The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

  “What? No,” he said.

  Too forcibly, as if the idea was horrifying.

  Belle gasped, as if that firing squad had responded to the command to fire.

  “It seems to me that I only need ask permission from you, Mrs Hudson, to call on Miss Ruth again and pursue my interest.”

  “You want to marry her?” Mrs Hudson said.

  “I am prepared to overlook our difference in social standing. Since your appearance today, Mrs Hudson, it is obvious that you are of a class that is tolerable to me and I need not fear too much the stigma of marrying beneath me.”

  “This can’t be,” said Fred.

  Belle was wringing her hands on her lap, looking all about the room for an escape hatch.

  “Once your bank accounts have been studied, ancestral lineage inspected and a dowry agreed upon we might announce the engagement.”

  Belle shot up with a cry. She snatched her cloak and ran from the room.

  “She is overwrought,” said Swingeford. “That is understandable. Her fortunes have changed beyond recognition this day.”

  He rose and took up his top hat and cane. “Mrs Hudson, Master Hudson. I bid you good day.”

  — 19 —

  BELLE RAN. SHE RAN along the backstage passage, she ran along the stage, ignoring the calls of her cast members, the only family she had in the world, she ran through the auditorium and through the ballroom and out through the doors to New Street where the snow was falling so thick, a beaded curtain, that she couldn’t see the dome of St Philip’s church at the top of Bennett’s Hill, above the old post office.

  She ran up New Street towards the looming pillars of the Town Hall, and passed a roast chestnut seller, the blast of warm air and the sweet, earthy smell so comforting that she almost halted to join the huddle of people surrounding his brazier.

  She hurried on till Christ Church loomed on her right and she crossed the street, the snow already settling on the dirt. She skirted the edge of the church and the pokey little shops set into the surrounding wall — Carrs brew house, Freeman’s pantry, Jones, Smith, Wakeham and Jones again.

  She rounded the base of the church and came to the little square where Ann Street wrapped an arm around the church as if to shield it from the competitive imposing grandeur of the Town Hall.

  A cluster of carol singers on the steps of the church chiming Good King Wenceslas, rattling a bucket of coins for the poor. In the square, a gang of boys threw snowballs around the gas lamp. The sky was dark, night falling fast, only the flurry of snow lighting the air.

  The boys scampered around the square, snowflakes dancing around them. From the door of the White Lion pub, a gang of men peeped out, clutching tankards, laughing and egging on the boys with cries of “Tallyho!”

  Belle halted to take it in.

  There seemed to be a cheeriness about it all. Everyone was grinning and in good spirits. Had it been the effect of Dickens’ speech? Everyone ignored Christmas. Too busy for it in the big towns like this. A cumbersome holiday. They frowned and scowled in the city.

  And yet this afternoon seemed different. The first time she’d sensed a magic in the air. The spirit of the season. As it used to be, so they said.

  Was it one man’s speech — a few little words reverberating on the air — that could change life for the better, go out and influence and make people smile and love their neighbour? Could a few mere words on the air change people’s hearts? As if his words had taken flight and fluttered all the way down New Street, sprinkling magical fairy dust on even the people who hadn’t heard them. Or could it be that the people who’d heard his words that carried them and spread them, like a common cold, a virus for good.

  A gentleman with a lady on his arm edged around her and climbed the steps to the church. Clad in the finest clothes, the woman younger than the man so you might mistake her for his daughter, but the way he held his arm out for her to hang onto, like a prince with a hawk, showing off his property, it was obvious she was his wife.

  Belle watched them climb the steps and enter the church, the dull echo of movement from inside reverberating around the vast white emptiness. She saw herself on Swingeford’s arm, perhaps this same day next Christmas.

  She turned from the sight and looked south to the mouth of Pinfold Street that tumbled all the way down to the Froggery. Could the magic bring a little happiness there too, or would it only work its spell on New Street, where the privileged promenaded?

