The Christmas Ball

Fiction - by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

The dancers shattered into a twirl of fragmented movement in the mirrors lining the walls. Despite the ballroom's heat, I shivered into goose-flesh at his icy hand between my shoulder blades. Though light on his feet, perhaps because he had none, my partner's chains tread heavy on my toes. Fetters however were no match for the heady waltz losing us in its vertiginous spin. Yet, when I listened closely he was counting. Not 1-2-3, 1-2-3, measuring his steps, rather, vast amounts of money — 112 pounds, 5 shillings 2 pence. While sighing, he seemed to be adding up some kind of accounts, unable or unwilling to otherwise converse. I dared not look at what damage the irons inflicted on my threadbare slippers, decades out of the fashion, almost as far back as Mr. Marley's pigtail and tasselled boots.

All proceeds from this charity Christmas Ball — a new event in the social calendar given by Mister Ebenezer Scrooge — went to the children of the East End. As with anything sponsored by the celebrated philanthropist, attendance meant opportunities to make social and other connections. Potential guests vied for entry, snapping up tickets. With Mr. Scrooge’s legendary open-handedness, it surprised no one that invitations came, offered at no fee, for poorer maidens such as my sister and me who must wed or be lost. Some weeks before, in fact, my mother fetched the day's mail and found an envelope of swooping script addressed to Mrs. Foxleigh, Miss Foxleigh (my elder sister Emily), and Miss Jane Foxleigh (myself) to Mr. Scrooge's Christmas Ball, falling on my birthday, December 24. Charlotte and Sophie, still in short skirts, pouted but made us promise to tell every detail. Settled on attending, our only problem was how we might beg and borrow proper dress for it.

Mother's hands shook as they opened the envelope. They always shook at any sign of someone on the doorstep, even for postal delivery, ever since my tenth birthday seven years earlier. We had been awaiting my father, a Chancery lawyer, to light the candles on my birthday cake before I would blow them out. I would entrust only him with my one wish, to become a poet, cherishing it deep in my heart since he had given me my first verses the year before. Instead of Papa at the latch, though, there was a knock at the door. A constable appeared to tell us that he had been crushed by a runaway cab whilst crossing the street. These short words snuffed out our little security in the world. Its candles unlit, the untasted cake was tossed into the rubbish, and my wish went unconfided. We spent our Christmas Day in the bitter stench of black dye and calling for the undertaker, my broken papa laid out in the parlour. My sobbing mother nonetheless gave me both a locket from herself and from my now late father, a diary with a key. From that moment the diary, and all its incarnations in after years, became for me my father's ear. He had inscribed it with a verse of his own : "A lock and a key/ for your thoughts to be free." As if he could read them, here is where I put unwhispered dreams and hopes, dashed and discouraged for the most part but standing yet firm there in my own handwriting.

Diary and locket were the last superfluities. Straightaway we cut expenses: we all of us cried at the loss of Bridget and of Mary. With no more schooling beyond what my mother could provide, we would now open our own doors and cook our own meals. We gave up the circulating library. This is the economy I recall most keenly even beyond our home itself as we moved to cramped and dank basement lodgings in Leicester Square. Call it reading rage or poetry mania, I needed my books as I needed to breathe. We cannot sleep without dreaming, how was I to live without reading ? I assuaged this by telling bedtime stories to Sophie and Charlotte, hoping to fill them up on fancy if not a square meal. My diary held captive princesses and robber barons, second-hand Tennyson and Scott, high adventure, and noble sentiments. I kept from the little ones — for my father’s ghostly ear only — my grimmer scribblings: tales of our thrice-darned stockings, squinting by smelly, sparely-used tallow candles, or grace over the Sunday cabbage stewed with some shank, and the everlasting potatoes for the rest of the week. Feeling his presence supporting me, I would propound on the whole dreadful scheme which trapped the poor in general and women most particularly in the cogs of its fetid machinery.

