The Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Andy Conway

  Died 1822

  How curious, Fred thought. Mrs Hudson had said her name was Susannah too.

  Swingeford let out a little snort of disgust. “You think you can appeal to my sentimentality. I do not look backward into the past. I look to the future, always, my gaze set firmly on the horizon, on tomorrow. Those who dwell in the past are prisoners to fate.”

  “You fear the world too much,” Mrs Jowett said. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”

  “Who is this?” Mrs Hudson asked.

  “There lies the poor woman Ebenezer Swingeford abandoned,” said Mrs Jowett. “The poor girl he ruined.”

  “I would have married her,” Swingeford said, “But it was not the right time. It conflicted with my ambitions.”

  “That poor girl died giving birth to your child, Ebenezer.”

  “I didn’t know she was with child at the time. You know that. I am not to blame.”

  “You didn’t care. You used a poor girl for your own pleasure and then abandoned her. She fell and landed in the workhouse and you washed your hands of her.”

  “I didn’t know she was—”

  “When she told you, you cared nothing for her. She died in childbirth, and with her everything that was decent and kind in you also died. Yes, I saw what man you were back then and there was some good in you. But you became bitter. You walked on through life resenting it and amassing money, as if that would absolve you. You became a monster, Ebenezer.”

  “And this is why you wish to sunder my proposal?” he said. “This is why you seek to prevent me marrying Miss Belle.”

  Mrs Jowett shook her head and gave a sad little laugh. “Oh, Ebenezer, you still do not see it.”

  “I remember it,” Swingeford snarled. “Twenty years ago this night. And you wonder why I spit on Christmas and your season of goodwill. My greatest mistake lies there, that woman and that child, and yes, the railway in which I invest shall come and wipe away all of this, but I will not care if their bones are swept away by progress.”

  “What a magnificent monster is this,” Dickens said, almost in awe.

  “You are wrong,” Mrs Jowett said. And here she smiled the painful smile of a fatally wounded man who knows he has won.

  “I’m glad you defend me, sister.”

  “I don’t,” said Mrs Jowett. “He’s absolutely right: you are a monster. But it is you who are wrong, Ebenezer. Your child does not lie in this grave.”

  “What do you mean? I buried them both here.”

  “You buried poor Susannah Bell. Not your child.”

  “What is this humbug?”

  Mrs Jowett nodded and her smile soured. “Your child is not there.”

  She raised a bony finger and pointed at the grave. Everyone followed that finger as it moved from the grave and traced a slow arc through the cold air, past Swingeford, past Fred, Mrs Hudson, Dickens and Forster, and settled on...

  Belle.

  “There is your child.”

  They all looked from Belle’s astonished face to Swingeford’s. The blood seemed to retreat from his cheeks, till his lips became pale. He stared dumbfounded, looking from his sister to...

  His daughter.

  “What lie is this?” he spluttered.

  The blood came rushing back to his cheeks, so violently he moaned in pain and clutched his heart. He fell to his knees as if to get a closer look at that gravestone, as if those few sad chiselled letters might reveal the truth.

  “Dig it up if you must, Ebenezer. You will only find your wife’s bones there. Your child lives and stands before you.”

  “No,” said Swingeford. “This cannot be. You lie!”

  Belle clutched her throat. “This is my mother?” she said. “This is my father?”

  Fred put his arm around her shoulder and felt her sink against him. And for a moment it felt as if he was falling with her. He shuddered and snapped back to the moment. He was flitting. That old familiar feeling — the same as all those times he’d flitted through time before and come back to his present. A sickening vertigo. Not now, he thought. Let me stay here, with her.

  “You see, dear brother,” Mrs Jowett said with a glint of malice, flashing like a knife. “Not everything that was good in you died; one thing survived and lived on: your daughter.”

  “This cannot be,” Swingeford moaned, with a sickening low of horror, rather like he might have sounded had he lost his entire fortune.

  “You haven’t seen it at all, have you? So much did you put her behind you. Your attraction to this girl is a memory of her that is dead. Doomed to repeat your ghastly mistake over and over again. A man truly in Purgatory.”

  “You knew this?” Swingeford spat, a thread of drool falling from his mouth. “All these years you knew this was my daughter? Why did you not tell me, damn you!”

  “You wanted no daughter! You wanted nought of this shameful episode. You detached yourself from this poor woman and her fate lest she drag you down into the Froggery with her. So desperate were you to climb out of the pit, you stood on her face and she fell into the abyss.”

  “You evil woman. What have you done?”

  “I raised your child and saved her from the worst of this. I will not see you further ruin her.”

  “God damn you!”

  Swingeford rose and stumbled towards Belle, one hand reaching out. She cowered away from him and Fred stepped before her. Swingeford stumbled past them, grasping cold air, and scrambled on and on and didn’t stop. He fled into the night, howling, his feet crumping in the snow, threading a path through the gravestones. He left no trail of blood in the snow but staggered like a man who had been mortally wounded and might fall any moment.

