by Penny Jordan
Confrontations and unpleasantness of any kind were abhorrent to them and, safe in the knowledge that in another few months they would be thankfully relieved of such a troublemaker’s presence, and that it would be up to the far harder and tougher regime of a boy’s school to deal with the character faults he was fast developing, they soothed the agitated mothers and took care to make sure that Charles was isolated as much as possible from the most vulnerable sections of his class, praying that the next few months would pass without any more incident.
One of the three sisters who ran the school did tentatively suggest having a word with Charles’s mother, but she had not met Margaret, and was quickly assured by her sisters that such a course of action would not be a good idea. For, though the woman had little enough love herself for her son, the stiffly ingrained sense of family pride she had inherited from her father made it necessary for her to believe, where the rest of the world was concerned, that her son was as near perfect as it was possible for any child to be.
At home, in the privacy of their solitude, she might refer to him as a nuisance and an unwanted burden on her finances and her emotions, but publicly he was her darling boy… her precious child… and to his already dangerous repertoire of adult emotions Charles added a new one: an awareness of the necessity to create a public image which did not reflect the truer, more private one.
He learned that responding in a pretty, deferential way to his mother’s cooing voice and flattering comments when they were in public earned him certain small indulgences in private, although it would be several years yet before he recognised that there were women who, no matter how great the evidence to the contrary, would self-woundingly allow themselves to believe that even the most fictitious and deliberate flattery was the truth.
Towards James, his uncle, he felt almost as great a resentment as he did towards his mother, because it was James who was responsible for his mother’s bitterness… James who had taken from his mother something which should have been hers. Rothwell!
She took scant interest in all other aspects of his education, but where their family history was concerned she was relentless in inculcating into Charles an awareness of her family and its greatness… its importance… an importance that focused on whoever was fortunate enough in their generation to be the eldest or only son, for, no matter how privileged in their time other members of the family might have been, in reality they were nothing, because eventually there would come a time when the doors of Rothwell would be closed to them.
Rothwell represented power, prestige and wealth. Rothwell, and her obsession for it, was the sickness that clouded his mother’s soul and shadowed her whole life, and Charles, through her, had become infected with the same disease.
By the time Margaret was petitioning her brother to provide the money to pay Charles’s fees at one of the exclusive prep schools, Charles was already recognised by his peers as someone to be feared.
Cruel he might be, but Charles was no fool. He quickly understood the advantages to be gained from the cooing admiration of his mother’s cronies—and the reason for that admiration.
He had grown so used to the words, ‘Such a handsome boy…’ that it wasn’t until he heard his mother commenting disparagingly on the plainness of Uncle James’s baby daughter that he began to understand the benefits that went with the face he saw reflected in his mirror every morning.
After that, he began to study the faces of his peers and astutely saw that those with the more attractive features received indulgences from adults that the plainer children did not.
On the death of James’s wife, Margaret had immediately rushed to her brother’s side, offering to take charge of his motherless daughter.
Charles, who had not been allowed to accompany her, suffered the full brunt of her rage once she returned home at being thwarted in her plan by Geraldine Frances’s refusal to take to her, but once she had calmed down Margaret began to see other advantages in the fact that her brother’s marriage had only produced one female child… But, while there was the possibility that James could marry again and produce sons, it would be dangerous to hope for too much. Even so, she began to look at Charles with new eyes, to see him as a potential asset.
Margaret kept constant pressure on James until in exasperation he gave in and used his influence to get Charles a place at his own old prep school.
It hadn’t been easy, and so he was less than pleased when within eighteen months he received a telephone call from the headmaster to inform him discreetly of his concern over Charles’s, as he termed it, ‘inability to mix well with his peer group’.
A deeper investigation revealed charges of bullying and mental if not physical cruelty which Margaret, when taxed about them, dismissed as jealous lies on the part of the other children.
Charles, summoned to his uncle’s study to account for himself, lowered his head and used his most convincing expression of bewilderment.
‘It’s true that there have been some problems at school,’ he told James earnestly, and by skilful manipulation of the truth he lied so convincingly that James was forced to accept Margaret’s assertion that Charles was being picked on because she, his mother, lacked the social and financial standing of his fellow pupils’ parents.
As always, Margaret managed to make James feel guilty by reminding him that he had been the one to receive their parents’ love and attention, that he had been the one to inherit the earldom and everything that went with it, while she, neglected by her parents, had rushed into a foolish marriage… had been pushed into it almost, by her desperate craving to be loved. And James gave in.
Privately he shared the headmaster’s views of his nephew, but Charles was Margaret’s child and there was little he could do personally.
He shied away from the knowledge that he could perhaps have taken a more ‘fatherly’ role in Charles’s life, and from the extra burden of guilt that went with it. He didn’t like Charles, and if he were honest with himself he didn’t particularly like his sister either.
Academically, Charles’s years at prep school were not a success, but in other ways they established a pattern he was to follow throughout his life: that of the subjugation and domination of others weaker than himself.
