LADY ANN'S DISGRACE: Chapter One - Part Two

The woman who had been Lady Ann Neville just a few days before opened her eyes and looked up at the dirty bare roof of the hat barn. It was the chill that had woken her, playing across her bare legs and arms that splayed from under the single blanket she and Burt shared.

She didn’t shift. Burt was lying on his side against her, his huge muscular limbs wrapped round her. He was still deeply asleep and snoring gently. Ann turned at the neck to regard his innocent slumbering face and thought about the tangle their lives had become; how confusing it all was now and how unexpected all of this had been.

Only a month or so earlier she had been Burt, dim-witted and simple, just going about her duties as a stablehand, making love with Mavis, the slutty barmaid from the village; admiring the beautiful Lady Ann from afar. In those days her desires had been simple because her intellect was. She had know little doubt or worry, just shovelling the dung, cleaning the stables, grooming the horses. And the nights with Mavis were enough pleasure to mark out the endless drudge, to keep her content. Or content enough. She had known she could never really be with Lady Ann but she still enjoyed her life to a point.

Things had started to go wrong when Lady Ann took her, as Burt, and made them change places.

Suddenly she’d been Lady Ann herself, hurled into a new world of London socialising and trips to the theatre. And no matter how quickly she became used to the whirl and the beauty, the gentility expected of her, she was never truly secure on her feet. Even when she found love and betrayed the new Burt, planning to trap him in his new life as a servant, she had seen cracks in her contentment almost immediately. Richard Hurley, her fiancé as Ann, was not the kind and loving man he had implied he would be.

She had fought for her life as Ann and kept it but it hadn’t made her happy enough and now she’d ruined everything.

Changing places a second time, this time with Mavis herself, had left Ann trapped more fully than ever before. She had been stuck as a commoner as Burt but without anything to compare it to it had just been her life. Becoming Ann had, after a period of acclimatisation, been mostly joyous. Now that she was Mavis she had all the comparisons she needed to comprehend her folly and how low she had sunk.

She had been a lady of the manor! Why couldn’t she have just accepted that and lived that way? She could have broken off the engagement with Lord Hurley – she realised that now. She needn’t have married him. She could have been happy.

And now look at her: curled up on the floor of a hay barn with an dirty, uncouth, country simpleton; nothing but a serving girl at the local watering house with little to no prospect of ever getting her real body back.

And what was her real body now even? Who was she? She still felt, on the whole, like Ann trapped as Mavis, but she knew it wouldn’t be long now before her sense of identity started to shift more fully toward being Mavis for real. Already her voice was mostly that of a Yorkshire clodhopper. She knew the education she had inherited as Ann had been stripped away.

“Is this me now?” she whispered.

Beside her Burt stirred, making a low buzzing in the back of his throat and smacking his lips together. He shifted his arm, gently rubbing her naked stomach under the blanket and giving her a graze of a thrill.

There was nothing left whatsoever in him of the original Lady Ann. That he had been a gentile lady was completely eradicated from him body and soul. He was only the simple man that she had once been now, and more perhaps. She sensed that his own changes had turned him into a simpler creature than even she had been once. All she knew for certain was that this Burt; the only Burt now; loved her and wanted to look after her. He was passionate and kind and doggedly loyal. And he was a titan under the blanket. He was everything she had fantasised about as Ann and everything she fantasised about now.

She let out a brief and shallow sigh.

There was no getting out of this new life of hers. That seemed certain.

Mavis. Barmaid. Lover of Burt. Lower class wench.

And maybe the only way forward was to reconcile with that; explore it; test out each facet of her new role and accept it for what it was.

She had wanted to be loved by a kind and passionate man. She had wanted to be with Burt. She had achieved that, even though she was now trapped in the fantasy.

She snuggled up against him and he mumbled something unintelligible but affectionate. Ann smiled. But a frown passed over her face because she realised there was something sad about all this, if she really was trapped.

Because surely she could never tell Burt about her true identity. He would never understand. He might even be hurt and angry.

It was a shame. She wanted to be open with him. But she was sure she couldn’t.

No. Burt must never find that out; that his Ann was now only a common servant girl. He must never come to understand the disgrace that she now felt to be brought so low and kept there.