The Ghosts of Christmas Past Read online

  Table of Contents

  About This Book

  Dedication

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  — Epilogue —

  Also in the Touchstone saga

  Thank you...

  Acknowledgements

  Historical Notes

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  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  About This Book

  Before A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens meets three ghosts out of time...

  Christmas Eve. 1842. New Street, Birmingham. The present and the future haunt the past when a pair of reluctant time travellers find themselves stranded in Victorian Britain.

  Fred Smith is a young man caught in a street riot in 1934. Mrs Hudson is an old lady who can’t remember why she’s at the station in 2019. Fred wants to change the world, Mrs Hudson wants to protect time. Can they work together to get back to the future?

  Is the secret to their timeslip something to do with Belle, the young orphan girl staging the Christmas pantomime for the city’s poor children? Or the ‘Worst Man in Birmingham’, notorious miser and vicious businessman, Ebenezer Swingeford? Is it oppressed clerk, Bob Cratchit and his rebellious son, not-so-tiny Tim?

  Or could it be something to do with Charles Dickens, the young author visiting the city on secret business, on the verge of bankruptcy and desperate for his next big literary success?

  As the snow falls on Christmas Eve, ghosts lost in time haunt the dark heart of the city in search of the true meaning of Christmas.

  Dedication

  To Stacy,

  The woman who sleeps under the bridge.

  — 1 —

  MRS HUDSON WAS LOST again. That familiar feeling of coming to her senses and not knowing where she was or what she was doing.

  She looked around the busy concourse of New Street Station. They had changed it in recent years and now called it something else. What was it again? She clenched her fists, trying to recover the name. So many names just out of reach lately.

  Grand Central. That was it.

  She smiled at her success. The relief, when you were struggling for a word, fighting the frustrating fog in your mind, and then it cleared and the word came to you — a precious lost jewel suddenly there before your eyes, gleaming in the light.

  It was the new name for the station. Yes, that was right. Except it wasn’t. They still called the station New Street Station. Grand Central was the name of the shopping mall they’d built on top of the old station.

  There had been a grand unveiling, she remembered, a couple of years ago. A new iconic train station for Birmingham. Except it wasn’t. It was just a new shopping mall.

  The smell of coffee grounds from the cafes greeted her, warm and homely. A brass band played Hark the Herald Angels Sing, the men in top hats and frock coats, the women in bonnets and bell-shaped dresses. A nostalgic Dickensian Christmas pantomime for the hordes of shoppers. The carol echoed round the giant atrium. A giant fir tree decorated with gold ribbons and twinkling fairy lights.

  Mrs Hudson looked around, wondering if she was due to meet someone.

  She couldn’t remember.

  Was she heading home? Home was in Moseley, she was absolutely sure of that. She hadn’t moved, even though she’d sold the shop, Pastimes. That time was over. And the mission too. Yes, that came flooding back to her: that awful taste of failure.

  Things had all gone so terribly wrong.

  Why was she here?

  She dug into the handbag on her arm and pulled out a pocket diary. This would tell her, but what was the date? She looked up at the Departures board: a row of TV screens with amber text, a dizzying array of place names and times, all different, and the screens kept changing.

  There, at the bottom right of each screen was the current time. 7:08. She glanced up at the atrium roof to see it dark. It was night. Seven in the evening.

  The screens did not show a date.

  People walking past, almost all of them reading their phones as they walked. She didn’t have a phone. She had had one, once, she remembered, but there wasn’t one in her bag. She checked the pockets of her camel hair coat. No. If she had a phone, she had left it at home. But perhaps she didn’t have one anymore.

  How to find out the date? She could ask someone.

  No one looked at her. A young man caught her eye and, at the gleam of recognition in her face, he looked at the floor and passed on. She saw herself as they might see her — a strange old lady asking for help. Had he thought she was a beggar?

  A WH Smiths store over there. A newspaper would tell her.

  She walked over and entered the store, crowded with shelves of books and confectionary and almost no space between the aisles. She went to a stack of newspapers in a plastic stand and peered closely to check the date.

  Tuesday, 24th of December, 2019.

  She walked out, back to the concourse and dug her pocket diary from her handbag, thumbing through the gilt-edged pages.

  It was4 Christmas Eve. Each page of the diary contained her scribbled instructions. Quite detailed. When a woman was forgetting everything, she made an effort to instruct herself.

  1000. Make smoking bishop.

  1200. Buy Christmas wreath at florists.

  1300. Visit parents’ grave at Brandwood End Cemetery. Leave Christmas wreath.

  That would have been earlier today. Had she done that? She cringed and felt her shoulders tighten. Yes, there it was, a memory: standing in the cold cemetery in bright sun and placing a wreath at the granite stone that bore her parents’ names. She’d had a flask of something warm. Yes, Smoking Bishop. This was her Christmas Eve tradition. She made the drink every morning on the 24th December, with a Seville orange stuck with cloves. The pungent smell of cinnamon, mace and Allspice with the port and red wine. The scent of every Christmas of her childhood.