When finally there were no more blank pages, Papa slipped further back into a past beyond my grasp. Nevertheless, I scraped together what I could of the unused parts of old ledgers or other such partially blank volumes discarded by more fortunate folk. I bound these with a length of ribbon in a knot known only to myself. My wish to become a poet did not however remain under my secretly-tied string. For one, as our fortunes changed, my mother distraught and Emily gone for a governess, it fell to me to give Charlotte and Sophie their lessons in reading. I could not long hide my particular passions for Mrs. Browning and the Misses Brontë. For another, they would often find my brow furrowed, rapping my skull with the pen at a stubborn rhyme. This gave rise in game to such inspired collective doggerel as :

Mr Keats bleats indiscreet feats, in heating sweet mincemeat of elite parakeet.

I could not help but giggle at it despite my somewhat loftier poetic preferences. At all events, even after shelving that first diary, I kept its key close to me in my locket in remembrance of my father's last gift, indeed his last words, hoping I might one day find matter in them to publish a volume of my own.

Meanwhile, that Christmas Emily found herself between situations. For my part, I could follow her as a governess, but knew from her letters, between their lines, what life this was, neither upstairs nor down, fish nor fowl. One must fawn over offspring however obstreperous, yet ward off a mother's jealousy in whose eyes they could do no wrong. Worse, one could fall prey to elder sons or even husbands. This last I only learned as she came home for good that Christmas, confiding to me in the dark as Sophie and Charlotte slept. Escaping the talons of a particularly insistent employer, she did not know whether she would have references afterwards. We agreed to keep the worst of it from Mama. And all this on a market glutted with governesses going for such meager wages as to laugh and so keep from crying. Nor did I have her accomplishments, no French nor piano to garner better earnings. I was seventeen this very night and had no notion how to drag us out of second-hand clothes rank with Sunday’s cabbage.

Such was life with a widowed mother living on a tiny annuity with four daughters. She dreamt of taking lodgers, especially in a seaside town in the south somewhere where her cough might improve. In our tiny rooms with me and my sisters, this remained a pipe dream unless we could marry just well enough. Not with the 10,000 a year the novels promised, but to climb towards a life with a maid-of-all-work and perhaps, if well enough indeed, a cottage with some rooms down Brighton way for mother in her old age. An event such as Mr. Scrooge’s ball could potentially turn into a ladder up and out for at least one of us, and perhaps the others might follow. Heaven knew we hadn't much opportunity to meet gentlemen otherwise. Those present however may have been happy to let their tickets go to the relief of the utterly destitute while they made their useful acquaintances but were less likely to choose a life partner from the simply down-trodden. Emily danced with a baron who afterward partnered me. The dances done, he left to fetch refreshments but was nevermore seen. Once I gave up all hope of his return, yet another in a long line, I swallowed back brimming tears and set my face towards the ball room once more, mouth moulded into a smile.

So dancing here at gala charity balls with gentlemen who might afford such things, girls like us were, in principle at least, as much the beneficiaries as the ragged small ones of Aldgate High Street. If only our rewards might be a new pair of shoes rather than a lucky glass of lemonade and a quadrille. The society damsels flitted in their bright array of ribbon and lace, never lacking in partners. The stuff of my own gown was drab and rough under my even rougher hands. I was a moth, certainly company for all those who had made their dinner through the years on the one silk shawl my mother had lent me. My sister had her lone bracelet with the garnet while I wore my locket.

Whatever the charitable venture, be it his housing for crippled children, his literacy efforts for those without schooling, or his programme of public lectures in the sciences and literature, Mister Scrooge must always, always involve his old business partner whose name still graced his business as full partner though his funeral had been before I was born. "Dead-as-a-doornail Marley," as our host called him, thinking after all these years still to punctuate the words with a slap on the back, where no back was to slap. Our host lifted a glass in a toast. "A word for my old friend and partner Jacob Marley who gave me what I thought the fright of my life and in fact saving that life, saving my soul even — seventeen years ago tonight — the story is known to all, I shall not detail..." After then going over those night's well-known events, our host bewailed the orphans and widows and encouraged one and all to give generously, to indeed partake of a raffle for that same mission. The prize in question he held aloft: a hand-tooled and embossed blank book of Moroccan leather from Bond Street, like something in which the Lady of Shalott might set down her cursed destiny. My heart raced at the thought of filling it with stories unspoken. The tickets to participate, however, equaled our family grocery bill for a week.

