The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

  Mr Swingeford swallowed hard and thumped his chest. “My sister attempts to blacken my name in your good graces, Miss Ruth.”

  “I do nothing of the sort! Your own words blacken what name you have left.”

  Belle felt the colour rush to her cheeks and wondered if she should get up and leave these squabbling siblings to their row.

  “No one is more surprised than I to hear of your patronage of the theatre, dear brother. You have never seemed like a man who cares for the arts.”

  “I am not. I am a level-headed man of business. It is a business interest, no more. A trifle in my affairs.”

  Mrs Jowett purred with glee. “And yet you also own a printing house. Are you not secretly a man of letters?”

  Belle looked at her lap to hide her smirk, fought desperately to clear it and raised her head to put on as stony a countenance as she could muster.

  Mr Swingeford’s eyes blazed defiance. “The railway is my main business. The railway that will wipe away all of this.” He waved a hand around as if to indicate the drawing room, the chapel, or the town of Birmingham beyond the windows.

  “What on earth do you mean?” Mrs Jowett asked, the grin falling from her lips.

  It was Mr Swingeford’s turn to smile. He sipped his tea and held the silence in the room, cosseting it like a bag of gold coins. “I mean there is a problem with this town, and it is that our station is on its outskirts.”

  “That is where stations should be,” said Mrs Jowett. “Ghastly, dirty things.”

  “No, I say. The town needs a train station that is central. A grand, central station.”

  “Here?” said Mrs Jowett. “This is what you have come to tell me?”

  “You are the first to know,” said Mr Swingeford, with the smile of a cobra.

  Belle shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “Curzon Street is too far out. Here is where our station should be.” Mr Swingeford pointed to the rug between them. “Right here, just off New Street. This is the heart of the town, and a train line is the main artery that pumps the life blood to it.”

  “Here?” Mrs Jowett cried. “You would build a train station next to my chapel?”

  “No, I would not, dear sister.”

  “I am glad to hear it.”

  “I would build it right over this chapel.”

  At his sister’s aghast face, Mr Swingeford merely sipped his tea and shrugged. “It is nothing personal. Do not assume that. It is simply progress.”

  “But this chapel. You would build it here and nowhere else.”

  “I fear you misunderstand the nature of this station,” Mr Swingeford said. “It will be ten times the size of that pathetic Roman folly at the end of Curzon Street. A vast cathedral. The largest building in this entire town. The largest roof in the world.”

  “Bigger than the new Town Hall?” Belle asked.

  “Five times bigger. A vast construction that will sit over this entire neighbourhood. Everything that the locals call the Froggery. I shall wipe it away and replace it with something grand.”

  “You plan to wipe out the entire neighbourhood?” Mrs Jowett asked.

  “It is a fetid swamp. I say wipe it off the face of the earth.”

  “But what will happen to these poor people?” Mrs Jowett now waved her arm to indicate the maze of streets outside.

  “They will make way for progress.”

  “But where will they go?”

  “They’ll move out to places more suitable. To Cheapside and to Small Heath. Push them out there, I say, where we shall no longer have to smell them.”

  “The poor are not vermin.”

  “They are a threat to our health. They spread disease like rats. They live among rats. The very air we breathe is heavy with pestilence from the labouring classes.”

  Despite this shocking news, Mrs Jowett looked to Belle and back to her brother and allowed herself a satisfied smile again. What was going on here between them? It somehow seemed to involve Belle, but she could not think why, other than she was witness to the childish one-upmanship of a sibling rivalry.

  “My dear brother,” Mrs Jowett said, pointing to the portrait on the wall of an old woman in a plain dress and a white bonnet. “This is a Countess of Huntingdon chapel. She may be resting with the angels now, but she has left a legacy, a formidable organization that has built a hundred or more chapels around this country and far and wide across the empire. Why, there are thirty-two almshouses on this very site — rooms for poor destitute women — bought by the Lench’s Trust. We shall not be as easy to move on as the wretched poor you despise so much.”

  “It will go, like every other building in these three acres.”

  “There’s a new synagogue too,” Belle said.

  “That will also go.” Mr Swingeford pointed to the portrait of the Countess of Huntingdon. “Even she will make way for progress. The railway is the greatest achievement of the modern world.”

  “And have you forgotten,” Mrs Jowett said, “what lies behind this chapel?”

  Swingeford looked at the rug and shrugged. “I have not.”

  “Though this chapel be new, the graveyard behind it is old, and it bears the grave of your wife. Would you disturb her bones?”

  “I was married a mere year and that was twenty years ago. She is gone. Her bones mean nothing to me.”

  “And your child.”

  “Who never took a breath on this earth.”

  “Dear God, you monster. I hope your dear departed wife haunts you.”

  “Ghosts,” Swingeford sneered. “Humbug.”

  Belle fought desperately to stay her tongue. She had heard the rumours of Swingeford’s tragic past, and it had seemed to lend him an air of doomed romance. This, perhaps, was what had made him so mad at the world. But could even such a tragedy as this be a reason for such cruelty, when it was something he dismissed so easily? She held her breath and stayed quite still, in case these squabbling siblings were alerted to her presence and asked her to leave.

