“This day could not possibly get any worse,” Charlotte moaned as she trudged down the sopping wet street, having given up trying to hold a newspaper over her head to keep her from the cold rain. Earlier that day she’d received the results of her first term exams and was utterly devastated. She’d failed three classes and was now on academic probation. If she had another semester like the first one, she’d be asked to leave the school. For all the times she’d started to wonder if this endeavour was worth it she was finally seriously considering that it wasn’t. It would be easy to get out of it now, the school didn’t want a poor student like Charles Russell and Charlotte was getting more discouraged and rundown by the day. 

To add to her misfortune it had begun raining while she was changing from her disguise back into her regular clothing and by the time she was on her way home it was freezing cold, and pouring. It was just a little too warm for it to snow, but she couldn’t keep herself from wishing it would just because her hair wouldn’t be pouring torrents of water down her back. She had to stop off on her way and pick up some things to prepare Nick’s birthday cake as well, even though she wanted nothing more than to give him a meal of rotten meat and a gift of rocks for how he’d treated her since they had returned home from her parent’s. Ever since New Year’s Eve he’d been acting very odd and Charlotte didn’t like it. It was as if someone had crawled into his mind and flipped a little switch changing him from nice to nasty. Just when she had started to understand the reasons behind some of his actions he went off the deep end and completely went the way of his father. He was demanding, bossy, irritable, and every time she walked into the room even if he had the most brilliant smile on his face he would immediately look cross. She wondered what she’d done to deserve his sudden change in personality but was also sort of worried to find out what it was. 

She sighed with relief when her building was within sight but a large black carriage out in front made her nervous. As she got closer she noticed two very official looking men standing beside the carriage, seemingly guarding the door. She glanced at them briefly, noting their badges before hesitantly venturing inside of the building. The place seemed to be a bustle of activity on each floor. Tenants were out of their flats, curiously looking up the staircases to try and see what all of the hubbub was about. 

“What’s all this?” Charlotte questioned a young woman who was standing on the first floor, trying desperately to see anything.

“I don’t know,” the stocky blonde replied, “Just all of a sudden there was a great bit of racket so I came out to see what was happening and one of those gentlemen introduced himself as a constable of the London Metropolitan Police. Can you believe it? London police! Here! Said they were looking for a wanted criminal but no one got a look at him, they’d already got him in that carriage. People have been carrying trunks and the like down the stairs for a while now. Evidence for some kind of trial, I imagine.”

Charlotte had a sick feeling in her stomach at the thought that some wanted criminal was living in the same building as her. If the London police came all the way to Cambridge to apprehend the person then they must have committed a serious crime, one that the crown was involved in. “Do you think it’s okay for me to go up?” she wondered.

The other woman nodded, “I imagine. They seem to be finishing up. People have been going up to their flats for a bit now.”

Charlotte made the long climb up to the flat, watching as some people starting returning to their rooms, bored with the events. She noticed some of the police officers on her floor as she walked down the hall, but she couldn’t tell where they’d just come from. 

“Have you been home long?” she asked, surprised to see Nick as she walked in the door. She wondered if he knew more than the lady downstairs. Quickly, she removed her wet jacket then rung her hair out into the wash basin.

“A while,” he replied, not looking up from the assignment he was writing. 

“Do you know what’s going on?” 

Nick dipped his stylus in the inkwell on his desk, carefully writing out an essay, “Yes, I spoke with one of the constables.”

“Well?” Charlotte asked curiously, pulling on his sleeve lightly.

“You’re going to smudge my ink!” Nick complained with a groan, putting his pen down so he could turn and talk to her, “They received some information about a criminal on the loose and they came to arrest them.”

“The person was wanted?”

“Yes, there was a warrant out for a group of people and she was part of this group. The London Police had been looking for them, and they received a telegram with her whereabouts,” he explained, turning back to the desk.

“She? Her? It was a woman? I just can’t believe it, I would have never imagined one of our neighbours to be a wanted criminal.”

“It’s definitely unsettling,” Nick agreed, “I mean all this time, living right next to us and we were blind.”

