by Jon Clinch
Marley puts upon his face the look of a repentant old sinner, caught in the act. “So it appears.”
“And we… we have suffered a loss?” Upon his tongue the phrase is poison.
“No, I assure you. We have simply not profited as we should have.”
“And what of our investments? The original sums, and the additional sums you required?”
“They have been recovered. Entirely.”
Scrooge permits himself to exhale. “And in the future?”
“In the future, we shall have no further dealings with Sr. Monteverdi and the fur trade. That I can promise you.”
Scrooge smiles. “I never imagined that you would meet your match.”
Even at second- or thirdhand, even based as it is upon a tissue of lies, the accusation stings. Monteverdi did best him, after all, even if Marley is not certain how the trick was accomplished. Every last element of his being wants to lash out in response to Scrooge’s effrontery, but he does not dare.
“And think of all the effort you put into the project!” Scrooge says. “Such a waste!”
“Do not remind me.” His look is abashed, but his brain is on fire.
“Ah, well,” sighs Scrooge, picking up his pen as if it is now his place to dismiss Jacob Marley. “Let it be a lesson to you.”
Marley nods and attempts an escape, but one more remark from his partner halts him.
“And let us continue divesting ourselves of those offensive businesses, shall we?”
“It will be more difficult now,” says Marley. “In the absence of our profits from the fur trade, I mean.”
“Oh,” says Scrooge, “I trust that it is not beyond your abilities.”
His tone strikes like a horsewhip, and Marley makes a wordless exit before his temper can get the better of him.
1807
Fifteen
Marley has spent months shuffling the deck, so when the new year arrives the cards are exactly where he wants them. The work has required long hours of careful planning, days of solitary labor in his workshop, and the more or less public assumption of several new identities, all of which has tested his limits and deepened his isolation. Each hour that he has spent reconfiguring his financial network—which now embraces the fictitious firms of Barnacle & Sons (maritime provisioners), Dodson & Fogg (solicitors), Honeythunder & Grimwig (general mercantile), and many others—each lonely hour that he has spent fleecing Scrooge instead of robbing some outsider seems to him a deep personal affront. An affront brought about by Scrooge himself, come to think of it. Which serves only to make him more intent upon punishing the man.
But grant Scrooge this: By demanding that his partner sell everything connected with the slaving business, he has given Marley full camouflage for his work. He has unwittingly opened the floodgates of change and let in a torrent of misdirection, of which he will be the principal victim.
Marley, to be certain, has not reduced their investment in the transportation of slaves by so much as a single iron chain. The business is too profitable. Nonetheless, he has seen to it that as far as Scrooge is concerned, it’s all being obliterated. Such a change is not without consequence, of course, and Scrooge has not been surprised to see that the value of his share has plummeted as a result. “Very well,” he says each time his partner presents him with further bad news. “With the help of the Almighty, we shall recover by and by! Besides, do they not say that good work should be its own reward?”
Scrooge’s happy acquiescence to the picking of his own pocket does Marley’s heart good. The single-minded bookkeeper has been reborn, and the great good cheer with which he meets every setback reminds his partner that his eye is on prizes even more elusive than financial gain: true love and Christian mercy.
* * *
From time to time, idly and without any real hope of return, Marley attempts to reestablish a connection with Monteverdi. In his books he has a dozen addresses for the miscreant’s various contacts in the Americas, and he mines them one after another.
At first he writes as Micawber, cultivating a peevish tone of injured pride. When no response is forthcoming, he takes on one by one the identities of Micawber’s various agents and representatives and solicitors, adding heat each time around. Demands for restitution are made. Lawsuits or at least their simulacra are filed in courts on both sides of the Atlantic. Arrest warrants are signed and sealed. Nothing helps, although the exercise does serve to maintain his skills in the duplicitous arts, now that the entire false-fronted enterprise of Marley Minus Scrooge is running without his daily intervention.
At length, an answer does come back from the Americas. It arrives within an ancient wooden crate, a swollen and misshapen thing whose seams are caulked with oakum and sealed with tar. Squatting there like a waterlogged demon on Marley’s desk, it looks sturdy and stubborn enough to have journeyed across the Atlantic under its own power. The crate is directed to Mr. Micawber at these premises but bears no return address, which Marley takes for a sign. He fetches a crowbar from the warehouse and prizes the lid open in a shower of wood shavings. These he curses until Ebenezer arrives to sweep them up for kindling—and then he burrows down and down among them until his fingertips fall upon a tiny, crisp envelope in their depths.
“What have we here?” he says, holding it up to the light. There is a single small slip of paper inside, and he extracts it carefully. It seems to be an obituary, clipped from a New York newspaper. The subject, of course, is Sr. Valentino Monteverdi—merchant prince, philosopher, and world-renowned philanthropist. The praise it contains is effusive, imaginative, and would no doubt suffice to get Satan readmitted to Paradise. Marley smiles as he reads it, marveling at the excellence of the entire presentation—the ruined crate, the damnable shavings, the torn edges of the cheap paper upon which the obituary is printed. And then he turns it over at last and discovers upon the reverse a small portion of an advertisement for The Finest Beaver Pelts in Canada, and he laughs out loud.
