Marley

by Jon Clinch

  The business of recording these varied transactions falls to Scrooge, as does the work of transforming them into something that an outside observer—an officer of the court, for example—would understand as the records of a modest importing business of the sort they seem to operate. He keeps two detailed sets of books, along with various other ledgers and listings that serve as guides to interpreting them. Piled around him as he works, and growing day by day like underbrush, are cross-references and codices, scribbled notes and coded entries. It is his obsession and his joy. Five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, rising from his little bed with the strains of some symphony bursting within his brain, was never more thrilled by the spontaneous act of creation than is Scrooge by these enchanting numbers. The realities they represent—casks of rum, bolts of cloth, the hides of enslaved men—are nothing to him. He cares only for their music.

  * * *

  The street beyond Scrooge’s door, like most streets in London, is a thing of monstrous filth and decay. Almost a quarter-million horses are abroad these days in the bustling city, carriage horses and dray horses and riding horses, too, and moment by moment they do exactly as horses will. One dare not grow too complacent upon the muddy streets.

  It is down this treacherous avenue that Scrooge’s sister, Fan, makes her way one evening. She lives with her mother, her father having passed on some years before, and today being Friday it is her custom to drop by toward closing time and drag her brother home for supper. It is his one decent meal of the week, at least in the opinion of his mother. Surely a periodic examination of his narrowing frame would not suggest otherwise. He seems to live on nothing but tea and calculation.

  She finds him bent as usual over his desk. A single dying candle flickers at his elbow, meager defense against the gloom that the advancing day has ushered into his grim little chamber, but he neither notices the failing light nor minds it. His pen scratches away automatically, seemingly under its own power, suggesting that he could work in utter darkness should conditions require him to, the virgin expanse of his ledgers lit only by the fires of his imagination. “Ebenezer?” she inquires when he fails to look up. She has never found a way to shorten her brother’s Christian name, some easy equivalent of everyone’s “Fan” for her “Fanny.” So “Ebenezer” it is, and “Ebenezer” again, this time accompanied by a rap of her knuckles against the top of his desk.

  He startles, and his pen goes skittering across the page, the nib tearing a little furrow into the paper and the ink filling that furrow with a long black blot. “Damn,” says Scrooge. He lays down his pen and reaches for some blotting paper and tries to minimize the damage, muttering something about an entire afternoon’s work being lost, lost, lost.

  “It’s just a little smudge,” says his sister, dabbing at it with her handkerchief.

  He shoos her as he would shoo a fly.

  “There’s no real harm done.” She’s aware, of course, that any efforts at comfort or distraction will prove useless. As long as she’s been on this earth, she’s known her brother to be a perfectionist through and through. She steps back and restores her handkerchief to her sleeve and scans the rows and columns of numbers arrayed before her. They are sufficiently regular in their arrangement to have been stamped and set out by a machine, with only that single ugly black stain marring their order.

  He burrows in a drawer and finds a straightedge, which he positions along the ledger’s central fold. “I shall have to write this entire page out again,” he says, “and the page on its reverse as well.” But before he can make the tear she stays him.

  “Not now, Ebenezer. Mother has supper waiting for us.”

  He resists, relents, studies the ledger with a sorrowful eye.

  “Perhaps things will look different in the morning.”

  “Perhaps I won’t sleep a wink all night.”

  “If you eat enough supper, you’ll sleep well indeed.” She closes the ledger and snuffs the candle.

  * * *

  Mother Scrooge lives under modest circumstances in modest rooms down a modest lane in a modest neighborhood. She saves and scrimps the whole week long to lay out the most extravagant meal possible when Ebenezer comes on Friday, and tonight is no exception. There will be roast goose, preceded by onion soup and served alongside boiled potatoes with lots of butter, freshly baked bread, and pastries both savory and sweet. The meal will be accompanied by a bottle of claret and followed by thimblefuls of a rich Spanish port that the Scrooge family has been conserving for years. The various scents in the air are both marvelous and deeply comforting, but Ebenezer instantly detects something amiss.

