X is for Xmas

by Carla Coupe

  Another silence. Then the voice, tentative now, as though pondering, said, “Fezziwig. Arthur Fezziwig.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Of Fezziwig’s Chandlery, supplier of goods to His Majesty’s Navy during the French wars.”

  Tim knew quite well the name of Scrooge’s former employer, Belle’s father. Again and again had the old man spoken of the Christmas parties held in Fezziwig’s warehouse, of how much joy he and his fellow apprentice Dick Wilkins had found there, of how Belle had refused to dance with anyone but young Ebenezer Scrooge—difficult as it was to conceive of a man so withered by age ever being flush with youth. What Tim did not know was whether Mrs. Minnow or her spirit guide meant to name Scrooge’s employer as one of his ghosts.

  “If Arthur Fezziwig is one of my benefactor’s friends,” Tim asked, “then who are the other two?”

  “Fezziwig’s Chandlery,” said the voice. “Christmas Eve. A pudding soaked in brandy and set ablaze. A sprig of holly. The gleam of gold.”

  Tim leaned forward and the spongy hand in his drew him back. Mrs. Minnow’s own feminine voice said, “You have had your answer, sir.”

  “But.…” Tim began, and then stopped, sensible of the other ears ranged about the table.

  A wobbly note of music sounded near the ceiling of the room, not the last trumpet, certainly, but one that was near to expiring. Again the male voice spoke from Mrs. Minnow’s lips. “There is someone here who has recently lost a beloved brother.”

  The gentleman with the luxuriant whiskers stirred and spoke. “Yes, yes. Dreadful accident it was, the poor soul burned to a cinder in his rooms.”

  “Spiritous liquors,” intoned the ghostly voice. “Fumes and fire.”

  Resisting the urge to inquire just which liquors were consumed by spirits, Tim retired into his own thoughts. If Scrooge’s partner Marley could return from the grave to assist him, then why not Arthur Fezziwig? That, at least, Tim could credit. But a pudding garnished with holly, and the gleam of gold—if those were clues, they were maddeningly slender ones.

  Fezziwig’s Chandlery, though. There was a place, a time, and a person. While Tim very much doubted he had any answers as yet, he now had more specific questions.

  * * * *

  The gleam of sunlight on the new-fallen snow made even the dirty, dingy streets of London shine as brightly as the streets of heaven. Each windowpane seemed to Tim to be gilded like the illuminated manuscripts in Lord Ector’s library. Soon it would be Christmas yet again.

  Passing beneath the weathered old signboard reading Scrooge and Cratchit, he opened the door to the counting-house offices. There was his father, sitting at his desk, a ledger book open before him. Tim remembered how thin and careworn the man had once been, for many years supporting his family on fifteen bob a week, until at last Scrooge had his change of heart, raised his salary, and in time made him a full partner in the firm.

  Now it was his hair that was thin, above a face lined with age, not care. Still, Tim could not remember a time when Bob Cratchit had not displayed a cheerful and confident disposition.

  “It does my heart good to see you, Tim,” said the old man, greeting his son with a clap on his shoulder. “Why, but for Mr. Scrooge I might not have you to see, and for that I am grateful not only at Christmas Eve, but on every day of the year. How fares our benefactor?”

  “Not well. I fear his days have grown short.”

  Bob’s face contracted to a pinpoint of sorrow and resignation mingled. “I wish there were some service we could render him, here at the end.”

  “There is,” said Tim, and acquainted his father with Scrooge’s request, and with the step he had already taken to fulfill it.

  Bob tossed Tim’s tale from thought to thought, then said gravely, “I remember when Scrooge saw Christmas merely as the one day of the year he could turn no profit. It was that same fateful Christmas Eve that I heard him say, ‘If I could work my will, 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 tempted fate, then,” said Tim, “and summoned the spirits with his own words.”

  “And yet, just what spirits were they? A fine question, an apt question. Surely, to have had such a profound impact on Scrooge’s disposition, these ghosts were indeed friends and acquaintances, as you suggest.”