  His pathetic form disappeared into the gloomy silhouette of the chapel, as if it were the gateway to Hell, the black mouth of the Inferno.

  A coachman cracked his whip a carriage rattled away into the night.

  Forster mumbled, “This is like something from one of your stories, Charles. I always thought in real life there weren’t these threads that bind us all.”

  “Oh, we are bound to everyone,” said Dickens.

  Belle gazed on the sad little gravestone. It seemed none of them could take their eyes off it.

  “All my life, I thought my mother threw me away, and now I know she died bringing me into this world. It was your brother who cast her aside and me with her. And it was you who covered up the crime.”

  “What I did, I did for the best,” Mrs Jowett said. “I did it to protect you.”

  “To protect your family name.”

  Mrs Jowett went to Belle, holding out her hand.

  Belle shrank away and into Fred’s embrace.

  Mrs Jowett looked at the cold ground and nodded and gave out a sad sigh. “I was wrong,” she said. “I was wrong about everything.” Without another word, she turned and trudged back to the chapel.

  They watched her lamplight fade through the darkness. A swirl of snow and then she was gone, faded into the darkness like a ghost.

  “Did you see his face?” said Dickens. “Swingeford’s. Such a sledge-hammer blow.”

  “And to poor Belle too,” said Mrs Hudson.

  Belle buried her face in Fred’s chest and he held her tight. The Holly and the Ivy was playing on the wind. He looked around to see where the tune came from. A brass band echoing on the cold night air. He felt the ground tilt again. He was falling.

  “I feel...”

  “Fred?” Mrs Hudson said. “What is it?”

  He felt Belle tighten her grip on him, though he was falling, the starry sky spinning all around him. That familiar swooning vertigo.

  “Not now!” he heard himself cry, his voice disembodied, as if it came calling from across the graveyard.

  His legs buckled under him and he fell into the yawning black hole of a grave.

  — 32 —

  MRS HUDSON’S HEART dropped to her feet. Belle and Fred had shimmered in blue f
or just a moment and then faded. They were gone. God knows where. At best, he’d taken her with him to his own time. At worst, he’d cast her into some other time and she was lost. For a moment Mrs Hudson calculated the odds of reaching her, casting out a signal to find her, but it was like throwing a message in a bottle on the ocean waves. Futile. She had no strength for it.

  “What happened?” Dickens said. “They’ve vanished.”

  “There’s an awful fog coming in,” said Forster.

  A thick mist all around. It had come from nowhere, swirling around their feet and burying the sad little gravestone that had guarded poor Belle’s secret and utterly destroyed Ebenezer Swingeford. And her own name carved there. Susannah.

  Her soul lurched and she reached out to steady herself.

  Charles grabbed her hand.

  “No,” she said. “You shouldn’t touch me. Not now. Not when this is happening.”

  “You’re faint,” he said.

  She was falling.

  The air changed around them, like Mr Wilber’s magic lantern show, the backdrop melting into a new vista.

  Snow beneath their feet, but they weren’t in the graveyard anymore. The giant Greek columns of the Town Hall towered above them. They were standing in the little square before Christ Church, under the gas lamp.

  “What magic is this?” Dickens asked. “We have been transported across the city in a moment?”

  “Not through space,” Mrs Hudson said. “Through time.”

  “But the theatre is just down there. I can see the portico from here.”

  “Look,” Mrs Hudson said. “Over there.”

  She pointed to the corner of the Town Hall that jutted into the cramped square. A poster on the wall there.

  Dickens stepped off the little island at the centre of the square, testing with his toe first, as if he might fall through the snow, as if the ground was ephemeral and this was all a dream. He crept over to the corner of the Town Hall and Mrs Hudson went with him. There, in large letterpress block type, it read:

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Public reading of his famous Christmas tale

  On the nights of 27th, 29th & 30th December, 1853

  They had travelled eleven years into the future.

  Dickens bent down to read the smaller print at the bottom. “On the 30th December all seats except the side galleries to be sold at a fee of sixpence to enable the working man and woman to gain admittance.”

  What was it she had to do here? Mrs Hudson thought, looking all about her for clues.

  She recalled the old library. Not the beautiful old Victorian library behind the Town Hall that hadn’t been built yet, but the Central Library, the Brutalist concrete inverted ziggurat that had replaced it in the 1960s. She had gone there. A memory of acres of orange carpet and fluorescent strip lights. She’d asked a young librarian about Charles Dickens. When did he come to Birmingham? The question had seemed very important to her.

  A young librarian with red hair. She knew her. Oh, what was her name again?

  “What is it?” Charles asked.

  “Oh, there was something I remembered. Something to do with you and when you came here. I was looking it up. The answer was very important to me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  Katherine! That was her name. Yes, the librarian who’d become a friend. Of course. Katherine had the ability too. She’d travelled in time. That was why Mrs Hudson had befriended her. They had worked together to solve mysteries, correct time breaches and save lives.