“They’re living right next to us?” Charlotte’s eyes suddenly bulged, and she pointed towards the wall the bed was against “You mean Mrs. Scott is a criminal? She seemed like such a lovely woman!”

Nick shook his head slowly then pointed his hand in the other direction, saying nothing.

The day just got much worse. Colour drained from Charlotte’s face in a flash and she bolted out the door and over to Sue’s apartment, swinging the door open to find it a complete mess. Flyers, and bulletins were littered across the floor, trunks had obviously been removed, some of her books were missing (which Charlotte suspected might include some of her own), and her closet was empty. Defeated, she slowly walked back to her own flat, the door still wide open from her sudden escape. 

“I was as shocked as you are,” Nick spoke as Charlotte walked back through the door looking crushed, “I would have never suspected that Sue was up to no good.”

“Did they say her crime?” 

“Apparently, dear old Sue was part of a group calling themselves the Birth Control League. The police have been looking for the leader of the group, as well as any of the higher ranking members for months. Sue was illegally publishing pamphlets encouraging young women to take part in birth control! In her room they also found a bunch of flyers talking about selective breeding, about how you should specifically pick a partner for the sole purpose of breeding bright, successful children. Planning pregnancies, or not having any children at all, can you imagine? It was unbelievable that she would be informing people of that kind of filth. She was brainwashing young, naïve women to believe that it was their choice when to have children, not God’s choice. The information even went so deep as to tell people where they could acquire contraception,” Nick let out an angry sigh and shook his head, “Instructions on how to sin, it’s the work of the Devil.” 

Charlotte ground her teeth to keep from lashing out at Nick after his diatribe. There was nothing she hated more then when he went on his religious rampages, criticizing people that he considered “sinners”. She herself was a religious woman, but obviously far more open-minded than her male counterpart. 

“Sue was a good person,” she said quietly, thinking about all of the things Nick had just told her, “the police…they told you all of that?”

Nick paused for a moment then nodded, “Like I said, I talked to the constable.”

“They told you all that but wouldn’t tell anyone else in the building anything?”

“Where are you going with this?”

Charlotte wiped away a lone tear that had managed to escape her eye and looked at her husband forlornly, “Did you have something to do with this?”

Nick stared out the window, knowing that now was not the time to be a hypocrite, “I won’t lie to you. I’m not a liar. I was the person who alerted the police to her whereabouts. I couldn’t stand the fact that she was doing what she was doing and getting away with it. You don’t need to worry though,” he breathed a soft breath and turned, taking Charlotte’s hand, “I got rid of everything that would link you to her. No one will ever know you were involved.”

“What?” Charlotte asked with her voice completely void of emotion. She couldn’t believe what he was saying; she couldn’t believe that he knew! Her hands shook slightly as she realized why Nick had been so grumpy lately, and she was ashamed that she had gone on all that time with him knowing one of her secrets.

“We can start over,” Nick told her, wanting so badly to forget that Sue ever existed. He was secretly glad that Charlotte was so broken up about her idol fallen, but he didn’t want to completely alienate her because that might only make things worse than they were before, “We’ll forget this whole thing ever happened.”

“I would have never thought of you as so vindictive,” Charlotte muttered, feeling Nick squeeze her fingers with uncomfortable strength.

“Vindictive? You want to talk to me about vindictive? There is no person in this room more unkind than you,” he spat, dropping her hand like it was on fire, “I planned on making this easy for you, not making you feel guilty, but you have to go and accuse me of being vindictive when all I did was my civic, lawful duty when I discovered that my neighbour was committing heinous felonies against God and against her country!”

“Heinous?!” Charlotte exploded, looking at him as if he were insane, “Do you think that giving women a choice of what they should do with their own bodies is heinous?”

“Therein lies the problem,” Nick detailed, “It’s not my decision, it’s the law’s decision and they decided that yes, it is. If it were up to me I would make a clause that would say that if a woman were allowed to make such a choice, it should be done with the explicit consent of her husband. It’s when you women start making your own choices that things get out of hand. Give you a little bit of power and you run amuck. You become two-faced and deceitful, playing your little games behind people’s backs.”

