Christmas Carol

by Speer, Flora

  “Nicholas!” The cry tore from her lips like the wail of some lost soul consigned to the outer regions of darkest hell.

  “Oh, Carol,” murmured Lady Augusta, “you do not yet understand. There is more … so much more still to come….”

  Part III

  Christmas Present

  London, 1993

  Chapter 7

  The cold draft blowing around her feet wakened her. At first Carol sat perfectly still in the old wing chair next to the dead embers of the previous night’s fire while she tried to remember where she was. Her body was cold and stiff, as if she had been sleeping in the same position for a long time without a blanket. Confusion filled her mind, making clear thought difficult.

  When she noticed a faint gray light coming in around the edges of the windows, she got up to push aside the curtains and look out on the little square in front of Marlowe House. The fog was gone, the sky was sunny, and the brightly colored lights on the Christmas tree in the square glittered as the branches moved in the morning breeze. A few early risers walked purposefully across the square. They were wearing twentieth-century clothing.

  “What has happened?” Turning from the cheerful outdoor scene, Carol surveyed her dingy, unattractive room. “What am I doing here? I should be in the blue bedroom, with Penelope just next door. This must be a servant’s room, but why am I in it?”

  Not until she flung open the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall did her memory begin to return. Looking down the hall she could see the wall that, since soon after the end of World War II, had divided the once-spacious Marlowe House into two smaller houses. The blue bedchamber—Lady Caroline Hyde’s bedchamber—lay on the other side of that thick wall, one level down from where Carol presently stood.

  “Was it all a dream? But how could it have been when it was so long and so detailed?” Deep in thought now, though still confused, Carol went back into her room and closed the door again. “It must have been a dream. Anything else is impossible. Lady Augusta’s ghost? Ridiculous. I don’t believe in ghosts. No sensible person does. Something I ate must have upset my stomach. Spoiled food can cause nightmares.”

  A half-eaten bowl of chicken soup sat on the table beside the wing chair, a thin, blackened slice of mushroom floating on top of the broth. Upon lifting the domed metal lid from over her dinner plate, Carol discovered a congealed mess of cold chicken and vegetables. The untouched wedge of apple tart did not look much more appetizing. Carol quickly replaced the dome.

  “If I didn’t eat any of my dinner, then it can’t have made me sick,” she reasoned. “I don’t recall ever hearing of an empty stomach causing bad dreams. More likely, it would keep me awake. So, what did happen here last night? Was it last night? Or have several days passed?”

  She sank down into the wing chair again, thinking hard, trying to remember every detail of her sojourn in the early nineteenth century. There had to be a rational explanation for the events she was able to recall in such vivid detail. Lady Augusta’s ghostly late-night appearance … Penelope … Nicholas—

  Nicholas. Pain flowed over her, grief and a terrible loneliness filling her heart. In the midst of lingering confusion she was sure of only one thing. The emotion she felt for Nicholas was real.

  “Nicholas,” she whispered. “Oh, my love. My dear, lost love.” Tears poured down her cheeks. She did not bother to wipe them away. She cowered in the wing chair, seeking comfort in its familiar shape. She did not stop crying until Nell, the chambermaid, knocked at her door and entered, bearing a tray with Carol’s breakfast on it. Then Carol hastily wiped her face on the sleeve of her bathrobe and sat up a little straighter, trying to appear more composed than she actually felt.

  “Are you up already?” asked Nell in surprise. After a closer look, she said, “No, you’re up still. You haven’t been to bed, have you? You’ve been sittin’ in that old chair all night long. Oh, miss, you’ll catch pneumonia or something worse if you don’t keep warm.”

  “I am not sick. I am just a little chilled.” It was all Carol could do to make herself respond, but she did not want to worry the maid. Nell had done everything she could to make Carol’s existence at Marlowe House a pleasant one, and Carol knew she hadn’t been very nice in return. For the first time, she felt guilty about that.