After the toast, chatter swelled once more and I overheard those noting that in the years gone the shade had lost some of his padlocks and lighter seemed the chains that bound him, fewer and fewer each year. Yet coiled about his person remained one ponderous cable of iron decked with a money box and padlock. Older guests agreed and spoke of his lingering as his chains grew lighter. That must have been the case, for linger he did. And clearly he favoured the poor girls, though none of us could decipher the meaning of his mutterings. Apparently — as others of his partners before me had passed the tale — he mumbled the amounts of the dowries that might save us from ruin, adding up the pounds and shillings against our own undoing. Each credit and debit like a whorl of black and red reeled off, he could not stop counting. Or, it was his own remains of damnation cursed, we whispered, with the debts he skewered out of the miserable, leaving him to wander the earth in his irons and return to hell at each daybreak. Another girl assured me that they were the sums of his sins and what donations to the unfortunate it would take to save his soul from torment. Or again the total of the evening's gains.

I promised myself to write it all down in the remains of my current makeshift ledgerbook, and fingered my locket with its old hidden key. There were but a few pages left until I must find some partially blank volume or loose quire. And so with an eye to amusing Charlotte and Sophie as well as filling the end of my journal, I looked out at the bankers, magnates, and nabobs.

My glance landed on a peculiar young man slouched in a corner. Slender, his dark hair fell over a wan brow. Even across the room I could see his pale eyes as they stared out distantly over the gay crowd of cavorting ladies and their cavaliers, as though they were worlds and not mere feet away. A sort of invisible caul seemed to separate him from others. At first I couldn't say why he caught my notice but that he did not engage in the prevailing merriment. Perhaps it was because his attitude mirrored my own dull spirits. Refusing any shadowy turn of thought, I asked myself how I might conjure him for Sophie and Charlotte? "Mark he is dark and stark but for a spark, not one for a lark;" "Lone and unknown, skin and bone, with eyes that shone, he doth moan…” I stopped myself there and wondered why I thought he would moan. Was it the numbered sighs of my erstwhile wraith still echoing in my ear? The young man spoke to no one, belonging to no particular party. After what seemed a long moment, he broke our gaze and looked down. I could hardly have been surprised, with my dowdy garb.

As for the rest of them, these gentlemen would indeed dance with the dowerless but hardly look at our faces, their eyes fixed clearly on the walls, duty done to dance with one and all but nothing further despite our host's best laid plans. I cheered myself from the hopes sunk in my stomach by capturing for the little ones the brilliant finery of the dashing if unreachable dandies and behooped belles of the ballroom's splendour of curled gold and red velvet, how even I might evoke my uncanny dancing partner. As the rooms bore down their heat upon my bare shoulders from the candlelight and overly-galop'd bodies, I almost longed to feel those chilly fingers once more at my back.

But for him, my dance card was woeful. A paper rose bravely attempted to hide my bodice's mended flounce but did not entirely succeed. This idea belonged to the fairy-fingered Emily. Teaching me what she knew, we had begun that week to take in shirtmaking and miscellaneous mending. As Sophie and Charlotte read aloud from their exercises to our corrections, I did the plain, Emily the fancy. Pulling needle through linens and silks, pricking my finger as often as not, we daydreamed the impossible: a shop of our own. We would lose caste by it certainly and it was hardly a way to fortune. It could though provide a stable respite from knowing that Charlotte and Sophie had often but bread and butter of an evening, or knowing Emily was in the grips of another cad, or again our mother’s health. Still, it was stories merely again as we hadn't the ghost of a chance of amassing the capital needed to invest in such an enterprise. In my heart what I wanted was to write about the unfairness of this hand dealt us, ours and that of so many like us, and so many far worse off. In my head, each tedious stitch became a turn of verse. And these words were not for my sisters nor my long-gone father or even for my secret self: I wanted them to expose the rot of this predicament far and wide to eyes who might finally see and act.