  “No, as Mrs. Minnow and her spirit guide suggest.” Tim looked about the offices, shabby still. His gaze settled upon the ledgers mounting higher and higher up a tall shelf, until the topmost row of books made a veritable Himalayan peak of dust and cobwebs. “What happened to Arthur Fezziwig, Father? His business failed, didn’t it?

  “Yes. With the defeat of Napoleon and the ending of the French wars the demand for his goods dropped away, and new means of production superseded the old ones to which he clung, as we all cling to that which is familiar. Fezziwig died impoverished in wealth but not in spirit, or so I heard.”

  “Aha,” said Tim.

  “Scrooge, I believe, considered his employer’s fate to be a cautionary tale, and so made his fortune not by selling goods susceptible to spoilage and changes in taste, but by dealing in properties and making loans. Always he felt the shadow of insolvency looming over him, even though he had funds enough to buy and sell a business like Fezziwig’s Chandlery ten times over.”

  “Could it be, then, that Scrooge’s engagement to Belle Fezziwig was broken off because her father had been unable to bequeath her a dowry?”

  “I believe so, although I doubt if even Scrooge at his most avaricious would have stated that so bluntly.”

  “Did Belle ever marry?”

  “Oh yes. After his miraculous transformation—and if ghosts or spirits were instrumental in that transformation, then it must truly have been miraculous . . .”

  Tim smiled his agreement.

  “…Scrooge asked me to seek her out, to discover if she needed his assistance. But it was too late.” Bob sat down in his chair, frowning slightly and drumming his fingertips upon his ledger. “What was her husband’s name? Oh yes, James Redlaw. He called in here one night, a full seven years before Scrooge’s metamorphosis, seeking to borrow against his property and thereby pay his debts. But that was the night Jacob Marley lay at the point of death. Redlaw revealed a greater delicacy of feeling than Scrooge himself by going away without transacting his business.”

  “So Belle’s husband also found himself a broken man?”

  “Not only in finance, but in health—he died the next year, I’m told. In losing her father and then her husband, Mrs. Redlaw was obliged to support herself and her daughter on very little income. I can only suppose, then, that she despaired of this world and all too soon was taken up into the next.” Bob shook his head sadly.

  “When you went searching for her, you discovered that she was dead.”

  “Yes, and under most unfortunate and mysterious circumstances, although I don’t know the full story. When I acquainted Scrooge with this fact, he said something about having seen her in his vision, well and happy with her family, and so he hoped that she was, indeed, in that bourne from which no traveler ever returns.”

  “Well then,” said Tim, properly saddened by the circumstances, and yet, at the same time, wondering if his clue had disintegrated in his hands like the ashes of a Yule log on Boxing Day. “What of Belle’s daughter?”

  “I believe she went into service, as a governess in the house of Sir Charles Pumphrey, the financier.”

  Another man of business, Tim thought. The gleam of gold did indeed illuminate his quest, although what the blazing pudding illuminated, he had not the least idea.

  Still, perhaps he had made some progress. If Arthur Fezziwig had been one of Scrooge’s spirits, then perhaps his unfortunate daughter Belle had also been. “I shall pay a visit to the Pumphrey ho
usehold,” Tim told his father.

  “Very good. And may I suggest you also call on your brother Peter? The lawyer with whom he has partnered himself has worked for many years with properties, deeds, and wills—although I hope to heaven they are not chaining themselves behind him, as they did to poor Mr. Marley. There you may well learn more about the Fezziwigs and the Redlaws than I can tell you.”

  “Then so I shall.” With a firm grasp of his father’s hand—strange, how that hand was growing so increasingly frail—Tim settled his hat upon his head and his feet upon the icy pavement.

  * * * *

  At the sound of feminine footsteps, Tim turned away from the black marble chimneypiece and its clock enclosed by a glass dome, as though time, like a jewel displayed in a shopkeeper’s window, were a valuable commodity allotted only to those who could afford it instead of meted out to all humanity, to use or abuse at will.

  “Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Redlaw?” Tim asked the elegant woman who entered the parlor, the white square of his card seeming tarnished against the alabaster of her hand.

