Mr. Dickens and His Carol

by Samantha Silva

  Some days are blessed with a feeling of newness from the start. Dickens blinked open his eyes the next morning at Furnival’s Inn to find an undeniable lightness in his heart. He wiggled his toes into slippers and walked to the window to see if London felt the same. The fog, at last, was in full retreat, rolling away in curls and wisps to make space for a clear winter sky. A light frost settled on the rooftops outside, whose narrow chimneys puffed with the warm fires of humble lives.

  Still in his nightshirt and stocking cap, he pulled on a robe and lit a fire, sat at his writing table, and pulled out a single sheet of paper, struck by the pure possibility of its blankness. The lost book was forgotten; here was a fresh beginning, a second chance. He filled his lungs and closed his eyes, surprised to find his mental museum just where he’d left it, corridors stacked high, shelves overflowing. When he opened them, he dipped his pen into the blue inkpot with precision and purpose. Then Charles Dickens began to write.

  He wrote without coffee, without breakfast, without washing up. Without any sense of day or night passing outside—neither noon nor three nor eight o’clock, nor two more rounds of each. He slept in tiny snatches, and woke still writing in his head, the quill often clutched in his hand.

  Jacob Marley was dead to begin with, still dead as a doornail, but now he would mark a path to his old partner’s salvation. Dickens’ own spirit awakened, too, his mind on fire. It was fueled anew by Scrooge, Fred, Fezziwig, and Cratchit; an old love who’d been lost, doors that close and open, and the ghosts of one’s own past, inescapable as they seem; and Christmases that once were and are, and might be again. Now he knew who and what they all were and why, almost beyond thought, in the fullness of his reborn heart.

  When he came within a stone’s throw of finishing, Dickens couldn’t bear to say good-bye to his story. He had written fast before, but never like this. He washed his face, dressed, and cantered all the way to Eleanor’s lodging house, where he knocked on the door with a cheery rap-rap-rap, his manuscript held to the breast of his coat.

  “I’ve nearly done!” he declared, when she greeted him at the door.

  “How happy that makes me.”

  “But found I no longer wanted to be alone,” he added, making his appeal.

  “Then I welcome your company,” she said, stepping aside to let him in, “but Timothy is his own master.”

  “What? He’s yet to forgive me harassing him through the streets like a madman and accosting him in his own house?”

  “He has his own way with the world.”

  Dickens nodded. She led him upstairs, where a fire in their small hearth bathed everything in warm light. Timothy sat at the modest table, drawing in his sketchbook with the last possible stump of black pencil. Eleanor said nothing, but gave Dickens a nod of gentle encouragement. He crept toward the table and crouched to the boy’s level, still holding his stack of new pages. Timothy kept his eyes fixed on his drawing.

  “I wonder if I might share your table with you, Timothy?”

  The boy pressed harder with his pencil, saying nothing.

  “I can see that you’re hard at work. But I promise to be quiet as a mouse. Why, you shall hardly know I’m here.”

  Timothy shrugged a shoulder. Dickens took it as invitation enough. He enacted a relieved sigh and walked to the other side of the square table, just big enough for two. “Well, if you insist,” he said, making a show of sitting in the other pine chair, which wobbled on a broken leg and threatened to topple altogether. “I see what you mean. That won’t do at all.”

  He stood and carried the little tufted armchair to the table. He settled into it as if it were the finest seat known to man. “How right you are. Yes, this chair does me very well. It fits just as a chair should fit. And arms! How fortunate a chair to have arms. And legs as well! If only it had a head, I should think it would do the writing for me!”

  Still nothing from Timothy, more rough lines and rubbed shadings. Dickens placed his elbows on the table, folded his hands under his chin, and watched the boy draw with quick sharp strokes. He studied the tossed scruff of hair, the soft lines of the boy’s face that hadn’t yet claimed its true jaw, freckles here and there, a smudge of lead, a smidge of dirt. He felt an exquisite sympathy for the boy, but didn’t know entirely why. He was poor, but he was loved.

  Eleanor blinked her approval. Keep trying, her eyes told him. So he turned back to Timothy. “You know, there’s a young boy in my new story. Who takes somewhat after you.”

