“Are you writing about Virginia Woolf now?”
“I’m thinking about writing about a woman interested in Jack the Ripper.”
“I see.” Polite distaste.
And Wendy Pritzke sets her hooker revenge story in your house, Allegra, in your kitchen. A butcher boy delivers his merchandise right where you do your gluey handprints. Winnie didn’t say this aloud. Instead, getting up to turn off the computer, she said, “You were going to tell me about your oddest experience doing those hand molds. Remember?”
“I do,” said Allegra. She laughed, but not prettily, not throatily. “You don’t really want to hear it.”
“Oh, sure I do.”
“It was so silly. People can be perverse, when you come right down to it.”
“In their idiosyncrasies they reveal themselves, if they’re lucky enough to have any.”
“A couple of parents had a premature baby who died, that’s all,” said Allegra, looking away. “They were friends of a cousin of mine and I couldn’t squirm out of it. I had to go to the morgue in the hospital and take the mold there.”
“Surely that’s against the law?”
“People bend around laws when it comes to times like that. Who cares, really?”
“You should move to Massachusetts, the baby trade is very strong there. You’d have no end of work. What did it look like?”
After a while, Allegra said, “Well, in the twentieth week the thumb can oppose the other fingers.”
“I see,” said Winnie. “Handy. No pun intended,” she added.
“I should think not.”
“I went to school at Skidmore,” said Winnie. “We got the Albany papers sometimes. Once I read a historical feature about a baby dying back in the early twenties. Some dark-haired teenager walked into a post office to mail a package going to an address just around the corner. Later the postmistress remembered the customer, but she’d disappeared. The package turned out to be a naked, lifeless girl child born three days earlier. She’d been smothered, and mailed with a five-dollar bill to help defray funeral expenses. No one could track down her mother so she was buried at the city’s expense under a headstone calling the infant Parcella Post.”
“Winnie,” said Allegra, “it takes an awful lot to put me off my appetite, but really.”
Was there something about Jack the Ripper and his prostitutes, something about the babies that came and didn’t come? What was it? Later.
She reached toward the off switch, a little panel to be depressed into the side of the screen. As her hand hovered, the endless snow-falling screen saver suddenly froze. (Screen saver of “The Dead,” she called it, after Joyce’s last line.) Every corner, every centimeter of grid filled up with random figures,
For an instant she thought the image had mirrored the marks on the pantry wall. But it was gone too quickly to be sure. Like most clues. “Oh, Christ,” she said.
The lights flickered and went out. “What are you trying to store in that thing, you’re draining the power out of all of Ham and High,” said Allegra drolly, getting up behind her. “Not enough memory. You’ve power-surged North London.”
“I just got a start. It’s nothing. You’ve seen computer paralysis before, I’m sure.”
The pounding began again. “Oh, is that the noise?” said Allegra calmly. The room was furred gray, darkening as they spoke. “Is that what you were complaining of? And well you should. Who could write stories while that row is thundering on?”
“But it’s not in the kitchen,” said Winnie. “Before, it was in the kitchen.” Despite herself she reached out and gripped Allegra’s elbow. “Now it’s in the hall.”
“Calm down,” said Allegra. “I know you’re excitable; just relax.”
They went into the dark foyer. The thudding was out in the stairwell, something hitting the door to the flat. “There’s a back entrance, isn’t there?” Allegra said conversationally.
“No, there isn’t, how could there be? The back of the house rears up against the back of yours, as you yourself explained to me. This is the only way in.”
A voice, a human voice out there. “Damn.”
“Mac?” said Winnie with relief, and went to the door. “What are you up to now?” She turned the handle. The door was locked—from the outside. She twisted the knob.
“I’m driving nails,” said Mac from the other side of the door, “but the light’s just gone out and I’ve bashed my fecking thumb.”
“What are you nailing?”
“The door shut,” said Mac thickly. “I’m locking it in there. I’m going for a priest or something.”
“Don’t be a fool. Open this door,” said Winnie.
“Winnie, who is this? One of the builders?” said Allegra. “What do you mean by this?”
“Ah, it’s got a voice now: and it is the voice of Jenkins’s daughter,” cried Mac. He sounded bereft and beyond. A few moments later Allegra and Winnie were at the open window looking down into the forecourt, shouting at him, calling for help, but the wind was rising and their voices were lost. As Mac streaked away, he flung his hammer into the bushes. He didn’t look back.
STAVE THREE
From the Chimney
Inside the Chimney
—that was the best Winnie could imagine it for herself, a succession of shafts within shafts, like nesting dolls—the sound unsettled the silence. A hammering precisely parroted the noise of Mac’s labors, as if the space behind the chimney breast harbored some thrumming armature. The realization dawned on Winnie—and, she guessed, on Allegra—that they were indeed imprisoned in John Comestor’s flat, and the chimney’s unmusical thud began to recede, but slowly, a long train passing very far away, on a very still night.
“Phone?” said Allegra.
“Disconnected. You remember—you tried to call,” said Winnie.
“We’ll climb out through a window. He may be coming back here—with his mates or something.”