  A dark shadow passed over her heart.

  Something had gone wrong with Katherine. Something in the future or in the past. If only she could remember what it was.

  Shouts up the street, from the darkness where the old library used to be. Would be. A commotion of calls.

  A woman came running out of the darkness. Men chasing her. Shouts and cries.

  The woman sprinted past.

  It was...

  “Katherine!” Mrs Hudson shouted. “Katherine, my dear!”

  The girl ran on, but glared at her name being called.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  Katherine ran on past her and disappeared down the dark hill of Pinfold Street. The chasing pack of men in uniform gave up and walked back.

  That frightened glare. The poor girl. Katherine hadn’t recognized her as she had never seen Mrs Hudson before.

  Yes, she’d told her that first time, in the old library. I saw you by the Town Hall. There was a poster for a Dickens reading. It was a slum.

  That was the moment Mrs Hudson had always known was yet to come. And here it was, at last. There were no more moments foretold to her.

  Imagine not knowing anything about your future.

  It suddenly felt a very lonely and uncomfortable place to be.

  She turned to find Dickens was gone. Where was he? She’d dragged Charles Dickens eleven years out of time and now she’d lost him. Where would he go?

  Her eyes fell on the poster. To see his talk. Of course!

  But there were two of them. What if he met himself? She had to stop him!

  She ran under the arched walkway at the front of the Town Hall and turned into the warmth of the reception hall.

  There were no ushers guarding the tall doors to the auditorium. They were crowded around one open door all peering in themselves.

  Charles was there, peeping over their heads.

  She came to his side, sighing with relief.

  Through the gap in the giant door, the hum of humanity. The sense of a great sleeping presence. Every seat taken, all along the stalls, and up on the balconies that ran the length of each side. Thousands of people staring with rapt attention at the stage. Under the giant cliff face of the great organ, one man in an evening suit and purple waistcoat stood at a lectern. Unmistakable even at this distance. His untidy hair, wild and flowing around his shoulders and with a rather large moustache. She fancied she could almost see the blue of his eyes.

  He was half way between the Charles beside her and the old man on the ten-pound note, just beginning to develop that grizzled look.

  His voice soared through the air. “Scrooge was better than his word! He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim... Who. Did. Not. Die...”

  A sigh of relief, like a giant in slumber.

  “... he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

  It was as if not a soul of the thousand or more people in there dared to breathe. Even the ushers crowded in the door did not stir.

  “Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”

  One of the ushers sensed their presence behind him and glanced back at Dickens, the smile still fixed on his face. He looked back at the stage and then did a little double take. Didn’t this man look an awful lot like the man on the stage?

  “He had no further intercourse with Spirits,” the great voice called out, rising to a crescendo, ”but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God... Bless... Us... Every... One!”

  He raised his glass to them all and the audience let out a great sigh, and then there was an explosion of cheering, clapping, shouting, acclamation. It was a roar that almost lifted the roof right off Birmingham Town Hall.

  The man on stage took a step back as if
the roar that was unleashed was a shot that had wounded him. Then he gathered himself and grinned, mopped his brow with a handkerchief and bowed.

  The roar went on and on and on and on.

  “Good God,” the Charles Dickens by her side said. “Just look at it.”

  The ground lurched and she had only a moment to feel herself slipping. She grabbed hold of Charles’ hand. An usher turned to them and his face froze into an astonished O as she disappeared.

  — 33 —

  FRED’S ONE THOUGHT was to hold onto her and not let go. Not to save himself, but because he knew, even as he fell, that he was falling into the future, a future that was beyond her own life. He knew, even as he fell in darkness, that he was going back to his own time. He knew, as he fell, that the spell that kept him in her time was broken, and that if he let go of her, he might lose her forever. Lose her in time.

  The graveyard behind the Connexion chapel off Peck Lane disappeared and he landed on hard stone, a jolt through his knees, holding onto her and protecting her from the worst of the fall.

  In a cloud of fog, he leapt to his feet and pulled her up, standing dizzy and disoriented.

  The rising of the sun and the running of the deer...

  People rushed by and Belle cringed into him. The fog cleared and Fred saw that they were on a train station platform.

  Belle looked all about her in wonder and up at the vast glass vault.

  New Street Station. They were on a platform at New Street Station.

  Fred laughed. They were on the exact same spot. This was where Susannah Bell’s grave had stood. And this was the station that Swingeford had threatened to build. The graveyard was gone, the chapel, the Dungeon, all the streets of the Froggery replaced by a grand, central station.

  A woman pushed past in a broad hat and a long coat that fell mid-calf. Like the women of his childhood, before the skirts became shorter and the hats smaller. She looked them up and down and smiled, clutching her little boy in a sailor suit, hurrying on.

  A brass band playing at the foot of the wooden staircase, all dressed in Dickensian costumes.

  “Don’t let go of my hand,” he said.