The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

  Forster’s mouth fell open.

  “What is this?” Dickens asked.

  “I fear... that’s to say, I suspect, though I can’t be certain, that there might have been a robbery.”

  “Good God!”

  “How do you know?”

  “That is to say, I fear that it might be my son that’s responsible.”

  “What’s the meaning of this?”

  “Your son has robbed me?” Dickens said.

  Cratchit looked at the floor. Tears dropped to the stage. “My Tiny Tim,” he cried. “The shame of it.”

  “What in God’s name has happened?” Forster roared.

  “He’s run away,” said Cratchit. “He’s run away and he’s with Slogger Pike now. Oh, my poor tiny Tim.”

  “Never mind your poor tiny Tim. What about our money?”

  Forster leapt forward and took hold of Cratchit, shaking him till his teeth rattled, and it all exploded. Belle found that she was between them, pushing Cratchit away, and Ira and Fred were holding Forster back. Everyone was shouting all at once.

  “Slogger Pike took him,” Cratchit yelled in despair. “They ran to the Froggery, where they know no police constable will follow.”

  “Forster!” Dickens yelled. “Please contain yourself! Can’t you see the man is distraught?”

  “He’s distraught? He’ll be distraught when he’s in prison right along with his son!”

  “Mr Forster,” Belle said, lowering her voice and speaking calmly, deliberately. “Please remember where you are.”

  It had the desired effect. Forster came to himself and lowered his face, embarrassed, and muttered an apology.

  “Now, Mr Cratchit, please tell us what has happened.”

  Bob Cratchit tugged at his shirt and straightened his cravat. “My Tim was ever so distracted during the show, and I thought it was due to his losing his employment today, when Mr Swingeford sacked him.”

  “Sacked him,” Mrs Aldridge muttered. “At Christmas.”

  “And I noticed he was looking at Mr Forster up there in the box an awful lot of the time. Not that the show wasn’t wonderful. You were all quite brilliant and engrossing to the entire audience... all except my Tim. And when he excused himself to attend the Necessary, I had a bad feeling. I can’t explain it. Like when you know something awful is happening. I went to find him. He wasn’t in the Necessary. So I went outside. He jumped down from a window at the rear of the hotel and ran away. I saw him under a gaslamp, clutching something to his breast. And I saw Slogger Pike take him. They ran off into the Froggery together. My son and that awful man.”

  “Have you ever seen him about this man before,” Dickens asked.

  “No, sir, never! Not my Tim. He’s a good boy.”

  “He’s a thief,” said Forster.

  “I’ve tried ever so hard with the lad,” Cratchit said. “I really have. It’s just with times as hard as they are, I know he feels it something terrible. The shame of our reduced circumstances. I know his employment at Showell’s made him feel better about things, like he was contributing to our family. When he lost that, I feared something awful would happen, but not this.”

  Dickens and Forster shuffled their feet and looked at the stage. “I’m very sorry,” said Dickens. “I feel as if I’m to blame.”

  “Not you, sir. You’re not to blame. I’m his father. Perhaps I didn’t raise him right.”

  “I’m going to the hotel to check on this,” Forster said, “and then to the police.”

  “I beg you,” Cratchit pleaded. “Please don’t report this to the police.”

  “Mr Cratchit,” Forster said, astounded. “A serious amount of money has been stolen.”

  “I beg you. Give me a chance to retrieve the money.”

  “We can’t do that,” Forster said. “A robbery has been committed.”

  “Let me make it right. Let me save my boy. If the police are involved, it’s the end for him. He’ll go to prison, or perhaps even be transported.”

  “That is what happens to common thieves,” said Forster.

  “I don’t want to lose my boy. Let me pluck him out of the depths. Let me save his soul.”

  “I’m afraid what needs to be saved is Mr Dickens’ business and his livelihood,” Forster said, strolling the stage and tucking his thumbs into his waistcoat like a lawyer making his case. “His family rely on that. If that deal is concluded, it is also your family, Mr Cratchit, that benefits, and yours Mr Wilber.”

