by Sarah Gray
Scrooge had a very small fire that afternoon of the anniversary of his partner’s death, but the clerks’ fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. They couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room, and so surely as one of the clerks came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerks put on their comforters, and tried to warm themselves at the candle, in which effort, not being men of a strong imagination, they failed. It was Cratchit who seemed to suffer more from the cold than Disgut; at times, Disgut appeared almost to enjoy the suffering.
“A merry Christmas, Bob Cratchit! God save you!” a cheerful voice cried, followed by the sound of the front door closing.
It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, his dead sister’s son, and from his perch behind his battered desk, Scrooge eyed him suspiciously. The young man was always in and out of Scrooge’s place of business, talking with Cratchit, whispering, smiling. Sometimes their talk was serious, but other times there was laughter. What business did a man like Fred have with a clerk? What business did either of them have with laughter? For neither was in a good financial situation.
Fred had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome, his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked.
“A merry Christmas,” Cratchit greeted Fred cheerfully. “Good to see you, sir.” He lowered his voice so that Scrooge could not hear him. “The VSU meeting last night, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but my Tim was feeling poorly. It went well, I trust?”
“Well, I should say, indeed. We had an excellent speaker on the use of the club and the pike. I only wish you could have been there.” Fred rubbed his hands together for warmth, for it seemed colder inside his Uncle Scrooge’s counting house than on the streets. “And there was a report made concerning the nest we believe has been found in Cheapside. A raid is being organized to fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day.”
The Vampire Slayers Union, or VSU as they were known on the streets, was a group of dedicated and courageous men, and the occasional woman, who had joined forces in London to fight the constant infestation of ghoulish vampires. The vampires had been in existence for years, centuries, perhaps since the beginning of time, not only in Transylvania and the sewers of Paris, but lurking in the very shadows of London Bridge and flying from the ramparts and windows of Buckingham Palace; but in days of strife among the common people, they became bolder. It was nothing these days in London for a vampire to swipe a grocer or shoeshine off the street in the shadows of dusk and suck the life’s blood out of him and throw him on a rubbish heap; nothing to find a countess or a knight of the chamber drained to an empty husk and stuffed in a chamber pot.
“You can count me in,” Cratchit whispered, glancing in Scrooge’s direction.
“We know we always can, Cratchit!” Fred clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re the best I know with a sharpened pike and a vampire on the loose. I want you at my side in a raid, I’ll fair say that!”
“What’s that? What are you talking about, Cratchit?” The other clerk peered through his round, smudged spectacles. Disgut was a short, thin, bony man with skin so ivory white that it glowed, save for the dark circles that ringed his orbs. He had an interrogative nose and little restless perking eyes, which appeared to have been given to him for the sole purpose of peeping into other people’s affairs.
Cratchit looked up at Disgut, then back at Scrooge’s nephew, and lowered his voice until it was barely a whisper. “Did you hear of the attack on the charwoman near Charing Cross?”
Cratchit glanced Scrooge’s way, shook his head, and dipped his pen into his inkwell, pretending to concentrate on his numbers. “Found dead yesterday morning on her mother’s door-step, flat as a dead mouse swept from beneath a beer barrel.”
“No,” Fred murmured. “A tragedy. And there was also that lamplighter and his son only two days ago.”
“No,” Cratchit cried. “I had not heard.” Then, upon seeing the stony-eyed gaze of Scrooge, he lowered his head, hunkering over his desk, which was less a desk and more a slab of wood than most. “Do tell. . . .”
“On Fleet Street at Ludgate Hill,” Fred explained. “Only the night before last. He was doing his duty, his son at his side, when both were swept off their feet. A hackney coachman saw it all from his box, but could do nothing to save them. The poor souls. The father was dragged off his ladder and carried behind a venison shop by two beasties in red cloaks.”
“So bold,” cried Cratchit.
“The child, no more than six, was bitten, sucked right there at the foot of the ladder (for no one dared intervene for fear of becoming dessert), and then carried off in a pickle barrel into the tunnels to be finished off at the leisure of another.”
