by Jon Clinch
Contrary to all expectation, Mr. Krook’s office is located in a mainly residential part of the city. The building that houses it stands alone behind an iron fence at the top of a deep and dreary yard, its solitariness suggesting that it has been shunned by other human habitation and sent up here to do penance in isolation. The gate is ajar when Wegg pulls up, and with much clacking of his wooden limb he clambers down and swings it wide. The yard before the house is steep, paved with a sticky soup of mud and lichen and horse manure, so rather than risk a direct assault on the front door he drives his rig upward from side to side in a long series of switchbacks. Mr. Wegg will have trouble enough returning the horse and wagon before his employer discovers them gone; he does not require the additional trouble of pulling them from some mucky half grave—an exercise in which his wooden leg would surely be an impediment. Mr. Wegg is a circumspect individual, after all. Especially since the accident that took his leg.
The door is an ordinary household portal; a bit larger perhaps than most, adorned in its center with a massive knocker of old brass. He tries it to no avail. There is no indication of commercial activity here—no listing of business occupants, no set of bellpulls, and in particular no sign of his customers, the firm of Krook and Someone-or-Other. He waits. He tries the knocker again. He waits. Out of sheer boredom he does an undignified pirouette upon that wooden leg of his, and then he gives the knocker one more go. Nothing. So he tries the door. It opens onto a dim hall and a stairway so broad that a hearse might fit sideways across it—an unearthly vision that gives Mr. Wegg a shiver as the portal behind him claps shut.
He calls upward into the dimness. “Halloo! Mr. Krook, sir? Halloo!” Receiving no answer, he tries the first step, which produces a ghastly squeak and yields ever so slightly beneath his tread. The wood is rotten for sure. This place could be the death of him, and all for the price of some hard-used furnishings not strictly his own to sell. He tests the next one, which seems a trifle more solid, but he is rapidly losing faith in the enterprise. It was not a good idea at all. His employer will be returning in an hour or two, and poor old Mr. Wegg will be caught out here on a fruitless frolic of his own. This will come to no good end, he decides, and he turns to abandon the project while he still can.
“Mr. Wegg?” echoes a voice from above. “Is that you, sir?”
“The very same,” he says, encouraged but not entirely.
“Excellent,” says the voice. “Come up, then, why don’t you? You’re just in time.”
“I’ll not come empty-handed,” says Wegg. “Send down the boy.”
“The boy?”
“The boy to help with the carting.”
“There’s no boy,” says the voice from upstairs. “There’s never been a boy.”
“You promised a boy.”
“I have no boy, Mr. Wegg, so I doubt very much I would have promised you one.”
“I have a wooden leg, Mr. Krook, so I doubt very much I would have come without the promise of a boy.”
“We have a bargain, Mr. Wegg.”
“The bargain called for a boy.”
Footsteps sound from above, and a gentlemen that Wegg recognizes as Mr. Krook peers over the third-story railing. “If it suits you, then,” says the gentleman, “you may return your wares to the dust pile. You’ll have no payment from me—and no further trade, come to that.” Just as suddenly as he appeared, he vanishes.
Payment. The delightful sonority of the word alters Mr. Wegg’s way of thinking. He tries the third step and finds it sturdy, quite sturdy indeed. He considers the content of the wagon—a desk in three pieces, four ladder-back chairs, a pair of modest cabinets—and decides that if he is quick, he can have everything up the stairs and stowed away in the offices of Krook and Someone-or-Other within a half hour’s time, boy or no boy. He sighs, salivates over the prospect of a piping-hot supper at his favorite tavern, and sets to work.
