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Forward to Time Past by Unbridled_Brunette
 
Chapter Two
 
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Chapter Two


The vicar friend of Buffy's kindhearted policeman was called Jonathan Chapman. The first indication Buffy had that his organization, the Chapman Institute for Women and Children, would not be the storybook charity house run by kindhearted missionaries that she first imagined, was that the vicar himself did not seem to be at hand. In fact, from what she heard from the people around her, the vicar really had very little to do with the actual running of the organization at all. He set it up; he collected money to fund it. Beyond that he seemed to have very little interest in the place and very little to do with the day-to-day life of the women who resided there. All of that he left to a hodge-podge group of women—both paid staff and volunteers—whose job it was to teach the Institute's charges the skills necessary to earn their own womanly way in the world.

The second indication Buffy had that this would not end with fairytale flair was that the kind-hearted constable seemed infinitely more concerned with getting home to his wife's dinner than helping Buffy adjust to her new surroundings. Confident that he had done his Christian duty, he said a few words to the staff and then departed, leaving Buffy standing beneath the general director's disapproving gaze.

Dorothea Mann, the Institute's director, was a plump and middle-aged woman with graying hair and coarse, overblown features. Though dressed very simply, she was neat as a pin and crisply starched, her hair smoothed into a bun near the nape of her neck. She might have been almost motherly looking had her countenance not suggested she had been lunching on some very sour lemons. She took one look at the faded cotton dress Buffy's constable had supplied her with and sneered.

Truth be told, Buffy didn't exactly blame her for that. The clothes were awful, but the constable had insisted he could not allow her back on the public streets until she was garbed "decently". After speaking with his vicar friend and securing Buffy a place at the Chapman Institute, the constable had gone home to fetch some clothing from his wife. The faded sprigged cotton dress and graying under things were clearly bound for the church charity bin long before Buffy got her hands on them. Beyond this, they were ill fitting and extremely uncomfortable, being both too loose for Buffy's small frame and much too long. However, there had been no alternative other than the hooker one, so she had put them on.

Dorothea's next words made her seriously wonder if she had made the wrong decision.

"You'll have to learn to present yourself better than that if you expect to get on here," she said plainly. "I expect you've no idea how to take in a dress or raise a hem?"

Of course, Buffy had to admit she didn't.

Dorothea's narrow eyes grew even narrower. "Such as I'd expect. What the mothers of the world are thinking, sending their daughters out into it with no skill and no sense is beyond me. Well, come along with you. I've not got all day."

She swept out of the drafty foyer, and Buffy obediently followed suit. They climbed a set of narrow and very rickety stairs that led to an equally narrow hallway lined with doors.

"You'll be sleeping here," Dorothea snapped, flinging open the second to last door on the right. "Right now you're to be alone, but another girl will arrive tomorrow morning and she'll be sharing it with you. I expect you to leave room for her things and to treat her with respect once she arrives."

Buffy couldn't imagine living in that room by herself, let alone sharing it with another person. It was narrow, smaller than the bathroom at home on Revello Drive, and windowless. Crammed against each wall was a narrow iron bedstead with a lumpy straw-filled mattress. The blankets were threadbare wool, the pillows flat and dingy. Between the beds was a stubby set of dresser drawers in desperate need of refinishing; the wood was scarred and chipped and two drawer handles were missing. The only decent thing Buffy could say about it was that at least there was no window to cast light on the sheer austere ugliness of the place.

"You'll be responsible for caring for your own things," Dorothea told her in such a way as to imply that if she didn't there would be hell to pay. "You'll make your bed and keep your room neat at all times. Housework is rotated weekly between the women, but no one is expected to have to clear up after anyone else. This isn't a hostel," she added, as if Buffy accused it of being one. As if Buffy even knew what a hostel was.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But what exactly is this place? The constable told me a little, but to tell you the truth I didn't really understand…"

Dorothea rolled her eyes. "It's a place where girls with no prospects and no intelligence can live while kindhearted people teach them the skills necessary to survive."

"Yeah, I got that part. But what skills? I mean…what kind of jobs are they getting us ready for?"

"Why, womanly jobs, of course! We've turned out dressmakers' assistants and ladies' maids, cooks and housekeepers and nannies. What did you think? That you'd stay here indefinitely? You'll learn what we teach and be gone within a month. Or, you won't learn what we teach, you'll be obstinate or stupid, and you'll still be gone in a month. We don't allow malingering here. Now come on; I'll show you the rest of the house and explain your chores to you."

