16th March 2008Several of her cssmates had noticed – and unfortunately asked about the sudden interest in history. It wasn’t something which fit with her carefully projected image of a male isoted computer geek. Then when a ftmate wandered in and found a pile of books topped with Debrett’s Peerage he’d asked several awkward questions and been met with very vague responses. Things were a bit more carefully hidden after that.
She was determined that Charlotte Jones would, if she existed, be a useful person to know. Or at least could be, should she want to leverage that. For a while she toyed with making herself 120th in line to the throne. Every list seemed to stop at or before 100, so that seemed safe enough. But you didn’t want someone to go digging and find that kind of thing, then be interested and go digging further, at least not yet. So instead her research had been targeted at finding some way of ensuring that Charlotte Jones had a historical link to power. Something which was far enough removed from anything current that she, if she really existed, would probably only faintly be aware of it. The sort of thing that might have been mentioned over dinner as a child: “Oh, well, your great great uncle Arthur was a lord. That was before they found out about the contents of his celr and his link to the Fox-Lan…uh. Anyway, he ended up selling insurance.”
It’d taken nearly a year of research. Nearly a year of dead-ends and frustrating failures. But eventually she’d found one of very few hereditary titles that could, in certain circumstances, be passed to a woman. And here she was at long st, making her move. Charlie sat facing the woman in her neat grey bodywarmer, Historic Trust logo embzoned on the front.
“Mrs Sampson, but please call me Patricia,” she’d said as she gestured to the seat.
The high-up windows in the small room were conspiring with the sun to shine bright light directly into Charlie’s eyes. When she walked in, she immediately guessed this had once been a tack room, or a store room, but now the barred windows let light into a fairly utilitarian office. She blinked and leaned slightly, trying to get a better view of the woman’s expression. She looked distinctly dubious. Whether that was because of Charlie’s answers so far or her appearance she couldn’t be sure. But it was certainly understandable; this long haired geek was pretty dubious about herself.
Charlie did not feel this interview was going well. She felt deeply wrong in the suit and tie. It was, she was sure, the best choice she had from her limited selection of clothing-for-the-boy. It was either that or another hoodie with holes picked in it covering tee-shirts with holes worn in them. But it felt at once baggily ill-fitting and deeply constricting. And at this moment it seemed like her discomfort must be radiating across the table and out into the room. But she couldn’t be Charlie yet. Charlie didn’t exist yet. She had to be him until she was ready. Fine. She could be him. He would get her where she needed to be.
Damnit. She’d checked out again, hadn’t she. She’d lost the thread of what was going on in the world, consumed by a feeling of endless discomfort. Charlie leaned a little trying to move out of the ray of sunlight to get a proper look at the woman’s face. It was pretty clear she was waiting for an answer to a question. A question that she hadn’t heard. She needed to be here. Charlie shifted her hands and snuck her nail hard against the webspace on her thumb, the spark of pain holding her in her body.
“I’m very sorry, I was a little distracted by the sun.” She scooted her chair across slightly, finally getting out of the gre, “Could you repeat the question?”
“And what is it about Hippenscombe Manor that interests you?” The woman sounded disappointed.
Charlie only just suppressed her sigh of relief. She actually felt prepared for this. She’d spent some time reading up on the history of the manor, from its first appearance in the Doomsday book, through the fire and rebuilding in the seventeenth century which led to the ‘modern’ manor. It was, at st, a topic she could talk on with some enthusiasm. Or at least, some faked enthusiasm.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the history of the area, obviously there’s the smaller manor at Vernhams Dean, but this manor, as one of the few surviving examples of the patronage of Lady Wilbraham, this is so much more of an important building…”
She excitedly expined her love of both the house and of the history around it – something that wasn’t being met in her computer science degree. She carefully didn’t mention the 1890s fire which had destroyed quite a few records and left the family’s history somewhat vague. Definitely didn’t want to bring that up, something about which she might seem a little too interested. Frankly, that the manor had survived at all was startling, but the spotty records were ideal for her pn. As she finished her answer, the sun passed behind a cloud casting the whole room briefly in shadow, and she thought she saw a hint of positivity on Mrs Sampson’s face.
Finally the interview wound down and Charlie crossed her fingers leaving that she’d done enough. She hadn’t really expected the interview for a volunteer position to be quite so thorough and made a mental note to both practice interview technique, and also to brush up on her social engineering. But despite her performance a few days ter she got a very nice phone call from a very polite person inviting her back to orientation. Working it in around csses was not terribly tricky since they really wanted more volunteers at the weekends, thankfully.
This was definitely better than trying to break into a manor house, she actually had the right to be there. And her expressed interest in history meant that – among several other less useful jobs – they’d actually assigned her to help with the library.
—
In the end, technically, if anyone really dug into it, and followed the family trees far enough, it seemed like Charlotte was the true heir to the Barony of Raby. But realistically to discover her newly acquired nobility, you’d already have to know or be digging in archives that very few people looked at. All the same, she’d had a lot of fun creating the fiction for that. Volunteering with the Historic Trust identified weak points in the security of the archive. That was mainly because they didn’t expect anyone would wander in and add things to it – everything was targeted at stopping people stealing. But since what she was doing tonight, painstakingly inserting new documents, wasn’t something they were prepared for, it turned out to be remarkably easy.
Creating the documents themselves had been hard but enormously interesting. She’d carefully sourced paper that she’d then stained with drinks or ash made from burning antique wood. She’d then neatly folded them to fit into envelopes and inserted and removed them multiple times until the creases were worn and dirty. In a few cases the letters she was slipping into the archives were typed on period equipment she found at another museum where she’d started volunteering. It’d been a little bit of a thrill when she realised that she could type herself a letter on an early typewriter that was helpfully on dispy in another room and that actually belonged to the family. How much authenticity could one person get? Well, unless they actually ran the ink through a mass spectrometer or something. But seriously, who would care that much?
That plus some early Victorian paper - she had a pang of guilt about using it for something that would probably never amount to anything - and she had a letter expining how her distant retive had been shipped off in the te 1880s for something inexcusable (like, she presumed, using the wrong fork), and unfortunately the youth had gone just prior to the death of her dear great great grand something Harry Plowett who’d been the Earl of something or other.
The letter was clear enough in its intention: that the boy was considered not the proper sort, but also made clear the retionship. This one she was keeping for herself, and she was quite delighted with it. Tucking that in an early edition of Origin of the Species, she’d tucked it into a storage unit well out of the way. If she ever felt aristocracy would be useful the evidence was something that a lot of people would probably consider conclusive.
But she’d saved the biggest hurdle for when she’d had some practice. The birth certificate was a whole ‘nother level of problem. As she was forging her way through creating a person, she’d briefly considered that maybe she should’ve started with the birth certificate, but that definitely seemed like the most challenging part, and researching a way to make that happen was a background task she kept returning to.
