The Worsley Family Locket: Chapter 2 - Benjamin and Ethel

For the next two months, I coveted the locket as Lady Ethel stroked it, polished it and kissed it. At night, she kept it safe in her quarters, though I could only speculate exactly where. During these days, my thoughts lingered on the unwelcome inclination to determine where it was sheltered on those rare occasions she allowed her eyes to rest. What I would do with that information should I discover it; I did not know. My desires were not compelled by logic or sanity, for my mind at times operated on an unexplainable and loathsome infatuation. Having already infiltrated the household, the locket had now taken residence within my very psyche and the majority of my years among the Worsleys, and in proximity to the foul pendant, I spent as an idle spectator to the tussle between my wits and delirium that bludgeoned away within me. Many times, when the twilight hour came and the moon waned gibbous, had I risen from my chambers and crept through the deserted halls of South-Peak Manor, intending to ransack Lady Ethel’s possessions or even bushwhack the locket’s frail, miser. It is of great relief to me that sense prevailed against the whims of the nameless and that rationale compelled me to return to my lodging.

One day, while Lady Ethel sat pouring over the jewel, I asked her what she intended to do with it. She told me that once the baby was born, she would have a photograph arranged and that the locket would serve as his shrine. In that moment I recalled the strange man who had sold it to her and the innocent, tender expression on the face of the boy in the picture. That was the only thing that remained of Claude; the picture once housed in the locket now empty. Lady Ethel had expected me to react with more joy than I had, but I could not hide my unease. I still owned the photograph. It was a ghost of a broken man. Yet, it was not the phantom in the picture that haunted me, but I that haunted him. I could not bring myself to dispose of him. I obsessed over his visage much like an artist meditates on the reverie of the muse. There was something there, in the eyes of the young man, a message, a kindness, a warning. A meaning I could not resolve. It was an indecipherable relic, the memento of a perished soul whom I kept close to me. An antiquity of utmost distinction and secrecy. I knew only this; when Lady Ethel told me of her intentions to place a photograph of her unborn child within the locket, I felt the overwhelming omen of trepidation.

When your brother was finally born, at first, an enormous weight of exhaustion and anxiety had been lifted from the household. Except perhaps, where Clarence was concerned. He was displeased about the idea of another male heir. Furthermore, he detested his mother’s new locket. He was the only person who proved in any way resistant to its unspoken charm. He repeatedly spoke about hurling the thing through the window, whenever he found Lady Ethel to be cooing needlessly over it. By the time of Benjamin’s birth, her obsession with the jewel had blossomed into a vile delusion. In the past, there had never been a mother more congregant to her family, or more captivated with affections than Lady Ethel had been when each of her children were born. I recall the obsessive attachment to both Clarence and Ida, and how they were scarcely granted freedom from their mother’s grasp. She fed each of her children from her breast, never once granting the midwife the honour. When Helen came, Lady Ethel was on to her third delivery, but her sentimentality had not diminished. If anything, her passion had only strengthened. Evidently, your mother had undergone an internal transformation, which was confirmed on the advent of Benjamin. His birth was markedly different and pitiful to witness. She had not been sleeping as soundly as before, she spoke less and less and the majority of her waking moments were spent entirely on beholding the locket. Even when her beloved son had been born, she held not the baby, but the locket.

This boy regrettably, was shown none of the compassion that had been showered so unrelentingly, on his siblings. The midwife, who had at best been an ornamental feature of previous child-births, was overworked and took up gaudy residence in a storeroom in the manor. Many a time, I was required to lend a hand in the upkeep of the baby, not even just Benjamin’s sake, but in the interests of the wellbeing of the midwife, who sought infrequent rest on whatever surface she could find. No more than two weeks after Benjamin had arrived, did Lady Ethel arrange for the photograph she craved more than the sight of her rueful and neglected son to be taken. In normality, these occasions were of great ceremony and extravagance. One might expect a day of pre-organised household celebration with invited guests, catered food and high spirits. This was no such thing. It was a hasty and disorderly affair. Only Lady Ethel, Ida, Helen, the photographer and the baby were present. Not a thought had been spared for festivity and no care was given to the quality of the photograph. Lady Ethel merely desired any image she could get her hands on and as soon as possible. Cynically, I judged that her plot to fill the locket with adorations of the new-born now focused on enhancing the locket rather than establishing evidence of any devotion to her son and once snapped, the photographer was paid for his services and promptly dismissed within hours. The blurred image of Benjamin laid on his mother’s lap had taken many hours to develop, and as such, was delivered two days later. That was the last time that I recall your mother holding your brother. By the next week, he was dead.

The exact details of his death cause my throat to compress and my stomach to contract every time I summon them to the forefront of my mind. I hoped that compassion might oblige me to spare you them. However, though officially recorded as a cot death, the grim truth is that Benjamin’s passing was far from a natural occurrence. I was the first to rise that dreadful morning. The midwife had been drained for days and I had wished to enact a kindness by tending to her morning duties, thus allowing her additional moments of precious, uninterrupted sleep – something near mythical at the time. It was I who discovered his body. The scene I beheld when I arrived enervated my legs and I crumpled to a shattered pile by his crib. Benjamin’s skin had been depleted grey and his eyes were clamped shut in a fashion so perverse it was as though his corpse still expelled power. His blanket, barely large enough to conceal a loaf of bread, dangled limp from his lips. Only a corner was visible, for the rest had been stuffed down his throat right to the belly. I knew instantly that this grotesque scene had not materialised by sheer misfortune nor was it a consequence of carelessness. There was something greater at work. An indefinable mass of evil more coercive than the envy of an elder brother or the anguish of a fraught midwife. An element vast in essence and capacity, far beyond the limitations of fragile, human machinations. This wasn’t death. This wasn’t murder. This was something worse.

