FIVE SHILLINGS
AND SIXPENCE

 

 

None of this is right, thought Peter when the turkey was delivered.

It wasn’t the bird itself, though to be sure there was no way his father could have afforded such a large turkey. It was… everything.

Peter tugged at the collar of his father’s old shirt, standing back while his mother and father and even Tiny Tim exclaimed over the turkey. The address, clearly printed right on the label, left no arguing it had been intended for anyone else but them.

“But who?” asked his mother.

“I think…” Tim said, then paused as though he was reconsidering his words. But, after only a slight hesitation, he smiled. “I think it was Mr. Scrooge.”

As his parents exclaimed over that particular unlikelihood, Peter eyed his brother and noticed the shadow around Tim had grown thinner.

“Well,” his mother said. “I expect I should start it now, though I’ll confess I’m unsure I’ve a pot large enough.”

His whole family laughed. An unexpected joy, and on Christmas Day no less?

Peter put a well-practiced smile on his face, and as Tim passed, he rested a hand on his brother’s thin shoulder for a brief moment of contact. Tim smiled up at him. Peter, after all, rarely touched anyone.

The shadow around Tim had grown lighter still.

None of this is right, Peter thought again. He bit his lip.

 

A

 

“Five shillings and sixpence,” his father said, finishing his announcement.

Peter lowered his head, feeling a swell of pride as his family cheered for his good fortune. It wasn’t much, but the first time his father had told him of the position, Peter had felt the shadows move around him. Most especially? The darkness looming around a lone crutch by the fireplace shifted. Moving farther away. Not gone—Peter wasn’t sure he believed anything could send a darkness so inevitable away—but farther. And farther he’d take.

The difference of five shillings and sixpence.

Their meal, later than usual thanks to the morning’s turkey changing a great deal of the day’s plans, also lifted some shadows from the Cratchitt home, and they were shifting so quickly Peter stumbled a few times through the meal, answering the wrong questions and only realizing after that he was having conversations others weren’t. He caught Tim staring at him, and had to stop himself from returning the gaze in kind.

The shadows around Tim—the ones he’d seen since he’d first started seeing them—were nearly gone.

How?

Surely not the five shillings and sixpence. He’d already known that meagre increase to the family fortunes would not be enough for more than a stay of…

He distracted himself from that train of thought by remembering Tim’s voice: “I think it was Mr. Scrooge.”

As though Peter’s rumination had conjured Scrooge to his father’s mind, at that moment his father led a toast, and included the man in question. The cries of outrage from his family—earned, deserved—still somehow rang hollow. Peter couldn’t quite join in. He glanced at Tim again, and found Tim looking at him, a small frown on his face.

“Peter?” he said. A quiet aside, the sort Tim spoke best. His voice had always been soft and gentle.

“It’s nothing,” Peter said kindly, and Tim turned back to the passing of the cup. But by the time the cup had passed around the table, Peter could barely keep up the pretence. Everything was changing.

And it hadn’t been him, his new position, or his wages.

After the meal, Peter excused himself, wrapped his neck with his muffler, and went out into the snow, saying—no, admitting—he needed a walk to clear his head.

 

A

 

Peter closed his eyes, recalling how the street had appeared only the day before, and when he reopened his eyes, the difference stuck as all the more obvious. It was like someone had washed some stones clean from the dark layer of coal smoke that coated them. And though it wasn’t just his family’s home, it was the cleanest.

It wasn’t a real stain, and the real stains were still there, of course, but to Peter’s other eyes, the sight that had opened wider and wider over the last couple of years, the dark smears of pain, and sorrow, and loss he’d gotten used to seeing everywhere had lessened.

Remembering how they’d appeared the day before reminded him of how overwhelming it had all seemed at first, but it hadn’t been long before he’d noticed he himself might shift the darkness, ever so slightly. A kind word. A connection. Doing unto others.

He pushed his hands into his pockets, took a moment to consider, and followed the shifting in the patterns of darkness. The path was hard to follow—as a rook might cross the sky, not how a young clerk-to-be might walk—but he found his way through alleys and crossed narrow streets as he needed until he faced a graveyard.

What now?

Peter had long learned to avoid graveyards. Here, the shadows were often the thickest yet. Losses, inevitable losses, those he believed not even the power of five shillings and sixpence might delay often tangled and twisted themselves thickly in places like this.

But no.

No, not this one.

To Peter, parts of the graveyard almost held light. Indeed, a single space where no gravestone yet had been placed burned brightest of all.

