A Vampire Christmas Carol (7 page)

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Authors: Sarah Gray

BOOK: A Vampire Christmas Carol
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14
A
s the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and Scrooge found himself upon an open country road, with fields on either hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter twilight, with snow upon the ground.
“Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here.”
The spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man’s sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten.
“What is this place?” the ghost asked, gazing down on the stone house nestled quaintly on a moor not far from London, but far enough to make idyllic.
“My boyhood home where I was born,” Scrooge murmured, feeling lightness in his head that he could not, at first, recognize, it had been so long since it had come upon him.
Nostalgia.
A very regular feature on the face of the country, the Scrooge family’s stone house was, and not the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in the landscape. A great square house with a heavy portico darkening the principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshad-owed his eyes, it was. A calculated, cast-up, balanced, and proved house. Three windows on this side of the door, three on that side; a total of six in this wing, a total of six in the other wing, two and ten carried over to the back wings. A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight like a botanical account-book. Gas and ventilation, drainage and water-service, all of the best quality. Iron clamps and girders, fireproof from top to bottom, mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with all their brushes and brooms, everything that one’s heart could desire. It was a fine house, a sturdy house, Scrooge recalled, lacking only in one thing; the love of a mother.
“Your lip is trembling,” said the ghost. “And what is that upon your cheek?”
Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple and begged the ghost to lead him where he would and get it over with.
“It appears to me to be a tear. Can it be that somewhere lurking in that shriveled heart there lies a crumb of sentiment for what is past and lost to you?”
“A pimple, I tell you!”
“Clear and wet, certainly more tear than inflammation.”
“A dripping from a tree branch, perhaps, but all the same some liquid of a natural origin and no tear of mine. I am not a man given to weeping or any other public display of emotion.”
“Tear or not, weeping or not, inside we must go.”
Scrooge shook his head. “Not . . . not inside. Seeing this place from here, it is enough. It . . . it is not necessary to walk within its walls.”
“But it is.”
Against his will, Scrooge felt himself propelled forward. As they drew closer, drifting first above the house, then suddenly standing in a hallway, he heard the sounds of great commotion, a household turned on end; dogs barked, maids whispered and shrieked, and there was talk of a midwife who had taken her leave too soon.
“A birth?” Scrooge asked.
The ghost smiled kindly, a hint of pity on its face.
“Whose?”
The ghost did not answer and Scrooge became anxious, twisting his hands in the long sleeves of his dressing-gown. It was a ridiculous question, of course; he knew the answer, for they were at his childhood home and this journey was into his past, was it not? “Mine?”
The ghost nodded.
“Mine and Fan’s?” he asked for further clarification, though there was no need for that question either, for he and Fan were born on the same Christmas Eve, twins. “Why must I see this? What is the point in my being present to see myself become the death of my mother?” Scrooge demanded, sounding bolder than he felt, for a part of him wanted to lay his gaze upon the face he had never seen, but a part of him feared the sight.
Scrooge saw behind him a man and recognized the face at once. The gentleman was rusty to look at, reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He was, even in those days, of what was called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young—and wore knee breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, was that they never shone. Mute, closed, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress was like himself.
But there was something in the face at that moment that it took a moment for Scrooge to recognize, having never recalled seeing it on his father’s face: pity . . . and fear.
“Where is the wet nurse?” bellowed Scrooge’s father. “The babes do not do well. They’ve need of a wet nurse immediately! And why has the midwife taken her leave so quickly! A midwife should still be with Mrs. Scrooge. I do not know of these women’s things, but by heaven I will have an answer!”
A maid in a dingy mobcap, apparently the bravest of the gaggle, approached Mr. Scrooge and bent her head low. “The midwife, Agnes, was called away, sir. I do not know why. The nature of her calling results in people calling for her in a rush. Another emergency birth, perhaps. But the wet nurse has just arrived, accompanied by another midwife. They say they were sent by Agnes, to care for Mrs. Scrooge. Good references, they say.”
At that moment, Scrooge heard the feeble cry of an infant, and he turned to gaze down the hall as something long dead seemed to waken and stir within his chest. At the end of the hall was the master bedchamber of the house, and the place where he knew his mother lay dying.
“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the ghost, as if knowing what thoughts raced through Scrooge’s mind. “They cannot be altered, and those you see have no consciousness of us.”
“They cannot see us?” begged Scrooge.
“They cannot,” said the ghost kindly.
Somewhere in the house, as the shadows of evening settled in, a door slammed. Feet pattered on the stone floor and three women rushed by, the first being the maid who had spoken to Scrooge’s father shortly before.
Scrooge turned on his slippered feet. “Wait. I know that one woman. You . . . you said this is my past, but that cannot be.” He gestured lamely to one of the two women just arrived. “
That
woman is of my present.”
If the ghost heard, he made no reply.
“That is my . . . my tenant’s wife,” Scrooge insisted, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. He followed the women down the hall. “That is not a wet nurse or a midwife, that is Mrs. Wahltraud, the wine purveyor’s wife.”
