Peter Cratchit's Christmas Carol

by Drew Marvin Frayne

And Scrooge! My Uncle Scrooge was with me, taking me through the streets, pointing out various happinesses I might have missed, stopping here to offer blessings to a shy young girl, and standing there in front of a group of noble carolers proffering a rousing chorus of “Good King Wenceslas.” I had a hundred questions for him, nay, a thousand, but I could only think of one to ask.

  “Uncle, dear Uncle, why have you brought me here?” I said, planting my feet midstreet in order to halt the pell-mell nature of our march through the city.

  “Why have I brought you here, dear boy?” he asked, an impish light glinting from his eyes. “Why, Christmas, dear boy. Christmas! Look around you.”

  “I’ve looked, Uncle. I see. But I don’t understand.”

  “No. No, you don’t.” This was said with all affection, and no malice, but still, his words stung.

  “Why are you here?” I asked him and then, more ably articulating the question I truly wanted to ask, I tried again. “How are you here?”

  The old man placed his hand on my shoulder. He moved his mouth close to my ear. “I asked an old friend for a favor,” he whispered, giving me a small wink and brushing the side of his nose with one finger. “Come!” he added, far more loudly. “We’ve much to see!”

  We made our way to a poorer section of the city, one I knew well. “This is Camden Town!” I said, but, despite the general condition of the residents of the area, Christmas was evident even in this humbler part of the city. Doorways were decorated with boughs of evergreen; good wives bustled about dressed in their finest gowns. True, they were nearly all bedecked from stem to stern with ribbons that, I knew, could at the reasonable sum of six pence adorn any fabric with a festive air and cover any manner of holes and tears. And yet the people! There was no quarrel here, not today, and I heard all the same greetings and good wishes and “Merry Christmases” as I might anywhere else in the city.

  I knew this place well; this was the home of my childhood. Yet another corner of this place was my current residence. So why had Scrooge brought me here? Did he know how far I had fallen?

  I asked my uncle that very question. “This was the home of my childhood Christmases, Uncle, but what connection does it have to my Christmas present?”

  In response, the old man only pointed toward a lowly poulterer’s shop. The storefront itself was dingy and tattered and gray, but the commotion in front was as lively as any scene I had spied that day. Squinting, I could make out two men dressed a far sight better than the others. But what were they doing?

  “Uncle?” I asked by way of inquiry, but Scrooge only gestured me forward, so I obeyed.

  Closer to the shop, I could see the two gentlemen were handing out birds to the common folk as they walked on by. Judging by their look and manner, they were father and son. “Take them to the bakery in the next street but one,” the younger was saying, “and the baker there shall roast them for you. For free!” Such meat was a great boon to any family in Camden Town, but I noted that those families who could afford their own merely looked on smilingly, leaving this generous bounty to those who truly needed it most.

  “I don’t understand, Uncle,” I said. “It is a most generous display. And these people will be made better of it—for a day or so. But what lesson is it that you seek to impart here?”

  “Ah, Peter,” Uncle Scrooge replied. “You observe, but you do not see. It was oft that way with you,” he added with a wry chuckle. “Look again.”

  I did as he bade, but I only saw the same tableau present itself to me. The two men, affably handing out trussed geese; some families waiting in line, others just looking on and absorbing the Christmas spirit. The geese were small, to be sure, but they would provide a goodly Christmas supper to everyone present. But what was it I was failing to see? What was it my Uncle Scrooge wished me to note?

  And then I saw something familiar in the eyes and the aspect of the younger lad passing out the birds.

  “Why— Is it?— Yes, it’s Tim! Tiny Tim!” Two years had passed since I had last laid eyes on my brother, but that time had seen him finally leave the last flowerings of adolescence behind and become the man he was destined to be. And if that youth was Tim, then that meant that the older man must be—

  “Father?” I rushed forward now. Yes, it was my father; it was Bob Cratchit standing there! He was two years older, and two years stouter, but his cheeks were as red as ever, even if his hair had grayed in some places and receded more in others. “Father! It’s Father!” I shouted back to my Uncle Scrooge, who clearly knew all along who the two generous benefactors were.