Peter’s breath hitched, a cloud of white tugged away on the cold city wind.

If this much might change, what about him?

He turned back to the whorling ropes of darkness, pausing to note where the darkness frayed ever more around the edges before following once again. In truth, he was almost unsurprised by the time he reached Ebenezer Scrooge’s home. It was not a beautiful place, and he’d never have known it in passing, but it all came from here. Every weakened braid in the twisting ropes of shadow, every loose thread in the weave of potentials Peter had been fighting for the better part of two years began here.

“I think it was Mister Scrooge.”

Tim’s voice again, in his memory. Peter breathed on his hands, unsure what to do now. He couldn’t as well as use the knocker, not if he wanted his father to know nothing of the route of his evening walk.

The knocker.

It, too, existed not only clear of shadow; it fair glowed.

The door opened. Peter started, as did the woman stepping out of the building. She wore a heavy shawl and had her hair tied up and appeared to be a servant. A charwoman, perhaps.

“Oh, pardon! You gave me a fright,” she said, not unkindly. She laughed. “Merry Christmas, in keeping with the situation.”

“A Merry Christmas,” Peter replied.

The woman, too, was positively alight, but he saw behind her the trailing edges of wisps of darkness. The shadows had been on her, too, but just this moment thrown from her shoulders as if they were nothing more than a disintegrating shawl.

She stepped past him, and Peter nearly let her go, but the words were out before he could stop himself. “May I ask..?”

She turned, waiting.

“Are things…well…here?”

“Young master.” The woman’s smile only grew. “Things have never been so well as they are here. It’s changed, I must say myself. It’s… well, it’s Christmas!” Then, with another “Merry Christmas!” from her lips, she was off. Peter eyed the closed door.

Changed, indeed.

Peter went home, wondering if change might also exist enough for him.

 

A

 

By the day after Christmas, it was confirmed. Tiny Tim had been right about the turkey, and more than that, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge had not only seen fit to give his father more time to be with his family, but a raise in salary as well. Peter stood quietly back as his father exclaimed the virtues of this new Mr. Scrooge, and he watched the shadows flee every corner of their home.

It should have filled him with joy, Peter thought. It should have left him overflowing. But instead, Peter felt a weakness in the place behind his heart, a duller ache than he remembered. Why should it be so, he wanted to know, now there were no shadows in his home to worry about? Why should that leave him so troubled when all the troubles he’d seen for so long were finally banished?

Indeed, the world around Peter Cratchit lightened hour by hour. The darknesses he saw in full retreat. Routed so thoroughly, in fact, the only place even the sense of the umbra remained were those very ropes he felt within his own heart.

For his family, though, Peter managed to smile and laugh, skills he’d been honing since the first braids of sorrow had started to appear throughout the world.

Those same laughs and smiles he prepared to carry to his first day of his situation. Where before he’d felt a sense of pride and minor triumph of delay against a future so determined to take his brother Tim from him, now he had only uncertainty. Five shillings and sixpence didn’t shift the world everywhere he looked, but rather Ebenezer Scrooge did. He had joined the Cratchit family for a dinner—Peter’s mind still spun at how much brighter the man seemed from all previous glances—and by the end of it, Peter had been hard pressed to find even a shred of ill fortune lingering.

He’d even touched Tim’s crutch, a thing he’d long ago learned never to do.

There had been nothing. In fact, there’d been a sense of needlessness of all things, that the crutch might soon be relegated to convenience rather than requirement, and then at some time beyond approaching with an unreal alacrity it would simply lose all necessity entirely.

And so, as he stood outside where he was to work, he wondered what he could possibly do, who he could possibly be, now the only thing to give him direction had shifted so suddenly and without his being of any usefulness or impact at all.

All that remains is myself. A person Peter Cratchitt had crafted no plans for, so busy had he been in battle in a war so suddenly and definitively ended.

Five shillings and sixpence. Perhaps he’d build on that. He looked at the place of business that would now be his place of employment, and then to either side at the adjacent buildings. One a chandler’s storefront—a convenience for their own lighting needs, to be sure—and quite a bit further, being a carver’s shop, he thought.

It was while he still stared in that direction, at the handsomely carved sign above the carver’s shop, when a fresh darkness gathered at the corner and crouched like a cat, twisting with tension and anticipation and catching his attention wholly. Peter turned, his breath coming quickly. A woman began crossing the street, and beside her a cart was awaiting unloading at the warehouse across the street, which blocked her from plain view. Then, beyond, a horse and carriage approached and the angles contrived to be not just unfortunate, but calamitous.

