Chapter 8: Epilogue
A week later McFergus sat at a table in a house near the edge of a town in Cornwall, sipping tea and listening to the rain on the windows. He looked outside; the land was painted in sepia and grey. His eyes followed an old fence to a distant grove of trees.
“Remind you of Scotland?” Amy asked him. It was a joke; she’d hired a bagpiper to meet him at the station, and found a cook who made a decent haggis.
“It does, it does,” he acknowledged. “Scotland in winter. A good day for poachers.” He looked around. “It’s warm in here.”
“You’re glad of that.” She sat down carefully, careful for her back.
“My old bones are. Does Mr. Lewis mind the quantities of coal we burn in his house?”
“You’re starting to sound like your Mr. Scrooge in his bad days. My cousin makes quite enough money that he can afford to keep us warm while we’re here.” She paused in her knitting. “This is a far cry from London, isn’t it? Do you like the cleaner air? Did you notice the blue skies yesterday?”
“I do. I did. I had almost forgotten what clear skies looked like.” He closed his eyes and remembered his trip through the sewer lines. “It’s not as interesting as London.”
“The food here usually has nothing but food in it.”
“There’s not much privacy. Everyone knows what you’re up to.”
“That gives one something to talk about with one’s neighbours, doesn’t it. You’ve had some long conversations at the Black Horse with your old Scottish friend, had you not?”
McFergus grunted. He had indeed been glad to find an old friend, Kyle, living in town. They’d spent much of one day walking the muddy lanes and hills comparing the countryside – always unfavourably – to the Scotland of their youth. “He’s dour, even for a Scot, but he’s got a Scottish sense of humour.”
“A Scottish sense of humour is often wickedly funny, and sometimes just wicked. More tea?”
“No thank you, my dear.” He turned to look at her. “I missed you at Christmas.”
“You brought me some wonderful presents. And the best present, yourself.” She poured herself another tea and served him some sweets. “Could you…?”
“Live here?” he stretched his bad leg towards the fire. “I could, perhaps. But you? We’d have to haul water from the well, you know. And there’s no gas line coming to the house for light.”
“We could get a servant, you know. Things are cheaper here, and some of the youngest local girls will work at a good rate knowing they can stay near their folks.”
Amy must be getting old, he thought; she had turned down the idea of a servant in London. On the other hand, not having a servant was the mark of a very low status in England, and here people would comment more. “Good point,” he said. “There’s not much entertainment in a town this size. And you did have some income from your filing job.”
“Mr. Green, at the telegraph office, says I might get a position part time with the telegraph. He was quite surprised to learn that I could do it almost as well as he could.”
“I imagine he was.” Amy had been raised by her father, who’d had an interest in odd things, and had given his only child an unusual education. He sighed, wishing to change the subject for a while.
“Are they really going to tear that building down?” Amy asked him.
“The Teacher Building? I think so, unless Mr. Scrooge changes his mind. Last rumour I heard was that the land at street level would be a small green space called ‘Scrooge and Marley Park.’”
“An eternal monument. That would be good.”
“That would last until Scrooge died and the city decided it needed the land for something else.”
“You are a sceptic, as always.”
“What was it you called that thing you knitted me for Christmas?”
“A tuque,” she said. “It’ll keep your head warm in winter. The bonnet you brought me from London will shade me in summer.” She looked up. “Will you always wonder – if we should leave London – what happened to the people you knew there? Sampson, Mr. Sikes, and Mr. Devon? Or whatever happened to Betty, the mudlark?”
“I can always telegraph some people in the police department, if you get that job. And I meant to tell you; it was strange, but I did see Betty again.”
“You did?” Amy looked up abruptly.
McFergus brought back the memory. He’d fallen asleep at some point on his journey to Amy, and had a dream.
In his dream, he’d been chasing someone – the person seemed to change as the dream progressed – along a street on Saturday evening towards one of the bigger London Saturday night markets. Workmen were paid on Saturdays, so the markets existed to exchange some of that money for goods before it was spent on alcohol. He could tell the market was ahead because the sky above it shone with the lights of hundred of coster carts as if part of the town were on fire. Some costers used candles, balanced on a table or shining from inside carved turnips. Some had new self-generating gas lamps, and others still used grease lamps. The person he was chasing disappeared into the crowded streets of the market, its thousands of people buying, selling, begging, or entertaining. There were people handing out ads for theatres, boys trying to sell the three or four onions they had in their hands, and small girls selling matches.
