Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Twelve: In Which Jessie Goes to a Wedding

I woke to the juddering shake of a carriage dropping in and out of a pothole.

My head was a slamming throb, and I reached up carefully in the half-dark and touched a raw spot just behind my left ear. There was a goose egg the side of my fist. I wondered if I was concussed. Probably.

"Good evening, my dear," Mr. Lewis's voice said from directly across from me. I jumped, pressed myself backwards and into a corner, but there wasn't too far to go, and the motion made my headache worse.

I opened my eyes. We were in the secluded and horribly intimate interior of a small, fussy carriage. The curtains were drawn shut and only the faintest amount of evening light was filtering through the cracks.

"Where are we?" I croaked. "Where's Francis?"

Mr. Lewis reached forward, pressed something cool and metallic into my good hand and forced both my hand and what I realized was a flask up against my lips. I turned my head to the side, felt the cold liquid slither down my jaw, down my neck. Mr. Lewis made an angry grunt, grabbed my nose and jerked my head back around so I was forced to swallow in order to breathe. Liquor, burning and disgusting, slid down my throat. Vodka or scotch or rum or something else that I never drank straight.

I coughed, spluttering, spraying droplets that stung horribly in the cut on the inside of my lip, and he withdrew.

"Where's Francis?" I asked again, feeling the lump or fear and helplessness press against my larynx.

"We are on our way to church," Mr. Lewis said, refusing to answer my question. "I expect you to behave yourself in front of the Reverend. I had to call in several large favours that I had been hoping to keep for later to make him agree to forgo the reading of the banns and marry us tonight."

"Tonight?" I repeated, and my fingers and toes were tingling with either numb horror or the knock on the head or the alcohol. "No," I said. "I won't."

Mr. Lewis surged forward, slammed me hard against the back of the carriage, making the world swirl and the darkness threaten again. I was seeing little sparkling spots. The booze was poured down my throat again and I had to swallow or drown.

"You will," he said. "Or I will kill you."

His rough treatment made the split reopen. I spat bloody booze on his cheek. "Fuck you."

Another well-placed slap made my whole head spin. A third shot of liquor was forced down my throat and I gagged and reached out blindly for some sort of weapon. All I found was more padded bench and a carefully folded bundle of fabric: denim and rubber-soled shoes and the black dress that Francis and I had ruined in the alley. My handkerchief package lay on the top, open.

I reached out and snatched it up, balling the fabric around the ID cards, the cell phone, tying the edges into tight knots.

"I found it pathetically easily," Mr. Lewis sneered. "You lied to me; those are not letters from your family. They are... what are they? Cards from the bottom of the sea, Jane Jessica Franklin?"

I swallowed hard. "How...?"

"Your identification cards. You go by your middle name, I see."

"Jane is a name for old milk cows."

"Did you know they claim that you were born in 1996?"

"Printer's mistake. It's a ...a joke... It's supposed to be, uh," I did the math quick, seventeen, uh, eight-three!"

He sat back and frowned. "You are twenty-three years old?"

"A spinster," I said. "Hardly worth marrying."