Cratchit’s Carol, Part 5: The Lady.

Part 1: VERSE THE FIRST: MY DEAR UNCLE SCROOGE. November 30

Part 2: VERSE THE SECOND: CHRISTMAS UN-MERRIED. December 6

Part 3: VERSE THE THIRD: SPIRITS! Memory’s Ghost. December 12

Part 4: SPIRITS! Continued: A Ghost Enfleshed. December 19

Part 5: SPIRITS! Continued: The Lady. December 22

Part 6: VERSES THUS ENDED, WE PROCEED TO THE CHORUS: December 24

I closed my eyes as I laid my head on my pillow. Though I don’t recall falling asleep, I was certainly awakened by the ringing of bells. They were not those of a belfry, nor the chime of an office door. They were like those rung at the words of consecration, rung thrice, and as I opened my eyes, I half expected to find myself once again in a church. I saw nothing, however, except the black of night around me, so thick it seemed like a substance.

“Take my hand.”

The voice was a woman’s, and somehow warm with a mother’s love.

“I… I can’t see your hand to take it!” I told her.

I felt a soft touch on my right hand. “Here,” the voice said softly.

I felt her grasp as I stood from my bed. Steadying myself on my holly cane, I tried to look about to see the familiar moonlight on the objects of my bedroom, but the darkness was all-encompassing. I had never seen such a lack of sight! I recalled the way a miner described the black of a coal mine, and wondered if this darkness was yet more dark than that.

What made the darkness all the more complete, I realised, was the lack of sound. No creak of the settling house, no rustle of curtains in the night wind, not even a night bird’s song nor the stirring of a mouse.

If I had not felt the grasp of the Spirit’s hand, I would have believed she was gone.

“Come,” she said. “Follow me.”

Although I held tight to her hand, I yet felt the need to tap my cane about as a blind man, but this only succeeded in reminding me, as I began to wobble, that this cane was needed for walking, and not intended for sight.

“Trust me,” she said, and I could hear her smile. “I can see the way.”

“Are you the one who is to show me a Christmas yet to be?” I asked.

“I am the one who has been appointed to show you what will be, what must be, what may be, though it is not my place to tell you which is which. All of that is up to you to decide with the choices you make.”

We walked on, and with each step I realised that, though I was no longer walking across my bedroom floor, I could not tell what kind of surface I was walking on. Still, I held her hand and, though all remained blackness about me, slowly I began to feel less trepidation in my steps.

The darkness all about me commenced to turn from blackness to an equally blinding white. I felt the familiar crunch of snow beneath my feet, and my cheeks became flush with cold. Snow was falling all about me, thick and furiously. My cane pierced the crust of snow and I stumbled slightly. My companion, unperturbed, kept my hand in hers, steadied me, and walked on.

She wore only a simple housewife’s dress, a lovely pattern of fleur-de-lis against deep blue. Her auburn hair was gathered into a simple bun, and the snowflakes graced her head like angels’ benedictions. Dressed as she was, she should have been shivering, but she walked on with regality, apparently warmed from some source I could not see. She was a silhouette of deep blue against bright white.

Another figure began to take shape, walking before us. It was an almost hulking figure, wearing a brown robe which flapped in the winter wind, and carrying a large sack on his back. He appeared to be a friar of the same order as my previous guide. He turned and looked behind him, his grey beard blowing in the wind, almost as if he could sense our presence there. I was relieved to realise that we were, apparently, unapparent to him. After a moment, he turned back to his course and walked on through the snow.

I don’t know for how long we walked behind him before we saw the small building ahead. As we came closer, I saw a plume of smoke rising from the centre of the structure. It looked like a log cabin, though octagonal in shape, with a dirt-covered roof.

He came to the door, or at least to a space in the wall where a door might have been. Instead, there was a thick blanket. He called out to the residents within, and a moment later he was greeted by a shorter, thick-set man with golden brown skin and straight, black hair. The friar stooped and stepped inside, and, unseen, my companion and I with him.

The man’s family happily greeted the friar in a strange language I had never heard. His wife wore her black hair in braids, and her long dress reached almost to the floor. Three children ran to the man and gave him a simultaneous squeeze: a boy of perhaps ten years, another of perhaps four, and a middle girl with a bright smile and braids like her mother.