  “You just drink your tea now, and eat something, and you’ll brighten right up,” Nell advised. “A nice, hot bath will help, too,” she added, pouring out a cup of tea and handing it to Carol.

  As she looked at the maid through the rising wisps of steam from her tea, it seemed to Carol that Nell was remarkably like Ella, the maidservant who had been taking care of her for the last few days.

  “Nell,” Carol asked, “what day is today?”

  “It’s Wednesday,” Nell responded, “the twenty-second of December. Just three more days till Christmas. I shouldn’t wonder if you’ve forgotten what day it is, with everything you’ve been doing lately, seeing to Lady Augusta’s care and then arranging for the funeral and all that.”

  “The funeral,” Carol repeated. “Nell, did you or anyone else in the house see or hear anything strange last night?”

  “What do you mean, strange?” asked Nell.

  “Just unusual sounds, or perhaps someone who shouldn’t be here,” Carol said.

  “Like an intruder? No, Crampton saw to all the locks as soon as the funeral guests left, and he turned on the alarm system. You know how Lady Augusta was about using that system. She thought she was going to be robbed and then murdered in her bed if it wasn’t turned on every night, and Crampton isn’t likely to change old habits now.” Nell paused, and Carol thought she went a little pale. “Why do you ask, miss? Did you see something? My old grammie used .to say that sometimes the ghosts of people recently dead come back to their houses just after their funerals. They aren’t quite ready to go to heaven yet, you see, or to the other place, either. Can’t blame them for that, I say. Heaven’s bound to be strange for most people after livin’ on earth for years, and as for the fires below—well, who would want to go there at all?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what it was I thought I saw and heard,” Carol said. “Perhaps it was just the wind.”

  “There wasn’t any wind last night,” said Nell, “only the clear sky and one or two stars. But after all, you can’t expect to see many stars with all the city lights shinin’ so bright, can you?”

  “I must have been dreaming, then,” Carol said, unwilling to continue the conversation. Nell claimed the previous night had been clear, but Carol distinctly recalled a thick fog. And she had heard the wind. “I was so tired that I fell asleep in the chair and, as you guessed, I never did get into bed.”

  “That uncomfortable old chair would give anyone bad dreams,” Nell agreed. “You take my advice, miss, and have a nice soak in a tub of hot water.”

  “Ill do that,” Carol promised. “I am planning to be out for most of the day, so would you tell Mrs. Marks I won’t be here for lunch?”

  “I’ll tell her.” Picking up the dinner tray, Nell left Carol to her usual breakfast of tea and a plain roll.

  After eating, and after indulging herself with a long, hot bath, she did feel better. Upon entering her bedroom from the bathroom down the hall, Carol took a good look at the place where she had been living for years. Until this morning the decor of her room had suited her mental state, but now she saw that it was filled with depressingly worn and faded furnishings.

  During her brief stay in the nineteenth century she had been learning all over again to appreciate comforts she had once taken for granted. After her father’s bankruptcy, and especially after his suicide, she had given up elegant furniture, good clothing in pretty colors, fresh flowers, music, the theater, and all other material pleasures as if she were a medieval monk putting on a penitential hair shirt. She had reacted to her father’s misfortunes and to his death as if she were the one to blame for them.

  Now, sensibilities newly awakened to the pleasures of Lady C
aroline Hyde’s daily existence made Carol chafe at the lack of beauty in her own life. Recalling Lady Caroline’s blue and white bedchamber, her finely made gowns, her rose perfume, and most of all, the frequent sight of Nicholas’s broad-shouldered form attired in perfectly tailored clothing, Carol heaved a deep sigh.

  “Nicholas, your presence in that borrowed life was the greatest pleasure of all. If I had known that living without hope of ever seeing you again would hurt so much, I’m not sure I could have given you up. No, not even for your own good.”

  The slightly musty smell of her room, to which she was so accustomed that usually she did not even notice it, suddenly irritated her beyond enduring. Carol flung open the windows, letting in cool air and watery December sunshine.

