A Victorian Virgin? Ch. 03

She smiled to herself as she knocked for entry. It was a strange feeling to be wanted and loved, something she had not felt before. She would see Ned Hawke again. Next time would be better than this time, just as he had promised.

The woman that answered the door was an unnatural caricature of her sister. She had the same blue eyes, warm complexion and reddish hair as Charlotte, but her expression was completely different. Gone were the wide smile and dimpled cheeks, replaced by a grim straight line for a mouth and cheeks puckered in displeasure. "Get inside," Charlotte snapped, in an abnormally savage voice.

Victoria felt her smile dissolve in a heartbeat. "Oh God, what's happened?" she asked in alarm. "Charlotte, has someone been hurt? Not Oliver- or Samuel-"

"Nobody has been hurt," Charlotte said, coldly. "Yet."

"Then what? Mother of God, Charlotte, you're frightening me."

Charlotte took a deep breath to cool the hot anger burning in her chest. The air did nothing but fan the flames of her fury. It was as if her sister did not regard what she had just done as wrong. "Go into the kitchen and sit down," Charlotte said carefully through grinding teeth. "We will be with you shortly."

"We?" Victoria asked. "What's happened? What's going on?" She jumped at her sister's bone-rattling shout of response.

"I told you to go and sit in the kitchen! Do as you are told for once in your life!"

Victoria reluctantly went into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. She sat down and waited for Charlotte to return. She did not have to wait particularly long. In less than a minute, Charlotte's skirt could be heard sweeping the floor about her feet as she entered the room, followed closely by Sam Morpeth's stockinged feet.

"How was the interview for the nursing position?" Charlotte said in a cold voice.

Victoria watched her sister carefully. She had the vague impression that somehow her sister knew exactly where she had been. How could she possibly know? Neither Charlotte nor Sam could have seen her in the street with Ned and got back to the house before she did. As it was, Victoria knew that Sam hardly ever left the house in the daytime, and if Charlotte did, it would be only to go to the greengrocers, market or to take Oliver for a walk.

"I-" Victoria began. Her sentence was finished by the dull thud of her corset hitting the table surface, accompanied by the flutter of Ned Hawke's letter.

"I think that you're the one that needs to tell us what's happened," Sam said, quietly. He was uncomfortable about the entire situation. He would have rather left Charlotte to deal with her sister, but Charlotte had insisted on his involvement. Whilst Charlotte was appalled by her sister's behavior, Sam was bemused that cold, critical Victoria could have found someone to melt the ice. As he had said to his wife, Victoria was twenty-five years of age, far too old for the two of them to be playing nursemaids to. Charlotte took a completely different line, but then women were like that.

Victoria hurriedly snatched her letter back from the table. "How dare you read my mail?" The flash of anger that transformed her benign grey eyes into storm clouds was directed not at Charlotte but at Sam.

Sam stepped back from the table as his wife erupted. "How dare we? How dare we?" Charlotte spluttered. "This is not about our behavior, it's about yours."

"My behavior?" Victoria snapped.

"My God, Victoria. Your father will be turning in his grave if he heard of this. He did not bring his daughters up to be what you have become."

Invoking her father's name was like holding a hot iron to her foot, for fiercely protective Victoria. She knew her father's actions to have been illegal, but told herself that it was circumstance that caused him to perform them, not any character flaw. She still clung to his past kind words and high ideals rather than moving forth to the future, as Charlotte had done. The blame for her father's death and everything else that had befallen her was sorely rested upon Charlotte, in a strangely twisted logic. "How dare you bring Father into this?" Victoria snapped. Her stormy eyes conjured up thunderbolts and the air seemed to be alive with the crackle of electricity.

Charlotte was just as ready to snap back. "I bring Father into this argument because I am deeply ashamed of you, just as he would be if he was still alive. He had pride in himself. He did not raise his children to-"

Victoria cut across her in rage. "Father did not raise us to be policeman's wives or nurses."

Victoria's comment was like a slap across Charlotte's face. "Our father did not bring you up to be spreading your legs open to every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street. For goodness sake, Victoria, don't you have any pride in yourself at all?"

"I have more pride than you did when you married him."

It was at this moment that Sam decided that he had heard enough. He left the kitchen in search of his son, Oliver. This was Charlotte's business, not his. The sooner she and Victoria got all of their secret grudges out onto the table, the better. They might argue about it and say things they did not mean, but it was better than the constant sniping he had observed between the two over the past month. They would burn themselves and the argument out, probably not speak to each other for days and finally reconcile. At least, that's what he hoped would happen. In the meantime, he would take Oliver for a walk. The boy did not need to be around his mother and aunt for the moment.