The friar set down his sack by the fire in the centre of the one-room cabin and commenced to take out its contents one by one. There was food, wrapped in paper and tied with twine, and toys, too: wooden horses, brightly painted, which I’m sure were crafted by the friar himself. I almost believed it really was Saint Nicholas emptying his sack; such a sight seemed plausible in light of all I had seen this night. This family and this friar seemed to be old friends, and the warmth of that friendship seemed to be what filled the little house as much as the open fire in its centre.

The friar unwrapped the food he had brought, while the young mother brought forth warm flatbreads, almost purple in colour, perhaps made of corn. I felt my stomach rumble at its scent. Then the family bowed their heads, and apparently asked the friar for a blessing over this Christmas meal. Finishing his prayer in this unknown tongue, each one made the sign of the cross and began the joyful business of eating.

We stood watching them for a time. The brown-skinned family’s communion enfolded the white-skinned friar, and somehow us too. It seemed as though, had they known we were there, they would have happily welcomed us to their feast. It was their gratitude that enfolded me, I believe, and made me feel as though they were aware of my presence, and that they had welcomed me as a guest they could not see.

I thought of my own family on that Christmas so distant in time, of my innocence, of our thankfulness, of our love. I marvelled at how this family, in this strange place, in this Christmas unlike any I had ever seen, could remind me so much of my own.

“Spirit?” I asked quietly, “If this is a Christmas that is yet to be, what could it have to do with me?”

“It could have everything to do with you.”

“But how? I can see that, wherever we are, it is very far from London, and I don’t know this family or this man who is their guest.”

“You do not know this man now, but you will. Your choice will lie in how you see him, and how you see what he can be.”

She saw the question mark in my eyes.

“He will walk through the doors of your Ragged School one day soon, yet another child with grimy fingers and a knack for trying your patience. Another hopeless case. But there is a path of love that may lead him from the London streets to a London friary, from a London friary to this distant place, to the door of this home on this Christmas, and it will depend a great deal upon your choice to love with a hopeful heart.”

I stared in unbelief at the man seated on the floor, laughing with all the joy of a child.

“What is his name?” I whispered.

The Woman only looked at me and smiled as if to say, Of course I can’t tell you that!

The family and the friar glowed brightly in the firelight, and they started to sing. The words were of this unknown tongue, but I recognised the tune in an instant.

“It’s a Christmas carol,” I said, laughing with delight. “It’s Silent Night.”

The Woman smiled, and we observed in reverent silence this sacred moment.

Finally, I said, “No one will know about this man, will they? No one will know about this family. I mean, their names will not be written in books. This kind friar won’t be remembered. And neither will this precious family.”

“Does that trouble you?” asked my guide.

“No… not really. It just seems that someone should know about this man, about this family. Someone other than me and you.”

“Someone does.”

I smiled as a tear fell from my eye.

“Come,” she said, “I’ll show you another Christmas that may yet be.”

She turned and walked through the blanket door of the little cabin. I followed, taking one last glance at the family and the friar, and a Christmas hearth unlike any I had seen before.

When we emerged from the little dwelling, it was not snow and wind and a blinding whiteness which greeted us, but the warm darkness of the soft glow of firelight, together with its crackling quiet. I first perceived the silhouette of a figure seated in a chair by the fire, and saw then the baby in the person’s arms, swaddled in cloths of blue. The child’s tiny face glowed in the firelight, and although it was sleeping, it did not wear the peaceful face of an infant at rest. Instead it seemed to take each breath as with a great struggle, as if each breath required deliberation and a decision in order to be taken.

The stranger who held the baby rocked it gently, and a tear fell from his cheek to the child’s. It was then that I realised that for a third time this night, I was looking upon yet another vision of myself.

By the low, flickering light of the fire, the man who was me could have been ten years my senior or twenty, I could not tell. I realised also that the Spirit had not taken me to some distant place or unknown land, but to my own hearth, the very hearth which held within its tiles the dearest of memories of time spent with my Uncle Scrooge.

“What do you see?” my guide asked.

“My Lady, you know better than I. What do I see? Is the little one my child? And if it is, what is this poor infant’s affliction?” My voice began to break as I spoke. “Why? Why have you shown me this?”

The Lady was silent.

“Is this only to torture me with knowledge of future pains? Shall I have a child only to lose it to sickness? Why would you show me such a thing?”

“What do you see?” she repeated.