“We’ll keep an eye out the windows. We’d see him coming. Don’t be hysterical.”
“It would seem to me this is a singularly apt time for hysteria.” Allegra raised an eyebrow, which in her circle probably passed for an expression of extreme nervous agitation, Winnie supposed.
They paced the apartment. The back two Victorian rooms were windowless, boxed in by the vacant flat rented to Japanese in the adjoining building. Some dingy skylights were pocked with pellets of gray rain. “Could we climb up there?”
“Doubtful.”
The forward Georgian rooms—the older rooms—were not much better. The side windows gave out on a bleak yard of rubbish bins, the front ones on the recessed forecourt. There was no convenient drainspout to scrabble down. And they could scream all they wanted—feeling idiotic, they tried—but the storm was hitting its stride, and the winds barreled abroad with vigor and commotion. And the lights were out, and the gloom was rising in the room.
Winnie, hunting for candles in the kitchen, afraid to turn her back to the chimney stack but doing it anyway, thought: Allegra Lowe is almost the last person I’d like to be incarcerated with. John Comestor’s “friend.” How those imagined double quotes clenched around the word friend. They squeezed the real meaning out of the word and made it vulnerable to infection by irony.
Winnie commanded herself to speak levelly. “Here’s some dinner tapers anyway, and there’ll be matches by the fireplace, no doubt.”
“Trust John to be equipped with beeswax tapers and no torch.”
“How extensive do you think this power outage is?”
“Impossible to tell with the clouds so low. I suspect the damage is only local, though that doesn’t do us any good.”
“Or any harm, either.”
“I’m not at all superstitious. But I don’t care for the thing in the chimney. I’m glad it’s quietened down some.” And so it had.
“It doesn’t like the fellows.”
“What’s the name of that cretin?”
“Mac. Our polter
geist doesn’t trust him, or either of them. Maybe for good reason.”
They settled themselves in the front room, near the most public window. If Mac should come back and start opening the door, they’d holler bloody murder again, and maybe this time some neighbor struggling home in the storm would hear their cries. “What in the world do you think the thing is?” said Allegra.
“I have no idea,” said Winnie, looking away.
They sipped. Somewhere, probably down the hill at the Royal Free Hospital, Jenkins’s lungs were going up and down, up and down. Somewhere farther out, in the City, perhaps his errant daughter was having a twinge, pausing in the downpour, regretting the distance from her father. “John told me,” said Allegra, “your side of the family has some pretense to descending from Ebenezer Scrooge?”
“Oh did he. What else did he tell you?”
“Don’t be like that. I’m only trying to make the best of a tiresome turn of events.”
Winnie thought it better to talk about the Scrooge nonsense than about John Comestor. If she slipped and let herself think he was dead, in any way—half dead, part dead, gone as gone—she would rise up shrieking.
But how much to tell? “It’s this house,” she said. “Rudge House. The Scrooge stories that got passed down the family may derive primarily from that accident of sound. Rudge, Scrooge, Scrooge, Rudge. There’s a little something in the family letters about it, but most of the references, after the fact, are mocking.”
“So what kind of story is it, to be mocked or believed?”
She didn’t want to say. “The builder of this house was my great-great-great-grandfather. Five generations back. A man named Ozias Rudge. His dates are—oh, I don’t remember exactly, 1770s into the mid–Victorian age. He was involved in tin mines in Cornwall. He worked for a large firm—the Mines Royal or something like that—as an expert in timber supports. Something of an architectural engineer, I suppose you’d say now. There was a mine collapse, and many deaths, and Rudge lost his nerve in a big way. He came to London, took rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and set himself up in the building trade. But bad London air scared him. Fearing consumption, maybe suffering from lung ailments from his mining days, he built a country house for himself in Hampstead to take the airs from time to time. This house, at the crown of Holly Hill, of course. To which he repaired alone, a middle-aged man without a wife and family.”
“This sounds very little like Scrooge. But you have the conviction of the natural storyteller. Do go on. I’m enjoying this hugely.”
Winnie doubted that, but went on anyway. “Be patient. Ozias Rudge had designed supports for the adits and stopes of tin mines. He parried this expertise into designing structural reinforcement of old buildings, using iron beams. He must have been close to a pioneer in the field. His clients included governors and overseers of ancient institutions, churches, the older colleges, that sort of thing. Here, and in France. There was good money to be had in architectural renovation and preservation at that time, and Ozias Rudge raked it in.”
Allegra suppressed a yawn. This pleased Winnie somehow and she continued more happily. “During one particular exercise in the early 1820s, Ozias Rudge was called to Normandy—to Mont-Saint-Michel—where the walls of some crypt had begun to buckle, threatening the stability of the buildings that leaned upon it. Rudge went and did his work, and while he was gone, a business associate in London made himself overly familiar with a woman that O. R. had been courting, on and off. Rudge, on returning to England, learned the truth, and dueled with his partner and killed him. Or so it’s said.”
“A horrible tale. Our ancestors were so . . . sincere. This did not win the widow back, I take it.”