As Sam entered Oliver's tiny bedroom, he could hear his wife's voice rising higher and higher, like the call of a boiling kettle. He had never heard her like this before. She was normally the calm rock in their relationship. He was the impulsive one, the one with the fiery temper, not Charlotte.

Charlotte did not even notice her husband leave the room, she was so intently focused upon her sister. Her eyes flashed beneath pinched eyebrows. Her blood ran fiery hot, evidenced in the reddening of her pretty face and limbs. She stood over her sister, looking down and hoping to knock her from the superior pedestal she had for so long occupied. Victoria had insulted her deeply, striking out as she always did when somebody had her backed into a corner.

"How dare you say such a thing? You insult me and my husband in our home. The same home in which you lived free of board whenever fancy has taken you to leave whatever nursing position you are holding. My husband's wage feeds you and keeps you warm whilst you are here. How dare you say such things about him? I don't even know you, you're so different, so completely different to the sister I thought you were. You're nothing but a dirty strumpet, indulging in your disgusting practices behind my back."

Victoria felt seven years of repressed feelings about her sister's marriage come to a head. She was angry and hurt that her sister could accuse her of such practices, when she knew her sister indulged in them also. It was hypocritical and wrong for Charlotte to accuse her of anything improper when she was married to that man. "It's not so dirty or disgusting when you're doing it with him, is it?"

"How dare you!" Charlotte spat in fury. Tears of rage formed a heavy lump in her throat and threatened to spill down her cheeks. Her sister had lied to and insulted her. After everything they had been through together, if she couldn't trust Victoria, who could she trust? She felt betrayed by her own blood, as she had been before. Her mind was filled with images of her beautiful sister in the man's arms, naked and bleeding upon the sheets.

Victoria was oblivious to her sister's pain. All that she was aware of was that she was exposed and threatened. The only way she knew how to protect herself was to lash back. To hurt Charlotte as much as Charlotte was hurting her. To tell Charlotte exactly what had been lurking in her mind for all those years. To give voice to ideas that were thought but should never have been said. "How dare I? Look at yourself, Charlotte. You are the one who should be ashamed. You are the one who has no pride. You could have made so much of yourself, instead you settled for him. Look at yourself. Look at what you've become. You're living in this poky little place that isn't even a house. It's cold, the walls are paper thin, the neighbors are noisy and foreign. It's Spitalfields, for goodness sake. Don't you think that you deserve better than this? You should be ashamed of what you've let yourself become."

"I should be ashamed? I should be ashamed?" Charlotte heard her own voice rise to sharp shrillness then crack like glass under the pressure of the sound. "This is not about me. It's about you, Victoria. It's about you going to some dirty lodging house or bedroom, taking your clothing off, and letting a man have your body, as if you were some sort of cheap-" Here her voice cracked further as the lump of tears in her throat tried to subdue her voice. "Some sort of cheap whore. That's all you are. You have no right to look down upon me when you are nothing better than those that parade the streets at night. Who's going to have you now? What happened to all that talk about high society?"

"Who said that I would go in the first place, Charlotte? I didn't want to go, I told you that. I told you that so many times, yet you made me go. You gave me the dress, you did my hair. You told me if I was affectionate maybe he would marry me-" Victoria knew that this wasn't the truth, but somewhere along the way she was sure Charlotte was someway responsible. Charlotte was guilty for everything bad that happened to her; not that she considered Ned Hawke a bad thing at that moment.

"Don't you dare lay the blame upon me. I said be affectionate. I didn't say go and open your bloody legs for him. Besides, you went this time out of your free will. I had no hand in your actions regarding that disgusting letter. As I said before, who will have you now?"

"Ned will." Victoria said, defensively.

"Oh, so we're on a pet name basis now. Why don't you smarten up, Victoria? Why would he want to marry you, when you've already given him what he wants? Sure, it will be all fun and games for maybe another month, but then he'll tire of you and leave you. You'll have nothing left. Who will have you then? You'll come whining back to me and my husband asking for a room and free food like you always do."

"He loves me."

"Where have I heard that before? Oh, yes, I recall. Last time, you whimpered that as I held your hair back and you vomited into the lavatory. Do you remember that, Victoria? He plied you with a bottle of champagne. You were practically unconscious when I found you. And what did you say as you vomited? He loves me. Grow up, Victoria. That excuse may have worked when you were fifteen, but ten years have passed and you should have gotten a bit smarter by now." This affront had been held against Charlotte's heart for ten years. It had burrowed away there like a worm in a spongy apple, hidden away until somebody took a big enough bite to expose it. She had sworn to herself that she would never speak of it, not even when Victoria inflamed her to anger. Now it was coming out, bit by bit.

"What on earth are you talking about?" Victoria watched her sister with weary eyes.

