Charlotte Hartley (nee Hutchinson) is the title character and deuteragonist of Charlotte, and also plays a minor role in Nikki, Stuart and Stephanie.
Early life
Charlotte was born on the 19th of May 1991, the only daughter of Graham and Janice Hutchinson (nee Easton). At the age of fourteen, Charlotte lost her mother, and was raised and home-tutored by her father, also finding work as a model in between her studies. She eventually became a model full-time and was signed to the Joshua Benedict talent agency. At the age of fifteen, Charlotte became romantically involved with a boy named Keith Hartley, who was the oldest son of one of her father's friends. Over the years, Charlotte & Keith's relationship would blossom and the two would fall deeply in love with each other.
Meeting Jamie
At some point in her late teens, Charlotte began to suspect that her father was somehow involved in her mother's death. Charlotte's mother had been a wealthy heiress, and her father stood to inherit her entire fortune if she died before Charlotte reached the age of eighteen. However, due to her father's controlling nature, Charlotte was unable to escape his clutches for long enough to prove her suspicions, until she stumbled across the Facebook profile of a young man named James Travis- who, gender aside, looked a lot like herself. With the help of her ballet teacher Ellen Heywood, the only person she implicitly trusted, Charlotte began to put together a plan.
Toward the end of March 2011, Charlotte put her plan into action. With the help of Ellen, she was able to lure James into a hotel room, where he was drugged and disguised as Charlotte herself, with any imperfections in the disguise being covered by make-up. With James in place, Charlotte travelled to the north-east of England, where she was able to secure the testimony of the doctor who had supplied the drugs that her father had used to poison her mother. Whilst in the north-east, Charlotte also visited a hospital to get an abortion, having discovered that she was pregnant shortly before executing her plan. Keith- the father of the unborn baby- would never know about the pregnancy.
Five days after leaving, Charlotte returned to London and confronted her father with her evidence. Rather than fight his daughter, Graham quietly surrendered and allowed himself to be arrested by police. He would later be sentenced to life in prison for his crime, but would die of a heart attack less than two years after starting his sentence.
After her father's arrest, Charlotte gained access to his vast wealth, instantly becoming a millionaire. The first thing she did was head up to her bedroom, where James was still asleep in her bed, unaware of what had transpired in the room below him. After waking James up, Charlotte turned over the £250 000 reward that she had promised, before observing that James had fulfilled 'his' role in the plan perfectly, having fooled Charlotte's father and boyfriend without either of them suspecting for a minute. Rather than send James away with a second thought, Charlotte offered him the chance to continue being a woman full-time and live with her as her best friend. 'James' accepted, and immediately started to be known as Jamie-Lee Burke.
Unbeknownst to Charlotte, while she was away, Jamie had attended an interview for the talent agency Spencer and Hall on her behalf. Charlotte had assumed that she had had zero chance of being signed by such a prestigious agency, hence why she had been content to allow Jamie to attend the interview instead of her, but much to her surprise, on her return she discovered that Jamie had passed the interview for her. Charlotte would later discover that her success was largely due to her father giving the agency a sizeable bribe (later discovered to be half a million pounds). However, this would be a shrewd investment on her father's part, as Charlotte quickly began earning vast amounts of money from her new arrangement.
After Jamie accepted Charlotte's offer, the two of them, along with Ellen, set about building that would be Jamie's new life.
To be continued
Relationships
Jamie-Lee Burke
Jamie is Charlotte's best friend, a relationship that began under unusual circumstances but would quickly grow into the closest friendship Charlotte had ever had- arguably an even closer friendship than Charlotte has with her husband.
To be continued
Trivia
- Charlotte shares a birthday with Jessica from the story Soixante-Trois Airlines, though Charlotte was born one year earlier.
- Charlotte is the only non-protagonist and the only cisgendered character to have a story named for her.