  She looked down the list of things to do for today. But there was a blank space and then a single line.

  Theatre Royal, New Street, 1842.

  But it was gone seven and this said a quarter to seven. She was late.

  She turned and headed across the concourse towards the New Street exit. Strictly speaking it came out on Stephenson Street, behind New Street. There was a tram line there now, another new feature.

  As she walked up the ramp to the row of glass doors that ran the length of Stephenson Street, she remembered that the Theatre Royal had been demolished years ago. 1956, wasn’t it? When she was a young woman in her 20s studying History. And the time in her diary was strangely specific. 1842. Forty-two minutes past six, not forty-five. Why was that? And she’d written the time at the end of the line, not at the beginning, like every other entry.

&n
bsp; She walked along the concourse, glancing out through the row of glass doors to Stephenson Street in the gloom.

  The building opposite was the one she expected to see: it had been the rear of the Midland Hotel most of her life and still bore the name carved in stone, then it had been a Waterstones bookshop and more recently an Apple store. The shops behind the old Midland Hotel, still a hotel but with a different name now, she couldn’t remember what. Hudson’s bookshop had been there in that block. Birmingham’s major bookshop that had borne her name. She had always laughed off jokes about her being heir to the Hudson’s bookshop fortune, or that she’d opened a vintage clothes emporium in Moseley instead of a bookshop. And Hudsons had died in the 1980s. Waterstones had come along and taken its throne.

  As she glided along, the shop fronts in the stately stone building seemed to shimmer and fade, the signs turning to ornate lettering in gold and red.

  And as she headed for the glass door at the foot of Lower Temple Street, her palm out, she felt a swooning sensation, as if the floor were giving way. She thought for a moment that it might be an earthquake.

  She plunged through and found she wasn’t in 2019 anymore.

  She sensed it immediately, even before she saw the physical evidence and her conscious mind could assert the fact. Her heart skipped a beat and she caught her breath, as it always happened, as if slipping through time meant her body died in one time for a second and was revived in another. A little death.

  Then the odour hit her. It was like walking into a farmyard.

  The street was a muddy track, not a tram line.

  She looked behind her to check where she’d come from, as any startled traveller finding herself in the wrong place would do, but there was just a row of dingy hovels, rickety wooden tenements that looked like they were about to collapse.

  New Street Station had disappeared.

  — 1 —

  FRED SMITH SURGED FORWARD into a flurry of windmilling fists. He was punched and felt nothing. He only knew he landed a few punches himself. He socked a man in a black polo-neck right on the nose and watched him crumple and fall back, a red rose blooming from his face.

  Fred fell too. Without even seeing himself fall, he was on the floor, trying to get up and he couldn’t get up, as if something was blocking him.

  A placard on the ground, trampled by boots. Someone’s trilby hat.

  A black boot lunged for his face and he jerked his head back.

  A kick. Yes. A kick in the head.

  The mob scattered like a starling murmuration, shrieking and screaming. He was on his feet, running, pushing through the throng. He ran past the Register Office, his place of work. His keys jingling in his pocket. He could slip inside and wait for the demonstration to disperse.

  He glanced over his shoulder. A bunch of Blackshirts chasing. He ran past the Register Office and on down Paradise Street to the Town Hall.

  Their boots drumming the pavement behind him faded and he slowed to a trot.

  He passed the Greek columns of the Town Hall and edged along Victoria Square where motor cars and buses belched out fumes as they made the turn at the island before the Council House and snaked down New Street.

  The uproar was well behind him, but he thought he could hear the clamour of violence crackling under the drone of traffic. Perhaps the riot was tumbling down from Broad Street all the way to New Street, following him.

  He stopped running and broke into a nonchalant stroll. To run was to give yourself away. He was safe now on New Street among the crowds. He was a normal man walking the street, just like all these nice, innocent shoppers. The trick was to slow down and pretend to be a young man out on a Saturday morning, not a demonstrator fleeing a riot. If you didn’t run, no one could chase you.

  Up ahead, the pavement was crowded with people. Was it an outlying crop of the demonstration? No, it was the Theatre Royal’s matinee performance emptying out a herd of people. He thought of ducking in and losing himself in the crowd, but ushers in purple livery were waving people out.

  Walking in front of him, two beautiful young women in silk stockings and cloche hats turned at the shouts echoing down from Victoria Square.

  “Some sort of demonstration.”

  “That bloody Oswald Mosley’s lot at Bingley Hall.”

  He smiled and shrugged, as if none of that had anything to do with him, and one of the girls smiled back and then frowned in disgust. She pulled her friend closer and they scurried across the street, weaving through motor cars to the other side.