Victoria did not remember, not even a little, Charlotte realized. She had thought over the years that Victoria must remember something, else she would not act so strangely in male company. Obviously she was wrong. What about Hawke? Surely he must have noticed, when they- She could not think about it.

"You don't even remember; that's how intoxicated you were." Charlotte's voice was savage. She sorely wanted to hurt Victoria as deeply as she herself was wounded, but somehow she could not let the whole secret slip. As a sister, she could not say it. She might be furious with her sister now, but that would pass like the healing of a graze. Her own wounds would also be repaired with time. But the secret would slice so deeply that the wound might not heal at all.

"I don't understand."

She might not tell her sister the secret, but that did not mean that she could not take her sister down a peg or two. Charlotte said, "That's the problem, Victoria, you don't understand. You act all high and mighty as if you are the Queen of England instead of the social nobody that you are. You judge people harshly and morally, yet you turn around and do these sorts of whorish acts behind our backs. You look down upon me for marrying a policeman, as if I have somehow lowered myself in doing so. What rights have you to do so, when you are nothing more than a whore?"

"I'm not a whore." Victoria snapped back.

"I'm sorry, I did not hear you. What did you say?" Charlotte said, sarcastically.

"I'm not a whore."

"Oh no, of course you're not, Victoria. Whore is too good a word. You are a liar and a hypocrite and a whore. How could you do these things? You told me you were going to an interview for a nursing position, but really you were going to him, dressed like some prostitute, just the way he wanted you."

"Would you have let me go, if I had said I was going to see Edward?" Victoria asked, almost timidly. She had never seen her sister in such a state before. It was frighteningly similar to the rages her Father had thrown in the last few weeks of his life. Moreover, with the chin and those eyes, God, it was almost as if he was there in front of her.

"Yes. Of course, I would have. You never asked. It was the morning, it still is. I would never have imagined that you would be off doing these sorts of disgusting acts at this hour. You must have known what you were about to do was wrong, else you would not have lied to me about where you were going." Charlotte retorted.

"It wasn't wrong. I didn't- We didn't-" Victoria protested. She hadn't had intercourse, she was a virgin yet. The other things... yes, they could be construed as disgusting, but no more so than anything Charlotte and her husband must get up to.

"Liar! I don't believe one word that comes from that serpentine mouth of yours. You disgust me." Charlotte shouted, but the doubt in her mind shook her voice just as much as her eyes did as she watched her sister's face. She saw guilt flicker in a flush of heat, the eyes waver and the bottom lip tremble. However, all these factors could also spell embarrassment. She had thought that she knew her sister well, but the evidence was piled against her. The corset, the letter. There had been other letters, Charlotte remembered. They had all been burnt. Why had Victoria kept this one?

Victoria's eyes suddenly rose in anger. How dare her sister say these things about her? She had heard Charlotte's stifled breathing in the dark hours between midnight and the morning. She knew that Charlotte liked what the policeman did to her. Victoria might like what she did with Ned, but she had kept her virginity, which was more than could be said for Charlotte. "Well you aren't exactly the Virgin Mary either, Charlotte. When he's not working nights you're at it, sweating and gasping on the kitchen floor. Don't pretend that I didn't hear you, because I did, several times. What were you doing, making more deaf children?" Victoria realized the quip had gone too far as the words escaped her lips. Either she could back down, like a weak child, or she could keep going.

"How dare you say such things in my house!"

"It's not a house and you don't own it. That's what you get for marrying a policeman. Nothing. A new dress every two years, ancient furniture, no servants-"

The small fist struck the side of Victoria's face with such force that she was thrown off balance. The next blow struck her ear and she fell to the cold floor. Victoria's chair crashed down beside her. Charlotte kicked this away as she wrenched her sister upright by the roots of her hair. Her sharp fingers pierced the scruff of Victoria's neck as she slapped her about the mouth, oblivious to the blood streaking from a split lip. She heard her sister scream in pain, but the sound only drove her onwards. Victoria's hands rose to protect her face so Charlotte battered those too. When she was finally spent, she let her sister drop to the floor, her mouth a mess of blood and saliva. "Pack your bags. I don't ever want to see you again," was the last thing she said before she left the room to find out where Sam and Oliver had gone.

*

Sam Morpeth found his wife kneeling in a pool of suds. Her arms furiously scrubbed the floor as if she were trying to clean away the guilt that blemished her conscience. For a moment, he observed the wet clothing, the reddened fingers with white knuckles and the face that was swollen with tears. It melted his heart to see his wife in such pain, yet he knew not how to approach the subject. Finally, he sank down beside her, ignoring the water that wicked into the fabric of his trousers. He took her in his arms and held her whilst she cried.