  “Dear, Ebenezer,” Mrs Jowett said. “All of this money you will make, and you will never spend it, only hoard it, like a sad, old miser.”

  “I did not come here to be insulted,” Mr Swingeford said.

  “I know why you came here,” Mrs Jowett snapped.

  Mr Swingeford rose from his seat and bowed to Belle. “Miss Ruth. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I only wish the encounter might have been in more pleasant circumstances.”

  “Go,” Mrs Jowett said. “Go back to building your mountain of gold.” She rose and followed him out, shouting after him, her voice echoing back to Belle. “But that mountain will slide and bury you, Ebenezer! Mark my words! It will bury you!”

  A door slammed. Mrs Jowett returned and slumped against the doorjamb. Belle put her teacup aside and rushed to help her.

  “My life, I feel all faint.”

  “Come and sit down, Mrs Jowett.”

  Belle walked the old lady to the sofa and sat her down. She reached for a fan and wafted her face.

  “Forgive me, Isabelle,” the old lady said. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “It’s quite all right, Mrs Jowett.”

  The old lady grabbed her wrist. “No. Let it be a lesson. That man is evil, and you must avoid his company. Shun him like the devil himself. Nothing good will come of any intercourse with him, as you have just witnessed.”

  Belle wasn’t sure what possible company she might ever endure with Ebenezer Swingeford and was certain she would never see him again, nor wish to.

  “It’s quite all right, Mrs Jowett. I shall heed your warning.”

  And, to Belle’s astonishment, Mrs Jowett wept. Real tears. Belle had never seen her show any form of weakness in all the days she had known her — and that had been her entire life — from her time at the orphanage when she had first seen the old lady introduced as a benefactor to whom they should all be eternally grateful. In all these years, this benefactor had never shown an ounce of w
eakness. Not until her brother had called on Christmas Eve.

  Belle sat by her side and held her hand. Mrs Jowett squeezed her fingers gratefully and sobbed into a silk handkerchief. Belle comforted her in silence and wondered how long she must stay before she could return to the mysterious strangers at the theatre.

  The clock ticked away and Mrs Jowett calmed herself and fell into a slumber.

  As Belle got up to go, Mrs Jowett let out an anguished sigh in her sleeping state and cried, “What have I done?”

  She fell back into slumber and Belle crept out to the hall, where Mrs Cratchit let her out to the street.

  Belle stood on the corner, pulling her cloak around her at the stark cold of the morning, and tried to imagine all of this gone and a railway station in its place.

  A man stood on the other side of the street, watching her, standing before the spike-topped great gate of the foreboding Dungeon, the old prison building that stood opposite, glowering over the Froggery like a gate of Hell, in stark contrast to the chapel which sought to offer the alternative. It was rumoured that the Dungeon was now occupied by criminal lowlifes and vagabonds, Slogger Pike among them, but Belle didn’t know if that was a child’s rumour.

  But the man standing before the Dungeon gate was not Slogger Pike. It was the young man she’d rescued. He must have followed her from the theatre.

  He stood and stared at her with a look of wide-eyed amazement.

  Belle stepped into the dirt road but before she had gone three paces the young man retreated, a look of terror on his face.

  A horse-drawn dray came thundering down the hill, the driver cursed and Belle jumped back to the pavement, mud spraying her dress.

  The young man was gone.

  She froze, startled. How was that possible? He couldn’t have gone through that enormous gate in those few seconds the dray had blinded her.

  She looked up and down the street but he was nowhere to be seen.

  Shivering at the thought she’d seen a ghost, she turned up Peck Lane and rushed back to the theatre.

  — 7 —

  FRED WOKE WITH A SLAP to the face. He jerked back. The old lady standing over him.

  “You can’t sleep,” she said. “Not after a bang on the head. At least I don’t think that’s wise for a while, anyway.”

  His head pounded. Awful now. Throat dry. She hadn’t slapped him, just a gentle pat on the cheek, a nudge, exaggerated by his sleeping state.

  A blanket of stars on the ceiling. A Victorian lumber room. The nightmare of his timeslip came back to him. Not a dream. He was here, living and breathing. The girl called Belle had rescued him, tended to him and said she had to go. He groaned and wondered why he felt such a deep sense of loss.

  “Come and see,” Mrs Hudson said.

  She walked out to the next room, taking an oil lamp with her, an elegant, slim column with a glass bowl that gave off a warm pool of golden light. Fred pushed himself up off the chaise longue and followed, shadows leaping along a corridor ahead of Mrs Hudson’s silhouette. She turned to face him at the open door to an adjoining room and he was struck by her face lit up so brightly like a ghost.

  “In here,” she said.

  He followed her into a great, dark room and the lamp cast a pool of light over racks of clothes, hanging solemn and silent.

  “It’s the wardrobe,” she said. “I suggest we dress in something more era-appropriate.”

  He groaned again. “Is this really happening?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m afraid so.”

  There was something about the finality of it that made his heart sink. This was no dream from which he might awaken. He was truly here, trapped, out of time.