  “Four seats at the table?” he says. “Four?” His mother has had to borrow that last chair from a neighbor, three being the most she has required upon these premises for a long while.

  “You’re a keen observer,” says she, trundling out of the kitchen and presenting a floury cheek for the application of her son’s birdlike kiss. “Tonight we are to have a dinner companion.” She looks from Ebenezer to Fan and back again, impish.

  “Oh, Mother,” says Fan. “Have you acquired a gentleman friend?”

  “Hardly,” she says.

  “Is it a gentleman at all, then, or a lady?” says Fan.

  “A gentleman,” admits Mother Scrooge.

  “Known to us?” says Ebenezer, joining in the guessing game.

  “Very much so,” says his mother, her look going from mischievous to quizzical. “In fact,” she goes on, “I’m a bit surprised that he didn’t arrive right along with you.”

  Two identical knit brows from Fran and Ebenezer demonstrate their shared lineage.

  “I sent a note to his office today. I received no reply, but then I hadn’t requested one.”

  “The gentleman must be away,” says Ebenezer. “Yes, there’s no doubt of it. He’s away on business, and he didn’t receive your message.”

  “Perhaps I should have requested a reply after all.”

  “Certainly. Certainly. Always the practical thing to do. Then again, you would think someone in his office…”

  “You would think,” says his mother.

  “If it were a well-run sort of place…”

  “A well-run sort of place. With proper management and oversight. Staffed by decent and professional gentlemen.”

  Ebenezer sighs and shakes his head like the most jaded old veteran. “I fear that such offices are difficult to find, Mother. Standards have fallen off everywhere.”

  She allows the subtlest hint of a twinkle to gleam in her eye. “Even at Scrooge & Marley?” she asks.

  Her son stiffens as if someone has thrust an icicle down his shirt collar. “I should say not.”

  “Then you would have noticed a messenger boy, had he come by this morning?”

  “Most assuredly. I believe one did appear, in fact.”

  “With something for Mr. Marley, or for you?”

  “For Marley, I believe. Yes. I recall setting it upon his desk.”

  “Without noticing that it was from your own mother?”

  Ebenezer cocks his head.

  “Standards have indeed fallen off,” she says, laughing. “Even at Scrooge & Marley.”

  “Wait…” Ebenezer lifts an inquisitive digit. “Why would you be writing to my business partner?”

  “You silly goose,” his mother says, taking her daughter by the hand and drawing her toward the kitchen, where there is a bit of work left to be done. “He was to be our fourth. Now we shall have to eat every last bite ourselves!”

  The vacant chair is still present, along with its empty place setting, when they sit down to supper. It stands opposite Scrooge’s place at the neat little table—his sister is on his right and his mother is on his left—and its persistence seems to him a kind of reproach. He tries to keep from staring at it, saying as he helps himself to a second portion of potatoes, “I don’t recall that I’ve broken bread with Mr. Marley in years, and I’m surprised to have come as close to it as I have this evening.
Whatever were you thinking by inviting him?”

  “Well,” says his mother, “you two are in a partnership after all.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re friendly.”

  “Perhaps you should be.”

  “I don’t see the value in it. We are business associates, not boon companions.” He saws at his portion of goose, methodically slicing it into a grid of little squares to be eaten one after another in sequence.

  “Friendly relations have never hurt anyone,” says his mother, with a meaningful glance toward his sister. “Isn’t that true, Fan?”

  He looks up at his sister in time to spy a blush dwindling from her cheek. “Mother,” he says, shocked by the woman’s audacity. “You would lure Mr. Marley here on behalf of—”

  “Oh, Ebenezer—don’t be such an old stick.”

  “It’s indecent,” he says, cringing. “Why, the man is practically her brother.”

  “A moment ago you were claiming that you barely know him.”

