The Worsley Family Locket: Chapter 3 - Arthur and Clarence

It is not possible to explain what occurred next, without speaking about your more senior siblings. How your eldest brother Clarence carried himself, was the epitome of the household’s ever-lasting cruelty and neglect. Aged just 13 when I first encountered him, he lambasted my beggared condition and inferior status with eloquence beyond his years. Irresolutely an intelligent boy, but one who utilised his perceptiveness and quick-thinking with callous intent. A disdainful slug of a whelp, on the very brink of blossoming into a vile moth that was drawn toward opportunities to torture and belittle like flickering candlelight. I was victimised relentlessly by the child, who seemed to claim a wilful disliking to me from the very moment he encountered me. He taunted me for my work, stole my possessions which only rarely returned to me destroyed and even physically struck me when his loathing was made its most bold. The women of the manor he treated with similar disregard. His younger sisters Ida and Helen were positively terrified of him. Yet Lady Ethel, before she came to know the locket with such lamentable affinity, remained smitten. He was, after all, the first child she’d birthed. Regrettably however, those affections had never been mutual. Clarence only behaved with any civility around his father, though even this was demonstrably lacking in sentiment. He had eyes only for his father’s capacity for prosperity and influence, and declared a divine right to a share in his prestige, though to my eyes it was utterly unearned whenever he received it. A dreadful young swine through and through, but one with a certain ruthlessness that had already sniffed the alluring scent of ascendancy; traits that often collude to put a rotten fruit at the forefront of the grocer’s stalls.

Throughout my time with your family, Clarence did not change, though his more loathsome qualities fortified with increasing age. This, he had in common with Ida, the eldest of your sisters. Even at the unripe age of 11 a vanity had consumed her obsessive mind. She could often be found raiding her mother’s cosmetic supplies and decorating herself in her formal wear. She was a pretty young thing, and grew more outwardly graceful with each passing year. It was commonplace, mainstream even, for the local boys to take a fancy to Ida, though she ostracised them all with the same stone-eyed shunning. She too degraded me, chastised me and despised me. Though, unlike her brother, she never sought me out for unleashings of disdain. She cared little for others less they dared to cross her path. Showered she was, with opulent endowments; the repeated declarations of a loveless mother, who in-turn received not so much as a glance. Ida was absorbed in her own mind, her own reflection, her own voice. There was one in the house whom was able to affect her, able to steal her gaze from the mirror she carried with her everywhere. One able to silence her wicked tongue and loosen her ears. Clarence. Undoubtedly, she feared Clarence, yet she bore an undeniable admiration for her older brother, something that aroused her strongest emotional outpourings. Clarence too, enjoyed provoking Ida, all the time a detestable grin sat chiselled to his skull. There was an odious intimacy between them from the time of my arrival, even as children. Yet another wretched element in the air that would later ignite into a maelstrom of woeful upheaval.

When Arthur’s scandal became common knowing, Clarence was 18 years old and Ida had just turned 16. It made little sense to me how Arthur had chosen me specifically for personal, household servitude. I was a young man, without any experience in the attendance of great people nor the maintenance of a great home. Gratitude, at the time, stifled my ability to question this strange appointment. Upon hindsight, I now understand that it was because I had come to Winchester alone, without a woman of my own, that I had been commandeered. I did not fit into Arthur’s repulsive scheme, which he housed in the manufactory where I had found initial employment. Arthur’s workers were all men, each of them recently married and looking to start a family. I was not, and so Arthur relocated me to a position more befitting of Arthur’s immoral whims. But more importantly, freeing up space at the heart of his deceptions. In the manufactory he had hired a Robert Hennings in my place. Robert came from a well-to-do family. He was over-educated, cherished the arts and had not performed manual labour once before in his privileged life. He was 20 years old, handsome and had ensnared himself a beautiful bride, whom he had wed the Summer before; Kymber Hennings. Robert, being new and unfamiliar with the routines and customs of manufactory work, found himself enlisted into lengthier and inconveniently timed shifts, a duty which he carried out, to his credit, commendably and without complaint. Like I had been before him, he was merely appreciative for the unexpected gift of pay and stability, when it seemed unlikely to be found. This left Kymber Hennings isolated and unprotected in her home, with little on her mind but the warmth of indebtment to one Arthur Worsley. And Arthur never failed to collect his dues. This was his ultimate trick, but not one he could pull on me, hence my sudden remotion.

