by Jon Clinch
My partner wouldn’t go off and leave his quarters unlocked, thinks Scrooge. We have far too many secrets for that. Thus Marley may be somewhere in the house after all. He holds his breath and has another go at the door and enters for a quick sweep of the airless apartment—kitchen, parlor, bedroom with a tall four-poster bed hung about with curtains whose brass rings make a shimmering sound as he draws them open—to confirm that the man is indeed absent and not merely dead. Satisfied, he latches the door behind him and sets out into the mapless warrens of the great house.
Thanks to Scrooge’s love of order, what begins as a lark soon becomes a challenge. Each corner he turns without locating Marley serves as an impulse to investigate two more. He goes methodically, intently, calling his partner’s name down every hall and into every crack and through every grate he encounters. Suspecting that any wall may be false and any panel may operate at the touch of a secret mechanism, he raps every vertical surface with his knuckles, tests every squeaky floorboard with his toe. No bit of carpet goes unmoved, no threadbare tapestry hangs unmolested.
As he proceeds he keeps his turnings always to the right, on the theory that strict regularity must render any maze negotiable. He does have the keys to certain doors—the one to Mr. Pecksniff’s on the third floor, for example, wherein he knows that a compartment hidden behind an etching of a pastoral scene (sheep, maidens) will yield the key to the offices of Honeythunder & Grimwig on the next floor down, behind whose baseboard the key to Pecksniff’s lockbox is kept. And so on, and so on. His impulse is to follow such links, but he stops himself upon realizing that to do so would be to subvert his method. And yet how is he to proceed, with half the doors locked against him and the rest invisible?
Regularly, of course. Obsessively.
In Pecksniff’s office is a writing desk, and within it Scrooge finds a moldy ledger and a bit of crayon. Thus armed he returns to his starting place at Marley’s door. He makes some estimates as to the dimensions of the house, calculates what seems a reasonable correspondence between the length of his pace and the width of each inked row, and sets off again, cautious as any cartographer.
Other than his careful footsteps and his inquisitive rapping upon the walls—along with an occasional rumble or crash from the wine merchants in the dungeon below—the house is dead silent. An ordinary man would look elsewhere for his missing partner, but Scrooge is no ordinary man. He perseveres, marking the ledger as he goes, plotting the interlocking shapes of rooms and alcoves and passageways. By the time he is done mapping the second floor, the daylight beyond the windows is beginning to fade. By the time he is halfway finished with the third, the sun has set. He filches a lantern from Marley’s rooms and completes his work by the light of it, puzzling over the schematic taking shape on the page and tugging at his lip in frustration.
Significant portions of the house would seem to be missing. He checks his work, pacing off relevant stretches a second and even a third time, but to no avail. The gaps that show up here and there—a broad section along the rear wall of the upper story, overlapping segments of the two stories beneath that, a number of narrow vertical channels that indicate either shafts or narrow staircases—are as incontrovertibly genuine as Scrooge himself. Careless as to whether he leaves any trace of his passage, he returns to the third-floor offices of Krook & Flite, a spot where the broad missing section of the rear wall meets with the largest of the narrow vertical channels. Armed with the lantern, he inspects every inch of the corner in question until he finds what he seeks: a mechanism, concealed in the base of a verdigris-encrusted wall sconce, that releases a sliding panel. He shines the lantern into the void beyond it, revealing a great long chamber filled to the roof beams with cartons, sacks, and strongboxes. To one side, exactly where he knew he would find it, is a precipitous staircase. He ignores the treasure that Marley has stored here—the entire premises is jammed with the stuff, it’s just more inventory to be accounted for one of these days—and heads down the stairs.
* * *
“Are you quite well, Inspector?” The girl asks because a fierce convulsion has passed over the gentleman’s body, and not a convulsion of the desired sort. The paroxysm was accompanied by a wounded howl suggesting that it is he, not she, who has been rudely violated. If memory serves, the last time such an incident took place it was only seconds before the ancient member of Parliament in question lay dead upon her bedsheets.
They have procedures for handling such things here at Mrs. McCullough’s, for they are professionals. A physician by the name of George Peppercorn, discredited and impoverished though he may be, lives nearby and can supply any number of likely but unprovable diagnoses as to cause of death. A carriage driver who goes by Richard Camphor haunts the district as well, offering transport of the questionably deceased to other, more appropriate precincts. And then there is of course the able Mr. Wegg, whose access to his employer’s wagon and ash pile simplify the complete disposal of the more troublesome cases. It is Wegg’s good fortune that his services are not required in this instance, however, for he would go mad deciding whether the corpse involved belonged to the reported Inspector Bucket or to his own longtime business associate, Mr. Krook.
There is no corpse, however. Not yet. There is only Inspector Bucket, heaved now onto his back with one hand pressed flat to his hammering chest.
The girl—her name is Madeline, and she is chief among his favorites—asks again. “Are you quite well, Inspector?”
His eyes are peeled back wide and their anxious gaze darts about, searching the low smoke-grimed ceiling and perhaps the vaulted heavens above it for something that remains beyond his vision. Some evil revenant, perhaps, bent on doing him wrong. Or else some friendly spirit who has sent him this alarm before dematerializing into the ether.