“Name’s Mrs. Grottweil, mum, wet nurse sent by Agnes,” said the woman accompanying the supposed new midwife, the one who looked like Mrs. Wahltraud.
Now, Mrs. Grottweil, she looked as she should have. She was a fat old woman with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the white of it. Having very little neck, it cost her some trouble to look over herself, if one may say so, at those to whom she talked. She wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated articles of dress she had, on principle, arrayed herself, time out of mind, on such occasions as the present when she was greatly needed. Arriving just in time to save a babe from starvation, she often invited the proud parents to present her with a fresher suit of clothing, an appeal so frequently successful, that the very fetch and ghost of Mrs. Grottweil, bonnet and all, might be seen hanging up, any hour in the day, in at least a dozen of the secondhand clothes shops about town. The face of Mrs. Grottweil—the nose in particular—was somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like most persons who have attained great eminence in their profession, she took to hers very kindly, insomuch that, setting aside her natural predilections as a woman, she went to a birth with zest and relish.
Mrs. Grottweil took one of the two babes nestled in Mrs. Scrooge’s arms, the female child. It began to squeal, much like a piglet removed from suckling, when she dislodged it from its mother’s arm.
Emma Scrooge lifted heavy eyelids. “Nurse, why do you not take my son?” she asked, her exhaustion heavy in her speech.
Mrs. Grottweil made no reply except to see the household maid out of the room. “Mrs. Scrooge must have her rest.” She closed the bedchamber door, wood panels moving right through the ghost standing in the doorway, barely missing Scrooge. There was light in the room now, but the light that came from a few lamps burning, lamps Mrs. Grottweil now turned down.
“My son must be fed,” said Mrs. Scrooge, gazing lovingly at the infant in her arms that was not much bigger than a pint of ale. “We will call him Ebenezer.”
“So you will,” said Mrs. Wahltraud, moving closer to the bed as Mrs. Grottweil withdrew to the far side of the room, where a rocking chair and a large cradle awaited. “So it has been foretold.”
“Foretold? What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Scrooge.
The midwife sighed. “You know very well what I mean. I know you bred him for the purpose of the prophecy,” she hissed.
Scrooge, the Scrooge of the future, grown to manhood and beyond, not the infant Scrooge or the father Scrooge, could not take his eyes off the new midwife. She looked just like the wine purveyor’s wife with her black hair and pale skin . . . and yet she did not. And she certainly did not have the appearance of any midwife Scrooge had ever seen!
The inky black hair of Mrs. Wahltraud was carefully smoothed down, and waved away under a trim tidy cap, in the most exact and quiet manner imaginable. Her neatly flowered skirts—red and white, like the bed-curtains hanging from the master bed—were as composed and orderly, as if the very wind that blew so hard out of doors could not disturb one of their folds. Her little bodice was so placid and neat, that there should have been protection for her in it, had she needed any, with the roughest people.
“I know nothing of a prophecy,” Scrooge’s mother said. “These children were conceived of love, as all children should be.”
Scrooge felt a strange twist in his chest and wondered if indigestion was upon him again.
“Who are you?” Scrooge’s mother asked, gazing up from the bed that was becoming wet with blood to the woman who stood over her.
“Are they not going to do something for her?” asked Scrooge of the spirit. “Are they not going to try to save her life?”
“This shouldn’t take long,” said Mrs. Wahltraud, glancing from the pool of blood on the bed to Mrs. Grottweil and smiling a most unsettling smile, one that gave Scrooge the watcher chills down his spine and made his breath come in deep, strangled gasps. “This will not even require my intervention.” She clasped her ivory hands. “Excellent. Have we brought bottles to collect some of the blood?”
“Wait,” said Scrooge, looking upon the black-haired woman again. “Ghost, this makes no sense. This woman looks precisely like my tenant’s wife, but it cannot be her, for this woman is no older than the one who lives in the lower apartments of my house. You said this is my past. She would be much older by now. An old woman, older than myself.” He shook his head, searching his brain for some explanation. Perhaps this was his tenant’s wife’s mother or grandmother, but the likeness was uncanny. That had to be it. “A relative?” he asked his ghostly guide. “One carrying the same lineage?” (He had first thought to use the term “bloodline” but had been unable to utter the word.)
The spirit looked on at the scene unfolding, offering no explanation.
“John?” Even with her fair hair, wet to her face with her perspiration, and her skin pale from the exertion of the birth and blood loss, she was a beautiful woman, Emma Scrooge. Fan had looked so much like her; Scrooge could see that now in her high cheekbones and arched brows.
“John, where are you?” she pleaded, reaching out. Emma opened her eyes. They were blue, the same color Scrooge’s had been when he was a younger man. The same color as Fan’s.
“You have your orders, Mrs. Grottweil. Are you clear as to what you must do?” Mrs. Wahltraud asked, plucking the baby Ebenezer right from his mother’s arms.
“Wet nurse? Are you going to feed my little Ebenezer?” Mrs. Scrooge begged, beginning to lose consciousness. “You’ll care for him. Tell me you will. . . .” Her voice faded as she closed her eyes again, her time on earth growing quickly to an end.
“I understand perfect,” said Mrs. Grottweil, settling down to put the baby Fan to her enormous breast. The babe shook tiny fists, turning away, but the wet nurse forced her teat into the little mouth. “A drop of blood a day to the boy, but not the girl. Just milk for this one.”
“That’s right. A drop of blood a day for Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“Blood?” Ebenezer shuddered. “You do not give infants
blood
. Even I know that, and I have never known an infant in my life.”

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