  “Her financial brother, I mean. His fortune and mine are closely joined, after all. If Fan cannot rely upon me for support, then she cannot rely upon him.”

  His mother purses her lips.

  “She must have prospects other than Mr. Marley.”

  Fan speaks up. “But I think him very fascinating.”

  Her brother scoffs.

  “And he was terribly solicitous when I encountered him on the street the other day.”

  “Fascinating and solicitous do not make a match.”

  “I’m not marrying him, Ebenezer.”

  “Good.”

  “At least not yet,” she teases, and her mother gasps.

  Ebenezer puts down his knife and fork and lays a steadying hand upon his sister’s arm. “What you find fascinating about Mr. Marley,” he says, “is no doubt related to an aspect of his character that I would describe as mysterious. His intentions and his whereabouts are often unknowable, even to me. His opinions—on everything but finance—are so flexible as to be practically nonexistent. He is in effect something of a chameleon. I have seen him become ten different men before ten different people, altering his language and his manner and even his ideas so as to serve his immediate aims.”

  “And yet you chose him for your business partner,” says Fan.

  “I did.”

  “You have never been a good judge of character, Ebenezer.”

  “Now, Fan…” says Mother Scrooge.

  “A fair point,” he says. “But Mr. Marley is irreplaceably skilled at his particular work. And I am the one who looks after the books.”

  * * *

  The map of London built up within Scrooge’s mind does have a gap or two, for he has not been everywhere. The portion of the East End known as Spitalfields, for example, is but an amorphous blot. Ever since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the parish has been home to Huguenot silk weavers, a group with whom Scrooge has had little contact and about whom he possesses no curiosity—although a careful reading of his ledgers would reveal that the firm of Scrooge & Marley does indeed have certain commercial interests among them. The weavers of Spitalfields have, after all, overtaken their French forebears in the world market for high-quality satins, velvets, and brocades, for silks figured and watered, for exotic paduasoys, and even for the most sought-after ducapes. There are fortunes to be made.

  So it is down the lanes of Spitalfields that Jacob Marley treads. The houses lining Dorset Street are grand indeed, proclaiming the wealth and position of their inhabitants. Looming high on either side, blotting out the weak sun, they seem eternal, immutable. Marley knows the lie behind that illusion, however, for these great houses have sprung up almost entirely within his lifetime. The earth upon which they stand yielded up the fruits of agriculture until the very instant the first French spade pierced the soil. So it is with the rise of any civilized thing, he reflects, and so it will be with its fall. Nothing lasts.

  He has been negotiating today with a certain Antoine Bernière, leader of a cabal of Huguenot craftsmen seemingly bent on impoverishing Scrooge & Marley at all costs. They believe they’re succeeding—a misapprehension that Marley has worked hard to sustain and that suits his intentions nicely. Bearing in his pocket a renewed contract signed just now under much feigned protest, he slinks away from Bernière’s door with the look of a beaten dog, but the spring returns to his step the moment he rounds the corner. He is bound for an ancient and low-slung building well known to him, a place that sulks miserably in the shadows of the grander buildings that surround it. Reaching it will require several unlikely turns down crooked lanes and up soot-stained alleyways and along the shabby edges of vacant courtyards. The house he seeks, a thing of wattle and daub and shabby repute, is a relic of a time when mansions like Bernière’s were only the most distant of dreams, and it will likely remain here when they have been reduced to memories. It was a farmhouse to begin with, squatting for generations upon its forlorn parcel of land, but now that London has swallowed it up, it has found a different use.

  Cemented inside the front window by a paste made from spiderwebs and the crumbling remains of various winged insects is a sign promising ROOMS TO LET. How more than one or two such rooms could fit behind this hunched façade is a mystery, but once he is inside, the place begins to reveal its true dimensions. The ceiling is lower than might be considered practical, but its nearness makes possible a set of rickety stairs to the left, leading upward to something that by all the laws of physics should not be much more than a loft, despite a sign directing patrons to the (unlikely) second and (incredible) third floors. A different set of stairs leads down into what must be some sort of ghastly catacomb, perhaps a former root cellar. To the right a handful of ratty chairs huddle around a dead hearth, two or three of them occupied at the moment by sleeping men of questionable vitality. The nearest of these figures rouses at Marley’s entrance, yawning and reaching out to consult the contents of an empty mug.