  Something was pouring into his eyes. He wiped a slick of sweat from his forehead and examined his hand. His fingers were stained scarlet.

  Blood. He was bleeding.

  Walking down New Street pretending to be a shopper and blood pouring down his face.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. A gaggle of Blackshirts running down the street alongside the motor cars. Had they seen him all this way? The blood on his face was a beacon calling every shark.

  He plunged into the Theatre Royal crowd, lost in it for a moment, pushed through and ducked into Lower Temple Street. A short slope down to the New Street Station entrance. Twenty yards away. He could run right in and hop on the train to Moseley. He winced at the cruelty of the joke: that the nice suburb where he lived had the same name as the fascist bully he despised. The bully from whom he was fleeing.

  He blinked and wiped more blood from his eyes. One eye closed now.

  He glanced in a shop window and saw his reflection. A dark stain down one side of his face. He yanked out his handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped it, and focused on the display beyond his reflection.

  Golden timepieces and carriage clocks glittering. He froze, beguiled by the beauty of it.

  Shouts and commotion on the corner. The Blackshirts pushing through the theatre crowd.

  He turned and ran and as he reached Stephenson Street he walked smack into someone coming around the corner.

  He jerked back, reeling. A pair of hands grabbed hold of him. An old lady.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said.

  He didn’t register her face, because he was staring at what was behind her.

  New Street Station wasn’t there. The grand Victorian facade of the Queen’s Hotel wasn’t there.

  None of it was there. Just a hovel in brown dusk.

  — 2 —

  “YOU’RE BLEEDING,” THE old lady said. “What happened?”

  A rich voice with the brittle edge of age. Kind eyes. A wave of warmth came off her and Fred felt safe for a moment, as if New Street Station hadn’t just disappeared.

  “Mosley’s lot,” he said, jerking a thumb behind him. He looked back, but they weren’t there. The New Street of motor cars and beautiful women with cloche hats and dresses that fell over the knees just wasn’t there. No men in trilbies and overcoats. No Blackshirts chasing him.

  A horse and carriage sailed past in the gloom up there. A real carriage, pulled by a horse. A couple passed in its wake, the woman in a bonnet and a gown that ballooned down to her feet, the man in a top hat and frock coat. It was as if the Theatre Royal had been staging A Christmas Carol and the cast had spilled out onto the streets. Or it was...

  Not now, he thought. Not when he needed to run from the Blackshirts.

  “Moseley?” The woman said. “You’re from Moseley?”

  “Yes, I am. But not that. I was talking about Oswald Mosley. The British Union of Fascists. The demonstration at Bingley Hall.”

  He hooked his thumb again in the general direction of Broad Street, though he knew Bingley Hall wasn’t there.

  “Oh,” the old lady said. “That Mosley.”

  She looked up and down the street, still holding on to him. “You’re not a Blackshirt, are you?”

  “What? Lord, no. I was fighting them.”

  “Oh, that’s a relief.”

  “Except I don’t think I’m much of a fighting man.”

  “Evidently.”

  “In fact, I’v
e never been in a fight.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Fred Smith,” he said, his eyes roaming from her kind face to the entrance to New Street Station behind her. But it wasn’t behind her. What was there instead was a row of Jerry-built wooden hovels that looked like they had been thrown up by a family of architects engaged in a bitter feud. No building resembled its neighbour.

  The woman followed his gaze and looked over her shoulder, and at that moment it seemed a dark figure came out of the gloom to greet her — a man in a crumpled stovepipe hat — as if one of the buildings across the dirt road had belched him forth. Across the street, where New Street Station had been, more figures emerged: skulking men in the shadows of that hovel.

  “We’d better go,” the old lady said. “I don’t like the look of this.”

  Fred didn’t move, despite her pulling on his arm. He was frozen, his eyes locked onto the man in the crumpled stovepipe hat approaching, a club in one hand. He looked like Bill Sykes walking out of the pages of Oliver Twist. But this man had nothing of the comic caricature about him. He was mean and grim and the threat of violence came off him like the stink of sewage.

  “Fred!”

  He came to, and let her tug him away, guiding him as they scooted along the row.

  Up ahead, more men crossed the street to block their way. A feral gang of Dickensian ruffians.

  He was hallucinating. This was all a waking dream. He’d been cornered by the Blackshirts and they were going to beat him up, but his addled brain was seeing them dressed as characters from a Christmas card. It wouldn’t matter in a minute, because he would be unconscious. If he was lucky, he’d wake up in hospital.

  Five steps ahead, a door opened and a young woman popped her head out. She threw a bucket of something into the gutter with a sickening splosh. She looked both ways and stiffened as she caught the scenario: a gang cornering a pair of helpless victims: an old lady and a young man covered in blood.

  Fred had just a moment to register she was quite beautiful: a girl in a ball gown, her dark hair pinned up in ringlets around her pretty face.