  She retreated from the square, an imposter, and skulked away from the carol singers and snowball fighting boys. She trudged into Pinfold Street, as if the Froggery were calling her down into its dark heart, as if the joy of the season wasn’t hers to live. She retreated from the warmth and the circle of light into the shadows.

  A building loomed before her, half obscured by the night blizzard. She pulled her cloak tighter about her and shivered at the familiar outline of the place.

  The orphanage.

  This dark building was the repository of all her memories. She had spent her entire childhood here, until they had thrown her out on the street at the age of fourteen to make her own way in the world. A hard, cruel place, were beatings and gruel were dispensed with glee by stern-faced, cold hearted matriarchs demanding thanks to God but showing not one morsel of Christian charity. Even the detached condescension of Mrs Jowett had seemed like a mother’s love after that.

  Isabelle Ruth had been formed here. A foundling girl given two forenames — the names of the nuns who had found her dumped on the steps of a chapel in the Froggery. Even there, where desperate mothers raised their ragbag of offspring on meagre rations of bread and dripping, there was no mother or father that wanted this girl.

  And now a man wanted her.

  The worst man in Birmingham. And twice her age too.

  Could the words of an author have melted something in the heart of a mean old man like Swingeford? Was that even possible for an awful old miser like that?

  His proposal was a business proposition, nothing more, and he had stated it with all the heart of a hostile takeover bid. An acquisition, he’d said. He was to acquire her. And yet he would require her to make a deposit, a dowry, for the privilege, after which he would own her, have rights to her, promising to pay on demand the sum of comfort for the rest of her days.

  All she would have to do was live with him, listen to him, every day, have his hands on her every night, be owned by him, acquired, invaded.

  His awful dead hand on her. Passionless. Like falling into one’s own grave.

  Why hadn’t Fred intervened? she wondered. All he had done was laugh when Swingeford proposed. She didn’t know why that hurt her so much, but she had wanted this boy, this man who was a stranger before this day but whom she felt like she’d known her whole life — she had wanted him to intervene, to protect her, to refuse Swingeford’s proposal for her. Why had she wanted him to do that?

  But he had laughed.

  She looked down Pinfold Street to the Froggery in the darkness, only little pinpricks of light down there — a few oil lamps to light the slum, and there, the lamp that Mrs Jowett placed in the roundel window of the chapel tower. Was it that or was she imagining it because she wanted to see it?

  Back up the other way, the glow from the gas lamps of New Street and the faint air of a cheery Christmas carol.

  She stood frozen, unable to make a decision.

  One way darkness and freedom, the other way lightness and death.

  — 20 —

  MRS HUDSON AND FRED rushed out after Belle, passing the actors on stage.

  “What is going on?” Mr Fezzwig shouted.

  “She went that way!” Mr Wilber called, pointing through the auditorium to the rear stalls.

  She climbed down the side stairs and rushed through to the front of the building. So slow. She was old. Fred might have run on ahead and caught her already.

  They came through the ballroom at the front of house and burst out onto New Street to find the snow w
as falling thick now, snowflakes dancing in the frigid air. She looked up and down the street but the blizzard made it difficult to make her out.

  “I’ll go up,” Fred said. “You go that way.”

  She nodded and was marching down the street in an instant, following her footsteps of this morning when they’d chased Dickens to the printing house. She passed it on the other side with no sign of Belle and came to the Hen and Chickens Hotel. She popped her head through the door but Belle wasn’t in there. In truth, Belle could be in any shop, bank, pub or store on the street, and there was no way Mrs Hudson could search them all. But something told her the girl would run, to be as far away as possible from the tragedy that had just happened.

  At the end of New Street, she came to the junction with High Street. On the left it ran straight along. She could see no one that wore a cloak like her own. On the right the street dropped down to the Bull Ring market. She could make out the outline of St Martin’s, Nelson’s statue standing before it, just as it was in her own time. Nothing else was the same though.

