by Jon Clinch
He begins by leasing any number of rooms in any number of boardinghouses and private residences and commercial enterprises around the city, and with the help of the amenable Mr. Wegg he transfers portions of his wealth—little by little—to their safety. He reestablishes connections and agreements with his old slaving partners, sometimes using false identities and sometimes using his own, always directing the proceeds straight into his own pockets. He hears of Scrooge’s visits to his house from the wine merchants below, and rather than raise suspicion he changes no locks and alters no hiding places. Let Scrooge believe that he is undetected, and that the shrinking of their mutual fortune is entirely his own doing.
And let the firm of Scrooge & Marley be damned.
* * *
To Belle’s surprise she encounters Ebenezer on the street, struggling along in the mud and snow beneath the weight of a heavy valise. She catches up with him easily, for his steps are slow and labored, and she surprises him without meaning to, for his breath is loud and his concentration is fierce. Her touch on his shoulder startles him into dropping the valise, which lands with both a wet thud and a metallic jangle.
“Are you now in the chain-making business, Ebenezer?”
“Oho! Nothing of the sort.” His face is pink, his tall forehead damp.
“Have you gone into silversmithing, then?” Her eyes twinkle.
“Never,” he says. Then he leans in close and in a whisper that’s half-conspiratorial, half-aggravated, he adds, “If you must know, I am on my way to the bank.”
“It’s not that I must know—”
“I have affairs to attend to,” he says. “Business affairs of an important nature.”
“Shall I walk with you?”
“Where?”
“To the bank.”
“Oh, that.” His gaze flickers down to the dropped valise and then goes anxiously to the crowded street, as if he is on the lookout for highwaymen. “No. I believe I ought to concentrate on my business. I have a terrible lot of work to do this afternoon. I fall further behind with each moment that passes. You understand.”
She does understand. She understands that the additional year she granted him has wrought a change for the worse. She would say so if she could, but she cannot. Not now. Instead, she pursues Fan’s request and asks if she might join him and his mother for supper on Friday. That would be a start.
“Oh,” he says, “I haven’t dined with Mother for the longest time. I suppose I’ve rather given it up, actually. You may go if you like. No doubt she would enjoy the company.” With a grunt he heaves the valise from the ground and starts off down the busy street, utterly alone.
Twenty-Five
The dire occasion that Belle’s father has spent the better part of his life anticipating finally comes to pass. In the springtime he falls ill with a lung ailment and rather unceremoniously dies, leaving his wife and two daughters at the mercy of his unwilling landlord, Mr. Liveright.
The funeral is poorly attended, the church cold, the bereaved desolate in their pitiful number. Scrooge, sitting dutifully in the front alongside Belle, turns around at one point to assess the number of mourners present. In a blink he can count them all. Once the service begins he closes his eyes as if in prayer, although he is actually testing himself to see if he can recall some detail about each one of them—a name if he knows it, or a hat, or the color of a dress—and he is happy to confirm that he can. The image is not just burned into his retina but engraved upon his brain.
His eyes have snapped open and he is smiling a satisfied smile when Belle looks his way. The heat of her gaze upon his cheek is sufficient to draw his attention. Her skin is pale, her cheeks wet with tears, her face an agonized mask. Such eye contact as he makes with her does not ease her sorrow or diminish her pain, although he does have the presence of mind—late though it comes—to put his smile away.
* * *
At the reception that follows, she can neither speak to Scrooge nor glance in his direction. Her betrothed may as well be in the ground alongside her father, for she has lost the two of them. Surrounded now by those who love her—her mother and her sister, Fan and Harry, ladies from the church—she sinks into their consoling affection as into a feather bed from which she knows she must one day rise alone.
By and by he intrudes. Mrs. Fairchild swarms upon him and takes him in an embrace under which he stiffens, murmuring and patting her gingerly on the back. With a single look Belle communicates to her sister that contact with Scrooge is not a thing to be encouraged, and so Daphne drifts away to the kitchen.
When Scrooge has extricated himself from the mother’s grasp he approaches Belle, who presents a frigid shoulder.
“I am sorry,” he says. It is a beginning, but no more than that. Whether he is sorry for the loss of her father or sorry for the coldness he displayed during the funeral is impossible to gauge, and he makes no effort to clarify.
“Think nothing of it,” she says. She turns her back and silently retreats to a narrow settee beneath an overhang in a dim corner. Scrooge follows, only to find that she has positioned herself at the center of the bench so as to exclude him, and that if he means to remain he must stand, looming over her in the confined space. A disinterested party would think he means her harm.
“Your father…” he begins.
“My father placed a great many demands upon you.”
“He had every right.”
“No.” She shakes her head, her eyes downcast. “He had no right whatsoever, and neither did I.”
“You speak as if I have resisted! On the contrary—I’ve done my best. I continue to do so.”
“But your heart isn’t in it.”
“My heart belongs to you.”
“No, Ebenezer. No. It does not. My father and I asked you to change your nature, or at the very least to defy it, and for that I’m sorry. It’s too late to forgive Father, but you can still forgive me.”