  It was good to see them, though seeing them both like this made my heart sing and ache in a confusing tumult of emotions. This was our old neighborhood; clearly, they had not forgot. And yet my own squalid domicile was mere blocks from here; how close had I been to detection, to even further ruin?

  Ahh, but to see them here, Tim and Father. It made me wonder how the rest of the family was: Mother, and my other siblings, and Fred and Clara. Were they well? Were they happy? My heart swelled to imagine they were. I hoped they were.

  “What you are thinking of, Peter, my boy?” my uncle asked me. But the look on my face said it all. So he asked me another pressing question. “Why did you not come back to them, my boy? Why did you not come home?”

  It was a simple question, really, and one I thought I knew the answer to. I had a veritable hundred excuses to shun my family when I once again landed on these shores. Now, of course, it was too late for all that. And yet…seeing them like this…I stepped even closer, so I might listen to their conversation and pretend to be amongst them once more…

  “That’s it, Father, the last of them,” Tim was saying. He truly was a strapping young man but still possessed the same gentle spirit he had always displayed.

  “Well done, my boy, well done!” my father replied. He surveyed their good works. “Drink it all in, Tim, drink it in! We shall not be doing this next year.”

  “I shall miss it, Father.” Tim smiled ruefully.

  “As will I, my son, as will I.”

  I longed to hear more, but Scrooge had taken hold of my hand and was drawing me away. “Please, Uncle, I wish to stay!”

  “We have much to see, Peter, and time is precious to me.”

  “But, Uncle—why won’t Father and Tim be able to give out such gifts next year?”

  At this, my uncle could only offer a doleful shrug. “I am sorry, Peter. I am no seer nor no spirit. I am only a humble ghost, and as such, my knowledge of this world and its events is limited.”

  “It must be as I feared,” I said. “They have lost hold of the business; their fortunes are fading fast.” This was what I sought to prevent by journeying away from them; how sad, how gloomy and cheerless I felt, witnessing firsthand all that my failures had wrought.

  Uncle Scrooge had no reply to this. Instead, he took my hand in his, and we were transported once more.

  We stood on a more fashionable street, but unlike the bustling center of London, this one was quiet. There were residences here, sleepy family homes, and shops as well, businesses that were more upscale than those found in center town. There was a dressmaker, and a men’s tailor, and there was one building, familiar to me—

  “Martha! Martha’s millinery is located here!” I said, running forward to the little shop in which my sister designed and sold her wares. “It—it is gone!” I sputtered, dismayed to find a common printing shop in its stead, with pamphlets and booklets in the front window, and not the attractive hats my sister designed and sold. “Martha! Martha!” There was a series of rooms atop of the shop, where my sister resided. I rushed through the street door and bounded up the stairs. “Martha!” I shouted again, though why I bothered, I could not say, since it was evident that neither Scrooge nor I could be seen nor heard by those around us. I burst into the residence and found—not my sister Martha, but Bettina, my sister Bettina, older than me by just a year and already a mother. No, make that twice over a mother, with one m
ore on the way, as she scurried around the cramped space of the upstairs dwelling chasing two very young children, while her round belly indicated that another child would soon enter this world. “Jeremy! Jeremy!” she shouted, half laughing, half gasping for air. “Come and help me with these scamps!” Jeremy was her husband—I remembered his name. Odd, though, that after two years’ absence, I could not picture his face.

  “Martha has lost her shop?” I asked my Uncle Scrooge as we watched my sister endeavor—fruitlessly—to gain some semblance of control over her wee ones. “And Bettina is forced to reside in these cramped quarters with her large family?”

  Uncle Scrooge was busy smiling at the children, wishing he could dandle one on each knee. “What of it?” he asked. “Your childhood home was smaller than this, Peter Cratchit, and there were far more of you Cratchits present there.”

  “Yes, but—this is what I went away to prevent, Uncle! None of this should have happened at all!”