Despite these long hours of practice, even my sister's skills could not wholly hide my gown's age and defects. This I feared heralded no great things for me as a potential partner, the time of a dance or for longer. As the band began a mazurka and I sat next to my mother hoping to seem demure and alert and nonchalant all at once while in fact gazing out at the snowfall. I wished I might step out to cool down and perhaps, if none were looking, to catch a snowflake on my tongue.

The mirrors' angles allowed me to spy Mister Marley amongst the other gentlemen, his lock boxes rattling despite his careful gestures and those surrounding him stiffly lifting their drinks to taut lips. As the ghost left them, they tightened their circle. One amongst them, whose macassared head signalled a swell, drifted towards our genial host. After some words both came up to us. Mister Scrooge introduced him. Mister Edgar Hobnail, so he said, owned a cotton mill, and had a lively interest in horse racing. He offered me his arm without actually requesting the honour of a dance, Still the gesture brooked no mistaking and no refusal.

"So it seems I'm hell bound, if I'm to listen to some of the present company," he laughed, nodding at Mr. Scrooge near the refreshments on the far side of the dance floor.

I heard now perfectly, especially with his moist lips at my ear. I pretended otherwise and did not reply. We spun past Mr. Marley once more and again I could distinctly hear, for that brief moment "41 pounds 18 shill..." before my partner spun me elsewhere. His hand slid lower than my shoulder blades, hot and tight and sodden. By the end of the dance I had been made to understand that his elderly mother needed a companion as his grasp slipped to the small of my back. I was relieved to put my chair's back between my waist and his hand.

Emily awaited. Surely sensing an all too familiar situation, she asked if I would not care to go onto the terrace for some fresh air.

We happened upon a gathering of the grander young ladies of the evening. One nodded briefly then turned back to her own party of peers when another remarked, "But Mister Marley has not danced with me." "Nor me." "I can only say I'm glad of it, what would those chains not do to my hem should he trip? And how is it he has not tripped ?" "Still it's odd — he only dances with ... " A few of them glanced over at us and the first of them cleared her throat. They shivered, though whether from the cold or from the idea of sharing a brief embrace with a visitor from Hell perhaps made for a distinction without a difference. Having had our fill of the chilly atmosphere, Emily and I made our way back into the ballroom's oppressive warmth.

At a tap on my shoulder, I turned to one of the girls from outside.

"Excuse me, as we have not been introduced, but did either of you perhaps lose this?" She held in her hand my locket, my hand darted to my neck which indeed was bare. In a sudden panic, I blinked back tears thinking I might have just lost this last trace of papa. Thanking her effusively for her kindness coming to us as she did unacquainted, still I dared not presume to introduce myself, not knowing if I had to do with a young lady of rank. Gracefully however, she side-stepped strict etiquette, introducing herself as Margaret Bewick. In turn, my sister gave her our names.

"Foxleigh...The name is not unknown to me!"

I told her of my father who had some little reputation for having concluded the Jarndyce v Jarndyce suit. I could think of no other reason for her to have heard of our family name.

"Then it was he who saved our inheritance, mine and my brother's! We are orphans and there was a dispute with our uncle. Oh, it was long and bitter - and doesn't warrant repetition here and now, especially on Christmas Eve, but he saved our very livelihoods or we might have ended up..." Here her eyes flitted to my paper rose, and she cut herself off. "You must do me the honour of presenting me to your mother and allow me to have you to our home for tea." After she made our mother's acquaintance and promised to return, she was swept away in a Schottische.

