The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  What reviewers are saying about the stories in The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

  “One of the most memorable pieces was ‘A Stake of Holly’, Lillian Stewart Carl’s tale of an adult Tiny Tim playing sleuth to track down the identities of Scrooge’s three Christmas ghosts.”—Book Loons

  “A Rose with All Its Thorns” by Lillian Stewart Carl puts the personality of Anne Boleyn in a (female) Tudor historian at an academic conference which reminds one of Connie Willis’s academic settings and characters—and performs admirably in that genre.”—Evelyn C. Leeper for NESFA

  ‘“A Dish of Poison’ is the prequel to Twelfth Night, giving the disguised Viola the opportunity to solve the mystery of Olivia’s brother’s death. It’s an enjoyable mystery that works without compromising any of the original story.”—B. Redman, Book Help Web

  “Topnotch entries include . . . Lillian Stewart Carl’s ‘Way Down in Egypt’s Land,’ a marvelous tale about 19th-century slavery . . .”—Publishers Weekly

  “Lillian Stewart Carl’s ‘Sardines for Tea,’ about two ‘veddy British’ kitties that solve a jewel theft, never lets the unlikely premise interfere with the fun. Sure to be popular with the kitty crowd.”—Booklist

  “Inspired contributions include...Lillian Stewart Carl’s ‘The Necromancer’s Apprentice,’ which presents an interesting solution to the actual mystery surrounding the death of Amy Robsart, wife of Elizabeth I’s favorite lord, balancing wizardry with astute deductions about the political motives of those who stood to benefit.”—Publishers Weekly

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  Copyright 2012 Lillian Stewart Carl

  The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

  by

  Lillian Stewart Carl

  Table of Contents

  A Stake of Holly

  A Mimicry of Mockingbirds

  Cold as Fire

  A Rose with All Its Thorns

  A Dish of Poison

  The Diamonds of Golkonda

  The Eye of the Beholder

  Way Down in Egypt’s Land

  Over the Sea from Skye

  The Rag and Bone Man

  Sardines for Tea

  The Necromancer’s Apprentice

  The Muse

  Writing Historical Mystery Short Stories

  Author Biography

  A Stake of Holly

  Jacob Marley had been dead as a doornail, to begin with, and soon Ebeneezer Scrooge would no longer be debating just why a doornail, rather than a coffin nail, was considered a fatal bit of ironmongery.

  Tim Cratchit bent over his benefactor’s bed—it was his deathbed, but Tim was not yet ready to admit to that awful fact—Tim bent over Scrooge’s wasted features and said, “You sent for me, sir?”

  Scrooge’s eyes fluttered open, and took a long moment to focus, as though they were already inspecting the new world to which they were bound. Then they lit with a pleasure that plumped the deep furrows in his face and tinged its ashen color with pink. “Tim, my lad. Always a good lad, aren’t you?”

  “Thanks to you, sir.” The young man pulled a chair, lately abandoned by the nurse, closer to the bed and sat down. “Your generosity to my family these nineteen years . . .”

  Laboriously Scrooge waved his hand in the air and let it fall back to the counterpane. It made a thump no louder than that of thistledown. “What right have I to demand thanks for going about my business as a steward of mankind and fulfilling my responsibility to my neighbor?”

  “Still,” Tim insisted, “I owe you not only my health and my education, but my position with Lord Ector.”

  “No, no, no, pass your gratitude on to someone else. Teach your children. . . . But I assume you will be blessed with offspring, even though you as yet have no prospects?”

  Tim ducked his handsome features shyly. “I shall find a wife, never you fear, Mr. Scrooge. I don’t spend all my time cataloguing Ector’s collections.”

  “No, you spend your spare hours scribbling stories.”

  “Only the occasional tale for The London Illustrated News and the like.”

  “And fine tales they are, Tim. Take care, though, not to neglect the finer sentiments.” The old man wheezed a moment, then coughed. “I was once engaged to be married, Tim.”

  Tim, having heard this story many times before, nodded patiently.

  “Belle Fezziwig, she was, daughter of my old employer. I let her slip through my fingers, for I preferred the touch of gold to that of a human hand.”

  “Such was the curse of Midas,” murmured Tim.

  The apron-swathed nurse clattered about the room, building up the fire and making mysterious motions with vials, spoons, and porringers. “Don’t be tiring him out now, young sir. He needs his rest, he does.”

  “Bah,” muttered Scrooge. “Before long I’ll have rest aplenty. We all come to the grave in the end, as the Ghost, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, reminded me. I can only hope that my efforts these last years have shortened the heavy chain I once dragged behind me and ensured that my death will be remarked upon with grief, not indifference, and never pleasure.”

  Tim had heard that story as well. Indeed, he remembered his own part in it as vividly as any occurrence of his childhood. Scrooge claimed to have been visited one icy Christmas Eve first by the ghost of his old parner, Marley, and then by three mysterious spirits, who had thawed his cold heart and softened his flinty disposition. Tim would have thought the story merely a fancy on the old man’s part, save that Scrooge was the least fanciful man in the city of London. Save that Scrooge had manifestly changed his ways that Christmas, to the benefit of all.