  “There is that,” said Wilber. “But as welcome as it may be, I do say Showell’s printing house will carry on without your money, Mr Forster, Mr Dickens. There. I’ve said it.”

  Dickens turned away and walked to the edge of the stage, biting his thumb, the crude magician now turned Hamlet.

  “So it’s Tiny Tim that’s at stake,” said Belle.

  “He will surely hang for it,” said Ira Aldridge.

  The women all gasped and clutched their throats.

  “They wouldn’t hang a child,” Forster protested. “He’ll merely go to prison.”

  “Not my boy,” said Cratchit. “He’s a good boy. Just so hurt and angry.”

  Dickens turned and spoke. “Little wonder having to work for that man.”

  “Pah! Any man,” said Forster, pointing an accusing finger at Dickens. “You make your living from these printing houses that print your stories, Charles, and every one of them employs children to sweat and toil for you. Their labour is on your hands. You can’t pretend that your hands are clean.”

  “I’m opposed to that. I supported the Child Labour Reform.”

  “While you engage them in labour. You can’t wash your hands of it.”

  Dickens looked at his hands and wiped them on his coat, even though they weren’t dirty, Belle noticed.

  “Mr Dickens, sir,” said Cratchit, rushing to the author and grasping those hands. “I know you want your money back. It’s an awful lot of money. But I just want my son back. He’s dearer to me than all the money in the world.”

  Dickens pulled his hands from Cratchit’s grasp, smiling with embarrassment and nodding, looking around at all their faces. “I’ll help,” he said.

  “Charles!” Forster yelled. “I simply protest!”

  “The first link in the chain happens in childhood. We’re talking about an innocent child. A child who hasn’t done a single wrong before in his life. Led astray, perhaps even threatened and bullied into this by a villain worse than my Bill Sykes, if the stories are to be believed.”

  “This is not one of your fictions, Charles.”

  “What’s the point of my fictions if a real, living Oliver Twist needs my help and I turn away and let a real, living Bill Sykes take him! What kind of man am I if I let that happen?”

  “I’ll help,” said Fred.

  Everyone turned to the young stranger. He stepped forward into the stage’s limelight glow, a little self-consciously, and patted Cratchit on the shoulder.

  “Me too,” said Fezzwig. “Let me get a chance to wallop that Slogger Pike good and proper. I’ll do it, I tell you. I’ll do it for us all!”

  “And I’ll be by your side,” said Mr Wilber.

  “All for one and one for all,” said Ira Aldridge, grinning.

  “We’ll all help, Mr Cratchit,” Belle said. “How could we not, tonight of all nights?”

  Bob Cratchit burst into tears. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. God bless you, every one.”

  “Come on!” Fezzwig bellowed, snatching up one of his stilts and brandishing it like a cudgel. “Let’s do it!”

  “Wait,” said Fred. “Not so fast. There’s no point rushing to a knife fight only armed with knives.”

  “I have this broom,” Ira Aldridge cried, brandishing it as if it were a spear.

  Yes, Fred was right, Belle thought. They were going into the Froggery, to the Dungeon, to face Slogger Pike and his gang. “Unless we’re going to clean the place for them,
I don’t think that’s going to be much use.”

  “What do you suggest we take?” asked Fezzwig. “A cannon?”

  “I’m speaking figuratively,” said Fred. “We’re running to their manor. They have the edge. Let’s give ourselves the edge.”

  “What can we possibly have that will give us the edge?” asked Mr Wilber, taking off his broken jaw contraption.

  “Fred is right,” said Belle, smiling. “Fools rush in. But we need a plan.”

  — 27 —

  MRS HUDSON LINKED ARMS with Dickens as the troupe walked down the Froggery streets choked up with a dingy mist. She held onto him and he supported her as her boots slid on the icy ground, but there was enough dirt and gravel to make it not so treacherous, and he was young and strong enough to hold her as they walked.

  There were no gas lamps in this part of town. The black house fronts with their white-topped roofs served as street lighting. The sky was black and gloomy, all the chimneys emitting a thick smog, but snow floated in the gelid air.