Scrooge wrings his hands. “My dear,” he says, “I have impoverished myself for you.”
“You’ve done it against your will.”
“On your behalf, nonetheless.”
“But not on our behalf, Ebenezer.”
Here ensues a pause from Scrooge, as if the calculating engine within his head has suffered some failure.
“I thought not,” she says. “And so I release you.”
“Release me? From…?” Scrooge is pure puzzlement.
“From your vow, Ebenezer. From our engagement.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“But I would never release you.”
“You already have,” she assures him. “You’ve exchanged your pursuit of me for the pursuit of wealth.”
“In my mind, the two are linked so closely as to be one and the same.”
“Think of how you have ignored me over these months. Over these years. It wasn’t always so, but the truth is that when we agreed to be married we were very different people. We were poor and content to be so.”
“Not content.”
“Content to make our way together.”
“And we shall.”
“No.” The word comes out upon a little sob. In response, Ebenezer drops partway to his knees and moves to embrace her. She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and holds it up between them like a rampart. “No,” she says once more. “If even the slightest warmth remains within your heart—for my father or for me—then leave me to my grief. Begone.”
* * *
Stunned, Ebenezer Scrooge roams the muddy streets of London. Anything is better than going home, home to the shabby little rooms he has lately so neglected, home to a future emptied of everything he has counted upon in this life.
Why has she said not a word of this before? Why has she chosen this day to drive a stake into his heart? He thinks back upon the happy times they have shared—distant now, yes, but undeniable—and in the shadow of her rejection they seem to be turning incorporeal, fading like dreams at the cock’s crow. He
curses her for ruining them. No, for stealing them! Yes! That’s more in the order of things. She has come like a robber in the night and spoiled his future by pillaging his past.
Perhaps she has found another. That would explain it. She has taken on some secret paramour. The individual was likely present at the funeral, lurking around the periphery with a song in his heart. Yes. That must be it. The woman has been untrue to him, unfaithful in her way as Marley has been in his. They are united against him, as are the economic and moral powers of the universe. No question of it. All while he has remained true as true can be—both to her and to his promise. The indecency of her behavior in return, the duplicity of it and the secrecy as well, brings him low.
Night falls. He walks on. With his long legs clacking out a furious gait he stalks from street to lane to alleyway, from gaslight to lamplight to torchlight, wending farther and farther outward through the maze of the city. He does not know what he shall do when morning comes, should it come at all.
As the hours pass, his walking works its magic. He wearies, and he falters, and he slows. His fury cools and his reason returns to him out of the mist. He has wronged Belle. He has wronged her in the past and he has wronged her now. How absurd of him to think that she could be unfaithful! She is an angel, the gentlest and kindest and truest soul in all the world, and it is he who has cast her aside. He with his fanatical obsessions. He with his ledgers and his labor. He with his numbers and his numbers and his numbers.
He returns to his office at dawn, disheveled and humbled and inspired. He cannot go back to her now. He cannot apologize and swear that if she gives him sufficient time he will set things right. He has failed to keep that promise too often. She would be a fool to have him. What he must do is continue his work—not ploddingly, not dully, not as if his world somehow goes on unchanged, but with renewed commitment and redoubled vigor. He will grow rich and he will grow righteous and he will grow into the man Belle deserves. Let it commence this very morning.
1814–1817
Twenty-Six
Now that Scrooge and Marley are fully occupied with ruining each other, their personal relations have grown more friendly than at any time before. Neither of them would benefit from any other arrangement, of course. And so it comes to pass that for two gentlemen bent upon taking food from each other’s mouths, they rub along with remarkable congeniality.
From time to time Scrooge worries that he has become a trifle too friendly with his partner, that Marley will note the change and divine that he is up to something. He does not, on the other hand, attribute Marley’s behavior to any suspicious cause. The man has always been unpredictable. If he is behaving in a familiar way toward Scrooge, then he must believe that it will work to his advantage. Marley, for his part—being in the last and thus most profitable position in their ongoing double- or even triple-cross—knows exactly why Scrooge has softened. He also knows that it will do him no earthly good.
So they work at cross-purposes, but they work—tirelessly and endlessly. As time passes they each gain ground and lose it and gain it once more. Thus even in their nefarious ways do they find themselves riding the more or less predictable tides of ordinary business.
* * *
While they are buried and oblivious, the rest of the world goes on.
Fan and Harry have a child—a rosy-cheeked little villain named Frederick in honor of his grandfather Scrooge. Her mother weeps with joy whenever she sees or even thinks about the child. “Oh, wouldn’t your grandfather just love you to death,” she says, cuddling little Freddy and kissing him as the tears stream down her cheeks. Fan does not disagree with her, although she knows her claim to be preposterous. Her father was a flinty old character, cold as the Thames in February, the last or next-to-last man on earth to go softhearted over a baby—even one bearing his name. But let Mother Scrooge have her fancies. They harm no one.