  “How could I have lived like that?” she muttered to herself. “After I started working for Lady Augusta, I wasn’t completely without money. I could have bought a few pillows or a new comforter to brighten up my room, or treated myself to a restaurant dinner once in a while.”

  Standing by the window, she gradually became aware of the spring-like warmth of the weather. The sun and the pleasant temperature drew her like a magnet. She took her unattractive but serviceable old brown coat out of the closet and, after a last glance around her room, headed for the outdoors.

  On her way out of the house Carol hurried past Lady Augusta’s suite on the next floor below her own room. Nell was busy cleaning and had the door and all the windows thrown wide. There was just the faintest trace of lavender perfume borne on the fresh breeze blowing through the door and into the hall.

  “I’ll have this suite spit-and-polish clean by the end of the day,” Nell called, catching sight of Carol. “Then, when Lady Augusta’s missing nephew finally gets here, he’ll have a nice place to sleep. These are the best rooms in the house. Lady Augusta was stingy elsewhere, but she kept her own rooms in good shape, at least till she got so sick at the end.

  “Go on now, miss,” Nell urged when Carol hesitated as if she would enter the rooms. “You’ve been indoors too much lately, takin’ care of Lady Augusta for all these weeks. Get some fresh air and sunshine and go for a nice long walk like you used to do and you’ll sleep better tonight than you did last night.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  As she started down the great staircase toward the entrance hall Carol paused, overcome by memories and seeing Marlowe House with eyes in which the past and present flowed together in a thoroughly disorienting way. The black and white checkerboard floor in the hall remained the same, but the hall itself now looked pathetically small to her. Just the day before, she and Penelope had come down these same steps together, laughing and planning a day of shopping, each of them secretly hoping to encounter a beloved man during their excursion to Bond Street.

  Carol had to fight back the urge to pound against the wall that cut the hall in half. She had the oddest feeling that if she could only break down that wall, or in some way pass through it, she would find on the other side of it the people she loved and the life she had been living for the last few days.

  “Not days,” Carol reminded herself. “One night. That’s all the real time it took for me to fall in love.”

  Even as she stood at the foot of the staircase, glaring at the wall with one fist raised as if to strike it, her common sense reasserted itself. In the other half of Marlowe House there currently lived a businessman with his wife and two small children. Nothing waited for Carol there. Nothing.

  With Crampton not in sight, Carol opened the heavy front door herself and stepped outside. Pausing on the top step to catch her breath and steady her nerves, she recalled Nicholas bringing her home and acting so terribly proper in front of Lady Augusta’s butler, though he had just been doing the most wonderful, outrageous things to her in the privacy of his carriage.

  With as much strength of will as she could muster, she told herself that all of it had happened one hundred and seventy-five years in the past. If it had happened. If what she thought she remembered was not a dream.

  “No,” she said aloud, her voice breaking a little. “I know it was real. I would never feel this loss and this aching sensation in my heart if it were only a dream. The emotions I experience when I have been dreaming last for a few minutes, or for an hour at most, after I wake up, and then they disappear. These memories are growing stronger the more I think about them. It really did happen. I love Nicholas and I will never see him again. I have to accept that. I have to learn to live without him. The trouble is, I’m not sure I can.”

  Consumed by memories of Nicholas, Carol spent the day walking around London while she looked for sights familiar to her in that previous time. The glittering, present-day Christmas decorations she saw everywhere mocked the sorrow she felt and made her yearn for the simpler evidence of the holiday season in the lost world of Regency London to which she longed to return.

  She saved the most important spot for last, walking to it from Bond Street as she had walked to it on an afternoon so far in the past, yet in her mind and memories only twenty-four hours earlier. Getting there was easier today. She was wearing her sensible walking shoes and there was no ice or snow to impede her. She found the right street at once, but Nicholas’s house was no longer there. Pretending she was a college professor doing research on the Regency period, she stopped an elderly, well-dressed man and asked him if he knew what had happened to Montfort Place.