  Belle and Fred walked together ahead and Mrs Hudson wondered if they were becoming closer. She checked the warmth in her heart. She was supposed to be preventing them getting together, but she couldn’t find any reason for it. There was nothing in her pocket diary to guide her so who knew if it was right or not?

  Forster huffed and puffed behind them, and Cratchit, Fezzwig, Mr Wilber and Ira Aldridge brought up the rear with their props. Everyone carried a lantern, lighting the way through the dark streets, a candlelit procession.

  “What an awful place,” Forster complained. “There no Christmas cheer, not in these mean streets.”

  “Nonsense,” said Dickens. “Listen to that. Even in this slum, the poor take a little comfort of the season.”

  They passed a squalid tavern from which came the unmistakable chime of a carol sung low and out of tune, but with a feeling that could not be denied.

  Forster said, “This isn’t like one of your tours through the rookeries in London, where you hire a constable and go wander the streets to observe the lower side of life.”

  Dickens didn’t seem to hear him. He groaned and muttered, “Why didn’t I—?” He put his fist to his mouth and Mrs Hudson felt him shudder at the violent thought that racked his body.

  “What are you thinking on?” she asked, squeezing his hand in hers.

  “Oh, nothing. There was an old woman at the station this morning. I just wondered where she is right now, and if she’s warm and cared for. I might have given her something. A little something, just to make a difference.”

  “You’re a good man, Charles Dickens.”

  “No, I don’t think I am,” he said with such sadness and so matter-of-factly that she knew it wasn’t false modesty. “I’m envious, cynical, greedy, selfish. Here I am, worried about money, so I put a wall around myself and defend my castle. And they make me blame the poorest of us for this. As if these poor wretches are taking money from me.”

  “Well, they are,” said Forster. “They actually did take your money.”

  “And the vicious gang of robber barons that sit in parliament right now took money from everyone here. That’s the cause of this. This Slogger Pike may be a vile thief and even a murderer but his work is child’s play compared to Sir Robert Peel.”

  “You can’t blame the government for poverty,” said Forster.

  “I certainly can, when they rob us all. And I refuse to succumb to their cynicism. They brutalize us with their callousness. It infects us, till we are as ruthless and uncaring as they are. See how they turn us into monsters.”

  They passed wretched hovels, their broken window patched with rags and paper. Noxious smells came from the cellars, sometimes a blast of something sweet; fruit and sweet sellers concocting their wares.

  They dodged slops emptying from windows, passed boys barefoot playing in the snow. In a basement hovel, they caught briefly the sight of children huddled in bed, their mother reading them a story. Negotiating the winding lanes of the slum, they passed melancholy pawn shops. Rats ran across the street and sometimes it seemed that cellars were teeming with them, squeaking their vile symphony.

  “How amazing is it,” said Dickens, “that misery lives side by side with wanton excess.” He hooked his thumb back towards New Street and its stores where the rich promenaded. “Poor Master Green,” he said.

  “Who?” Mrs Hudson asked.

  “Someone I remember. Someone I left behind once. You don’t know the dirt that was on these hands.”

  Mrs Hudson squeezed his hands extra hard and whispered, “Warren’s Blacking Warehouse.”

  He looked to her with amazement. “But how do you know about that? No one knows about that. Only my father and mother and they never talk of it. They pretend it never happened.”

  She lowered her voice so that Forster wouldn’t hear. “The whole world will know about it one day, Charles. I’ve seen it. Your past and the future. You know that, don’t you?”

  They walked on, just the sound of their feet crumping in the snow, and she thought he wasn’t going to respond.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see it. You have the same power. You’re a ghost.”

  “The living are ghosts to a ghost. It’s all about which end of the telescope you’re looking through.”

  “My shame will come out one day?” he asked.

  “Not shame. No one will judge you for it. The world will see why you have such compassion for the poor, for those who can’t defend themselves, for the children who are crushed by men like Swingeford.”

  “By men like me.”

  “We all play our part if we don’t try to stop it,” she said. “It takes a brave person to know it and change.”