“No.” Winnie was disappointed that Allegra wasn’t more shocked. “But now I’m arriving at the confluence of stories. All of that is prologue. Old O. R. apparently became a curmudgeon worthy of the title Scrooge. He grew sullen and inward. He retired full-time to his country house. I mean here.”
“Yes, yes, I understand. Rudge House.”
“Maybe Ozias Rudge suffered remorse about the man he’d killed, or the miners who lost their lives in the mine collapse. Maybe he had weak nerves. Anyway, he became celebrated in Hampstead as a man who was pestered by ghosts. You can see a reference to him in the histories of Hampstead under ‘ghost stories.’ The tourist pamphlets don’t make the Dickens association, though. That’s our own private family theory.”
“How do you work out such an association?”
“As a twelve-year-old boy Charles Dickens came to stay in Hampstead. In 1824, I think. All recollections of the young Dickens suggest that he had a lively and receptive mind. It’s said that when Ozias Rudge was about fifty, a garrulous single man, probably lonely, a nutcake, he met the young Dickens and told him—as he told everyone—about his being haunted. Hampstead wasn’t a large village in those days, and Rudge would have been a figure of some importance. And Dickens was always impressed by people of importance, and spent some time, especially as a young person, trying to be impressive back. We guess he may have befriended O. R., and listened to his tales of woe.”
“Shockingly thin evidence.”
“In adult life, Dickens said that the memory of children was prodigious. It was a mistake to fancy children ever forgot anything—those are nearly his exact words. So if he heard some tale of nocturnal hauntings of a guilt-ridden scoundrel, mightn’t he have remembered enough of it to turn it into A Christmas Carol, twenty years or so later? It’s not a very big jump from Rudge to Scrooge.”
“I see,” said Allegra. “I’m rather less convinced than I expected, frankly.”
“Well, there’s the painting too.”
“The painting?”
Winnie studied Allegra to see if she was putting on ignorance. “You know, the painting in John’s bedroom.”
“I couldn’t say I know anything about paintings in John’s bedroom.”
Oh, the coyness of it. Winnie was on her feet and feeling her way, and back with the painting in a moment. “Look at the back,” she said, “there’s one bit of business. NOT Scrooge but O. R. Then look at the image and tell me if you think it’s the Scrooge that Dickens imagined or a painting of a real nineteenth-century nutcase.” She glanced around for a place to hang it, and feeling feisty, she thudded into the kitchen and picked up a hammer again. She jerked at a nailhead in the pantry wall, pulling it out an inch. This time it stayed put, and on it she slung the painting of the frantic old gentleman. “Now look at it and tell me what you think.”
“Is this a quiz show? I have no opinions about this painting, nor about whether Rudge was the model for Scrooge or not. Does it matter that much?”
“I’m not saying I believe it,” said Winnie crossly. “I’m telling you what I’ve been told.”
“So did your grand-thingy ever mention the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come?”
“Of course not. That was the sentimental invention of Dickens the storyteller. Like any writer, Dickens stole what he wanted from someone’s real life and made off with it, and richly bastardized it and gussied it up. But who do you think this is? In the painting? Is it a portrait of someone unsound, or someone seriously haunted?”
“You’re the astrologer—I yield to your professional opinion.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said, in a temper, “don’t condescend.” She was rising, she was putting aside the teacup, she was working hard not to throw it against the wall. “Let’s just put this ghost to bed, this wobble in the drains, this nonsense. Come on.”
“You mean?”
“Let’s exhume it.”
There was an electric surge, but it wasn’t a phantasmic event, it was the faintest tremor that occurs when the nature of a relationship shifts. Maybe Allegra didn’t feel it—who could tell what she felt? Rather than compete with Allegra for the attention of John Comestor, Winnie would rather ally herself with Allegra against some third agent. “Come on, it’s the ladies against the pantry, and no
t for the first time in history, I’ll bet.”
Before long Winnie and Allegra had amassed a dozen or so tapers in a circle on the kitchen floor and windowsill and counters. The feeling began to be one of a Girl Scout campfire, the recital of a ghost story without teeth sufficient enough to bite.
“All right, you,” said Winnie to Not Scrooge but O. R. “Stand aside.” But now he looked, with his hand against the shadowy doorframe, as if he were blocking the way, keeping them from the shrieky diaphanous thing painted in the shadowy background behind him. Winnie removed the painting anyway.
“I like working with my hands.” Allegra picked up a crowbar.
“You make better mistakes with your hands than your head,” said Winnie. “I mean one does. I mean I do.” She took a hammer and a tea towel. “Okay, pantry, we’re getting in touch with our inner demolition team.”
“What mistakes do you make with your head? I don’t know what you mean,” said Allegra.
“It’s all plot. Life is plot. Plot mistakes,” said Winnie. “What happens, and why.” She ran the towel over the surface of the wood, easily erasing the slashed sign of the cross. “In life you get at least the appearance of choice. In a book, even one I’m writing myself, the characters seem to have no choices. Only destiny. How it will work out.”
“We have no choice,” said Allegra. “We can’t choose for this to be drains, or to be the ghost of your cousin. It will be whatever it is.”