He had quickly discovered that his good looks acted on the unwary like a spider’s web trapping flies; the only problem was that sooner or later his ‘friends’ discovered the more unpleasant side of his nature and quickly abandoned him.
Emotionally that didn’t bother him at all. The early neglect he had suffered from his mother had cut him off from any ability he might have had to react emotionally to others, and had bred in him instead a deep core of inner coldness that successfully isolated him from the pain of any peer rejection.
However, what did bother him was the fact that, in losing his admirers, he was also losing ‘face’, and so he learned to cloak his desire to hurt and dominate, so that each of his victims thought himself alone and, fearing the ridicule he thought exposure might bring, kept his misery to himself, outwardly still forming a part of Charles’s ‘court’, but resentful and frightened.
From subjugating his peers emotionally, it was a short and simple step for Charles to dominate them in other ways; especially financially.
No matter how generous James was to her, Margaret never forgot the humiliating poverty of her marriage. She was careful with her money to the point of meanness. From her Charles learned that money represented power, and that power in his mother’s life lay vested not in her, but in James. He also observed and learned how skilful his mother was at playing on her brother’s guilt and extracting money from him, and he too began to develop the same skill. Draw someone within your power, subjugate them, and then subtly threaten them. Charles soon found it possible to increase the miserly pocket money his mother allowed him almost tenfold by this means.
But a restless, driving dissatisfaction was beginning to infiltrate his life.
Real power, true power came from Rothwel
l and everything it represented. Rothwell should have been his, his mother had told him as much.
Sometimes, driven by a frenzy of irritation and compulsion, his mother would say, ‘She’s only a girl; she can’t inherit… Rothwell could be yours yet. If your uncle doesn’t remarry and produce sons, then you will inherit Rothwell.’ If James did, then he, Charles, would have nothing. But in either case, Geraldine Frances, that plain, pampered girl-child on whom his uncle so inexplicably appeared to dote, would lose out, because as a girl she could not inherit Rothwell. And that pleased Charles.
Sometimes it amused him to use his charm to bedazzle his much younger cousin. He liked the way she followed him with her eyes, the way she gazed at him with open adoration. At the same time he despised her for her weakness in allowing him to see how she felt, and he would then be unable to resist punishing her. No one of any sense ever revealed their real feelings; he had learned that from his mother.
It was nearing the time for Charles to leave prep school to go on to the famous public school attended by his uncle, and before that, since the school’s inception, by each and every one of his male ancestors. Only Charles had other ideas. Ideas which would allow him to widen the scope of his own particularly non-academic talents.
He knew all about the type of school his mother had in mind; there he would be nothing, no one… the son of a man whom his fellow pupils’ parents would remember as a social climber, and worse.
His mother had reverted to her maiden name after his father’s death and had his name changed to it by deed poll, but in their world such things deceived no one, and if there was one thing Charles hated it was being made to feel inferior to his peers… At the school he had in mind things were different; money ruled there, not social status. It was a progressive, modern establishment favoured by actors and pop stars for their offspring, and it had received a good deal of media attention, since it catered for both boys and girls, and moreover did not provide any kind of strict regime but allowed its pupils to choose which subjects they wished to study and the time when they wanted to study them.
Charles had discovered one very important fact: how much easier it was to manipulate girls than boys. Young girls, like their elders, were so much more susceptible to his good looks and spurious charm… girls were so malleable… so trusting… so easy to hurt; and in hurting them he had discovered the perfect way of punishing his mother for the way she had hurt him.
He broached the subject carefully with his mother, knowing quite well by now how best to bring her round to his point of view.
At first she demurred. She wanted him to attend the school the males of her family had always attended, but when an interview with its headmaster informed her that, despite everything James had been able to do, there was no place there for Charles, she hid her chagrin and said airily to her cronies that she wanted something more for Charles than the outdated, regimented, institutionalised education offered by a traditional public school.
Charles took to life at his relaxed, easygoing coeducational boarding school better than a duck to water.
It offered him limitless opportunities to refine and hone his skills, providing as it did a wide field of victims only too ready to offer themselves up to him.
He was tall and well developed for his age, and it wasn’t very long before he lost his virginity and, in doing so, took that of the shy, rather nervous girl in his class whom he had picked out from among her peers.
Not because he desired her more than the others, but because he knew she would keep her mouth shut, and because it amused him to torment her by letting her believe he cared about her when in reality he felt nothing for her at all.
The school acted like a forcing house of burgeoning teenage emotions, throwing the sexes together without any parental supervision and fostering a network of small, secret groups, each devoted to the pursuance of their own particular pleasure.
When Charles discovered he had been nominated by an older class of girls to join the select group of boys they allowed to have sex with them he went readily to a secret meeting to undergo an initiation ceremony of which he had already heard exciting whispers.
The leader of the group was a tall, heavily built girl with dark hair and curiously flat pale blue eyes that seemed to have an almost magnetic quality.