For much of her life prior to the attainment of the locket, Lady Ethel had been a fervent horticulturist. The land surrounding the foundations of South-Peak manor, which had mostly been a pasture of dilapidated sludge had resultingly been bewitched into a stunning realisation of arcadian fantasy under her adept stewardship. Benjamin was the first to be buried there. The midwife, pale skinned and muted, attended the funeral and then never returned to the Manor. She had been surely broken by Benjamin’s passing, after all, it was her who had shown the child the most fondness and her who had provided him with the most care. Lady Ethel on the other hand, did not so much as weep, as the stunted, feeble coffin carried her son beneath the soil. Her family had always been a hateful and forsaken bunch, but Ethel was now truly its master. In the weeks that followed, her voice had degenerated into a freakishness of extremities, ranging in a haze between vile, inaudible croaks and a deafening, shrill howl. Gone was the softness of her tone and the alluring magnetism that enchanted at the sounds of her laughter. Her face became scarred and shrivelled by age beyond her years and her spine warped crooked where she sat. She bickered and lambasted, wailed and tantrummed and besieged any who crossed her path with wicked scorn. The nurturing protector of old had been disfigured into a stony statue, a malformed memorial of the woman who had once lived and loved, now completely devoid of emotion and yet bitten with the frosts of contempt. Perhaps the death of her son drove her mind from the haven of sanity into a dark abyss of madness and despair. Perhaps the locket had seized prominence and deplorable governance in the absence of principle, lucidity and joy. It is hard to determine the exact moment she was lost, or to define the form of the true cause of her unyielding malicious antipathy. Abundantly clear though it was, the real Ethel, my Ethel, had perished, and a monster now wore her body.

Not long after the funeral, the harsh winds of Autumn inevitably stiffened into the bitter tyranny of Winter’s enduring chill. Amidst the icy gloom of the dark season, it was not uncommon nor peculiar to find members of the household entrenched by the fireplace. Helen, the youngest, took refuge by this spot on a recurrent basis, bringing her toys, some of which Ethel had purchased a lifetime ago at the fateful port market. On the mandala christened rug, she had the appearance of a prosperous princess from a foreign land where carpets blessed with Magicks were tools of mobility and prestige. Clarence and Ida also passed the hours in this spot, electing to share the same seat in a needlessly appressed manner which struck me as inappropriate given the budding adulthood that threatened to emerge across their rapidly aging adolescent bodies. Even Arthur could be found there, though his appearances, much like the celestial magnitude of the alignment of the planets, were the rarest of all. When he did come, he was able only to stare absently into the warm glow of the fading firewood. It was Ethel who could be found here most nights, and when that was the case, the others committed to embrace the stinging cold rather than sit by the fire with her. I could not bring myself to call into judgement their desertion. The very depths of January’s frigid condition, after all, compared in redundancy to the shivering inclemency that radiated from the cruel creature Ethel had become.

One sombre night, when cloud fall had concealed the intrusive gaze of the moon, Lady Ethel fell asleep by the fireplace. It had been dark that night. Impossibly dark. A blackness had descended on the Manor with the force that stifled the spotlight cast by the stars and crushed the candlelight of all its constitution. Only the fire perpetuated, the dim lighting of which, Ethel bathed and thawed sumptuously. In her slumber, the flames flickered, danced and enticed, like the tentacles of a subaqueous beast groping restlessly at its prey. In the void of visibility, I became entranced and embarked on one of my ill-conceived efforts to pilfer adjacency to the locket. I crept towards her, my greedy fingers mimicking the supple movements of the fire, desperate to reach farther and more bravely than ever before. For the first time, cognisance failed me and my dastardly approach for the locket was now without bounds. I inched closer and closer, unperturbed by neither the tremulous consequences that might befall me should I be seen nor by the hideous condition of the infernal concoction that I stalked, until at last I stood over her. The locket laid prone around her neck. The very most I could do was touch its grubby sheen, which is what I did. At the time, I thought I had disturbed a catch I had not espied, as the exact moment my skin arrived to caress its silver frame, it burst open. I recoiled in horror, certain that I would be exposed. Yet, the wearer remained dormant and the locket was open.

What I found betwixt within the entrapping arms of the jewel struck me sober, reviving me from the madness that had arrested supervision of my despicable intendments. It was the picture of Benjamin that had been taken mere days before his death. The photograph was too large for the locket, yet Lady Ethel had forced it in, tearing and breaking the expression of her son that one might have expected to be handled with the gentle and doting attentiveness of a grieving mother. Something about this heinous discovery shook me to my core. A glacial surge had flooded my bones that rendered the presence of the roaring fire obsolete and I felt my skeleton harden into solid mineral, as cold as the unscrupulous gem before me. In this moment I knew that the terrible evil I had sensed months before did indeed have physical form, and I had stroked its treacherous crust. When I finally recovered the courage to move, I fled to my chambers. In the days that followed, I became isolated with a knowledge that I could share with no other for the Worsley family found themselves embroiled in the misery of yet another raging thunderstorm of controversy and amassed titillation. Owing to the testimony of a handful of his sufferers, Lord Arthur’s vast deception had been brought to the prospect of public consumption; a revelation so harrowing and reprehensible, that on the murdered carcass of his professional aspirations did they feast.