If vengeance was due, then it was little more than Joseph deserved. He thought of his recent treatment of those around him, and the way Barbara had turned from him in disgust after only one night. She was right. He had used her, clinging to her like a lifeline in a stormy sea, trying to postpone what he’d known was coming.
If the coming shadow was no more than his death, he had waited too long to tell her what she meant to him. He would go to his grave in silence, and she would never know. He had given her reason enough to hate him. Perhaps that would be easier. Then she would not grieve.
He opened his eyes, aware of a change in the room. There was movement, but none of the light that the other spirits had brought with them. This future, whatever it was, was darkness. And the greatest cold yet. The very air around him was as the touch of the previous spirits, and it froze the breath in his lungs and the soul at his core.
He reached out to the darkness in the corner. Tonight it suited his mood to embrace it. ‘Whatever you are, come and be done with it. I deserve all the punishment you wish to deliver. But if this is the end, then I request a boon. Give me one more day to make right what needs mending. Do not take me to judgement, knowing what I have left undone.’
There was no answer.
‘Very well, then.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose that all men facing this have regrets. And if you granted wishes then it would be one more day, and one more, in a never-ending string.’
A deeper silence was his only answer. He could sense nothing: no amusement, condescension or annoyance from the thing in the corner. Only a feeling of waiting.
He studied it. The dark thing was man-shaped, and yet not quite a man. As tall as he. Cloaked, perhaps, for the outline of the head had a hooded quality. But only that. It seemed the harder he tried to look at it the less he could see. This lack of definition made him uneasy, building a fear in him that was worse than anything he might have imagined. If it had simply been some horror, he would have catalogued the deformity and recovered from the shock of it.
But this nameless, faceless thing taunted him with the idea that, if he struggled for a while, he would know it for what it was. It drew the tension in him out like a fine wire, making him wait for the snap of recognition that would cause him to go mad.
He deliberately looked away and stood, walking towards it. ‘Come on, then. Take me to wherever it is that you mean to, and let us end this.’
He touched its hand. Or thought he did. For when he looked down there was nothing there. Yet the feeling of cold dry bones in his hands remained. This time they did not fly. They walked slowly—out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the front hall, marching towards the front door, which swung open before them, engulfing them in a chill mist. He could feel the December wind rattling the leafless trees until they scraped against the windows and rustled curtains. And high on the icy gusts he heard a cry that was not so much a wail as a low moan. It came not from outside, but within.
As they passed the door of the salon he heard voices, and turned to view the tableau. A couple wrestled on the couch in a passionate embrace, near to devouring each other with the intensity of their kisses.
Anne looked as he had never seen her, beautiful but dishevelled. Her hair was free, her bodice loosened and her expression hungry. ‘We cannot. We must stop.’ Even as she said it she tore at the neckcloth of the man who held her.
‘So you have said, for ten long years. Yet we never do.’ Robert Breton kissed her again, pushing her hands away to pull at his shirt collar. ‘Some day he will discover us. He is not a man who takes lightly the violation of what he considers his.’
Joseph’s wife laughed bitterly. ‘I doubt he cares. He must know by now. There have been no children. Nor are there likely to be. But he barely even tries any more.’
‘Do not speak of your time together. I cannot bear to think of it.’ His oldest friend reached up to smooth the hair away from his wife’s face. ‘You never should have married him.’
‘But I did. And now it is too late.’
‘You are still young,’ he assured her. ‘And just as beautiful as the day I fell in love with you, so many Christmases ago. Leave him. Run away with me.’
Do it, you faithless harlot. I do not want you. The words sounded clear in his mind, and in his heart. He wanted to scream at the harshness of them, even if they were true.
‘I cannot.’ Anne sighed. ‘I do not love him, nor does he love me. But without me he would be alone.’
‘You know that is not true.’
‘I do not wish to think of that,’ Anne whispered, with a sad little laugh.
‘Then think of his work. He has the mill to occupy him. It is his one true love.’
‘He takes no more pleasure in that than he does in me. When he is at home he wanders the halls at night, counting the rooms.’
Had the habit never changed, then? Even ten years later, was he still so unsure of himself that he needed evidence of his wealth?
‘He drinks far too much.’
‘All the more reason to leave him,’ Breton encouraged her.
She shook her head. ‘It is likely to be the death of him soon enough. I have looked into his eyes. He is not well. What harm would it do to wait a month? Maybe two? I will be a widow then. None will think it odd that we find each other.’
His old friend’s jaw tightened imperceptibly at the thought of further inaction. ‘I will wait, if I must, for the love of you. I know how difficult it would be for you to leave here, and to admit to the world what has been going on between us. But if he does not finish himself soon, then it is not the drink that will end him.’
Anne clung to his arm. ‘You mustn’t say such things.’
Bob Breton, who was the mildest and most pleasant man that Joseph could name, looked colder than December. ‘I think them often enough. I find it difficult to stay silent, with the cancer of it eating me from the inside. I said I understand why you stay, and I cannot fault you for it. He is your husband, and can offer much beyond the legality of your union. But that does not mean that I like it.’