“What is it?” inquires Scrooge from his chamber, for laughter is a thing rarely heard upon these premises.
“A fascinating development,” says Marley. “Sr. Monteverdi would appear to be dead.”
* * *
When Marley announces that the last traces of their slaving investments have been liquidated, Scrooge decides that a celebration is in order. He shall take Belle ice-skating. What’s more, he shall surprise her with the invitation in person. He waits until the close of business, fortifies himself at home with a cup of hot tea, and troops off in the moonlight to her family’s lodgings. At the top of the open staircase he knocks upon the door, and there he stands—his breath steaming and his eyes atwinkle—when she answers. He is dusted all over with snow, and in place of his customary top hat he wears a stocking cap that she knitted for him either last Christmas or the Christmas prior. It gives him a youthful air, and combined with the scarf wrapped doubly around his neck and the ice skates tucked beneath his arm with their curved elfin tips agleam in the moonlight it makes him seem an entirely new man.
“Come,” he says. “Find your skates and let us have some fun.”
Impetuous Ebenezer!
He waits until they are out on the ice, pottering along arm in arm, before he breaks the news. It has taken time and determination and a world of sacrifice, he says, but the firm of Scrooge & Marley is at last washed clean of the sin of slavery.
“How marvelous!” she says, letting go of his arm and gliding around into his path so as to coast for a moment face-to-face. “Why didn’t you come in and tell Father?”
“I don’t plan to marry your father,” he says. “I plan to marry you.”
She flings herself upon him, and in his startlement he loses his already precarious balance. Down they go, whooping. Belle loses a skate. Ebenezer loses his cap. The whole enterprise collapses into a merry mess, and by the time he has rebuckled her skate and she has refit his cap they are half-frozen and completely famished. Belle knows a restaurant not far from the pond
, just a short walk down a dimly lit avenue, and so they take a few more celebratory turns and remove their skates and set out.
The night has grown colder, and they press ever so tentatively against each other as they proceed—so as to conserve warmth, Ebenezer would say if asked, and physical warmth is surely part of it. Thus joined together they move from lamp to lamp like a single earthbound moth, the sole creature out on this deserted street. A fog has come in that hangs in the air like particulate ice, collecting the lamplight that spills from an unshuttered window here and there. Moving from one pale glow to the next, their faces shine.
A shadow appears from the black mouth of a cross street. It moves powerfully, purposely, striding through the dappled fog toward some dark rendezvous.
“Jacob!” says Ebenezer. “Why, it’s good old Jacob, who has done so much to extricate us from our weary chains. Jacob, the author of our happiness.”
Belle smiles, feeling a warmth rise within her that this individual has never before induced.
“Jacob!” he calls.
Nothing. The shadow moves along, determined.
“Ho! Jacob Marley!”
The shadow stops, cocks its head, and steps forward into a little light of its own. “Why, Ebenezer, you old stick.”
“He’s not such an old stick,” says Belle with a laugh.
Marley approaches. “As you say, Miss Fairchild.”
“Are we now on such formal terms, Mr. Marley?”
“The nighttime enforces a decorum of its own, don’t you think?”
She pulls Ebenezer’s elbow closer to her breast. “And the cold does otherwise, in my experience.”
“I understand,” says Marley, with a smile that in daylight might reveal itself to be a shade lubricious. “So what are you doing out in this chill?”
Ebenezer rattles his skates. “We’ve been to the pond.”
“How oblivious I am,” says Marley, who in truth never misses a thing.
“And now we are off to supper,” says Scrooge.
“Don’t let me keep you.” He shivers eloquently. “I must be going as well.”
“But your lodgings are that way,” indicates Scrooge.
“I have an errand.”
“Be quick about it, then. ’Tis a most inhospitable night.”
“Oh,” says Marley, turning to continue along his way, “there are pockets of hospitality everywhere. Provided a man knows where to look.”
“Very well,” says Ebenezer, freezing and hungry and hoping that the next lamplit window will mark the source of their supper. He and Belle resume their walk, but let us leave them to their happiness and follow Marley instead.
His track takes him down one shadowed lane after another, wending and winding into the nautilus of London’s underside, until he comes to the door of a place that is not Mrs. McCullough’s but may as well be. It possesses the same disreputable air, the same ruined paint and spiderwebbed glass, the same hand-lettered indication of ROOMS TO LET. In the darkness within a single lamp burns, and through the filthy, frosty window he can make out a covey of women gathered on couches around a small table. Upon the table is a bottle, and within each woman’s hand is a glass, and they commune with great seriousness—both with one another and with the gin—until he springs the latch and opens the door and they arise like so many doves upon the blast.
“Inspector Bucket,” they cry in chorus, for he maintains the same identity and extracts the same toll with regard to all enterprises of this sort.
“Ladies,” he says, pressing the door shut behind him and turning the lock.
“Ain’t a fit night,” says one, with professional sympathy.
“I should say not.”
“For man nor beast,” she goes on.
