by Jon Clinch
“Instead of pining away for roast chicken, they should be remembering their lessons. Pythagoras ate no meat, and he gave us mathematics.”
“Pythagoras, sir?”
Blood rushes to Drabb’s face. “Do you boys retain nothing of your education?”
“No more than we’re taught, sir.”
The professor selects a child at random, a small one, harmless and half-starved, and he takes him by the neck with one meaty hand. Were he to lift him into the air and shake him as a cat shakes a mouse in its final throes these silent children would be unsurprised, for all of them but Scrooge have witnessed such violence before. But he only draws him close, studying him through bulging eyes and breathing upon him the hot and fetid breath of one who has just risen from a week in bed. The child seems prepared to withstand anything, suffer anything, confess anything. If he were made of wax, he would melt.
Overcome with disgust, Drabb flings the innocent toward the boy in charge. “Have this ungrateful little ruffian go out and slaughter my supper,” he says. “Perhaps he’ll remember that.”
* * *
Ebenezer’s instinct is toward anonymity, and it proves to be his best defense. At least a dozen other boys claim to have never crossed paths with Drabb at all—there are legends of some who spent entire careers here, arriving as little more than babes and exiting as fully fledged members of the criminal class—without the professor ever learning their names. These few, along with the occasional child who might sicken or die or otherwise wash out early, are the lucky ones.
Young Ebenezer is seated alone in what passes for the library one December afternoon, working out a long series of sums in the dying light, when his comfortable invisibility threatens to collapse around him. The development comes at the hands of Jacob Marley.
“You won’t like this,” says the boy, closing the door behind him and thrusting an official-looking document between Ebenezer and his calculations. The top of the page reads Sweedlepipe & Steerforth, Solicitors, and the scrawl at the bottom would seem to be the signature of that same Sweedlepipe himself. Everything in between is the work of a professional scribe with a hand far superior to his employer’s, and both its penmanship and its intent are terrifyingly clear. Sweedlepipe and Steerforth, acting on behalf of Mr. Elias Stump, the farmer whose acreage lies beyond the hedgerow to the south of the Academy, are filing a lawsuit against Professor Drabb “for damages committed upon Stump’s property including but not limited to the breaking of six (6) windows, the destruction of one (1) outbuilding by fire, and the loss of two (2) prize geese through means unknown—such damages having been committed in person by a youth in Drabb’s charge, one Ebenezer Scrooge.”
Ebenezer is speechless.
“Be glad the professor hasn’t seen this yet,” says Jacob. “He’d have your skin.”
“But I had nothing to do with—”
“Of course not. No one did. Stump does this every now and then. Hires a lawyer, makes up a charge.”
“Why?”
“He hates Drabb like poison. He’d see the place closed down if he could.”
“But he can’t think he’ll win.”
“He lives to torment the professor, that’s all.”
Ebenezer shakes his head, marveling at the pig-headed meanness of some people. He feels positively vindicated.
“Still, the problem remains,” says Jacob, running one finger along the text of the letter. “Your name is on the suit.”
“I cannot imagine why.”
“No one knows how Stump chooses his targets. He works in mysterious ways. He does like to go after the weak, though—and you happen to be new.”
“Just my luck.”
“The trouble is, there’s not a single boy left here who’s ever been named in one of Stump’s lawsuits.”
“Sent home, were they? I’d be happy to be sent home.”
“Oh, they weren’t all sent home.” He picks up the letter and folds it and restores it to its envelope. “They’re just not here anymore.”
“What became of them?”
Jacob carries the envelope to the grate and puts a flame to it. It bursts alight and dies without warming the chamber the slightest fraction of a degree.
“What was their fate, Jacob? The other boys?”
“Never mind them,” says Jacob. “Just be glad that we keep watch for these letters. Those of us with more experience owe it to the rest of you.”
Naturally, he has a plan. He assures Ebenezer that it has worked many times before, saving the skin of any number of boys imperiled by Stump’s phony charges.