Opening the locket to reassure myself it still retained its treasure, I found instead a small folded piece of paper. At the shock of not immediately spying the key, my heart beat apace in my breast. Unfolding the scrap though, there lay the tiny gold thing, nestled in an inked scribble. What to make of the paper I had not the least idea and opened it to find a scramble of writing I could not make out. At first I thought the hand must be in another alphabet. With a string of five digits on the back I guessed it might be a raffle ticket. Did I have a chance at the diary, in spite of it all ? As for the rest of the scrawl, inspiration struck and I held the paper up to the mirrored wall panel. Before my eyes, the writing transformed into more puzzlement. "To each key a lock; to each lock a key." What to make of this? Had Miss Bewick returned my locket and offered me the ticket as a gift, though entirely unacquainted with her at that moment? And how in so short a time? The hand was not however feminine: was this some sort of assignation? A poem? A cipher?

By way of the mirrors I thought I could just make out Mister Marley coming up to us. I turned to see him in person and found instead the pale young man I had seen from before. Miss Bewick introduced our party to her brother, Mr. Laurence Bewick. Softspoken, he addressed my mother: "Margaret has told me whom we have the honour of meeting here tonight, and I would like to join my sister in asking you to afternoon tea in the coming week, or as soon as might be convenient to you," Flattered, mama pretended some confusion in previous engagements, of which we of course had none, despite which a date was soon settled upon for the coming week. A hesitant Mr. Bewick risked a bit more, even, and asked me for the favour of my next free dance. That, embarrassingly, was just beginning. Upon finding me at liberty, a smile came to his lips. It did not, however, seem to reach his eyes. Their otherwise limpid blue remained clouded.

Despite his serious demeanour and unsure step, my partner was the most agreeable of the entire evening. He engaged me in conversation without the least distaste or distance, and his touch was light on my back. His eyes did not perhaps smile but their gaze was kind: no stern stare over my head or at the back wall. He even came back from the refreshment room with sherbets for mother, Emily, Margaret, my mother, and myself.

The topic turned to his acquaintance with Mr. Scrooge. Mr. Bewick had benefited from his attention when the businessman had provided him with an education and welcomed him into his warehouse as an apprentice only to find he had no gift for commerce. He had begun a study of the law, under his patron's auspices, though had abandoned it when he finally came into his inheritance which I understood had happened not so long before. Mr. Scrooge refused repayment. Mr. Bewick mentioned his debt — become now one of the heart — to his benefactor and pledged to contribute to all of his philanthropic efforts.

“The raffle was my brother’s idea” his sister chimed in.

“It seemed to me that something of the sort might be serviceable, if I am to judge by my sister’s attachment to hers” he mumbled.

I added how beautiful it was and how I loved having a repository for my unguarded thoughts. From writing it was but a short step to reading. He asked our opinion of The Mill on the Floss or Castle Richmond. Of course I could not pretend to know the latest novels and demurred, speaking instead of Jane Eyre and Sonnets from the Portuguese, hardly books on the tip of fashionable tongues, but close to my heart nonetheless. Yet at this, in a voice I could barely distinguish above the din, he quoted Mrs. Browning:

Art's a service,–mark :

A silver key is given to thy clasp,

And thou shalt stand unwearied, night and day,

And fix it in the hard, slow-turning wards,

And open, so, that intermediate door

Betwixt the different planes of sensuous form

And form insensuous, that inferior men

May learn to feel on still through thee to those,

And bless thy ministration. The world waits

For help

He declaimed with more ease than he danced. Both the words and their low timbre were equally sweet, jumping from heart to lip at a mere passing reference to their author. As he spoke, I thought I spied a reddish scar peeking above his neckwear. I looked away, sensing something of this soul I had spied alone and apart, and his distance from his fellows. My cheeks rushed with warmth at the hope of further exchanges but I caught myself. Still I looked once more at those cerulean eyes set into the pallor of his skin. At this his own face flushed but his eyes seemed to clear. He offered to lend me some newer romances which I could return at my leisure. Suddenly Mr. Scrooge beckoned to him. Making his apologies, he turned to answer his benefactor's call.