  Marley steps around the men and raps on the rough wooden plank that passes for a bar. “Mrs. McCullough?” he calls.

  In a trice the lady emerges. She is massive, catlike, and languidly aggressive, and her entrance is preceded by the dizzying scent of some perfume most likely sold by the hogshead. “Welcome back, Inspector Bucket.”

  “Who’s in?”

  “Ain’t they all the same in the eyes of the law?” She bats her lashes, habitually but perversely coquettish.

  “Who’s in?”

  “Lizzie,” confesses the lady, with a trace of regret.

  “Just Lizzie? Not Madeline?”

  “It’s early, Inspector. Come back this evening, why don’t ye?”

  “I keep a very busy schedule, Mrs. McCullough.”

  “No doubt of that, Inspector, but I’d hate for our relations to suffer on account of her. Next thing ye know, ye’ll be talking to the magistrate.”

  “I have better things to do than talk with the magistrate,” says Marley. He nods gravely and turns toward the stairs. “Lizzie will suffice.”

  1805

  Five

  “Your brother is painfully slow in courting,” says Belle.

  She and Fan pause at a muddy crossroads to let a carriage thunder past, and in its wake they lift the hems of their skirts and proceed. They are walking nowhere in particular. Their real errand, as usual, is the communion of their thoughts.

  “My brother is painfully slow in most things,” says Fan. “Other than calculation.”

  “Then he must calculate the progress of our courtship.”

  “If he were to do that,” Fan replies, “you’d be marching to the altar right now. And where would I be?”

  “At my side.”

  “And the next morning? When you and Ebenezer began married life?”

  “Perhaps you’d be dreaming of how you danced the night away with that devastating Mr. Marley. Surely he’d be invited to his partner’s wedding.”

  Fan’s look turns dark and pensive. “No matter what I say, no ma
tter how poor my opportunities with other gentlemen, no matter how grim my future, Ebenezer’s opinion remains fixed.”

  “What if I were to speak with him on your behalf?”

  “He won’t concede.”

  “He might.”

  “He won’t even listen.”

  “He might listen to me.”

  “No. Not where Jacob is concerned.” She pauses and makes a show of pretending to examine the contents of a shop window, and after a moment she gathers herself and states to Belle’s reflection: “Ebenezer has a heart of stone.”

  “Fan! That isn’t true.”

  “It is. You may as well know it.”

  “I don’t know it. And neither do you.”

  “I’ve known him my entire life, Belle. He never changes. You can hope for transformation if you like, you can swear that you detect little increments of improvement on his part, but in the end he never changes. He never will.”

  “So we must change him.”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’ve given up.”

  “Then I shall take it upon myself,” says Belle. “Both for your sake and for my own.”

  * * *

  The deliveryman has a wooden leg that belongs to him, and a horse and wagon that don’t. His name is Mr. Wegg, and he has taken possession of his employer’s implements in order to deliver a lot of used furniture to the offices of a certain Mr. Krook. The horse is lame and the wagon has one wobbly wheel and altogether they complement Mr. Wegg nicely. They are three broken Musketeers, out seeking fortune and adventure.

  The furniture heaped up in the wagon bed is wretched in the extreme, having been repeatedly discarded from the houses of various London families, passed down from one to the next like misfortune or disease. That anyone would desire a stick of it is beyond even Mr. Wegg’s imagining, and he’s the one who found it in the first place, half-buried in the great ash heap at his employer’s place of business. He had pulled it out to be set aside for burning, when a passerby—that same Krook—spied it and expressed interest. Warmth is one thing. Money is another.