  “I was once Miss Redlaw,” she answered. “Now I am Mrs. Pumphrey. You are fortunate, Mr. Cratchit, that the servant who answered your knock has been in our employ long enough to know my former identity.”

  So the governess was now mistress of the house, Tim told himself. Had she married the Pumphrey’s only son, and so restored herself to the position in life to which she had been born? Such an event seemed likely—her face and form, even in mature years, held just such a blushing beauty as he had always envisioned in Belle Fezziwig’s. But that was one question he saw little chance of asking.

  He sank onto the chair that Mrs. Pumphrey indicated. When she had spread her voluminous skirts across a horsehair sofa—which movement released a scent of spring lilac into the air—he identified himself, detailed his family’s relationship to Ebenezer Scrooge, sketched out Scrooge’s story of the three ghosts, and recited the results of his researches so far.

  Save for a slight creasing of her brow, Mrs. Pumphrey’s delicate features did not move for several ticks of the mantelpiece clock. Perhaps, Tim thought, she would condemn him for his effrontery in asking questions about her family. Perhaps she would order the servant who had seen him here to show him hence.

  At last her pink lips parted. “I commend you for visiting Mrs. Minnow. She has afforded me invaluable assistance by contacting the spirit of my grandfather Fezziwig, who is as hearty on the astral plane as he was here on Earth.”

  Tim made sure Mrs. Pumphrey did not notice the quick relaxation of his posture, and the sigh of relief that escaped his throat.

  “As for my mother and father—well, as you perhaps already know, there is a tragic story. How it cheers me to know that they, too, are well and happy in the great beyond!”

  “And perhaps Mr. Fezziwig and Mrs. Redlaw,” Tim hinted in Scrooge’s words, “after working kindly in this little sphere of earth, find their mortal life too short for their vast means of usefulness.”

  “Yes,” she said, coloring prettily, “I do believe so. You see, Mr. Cratchit, my mother regretted breaking her engagement to Mr. Scrooge, because, she said, if she had been his wife she could perhaps have modified his miserly ways. And yet if she had been Mrs. Scrooge, she would never have been Mrs. Redlaw.”

  “It is a paradox,” said Tim.

  “But that was my mother, always thinking of others even when her—when our—position became dire. After my father passed over, Mother and I were reduced to the income from one rental property, a public house, and the interest from several India bonds. Still, though, there were others less fortunate then we, and Mother made sure that what we little we had, we shared.”

  Tim, having told himself that the ladies’ income had no doubt been greater than fifteen bob a week, now congratulated himself for not stating this aloud.

  “We took lodgings in a house owned by Dick Wilkins. Is that name familiar to you?”

  “Why yes,” Tim said, sitting up straighter. “Was he not one of Mr. Fezziwig’s apprentices and a boyhood friend of Mr. Scrooge’s?”

  The lady nodded, setting her curls to dancing. “That he was. Grandfather Fezziwig helped Mr. Wilkins establish a weaving mill, dyeworks, and clothing manufactory, which first supplied uniforms to our troops fighting the Corsican, Bonaparte, and then went on to provide ready-made clothes to all classes of folk. While Grandfather’s business failed, Mr. Wilkins’s prospered. As an old family friend, my mother was quite pleased when he offered her lodgings in his house.”

  “He rented out rooms?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Pumphrey said, a slight edge entering her voice. “By this time he owned many properties, and lived with his wife Theodora—a foreign person she was, with the exotic beauty of a gypsy—in a house that had once been a lovely villa, but which he had subdivided into many small flats, the better to turn a profit, I believe.”

  The gleam of gold, Tim repeated to himself, but said nothing.

  The edge in Mrs. Pumphrey’s voice was taking on the sharpness of that serpent’s tooth mentioned in Scripture as belonging to a thankless child. And yet neither she nor her mother, Tim thought, was the person of whom she was thinking. “Mr. Wilkins persuaded my mother to sell him her properties and bonds, in return for which he guaranteed her an annuity for life. The bargain was fair, she felt. What she did not realize—what none of us mercifully, realize—is how soon one’s life can end.”

  “What happened?” asked Tim, dreading her answer.

  “My mother was found burned to a cinder, in her bed one Christmas morning.”