“We must settle the case,” he says.
“Settle?” says Ebenezer.
“Settle.”
“How?”
“The usual way. With money.”
“Six windows,” says Ebenezer, working the damages out in his head, “plus an outbuilding, plus two geese…”
“Two prize geese, at that.”
“It would come to a fortune!”
“We must make every effort. Your life depends upon it.”
“No.” Ebenezer sags. “It’s impossible.”
Jacob presses a steadying hand upon his shoulder. “Your father must have resources.”
“He employs most of them to keep me here.”
“Then you shall write to him, and plead to be brought home at once. I shall cover your tracks with Stump and Drabb and the solicitors until you are well beyond their reach.”
“No,” says Ebenezer. “Father would think me at fault.”
“Well, his punishment surely would be lighter than Drabb’s.”
“Perhaps. But in the end he would send me off someplace even worse than this.”
Jacob sighs a long sigh as he taps his forehead with a finger. “Do you receive some small monthly stipend? Some kind of allowance?”
“It is but a pitiful amount.”
“Then we shall make an offer. We shall work out terms.”
“Repayment could take years.”
“Consider the alternative,” says Jacob, opening the library door to let himself out. “Now, you must leave it all to me. I shall handle the correspondence in my role as Professor Drabb’s secretary, and we shall have you off the hook in no time—God willing.”
* * *
The post is slow and erratic. Weeks pass with no word from Marley beyond the occasional report that negotiations are under way or temporarily stalled or pressing forward against all odds. Ebenezer ducks when he encounters Drabb in the hallway and seethes when he spies Stump at work upon his squalid acreage.
If only those two would settle their differences without involving me, he thinks. The situation is unendurable, and yet he endures. When his spirits are at their lowest, he permits the thought that Jacob Marley is working on his behalf to cheer him a bit. Perhaps he has made a friend here after all.
He finds himself in just such a funk one gray afternoon in the late spring, when Jacob descends from Drabb’s aerie with a thick envelope in his hand. “Success,” says Jacob, taking him by the shoulder and aiming him into Drabb’s disused office.
The terms agreed upon in the covering letter seem like something less than success to Ebenezer, but Jacob assures him that they are the very best possible. “You’ll have a ha’penny left over each and every month,” he says, “free and clear. I’d count that as a victory.”
Ebenezer looks unconvinced.
“These fellows would have had your scalp if we hadn’t taken things in hand.”
“I suppose you’re right,” says Ebenezer. “And I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”
“We’ll find a way for you to make it up to me, if you insist.” He smiles and withdraws from the envelope a set of contracts written in duplicate, already signed by Sweedlepipe and Stump. He rummages in the desk to locate a bottle of ink and the stub of a quill pen and hands everything over to Ebenezer. “Sign here,” he says, indicating the spot. “And here as well. Yes. That’s right. Well done.”
1
800
Three
Belle Fairchild has always found Ebenezer Scrooge interesting—charmingly distracted in his manner and surprisingly puckish in his observations—at least when she can capture and keep his attention. Teasing him out of his shell was one of her favorite activities when they worked for old Mr. Fezziwig, but now that they have gone their separate ways she encounters him less often. She does see his sister, though, Fan, one of her oldest and dearest friends.
By means of that connection she has invited Ebenezer to join the church choir, in which her own bright and soaring soprano contrasts nicely with Fan’s deep and passionate alto. Thus it is with these two, always and ever: Belle a creature of spirit and air, Fan steady and earthbound. The choir happens to be short a second bass at the moment, and although Ebenezer’s voice falls a good bit higher than that—closer to a baritone—he accedes to her wishes and promises to attend Thursday evening’s rehearsal. Belle thinks she might detect a twinkle in his eye as he does so, as if he knows what she’s about and is making himself a willing party to it. But as she smiles back he looks away, distracted by some invisible thing a few degrees beyond her left shoulder, and that’s the end of it.