Not at all attractive in the accepted sense, she nevertheless possessed a formidable charisma, which Charles recognised and duly paid homage to.
This girl knew and recognised power. What was more, she also knew how to take control of it and to use it. Older than Charles by almost three years, outwardly, to her tutors at least, a rather dull, plain girl who worked reasonably well, she had another side to her personality which only those admitted to her secret sect knew.
The initiation ceremonies took place in an abandoned hut in the grounds of the school, and involved group sexual acts that focused mainly on the oldest girls in the group and the boy they had chosen to admit to their ranks, but which also occasionally permitted a chosen and favoured male to remove from a young and newly admitted female member of the sect the unwanted burden of her virginity.
Charles’s initiation ceremony was very well attended.
Two girls, masked and robed, met him at the doorway of the room. Its windows were covered so that the room was dark, illuminated only by candles which gave off an odd sweetish scent.
He was given something to drink that quickly made him feel light-headed and euphoric. And, while he watched, more of the same stuff was passed around between the watching girls.
By the time they started to undress him he was conscious only of the distant pleasure of their hands on his flesh… that and the burning power of the pale blue eyes of the one girl who stood aloof from the others… silent, motionless, and yet so exciting him with the unblinking, unwavering intensity of her stare that merely to look into her face brought him to such a state of sexual arousal that his body was eagerly responsive to everything that his initiators demanded of it.
At no time at all did the girl who stood aloof touch him or communicate with him in any way, but it was she who filled his consciousness as the eager hands and mouths of the others explored and tested the endurance of his arousal.
When he woke up the next day he was violently sick, his head and body hurt, and for the first time in his memory he was aware of having lost control, not only of a situation but of himself as well.
A fellow pupil observing his nausea and inability to concentrate, asked mockingly, ‘Been drinking Helen’s magic brew, have you? Watch out you don’t get hooked on it.’
And it was then that Charles realised what had happened to him. He had heard whispers about drugs, but only whispers, and they hadn’t meant a great deal to him. Now, suddenly, they did, and he recognised the power they conferred, not on the person who took them, but on the one who supplied them.
That was to be his one and only experimentation with taking drugs. Anything that robbed him of his powers of self-control, and through that his power to control others, was something there was no room for in his life, but, for the supplier rather than the taker, drugs opened up a whole new world, one which he was anxious to be a part of.
His enquiries brought him into contact with a boy two years ahead of him in school, the son of a pop star who had unlimited access to supplies of drugs.
By cultivating Mike Rigby, Charles soon became one of the chosen few to whom he ‘sold’ drugs acquired in secret on his visits home.
Charles in turn sold his supply to his own carefully chosen and discreetly monitored group of users. He was always careful to sell only to those who he knew had the money to pay and who he knew to be well under his own control.
For Charles there were no moral qualms or compunction about what he was doing. In this world the strongest survived and the weakest went to the wall; and he intended to be among the strong.
And then came the master stroke of fate that suddenly cleared the way for him to inherit Rothwell… And all through
a childish virus that Geraldine Frances had so helpfully passed on to her father.
Margaret was ecstatic. When Charles went home for the school holidays she could barely wait to tell him.
‘Poor old Geraldine Frances,’ he gloated. ‘She won’t have a bean…’
Margaret frowned. As she had good cause to know, her brother’s private fortune, the money he had inherited from their father and so miraculously expanded, was his to do with as he pleased. If he wished, he could leave every penny of it to Geraldine Frances… Money which by rights ought to go to Rothwell.
Charles was in a high state of exultation. That Christmas he alternately bullied and bewitched Geraldine Frances, secretly despising her… looking at her with the sexual cynicism he had developed, half of him wanting the pleasure of revealing that knowledge to her, just for the sheer thrill of savagery it would give him to smash down the barriers his uncle had placed too protectively around her, the other half of him holding back… just a little bit afraid.
And then, that summer, just when the wave of exultation was reaching its peak, everything came crashing down. And it was all his fault, or so his mother claimed, turning on him in a fury of anger as she demanded to know why he had been so stupid as to boast of his inheritance, and in front of James of all people.
Did he realise the damage he had done? she stormed at him. Did he realise that, because of him, James had told her that he had finally decided to petition the Queen so that the earldom and Rothwell would pass not to Charles, the next male in line, but to Geraldine Frances… his daughter… and a woman.
At first Charles hadn’t believed her… it couldn’t happen. He was the male, the heir! But gradually he had been forced to accept that it was true.
‘There’s only one thing for it now,’ his mother told him acidly. ‘You’ll have to marry Geraldine Frances. That’s the only way you’re going to get Rothwell now…’
‘Marry Geraldine Frances?’ Charles stared at her, the words of denial spilling from his mouth. He felt trapped, infuriated… full of hatred for his mother, his uncle and most of all against Geraldine Frances herself, because he knew that, no matter how much he fought against it, the only way he was going to hold the power that was Rothwell was through that plain, hated girl who was his cousin.