  “You sent for me, sir?” Tim repeated, sensing that his patron had matters burdening his sensibilities far and beyond the usual courtesies and reminiscences.

  “Yes, so I did. Tim, I’d like for you to do something for me.”

  “With pleasure, sir.”

  “The three spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Past with its white dress and the jet of light springing from its head, the Ghost of Christmas Present, a jolly giant, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, shrouded in a black hood. Were they dreams, thrown up not from a feverish but from a frozen mind? Or were they truly visions from another dimension of this familiar world?”

  Scrooge’s talon-like hand seized upon Tim’s, with its ink-stained forefinger. “The ghost of my old partner Marley told me this: that if a man’s spirit does not walk abroad among his fellow men in life, then it must do so after death. And, conversely, that a spirit working kindly in this little sphere of earth will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.”

  ”There are the spirits paying penance,” said Tim, elucidating the old man’s words, “and those whose generosity of temper persists beyond the grave.”

  “Marley was one of the former. He told me this himself. But what of the other three ghosts? What events in their mortal lives sent them to me? Soon I too, shall be a spirit among spirits. I would like to seek out those who came to me, and thank them most humbly for their efforts. I must
know, Tim, who they were in life.”

  Tim had barely begun to digest this strange request when he felt a presence at his back, the bulk of the nurse looming over him like a great warship under full sail bearing down upon a dinghy. “Begging your pardon, sir . . .”

  “Yes, Mrs. Gump?”

  “If you’re wanting to contact the spiritual world, there’s none better at it than Mrs. Minnow in Bedford Square.”

  “A medium?” Tim asked. “I know that even Her Majesty has employed spiritualists, endeavoring to speak with her late consort, Prince Albert, but still. . . .”

  Scrooge’s hand tightened upon his, grasping the young man’s warm flesh as it had once grasped at gold coins, but to much greater effect. “Tim, I know not if this Mrs. Minnow could be of help to you, and through you to me, but if you please . . .”

  “Yes,” said Tim, setting aside his qualms as unworthy of both mentor and student. “Yes, of course. I shall do everything in my power to answer your questions, Mr. Scrooge.”

  “Bless you, my boy.” Releasing Tim’s hand, the old man settled back onto his pillow. The blush drained from his cheeks, leaving them the color of cold gruel. Still he smiled gently, even affectionately, up at his bedcurtains.

  Tim took his leave, and walked out into a swirl of snowflakes with less spring in his step than steely determination in his soul.

  * * * * *

  Mrs. Minnow’s parlor was all respectability. Not one hint of either charnel house or circus detracted from the sprigged wallpaper, the ponderous rosewood furniture, the circular table draped with a paisley-pattern shawl. The lady herself resembled a doll clothed in taffeta. When she told Tim to join those seated at the table, he did, even though he would have had more confidence in the spiritualist if either her apartments or her person had offered evidence of things, if not unseen, at least unsuspected.

  With a sly silken rustle, Mrs. Minnow turned the flame in the oil lamp down to the smallest of flickers. “Let us all join hands,” she instructed, putting her words into effect by taking Tim’s right hand in her own soft grasp. He felt as though he were holding a mite of warm bread dough.

  He allowed the bewhiskered gentleman on his left to clasp his other hand, and strained his eyes through the wintry gloom, but could see only shadows and implications, grey writ upon grey.

  Another crinkle of fabric, and Mrs. Minnow began to murmur softly in what might or might not have been the Queen’s English. She could as well have been summoning a waiter as summoning spirits, Tim thought. . . .

  A sudden swish in the air above the table, and a spatter of ice-cold water droplets, sent a ripple of surprise around its periphery. Like the gentleman on his left, Tim jerked in surprise. Mrs. Minnow did not.

  The odor of pine boughs freshly cut in a snowy field came to Tim’s nose. A masculine voice reached his ears, although it seemed to issue from the female shape to his right. “There is someone here who remembers a Christmas Eve long ago.”

  After a long pause, Tim found his voice. “Ah—yes.”

  “I see a lad,” said the voice, “a small boy with a crutch, sitting before a fireplace.”

  Now how did Mrs. Minnow know of this? For a moment Tim entertained the thought that Scrooge and his nurse and Mrs. Minnow herself were conspiring in an elaborate joke at his own expense. But if so, why?

  In for a penny, in for a pound, he told himself, and directed the—the spirit guide—to speak of Scrooge’s past, not his own. “I was that boy. That I survived, nay prospered, and have achieved hale manhood I owe to a benefactor. It is on his behalf that I come here today. He is searching for the identity of three, er, friends who once did him the greatest of good turns.”

  Another silence. Then the voice, tentative now, as though pondering, said, “Fezziwig. Arthur Fezziwig.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Of Fezziwig’s Chandlery, supplier of goods to His Majesty’s Navy during the French wars.”