He kissed her again, until she was near to swooning with desire for him. Then he spoke. ‘I love you, Anne. But I cannot wait much longer. If he does not let you go with his own timely death I will do what is necessary to achieve the end necessary so that you might be free.’
Joseph waited for the denial, the pleading from his wife that would spare his life. Instead she was silent, but worried. She leaned forwards into Breton’s shoulder, as though her only fears were for him. Breton’s arm went about her, offering her the support that a husband should have given her.
Strangely, he felt no real jealousy at the sight—only sadness that it had come to this, and that two people so obviously in love had been poisoned to desperation with it.
‘Enough of this,’ he said to the shadow at his side. ‘They hate me. There is nothing more to see. I am a cuckold, but at least I am alive. Take me to the mill, for I wish to see how it fares.’
They continued down the hall and out through the front door, across the lawn and into a mist so thick that the walk might have been one mile or ten for all he knew of it. There was no landmark to show him the way. Nor did he feel the passage of time as he walked.
They were standing at the mill gates now. The silent spectre reached up, resting a wisp of a hand against the gatepost, tracing a divot where a bullet had struck brick.
‘There was trouble here, then?’ There was no other evidence of it. The mill still stood, even larger than it had been when he’d last seen it, a decade before. He released an awed breath. ‘Let me go inside.’
They entered through the dock, to see goods rolled and stacked in neat rows along the wall, ready for delivery. The boilers chugged and rattled, letting off heat and clouds of steam and the stink of sizing and dye. On the factory floor the looms rattled and the shuttles clattered in and out of the warp in a sprightly rhythm—the deafening sound of industry.
Everywhere he looked he saw work
ers: silent, sullen women and children, operating as surely and mechanically as the machines he’d made for them. From time to time they looked up with quick, rat-like glances at the clock. Then they hurried back to their work with a nervous shudder, as though they did not want to be caught looking anywhere but at their assigned tasks. It was functioning exactly as he’d hoped. And the sight of it filled him with a misery he could not describe.
‘Very well, then. All I have worked for, all my dreams, will be like a mouth full of ashes to me in ten years’ time. Is there more? Or will you take me home to bed?’
The shadow moved on, out into the fog again. There was nothing he could do but follow.
They walked down the high street of the village, a little way behind a hunched figure that seemed strangely familiar. Joseph quickened his pace to catch the man and end the mystery. But then he watched the villagers look up from their daily doings, stiffen and turn away. ‘They see me?’ he asked the spirit. If they did, it was not a connection he welcomed. While he had not been well liked in his own time, their glares now held a level of animosity he was not prepared for. What had once been reserve and suspicion had hardened into cold hatred. And it was all the worse because it was mostly the women who stared at him—not just the men who had always been angry.
In fact there seemed to be an unusual number of females.
Then a woman stepped directly into the path of the man in front of him, blocking his way.
The man he was following stopped dead in his tracks. He did not push past the stranger, but neither did he say anything, either in apology or enquiry. It was as though this was a ritual that had occurred before.
‘Merry Christmas, Mr Stratford,’ she said to the man he followed. ‘I hope you are glad of it.’ Then she spat on the ground at his feet.
Without a word, this other, older him stepped around her and continued on his way to the edge of the village, past the church and into the little graveyard beside it.
Not so little any more, Joseph noticed. Not huge, by any means, but larger than he would have expected. Had there been an epidemic? Or some other disaster to account for the additional graves? With little warning, the spirit at his side turned in at the gate and walked through the headstones to the last row of stones.
They were all names he recognised, for he had seen the men gathered around him just a few days ago, with hammers and torches, eager to push through the gates and smash the frames on the mill floor. Wilkins, Mutter, Andrews—and the eponymous Weaver, whose family had been at the craft for so long that they shared its name. All dead. All on the same day.
Had he called the militia? Or some other branch of the law? It could have been hanging, or just as easily a pitched battle that the local men were overmatched to fight. But the arrival of troops would explain the crease a bullet had made in the stonework at the mill. No matter what it had been, the rebellion had been stopped. And he had been at the heart of it. Calling in the law to protect his rights, and wiping out families in the process.
‘It seems I won the argument in the end,’ he said to the spirit. ‘But there is no joy in knowing it.’
He looked down at another grave, some way distant from the cluster, and found Jordan—the man whose family he had seen starving just two nights ago. This man’s stone was flanked with two smaller ones, topped with stone lambs. Joseph felt a chill, and found he did not have the nerve to look closer, for he was already imagining that table of hungry children, and the likelihood that whatever food was offered there now did not have as far to stretch.
The spectre gestured that it was time to withdraw, but he shook his head. Joseph searched the gravestones for one name in particular, knowing that if these men were here Barbara’s father had likely died at their side, a victim of violence. She might have been hurt or killed, and the fault would lie with him.
‘Where is Bernard Lampett? He must be dead as well. Why does he not lie with his friends?’
