the financial freedom for those families to have a stay-at-home wife instead of everyone going out to work, and the division of the working classes and upper classes, women might have seemed to have won, but they really hadn’t.
Without financial independence of any kind, a middle-class woman was imprisoned in the house and destined for a life of childbearing, without the later benefits of medical knowledge.
Victorian women often died in childbirth, and it wasn’t uncommon for a middle-class woman not to understand her own body, because it was considered indecent to discuss matters of biology; an angel of the house was supposed to be pure and only decent if she repelled the sexual advances of her husband as a matter of honour.
Rebellious women could be declared mad for not being happy with their lot, and sent to the asylum.
Life wasn’t much better as a working-class woman in Victorian times – there was the threat of the workhouse and dire living conditions, especially in the London slums, but even prostitutes in Victorian times at least had their own money, freedom and independence.
I knew from my history studies that, in fact, rather than the vision of dire awfulness that history had tended to paint of the lives of working women and prostitutes, their lives were far better than historians had made out.
But I would have to save the history lesson for another time. I needed to get William out of gaol without further delay.
‘I’m not safe without you, William. My body isn’t safe on these streets. It’s full of thieves and would-be attackers. And, I need you. Please.’
I was laying on the thieves and attackers thing a little bit strongly, but it wasn’t untrue.
Technically, Nancy and I could be mugged at any time, especially wandering down these dark little lanes, although Nancy seemed very well known and respected, and I wondered who would be brave enough to attack a pellar, given that the Cornish were a superstitious folk, and no doubt believed that Nancy would cast a spell on them in revenge.
‘I’ve told them you’re my husband, and that we live in Penzance,’ I whispered. ‘We’re pretending in the village that I’m Nancy’s cousin. She’s with me. She’s a pellar; she lives at Yew Tree Cottage. Nancy Willcock.’
‘Willcock? So, the Willcock family still live there?’ He stared at me.
‘Yes. I’ll explain everything, William. Well, as best I can, anyway. But, please. Come with me now. For my sake.’
He let out a long sigh.
‘For your sake, and only yours, Tegan Penrose,’ he muttered. ‘I will protect you. But please don’t think that this is some kind of romantic reunion. We are very, very far from that.’