Ben and I began immediately to plan our overthrow of Charles. Charles was a problem. He had come to view the Island as his, not as Jacob's or as a place he had a sort of stewardship of. I have read Tolkien's The Lord Of the Rings recently, and I found the Lord Denethor to be very much like Charles, only Charles had no sons to care for. True, Daniel was said to be his son, but he never paid him any attention, not even as much as Denethor paid Faramir. Eloise took Daniel away to Los Angeles as soon as we had control of the Dharma submarine, ostensibly to help take over the remaining Dharma stations there, but primarily to get him away from Charles and to help him fulfill his destiny as revealed by his older self. So Charles was left with no leavening influence in the woman who insisted on reminding everyone that they had a greater destiny.
He had long ago begun to act like an autocrat and was gradually moving to despot. Though he had lived on the Island most of his life, he was still culturally very old-world British. The first time I encountered certain attitudes in British literature (Sir Leicester Dedlock comes to mind) I was astonished to recognize Charles. He barely respected my position, thinking it subordinate to his own, and even Jacob he treated as many of the old noblesse of England did the idea of God, as a nominal authority they gave lip service to while in every way following their own wills. Once he was able to leave the Island, he thought he had the right to live however he desired, since Jacob supposedly could not see him. Whatever I may now think about Jacob's true nature, the reality of what kind of being he was, he was our true authority, the one who protected the Island and gave us our duties to do the same. If Charles could not obey, he did not deserve leadership.
I wanted it to be Ben's overthrow of Charles, not mine. My life was not wholly bound up in the lives and doings of the Islanders. I was first Jacob's emissary, second one of them, a little separate, a little separated. I called them my people, but the Islanders had to be Ben's people, never really mine. Ben never needed me prodding him anyway. We planned together and he consulted me, but he always knew his own mind, and he could see as well as I could that Charles had to go.
Charles knew Ben was a threat. He'd known it since the day I insisted on taking him into the Temple. He tried to cultivate him, possibly as a successor rather than a usurper, but Ben would not be cultivated, not even by me. Ben was Ben, and he would not be made into anything else.
Unable to bribe, win over, or cultivate Ben, Charles tried to break him down, and Ben only laughed at him. Not to his face. Even Ben did not laugh in Charles' face. But behind his back, definitely, and defied him the way he had never allowed himself to defy his father. Charles once locked him up for four days without food and water in an empty shark tank on Hydra Island. Ben used it as an opportunity to test his own endurance, emerging nearly dead and triumphant, though disapproving of my efforts to free him. Charles sent him to kill a woman and a baby, and instead he took the baby for his own (an action that considerably startled me). Charles even sent him on submarine trips to the Real World in the hope that he would find himself small and insignificant in the face of its immensity. Instead he found it small and the Island he served immense in meaning and implication. He even took the opportunity the trips afforded to create a network for himself that Charles could not touch, beginning with Eloise and the Lamp Post Station, and to establish identities and stashes of money and supplies in case he should ever need them, and to set permanent investigators on Charles' activities when he was away from the Island. He was always far-seeing, and he always had a plan.
Ben's plan was very simple. Charles had a certain number of devoted followers to be dealt with (the rest tended to follow the strongest leader like sheep, not that I had ever seen a sheep), and we wanted to be able to do it without killing them. We didn't kill our own. Ben was confident in his ability to sway most of them, but those he knew he couldn't he persuaded Charles to send to America and England on certain missions, where his own people prevented them from returning. This was a feat of manipulation that I still think of with a certain amount of awe, the first time I truly saw what he was capable of with nothing but his tongue. Did it frighten me then? I can't say. I'm not certain whether I'm projecting feelings on the past or not. I ought to have been frightened, if I wasn't.
After sending away the true loyalists, we seized the rest and locked them up on Hydra Island. Charles was marched straight out to the submarine. There was no fight. No one had an opportunity to fight. Ben had more loyal followers than Charles did. Isabel was one of them. I believe she loved Ben, but she hated Charles more. She would gladly have killed him, but Ben wouldn't let her. The surprise to me was that Ben let him live, for despite what I said about us not killing our own, I thought Charles was too dangerous to keep alive. A few years later he wouldn't have let him live. That one act of mercy undid him in every way—but perhaps it was for his good as well.
Charles was impotent with fury and made all kinds of threats, which he was not able to carry out for a decade and a half. We never thought he would be able to find the Island again. Eloise wasn't going to let him near the Lamp Post. I, for one, had no idea that the young Daniel Eloise killed had come back to the Island on his father's own boat to kidnap Ben and finish the destruction of his life in my future… All I knew was that Ben had won without bloodshed. We put Charles on the submarine and sent him away blithely. The rest of his people Ben slowly persuaded over time that they wanted to join us. Danny Pickett was one of them. So was Tom Friendly, who became what Ben referred to as his butler, though he did none of the tasks of a conventional butler.
And then everything was new. Everything was just as I had seen it must be. Ben was our leader, and the Island would go back to the way it used to be, before Charles, before Dharma, before the Americans.
Nothing was ever the same again. It was a new beginning alright, the beginning of the end—for Jacob, for me, for Ben, for the Island we knew. All along I was slowly pushing events to the destruction of us all.