  Timothy tucked his chin into his sweater until its rough woolly edge tickled the tip of his nose. Dickens squinted and screwed up his lips to make an exaggerated point of examining the boy’s features. He rubbed his chin. “Oh, my. Now I see that I’ve stolen you whole cloth. My Tiny Tim is you.”

  The boy pulled his chin from his sweater.

  “Oh, you don’t mind, do you? I tried other names—Thomas, Theodore, Thaddeus—but nothing suited him quite like your name. He’s small, like you. But large in presence.”

  Timothy looked at Dickens, but not straight in the eye. Eleanor nodded again, urging their visitor on.

  “In fact, if you hadn’t nearly trampled me in the churchyard, I’d have had no new book at all!”

  The boy blushed. The dimple on his left cheek dented enough to suggest there might be a smile somewhere to be had.

  “And that drawing of yours, of me like a ghost in the graveyard? Inspired again! So I threw in a spirit for good measure. What do you think of that sort of thing, Timothy? Are you yea or nay for it?”

  Timothy shrugged again.

  “What harm can come of a ghost?” Eleanor added, speaking for them both.

  “I’m so glad you approve,” he told Timothy. “I’ve in fact thrown in a few.”

  “The more, the merrier!” said Eleanor, amused.

  Timothy smiled at last, a small crescent moon. The boy was a copy of her, in all good ways and measurements—the proportionate forehead to chin, the fine round cheeks, the rosebud mouth, the way his eyes did all the work for his face, showed gladness, worry, relief. They shone together, mother and son, reflected in each other’s light. The indelible link between parent and child moved him greatly.

  He leaned over the table and cocked his head to look at the drawing, albeit upside down. He could make out the beginnings of a family—a large family—around a simple table. He pointed to one of the children.

  “That one there, the tall girl. That could be my Mamie.”

  Timothy put his pencil down.

  “Looks like it from here, anyway.” Dickens watched the boy study his own sketch for a good while, as if trying to see what he saw. He made a gesture of reaching toward it. “May I?” he asked.

  The boy bit his bottom lip and then, with small, smudged fingers, slid the sketch across. Dickens took it and turned it right side up. He studied it long and hard. “Hmm. Oh, no. Now that I see it up close she’s far more like my Katey, with those fat sausage curls…”

  The boy scooted back his chair and, with the help of the little crutch, limped to the other side. Dickens pointed to a young boy in the drawing. “Oh, but this one. This one here is Walter, only Walter would have lots more freckles, and a dimple like yours, only on the right cheek, just a little higher.”

  Timothy rested a hand on his shoulder and leaned a little against him. It was a small gesture, as natural and unthinking as could be. How often his own children had done the same, that simple tenderness. He looked at Eleanor, who seemed to see it, too. Dickens carried on, not wanting to lose the moment. “Whereas Frank would have mussy hair and a sucking candy in his mouth, and sticky fingers, always sticky fingers…”

  His voice trailed away. He was suddenly overcome with missing his own children, each one in turn. But how grateful he was for Timothy’s light touch on his shoulder. He patted the boy’s hand, just that, so as not to scare him away with sentiment. But he could barely speak, trying to hide a hundred feelings. “Sticky, sticky fingers…”

  It was s
omehow enough. Dickens and the boy soon settled at the table, one on each side, like old working partners. When Eleanor announced she had to go to the theater, she asked Dickens if he would stay to watch over him until she returned, and he was glad to accept. When she left, Timothy barely looked up. He sketched on, front and back of each sheet, right to the edges, until his stump of pencil ground to black dust. Dickens wrote until his hand hurt, then wrote some more. When night fell, Timothy lit a small candle for him, then wrapped Dickens’ borrowed coat around his own little shoulders and curled on the floor near the fire.

  Dickens carried the tufted armchair back to its place by the hearth; it might be a comfort to the boy to sit near him. He had a thick sheaf of pages on his lap, and thought to read back through them. But he was soon asleep himself, head dropped to one side, mouth open. He stirred once, not quite sure where he was. But when he found Timothy resting against his calf, asleep, head on his knee, everything came back. He watched the reassuring rise and fall of the boy’s sparrow chest in his too-big shirt. How he missed the soft breath of sleeping children.