It’s a noisy business, accompanied by extravagant curses and punctuated by the irregular hammering of that wooden leg on the open stairs, but it’s over quickly enough. Not a moment too soon, thinks the irritable and ostensible Mr. Krook, who, thanks to Mr. Wegg’s racket, can barely concentrate upon his own affairs. He has set up a worktable in the hall, over which he has spread a sheet of heavy sailcloth and upon which he has arranged the supplies of a calligrapher and sign painter. Brushes of various sizes, pots of ink and paint, a set of ship’s curves, a flexible lead rule, and a supply of gold leaf. He is nearly finished executing upon the door to the room in question a sign reading KROOK & FLITE, LTD.
“Is this your specialty?” says Wegg, jutting out a finger. “Sign painting?” He’s finished with the furniture and stands awaiting his pay. “You’ve done a fair job of it.”
“Thank you,” says Marley, drawing a few coins from some hidden spot on his person. “The truth is, Mr. Flite and I are in tinware. But I have always found it wise to be flexible.”
“Aye, sir. Flexibility in all things—that’s the ticket.”
“Amen, Mr. Wegg,” says Marley, but Wegg has already vanished down the stairs, pockets ajingle and wooden limb stamping furiously away, with the aim of restoring his employer’s horse and wagon before his own flexibility gets the better of him. That, and then a well-deserved hot supper.
* * *
What sort of Englishman is forever too busy for tea? The nose-to-the-grindstone sort, to begin with. The sort who gets ahead without connections, who makes something of himself without benefit of small talk or social lubrication or the seeking of personal kindnesses. The Englishman too busy for tea is also likely to be solitary, perhaps even lonely. In other words, Ebenezer Scrooge.
A small fire is burning in the stove when Belle bursts in from the windy street. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says upon detecting its faint warmth.
Scrooge looks at her from over the top of his glasses, one finger marking his place and the nib of his pen hovering wasplike. “Cold?”
“Oh, yes. A cup of tea would be nice, don’t you think?” She makes the suggestion herself, for it would never occur to him.
He nods toward the cupboard where she’ll find what she requires—a kettle and spoons and cups and all the rest of it, left behind by whatever tenant occupied these rooms prior to the arrival of Scrooge & Marley. She sees that the supply of tea is nearly gone, and makes a mental note to replenish it when next she visits. She fills the kettle and places it upon the stove while Ebenezer continues scratching away. By the time the steam has begun to rise, she finds herself warm enough to remove her coat. She pokes her head into Mr. Marley’s chilly office and sees that, as usual, he’s absent. This will make her mission easier. Encouraged, she returns and makes the tea and presents herself at Ebenezer’s desk, a steaming cup in each hand, leaving no opportunity for him to object. She hovers until he clears a place. Closing his ledger seems to provide him a stab of actual pain.
“I suppose,” she says, tilting her head toward the doorway that gives onto Marley’s chamber, “that you’re happier in his absence.”
“I almost think I wouldn’t know,” says Ebenezer. “He is on the premises so very little.”
“So perhaps you don’t mind his company?”
“I have hardly experienced his company. In the six years that we have been yoked to each other, we have passed no more than a hundred working days in each other’s presence.”
She sips her tea, and nods at Ebenezer to suggest that he do likewise before it cools. “But you do have opinions as to his character.”
“Certainly.”
She lifts an eyebrow.
“I fear that I find him… coarse.”
“But he presents himself as quite the sophisticate.”
“Mr. Marley presents himself in many ways.” He sips his tea and looks wistfully at his ledger.
“Don’t we all?”
A shrug from Scrooge. He purses his thin lips, angles his teacup to consider the leaves that have collected at the bottom, and sets it down carefully.
“By the way,” he says, “I know perfectly well why you’re asking about Mr. Marley.”
“You do?”
“I do. You’re asking on behalf of Fan. I have made my opinion known to her on many occasions, more clearly and in more detail than I ought to make it known to you.”
“So I have heard.”
“What has she told you?”
“That you disapprove. That’s enough.”
“It ought to be.”
“And yet she persists.”
“My sister has a stubborn streak.”
“As do I, Ebenezer.”
He smiles. “Does this mean that you intend to plague me on her account until I give in?”
She laughs. “Hardly.”
