Christmas Yet To Come (The Ghosts of Christmas) by Perera Marian

Author:Perera, Marian [Perera, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ghost, Victorian, scrooge, carol, holiday, Christmas, wraith
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Candle in hand, Justin entered the attic a little cautiously. When his father had been alive, that room had been packed almost end-to-end with chests and boxes. Toys, china, even furniture. And, of course, there would have been Christmas decorations, taken out each year, inspected and dusted to hang from the branches of a tree and the edge of the mantelpiece.

Those were long gone, discreetly sold. When he allowed himself to think about them, he remembered the way those ornaments had shone in the firelight. But at the time, he’d told himself no one ever starved for a lack of polished tin spirals that gleamed like icicles.

Now, he looked at the few boxes that remained, all neatly labeled under a coating of dust. He knew what was in those—clothes that wouldn’t fetch more than pennies, yet which had plenty of wear in them. Probably because they were all out of fashion. And there were a few mementoes of his mother: her journals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, a tortoiseshell comb. Nothing he could take downstairs to use, despite his inviting Miss Snow—Laura—to stay for Christmas.

Really, what had he been expecting to find? Boxes of red ribbons and glass bells and frosted baubles miraculously still there? He sat down on a box, which creaked. Now what?

Well, he could have a meal laid out. Mrs. Rowe, his cook, had left enough food. But he’d promised Laura a celebration. He wanted to give her something to remember him by before she left, but more than that, he wanted to see her smile, a pretty flush riding high on her cheekbones and her face lit up so her eyes glowed. For all of her afterlife, there had never been spring or summer or autumn, only the bleakest face of winter. He could change that, at least for one night.

All right, think. He had to be like her, innovative enough to turn a candlestick into a cutlery receptacle. What a pity about the snowfall; if not for that, he might have gone out to cut sprigs of holly and yew branches to fill vases. He could even have collected handfuls of wispy old-man’s-beard to decorate the edges of the shelves.

Wait, there were pine cones. Mrs. Rowe used those as cheap firestarters, and he was sure she had plenty. He could scatter flour or salt to make the cones look tipped with snow or frost. That was a start. And he had plenty of leftover paper. He could do something with that, maybe make a lantern chain.

Which might look childish and economical, to put it politely, something he wouldn’t normally have dreamed of doing. But there had been no self-pity at all in Laura’s voice when she’d spoken of what had happened to her, so he tried not to be embarrassed about his own situation either.

Of course, she’d had years to come to terms with her life, or lack thereof. Though she didn’t look like a girl left sleeping forever beneath ice. Oh, she was young, but there was none of that girl’s innocence in the calm steady eyes that had seen too much.

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