A Regency Christmas Carol (17 page)

C
hristmas Eve dinner was excellent, with roast beef fair to melting from the bone, and a Yorkshire pudding to sop up the rich gravy. The Christmas pudding was so soaked in spirits that a man could feel drunk on the richness of it, his own soul licked with the blue flames that danced over the surface of it without consuming it.

To Joseph Stratford every bite tasted like sand.

The Yule Log was crackling in the grate, and beside it were pans of chestnuts. Tables were set with bowls of wine and currants ready for snapdragon. His guests lit the spirits and snatched at the little fruits, shrieking with laughter and shaking their singed fingers.

And yet Joseph was cold.

The music, though not as raucous as it had been the previous evening, was lively enough to satisfy. But all the songs in the world could not have chased the dullness from his own spirit. He had done nothing as
the only person who could make a change in him had turned and left. He had not stopped her. And soon he would pay the price for that.

To avoid conversing with others, Joseph danced the better part of the evening with Anne. True to form, she had little to say to him, letting him stride through the patterns in silence. She wore the same serene smile she always did. But there was a slightly panicked look in her eyes, as though she was bearing up no better than he. In encouragement, he squeezed her hand.

She started. Then, her worried eyes darting to his, gave an answering squeeze as if to admit that, while they both might be trapped, there was some comfort in knowing she had his sympathy.

Not trapped for long, my dear
, he wanted to say. He had his own suspicions on how this night was likely to end. Try as he might, he could not see a marriage—happy or otherwise—looming on his life’s horizon. Though it had been his whole world just a few days ago, the opening of the mill now seemed a distant and unlikely thing that he would have no part in. He wondered if Breton had the nerve to take it on. But that would mean turning his back on his birth and taking on a real position. Perhaps he could find some man of business to run the place. More likely the whole of it would fall to ruin if Joseph was not alive to fight for it.

It made him wonder… Would it have seemed too fatalistic to draw a will? He had no heir. Perhaps the house could revert to the Clairemonts once he was out
of the way. It would have been wise to leave some document stating that it was his wish, should the worst occur tonight.

Although he had thought to fear death, now that it was likely upon him he could not seem to care. Barbara was gone, and he felt the emptiness of it as he walked the corridors of the great house before bed. He should have said something to her when he’d had the chance.

But what? How did one find the words for something that came so suddenly, so illogically, so inappropriately into one’s life, upsetting plans, breaking vows, subverting all sense and reason? If he had fallen in love with her a few short months ago it might have been difficult. Now that he had formalised the agreement with Anne and her family it was quite impossible.

But then, everything seemed impossible to him. Where once his head had been full of bright and ambitious plans, it was now totally empty. He could not have a future with Barbara Lampett. But neither was he able to imagine one without her.

After his valet left him, he lay in silent dread, waiting for the strike of the clock. His father had been unnecessarily vague about the purpose of these visits. But he had said there would be three of them.

If he had seen the past and the present, then there could be little doubt that next would be the future. What if he had no future? It was quite possible that there was no future to see. If death was coming to take him, then
he would be an angry spirit for having been kept waiting a night longer than expected.

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 workers: 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.