Arthur would visit those very women whom, through his own manipulations, found themselves unattended and vulnerable. They would invite him inside, regarding him as a friend, one who helped, one who showed their husbands kindness, and once inside, his veil of courtesy would drop. Kymber Hennings was one of many beyond counting who fell into the trap of granting the conspirator entrance to her home. There in the very dwellings he had helped them to afford, Arthur’s perversions made a victim of Kymber. A merciless and unfeeling manoeuvre that he repeated, escaping culpability time and time again. This tale is made even more vulgar by the particularly depraved dispositions that cycloned within the mind of Arthur Worsley. During my time at South-Peak Manor, I had the freedom of access to all but one room; Arthur’s study. This was not a result of my lower standing in society, this was a rule that extended to all whom stood under the roof of the Worsley Manor. It was a space reserved entirely for Arthur. What he did in there, I never knew. What was housed in there, for the longest time, I did not know. Whether he had furniture, long lost treasures of ancient times, or the holy grail itself, I could only guess. It was a room kept locked by a key which Arthur carried close to his breast. The study door, on the rare occasions it was opened, was held ajar only wide enough for Arthur to compress his bulbous body and not for the entry of peering eyes. I had barely espied the colours of the walls, such was the infrequency of my sightings.

One rainy day, as Spring had begun to flower its vibrant hue, I took heed of a barbarous wailing emanating from a room overhead. It was a sound new to me. Not man nor woman, two-toned and resonant with the blackness that had clung to the manor suspiciously long after Winter’s paling. With haste, my legs carried me up the main staircase which shook with the turbulence of a frenzied banging that screamed louder than shrieks of the being I had heard first. The sound, I discovered, was coming from the hallway at the very top of the house that guided unwelcome feet to the curious, sealed gateway into Arthur’s study. I ascended higher and the bludgeoning sound grew louder. When I turned my head into the site of the commotion, I did so cautiously, expecting to perceive the visage of a rampaging bull that I dared not to disturb. I found not an enraged beast, neither the door to Arthur’s study closed for it had been destroyed. Colossal splinters and chunks of wood littered the hallway carpet, which had been stained first by a distrustful blue fluid that shimmered in the low-light and second with the blood dripping from Lady Ethel’s weary hands. I encroached closer. The vantage point from where I crept showed me directly into Arthur’s study.

Lady Ethel was sat at a desk drenched in a deep blue, papers were scattered and marked by the same blemishes and the floor was a scrapheap of broken glass. The strange liquid that had been spilled so abundantly sat in thick heaps on the carpet that protruded in fouls mounds in resistance to nature’s pull. Gravity itself appeared to struggle as it hauled the fluids slithering down from the desk. Ethel did not look up from the bloodied locket in her ruined hands. This paltry, feeble woman had torn a slab of timber to ribbons and her fingers too had been carved in the act, contorted into fragments of crooked bone which mimicked the wreckage at my feet. This was the very day Arthur’s scandal had been revealed and it had sent Ethel into a fury that granted her an unnatural strength beyond her own. I could do little to salvage wellness from her injuries. At that desk, I tended to her ailments, stemming the flow of blood from her lacerations, all the while the locket sat firm in a grasp painful to perform. She winced as I worked and I dared not to touch the jewel with which she could not part. I found myself mustering the efficacy to gaze away from the locket. A might that waned as I swept my fingers across her broken skin, tauntingly near the shining gem. An agonising urgency to swipe it for my own came over me and I felt the vigour and compulsion to destroy a fastened, oak-wood door course through my body like the volts of an electrified execution.

Had I not espied what was hidden inside Lord Arthur’s desk compartments, surely I would have been lost to the madness of corrupted greed. A glance in aversion to the foul locket at my fingertips brought my eyes to the sight of an aperture hanging half-open lower to the ground. Flicking it with my shoe revealed a handful of flasks, not yet smashed, housing half-pints of glutinous blue. Affixed to the inner-wall of the compartment was a schedule designed to regulate intake and therefore maximise potency. This I discovered, was the nucleus of Arthur’s debauched machinations. Regretfully, Lord Arthur bore a sinful fascination for the miracle of conception and took vicious satisfaction in impregnating each of his sufferers; something he achieved with unearthly consistency; something he owed to the bizarre elixirs he smuggled into his study. When I first met with Arthur Worsley, I understood him to be the father of four. In truth, he was a father to an incalculable mass of ill-made impurities. His victims were kept quiet with both, the promise of public revelation and expulsion, and the threat of pauperism looming menacingly over the lives of their husbands and children. In return for their secrecy, he kept a watchful eye on his horde of bastards, bending fate their way, with gifts of coin and instances of fortune.