Charlotte couldn’t keep herself from crying, ashamed that she had changed Nick’s philosophies because of her lies, “I never meant for you to find out!” 

“Well I did find out!” Nick yelled furiously, not caring that everyone in the building could probably hear him, “You will never be able to even begin to imagine how much it pained me when I did! You might as well have reached into my chest and ripped out my heart! Never in a thousand years would I have ever thought you would do something like this!” he looked away quickly, having to take a staggering breath as his own tears started to fall. Quietly he continued, “It wasn’t that you did it. Even though it’s something I don’t agree with I’ve always let you have opposing views than my own and express that. It was that you did it and you lied to me about it. You didn’t just lie, you made stories to cover it up, and you acted as if nothing was wrong. You tricked me into believing in the back of my mind that maybe it was my fault we hadn’t had a baby when all along you knew why and you said nothing. I still don’t quite understand why you don’t want to have my children.”

His breakdown and closing statement were all Charlotte could handle and she full out bawled into her hands, “I do want to have your children, please trust me! I’m so sorry! I won’t blame you if you leave me!” she cried.

“I’m not going to leave you,” Nick sighed, “I just hope one day you can explain everything to me so that I know what I did wrong.”

“Nothing! You did nothing wrong!” she tried to assure him. Charlotte stood and walked the few steps towards him, hugging him around the stomach, “You have to believe me,” she whimpered, surprised when Nick suddenly pushed her away from him.

“Don’t touch me,” he growled, angrily wiping his eyes, “I can’t stomach you touching me right now. Every time I think of the times we’ve made love I’m completely disgusted. They were all lies. I was baring my heart and my soul to you and I was hoodwinked. Just for a little while...please don’t touch me.”

Charlotte couldn’t believe her ears; she had never heard pain in Nick’s voice like she was hearing then and it made her ache inside. She was so ashamed of what she’d done, and in the back of her mind she wondered how horribly he would react when he found out about her bigger secret, “I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispered.

“Yes, you will, because I’m your husband,” Nick said to her frankly. He had never intended on blowing up at her. In fact, his plan of attack was to be coy with the whole situation so that they could move past it and he wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. Instead he’d now gotten himself upset again and couldn’t stop thinking about it, “I need to go out for a while. Don’t wait up.”

“Alright,” Charlotte nodded, knowing that he just needed to be away from her and she completely understood. She watched him as he got his jacket and derby from the closet and started dressing to go out, “Nick?” she called out, expecting him to ignore her.

“Yes?” he replied as he buttoned his coat.

“How did you find it?”

Nick stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned back to look at Charlotte, tears running down her face looking completely lost sitting on the bed, “Cufflinks, my dear. Cufflinks,” was all he said before heading out the door.

Charlotte immediately knew what he meant. She had wondered what had taken him so long looking for his cufflinks, and his demeanour suddenly had changed that night but she never thought that maybe he’d found out. It never occurred to her that she could be found out. She knew now though that Nick had gone almost a month with the knowledge looming over his head and she started to understand why he did what he did. If she had never met Sue then the thought of using something like that diaphragm would have never crossed her mind, and he knew that. He knew her. He got Sue out of the way in the hopes that he could have that Charlotte back and the thought killed her because even though it would hurt her it showed her how much he loved her. He was willing to send a woman he hardly knew to prison because he thought he was helping his marriage. Without Sue she’d have gotten pregnant long ago and ended her charade, and she was starting to think that may have been a better idea. 

Two lies were just too complicated. Now she was down to one, but her dedication was beginning to waiver. No Sue meant zero help hiding her schooling, so she made herself a promise. She would give it another month and if she couldn’t manage it then she would be done with it. She knew there was no risk she’d get pregnant in that time because Nick was obviously taking a self imposed break to be celibate.

February 28th was the deadline. If she couldn’t get dinner on the table, study, pass in assignments, do the required reading and make her husband the happiest man on the planet then it was done, no more Charles Russell, no more Cambridge.