  Allin’s old curiosity shop called out her. In the window it said Multum in Parvo. What was that in English? She’d studied Latin, she remembered. A great deal in a small space. She thought of her own shop. Pastimes. Yes, that was it. She’d been trying to remember the name all afternoon. Names were the worst. They were constantly eluding her. She stumbled on down the hill along the row of shops and came to the Bull Ring, a jumble of tented stalls, costermongers and street hawkers trading their wares in a cacophony of shouts and calls. The sweet smell of baked potatoes masked for a delicious moment the stench of the street. It was worse than an open sewer. How did anyone live in such filth?

  They didn’t, she thought. They died in it. They scratched out a mean existence and they died, mostly very young.

  A grubby girl in rags held out her bony hands, pleading, gaunt, hollow eyes.

  Mrs Hudson recoiled, shamefaced. She had nothing to give her. No money. She owned nothing. Even her fine clothes were the borrowed rags of a theatre cast-off.

  It was hopeless.

  She came to the Nelson Hotel right next to Nelson’s statue and rested on the railings that guarded the war hero.

  What was she here for?

  Belle. Yes. That was it. The girl had run off and they needed to find her.

  A small army of women were filling baskets with chestnuts, potatoes, onions, apples, plums from the various market stalls. Mrs Hudson jostled her way through looking for...

  Oh, what was it again?

  She came to an old crone standing in the gutter clutching bundles of rosemary and sage, and she was caught by the sweet, earthy scents.

  It transported her to a memory. The scent of Christmas.

  Her mother and father on Christmas Eve. Decorating the tree and pouring Smoking Bishop. They always let her have a little glass, even as a girl. They took turns in reading aloud A Christmas Carol. She would listen to them, lying on the rug, the open fire crackling. The glow of tinsel on the tree. Her stocking hung on the mantelpiece.

  Such a beautiful, warm, safe feeling.

  The darkness outside and listening for the sound of a sleigh flying through the night sky, somewhere between her parents’ words. Dickens’ words.

  She couldn’t see her parents’ faces anymore. What did they look like again? But she could hear them reading about Tiny Tim and Fred Cratchit and Marley and Scrooge. Their faces had gone. How long before their voices faded too? How long before every memory was gone? Would she even know them next Christmas?

  “Are you all right, my dear?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  The lady selling rosemary. “You’re looking quite lost.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs Hudson, glancing around. “I don’t think I am.”

  “Where are you off to tonight, my dear? Home’s not far I hope. In this.” She shook her shawl and snow sprayed off her.

  Where was home? Mrs Hudson had no idea. Where had she come from? Oh, that feeling again. She clenched her fists. It would come, it would come, just a little time.

  She’d been looking for someone. Who was it now?

  In fact, where on earth was she?

  “You really do look lost, my dear.”

  It came. A phrase like a flash of a knife blade, clean and pure. “The Birmingham & Midland Institute,” she said. “That’s where I’m going.”

  The herb seller crinkled her face up. “I don’t know of any such building, my dear.”

  “Are you sure? I think I’m supposed to go there.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  She retreated, backing away from her.

  “Don’t go, lady. I’ll call a policeman to help you.”

  “It’s all right. I’m quite all right.”

  She turned and marched up the hill, not sure where she was heading. Nothing looked familiar. She glanced back at Nelson’s statue and the church behind it. St Martin in the Bull Ring. That was clear enough. But looking up the hill it was all different. No Rotunda, no great bronze bull.

  She came to the top of the hill. A sign said New Street but it didn’t look like it at all. The Hen & Chickens Hotel on one side and, oh, that was the old King Edwards school. Knocked down when she was a baby, but she’d seen so many photographs of New Street with it there. It seemed to be the only building she knew.

  She trudged along the street. A print shop on the other side. Showell’s. That was familiar. Hadn’t she been there before? It was important.