It was, in his dream, almost Christmas, with luxury goods in the departmental store windows and the booksellers on the streets selling Christmas cards and annual books of poems, stories, and illustrations. Geese and turkeys hung outside butcher stores in the chilly air. The shelves were full of nuts, fruits, and sweets, but in his dream, McFergus discovered he had not a farthing in his pockets.
The noise, from marching bands to vendors yelling their wares, “Bonnets for fourpence,” “chestnuts all ‘ot, a penny a score;” from people shooting at targets to street singers, made conversation impossible. Nonetheless, in the noise, he tried to ask people if they’d seen the person he was looking for, but no one could hear him, and he stood there, almost in tears, feeling abjectly lost.
Then someone touched him on the shoulder and said, “Merry Christmas.” He’d woken to discover the conductor tapping him to tell him the train was pulling into Exeter Station. He took his suitcase from the overhead rack and got off, knowing he had enough time to find a toilet, purchase a meal from a vendor, and catch a different train into Cornwall.
“I was in Exeter Station,” he told Amy, “and while I was changing trains I saw Betty, among the beggars and vendors, sitting at the edge of the walkway, selling apples and oranges.” He shook his head slightly at the way things in life work. “I was almost past her before I recognized her. I has assumed she was dead in London.”
“What did you do?” Amy resumed her knitting.
“I bought an orange, of course.”
“Did she recognize you?”
“I’m sure she did. She seemed a bit taken aback.”
“Did you wish her a merry Christmas?”
McFergus nodded. “I did, and gave her a coin for the orange.”
“Good for you,” his wife said. “I hope it was more than a shilling.”
“It was a good coin,” McFergus said, remembering that he’d planned to bring that last odd coin from the sewer to Amy. “It was a good Christmas coin.”
*** END ***
Notes
Eighty percent of the inhabitants of London, at the time of these events, were born outside the city. The variety of accents would have been great, and not always comprehensible to the wonderful people who read this novel. I have, therefore, carefully (but not necessarily accurately) translated the conversations of the characters in this book from the original Anglo-Cornish, Angus and the Mearns, Ayrshire, Belfast, Berwickshire, Black Country, Blackburn, Bolton, Bristolian dialect, Brummie (Birmingham), Buchan and Aberdeenshire, Burnley, Caithness, Cardiff, Cardiff dialect, Cheshire, Cockney, Cork, Cornish, County Durham, Coventry, Cumbrian, Derry, Donegal, Dublin, Dumfriesshire and theScottish Border
s, Dunbartonshire, Dundonian, East Anglia, East Midlands (Derby, East Riding of Yorkshire, Easter Ross and the Black Isle, Esk, Essaxon (Essex), Estuary (Thames Estuary), Fylde, Geordie, Gower, Guernsey English, Highland English, Home Counties,Cockney, Inner city, Inverclyde, Irish Travellers , Isle of Bute., Jersey English, Kentish (Kent), Kerry, Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire., Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Leicester and Rutland, Leinster, Liddel Water, Limerick city, Lincoln,Northampton, Liverpool and Wigan, London, Lothians,, Mackem, Manchester, Mancunian, Manx English, Mid Northern, Mid Ulster English , Midlands, Moray, Multicultural London (Inner London), Munster, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norfolk, North East, North East Central, North London, North Northern, North Riding of Yorkshire, North Wales, Northumberland, Northumbrian, Nottingham), Orkney and Shetland, Peeblesshire, Pitmatic, Potteries (north Staffordshire), Preston, primarily, Renfrewshire, Scouse, Sligo town, Smoggie , South London., South Ulster, South Wales, South West Central – west Dumfriesshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Suffolk, Sunderland, Sussex, Teesside, Telford (east Shropshire), Teviot and the Yarrow Water, The Black Country, Ulster Scots Connacht, Waterford city, East Perthshire, West, West Country, West Midlands, West Riding of Yorkshire, Wexford town, Wiltshire, and Wolverhampton accents, as well as from cockney rhyming slang, into contemporary North American English for this novel’s intended readership.
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