  She put the lamp to one side and set it on a table that seemed designed and placed for the purpose. It gurgled quietly to itself.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It’s a Carcel lamp. I’m afraid we don’t get paraffin lamps for a few more decades.” She was rifling the racks of ladies gowns, assessing them swiftly.

  Fred went to a row of gentlemen’s clothes and flipped through them. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do. I can’t remember yesterday but I seem to be rather good at history.”

  “You’ve done this before. You’re... at home with this.”

  She pulled out a black gown and held it against herself. “I’ve done this many times. Far too many times. I wonder if I’ve spent more of my life in the past than in the present.”

  Fred chuckled. “Don’t we all spend more of our life in the past than the present, when you think about it?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  He heard her shuffling off her clothes, hidden behind a rack two rows beyond, and thought he should do the same. He pulled out a pair of dark check trousers that looked like they might fit him, a white shirt, a plaid waistcoat and frock coat with tails, all hanging together — a ready-made costume for a character he would play: a young, Victorian gentleman out to make his fortune, like Pip Pirrin or Nicholas Nickleby. He threw off his baggy suit and blood-stained shirt and tie and squeezed into his costume and felt ridiculous. The trousers were absurdly high-waisted and flat-fronted with no pleats at all, and so tight. The clash of patterns was garish, even though it was the most sombre outfit on the rack. He was definitely one of Dickens’ more comic characters, not the young hero.

  “That looks fetching.”

  The black gown looked like Mrs Hudson had been wearing it her whole life. She topped it with a black cloak and pulled the hood up over her head.

  “I look like a Scottish Widow,” she said. “Or the French Lieutenant’s Woman.” She saw his nonplussed shrug and added, “Neither are particularly comfortable places to be.”

  “I feel ridiculous,” Fred said.

  “You’ll need some shoes. I’m keeping my boots on under this. They’re nice and warm. But you need something that looks right.”

  She went to a shelf where rows of shoes sat and pulled out a pair of black boots, sizing one against the sole of his feet. He squeezed into them.

  “A little tight, but not so bad. The whole outfit is tight.”

  She fiddled with the cravat tie he’d hung loose around his neck. “Come here. You need to tie this up. Do you know how to tie a cravat?”

  “Do I look like I know how to tie a cravat?”

  She pulled and tugged at it, patting it in place. “There. Splendid. Now get a hat.”

  She pointed to a high shelf with what looked like leather buckets. Top hat boxes. He scanned the numbers until he came to 56, his size, and pulled one down. A hat suspended upside down. He pulled it out, put it on his head, and felt it swamp him.

  “Too big,” she said.

  He tried three more till he found the right size and looked at himself in a full-length mirror. A character from a Victorian novel looked back at him, one that had somehow stolen his face.

  “Is this real?” he asked.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  She thought about it and seemed lost for a long time. So long he wondered if she’d forgotten his question. “Not here exactly. Not this time. I know that. But I knew I’d come here one day. I was told, you see, by someone who saw me here.”

  “Who was that?”

  “A girl. A girl with red hair.” She frowned and screwed up her eyes. “I can’t remember her name.”

  Fred turned from his reflection and flapped his arms open as if to say, well, here we are, then.

  “She knows,” said Mrs Hudson.

  “This girl you can’t remember?”

  “No. The girl who rescued us. The girl here. Belle.”

  “She knows what?” Fred asked.

  “She knows about us; where we’re from; what we are.”

  “Oh, great,” he said. “Perhaps she can tell me, then.”

  They both jumped at the sound of a door wrenched open and banging
shut again. The door to the rear of the theatre.

  — 8 —

  FRED PANICKED, AS IF caught stealing. Belle came through from the rear entrance of the theatre and stopped short at the sight of them standing facing her.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re still here.”

  Fred snatched the top hat off his head; a child caught playing dress-up, guilty and afraid he was about to be told off. It was sort of stealing. In her absence, they had helped themselves to the contents of the theatre’s wardrobe.

  Belle smiled. “My, you look transformed. What a picture you make!”

  “We thought we should...” He faltered, not sure what to say. Thought we should dress more era-appropriately, seeing as we’re not from your time. He couldn’t say it.

  “We thought we should dress more era-appropriately,” Mrs Hudson said.

  Belle considered this, frowning, and then nodded. “Yes. I agree. You look splendid. And I am so glad you’ve remained.”

  She went through to the lounge where she’d taken them earlier — a lumber room of props in which she seemed to have made a home — and she placed an enamel urn on the table. “Please sit down. I should love to play host to you, even in this shambles of a room. You must forgive the state of my abode.”

  “You live here?” Mrs Hudson asked, taking a place on the chaise longue, flouncing her skirt out as she sat, as if she had worn that type of gown all her life.

  “It is my home, temporarily. The committee have been happy to turn a blind eye to my living here as it has solved the matter of security and maintenance. I am a caretaker requiring little to no remuneration.”

  As she talked, she took glasses from a cupboard and filled them with dark brown liquid from the urn. Fred thought it must be tea but no steam came off it.

  “Though I fear that my circumstances are due to change. A new person who has invested in the theatre would take a dim view of this. And the theatre might not be here much longer.”

  “What do you mean?” Fred asked. “The theatre will be here for another hundred years.”