  “But what has happened, Peter? They seem quite happy to me!”

  And, indeed, my sister was laughing, and her husband, a strapping, handsome, fair-haired man, had now entered the scene, and had managed to secure each wriggling child, one under each arm, and engaged them in some kind of combat involving tickling each other’s toes.

  “Yes, but—oh, you don’t understand, Uncle!” I said, turning my back on this domestic scene and making my way toward the street once more.

  “Then tell me, Peter,” Uncle Scrooge said, following behind me. “Tell me what it is I do not understand.”

  “You should know—you should know better than anyone!” I shouted at him. “You raised us up from hardship. You gave us everything, made us who we are!” I lowered my voice. “I only wanted to protect them, to preserve them, the way you did.”

  “Is that what I did?” Scrooge asked. “Is that why I did what I did?” The old man placed his hands on my shoulders. “Peter, you and your family did far more for me than anything I ever did for any of you.”

  “No, Uncle, I—you’re twisting it all around!” I yelled. “I only ever wanted to keep them safe, the way you did, the way you—the way you kept me safe.” There it was. The sentiment, buried deep inside, I had been afraid to utter for far too long. “I wanted to protect them from the world, the way you protected me. All of us.”

  “You have always feared the world too much, Peter Cratchit,” he said, the same words he would say to me as a youngster at his feet. Scrooge moved his hands to my face. “Listen to me, my boy, and understand this. It is important. I was the same way once. And it nearly drove me to my doom. I feared the world, so I locked it away, becoming cold, unfeeling, heartless. I was dead inside and didn’t know it, until the spirits set me free.”

  “I hardly think my actions are the same as yours, Uncle Scrooge,” I hotly replied. “I have never acted for own benefit and gain, but for what I could do for others, for the family.”

  “I know your intentions have always been good, Peter,” Uncle Scrooge said to me. “I know your heart is in the right place. But you cannot always be so afraid, my boy.”

  “I’m not—I’m not afraid!” I replied. “I did it for them. For them! To make them happy. To keep them happy!”

  “And are they happy?” he said, taking my hand in his. We were transported once again. But this space was instantly familiar to me. These were Scrooge’s old chambers, where the Cratchit family now lived.

  “Home,” I said, a word I had not uttered in quite a long period of time. “Uncle, you have brought me home.”

  At first blush, the rooms seemed deserted. But then I saw, in the corner of the room, my mother, and my youngest sister, Amelia, engaged in sewing. But this was not the happy pastime it once was! There was no laughing, and telling of old stories or family lore. They were both quiet, and still.

  I watched my mother lay her work upon the table. She put her hand up to her face. “The color hurts my eyes,” she said to Amelia, who set her own work aside and took my mother’s hand in her own.

  “It’s the candlelight, I suspect,” my mother added. “It makes my eyes weak. And I don’t want to show weak eyes to your father when he returns.” Amelia said nothing, but continued to press my mother’s hand. I, however, had much to say over this scene.

  “Do you see?” I said, rounding on Scrooge. “It matters not who one is, or how one starts. When fortune fails, everyone suffers.”

  “Again, Peter, you observe but do not see. Look closer, and note what ails your mother so.”

  I looked again, and though my mother was dressed in a blue velvet gown—fit for the season, if perhaps a bit more sedate than her usual colorful garb—I noticed that she fiddled with a black brooch pinned to her breast. “But that—that is mourning jewelry,” I said to Scrooge. “But who—who?”

  “Don’t you understand, my boy?” he gently replied. “It’s you she is in mourning for.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, to remind Scrooge I was not dead, that I had been here all along. But I realized that, to my mother, and my whole family, I must be dead. When the Belisama was scuttled, and my name not listed amongst the survivors, the captain must have created some excuse for my absence, telling Whitby and the authorities—and my family—I had been killed during the journey. Men always die on such trips, from sickness or from drowning or from any number of unseen dangers, and we had lost a fair few men along the way. When that treacherous sea captain returned to London, he must have told everyone I was—I was dead. This was a safe enough lie for him. And if I ever did return, it would be of no consequence, because by then, the captain would be long gone. Long gone, and quick.