Reluctantly, Buffy followed the stout director back downstairs. Her long skirt almost tripped her up as she navigated the steep steps and the corset stays were digging into her ribcage. Not to mention the headache she was getting, listening to Dorothea describe all the "chores" she would be expected to complete while at the same time learning some type of trade. She closed her eyes briefly, trying hard not to let fear overwhelm her.

Willow, I hope you're working on a way to get me home soon…

~*~ ~*~ ~*~






Later that night, after the tour and the introductions, after the chores and a completely heinous dinner, as she lay in bed, exhausted and confused, Buffy went over her options. She could stay here, of course. It was free room and board, anyway. And Willow might get her mojo on and have Buffy back home before they shipped her off to be a chambermaid. The place might have all the homey charm of a prison cellblock and the "chores" were definitely more along the lines of penal servitude. But at least it was safe enough.

Going it alone wasn't really an option, she decided. Or, at least, not one she cared to explore. She couldn't rent a room without money to pay for it, and as the constable said, no one would hire her as she was now. And panhandling on the streets or prostituting herself was definitely not on the agenda.

The only real alternative she could think of was to search out the Watchers Council and beg their help in getting back to her own time. She knew their headquarters was in London, and she could easily offer up proof of her identity as a slayer. But she didn't trust the Watchers, here or in any other time. She was afraid they might look at her and think two slayers were better than one, that they might not help her go home at all but instead enlist her as a partner for the current slayer, whoever that might be. They might even hinder her in her efforts to get home. She wouldn't put anything past them. Which meant that her alternative wasn't really much of an alternative at all.

She sighed and tugged at the neck of her cheap cotton nightdress. Dorothea had given it to her—a cast-off of somebody's cast-off—once she found out that all Buffy had were literally the clothes on her back. Dorothea didn't like her. Not that the woman had come right out and said it, but Buffy could tell. She wasn't sure, but she thought that it might have to do with the fact that the policeman had slipped her in without a wait. Dorothea seemed to resent it when any of the poverty-stricken women under her care caught a break. And Buffy was an American, an outsider being treated to care usually only provided to Londoners.

Honestly, the other women didn't seem all that fond of her either. Maybe the American thing again. Or, it could just be that Buffy was the only one among them who wasn't strapped down with two or three kids. Though several of them were near to her own age they seemed so much older. Tired and worn down with caring for children and worrying about money—and seemingly not very enthusiastic about their future prospects as servants to the wealthy.

Buffy sighed. They weren't the only ones dreading it.

She rolled over, trying to find a comfortable spot on the bed. It was impossible. If the straw wasn't poking up against its rough canvas cover and making her skin itch, then her body was jabbed against the woven rope that served as a support for the mattress. Her muscles were already aching from the stress of the situation and the backbreaking "after dinner" chores Dorothea had assigned her, and this was certainly not helping any.

She sniffed her armpit.

Plus, she was really starting to feel gross. There was a strict rule at Chapman that the residents were allowed only one real bath a week. Real was a matter of perspective to Buffy, since this consisted of sitting in a tin tub of tepid water hauled from the well and heated on the stove, and then scrubbing oneself with slimy brown soft soap. But it was still better than the "spit bath" they were sentenced to for the rest of the week. A "spit bath," she discovered, meant washing one's body with a rag dipped into a basin of water and without the benefit of soap on anything except the most vital of areas. And after the "bath" there was no deodorant, powder, or perfume to help keep you fresh until your next bath. Hell, there wasn't even toothpaste to keep her breath decent, just a hideous white powder that came in a tin and tasted like chalk dust. If she had to stay here more than a couple of days, Buffy was certain she would be in danger of attracting flies or contracting a disease. Maybe both.

She groaned and turned her face into the pillow. Even Glory's hell-dimension home was looking pretty good compared to this.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





In the next several days, Buffy was to learn that her initial fears about the Chapman Institute were perfectly warranted. The place was the ninth level of hell.