He draws a calm breath at last. “I must go,” he says. And so he does.
* * *
The unlit stairway plunges downward like a mineshaft, and at its sudden bottom a narrow panel opens onto the mysteries of Marley’s workshop. No alchemist of old ever dreamed of such a place as this, for alchemists were men of theory and dream. Marley is no dreamer, and he is practical if he is anything. His workshop is a place where deception becomes truth, where loss becomes gain, where ideas become men—men who rise up and step out into the world and empty the pockets of such individuals as have had the misfortune to be born mere flesh and blood.
Scrooge is not much interested in the tools of his partner’s malefactions, for he has neither the brain nor the hands nor even the stomach for using them on his own account. What does interest him is the extent and complexity of his partner’s deceit—and within a tall cabinet located in the dustiest corner he finds the first indications.
There are names—individuals, offices, entire commercial empires—described in Marley’s notes that he has never heard before, mingled with others that he has. Some—Badger & Son; Plummer & Snagsby; Merdle, Jaggers, Slumkey & Lightwood—are among the missing respondents to his wedding invitation. Others, many others, are utterly confounding to him. A Josiah Bounderby, Esq. A Sampson Brass, Ltd. The firm of Dawkins, Dawkins, Dawkins, & Drood. Here among the records of the real and unreal companies that he knows—or believes he knows—are records of other entities altogether. They seem entwined, interwoven, the cunning work of a mind even more devious than he has understood it to be.
There are older names and entities entangled here as well, names from the abandoned past, and in the web of them lies the greatest dismay for poor Ebenezer. His eye falls upon them in the lantern’s gleam as upon a palimpsest of sin that lingers on through the ages, and he hangs his head. They are slavers and affiliates of slavers. He has believed himself shut of all such connections.
* * *
The Cratchit boy could happily sleep in Scrooge’s chair all night, for even though the fire in the grate has died the room is still warmer than his family’s quarters. More peaceful, too, in the absence of his many sisters and brothers. But such a kind fate is
not to be his, not with the arrival at the door of this sudden fierce specter, charging in from the darkness and calling out for Scrooge.
“He’s gone in search of Mr. Marley, sir,” says the boy.
“I’m Marley. He’s left you in charge?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just like him, leaving a boy to do a man’s work.”
“I done it as a favor to him, sir. He was kind to me.”
“I’ll bet,” says Marley. “Kinder than I’d have been.”
“Just leaving I was, Mr. Marley.” Muttering thus, the boy makes for the door.
“Take your coat, then. Dare to come back for it, and I’ll skin you alive.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” says the boy, opening the door into a wind that nearly tears it from his hands. “I don’t have a coat.” With that the winter night sweeps him away.
Marley lights a candle and spends a few minutes scouring his office, trying locks and checking drawers and generally determining whether anything might possibly be other than the way he left it. He finds nothing, and yet he is not satisfied. Although the shocking pain in his chest has passed, the memory of it has him unbalanced, wary. He’s halfway prepared for a sign that everything he’s built in the world is about to collapse around him. For a moment he’d thought that the child might be the bearer of such a message, but no.
So Scrooge has been looking for him, has he? Whereabouts, he wonders. He surely knows some of Marley’s usual haunts, although the list to which he has access is highly redacted. Even still, most of those locales are spots where old Scrooge would not be caught lingering. So where might he be instead? Where could he go, should the idea occur to him, to do damage worthy of that infernal clutching at Marley’s chest and vitals? With a swallow that nearly resurrects the pain, he realizes. And off he goes to his own residence, his private lair, his palace of secrets, to see what mischief his partner may have gotten up to.
Young Cratchit’s footprints—of no more consequence to Marley than the traces of some game animal—are visible in the snow just outside the door, but soon they’re lost among half a hundred others. Were he paying attention, he would note that the child seems to have turned down a narrow alleyway, a grimy passage employed mainly by pickpockets, beggars, and other practitioners of the more larcenous and tawdry arts. But he is not paying attention, for his mind is occupied with thoughts of his house and his partner. Businesses along the street are closing up, their lamps going dark and their doors swinging wide to empty their prisoners into the freedom of the street. They are a lively and good-humored lot, he thinks, considering that moments before they were surely yawning over their desks, complaining of exhaustion and low wages.
The thicker the crowds the slower his progress, and the slower his progress the more tangled his thoughts, and the more tangled his thoughts the greater his impatience. He shall never get home. By the time these infernal crowds have let him pass, Scrooge will have learned all of his secrets, grasped how thoroughly he has been cheating him all these years, and had a constable brought around for his arrest.
* * *
While Marley’s mind races, Scrooge’s plods ahead like an old draft horse. Back and forth it goes, slow but implacable, dragging understanding like a plow. And like a plow, the path it traces across the thicket of Marley’s deceit is both narrow and exact. He cares nothing for his own finances. He cares nothing for the illegality of anything that Marley may have done. Indications of these things he dismisses without so much as registering them, for there is but one principle driving him on, one realization to which every discovery worth making must adhere: that the firm of Scrooge & Marley, unimaginable as it may be, is still very much in the slaving business.
