The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

  Belle turned to him and stared. How could he possibly know that? Unless he’d come from a hundred years in the future and seen it for himself. She gave them a glass each.

  “Please, do take a drink. You must be thirsty.”

  Fred sniffed at it. Not tea. “It’s beer.”

  “Yes,” Belle said. “I’m sorry I had nothing in earlier.”

  “It’s a bit early for beer, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Belle asked. “Why?”

  “They don’t drink water here,” Mrs Hudson said. “It’s not safe.”

  Belle took her own glass and sat beside Mrs Hudson. Fred took the other chaise longue.

  “Where have you come from, where people drink water not beer?”

  Mrs Hudson coughed and looked away. Belle searched their faces for an answer.

  “You know where we’re from,” Fred said.

  “I don’t think you should—” Mrs Hudson began.

  “She heard us earlier. She knows. You do know where we’re from, don’t you, Belle? Or is it Isabelle?”

  She looked to Mrs Hudson.

  “Miss Ruth,” Mrs Hudson said, “may I introduce Mr Fred Smith to you?’

  “Certainly. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Fred stood and bowed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really understand all this formality.”

  “It is not regarded as respectable for you to address a young lady by her first name,” Mrs Hudson said.

  “Really? Never?”

  “Not until you are engaged.”

  “I’ve always thought it a great deal of humbug,” Belle said. “I don’t think anyone would count me a lady, being so low in life — an orphan foundling and the subject of charitable education — and I sense the customs of this time are not yours. My name is Belle. This is what I’ve always been called.”

  “Belle,” said Fred. “I’m honoured. But let’s be honest with each other. You heard us, didn’t you? You know where we’re from.”

  Belle nodded. “You are from Christmas Yet to Come.”

  Fred and Mrs Hudson looked at each other.

  “Yes. I see it from your faces.”

  “And what do you know of this future?” Mrs Hudson asked.

  Belle leapt up and went to the door. She was going to run out. Fred noted a sudden pang of loss in his heart. He didn’t want her to leave. But Belle peeped out and looked both ways down the corridor outside, slammed the door and leaned back against it, a hand to her mouth as if she might say too much and wished to stop herself. She stared at the floor for a moment and when she looked up her eyes were bright with defiance.

  “I have seen it sometimes. I believe. I was never quite sure that what I saw was real or an hallucination and that I might be insane. I’ve kept it secret for many long years, ever since I was beaten at the orphanage for being fanciful.”

  She winced, as if the memory of that beating was too much to bear. She turned away again and Fred thought she was going to leave but she slumped onto the moth-bitten chaise-longue. Mrs Hudson took her hand.

  Fred leaned forward in his seat, dearly wishing he’d been the one to sit with her and hold that delicate hand.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs Hudson said. “You’re with people who believe you. We’ve both had similar experiences and I rather think we might all have suffered the same confusion about what we’ve seen through our lives.”

  Belle looked across at Fred and there was such a bright light of entreaty in her eyes. He nodded and tried to smile to give her encouragement, and was pleased to note that she smiled and nodded and looked at her lap.

  “It will sound like the ramblings of an insane person,” Belle said. “It is the sort of thing for which they put people in the asylum.”

  “But it’s real,” Fred said.

  She looked up to him again with a blazing light of trust. He wanted to be the man she would trust to the end of time.

  “You have seen the same things?” Belle asked.

  He nodded. He’d never seen the future, but many times he’d thought he’d seen the past. As a child, the night he’d woken and seen the girl on the landing. She had seen him and been just as scared of him as he was of her. He’d asked her name and she’d walked away, right through the wall. Sometimes the uneasy feeling that time had slowed and he would look around and see something out of place: an antique shop in Dale End that hadn’t been there before and wasn’t there again when he sought it out. And that strange afternoon he’d rushed along a platform at New Street Station and seen...

  “You,” he said. “I saw you.”

  Belle frowned and shook her head, confused, fighting the raging torrent of thought, then she nodded, accepting it. She had seen the same thing. She’d recognized him.

  “Tell us some of the things you’ve seen,” Mrs Hudson said.

  Belle rose, and again Fred thought she was going to leave, but she paced the rug that lay between them.

  “Once, I was walking along Queen Street about to enter the Froggery — this neighbourhood behind the theatre — and in a moment, it was gone. A giant silver dome took its place. It lasted no more than a few seconds before everything was normal again. Another time I was at the top of New Street. Christ Church disappeared and was replaced by a fountain in which sat a great stone effigy of some pagan goddess, guarded by other stone figures of mythical beasts with human faces — people, so many people, dressed in strange attire; the kind of clothes that you were wearing. I thought you might disappear, like all those people had, but you are here and as real as this hand of mine. You are the people from my deluded waking dreams and it seems now that they are real after all.”

  “We are real,” Mrs Hudson said. “Have no fear of that. Quite real.”

  Belle looked up with such a vulnerable gaze that Fred fought the urge to jump up and embrace her, but he nodded and sipped at his beer.

  “I thought these things fancies, visions, hallucinations — the product of a troubled and defective imagination. I have long thought there is something wrong with me to see such things when I know that no one around me sees them. Or perhaps I was strangely attuned to see phantoms, ghosts that no one else could see.”