“Good.”
“It means I have held out for certain concessions of my own. In my case, from my father.”
“Concessions?”
“Just so.”
“Having to do with…?”
“With you, Ebenezer.”
He could not be more fully dumbstruck if a spirit had materialized before him.
“He doesn’t approve of your… work.”
Ebenezer places a hand upon his ledger, as if he’s been required to swear upon a holy book. “My work is beyond criticism.”
“Your bookkeeping, certainly. That isn’t what troubles father.”
“Then I am at a loss.”
She rises and begins to gather up the tea things. “He objects to certain of your cargo.”
Ebenezer thinks.
“Frankly, I object as well.”
“You mean the leg from Africa to America.” He puts it this way, rather than name the sin outright.
“Yes.”
“It is all perfectly legitimate. It is all perfectly profitable.”
“And it’s all perfectly vile. Yet I care for you, and so I attempt to see past it.”
“And your father?”
“He knows me. He knows I have faith in you.”
“To do what?”
“To see the light, by and by, without his insistence upon it.”
Ebenezer sniffs.
“One day everyone will come around to the side of right—including you and Mr. Marley. The trade will die of its own wickedness, or it will be outlawed.”
“And then what?”
“You will find other cargoes, and you will wonder why you waited so long.”
“Finding other cargoes would be Jacob’s department.”
“Your name is over the door.”
“As is Jacob’s.”
“Yours is in the first position.”
“We are equals.”
She hesitates. “I think not.”
He scoffs.
“I think you are the better man.”
He looks into her eyes for just an instant but it makes him uncomfortable, and he looks away just as quickly. “But what has all of this to do with Fan and Jacob?”
“Do you care for your sister?”
“Of course.”
“Then stop frustrating her. Show faith in her judgment, as my father has shown faith in mine.”
Ebenezer, whose brain always trades in equivalencies, grasps the parallel at once. He chafes beneath the implications just a trifle—having stated that he is a better man than Jacob, is she further suggesting that her father is a better man than he?—but there is something about the depth of feeling that has brought her here, a great humanitarian reaching out not just to him but to shiploads of Africans who are clearly more to her than tonnage in a hold, clearly more than tally marks upon a ledger, that moves him. “Very well,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“I shall put some thought into that African cargo.”
“I trust that you will follow your heart,” she says. “Particularly now that you know mine.”
Six
In Marley’s house there are many mansions.
Besides his own living quarters, the building holds multiple separate apartments of one, two, or three rooms each, a cavernous attic, a vast and echoing basement, a vile and damp subbasement below that, and a cartographically unchartable array of closets, cubbyholes, passageways, chimneys, crawlspaces, and hidden chambers. Thanks to Marley’s efforts at filling its various long-vacant rooms, the occupancy of the place is nearly complete. The tin merchants Krook & Flite—third floor, last on the left—now rub shoulders with a Mr. Pecksniff (international investments) and the firm of Nemo & Hawdon (import/export specialists). A freshly minted lease even now awaits the signatures of Squeers & Trotter (purveyors of specialty foodstuffs)—second floor, first on the right—but it will have to wait until the men from Grimby & Murdstone’s wine-bottling operation finish wrangling their last wagonload of casks down the long, steep stairs into the basement. The upper basement, that is. No one, not even one of Marley’s fictional entities, could tolerate the lower.
As for why he is wasting this perfectly fine space upon an actual flesh-and-blood tenant when he could be filling it with credible alibis and hard currency, Marley has his reasons. First, the wine merchants will provide visible activity sufficient for a houseful of false fronts, which will help the place appear legitimate from the street. Second, should any curious authority come sniffing about, the presence of the wine merchants and their ranks of warehoused casks should serve as convincing evidence that everything is on the up and up. Third, beginning this very night, his private quarters will be only a few steps from a limitless supply of the very finest tawny port in England.