  “He shall not get away with such deceitfulness,” I seethed.

  “Who?” Scrooge asked me. “Who is being deceitful here?”

  I opened my mouth to explain—and then realized that I was the deceiving one. I had been here, in London, for more than half a year. I could have revealed my presence to my family at any time. I could have abated their pain.

  And I chose not to.

  I opened my mouth to speak—and did not know what to say. In my grief, in my blindness, in my anger at the world, I had caused far more pain and hurt than I had ever intended. “Uncle,” I said, turning to old Scrooge. “I—”

  But Scrooge grabbed my hand, and we were whisked away once more.

  We were in Fred’s house. It was later that same day. All of my family was there, huddled together—quite uncomfortably—in the drawing room. I spied Father and Mother, Bettina and her brood, Tim, Georgie, and Amelia. And Martha was there, too, Martha who had lost her milliner’s shop, her pride and joy. And there were Fred and Clara, standing together by the piano. No doubt, Clara’s plump sister Maybelle would soon arrive, with her husband Mr. Topper, who always scampered and romped around with us children as if he were still a child himself.

  But this was a somber scene. In some way it was reminiscent of the very Christmas two years back—my last Christmas with them—when I announced I would be leaving on my voyage. “Peter’s Golden Voyage” my father had labeled it, despite the fact that he hated to see me leave, despite the fact he thought I should not go. Well, he had been proven right, time and again.

  Uncle Fred was making a toast. He was ever fond of making toasts, but this one lacked his usual joie de vivre.

  “Dear ones,” he was saying, “let us drink our first toast on this Christmas Day to those members of our little family who are no longer with us.” Solemnly, every person assembled raised a quiet glass. “To Uncle Ebenezer, who brought our family together, and to Peter, our golden voyager. We miss you both very, very much. May God’s blessing always be with you. None of us shall forget either of you, or these first partings amongst us. A Merry Christmas to you both.” There was a small murmur as everyone drank to Fred’s toast.

  My heart pounded in my ears. I may not have been present for my own internment, but here I was, being memorialized all the same. I took some small comfort in the fact that when my body is
finally, truly found, tucked away in my little recess in a foul back alley in Camden Town, no one will be able to identify who I once had been, and I would be buried in an unmarked grave in Potter’s Field. At least, that way, my family would not have to mourn me twice…

  “And now, my dears,” Uncle Fred continued, “on to other news. As you know, come the new year, Scrooge and Cratchit will close its doors for good—”

  I turned and fled. It had happened. Everything I feared. The disintegration of my family was at hand. All my efforts to abate it had come to naught. I had lost everything—Augie, my life, and now my family—and all for nothing.

  I waited outside for Scrooge to join me once more. It was some minutes, but the old man finally joined me.

  “You left,” he said.

  “I did not wish to bear witness to the end.”

  “Is that what that was?”

  “How would you classify it?”

  But, infuriating as ever, the old man refused to answer my question. “There is still more to see,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “I fail to understand the purpose of these endeavors,” I said, the words bitter across my tongue. “The first spirit showed me all my sins. Now, you show me all my failures.”

  “Is that all you see, Peter Cratchit?” the old man asked.

  “You keep posing these riddles!” I roared in reply. “What is it you wish me to see, Uncle? What am I supposed to have seen here tonight? Tell me, plain and true, I beg of you! What am I supposed to see?”

  “Love,” was his reply. It was so simple, so understated, and so true, that it caught me by surprise. “Observe the genuine love they all have for you. For me. For one another.” The old man’s smile was small, but distinct. “Is that not the lesson of Christmas? Is that not what this day ever deigns to teach us?”

  I had no response to his words. “Come,” he said. “Take my hand. We’ve more to see.”

  In the blink of an eye, I found myself standing in front of a small croft, in a place I did not recognize, or had ever been before. “What is this place, Uncle?” But Scrooge would not reply, and instead walked into the small home. I had no choice but to follow suit.