Cratchit gasped. “Six years old? Why, he would be the age of my Tiny Tim. The poor lamplighter. The poor family.” He shook his head, his knit cap sliding this way and that. “I must say, I’ve never known a lamplight, but I hear they are a simple people.” He peered up at the man who he truly considered a friend despite the differences in their social class. That was one thing the vampires had done for London society; it had brought the classes together in order to fight them.
“That is the third lamplight taken in the last fortnight; they seem to like them. Think you, perhaps, the vampires find them tastier than, say, a poulterer or a charmaid?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. I know that they are a strange and primitive people,” Fred observed. “They rigidly adhere to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors. They intermarry, and betroth their children in infancy; I was told the boy was already promised to a gravedigger’s daughter. They enter into no plots or conspiracies (for who ever heard of a traitorous lamplighter?), they commit no crimes against the laws of their country (there being no instance of a murderous or burglarious lamplighter). They are, in short, notwithstanding their apparently volatile and restless character, a highly moral and reflective people, having among themselves as many traditional observances as the Jews, and being, as a body, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as the streets. It is an article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilization shone in the first street-light maintained at the public expense. They trace their existence and high position in the public esteem, in a direct line to the heathen mythology, and hold that the history of Prometheus himself is but a pleasant fable, whereof the true hero is a lamplighter.”
“A tragedy.” Cratchit sighed, glancing into the wavering light of the sputtering candle on his desk.
“Sir.” Disgut interrupted quite suddenly, pouncing off his stool (for he was trying mightily to hear every word, most of which he could not distinguish). For you see, Disgut was not what he appeared to be. But I imagine you have already deduced that morsel.
Actually, Disgut was what he appeared to be: a pale, nosy man with beady dark eyes and dirty spectacles, but he was no ordinary clerk. Did you take notice of my mention that he was hired the very week Marley died, coinciding with the first time Wahltraud made himself visible to Scrooge? Ah, yes, one of the King of the Vampire’s minions he was. Of course! For years he had played spy for Wahltraud, and forever fearing punishment for not being able to repeat every word said in Scrooge’s counting house, he interrupted the conversation between Cratchit and Scrooge’s nephew, afraid they were plotting against the King of Vampires. (Which of course, they were.)
“Would you care to make your way to Mr. Scrooge’s office?” Disgut cut his rodent-like eyes at Cratchit. “We’ve work to do, still, you see.”
“Most certainly. Thank you.” The nephew looked back to Cratchit, even as he made his way through the narrow doorway. “We’ll speak later.” And then he called cheerfully to his uncle, “A merry Christmas!”
“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”
“Christmas a humbug, Uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough. Not as poor as those two.” He pointed an arthritic finger at his two clerks hovering over their desks. “But poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re as rich as your clerks are poor.”
Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again and followed it up with “Humbug!”
“Dear me, don’t be cross, Uncle,” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned he, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money, a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
At the suggestion of a human being boiled in pudding, Disgut perked up his ears, for he was a tragic creature, mostly human, but not entirely, with a taste for human blood. Raw was acceptable; he liked it cooked, on occasion. But boiling a man in pudding seemed a waste, not to mention the possibility of adding unwanted sweet and fat to one’s diet. Boiled in pudding? Disgusting!
Of course, no man in the counting house could have known this little tidbit about the man on the stool pretending to add his figures while listening to his employer’s conversation.
“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.
“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly. “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”
“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time. It is a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. This is the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good. I say, God bless it!”
Bob Cratchit, in the tank, applauded with great gusto; Disgut screwed up his thin face and fixed his black eyes upon his companion. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, Cratchit hopped off his stool, poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark forever.
Scrooge looked Cratchit’s way. “Let me hear another sound from you,” he said, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! Disgut does twice the work of you for less coin!”
It was untrue of course, for Cratchit was a hard worker. Everyone knew it, but no one dared argue with Ebenezer Scrooge.
“You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” Scrooge added, turning back to his nephew. “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”
“Don’t be angry with me, Uncle. And don’t poke fun at me. I am sincere in my wishes. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.”
“What are you having?”
“Sir?”
“You offer a free meal. What are you having?” Scrooge demanded.
“Well . . .” The nephew hesitated. “A roasted joint of pork with potatoes and gravy. I . . . I believe the pork will be stuffed with sage and onion.”
“No goose?” Scrooge questioned.