The facts are incontrovertible. All of the firm’s historic holdings and investments are still in place, although Marley has hidden them beneath clever new accretions of falsity and fraud. The old agreements remain in force. The old contractors remain employed. Entire vessels—the Marie, the Dauntless, the Mercator, the Seahawk—have been reported lost, collected upon, secretly rechristened, and falsely registered under foreign flags so as to go about their business undisturbed by British law. It is nearly inconceivable, and yet here it is before him.
So lost is Scrooge in his thoughts that when a snowball strikes the window above the workbench, the sound of it fails to register. Register the second one does, though, and straight to the window he goes to spy the boy, standing alone in the yard below.
He swings wide the window and thrusts his head out into the cold. “Cratchit?”
“I saw your light, sir.”
“What of it?”
“Mr. Marley’s on his way.”
“I should think he might be. He does live here, after all.”
“He don’t look happy, sir.”
“He’ll be less happy when I finish with him.”
“You were kind to me, sir. I thought I owed you.”
“Owed me what?”
“A warning, sir. Mr. Marley don’t seem like a fellow to cross.”
“You’re a wise boy. You’ll go far.”
“Thank you, sir. I should think there’s wisdom in choosing when to do battle with one such as Marley.”
“And you’re a clever boy as well.”
“Thank you, sir. Does that mean you’ll go, then?” He casts a desperate look back over his shoulder, down the hill toward the torchlit street. “I took a shortcut. He’ll be right along.”
“Perhaps you’re correct,” says Scrooge.
“Live to fight another day.”
“Come see me in ten or fifteen years. I’ll put you to work.”
“Then you’ll go?”
“I will.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Goodbye, sir.”
But Scrooge is already gone and the window is shut and the light is vanishing into the depths of the house.
* * *
When Marley arrives, there is nothing to see. The entire premises, so far as he can tell, is just as he left it. The child was lying, no doubt. He saw Scrooge leave on some errand, sprang the lock, and let himself in. Thank heavens the negotiables were locked away, or he’d have to hunt the urchin down and take the loss out of his skin. It’s bad enough that the little bastard gave himself the run of the stove.
Twenty-One
Scrooge has no time for despair, no time for fury, no time for anything but work.
He does not even go home. He returns to his office instead, plants himself behind his desk, and transcribes the web of Marley’s deceit into a fresh ledger. The facts of it are etched into his brain right now—it is as if he’s tracing them onto the page—but rather than risk the loss of a single incriminating detail to time and memory he spends the night getting it down complete. He does not stir from his chair, and his pen flies as fast as his mind can race. He blots errors and corrections and desperate stray splashes of ink with sand, with blotting paper, with the linen of his sleeves and the flesh of his fists. By dawn he is nearly as black as his partner’s heart, tattooed all over with the inverse image of every error he has made and corrected in the process of charting the wickedness that he must now undo if he is to keep his promise to Belle and to her father and to God Himself. He douses his candle as the first pale light of day strikes the frost on his window. The room is frigid, his fingers stiff, his feet blocks of ice—but what of it? A man with work to keep him warm does not require a stove.
He rises and locks the ledger away and goes home to bathe and breakfast. He is resolved that so far as Marley is concerned, he must behave as if nothing in the world has changed. So on the chance that the man should appear at his desk this morning—and he probably will, given the events of the evening past—Scrooge must now collect himself, remove all signs of his long night’s labor, and be back in ordinary form before the start of business.
With the exception of certain traceries of ink still embedded in the palms of his hands, he succeeds. He reappears at Scrooge & Marl
ey a minute or two ahead of schedule, and as he unlocks the door he is overwhelmed by a sudden gust of uncertainty. What if the project before him is too great? It is certainly daunting in its complexity—doubly so, since he will have to undo Marley’s work without Marley discovering it. Additionally, there is the fact that he is but imperfectly suited to the job. His strength is in calculation, not strategy. Standing there between the outer cold of the street and the inner cold of his office, he feels his heart sink. Perhaps he should confront Marley after all, tell him what he knows, and insist he make it right. But no. Even if he could explain how he came to be ransacking his partner’s residence last evening, even if Marley put a good face upon it all and agreed to correct his wrongdoing, how could he be sure in the end that he did so? He can rely only upon himself. He must go stealthily, methodically, and above all righteously about keeping every single promise he has made to his beloved Belle and by extension to her fathers both on earth and in Heaven. Such is his duty.
On the other hand, he could lie.
He could lie to Belle and to her father and to God Himself. Plenty of other men would, automatically and without qualm. Society is full of them: Duplicitous men ready to take the easy route clear of whatever trouble they may have brought into the world. They and their fathers and grandfathers make up a considerable portion of the human race, if his business partner is any indication. They recede into the past, generation by generation, terrible ordinary men with terrible ordinary failings and terrible ordinary secrets that they have learned to keep even from themselves—burdens fated to accompany them to their graves and beyond. Scrooge is not an especially religious man and he has no particular ideas about Heaven and Hell, but he does not like to imagine himself a restless ghost, weighted down by the bloody iron chains of innocent men made chattel.
