This, again, is not a proper ‘Pregnancy Trap’ post with a long-form focus on one or two traps that define a particular work. Here is another hurried catalogue of all the “coercive love” relationships in the Strike-Ellacott mysteries: it follows the ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: First Four Strikes‘ post in which I reviewed the several traps encountered from Cuckoo to Lethal White. This post covers the most recent three novels in the series, Troubled Blood to Running Grave. I have written longish posts about the ‘Big Four’ Pregnancy Traps that play defining roles in the Harry Potter novels (Merope and Tom, Sr.), in Casual Vacancy (Krystal and Fats), in Cursed Child (Bellatrix and Tom, Jr.), and in the Strike series (Leda and Jonny); with this post and one other that surveys The Ickabog, Christmas Pig, and Beedle the Bard, I’ll wrap up this Pregnancy Trap Golden Thread in an article on the Substack page and a ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast for subscribers before moving on to the next Golden Thread ‘common denominator’ in her work.
Book-by-book, then, the Pregnancy Traps to be found in Troubled Blood, Ink-Black Heart, and Running Grace!
Troubled Blood
[See the first comment beneath this post for the Pregnancy Trap in Strike5 that I left out of the first version of this piece, the most important Trap of this specific book, of the Strike-Ellacott series, and perhaps of everything Rowling has written.]
- Sarah Shadlock’s Trapping Matt Cunliffe
Readers learn in Lethal White with Robin’s discovery of the diamond earring in the Cunliffe conjugal bed that Matt and Sarah have been sleeping together. It comes as little surprise because since Career of Evil Matt’s old friend from University has been “shit stirring,” i.e., implying when she and the engaged and then married couple are together that Robin must be attracted to Cormoran and sexually tempted by him. This is not to mention, of course, Rowling having revealed in Strike3 that Robin’s fiancée had slept with Sarah while at Uni after Ms Ellacott was raped at her school and been unavailable to him at home due to her year-long agoraphobia.
The slow-release of Sarah’s long-term plan to hook herself the husband she wants, Matt Cunliffe not Tom Turvey, though, comes at last in Troubled Blood, Rowling’s wondrous fifth Strike-Ellacott mystery and perhaps the best single novel she has written. She has Robin learn via a phone call with Shadlock’s furious fiancée Turvey in a crowded Christmas season department store that Sarah has moved on to (moved in with?) Matt; she inwardly reviewed that conversation in her head while sitting with Strike in the store’s cafe:
A waiter had arrived at the table. When both had ordered coffee, and Robin some toast, each relapsed into silence. Robin was looking away from the window toward the shoppers stocking up on fancy groceries for Christmas down on the shop floor and re-running Tom Turvey’s outburst in her head. The aftershocks were still hitting her. Four weeks before my fucking wedding. It must have been called off. Sarah had left Tom for Matthew, the man she’d wanted all along, and Robin was sure she wouldn’t have left Tom unless Matthew had shown himself ready to offer her what Tom had: diamonds and a change of name. I’m the only one of us who hasn’t been fucking around. Everyone had been unfaithful, in Tom’s opinion, except poor Tom… so Matthew must have told his old friend that she, Robin, had been sleeping with someone else (which meant Strike, of course, of whom Matthew had been perennially jealous and suspicious from the moment Robin had gone to work for him). And even now that Tom knew about Matthew and Sarah, after his old friend’s duplicity and treachery had been revealed, Tom still believed the lie about Robin and Strike. Doubtless he thought his current misery was all Robin’s fault, that if she hadn’t succumbed to Strike, the domino effect of infidelity would never have been started. (Part Three, Chapter 24)
Rowling rolls out the Pregnancy Trap that Shadlock had been compelled to set only after the final divorce mediation between the long-separated Cunliffes. Ellacott deduces that Sarah had deliberately become ‘preggers’ to secure the vacillating Matt:
“Yeah.” He hesitated. “It was an accident.”
Was it hell, thought Robin. Sarah had always known how to get what she wanted. Robin realized at last how long a game Sarah had played: always present, giggling, flirting, prepared to settle for Matthew’s best friend to keep him close. Then, as her clutch tightened, but Matthew threatened to slip through it, there’d been the diamond earring she’d left in Robin’s bed and now, still more valuable, a pregnancy to make sure of him, before he could enter a dangerous state of singledom. Robin had a strong suspicion that this was what had lain behind the two postponements of mediation. Had a newly hormonal and insecure Sarah made scenes, frightened of Matthew coming face to face with Robin while he hadn’t yet decided whether he wanted either the baby or its mother?
“And she wants to be married before she has it?”
“Yeah,” said Matthew. “Well, so do I.” (Part Five, Chapter 55)
“A pregnancy to make sure of him”… Once again, Rowling uses “coercive love,” a pregnancy trap in a key story relationship. The successful trap that secures clueless Matt to Sarah, effectively closes the Cunliffe story-line in the Strike novels (if hope springs eternal that the man Louise Freeman refers to as the “flubberworm” will make a cameo of some kind in the last three books; he has to harbor thoughts of revenge against Strike, no?).
- Janice Beattie’s Failed Trap of Her Son’s Father
During Strike’s end of novel confrontation with the “Poisoner Granny” in her flat’s Red Room, Rowling reveals that the serial killer had years before tried to win an engagement ring from her beaux by becoming pregnant with his child. Strike has asked Beattie why she killed people after sharing with her that her son Kevin will be testifying against her, that he will be sharing in court the times his mother tried to poison his father, himself, and his child, her grand-daughter. Rowling lets her readers know only then that Janice’s wedding band was a front and that she had tried to win her husband by becoming pregnant: [Read more…]
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