  “I know the house you mean,” the man told her. “I remember this area from my childhood. It was a very different neighborhood in those days. The original buildings on this block were bombed into rubble during World War II. You do know about the Blitz?”

  “I do.” The lump in her throat prevented further speech.

  “You must be terribly disappointed not to find the particular historic house you wanted to see,” said the old man. “But there are other interesting spots in London still surviving from the Regency period.”

  When Carol nodded and thanked him, he passed on down the street, leaving her to stare at the uninteresting modern building that now took the place of the lovely white house in which she and Nicholas had once made love.

  “So long ago,” Carol sighed, “and yet only yesterday for me. Oh, Nicholas, why can’t I feel your presence here? Where have you gone? Into the afterlife with Lady Caroline, I suppose,” she said, answering her own question sadly. “You are dead now—grown old and feeble, dead and buried more than a hundred years ago.” Unable to bear that thought, she hurried away to walk unseeing through the busy streets until the early December twilight brought her ramblings to an end.

  Her way back to Marlowe House in late afternoon took her past a small florist’s shop. Just as she reached it the shop door opened to discharge a customer. The scent of holiday greenery mingled with the fragrance of roses wafted outward to Carol’s nose, stopping her when she would have hurried by. Once again, memory assailed her. The drawing room of Marlowe House had smelled like that long ago, on a day shortly before Christmas.

  “Perhaps spending money on flowers isn’t a waste after all,” Carol said to herself. “How much I enjoyed receiving the bouquets that Nicholas sent to me.”

  Irresistibly drawn by the sight of numerous containers within, all filled with bright flowers, and by the sparkling white and green display of miniature Christmas trees in the window, she entered the shop. There she purchased a few red roses and some evergreens. Then, acting on an impulse, she also bought a red glass bowl of paperwhite narcissus bulbs set in white pebbles. The buds at the top of each stem looked ready to burst into bloom.

  When she reached Marlowe House it was almost dinnertime. Carol did not use the front door. Instead, she pushed open the gate in the iron railing at the front of the house and went down the outside stairs into the sunken area where the servants’ entrance was. Opening the old-fashioned, glass-paned door, she stepped through the tiny vestibule and thence into the kitchen. The cook looked up in surprise at her unexpected appearance.

 
; “Good evening, Mrs. Marks,” Carol said. “Would you have a small vase I could use for these flowers?” Carol looked around at what were obviously preparations for the holiday. Certain spicy aromas suggested that gingerbread was in the oven, and two fine, high loaves of white bread were cooling on a rack. A second rack held a batch of cookies onto which Mrs. Marks was just sprinkling red and green sugar. Hettie, the scullery maid, was busy chopping celery and onions.

  “I suppose we could find something. Hettie, put down that knife before you cut off a finger and go see if you can locate a vase in the everyday china closet.”

  Mrs. Marks was, as always when dealing with Carol, polite but not particularly pleasant. Carol had long suspected the cook of disliking her. It had never bothered her before, but for some reason on this evening the cool glance Mrs. Marks gave to the flowers in her hand irritated Carol.

  “Actually,” Carol said, pulling back the wrapping a bit and holding out the flowers, “I bought them for the table down here. Nell told me you are planning a Christmas feast and I thought you might like a centerpiece.” She had thought no such thing while purchasing the roses, intending them for her own room.

  “Oh, ain’t they pretty?” Hettie returned from the china closet with a vase. “I do like red and green together. So Christmasy. Thank you, Miss Simmons. They’ll look ever so nice on our holiday table, where we can all enjoy them.”

  “The feast we are planning,” said Mrs. Marks in a repressive tone of voice, “will not take place for two days yet. These flowers will surely be dead by that time.”

  “If they are,” Carol replied, seeing Hettie’s face fall at this prediction, “then I will go out and purchase another bouquet.”

  “You could eat with us on Christmas Eve,” Hettie suggested, oblivious to Mrs. Marks’s scowl of disapproval. “I know Nell has asked you, ‘cause she told me so.”