“I see only more heartbreak! I see more tears, more sadness! More sadness than I have ever known! Can this not be prevented? Can you not spare me from these tears? Why would I be given a child only to have it taken from me? What purpose could that serve? Please, Spirit, please tell me what I must do to prevent this!”

“There is only one way to prevent such sadness, and you know the path. Until this night, you had been walking it for some time. It is the way of isolation, of coldness, of safety. The choice is between life and death, Tiny Tim, though not in the way you may be inclined to think.”

I stood silent in the truth.

I gazed again upon the struggling child. Would it not be a kindness for it to never to have been conceived? Would that not be better than to be born and then to die?

“At least tell me,” I whispered at last, “will the little one live? Is this what must be or what may be?”

But she remained silent.

“Of course I cannot be told,” said I.

She spoke softly. “I ask you again: What do you see?”

I looked upon the scene some moments longer. I saw the Dutch tiles about the hearth, deftly decorated with beautified scenes of violence, of sorrow and judgement, painted in simple lines of blue: Cain and Abel, Pharaoh’s army drowning in the Red Sea, Noah’s Great Flood. Next to them were images of mercy: A woman clinging to the feet of a haloed Christ, washing his feet with her tears. A little girl arising from death. A child at rest in a manger. A man in the sleep of death on a Roman cross. A man stepping forth from his own tomb.

I looked at the stranger, this man who was me, and I looked upon the tiny life in his hands. I considered the path which must have led him here, and I realised that it was not chance, it was not fate, and it certainly was not the capriciousness of a cruel deity. It was love. If he held this child in his arms, it must have been because he had learned to give his heart to another, and to receive the giving of another’s heart. I saw his eyes, how they gazed upon this child, and I knew that he saw in that child the mysteries of the cosmos. He loved the child with a love I could not yet dream of knowing, and there was nothing on earth that could convince him that it would be any kind of mercy for it never to have been born. I had mistaken his tears for anguish; that’s not what I saw in them now; at least, it was not all that I saw. What I saw was gratitude. How this was possible as he held this sickly child I did not yet know, but there it was.

“My Lady, I see my Uncle Scrooge!”

He was not standing before me in some spectral form, nor in a memory, nor even in the flesh, but there he was in that stranger’s eyes, in the eyes of this elder, wiser, more hopeful, more loving form of myself. I saw compassion: waters of compassion as deep as the wells in the eyes of Ebenezer Scrooge. And beneath it all, somehow, unfathomably, incredibly, I saw joy.

“Forgive me, my Lady! Oh please beg God’s forgiveness for me! I have wasted the years since his death. I’ve been so selfish in my grief! So ignorant of all that is around me, so ignorant of every person. I’m so sorry for what I have done. I’m so sorry I feel as if I may break in two. Please, Good God, forgive me!”

The Spirit placed her hand on my shoulder, and though I wept I had to raise my eyes, for a brightness penetrated me. My surroundings became illuminated, illuminated as if from within. The hearth glowed not only with its flame, but as if also from some interior splendour. I saw the child in the man’s arms as I had seen the people in the market: aglow with a mysterious glory that nearly drove me to adore him as the Christ Child himself. I fell to my knees, and saw then that the man who held this godlike infant was himself aglow with that same glory.

The man spoke. He spoke very softly, not to himself, and not to the child, but as if speaking to me, as if he knew somehow that I was there.

“This is not the worst Christmas you’ve ever faced,” he said. “It’s just the hardest.”

I knew that this was true. My worst Christmases were the ones I’d spent with my heart shut fast and my eyes sealed in blindness to charity and mercy.

This stranger’s life, my life, had become larger, grander, richer, than anything I could have imagined. It was not because he had done great things, or traversed land and sea to shores unknown, but simply because he had loved. Uncle Scrooge had spoken of a Spirit which gave life to each Christmas: past, present, and yet to be. It was this Spirit I saw alive in him, and awakening in me. It enfolded within it all loves pure and self-giving, yet still was stronger than each love that had ever been. It gathered within itself each act of kindness from all of human history, yet still was infinitely greater.

I knew for the first time that I would be pursued and surrounded by that Love, that Spirit, all the days of my life. No moment—past, present, or yet to come—would exist outside this Spirit’s knowing or beyond that Love’s embrace.

“Let me take you home,” the Lady said.

The scene began to dim from my sight as she took my hand once again, till the last glow of glory that shone from the stranger and the child faded into the light of the candle on my window-sill. Still led by the hand of the Lady, I came to my bedside, and rested.