  When Eleanor returned, she thanked him with her eyes and took his place in the chair. Picking up his things, Dickens found, tucked beneath his manuscript, the boy’s finished sketch: a family at Christmastime, all the children so like his own, with Timothy there, too, enjoying a feast with a bulging roast turkey at the center, big enough to feed them all. They were a poor family, but beamed with happiness, rich as kings.

  What a gift it was. Dickens held the drawing to his chest, aware that Eleanor was softly humming a carol to her son, her hand hovering over his crop of hair so as not to wake him. It was an old song, from childhood—a hymn that had long ago found a special place at Christmas, then lost it, then been resurrected, though hardly anyone could remember what it was called; its words were always half forgotten, mostly mumbled or rearranged. Still, no one ever forgot the lovely tune. Eleanor sang in a whisper, slower than he remembered it, but his ears perked to her dulcet notes. He hugged his pages and gazed out at the waxing gibbous moon, humming along to himself.

  Then, filled with the dearness of her simple carol, he bade mother and son a silent good-bye, and left, alone, to finish where he’d begun.

  39

  Dickens couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to. The end was too near, close enough to touch. With Timothy’s sketch occupying a proud place to the right of his ink and nibs, he wrote feverishly through the next afternoon, racing for the end of it, the final stave, now that the last of the three spirits had shown Scrooge his own grave, and dwindled to a bedpost. Ebenezer Scrooge was waking to a new world, a new self, tears still wet on his face. For a miserable pinchpenny who had long made a business out of men, he now knew that his business was all mankind. Dickens wept and laughed and wept again.

  “Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in! ‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!’ Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed.”

  Dickens felt restored as he hadn’t in days, weeks, was it months, could it be years? He wrote churches that rang with lusty peals, made the air outside Scrooge’s window fogless and jovial, his fellows blithe and good-humored. His streets and people, children and beggars, houses and windows gave his once-miser so much happiness, he thought they both might burst. And burst they did.

  “‘I don’t know what to do!’ cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath … ‘I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man.’”

  Eating a stale crust of bread, Dickens wrote a fine surprise for “nephew Fred” with Uncle Scrooge knocking at his Christmas door and nearly shaking his arm right off. The turkey for the Cratchits would be twice the size of Tiny Tim, and the boy would live, he would, and be loved. As for Bob Cratchit himself, Dickens made Scrooge determined to catch him late coming to the office the next day, and when he did, pounced on him, only to double his salary and pledge help for his family, whatever was needed, all to be decided over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop.

  Dickens’ pen lost speed. He had arrived at the finish, lingering over the final few words of his book. He had put all phantoms to rest forever except for the spirit that infused his being and radiated outward. It had no end. It lived in the wispy feather of his quill, the wavy grain of the pale birch desk, the abalone dusk outside. The world was whole and had every color in it.

  Then, with great care and purpose, he dipped his quill and, while at it, wiped his own wet cheek with the heel of his hand, clear-eyed, to write the final words of his Christmas book.

  Dickens laid down his pen. There was a frisson in finishing, a rush of great feeling for the life of his characters, all the Cratchits and Fezziwigs, Fred and his wife, and Scrooge most of all. He didn’t want to say good-bye; he wanted to keep them close, where he might watch over them. But he knew that the end of his book was a beginning of their life without him, and he must let them be born into the world, and welcomed, as he felt sure they would be. Still, how grateful he was to have known them at all.

  He stacked the pages edge to edge, corner to corner, humming the carol Eleanor had sung to her son. It popped into his head just then; he closed his eyes and tilted his face to the ceiling to stretch the moment a little further, to let the song sing to him. How glad he was that carols were the thing again, after being stamped out by the Puritans two centuries ago. They’d survived in the hearts of the people, sung in secret, but had returned, of late, to their rightful place in church choirs, on the streets, house to house. Village tunes were commandeered, new carols written, old ones revived. Songs of pent-up praise and joy on the lips of every man and woman, no matter their class; all the children, well dressed and ragged, knew the words.

  A knock at the door. Dickens opened his eyes, pushed back his chair, and stood, full of new life. He picked up the stack of pages and reached for his coat. “Yes, come in! Come in!” he shouted cheerily through the door, more into his coat than out of it.