“No goose,” Fred repeated. “But breads and cheeses and, I believe, grouse pie.”
“And dessert?”
Fred nodded, not entirely sure what the intention of his uncle’s questioning was, but thinking it might be a positive sign. “Desserts, to be sure. Apple and cherry tarts, and butterfly cakes with clotted cream and jam.” Forever the optimist, he looked at Scrooge. “So shall we see you tomorrow?”
“Indeed,” Scrooge said.
“Indeed?” Fred was so excited that he nearly reached out and clasped his uncle’s hand. “We will see you?”
“In Hades!”
Taken aback but not surprised, disappointed but not discouraged, Fred drew himself to his full height. “But why?” he asked. “Why will you not join my wife and me on Christmas Day?”
“Why did you get married?” said Scrooge.
“What has that to do with anything?”
“Why?” Scrooge repeated, narrowing his gaze.
“Because I fell in love.”
“Because you fell in love!” growled Scrooge, as if that were the only thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. “Good afternoon!”
“Nay, Uncle, but you never came to see me before I married Penny. Never once, no matter what was served. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?”
“Good afternoon,” repeated Scrooge, quite satisfied with himself.
Trying not to feel crushed, Fred clasped his hands in a plea. “I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you. Why cannot we be friends?”
“Good afternoon.”
“I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humor to the last. So a merry Christmas, Uncle!”
“Good afternoon,” replied Scrooge, drawing the sides of his coat more closely to ward off the cold . . . and perhaps, unbeknownst to him, the cold-eyed stare of his clerk Disgut.
“And a happy new year!”
“Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.
His nephew left the room without an angry word. He stopped at the outer door to bestow a final greeting of the season on the clerks. Disgut pretended not to hear the nephew, but Cratchit, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge, offered a merry smile and a word of good cheer.
“There’s another fellow,” muttered Scrooge, who overheard him. “My clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. The day I see any reason for him to be cheery, I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
5
Cratchit, in letting Scrooge’s nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now, with their hats off, passed through the tank. Disgut, who seemed relieved the nephew was gone, perked up with interest again.
“Whatever are they doing here?” Disgut asked Cratchit quietly, though not so quietly that they could not hear him.
“I’ve no idea. It’s not my place to ask, nor yours,” Cratchit answered, showing them to Scrooge’s office and then returning to his perch.
The visitors had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.
“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”
“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”
“I am so sorry,” said one.
“No doubt so was he,” Scrooge replied, his tone as dry and stale as bread crumbs swept across a baker’s floor.
The gentlemen looked at each other and one cleared his throat as if to prod the other on.
“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,”
said the one presenting his credentials.
It certainly was, for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge after a blink and a pause.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen.
Scrooge’s bushy white eyebrows rose, almost as if of their own accord. “And the union workhouses?”
“Have you ever been to a workhouse, sir?” asked the more portly of the two gentlemen, though both appeared amply fed. “Do you know what workhouses do to the body and soul? Do you know what the faces of the citizens of the workhouse look like?” Guessing at the answer, he went on before Scrooge could reply.
“While having not previously stepped foot within the walls of such a place, it was my duty last Sunday past to attend service in the chapel of a workhouse here in London, one holding near to two thousand paupers.”
Scrooge looked at him without so much as a fleck of emotion.
“Among this congregation were some evil-looking young women, and beetle-browed young men, but not many—perhaps that kind of character is kept away. Generally, the faces (those of the children excepted) were depressed and subdued, and wanted color. Aged people were there, in every variety. Mumbling, blear-eyed, spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame; vacantly winking in the gleams of sun that now and then crept in through the open doors, from the paved yard, shading their listening ears, or blinking eyes, with their withered hands, poring over their books, leering at nothing, going to sleep, crouching and drooping in corners. There were weird old women, all skeletal within, all bonnet and cloak without, continually wiping their eyes with dirty dusters of pocket-handkerchiefs, and there were ugly old crones, both male and female, with a ghastly kind of contentment upon them which was not at all comforting to see. Upon the whole, it was the dragon, pauperism, in a very weak and impotent condition, toothless, fangless, drawing his breath heavily enough, and hardly worth chaining up. These are the souls I have recommitted myself to giving aid.”