Miss Bewick then brought up my father, his work on her and her brother's behalf during their childhood

“He seemed a knight in shining armour to us as small children, shuffled about between various relatives’ homes. Our welcome, whichever place it was, depended on the standing of the suit. That was Byzantine at least. In fact, your father would summon us to his chambers, where he very kindly simplified how matters stood. And he insisted on addressing us personally rather than speaking over our heads to our guardians as any other lawyer might have done. Before we left, he also told us each and every time stories of orphans and of fortune favoring the hopeful as well as the bold. I think I owe him my sanguine view of luck. With my brother it went differently. Please forgive my frankness, as neither Laurence nor myself were brought up to the niceties of ceremony. But it is such a delight to see him not only put so many words together at once, but even to dance!” He had, she explained, fallen into a depression of spirits in the midst of the suit. Despite its favorable settlement, a general melancholia endured. Spending his time primarily in authored worlds between two book covers, he had little interest in consorting with others. Mr. Scrooge only owed his presence at the ball to the young man's sense of abiding obligation, but little induced him to join in terpsichorean pleasures.

When the fall and swell of the crowd had once more swallowed up both Mr. Bewick and his sister, Mr. Hobnail slinked towards me once more.

“Have you given any thought to becoming my mother's companion ? I can pay you pretty well I can tell you. She most often is asleep at all events and your duties would be light — you could come and keep me company at those times. The life of a single man can grow lonely.”

If the words were not enough, there was his ingratiating smile and roving eye and the small of my back still recoiling from his earlier touch. Unless he thought me entirely degraded, he could believe I was young enough not to understand between the lines, but I had Emily's painfully recounted experience behind me as well. I knew now of these masters of the house with their wandering eyes and worse. It was clear from his leer alone that I would have matters to attend to other than reading to his mother.

“You are a pretty thing, prettier than your sister even, and it looks like a bit of pin money would not come amiss.” I looked at his mop of artificed curls slick with hair oil. His smile was too wide, with mercury-blackened teeth. He put his hand under my chin; my stomach lurched. My own mother, watching Emily on the ballroom floor, neither saw nor heard above the music and conversation. She began to cough over the noise. I thought of her need to be at the seaside, her life perhaps in play. No governess job could fund such a luxury, even were it only to let rooms in season. I thought of Sophie and Charlotte hungry, and growing up without benefit of any kind of lessons which might cultivate their minds and souls, or help them up in the world, or even of proper society. I thought of Emily in the clutches of another ravening wolf. And who knew if she would find another situation without a character from the mistress ? We had not the savings for the shop we dreamt of, caste or no. We looked an impoverished spinsterhood or worse directly in the eye, as Mr. Hobnail tried to get me to look into his.

At 17 now, none could claim me too young to earn my keep. It wouldn't take much cajoling for mother to allow me to leave home and send some part of my wages back for the rest of the household. If I did this thing I could never again face the mirror or the blank page again. This I knew. I turned to Mr. Hobnail, and, swallowing something bitter that tasted of potato, smiled back. The words would not come. "Perhaps" he suggested, as I hoped my mute, stupid, sickly smile seemed merely mysterious, "we could further discuss details more comfortably over some champagne." Knowing full well he wanted to tempt me away from mama, I followed. I put away my locket reveries to concentrate on the matter at hand. I would need fortitude and all thoughts on the future, certainly none of papa. Emily glimpsed me and my company from the dance floor. Her frightened glance chilled me before her partner winged her round from view again.

We were at the doorway leading to the refreshments when an almighty clamour arose. All eyes turned to Mr. Marley staring straight in our direction, rattling his chains and bellowing of brimstone and damnation. Mr Hobnail blanched and looked at me, eyes popping in alarm. Making his excuses, he pushed past me to another young lady and asked her to dance instead

Though relieved in the moment, my greater circumstance had not changed. I sat down, spent, and reflected on what to do should he approach me again. Or should I humiliate myself in approaching him? Lost in such thoughts, I held my fan against the sweltering atmosphere, when suddenly the air turned frosty. The shade sat beside me against the mirrored wall. A sigh came from the depths of him that might move anyone on this side of the underworld. But in gratitude for his aid, however temporary, how could I help him in his anguish? He began again with the sums, "60 guineas," then attempting once more to open his mouth he uttered "120 pounds, two shillings, and 3 pence." He seemed frustrated and kept turning towards the mirror as he pronounced these various numbers. Finally I too turned in my chair towards our doubles in the glass. There his reflection became perfectly understandable to me. The very fact of this left me astonished and then I began to take in the meaning of his words.