  Mrs Hudson patted her hand. “Those things you see are no fantasies. You have travelled through time, that’s all. It is a great gift, and nothing to fear.”

  Belle looked to Fred. He didn’t know what to say. He needed Mrs Hudson’s words as much as Belle did.

  “They’re not ghosts, you see,” he said, feigning certainty. “Only the ghosts of the past and the future.”

  A knock came at the door. A feeble rap so weak that Fred thought at first that it couldn’t possibly come from the rear door to the theatre — it must be the door to this room.

  Belle shuffled out down the corridor and answered it. A bolt slid and the door creaked open. Muttered words and the ring of activity out there — the hum and grind of a city awake. Belle came back with a pale boy whose cap came to her waist, and only then because it was a rather large cap.

  “Little Tim, I’d like you to meet two friends of mine who have come to take part in the play today. They have come from a very long way away.”

  She looked to them, eyes earnest, appealing.

  Mrs Hudson put out her hand and the surprised boy shook it with a shy smile. “Mrs Hudson. Delighted to make your acquaintance, young Tim.”

  Fred strode across the rug and did the same. The boy’s grip was as weak as a sparrow’s. “Fred Smith. Very pleased to meet you, Tim.”

  The warm smile on Belle’s face pierced Fred’s heart. She was so grateful that they had played along with her lie. So pleased that this tiny boy had believed her.

  “Now, my friends,” said Belle, “we are to meet a very important person who’s here to write about our play, aren’t we, Tim?”

  “Yes, Miss Belle,” the boy said. “He’s right next door in the New Hotel Royal. I took him there myself.”

  “Come along,” said Belle. “All of us.”
<
br />   She led the way and Fred followed them out to that back street where the girl had rescued them. He was stepping out to his city almost a hundred years ago. His head swam, dizzy as he crossed the threshold to Christmas Eve, 1842 and wondered who on earth they were about to meet.

  — 9 —

  JOHN FORSTER UNPACKED in his room and as soon as he was ready, knocked the door to the adjoining suite and entered.

  Charles was sitting at the desk, scribbling on sheets of vellum, holding up a hand for silence.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were writing.”

  “Not writing,” Charles muttered. “Just a letter to the donkey.”

  He finished with a flourish and looked up, not with a smile. Still a little lost, as if he belonged in that world of his imagination and didn’t much care for this real world outside his pages.

  “The donkey?” Forster asked, taking a seat.

  Charles folded the letter and tucked it in an envelope. “My dear, sweet Catherine.”

  “Charles, that is rather unkind.”

  “Nonsense! A term of endearment, John. If you were married, you would understand.”

  He laughed, a little cruelly, Forster thought. His heart grew dark at the memory of his broken engagement. Ten years gone and it still hurt. His friend could be a monster when this mood was on him.

  Forster had seen the waves of discontent in him, and this one had crashed with greater force than usual. ‘Donkey’ was a new low in the casual contempt he gave for his wife. But then it might be the new work, Chuzzlewit. He was always a little monstrous when he embarked on a new book and wasn’t sure what it was all about; the characters not yet allowing him into their world, shutting him out.

  Charles scribbled his home address on the envelope and rolled the ornate blotter over it.

  “There is a wonderful new Post Office behind us. A huge affair.”

  “Oh, is there?” Charles looked out of the window at New Street.

  “Not that little cottage across the street as it used to be. Too small. The post is a booming business, and they transport it by rail now, not coach. Your letter will be with your dear wife this afternoon, quite possibly. The wonders of the age.”

  Charles leapt up and paced the room.

  “Nice rooms,” Forster said. “I’m afraid we can’t afford the Royal Hotel up the top of the hill but this is not so bad at all. In fact it might even be better.”

  “You know it isn’t, John.”

  “Come now, Charles. It may serve our mission to be less noticed.”

  “And you keep calling me Charles.”

  Forster lowered his voice. “I doubt anyone can overhear us here.”

  Charles was pacing the drawing room like a caged tiger in Regents Park, like he always did when a new novel was germinating. All the tell-tale signs were there: the restlessness, the impatience, the surliness. But this ferocious impatience with his family was a little more pronounced this time. It was concerning.

  “Don’t be so hard on the place,” said Forster. “You don’t want to treat it as harshly as you treated America.”

  “I’m ‘dear Boz’,” Charles said. “I made my name writing biting satire. They love me for it.”

  “People don’t like it so much when that biting wit is turned on them. They buy your books here too, Charles. A great many, in fact. Hopefully, some of them will also print them, eh?”

  “So I’m to blunt my pen for these dull provincials?”

  “Be kinder, that’s all.”

  “A little gentle mockery is all I have in mind,” said Charles. “I think these people know full well they live in a second-rate town. It will take more than a railway from London to elevate it to the level of a metropolis.”

  “There are grand things happening here, Charles, you will see. Great investments. It’s a town that has great expectations.”

  “Humbug,” said Charles. Then he had that faraway look. “Hmmm,” he said. He went to the desk, snatched up his notebook and scribbled something. No doubt some grammatical error John had made that would go into a story. “If even this backwater is booming, why is there such a depression in the book trade?”

