Name: Deborah Griffith
Age: 15
Gender: Female
Social Class: Nobility
Occupation: Family Heiress, owns and runs chain of shoe shops and clothing stores
Region: London
Ethnicity: British, distant Scottish lowlander roots
Personality: Genuine: When Deborah acts it is not without thought or careless intention. Her actions often betray her deeper thoughts or emotions, which also are rather readable. She’s slightly ashamed of the lack of ability to hold it back. She tends to try and say that what she’s showing is just a ruse or something to brush off, but the first emotion she conveys is a true emotion and feeling or thought. While it may seem contradictory for her to dismiss her feelings and emotions, in truth she is just trying to hide them.
Flighty/Shy: With her emotions and heart on her sleeve and her lacking a great control of hiding them, Deborah has created a wall to protect those emotions and thoughts she’d like to keep to herself. This wall is the fact she is rather shy about her personal life and not prone to telling a great deal about herself. She also will try to walk away or escape from situations where she feels she’s opening or exposing too much of herself. She knows that now, she can’t afford to risk her emotions. Especially after forming her contract. Even before her contract she was like this, her step sister not giving her much room to open up without fear of it being used against her. After the attempted rape, she is nervous around men alone in private, and when grabbed roughly, reacts badly. She also is unsettled by men she doesn’t know looking at her or trying to touch her in friendly manners. This is eased with repetitive encounters and or public settings.
Savvy: From early childhood, she was taught that when opportunity presents itself, take a gander, asses the possibilities, and then, make your decision. She’s not a fool going to grab at the first thing that presents itself. No, she thinks things through to the best of her abilities and will base her decisions and choices from there. When she does make choices without forethought is when she’s utterly and completely desperate.
Stubborn: When presented with something she wants, Deborah has little hesitation to make it known. When she gets a thought in her head, she sticks to it. If she makes a promise, starts a project, voices a particularly strong opinion, changing or taking it back just doesn’t happen unless she’s pushed to her breaking point or has absolutely no other choice. Her breaking point is high but it does exist, such points would be forced to view her contradictions her failure head on with no ‘candy coating’.
History: Her birth was delicate subject in the Griffith manor, as with her life came her mother’s death shortly after. Her mother had always been a sickly woman, and many expected her to die in or immediately after childbirth. This was thankfully untrue, as the late Caroline Griffith survived for a time. However, the stress of birth was followed with a slow healing, and the winter was particularly cold. The new mother fell ill and succumbed to pneumonia not 2 months after her daughter’s birth.
Her father grieved for much of her childhood, but adored Deborah and the simple fact she had her mother’s smile. He would often tell her stories of her mother, and from them, Deborah learned just who her mother had been, a frail but thoughtful woman who believed that nothing was without god’s guiding hand. As her father’s only child, she was going to inherit his estate as they had no other relatives for it to fall to. So, at a young age Deborah was exposed with some her family’s bare basics. Her father was indulgent and let her go to refinery school for a year (she was 8 ) and become more educated and ‘blossom into a young lady’. He also paid a good sum to have a tutor come in and teach her basic math and sciences. Not of course without her father and her escort, Miss Catherine in the room. At 9 however, a woman named Margaret entered Deborah’s life. She was a widow and had a daughter just a year Deborah’s senior.
Like the story of Cinderella, the wicked step mother and step sister came a ruined Deborah’s life. Only not. At least not immediately. To her credit, Margaret was a rather kind step mother, but her favoritism was obvious and it lead to many times Deborah’s father struggling to make sure both his daughters were treated fairly and as equals. He wasn’t blind to Margaret’s bias, but his wife was. Not out of cruelty, but just her love for her birth daughter. No, Elizabeth, Margaret’s daughter was the evil step sister, going out of her way to one up Deborah in anything the young girl desired to do.
Frustrated, her father found it best to keep Deborah at home to continue her private lessons with Miss Catherine, while sending Elizabeth to a refinement school. The daughters lived apart in many ways, only seeing each other in the mornings and evenings at family meals. They lived at odds, with Deborah focusing on her own interests and trying to become a young lady, and Elizabeth doing all she could to cast her step sister in poor light. Elizabeth would often lie of Deborah’s doings, steal her things, undermine or sabotage her work. She had set her sights out to turn the nobleman’s daughter’s life hell. And it worked. One of the only things Deborah was able to herself and Elizabeth had no interest in was the paranormal, a secret Interest originally of Miss Catherine’s which she shared with Deborah in private.
At 13 Deborah fell in love with a young nobleman, Gregory Carlton. A young nobleman from the Scottish lowlands. Her father was moderately approving but allowed the romance to go unhindered. But like all things, Elizabeth was not to let her younger stepsister have what she didn’t. It came to be that in the end, the two sisters were after the same man. A year of playing both sides, and at a Christmas, Gregory professed his love to Elizabeth, and openly rejected the idea of him and Deborah. What spurred this on was a rumor that Deborah was no longer a caste woman. Not only were the rumors untrue, and she had many that supported her, a single whisper was all it took to ignite the flames of doubt and speculation. It did not help that before the rumor, she had taken private tutors in things not suited for ‘young ladies’ and a much worse incident; her carriage had been attacked by roaming thugs, one of whom attempted to rape her before her screams and the screams of Catherine got the attention of patrolling officers from Scotland Yard. Their coachman giving the young woman and her ward sometime to start causing a commotion and getting attention before the situation escalated. For the rest of that fall she was more or less under her father’s eye.
In a grand act of cruelty, the Elizabeth and Gregory kept their secret for a month, and chose the social party of Deborah’s own 15th birthday to announce their plans to wed. Her heart broken, Deborah started to become more withdrawn from her father and social events. A month after her birthday and another tragedy. A carriage accident. Both her father and Margaret died. The only saving grace for Deborah was that her father’s will left explicit instructions that the family company pass to his birth daughter and her husband, whom ever that might be. Her Guardian would be a longstanding family friend, and an accountant had already been chosen. Elizabeth was infuriated, but had her small portion of assets and her own inheritance from her birthfather and her mother, not to mention her new husband had his own chain of tailor shops and men’s fashion, the original reason why few questioned moving the wedding or it’s secret for a month. People assumed the two companies were merging. It was not the case.
The wedding was pushed not back but forward, Gregory now far crushed under Elizabeth’s heel, and unaware of the hate the elder step-sibling had for the younger girl, not that he minded, as he slowly grew more like Elizabeth’s parrot, further tormenting Deborah.
Struggling with not only watching her first love marry the one person Deborah despised, but the fact he was now just as cruel to her as she was, compounded with her father gone, Deborah couldn’t take it. She wanted to pay Elizabeth back for all the pain, all the suffering she’d endured not just recently, but ever since she first met. Her and Gregory both.
Recent History: After making her contract with the demon, Deborah Spends much of her free time attending her lessons and secretly getting tutored by Derek in things like math and literature and history. She still is going out and attending social parties as needed to keep up her looks, all while building herself up while tearing her sister and brother in law down. Them and their company. Slowly, bit by bit, until at the end, they would be nothing. A slow process, but one Deborah is determined to see to the end.
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