She is not an avid husband-seeker, not yet, although it pays to keep an open mind. She has watched while her own sister—older than she, about Scrooge’s age—has bloomed and faded faster than anyone with an ounce of kindness in his heart might have thought possible, and so she is not entirely unwary as she looks toward the future. Belle is not, after all, a girl with financial or social prospects. Scrooge, on the other hand, would seem to have prospects aplenty. He’s engaged in a business partnership with another striver, one Jacob Marley from out in the countryside somewhere. Two eager lads merging their fates and their fortunes, although to look at them you’d think neither would have two pennies to rub together. “That’s the secret,” Scrooge would say if she were bold enough to ask. “Economy in all things.” He and Marley have other secrets, too, ones not so easily prized loose.
He will arrive in the choir loft late, having lost track of the hour as his workday came to a close. Whether one ought to call this concentration or distraction makes little difference, for either way it will prove to be an enduring asset to both Scrooge and his partner. Right now it is a mere inconvenience, cause for a missed supper and a breathless run to the church through London’s darkened lanes. The fog has crept in and the lanterns are not yet lit, and although he could hire a boy with a torch to accompany him he would no more waste money in that fashion than he would throw it away on a carriage. So this lanky scarecrow in his ill-fitting black waistcoat and his rolled-up shirtsleeves and his oft-darned tights accommodates himself to the darkness in his favorite way: He turns it into an exercise in memory and computation. Scrooge keeps within his mind a detailed map of the city built up from earliest childhood, and he holds in some secret compartment of his heart or his lungs or perhaps his liver a compass of unerring accuracy. Let some angel or devil or ghost intent upon abduction drop him from a terrible height into the least of the city’s lanes, and he will know instantly which direction he faces down to the degree. So even as he snuffs his candle and passes through the warehouse door and fastens the lock upon its rusty hasp behind him, he is busy making calculations. Three blocks north, then five blocks east, then north-northeast along a curving lane through one, two, three, no, make it four intersections, and then a sharp turn due west at the fifth down a narrow courtyard—and there’s the church. He’s running before he’s finished making his mental chart, and he’s halfway to his destination before he begins breathing hard. In no time at all—no false turns, no dead ends—he skids to a clattering halt at the church door. Upon his lips he bears the smile of a victorious Olympian.
The sanctuary is dark save a candle sputtering here and there, most of the available light warmly gathered in the loft where the director has begun running the sopranos through their scales. The sopranos being the high ones, he thinks. Should choir or director or pianist detect his footstep on the winding stair, no one makes any audible response, which gives him hope that he may be able to slip in unnoticed. That hope rises right along with him until he gains the loft at last and spies there in the glimmering candlelight Belle herself, seated at the end of the row closest to the head of the stair, glancing up from her hymnal to greet him with a bright gleam in her eye and a smile as subtle as it is inscrutable.
Scrooge coughs.
The piano stops.
The sopranos strangle.
Belle rises and sets down her hymnal. “Miss Percival,” she says to the director, “may I present Mr. Scrooge?”
“This is your bass?” says the old woman, glowering from behind her music stand.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miss Percival squints at Scrooge with hopelessness written upon her narrow face. “He don’t look like a bass. Not at all.”
Scrooge wrings his hands and offers a pleading smile that by daylight would terrify even the bravest of children.
“Ain’t enough meat on his bones.”
“Madam,” Scrooge puts in, “I can assure you…” but his voice cracks into a register startling even to him, and he abandons the cause.
Miss Percival scoffs and turns her attention to Belle, the source of this disappointment. “A fellow that skinny just don’t resonate,” she says, as if Scrooge were not even present.
From the other end of the front row, from her place down among the altos, Fan comes to his aid. She says, “I’ll have you know that my brother was always the true singer in the family,” which makes Scrooge swallow hard. “You should have heard us on Sunday evenings, the whole family gathered around the piano. Mother sang soprano and father sang tenor. More than once we had to put Ebenezer in the butler’s pantry and lock the door rather than let him overwhelm us with that powerful basso of his.”