"You are a poet, Miss Jane Foxleigh. After my earliest school days I never read another poem, there was nothing in it, I thought, all humbug. Yet it is not so. Words have saved harder souls than mine. And so it falls upon you to bear witness in beauty and power to the torment of the poor, the widows and orphans, and to what end their abuse must lead. There are those prowling here tonight ready to feed off the distress of those without protection. I myself can only warn ill-doers of imminent spiritual destruction. You must not be caught up in such machinations. You, of all of us, must not cast aside hope. You were born the very night I saved my former partner from eternal hellfire. And so you bear in yourself the promise of second chances, of redemption even. This chance is with each and all of us but quickened in you with your birth — you are the child of the spirit of Christmas grace.”

I stopped at this. The commonness of my plight mocked his speech. My moth-eaten shawl covered a drooping paper flower which covered in turn a rip. I was planning to betray my father’s hopes and all my upbringing to Mr. Hobnail for a bowl of lentils. (I and how many others to an army of Hobnails). Giving myself to the man would mean the travesty of all tales of honor that I had told in my life either to my sisters or myself. Could I ever even write again? Yet I was ready to do this if it meant raising up Charlotte, Sophie, Emily, and Mama. The ghost knew it. I was hardly some angel or guiding star atop a gold-decked tree. Yet he was clearly sincere. His translucid eyes in the glass compelled me to listen.

“I must tell you too that in our company this night, there are others burdened by their own despair, other kinds of fetters than mine, haunted by other demons, half their own forging, half that of a cruel fate. Some have wished even to shorten their torment, by unspeakable means. One so burdened might find succor, salvation even, in the strength of your verse, indeed in the warmth of human companionship and exchange." In the mirror his eye urged mine to follow his gaze and it fell upon Laurence Bewick’s reflection. I could now perceive shadowy bonds engulfing his slim, mortal person.

The apparition continued his confession. "I never read a poem to a young woman so as to gain her heart, much less marry and have children. I died without heir of either the flesh or the spirit. No man or woman loved me and what was there to love ? I see the poetry now, in the very tragedies of those closed to the beauty around them, who see nothing in their lives but the monetary value of their things at best or their bank accounts at worst. Seventeen years ago this night I was allowed once more amongst the living so that at my witness men might mend their ways. I have striven in that time to bring understanding to those blinded and bound as I had myself been by the world's narrowest ways and means. I have been true to this charge and have brought some few souls from the brink of perdition to the business of common welfare, to the love of fellow man and woman. My time with the living is counted each night by hours, drawn back into the maw of suffering by the weight of chains I myself forged. It is also true that over these many years gone that as I have freed a soul here, a soul there back into the lively bonds of our shared humanity, these fetters have grown lighter than the year before. A money box falls away, then a ledger. Still the padlock remains tight and heavy upon me and without complaint I still must bear it, as it is of my own manufacture. I have little hope to be quit of it before the end of time.”

I looked at the padlock whose keyhole opened a mere whisper for all its iron workings, wishing I might do something for its weary prisoner and yet I with nothing to offer. I wanted him to know that one among us would remember him and wondered what might serve as a reminder for him. I thought of how his intercession had scared off the bogie of flesh I must still later face and how my father’s own soul might thank the wraith in the hereafter. This gave me an idea. It wrenched me, but felt, in the face of all the wrongness I was ready to commit, to be at least one right action, no matter what it cost a girl I was bidding farewell to, no matter how fruitless the gesture. And what use might I have for it once I was to engage myself with Mr. Hobnail’s offer?