This coming to light transformed the Manor into the eye of a raging thunderstorm which left strenuous carnage in its wake. Arthur suppressed himself away into the futile project of rebuilding his study, and as he sheltered, his abandoned and besmirched businesses came to the brink of ruin. Clarence became agitated and pleaded with his father to arrest the collapse of the empire he was fated to inherit. Yet, he scarcely said a word in reply. Arthur became lost in the restoration of his private office, mindlessly scrubbing at the carpet and grooming the floor for shards of glass and wood chippings. He became a creature of robotics, that could not be spoken to or negotiated with, akin to the machinery conquering the industrial spaces of the country that he had for years resisted implanting into his manufactories. Ida too had become stricken with concern. Not by a panic brought on by the harrowing and sudden revelations regarding her crippled, iniquitous father, nor was her anxiety reserved for her mutilated and betrayed mother. She, like Clarence, feared for the roof above her head and the shamed legacy of her family name. Poor Helen, still only a child, could sense the palpable volatility which abounded vehemently everywhere around her. Yet her misgivings were overlooked by all save for myself.

It was during these days that I found myself spending the majority of my time with young Helen Worsley. I could keep her distracted from the chaos, sitting with her by the fire, making enquiries about her dolls. What they were named, how she liked to dress them, what their jobs would be. Strangely, Lady Ethel was another point of calmness amongst the madness and colluding feelings of instability. She rested, unaffected by the enduring commotion and did not acknowledge her abnormal outburst that had occurred only days earlier. Ethel was often a silent companion in the room, while Helen and I played on the rug by the fireplace. On occasion her reticence would be broken by a grumbling; a muttering of unheard ravings, unpleasant if examined, but ultimately, I found them to be disregardable. A fool I was. Those rare outpourings were a glimpse into the dwindling mind of a lady with a strange power. A power that did not belong to her, but one granted by the odious ornament she caressed with disfigured hands. Had I listened more closely, studied her more attentively, perhaps I’d have noticed sooner that she had replaced the picture in the locket with one of Lord Arthur Worsley.

Much of Lady Ethel was gone and now only loathing governed her being. Loathing and the locket; things I could not yet determine to be either two separate entities or one. It mattered not. For the placing of his image inside the silver pendant sealed Lord Arthur’s fate. She knew what this action would entail and so now did I. It was a vengeful enactment of a women whom, for all her rantings and perceived lack of cohesion, plotted with intent and wrath. She cared not for the suffering of the victims of her husband. In fact, she cared for them only in order to hate them and she remarked one evening, in the midst of Spring’s colourful renaissance, that she wished she’d had enough photographs for the lot of them. That was the moment I came to understand the nature of the evil she possessed, and as Lady Ethel spat her poisonous damnations, did I hear the furor taking place on the floorboards above my head. Lord Arthur Worsley’s obscured destiny and the monstrous will of the locket unfolding without contention. I leapt from my position, startling the poor Helen, who for days had relied on me for composure and comradeship. As I ran for the door, Lady Ethel cackled in horrid amusement; a sound that accompanied me as I fumbled up the stairs towards the scene of ferment. My climb was clumsy and distressed. I fell numerous times and took longer to reach the top than I would on an unexceptional day at a walking pace; a failure I assigned to the hysteria running through my veins, though I suspected a greater force than my own pushed against my ambitions.

By the time I reached the room above the fireplace, Lord Arthur had been beaten into an unrecognisable lump. His body laid twisted and crushed, creating a heap of exposed bone and variegated colours. The abuse he had sustained matched not with the capabilities of human brawns, yet it was Clarence who found me first, who for the first time in his life, did not assail me but merely commanded that I leave the room in a self-assured and relaxed expression. Ida came soon after and her surprise only surfaced when her eyes met with mine and not with the sinuous remains of her vanquished father. In the room they wished to remain undisturbed and behind me, the door was closed. There I was left with only with the troubling suspicions swirling through my head and the haunting companionship of the wild and uninhibited laughter of Lady Ethel that sounded anew from her seat by the fire.