“Oh, really?” says Miss Percival, not believing a word.
“This was before he learned to control his breathing, of course. These days he’s as harmonious a chorister as you’ll find short of the choir at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. I mean the ones on the payroll.”
Which Scrooge sees for the cover that she intends it to be. He resolves that henceforth his singing shall be a mumble, a wheeze, a vague and timid muttering meant to suggest great power under tight rein. Just that much and no more, which suits his untested abilities perfectly. God bless Fan. He gives Miss Percival a little bow and smiles cautiously at no one in particular and sidles toward the lone empty chair in the back row, where a hymnbook is waiting. The gentlemen to his left and right—a Mr. Carstone and a Mr. Gradgrind—welcome him as if he is cavalry arrived for last-minute reinforcement.
“Now we’ll give them a run for it,” says Mr. Gradgrind, beaming. Even at a whisper, his voice rumbles like distant cannon fire. Mr. Carstone agrees, in tones that might be more audible to the larger members of the cetaceous family—the finback, perhaps, or the mighty blue.
Miss Percival taps her baton on the music stand and glares at the basses. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Carstone straighten their posture and Scrooge follows suit, as if he is strung between them on a line. His voice cracks and crumbles as she propels them through their scales, but his presence encourages the men on either side to such an extent that as a group they have never sounded better.
Miss Percival’s ear is discerning, though, and she is a hard one to get the better of. “Now I should like to hear Mr. Scrooge alone,” she says, lifting her whalebone baton, narrowing her eyes.
“Am I to be a soloist, then?”
The cunning Miss Percival is not to be outsmarted. “To judge from your sister’s recommendation…” she begins.
Scrooge interrupts, aghast or feigning it. “Begging your pardon—I came here not to elevate myself, but to praise the Almighty.”
Miss Percival puckers her lips and draws her narrow chin into a tense knot.
“I am quite certain,” he goes on, “that I can accomplish such praise in fellowship with these gent
lemen far better than I ever could alone.”
Suffused with delight and solidarity, Mr. Carstone and Mr. Gradgrind clap him on his jutting knees, one to each. Miss Percival, crestfallen, moves on to torment the tenors. And Scrooge’s place here is made fast.
The anthem this week is to be the Reverend John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.” A favorite of seamen and other desperate types the world over, the hymn was the product of a storm-tossed shipboard conversion. Newton lay down one black night a slave trader and arose at dawn transformed, certain that prayer had induced the Almighty to calm the gale on his behalf. No more kidnapping Africans out of the jungle, he would decide by and by. No more hauling cargoes of disease-riddled human beings across treacherous waters to the Promised Land. And no more flogging dark-skinned men and women to within inches of their commercially unacceptable deaths, either.
“Amazing Grace” is a dirge in three-quarter time, its gloom poorly matched to its hopeful message. The eight-part arrangement that Miss Percival has found is no exception, and the lugubrious tempo that she sets only deepens the effect. Scrooge has time to think as the music trudges forward, though, and between the vocal support of the men to either side and the simplicity of the bass line he is able to get his footing nicely. He has no clue as to what any of the notes are, but that doesn’t matter. It’s all relative. Steady on this low one at the bottom for three beats and then up a sizable notch for one and then up a smaller one at the end of the phrase to finish things out. As for interpreting whole notes and half notes and dotted halves and so forth, the familiar melody lets him grasp their coded secrets with little effort. So by the time the choir has finished polishing “Amazing Grace” and moved on to “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” he understands that he doesn’t actually need to read music at all, at least not in the conventional sense. He only needs to see the lines of the bass clef as a kind of map for singing, with rhythms indicated by numbers done in hieroglyphs. Nothing could be simpler. As his confidence grows he even begins to sing out a little—not much, but a little—and bit by bit he grows happy.