  Tim searched for some appropriate response, and found only a simple, “I am so very sorry.”

  Mrs. Pumphrey looked down into her lap, where her fair hands—white as the garment of the first ghost—were tearing Tim’s card into shreds. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins put it about that my mother, in her despair, had turned to drink, for such spontaneous burnings do happen to those besotted with alcohol.”

  With spiritous liquors, thought Tim, realizing suddenly that Mrs. Minnow had been speaking not only to the gentleman with the whiskers but to himself. He should, no doubt, have kept an open mind and paid closer attention.

  “My dear mother, though, while having her moments of despair, was still inclined to the positive outlook of the Fezziwig disposition, and took only the occasional glass of sherry.” The lady lay the shreds of the card upon a marble-topped table and folded her hands. “Yes, Mother suffered from a cold that Christmas Eve. Mrs. Wilkins provided a counterpane from her own storage chest for Mother’s bed, and smelling salts to clear the congestion in her throat that had rendered her speechless. But Mother took no drink, not one drop beyond the brandy soaking her portion of plum pudding.”

  “Was there an inquiry made?”

  “The police made a brief inquiry, but brushed the matter aside, wishing to spare my feelings, they said, and those of the Wilkins family.”

  “But you suspect the Wilkins of taking some action to bring about your mother’s death?”

  “Indeed, while manifestly Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins profited by my mother’s death, there are no means by which they could have accomplished it. I myself saw my mother alive, if not well, when I carried her pudding into her room on Christmas Eve, and I myself was breakfasting with the Wilkins’ on Christmas morning when the maidservant came rushing in with her terrible intelligence.”

  Tim eyed the lady’s bowed head with its trembling curls. So Belle had indeed died in unfortunate and mysterious circumstances, as his father had heard. Now he understood, with ghastly certainty, why it was that Scrooge’s first ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Past, had appeared illuminated by a flame.

  Collecting herself with a little shudder, Mrs. Pumphrey turned a wan smile upon her guest. “You may well ask, Mr. Cratchit, whether I have ever inquired of my mother, through Mrs. Minnow’s spirit guide, exa
ctly how she came to die.”

  Yes, Tim might well have asked that, had he not been reluctant to disturb the lady’s sensibilities even further.

  “To that, I can provide no answer, for my mother has spoken only of flames shooting suddenly up, and of merciful oblivion. I have more than once chided myself for not staying with her that evening, and yet there were guests downstairs and she gestured, smiling, for me to join them, and then, still smiling, reached for her bedside taper to light her plum pudding and make her own solitary celebration.”

  Tim sat in silent horror at the scene that rose before his eyes.

  Clearing her throat, Mrs. Pumphrey went stoutly on, “I take great comfort in my mother’s present happy circumstances, no matter how difficult was her transition to them. And in her name my husband and I have provided for many charities.”

  The parlor door opened, admitting a young woman so fair, so charming, that her mother with all her comeliness seemed reduced to a crone before Tim’s eyes. He stared, then remembered his manners and leaped to his feet.

  Mrs Pumphrey’s eye glittered perhaps from unshed tears, or perhaps from maternal calculation. “Mr. Cratchit, may I present my daughter Annabelle.”

  “Miss Pumphrey.” Making his most accomplished obeisance, Tim wondered if—Annabelle, what a lovely name—if she heard the sudden twang of Cupid’s bow just as surely as he did. And yet how could he dare hope that such a lovely, nay such a stupendously beautiful, young lady could look with favor upon him?

  She curtsied, the color rising past her exquisitely formed lips into her cheeks. A rose would surely have hung its head in shame at a comparison. “Mr. Cratchit,” she said, in a voice resembling the song of a lark, “I trust you’ll forgive me for listening outside the door. I am most impressed by the compassion of your quest, and would assist you in any way I can in its fulfillment.”

  Tim would have forgiven her for plunging a dagger into his heart. “Perhaps,” he said through his teeth, quelling a stammer, “you will permit me to call upon you again, so that I may share with you my discoveries.…” What discoveries he made, he told himself. If he knew she was waiting to hear them, he would make them, no doubt about it.