Once the men have gone, Marley retreats to his workshop, which is accessible both from his bedroom and through a hidden stairway behind a sliding panel in the offices of Krook & Flite. Beyond the accumulation of dust, little has changed within the tin merchants’ premises since the afternoon a few months before when Mr. Wegg dropped off the furniture. The desk still stands in its three component pieces, and the chairs still cluster together at a vacant nexus like a gathering of spirits convened to discuss the afterlife. The two cabinets are no longer empty, however. They are filled with bundled bills and various other treasure, too precious and fungible and anonymous to be entrusted to any banker.
One day Marley will get around to assembling the desk and arranging the chairs and otherwise making the place look occupied, but for now the lettering that camouflages the door will have to suffice. He has employed Wegg to obtain furnishings for the other offices, always maintaining the fiction that he is the selfsame Krook and always paying in cash. Wegg has been cooperative and solicitous to a fault, and knowing an opportunity when he sees one he now keeps an eye open for any such appurtenances as might befit Krook’s growing community of fellow tenants. He winks and says, “Remaining flexible, I see,” whenever the two meet on the stairs. Should Marley spy him on the street, however, he will slip to the other side rather than risk being called by the wrong name in public.
Seated at his worktable, he dips a pen and warms up his wrist. His left wrist, for he has decided that his left hand will provide the signature of Mr. Squeers. It is to be filigreed, ornamental, bombastic. His right hand will supply the signature of Mr. Trotter, which by contrast will be meticulous and regular, the sort of timid and bookish penmanship that a young fellow might have acquired at boarding school and never shaken. The lease itself is a marvel, stamped and witnessed and dated five years prior so as to agree with certain other manufactured records he has passed on to Scrooge for incorporation into the narrative of their business life. He holds it up to the candlelight and smiles a smile of great personal satisfaction. No element is amiss, no detail unpersuasive. Which is not by any means to say that a single aspect of the document is perfect. The paper, dog-eared in one corner, is slightly embrittled by means of an arcane process known only to Marley and a handful of other specialists. The wax seal is unevenly centered and the stamp pressed into it is irregular, deeper on one side than the other. It looks hastily done but its offhandedness is a matter of much consideration. Such is art.
Marley dips hi
s pen and describes Squeers’s signature in a series of loose calligraphic extravagancies. While the ink spreads and dries he warms up his right fist, and when he is ready he executes the contrasting signature of the fictional Trotter. Just so, he thinks as he blots it clean. The mark of a man who believes he knows exactly what he is about in this world. The sober Mr. Trotter, set alongside the immoderate Mr. Squeers. It occurs to him as he slips the lease into a drawer that to an untrained eye, Trotter’s signature might look very much like that of his partner, Ebenezer Scrooge.
* * *
Leave it to the French.
Scrooge & Marley’s Huguenot contacts in Spitalfields are determined to hold a Christmas ball, and they are further determined that Scrooge and Marley should attend. The invitation arrives in the company of another envelope, larger and containing a statement of accounts that Scrooge studies with his usual avidity. He has no interest in the smaller one, which would seem to be of a nature more personal than commercial, so it sits unmolested in the entry for several days.
Marley, on one of his rare visits, discovers it and slits it open at his desk.
“The Huguenots desire the pleasure of our company,” he calls out with a whoop.
“Is it a summons of some kind?” asks Scrooge.
“Of some kind,” says Marley. “It’s an invitation to a grand ball. At the home our own Monsieur Antoine Bernière. On the evening of December 24.”
“Oh dear,” says Scrooge.
“Have you other plans?”
“I…”
“You cannot possibly have other plans.”
“I…”
“Cancel them.” He leaves his desk to stand in the doorway between their two offices. “Ebenezer, just imagine the feast that those Frenchmen will put on. Imagine the wine alone! This is our chance to recover some of what they’ve stolen from us over the years.”
“We do quite well by the Huguenots.”
“Not so far as they know. They believe they’re pauperizing us and starving our children.”
