Hogwarts Professor

This is not a proper ‘Pregnancy Trap’ post but a hurried catalogue of all the “coercive love” relationships in the first four  Strike-Ellacott mysteries. 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 Golden Thread in an article on the Substack page for subscribers before moving on to the next Rowling Studies ‘common denominator.’

Book-by-book, then, shall we, Cuckoo’s Calling to Lethal White?

Cuckoo’s Calling

• Charlotte Campbell trap to win Cormoran Strike

He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.

‘Don’t you dare fucking investigate me. Don’t you dare treat me like some drugged-up squaddie. I am not a fucking case to be solved; you’re supposed to love me and you won’t take my word even on this…’ Cuckoo, Part One, Chapter Seven

Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.

This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all. Cuckoo, Part Four, Chapter Five

The opening chaos on Denmark Street for the entire Cormoran Strike series, the opening that makes possible his first meeting with Robin Ellacott, is the Peg-Legged PI’s break-up with his on-and-off girlfriend of seventeen years, Charlotte Campbell. The ‘inciting incident’ for that key relationship inciting incident was Campbell’s having told her live-in lover and fiancée that she was pregnant and then saying that she no longer was pregnant. For Strike, with all his doubts about his own mother’s motives in conceiving him (?), this was a lie-too-far from a congenitally dishonest woman. Wrapped as it is in her probable relationship with Ross, in Cuckoo he resolves and keeps to his resolve never to renew their relationship.

In Silkworm, she sends him a text the day before her wedding to Ross, seemingly to rebuke him on this score, the simple message being “It was yours” (Silkworm, chapter 40). The first time they meet in the series post Calling is in Lethal White at the Paralympians Ball — and this is Strike’s first thought on seeing her:

“Corm, don’t go,” she said, reaching out. Her fingers did not quite make contact with his sleeve; she let her hand fall back by her side. “Don’t, not yet, I—you’ve done such incredible things. I read about them all in the papers.”

The last time they had seen each other he had been bleeding, too, because of the flying ashtray that had caught him in the face as he left her. He remembered the text, “It was yours,” sent on the eve of her wedding to Ross, referring to another baby she had claimed to be bearing, which had vanished before he ever saw proof of its existence. He remembered, too, the picture she had sent to his office of herself, minutes after saying “I do” to Jago Ross, beautiful and stricken, like a sacrificial victim.

“Congratulations,” he said, keeping his eyes on her face. White, Chapter Thirty-three

He keeps “his eyes on her face,” of course, because she is enormously pregnant with Ross’ babies, twins, at that time.

After Ink Black Heart’s confrontation with Jago Ross in which Strike reveals the video evidence to him and Charlotte of child abuse, she runs ‘Corm’ down in the street to share her elation about being freed to be with her old beaux again. Strike rebuffs her by saying that there is no way he was going to help her raise the children of Jago Ross, to which she replies that isn’t really a concern because she would not be pursuing sole custody of James and Mary. Strike is appalled by her indifference to the safety of her own children and whatever feelings he has for her are extinguished (Chapter 87). He recalls this moment in Running Graves’ dialogue with dead Charlotte in the Norfolk tower church, in his meeting with her sister Amelia Crichton, and, most importantly, in his final chapter conversation with Robin in the office.

Charlotte’s bizarro mysterious pregnancy drives Strike’s away from her at the start of Cuckoo’s Calling, his remembrance of her ‘It was yours’ claim at their meeting at the central part of the central novel in the series, and his return to the theme of her being someone with whom he had nothing in common and could have no relationship in the light of her indifference about parenting makes the first pregnancy, real or feigned as with her breast cancer, seem at least potentially to have been a pregnancy trap. [I have searched for but been unable to find the passage in which Strike thinks Charlotte sprung the trap to win him away from his obsession with his detective agency.] The beginning, middle, and end of the seven book series — and the longer the delay in producing Hallmarked Man, the more I am convinced the series was originally plotted as a seven rather than ten book epic — all turn on this subject, as explored in the Charlotte was Murdered substack posts and podcast.

All the allusions to this pregnancy in the books in Strike’s musings and Charlotte’s texts are without mention of “pregnancy” or “baby” or “abortion.” [Whoops! Strike thinks in Career, “Robin was one of only three people (he suspected) who knew about that putative baby that Charlotte claimed to have lost, but which might never have existed, or was aborted.” Chapter Forty] Rowling does her best here to keep those subjects in our mind by forcing us to think of them rather than sharing those ideas herself. If Hallmarked Man or Strike 9 turns on the murder of Charlotte Campbell, as Nick Jeffery and I believe one will, the mystery of the phantom pregnancy that drove Strike from Charlotte will be solved at last. With the equally mysterious but assumed pregnancy trap of Leda Strike to capture Jonny Rokeby, the series can conclude. [Read more…]