Susan led her around the empty square, all while Kate puzzled out what little she understood about her surroundings. Dickens. Susan. None of it made sense, but she decided she saw no harm in playing along. Her heart broke yesterday. It couldn’t re-break. Besides, the pieces were too small to be crushed into anything else. What did she have to lose?
When they reached the corner beneath Scrooge’s house, Kate turned to Susan for instructions. Susan, for her part, tapped her toe on the sidewalk and stared up at the closed windows.
“What are we waiting for?” Kate asked.
“I’m really not supposed to break character, but—”
“You there, boy!”
System overload. Kate’s processing power extinguished itself within one second of hearing that familiar, booming voice fill the square. Like staring at a box of puzzle pieces, she understood the picture in front of her in fragmented snippets. She knew that line. It was Dickens. No one knew A Christmas Carol better than she; it only took three words for her to identify his speech. And when Kate followed the conversation up and up and up the wall of the building she stood in front of, she was greeted by the unfathomable puzzle piece.
Clark Woodward. Leaning out of Scrooge’s window. Wearing the Ebenezer Scrooge costume. Screaming Scrooge’s Christmas morning lines.
Rats. Somehow the cut of the Victorian era costumes made him even more attractive. Great. Just great.
“What’s the day today?”
Nope. Susan couldn’t be right. This had to be a dream. Nothing else could explain it. Screw Sherlock Holmes logic. Not only was Clark wearing the Scrooge costume, but he somehow got at least one person in town to trust him enough to play along with…whatever this charade was?
No. Wrong again. If this was her dream, Clark would get the lines absolutely right instead of paraphrasing them. This was definitely happening, but why?
“Uh… Christmas Day, sir? What’re you, crazy?”
Ah, Susan caught the paraphrasing bug, too. As the Assistant of Operations, Kate always stayed on book and gave the performers line notes at the end of each night, ensuring vigilance and protection for the Dickens text. This morning, protecting a long-dead author seemed everyone’s last priority.
Kate knew everything there was to know about this scene. Pick any random scene in A Christmas Carol, she could have recited the dialogue, at least, entirely by heart while visualizing its exact place in their version of Victorian London. Here, after waking up very much alive, Scrooge renews his lease on life and decides to live every day as if it’s Christmas, beginning by employing an errand boy to fetch him the biggest turkey in London.
What a crock.
Caught between her desire to continually roll her eyes every time they spoke and her rapture at watching the most wooden, stoic man in the world wildly shout about turkeys with a face-splitting grin on his face, Kate leaned against the nearest lamp post for support.
His smile, rare and pure, weakened her knees. Her last thoughts before falling asleep last night were, I’m so glad I got Clark Woodward out of my system, but the longer he smiled and the longer she stared at it like a snake charmer’s victim, the more untrue that statement became. He hurt her. He hated her. But he was not out of her system.
Dickens’s dialogue—or this interpretation of it—flew past her like a familiar song, allowing her to just drink him in. A dangerous prospect. If this was a dream, she’d dream something stupid like falling into his arms, and if this was real, she’d endanger her heart. And then probably stupidly fall into his arms.
Unable to speak during the performance, a hurricane swirled inside her. Remnants of her feelings for him yesterday swirled with her anger at not being able to fight them off well enough.
At the end of their scene, Susan took the oversized bag of gold coins and rushed off, leaving Scrooge and Belle—Clark, who had somehow made his way down to street level, and Kate—very much alone, but that didn’t break his concentration.
“I must go see the charitable gentleman. And Fred and his wife. Oh, thank you, Spirits!”
Apparently, these were cues of their own as out of nowhere, Doctor Joe Bennett appeared, dressed as the charitable gentleman Scrooge denies a donation earlier in the book. In real life, Joe played this role every year as a bit of a charitable scheme in and of itself. As the Chief Physician of the county’s charity hospital, the festival always donated a little something to the cause. But when Clark approached him and shook his hand, he did not pull out one of the phony-baloney bank notes used during the regular festival. Clark instead handed the man a very real-looking check, and the man’s shock wasn’t the well-rehearsed expression he used every year during this big moment in the narrative.
“Hey, man…”
The line was most definitely, Lord bless me! Yet another clue the check in Clark’s hand was real.
“And not a penny less. I owe you many, many back-payments, and this is just the beginning.”
Doctor Bennett rooted himself to the spot, jaw nearly scraping the floor, while Clark-as-Scrooge hummed to himself and scooped up several brightly wrapped presents on his way down the slowly filling street towards Fred’s house. Familiar faces of the town started to mill about in their costumes, just as they would any other Christmas morning. As if this all were very normal indeed. Without the slightest clue what else to do (she thought she might need to stay and give the doctor a dose of oxygen to combat the symptoms of his shock, or at least stick around long enough to see if the check really was real and how much it was made out for, but ultimately decided against it because she didn’t want to get stuck taking care of a fussy doctor type), Kate followed them.
The scene in Fred’s house