“Can you always tell one from the other?” he asks. “Man from beast, I mean?”
“There’s none here for me to judge,” she says, with a coy toss of her head. “Save yourself.”
“And saving myself is precisely what I mean to do,” says he, hanging his hat and coat on a peg. “With your assistance.”
“Me, sir?” asks the one.
“All of you,” says the lascivious and insatiable Inspector Bucket. “The night is young, and I am terribly cold.”
The fires are banked in the grates upstairs, so with the door locked and the lamp guttering they set to their pleasure down here upon the couches. Marley directs the proceedings with a peculiar and avid authority, as if he has done exactly this a thousand times before. Perhaps he has. Whatever the women may think of the acts that they are called upon to perform, they carry them out with the required urgency and to such a satisfactory degree that their apparent pleasure at length removes Marley from the prison of his own body and mind. Through their senses he seems to feel something. And when at last he can endure no more of it, he finishes with a small and stifled cry: “Fan.”
Sixteen
She is a missed opportunity, and Marley hates a missed opportunity.
That good girl, that churchgoing girl, that naïve girl! Although she is not precisely a girl anymore, now that he thinks of it, or certainly not a girl for long. She must be what, twenty-four or twenty-five? Some would call that the very prime of life, although others—a desperate lady experiencing it herself, for example—would describe it as one step shy of spinsterhood.
That in itself could work to his advantage.
He curses his shortsightedness. He has been blinded by his work, that’s all. Now that he has stabilized affairs at Scrooge & Marley, and now that three-quarters of the firm’s profit goes straight into his private accounts, he possesses the leisure for something that might resemble a conventional romance. He has, of course, no interest in focusing all of his sexual energies upon her. The very idea! But surely an innocent girl would not have the power to limit his activities in that area. She would never hear of them, to begin with. And if she were to hear, he would have no difficulty redirecting her attention. He has concealed a thousand secrets larger than a midnight dalliance with some whore. He has concealed financial malfeasance on the grandest of scales. Contrast that against a little faithlessness in love, and you will find that there is simply no comparison.
Scrooge certainly is happy with that inconsequential girl of his, although Marley would wager that the two of them have never come within a league of the procreative act. They have no doubt barely dreamed of it, and its execution is at this point surely two or three years distant. Good God, what people will do in the name of romance. They will deprive themselves of the very thing they seek, to begin with. It’s positively unnatural. And yet there must be something to the whole business, or why would so many commit to it?
He resolves that he will find out. If he can possess the best of both worlds—romance with Fan and continued free exercise of his manly rights—he would be remiss not to make the attempt. And so it is that he begins the full and brutal siege of courtship.
He begins inquiring after her by way of Scrooge, at first only once a week or so, and usually in the context of a question about the well-being of the family. But as the weeks go by he begins to focus his curiosity on Fan alone—not only on her health but on her interests. He makes note of the books she has read and the plays she has seen and the lectures she has attended, aiming to familiarize himself with whatever ideas might now be furnishing her mind. By January he has asked Scrooge to remember him to the girl at least three times, and by February he has begun sending her not just his kindest wishes but the occasional little gift: a book by some author whose work he knows she has enjoyed, tickets for her and her mother to attend a play she might like.
By the beginning of March he is prepared to commence the final assault.
* * *
“For Miss Scrooge, mum?” The boy holds out a small envelope inscribed in an elegant hand.
She thanks him and shuts the door and examines the face of the envelope, but there is nothing written upon it save her daughter’s name and this very address. The ink dried across i
ts creamy face could have been laid down by a machine built to ape the human hand at its most idealized and least personal. Whether it was put there by man or woman is impossible to tell, but Mother Scrooge has an idea—an idea confirmed at least in part by the deep impression of a signet ring on the reverse, sunken into a pool of bloodred wax: M.
She brings the envelope to the parlor, where Fan is reading today’s Morning Chronicle, and she stands with arms crossed until her daughter has put down the newspaper and slit open the envelope.
“Mr. Marley desires the pleasure of my company—at the opera.”
“How nice.”
Her daughter frowns.
“I’ve seen an invitation like this on the horizon for some time now—haven’t you?”
“Oh, I surely have, although I’d hoped that it would remain on the horizon rather than appear in the flesh.” She sighs and slips the note back into the envelope. There is a stack of kindling on the hearth at her feet, and by dropping it there she signals its fate. “I should have known better.”
“But Mr. Marley has been so very solicitous!”
“Mr. Marley solicits what he wants to solicit, when he desires to solicit it.”
“Now, Fan.”
“Now, Mother. Ebenezer warned me about him, and he was correct.”
“Bah! What does Ebenezer know? Men can change.”
“Mr. Marley changes too much and too often. He is erratic, mercurial—both in his interests and in his affections.”
“But he has lavished such gifts upon you…”
“With the aim that I should find myself beholden to him.”
“And you do not?”
“I do not.”
“And still you accepted them.”
“I did not ask for them.”
“You could have refused.”
“I chose not to.”
“But…”
“He gave those gifts freely. I knew his mind from the start, and I chose to take the course that would frustrate him in the end.”