The ghost led him back to a monument worthy of a lord: a marble tomb, with brass fittings and a weeping angel at the top that shone with gilt. It was just the sort of grand thing he’d have ordered, had he the choice. It was garish and horrible next to the sad simplicity he had visited, but at one time he would not have been able to resist this final display of wealth. He fingered the letters carved in the side.
‘Lampett. Dead the same day as the rest. And his wife three months later.’ Whether she had passed from poverty or grief, he did not know.
There was no sign here of what had happened to Barbara. But he could read the truth in the marble. Whatever had occurred, she had been there to see her father fall and to know that Joseph was to blame for it. The crypt he stood before was the product of his own guilty conscience. He had buried her parents properly, hoping to assuage whatever obligation he had incurred from the deaths.
He would only have done that if Barbara were still alive.
‘Take me to her. I need to know what has happened,’ he said, not bothering with a name. If the spirit knew to show him this, then it knew everything. He glanced helplessly as it raised a hand in the direction of the village, and they set off down the road together.
They would not be walking if there was nothing to see. He tensed, knowing that if the lessons held to form the spirit had likely saved the worst for last. But he had to know the truth, and so he set an eager pace.
‘If you have something to show me, then be quick about it. I think you have managed to teach the lesson you wished. I must change. Although how I will do it I am not sure. There are expectations on me, you know. I cannot throw aside my engagement with the promise that she will be better off. Nor can I let the profits go hang and the equipment be destroyed. I cannot just walk away from it all.’
In response, the spirit said nothing.
‘And now you will show me Barbara. What has become of her, then? Has she forgiven me? I seriously doubt it. Does she hate me? What misery am I likely to see? How will you lay it all at my door? Surely these people deserve some credit in their futures?’ he said. ‘She could just as easily have made a hash of things on her own, without my help. She was well on the way to that when I met her.’
He might as well have been arguing with the fog, for all he heard was the echo of his own empty words. But even he did not believe them. Even if he could convince himself that her misfortunes were her own doing, or her father’s, it would pain him to see them.
At least they were going back to the village and not searching the graveyard for another stone. Surely that meant there was hope.
If he could just see her, it would be all right. What he saw—whatever its cause—could be changed for the better, even if he had to move heaven and earth—he glanced at the spectre beside him—or perhaps heaven and hell.
They were stopping at the same cottage she lived in now, as quietly cheerful as it had ever been, despite what he had just seen of her family. It held the same air of peace that he had seen just the other day, with the path swept of snow and the holly bushes by the door carefully trimmed. But it was as if, with the passage of time, the presence of the two others who had lived there had evaporated. If he searched, he would find no pipe ash in the garden, nor papers scattered on the writing desk. And there would be no Christmas dinner big enough for three and whatever guests might stop.
They drifted through the door as though it was nothing more than mist, and he was glad. He was sure that the cold tended to get in with each opening of the door, and it had a way of lingering like an unwanted guest. At least she should be warm and comfortable in her own home.
She was not in the front room, or the little kitchen, and he drifted with the spirit towards the bedrooms, feeling like a voyeur but unable to contain his curiosity.
He was right to be ashamed, for she was not alone. Though it was the middle of the day she was in bed, the sheet pooling around her waist as she stroked the back of the man lying beside her. She was older, as Anne had been, but still as beautiful as he remembered her from the previo
us night. Her breasts larger, heavier, her waist thickening. He wondered, if he passed through the cloth that hung over the doorframe of the other room, whether he would find a cradle in use, or a row of tiny cots. Were there children playing in the garden behind the cottage?
But there was no sound of laughter in the house or the garden.
He did not like to think that she had made no family for herself. But she was looking up at the man beside her with such warmth that perhaps the future was not so very grim. If he had nothing else, he would know that she was safe.
Then her lover turned, and Joseph saw his older self, rising from the bed.
Without thinking, Joseph ran his hands over his own body, seeking reassurance of sound mind and limbs. Was this really what he would look like? Or did he have some bit of that in him now? Vanity had made him sure that he was handsome, and ladies had done nothing to dissuade him from the belief. But this new him was a strange thing—pale, hair shot with grey, face hardened into a frown, body spider-thin and beginning to stoop.
The other him rose from the bed, not even looking down at the lovely woman who reached for him, pulling on trousers, tugging a shirt back into place and hurriedly tying his neckcloth.
‘You cannot stay?’ Barbara held out a hand to him, inviting.
‘Why would I wish to? You could not even manage to heat the room, though you knew I would be coming.’
If the words hurt her, she gave no sign of it. ‘It is warm enough in my bed, is it not?’
‘It would be even warmer in a larger bed, with softer sheets. I have given you ample opportunity to move to more hospitable lodgings, and yet you insist on remaining in this hovel.’
‘It is my home,’ she said simply.
‘It forces me to come into the village in the middle of the day. You know how the people treat me. And we both know what they think of you because of my visits.’
She smiled sadly. ‘I cannot help how they treat you. What they think of me is no less than the truth. I fail to see, after all this time, how I can change that.’
A Regency Christmas Carol Page 18