  Forster looked at his boots. “It is most likely as you say, Charles. With this dreadful government, people have little money for literature.”

  “You might think they would want an escape all the more.”

  Forster checked his fob watch. “Come along. It’s time.”

  Charles reached for his jacket and tucked the notebook in his pocket. He threw on his muffler and his top hat, pacing, eager to be out of this place.

  Forster rose, feeling the call of the street. Anywhere but here in this room with his friend’s worry that his career was a flop. The failure of Barnaby Rudge, so dreadful that even the periodical it had been serialized in had folded. And the looming bankruptcy.

  There was a timid knock at the door. Forster answered to find the boy, young Tim Cratchit.

  “Look at this. Right on time.”

  “I’m to take you to the place I’m not supposed to say aloud,” the boy said.

  “Intelligent boy,” said Forster. “Come along, Cha— er, John. We’re off to Showell’s printing house.”

  Dickens was out the door in a flash. Forster patted his pockets and felt the wad of money. Best to leave it here.

  “A moment,” he said, retreating to the bureau and opening a drawer.

  “What is it?” Dickens said.

  “I don’t like to carry it around on the streets. It’s quite safe here.”

  He placed the wad of cash in the drawer, disturbed that there was no key. But it would be quite safe in a respectable hotel like this.

  “Quite right,” said Dickens. “In a negotiation, it would be vulgar to flash the money anyway.”

  Forster shuffled to the door and stepped out to the corridor, turning his key in the lock. There. The room was locked and that meant the money was safe.

  They walked along the plush corridor, the boy ahead.

  “Perhaps it might not be a depression in the book market at all,” said Forster. “Perhaps public tastes are changing.”

  Dickens turned, suspicious, his eye twitching involuntarily. He put his hand to his face to stop it.

  “What if the public are moving on from the, er... kind of story you have previously tended towards, hmm?

  “Is this another conversation where you try to talk me out of writing a picaresque adventure?”

  Charles tramped on down the corridor to the stairhead and Forster followed, already behind pace.

  “I’m just saying, Perhaps the public desire a more immediate experience...”

  “Nonsense.”

  “They want things now, Charles, today. They want to go out and buy a book and consume the whole thing in a week or weekend, not have it doled out to them in little bites every month over two years.”

  They skipped down the ornate sweep of stairs to the lobby.

  “It is bingeing, nothing more, John, and you know it. Literary gluttony, and, and, and impatience, yes. The speed of life moves so fast in these industrialized times that they want everything now!”

  “Exactly.”

  They walked out of the hotel doors to a blast of frigid air and strode up the length of the elegant pergola that reached for the street.

  “The Pickwick Papers was a roaring success. It built my name. And Nicholas Nickleby. The Old Curiosity Shop enthralled the world. Martin Chuzzlewit will be the same, mark you. I rather think this will be the book I shall be known for. It will outshine all the rest. Even Oliver Twist.”

  Forster held up his arms in surrender. “Pickwick, yes, I grant you. But Oliver Twist is your biggest success and that is a straight novel. And Nickleby is the same.”

  “They are picaresque adventures and you know it.”

  “More so novels, I say. It is the novels the public wants. The picaresque style has rather died out, I feel. Except in Spain. Its time will come again, no doubt, but for now, thin
k of a concentrated tale with a single line of action. Sub-plots, yes, but unity of action. That’s the thing.”

  “Like a play.”

  “Exactly that. Perhaps even a shorter work — a novella — to win your audience again?”

  “Novellas. Humbug. No one takes them seriously.”

  “Thackeray serialises lovely novellas. His Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond was a roaring success in Fraser’s Magazine.”

  They came to the pavement and stopped. Forster looked around for the boy. Where on earth was he?

  “There’s no money in novellas, John,” Charles scoffed. “Why do I have to tell you that? Long form serialised fiction is what keeps the people coming back for more, month after month — a story over a year or two, not done and dusted in four months. Monthly, even weekly, instalments. Why, if I could, I would put before the public an episode every single day, so that every person in the land could go home from their work, take their supper, and gather round the hearth to experience a nightly entertainment of myriad characters and storylines. Imagine it. A periodical that was never ending. One endless rolling panorama of everyday life, say of a single street or a square and all the characters in it. A street opera.”

  Charles pointed his cane to the west and all the way down to the east end of New Street as if it were his rolling street opera.

  Forster was about to respond that there would never be a fashion for such a story and that Charles should focus his mind on something more palatable, when the boy tugged at his coat. He had reappeared from nowhere as if he were a mischievous Christmas spirit.

  Forster was highly conscious that the longer they tarried, the more likely it was Charles might be recognized. They had been on New Street but a mere moment when all his hopes were dashed, because he had not even opened his mouth to urge the boy to take them on to their destination, when Charles was mobbed by a group of readers.

  “Mr Dickens!” a young lady cried. “Mr Charles Dickens, if I’m not mistaken!”

  — 10 —

  TINY TIM LED MISS BELLE and her strange new friends round the corner onto New Street, passing the front of house and along to the hotel.