  The desk clerk poked his head inside. “Pardon, Mr. Scrooge, we’ve some payin’ customers for the museum,” he said, hardly believing it himself. “All the way from Ireland!”

  Dickens buttoned his last button and waved them in. “Of course! I was just going out.”

  The Irishman and his wife shuffled in behind the clerk, as if entering hallowed space. Dickens guessed they were a pair nearing the winter of their years together. They were the sort who begin their couple-hood quite distinct from one another, but grow into one—the same fleshy jowls and ruddy cheeks, spidery veins on their noses, craggy laugh lines emanating from the drooping corners of their eyes, as if they’d shared all the same jokes in all the same measure, and had done for years. The man stood, taking in the room.

  “Please,” said Dickens, gesturing. “Nothing sacred here. Look anywhere you like. It’s just as he left it. So they say!”

  Dickens winked to the clerk as he said it. The Irishwoman leaned in to scrutinize his face, nagging the sleeve of her husband’s coat until he looked, too, at the full fact of the man standing before them. The wife pinched her husband’s arm.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” said the Irishman, taking a small step toward him, “but … you’re not ’im, are ye? Boz ’imself?”

  The desk clerk exploded with a giggle, nudging and pointing at his tenant. “Charles Dickens? Don’t ’e wish!”

  But the Irish couple held their breath, awaiting his answer.

  “I am,” he said, surprised to hear himself say it. “I am Charles Dickens.”

  The desk clerk’s jaw slacked open. He looked at Dickens, took off his glasses, and squinted. The woman’s hands flew to either side of her round face. The man slid his hat from his head and crushed it to his heart.

  “Ooh, I not ounly want to thank ye fer yer books, sir … but fer the light you’ve been in me ’ouse (and God love yer face!) this many a year!�
��

  Dickens tilted his head in a smallish bow, with the sort of humility he hoped would mark a place in the Irish couple’s memory for the rest of their years, as they’d just done for him. And then, with his hat on his head, on his own hair, own forehead and face, and his new book under his arm, he left Furnival’s Inn to find the muse that had led him back to it and, doing so, led him back to himself.

  40

  The night was an embroidery of stars on a taffeta sky so blue it bled all the black away. No more drab-colored December fringed with fog. The eve of Christmas week burst into the world, clear and dry, the streets one continuous blaze of ornament and show. Even the lesser thoroughfares were crowded late with holiday people all dreaming of the celebration to come. Shops sat in their best trim under bright gaslights turned all the way up, with evergreen plumage four stories high, like a great forest canopy. There were great pyramids of currants and raisins; brown russet apples and golden bobs, Ribston Pippins and huge winter pears; towers of jams, jellies, and bonbons; solid walls of sardines, potted meats, bottled pickles, drummed figs. Every third-rate inn and public house still pushed its “never-too-late goose-and-brandy club.” Even the gin shops had brushed up and varnished over their dirty paint on the outside and decorated their insides with hopeful smatterings of red and green. Over grappling horses’ hooves, roaring drivers, and chaffering dealers, rose the harmonies of an oboe, French horn, and flute, warbling a pastoral Christmas tune.

  All of London seemed set upon suffering gladly a sprinkle of brotherly this and that, but cheer most of all.

  Dickens walked with Eleanor at his side and drank it all in. The throngs dwindled and fell away, but they wandered on, soon feeling themselves the last two people awake. He felt a steady calm in her presence, the utter absence of his customary restlessness. His stride was an easy match for hers. There was no question of keeping up or falling behind; it was shoulder to shoulder, soul to soul, the whole time. He told of his bright hopes for the new story, rolled tightly and tucked in his pocket, how he looked forward to delivering it to the printers in the morning, but wanted her to be the first to hear it, and Timothy, too. Eleanor spoke dearly of her late husband, how good a man he was, a patient father, how he taught his son to read, how much books had meant to him. Twist had been his favorite until Nickleby came along, but it was The Old Curiosity Shop that nursed him through his first bout of illness, until Little Nell, whom he loved dearly, met her own demise, which propelled him, determined, from his sickbed for another three months. But they were glad months, and not to be traded for all the gold in the world.