Actually, it didn't even take her several days to figure this out; she knew on the first day. Having rolled out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn, she stumbled downstairs and directly into Dorothea's wrath. Because apparently the ass-crack of dawn wasn't quite early enough. No, Buffy would have to get up at least an hour earlier in order to perform her "before breakfast" chores (as she soon discovered there was a series of chores to be performed before every meal, a cunning way to ensure that everyone completed their tasks because, otherwise, they wouldn't get fed). The tasks were rotated weekly and for her first week there, Buffy's job was to empty and rinse all the chamber pots in the house, gather the dirty linens and place them in the laundry basket, and stoke up the fire in the kitchen stove. The first two tasks were nothing short of disgusting and the third she had no idea how to do—the result being that for the first four days she stayed at the Institute she spent the first part of her morning listening to Dorothea yell about how incompetent she was.

After the chores, there was breakfast, a singularly abysmal affair. No one talked but ate of their tasteless porridge and toast as quickly as possible in order to get started on their "after breakfast" chores. Buffy's main task after breakfast was to help with the washing-up, which meant that she and another girl had to lug pails of water from the well to dump into the big basin in the kitchen. When the basin was near full they placed it on the stove to heat. Then they scrubbed all of the dirty breakfast dishes, rinsed and dried them, and neatly stacked them in the cupboard to await the next meal. And woe betide the girl who dropped a plate or cup and broke it. Buffy did this on her second morning, and Dorothea spent such a long time verbally thrashing her that she was behind on everything else for the rest of the day.

After the dishes and after Buffy had straightened her own room it was time for lessons. Each girl was assigned a certain career path based on an assessment of her abilities or talents. For instance, if she already had some basic skills hemming clothes, then they would teach her how to baste dress pieces and use a sewing machine, so that someday she would be a decent dressmaker's assistant. Girls who could already cook were encouraged to improve on that skill so that they could be bakers or under-chefs in a big house, and so on. From the very first day Buffy attended the lessons at Chapman, she proved a challenge to the staff.

A big problem they had was that on their assessment, they could not find that she possessed any discernable skills. She couldn't cook; she couldn't sew; she knew nothing about children. She couldn't even build a proper fire in the stove, which meant that even the position of scullery maid—the most base of jobs—was beyond her reach. At first, the staff told themselves this didn't matter, that she could pick up the necessary abilities in no time and be just a little behind the rest of them. But despite huge efforts on the part of the teaching staff, she remained the most domestically ignorant person at the Institute.

It wasn't that Buffy wanted to fail; she really didn't. The speech Dorothea had given her on her first night had done its trick and she was terrified of failure, terrified of being thrown out on the street after a month with no job and no prospects of getting one. It was just that everything they wanted her to do was so hard. It seemed that no matter how she tried, Buffy was never able to get things right. Even the simplest task, like cleaning, eluded her because in 19th century London everything was done differently than in the modern day. The cleaning supplies were different—a lot less helpful—and everything took about five times as long. Laundry was especially difficult: scrubbing the clothes on a washboard and sending them through a ringer, hanging them up in wet rows on the line out back. It took all day long just to do a weeks' worth and afterward her fingers felt like hamburger meat from the harshness of the soap, the constant rubbing on the washboard.

The stress of continuous failure was bad enough, but Buffy also had the stress of being a social pariah to contend with. Her assumption of the first night had been correct: none of the other women in the house liked her. They resented that she had been allowed into the Institute immediately while many of them had been forced to wait weeks or even months for a room to open up. They also distrusted her because she was American, a foreigner. They thought Americans were immoral and lazy; they wondered within her hearing why people immigrated to England when they could have stayed to be a burden on their own country. Even her own roommate—a twenty-something year old widow who arrived the day after she did—loathed her and spurned all attempts at friendship. It left her constantly on edge, being in a house full of enemies, and Buffy grew thin and nervous from lack of sleep.

She thought about Willow a lot, wondering if her friend was working to bring her home—or if there was even any hope of going home. Once, while running an errand for Dorothea, Buffy thought about searching London for a magic shop. Maybe she could do a spell herself, a simple one, just to let Willow know where she was. But after asking a few people if there were any occult shops around, she discovered that the practice was highly frowned upon and decided to be more discreet in the future. She didn't want to be burned at the stake or anything—if they still burned at the stake in 1879. But since Dorothea left her very little time to explore the city herself, it looked like she wouldn't be finding a spell book any time soon. She just hoped Willow was having better luck than she was.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

 
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