  Tim knew quite well the name of Scrooge’s former employer, Belle’s father. Again and again had the old man spoken of the Christmas parties held in Fezziwig’s warehouse, of how much joy he and his fellow apprentice Dick Wilkins had found there, of how Belle had refused to dance with anyone but young Ebenezer Scrooge—difficult as it was to conceive of a man so withered by age ever being flush with youth. What Tim did not know was whether Mrs. Minnow or her spirit guide meant to name Scrooge’s employer as one of his ghosts.

  “If Arthur Fezziwig is one of my benefactor’s friends,” Tim asked, “then who are the other two?”

  “Fezziwig’s Chandlery,” said the voice. “Christmas Eve. A pudding soaked in brandy and set ablaze. A sprig of holly. The gleam of gold.”

  Tim leaned forward and the spongy hand in his drew him back. Mrs. Minnow’s own feminine voice said, “You have had your answer, sir.”

  “But. . . .” Tim began, and then stopped, sensible of the other ears ranged about the table.

  A wobbly note of music sounded near the ceiling of the room, not the last trumpet, certainly, but one that was near to expiring. Again the male voice spoke from Mrs. Minnow’s lips. “There is someone here who has recently lost a beloved brother.”

  The gentleman with the luxuriant whiskers stirred and spoke. “Yes, yes. Dreadful accident it was, the poor soul burned to a cinder in his rooms.”

  “Spiritous liquors,” intoned the ghostly voice. “Fumes and fire.”

  Resisting the urge to inquire just which liquors were consumed by spirits, Tim retired into his own thoughts. If Scrooge’s partner Marley could return from the grave to assist him, then why not Arthur Fezziwig? That, at least, Tim could credit. But a pudding garnished with holly, and the gleam of gold—if those were clues, they were maddeningly slender ones.

  Fezziwig’s Chandlery, though. There was a place, a time, and a person. While Tim very much doubted he had any answers as yet, he now had more specific questions.

  * * * * *

  The gleam of sunlight on the new-fallen snow made even the dirty, dingy streets of London shine as brightly as the streets of heaven. Each windowpane seemed to Tim to be gilded like the illuminated manuscripts in Lord Ector’s library. Soon it would be Christmas yet again.

  Passing beneath the weathered old signboard reading Scrooge and Cratchit, he opened the door to the counting-house offices. There was his father, sitting at his desk, a ledger book open before him. Tim remembered how thin and careworn the man had once been, for many years supporting his family on fifteen bob a week, until at last Scrooge had his change of heart, raised his salary, and in time made him a full partner in the firm.

  Now it was his hair that was thin, above a face lined with age, not care. Still, Tim could not remember a time when Bob Cratchit had not displayed a cheerful and confident disposition.

  “It does my heart good to see you, Tim,” said the old man, greeting his son with a clap on his shoulder. “Why, but for Mr. Scrooge I might not have you to see, and for that I am grateful not only at Christmas Eve, but on every day of the year. How fares our benefactor?”

  “Not well. I fear his days have grown short.”

  Bob’s face contracted to a pinpoint of sorrow and resignation mingled. “I wish there were some service we could render him, here at the end.”

  “There is,” said Tim, and acquainted his father with Scrooge’s request, and with the step he had already taken to fulfill it.

  Bob tossed Tim’s tale from thought to thought, then said gravely, “I remember when Scrooge saw Christmas merely as the one day of the year he could turn no profit. It was that same fateful Christmas Eve that I heard him say, ‘If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.’”

  “He tempted fate, then,” said Tim, “and summoned the spirits with his own words.”

  “And yet, just what spirits were they? A fine question, an apt question. Surely, to have had such a profound impact on
Scrooge’s disposition, these ghosts were indeed friends and acquaintances, as you suggest.”

  “No, as Mrs. Minnow and her spirit guide suggest.” Tim looked about the offices, shabby still. His gaze settled upon the ledgers mounting higher and higher up a tall shelf, until the topmost row of books made a veritable Himalayan peak of dust and cobwebs. “What happened to Arthur Fezziwig, Father? His business failed, didn’t it?

  “Yes. With the defeat of Napoleon and the ending of the French wars the demand for his goods dropped away, and new means of production superseded the old ones to which he clung, as we all cling to that which is familiar. Fezziwig died impoverished in wealth but not in spirit, or so I heard.”

  “Aha,” said Tim.

  “Scrooge, I believe, considered his employer’s fate to be a cautionary tale, and so made his fortune not by selling goods susceptible to spoilage and changes in taste, but by dealing in properties and making loans. Always he felt the shadow of insolvency looming over him, even though he had funds enough to buy and sell a business like Fezziwig’s Chandlery ten times over.”

  “Could it be, then, that Scrooge’s engagement to Belle Fezziwig was broken off because her father had been unable to bequeath her a dowry?”

  “I believe so, although I doubt if even Scrooge at his most avaricious would have stated that so bluntly.”

  “Did Belle ever marry?”

  “Oh yes. After his miraculous transformation—and if ghosts or spirits were instrumental in that transformation, then it must truly have been miraculous . . .”

  Tim smiled his agreement.