  Dickens. Yes. Charles Dickens. She’d followed him up this street earlier today. And there was a girl. A pretty girl in a cloak, just like the one she wore.

  She halted and checked her reflection in a sweet shop window. An old woman staring back at her. Was the young woman herself? Was it a memory from long ago? She looked about her at the ladies and gentlemen on the street. She was in a Dickensian Christmas card. It couldn’t be herself as a young woman.

  No, that was right. It had been earlier today. She’d followed Charles Dickens up the street.

  She banged her fist on her forehead. This stupid brain of hers! Why couldn’t it remember anything?

  From a pocket sewn into the cloak, she fished out a diary. Yes, that always told her what she was doing. She edged under the glow of a gaslamp and leafed through the pages. It was Christmas Eve, yes. The diary was printed for 2019 but her scribbled note said It’s Christmas Eve 1842. You need to find Dickens. He is the key to all this.

  She was here to help Dickens. He was a young man. Yes, that was right. He was a young man who was a little surly and mean, and he said something beastly about his wife. So why would she be helping him? He would write some wonderful books, and they were books that changed society, forced Victorians to look at themselves and how they treated their poor. There was that. Perhaps that was what she was meant to be doing.

  It was all so confusing.

  If only her mind wasn’t so scrambled.

  Why hadn’t she written it down in this blasted diary? What was the point of writing the appointment if she didn’t know what it was for?

  She was sure she had to go back to her own time and do something very important there. At the edge of her mind, just out of reach, there was some urgent thing to be done. Only she couldn’t remember what it was.

  Perhaps if she left now she would remember it. She could force herself to leave and go back to her own time, and then she’d remember what it was she had to do.

  She walked on up New Street, sensing that the upper part of the street would hold the answers. She had come from that direction earlier today when she’d chased Dickens.

  She crossed Lower Temple Street to the Shakespeare Tavern on the corner, and just up the road the portico that said Theatre Royal.

  Yes! It flooded back to her. Belle, the theatre, Fred, all of it. She was looking for Belle. That was it. Fred had gone the other way, up the street.

  She wanted to cry with relief. Each time she blanked out like this it seemed longer and longer fo
r the memories to return. One day, they just wouldn’t come back at all and she would be lost. It was inevitable, and then she would be caught in a living hell.

  Caught in a place like this.

  Livid horror seared her heart. To be trapped here, penniless, having to scrape a meagre living on the streets, selling clumps of herbs or something. Dying in the cold.

  She stood on the corner of Lower Temple Street. Down there was where she’d come from. The mangled chrome dome of New Street Station, like a crumpled hub cap in the gutter. It was there, if she thought hard enough.

  A coach-and-four thundered down the street from the direction of the Town Hall, Parthenon-style pillars just visible through the blur of snow.

  She had to go home, while she could still think clearly, while she still had some memory left. She had no idea why she was here to help Dickens. Fred wanted her to help Belle.

  The carriage thundered towards her, its wheels spraying slush into the gutter.

  The placard outside the theatre announced the Christmas Harlequinade at four today. She was stuck here in this trivial matter of a theatre and a pantomime. She laughed at the word. Pantomime. The very definition of a frivolous activity that meant nothing.

  No. She would leave Fred and Belle to whatever Fate or Time had in store for them.

  A gust of wind smacked a flurry of ice into her face and she tottered, stumbling blindly into the gutter as the carriage roared down on her.

  — 21 —

  FRED WATCHED MRS HUDSON set off down New Street and wondered if he ought to let her loose on her own. It was a dangerous place and not the city either of them knew. He recognized almost nothing. He could make out the outline of St Philip’s dome up there, which was something you just couldn’t see from here in his time as New Street was lined with tall Victorian buildings. And up at the top of the street, the Town Hall stood guard with its Parthenon pillars. He’d attended concerts there all his life. Had Belle said it was a new building? To think of it as something new, when in his life it was the oldest building on New Street: the one constant of the city centre that had stood while all around it changed.