"I cannot guess what key might relieve you, Mr. Marley, but on this my birthday please let me be the one to give you a gift." I opened my locket and took out the key and placed it in his glacial palm. "Keep this as a token from one who wishes you peace just as you have, whilst undergoing your own suffering, offered the way to peace to so many other erring hearts. Accept it please, until you find the key that will unlock this final coil of chain from your soul."

I don't know how I imagined my diary key might help him. I did want to understand how he knew of my writing or even of my birthday. Before I could ask, Mr. Scrooge mounted the podium, tapping his glass and clearing his throat. I turned back around to hear the winner of the raffle. I held my breath and opened out the paper from my locket. The number called did not match and one of the belles minced her way to our host. I flinched as she received the diary into her soft, white grasp. My heart fell into my slippers, but what difference did it make? As matters were soon to stand, I would no longer have need of somewhere in which to weigh my thoughts and deeds. Only the puzzlement of what the message might mean grew stranger. I turned to Mr. Marley, thinking he might, as it were, hold the key but he had vanished.

The band played its final waltz. As the ball wound down, the Bewicks warmly insisted on sending us home in their carriage, which was a boon to us, certainly, else we would have travelled home by foot under the melting sleet.

I snuggled into the woolen mattress with Emily, careful not to wake the others on the farther side of the bed. A 3/4 melody lilted me to sleep by the light of a blue-eyed gaze, but my dreams were tainted with the escape route offered by Mr. Hobnail and how I must go about finding him again. It seemed I had a key to an unending series of doors and yet it fit none of them until he was behind me and instead of going to him I was running again towards these doors whose locks would not open. Down this long hallway stood now a chainless Mr. Marley now a bechained Mr. Bewick. I kept trying to reach them and I’d find myself in the arms of Mr. Hobnail, chained in my turn.

Some hours later I awoke to Sophie and Charlotte bursting into our room "Jane! You must awake” “For heaven's sake!" As they burst into our room, Sophie held a brown paper package high in the air, squealing:

"Package in the mail"

"My sister will unveil"

"Upon her we'll prevail"

"These tidings of wassail"

"No delivery on Christmas Day!"

"As all abed she lay"

"What can we do to make her play!"

Groggily, I thought up “You may stay” and lifted myself onto the pillow flattened by nightmares and worry. I shook them from my head. Indeed the package held no sign of a sender's address. Tearing at the brown paper with as much care as my sleepy fingers could muster, I wondered if I were still dreaming. For inside I found a gilt-edged volume bound in indigo velvet. From its ornate heart-shaped lock dangled a key. I gathered myself to unlock it finally, marvelling at its marbled endpapers, running my fingertips over the voluptuous Bristol-textured blank leaves. Then, interspersed at each turning, the pages contained...bank notes. One by one, hundred pound notes fluttered through the air. Sophie and Charlotte gathered them up and after a moment of hushed awe began to shriek. My frightened mother rushed in, and seeing the bills in the girls' hands, stood motionless with her mouth agape. Once I had gathered myself together, Emily and I counted them, one after another to make sure we were getting the sum straight. Looking at her I could tell she was thinking, as I was, of railroad shares or opening our seamstress shop or mother letting rooms by the sea. Or even all of these.

When I turned to the last page, inked nonsense appeared. I knew the trick of it now, however, and asked Sophie to fetch me the mirror “To each key a lock; to each lock a key” Astonished, I brought out the note from my locket — the string of digits had never been a raffle ticket. It announced the sum of money the book enclosed.

As I held open the volume to the mirror, more paper fell out of the back cover. This was no banknote but a document folded and sealed. Without hesitation I broke it and learned that I was now heir to the unclaimed fortune of Mr. Jacob Marley as well as to his estate, as administered by Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. There was no longer even need to think of starting shops and letting rooms, much less dream of it.

I grabbed Charlotte, Emily grabbed Sophie, and with their warm little bodies close in our arms we began to spin in celebration around our mother. We cared not that we knocked into the bedstead, into the chair, as we twirled our joy to be released finally from the shackles of bitter want.

One week later, it was a carriage taking us to our tea engagement, the winds of the new year buoyant in our hearts' sails.

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