  And even as she said it, she wondered why it mattered. She was intervening. They would help this band of players save Tim Cratchit. Dickens was intervening too. But what did it matter? What did it have to do with her? Dickens was just some writer whose stories her parents read to her when she was a child, and she couldn’t even remember her parents’ faces anymore. The memories all fading.

  Dickens fell silent. They followed Belle and Fred ahead and she wondered what they were talking about as they wound their way through more streets, turning this way and that.

  Belle looked back to make sure they were following, and turned into a dark void between an alehouse and a chapel. The grass was hard with frost and uneven. Mrs Hudson struggled and Dickens helped her over the rough ground. They came out to a grey space, a vast white sheet of snow, dotted with stone tablets.

  A spectral place.

  She squinted in the gloom, trying to work it out.

  A graveyard.

  Their lanterns lit up the gravestones, casting shadows across the gloomy snow.

  “It always gives me a terrible sense of dread, this place.” Belle said. “I don’t know why.”

  She pressed on, and Mrs Hudson noticed Fred held her hand as they tramped through the snow towards a cluster of dark buildings.

  “The chapel is just ahead,” said Belle, “and the Dungeon is opposite. All along this row are the chapel’s almshouses. There are rooms for thirty-five fallen women here.”

  “Wonderful,” said Dickens. “Such a noble enterprise.”

  “Alas, Mr Swingeford revealed this very morning that he’s going to knock it all down. They’re building a railway station here, something more grand and central.”

  “Ah,” said Forster, huffing and puffing with the exertion. “You were only saying this morning that that is what this town needs.”

  “Quite,” said Dickens.

  “All of this will be gone soon,” said Belle. “A giant station here. The largest building in the city, Swingeford said. Imagine it.”

  Mrs Hudson and Fred shared a secret glance. They’d seen it. Mrs Hudson had seen it in three of its guises, and now before it had ever been dreamed up. She looked around her at the grim tenements and the crooked gravestones and tried to imagine which part of New Street Station this w
as. Perhaps where she’d stood last night — this morning? — with the giant Christmas tree in the atrium.

  Belle pushed through the rear gate of the rectory building, Mrs Jowett’s residence, lighting the way through a backyard with her lantern, and they gathered at a door. The tradesman’s entrance. She knocked at a brass knocker whose face was a lion’s head.

  “Shall we sing a carol?” said Mr Fezzwig. “We do rather look like a bunch of carol singers.”

  Steps came to the door and Mrs Cratchit answered. “Miss Belle, it’s you. I wondered what was going on.” Her eyes fell on the troupe of players behind. “Oh my! Whatever is the matter?”

  Bob Cratchit stepped forward. “Dear Emily. It’s about our Timothy.”

  Stark fear wrote it itself on Emily Cratchit’s face.

  Belle smiled and said, “It’s all right. We’ve come to help him.”

  — 28 —

  THE TROUPE PILED INTO the kitchen, so many of them, Belle thought, even though the kitchen was rather large: Mrs Hudson and Fred, Mr Fezzwig, Mr Wilber and Ira Aldridge, Dickens and Forster.

  Bob Cratchit tried to calm his wife, but as he listed all that had happened — her son was missing, and a thief, and he was with Slogger Pike in the Dungeon across the street — the horror of it grew on the poor woman’s face.

  “It’ll all turn out for the best,” Bob said.

  “We’re going to save your son, Mrs Cratchit,” said Dickens. “I promise you.”

  “And if you don’t mind me asking,” Emily Cratchit said. “Who are you?”

  “This is Mr Charles Dickens,” said Bob proudly.

  “The author? The Oliver Twist man?”

  “‘Tis I,” said Dickens.

  “He’s the important gentleman from London I couldn’t name,” said Bob.

  “Charles Dickens. Here,” said Emily, slumping at the kitchen table. “Is this a dream? I fear I’m seeing things and this is all a dream.”

  “Alas,” said Dickens, “It’s all quite real. Your son is in danger but we intend to save him.”

  “Where is Mrs Jowett?” Belle asked.