The old woman comes to help when Freddy arrives. The two of them—the family’s eldest and youngest—share a bright and airy upper chamber with windows all around. The glass is soon smeared all over with Freddy’s fingerprints, a good portion of them laid down while they watch his father marching off to work or trudging back home. She cannot bring herself to banish them with a cleaning rag, and so they build up week after week into a sentimental impasto of milk residue, saliva, and Heaven knows what else.
As the spring ends and the high summer takes hold, Fan and her mother settle into a comfortable routine, re-creating here along the riverfront many of the customs that characterized their lives back in the lanes of London—with the addition, of course, of the baby. In fact, two or three nights a week little Freddy is the only male in the household, for his father often travels to London and Liverpool and elsewhere on missions that keep him away overnight. As the ships of the West Africa Squadron have found their way out of the wharves of England and into the great wide treacherous world—and as they have begun to register triumph after triumph over the piratical miscreants who are the squadron’s sworn enemies—Harry’s duties have expanded. No longer is he focused mainly on the outfitting and manning of ships. With the maturation of the squadron he is called upon to oversee an expanding roster of investigations, court proceedings, and so forth. Having come to his maturity in a life of action on the high seas, he was at first uncomfortable with the change. But with the passage of time he has come to see that all the hard and dangerous work done by the men of his fleet can bear fruit only under careful oversight here at home. Beneath that weight he has grown ever more serious, although the only sign of it visible during his happy moments with Fan and Freddy is a somber shadow behind his eyes.
* * *
Conditions have also changed for Belle, thanks to a gentleman named Arthur Cope. Upon Fairchild’s death, Cope was the solicitor employed by Liveright to oversee the family’s eviction from the rooms above his stables. An unprepossessing little man, compact in his person and plain in his speech, he at first struck Belle as a mere implement of Liveright’s, a thing with no more humanity than a quill pen. But as the proceedings went along he proved himself compassionate—or as compassionate as possible, given the circumstances. Among his kindnesses was an unstated but genuine effort to delay their eviction for as long as possible, and the discovery of some inexpensive but charming alternative rooms which, though a trifle small, suited the displaced family well enough.
He arrived at the door early on the morning of their departure, wearing a workman’s rough clothes and volunteering to help in any way he could. Belle leapt upon him and kissed him through tears, with a startling passion that very nearly launched the little man off the high porch. She hardly knew herself why she did it, but it made all the difference.
Those rooms so jealously coveted by Liveright, by the way, were to remain empty and cold for the rest of the old man’s life. God knows he must have gone to the grave contented.
* * *
Belle and Arthur marry in a year’s time, freeing space in the lodgings kept by her mother and sister and making conditions there more comfortable. Daphne will always tease Belle that Cope recommended such cramped rooms as part of a long and subtle plot to wrest her away from them and into marriage, but Belle prefers to believe that if there was any plot at all it was her doing.
Arthur has always wanted children, and although Belle has not actively considered the possibility she warms to it right away. Motherhood—first the notion of it and then the reality—suits her completely. When she and Arthur have been married for just a year she begins meeting Fan and Freddy in the park with her own little Annabelle. In another year it will be Annabelle and Rebecca. In one more, Annabelle and Rebecca and George. And so on, and so on. Arthur rises in his firm and money is no object and the children bring them nothing but delight.
Arthur suggests they name their fourth after his favorite uncle, a merry old Scot on his mother’s side with a fine arm for the fiddle and a high, powerful singing voice. His name, he says, is Ebenezer J. MacTaggart.
Belle ask
s what the J stands for.
“James,” he says.
“I will grant you James,” she says, her eyes flashing, “but not Ebenezer.”
Which marks the first time he has seen a hint that his bride and Fan’s brother may have crossed paths. Their betrothal has certainly gone unmentioned all these years, not from a desire on anyone’s part to keep it a secret but because the person of Ebenezer Scrooge has all but vanished from the haunts of his relations. Rarely have Belle and Arthur and their brood visited the waterside Balfour residence upon some family occasion (Harry and Fan bought the house a few years ago) and encountered Ebenezer in the flesh. No matter what feast is being celebrated, he has been mostly an absence, a mystery, a minor embarrassment.
“Not Ebenezer, you say?”
“Never.”
“What could you have against the name?”
“It has… bad associations.”
Light dawns. “Surely not with Fan’s brother.”
“Yes. With her brother.”
“Oh, he’s a bit of an old stiff, I’ll grant you that. Not the sort you’d aspire to have your son emulate, I suppose.”
“He once courted me. Long ago.”
Arthur is dumbfounded. “Courted? You? Ebenezer?”
“At the time, it didn’t seem so strange.”
“Why not? Did he have a heart then? Was he made of flesh and bone like an ordinary man?”
“We were in fact to be married.”
“No.”
“He was a different man then. But he changed, and I released him.”
“Thank God for that.”
“It was difficult, Arthur.”
“Difficult? Did he do something to make it so?”
“Oh, no. Sentiment is what made it difficult. Ebenezer only made it necessary.”