Peter Cratchit cried out in warning even as he moved, but did not rely on being heard nor understood. Instead, he leapt, catching the woman by the arm, half-swinging and half-pulling her with him. They fell together backwards into dirty snow, and the horse and carriage passed them with room for but a barest breath between where she’d have been.

“I’m so sorry,” Peter said once he realized their landing had soaked and soiled them both.

“No, no,” the woman said, her voice shaking as they rose and she eyed him. “That was nearly my life. I’ve see you before, I believe.”

Peter didn’t recognize her, but he offered his hand. “Peter Cratchit, at your service.”

“Indeed you were,” she said, with a small laugh he thought might still be born of shock as much as humour. She was older than he’d first thought, though only now was it obvious. Still, her eyes were kind and her smile was easy. “And that settles where I’ve seen you. You’re the new clerk.”

Peter gestured to the building where he was to work, though he didn’t follow. “There, yes.”

“There.” She nodded. “My husband’s company. Come. I’ll come in with you and explain why we’re both so wet. I’d only meant to stop by to see my husband and son.” She winked. “Now, I have a tale to tell.”

Peter gestured for her to go first. The feline darkness scattered away from them, undone.

Undone by him.

Upon the woman’s completion of telling the story, her husband—Peter’s employer—embraced her despite the wet snow drenching her coat and dress, and kissed her forehead. “My Belle,” he said, his heart obviously full of a deep love. “Never.” He said it again, like it was a vow. “Never.”

“I am unharmed and well,” she said, though she did not let go of his hand. “Thanks to young Peter.”

“I knew I’d made a good choice,” the man said, and Peter blushed.

He was shown to his desk, and introduced to the man’s eldest son, who would be his companion in the small office they would share. It was cozy, warmed by a fire. Peter thought of his father’s office, and a small shiver ran through him, though his father said it had been much changed in his office of late.

“Are you warm enough?” the owner’s son asked him.

“I am,” Peter said. Faint shadows fled from the young man, ones Peter knew, had nothing to do with Ebenezer Scrooge. A future that had almost been, thanks to a horse and carriage, was instead never to be. And he’d done that. Peter himself. “Thank you. I was just thinking of…something else.”

“Oh?” His companion asked it with genuine interest.

“I’m afraid I can be over-concerned with the future,” Peter said.

“That seems wise to me.”

“Does it?”

“The grasshopper and the ant,” his companion said.

“Yes. In a way.”

A moment drew out between them, and Peter found himself not looking away, even if they should both get back to their work.

“Join me for dinner,” the man said.

Peter blinked, surprised. “I…” He wasn’t sure what to say.

“By every account, you saved my mother’s life today. It seems only fair I treat you to a simple dinner. Besides, you’re a working man now, Peter Cratchit, and we working men might as well be friends.”

Peter looked at him. Really looked. Despite the man’s smile, and the brightness of his voice, something familiar lay between them. It took a moment to find a twisting dark behind his companion’s heart. Worry. Fear. A hopelessness. A future only imagined alone, because…

Ah.

Because.

Except… no. Even as Peter watched with his eyes-that-weren’t-eyes, tiny pieces of the knots behind this young man’s heart began to fray and drift away.

Something familiar indeed.

“I would like that very much,” Peter said, wondering.

Another fray. Peter saw his acceptance of a simple meal shift another fragment free. Which means what, exactly?

Of all things, Peter Cratchit’s thoughts turned to Old Mr. Marley. He wasn’t sure why, but the memory of him, so close to Mr. Scrooge even before his father had worked for him, suddenly struck as clear as day, even though he’d but met him only once.

Peter shook his head. Over-concerned with the future. But it did occur to him to wonder what Mr. Scrooge might have been like had Mr. Marley remained alive longer. What would this world be like had Mr. Marley perhaps had the chance to see the shadows Scrooge could have undone, and what that might have meant for both of the men going forward?

Peter dipped his pen into the inkwell. He should start. The sums on the paper in front of him would keep his mind’s attention from all these imaginings, and that was a good thing.

Besides, there was no way to know, of course, and what a curious thing to consider. Perhaps just a strange and random thought. Mind, graveyards, door knockers, charwomen… It had been a strange and random week, all told.

He looked at the other clerk and caught him looking back at him.

“I do look forward to being friends,” Peter said.

His new companion smiled.

They got to work.