Sybrina Read online

  “Very well. You mustn’t force it.”

  The fork clinks against as the plate as the minister cleans up. “What about your dinner? Aren’t you hungry?” I wonder.

  “I will eat later.”

  My eyes suddenly feel so heavy, blinking, I can barely keep them open. With the food and drink, my body wants to sleep. I close them and nestle back into the pillow. “Thank you” slips from my lips.

  “Sleep now.”

  Chapter 8

  Sybrina:

  The next morning my eyes pop open with vitality. Sunbeams are streaming through the window. I twist from my relaxed position on my side and see the minister standing like a sentinel watching for an attack. His sculpted form and dark hair are even more of a beautiful vision to me this morning. As I shift, he looks down at me with a heated gaze that turns my already weakened body slack. Our eyes exchange words, and if I am hearing them correctly, he is as curious about me as I am him.

  Harsh knuckles tap against the wooden door. Elijah reaches to answer it. I look up from the bed, and one of the many large sailors that joined my readings is there.

  “Miss Sybrina’s room is ready.”

  “Very good.” The minister wraps the blankets tightly around me and scoops me up like a small child too tired to make it to their bed on their own. I am cradled in his arms. “Lead the way.”

  Down a dark narrow hallway, the sailor leads us to a small door. When he opens it, the first thing I notice is that the room is flooded with sunlight. The tiny room is neatly kept and clean. It is very close to the accommodations I remember when traveling abroad to and from school.

  “Is everything as it should be?” a familiar voice asks from behind me. I turn my head in Elijah’s arms and see Mr. Tinker. The minister places me upright on the bed. The sailor that led us here leaves.

  “Yes,” Elijah responds.

  I smile, happy to see him.

  “How fare thee?” Mr. Tinker asks with a smile that lights his whole face.

  “Weak, but much better. Thank you.”

  “Breakfast shall be coming. Why don’t you settle in?”

  “I will. Thank you again.”

  Mr. Tinker nods heartily and leaves. The minister and I are alone again.

  “I should not be in this comfortable room. I should be in the hull with the other passengers,” I say with guilt.

  “Ridiculous. You have been extremely ill. Take the captain’s offerings of hospitality.”

  I concur but it doesn’t stave my guilt. Michael, Mr. Overton, and all of the passengers, especially the elderly, who have been my companions, are still in the harsh conditions below.

  Mouse appears in the open doorway. In his arms, he is carrying clothing—women’s clothing.

  “These are for you, Miss Sybrina. The crew collected them. The dress is from the captain.” He walks in and hangs them on a lonely hook on the wall.

  “I cannot accept it. Please tell the captain that I appreciate the gesture, but do not want to overstep.”

  “The dress is more suitable for a lady,” Elijah interjects with his intrinsically powerful voice. “You must rest now.”

  *****

  Mouse raps on my door. I know it is he. The way his knuckles tap the wood is young and indecisive.

  “Miss?”

  “Come in, Mouse,” I acknowledge.

  “You look much better,” he announces at seeing me sitting up and clothed in the dress from the captain.

  “I feel much better,” I declare with sincerity. Amazingly, I am having a very quick recovery. My own personal knowledge of such an ailment would be two weeks of rest and clear liquids to recapture strength and fortitude. I, having suffered so, am just as amazed at my abilities. I am weak but it is tolerable.

  “The captain wished me to see if you’d like dinner in your cabin or to invite you to dine with him.”

  “Oh!” I am utter flabbergasted. The captain would wish to dine with me? He recently imprisoned me!

  Mouse senses my quizzical thoughts.

  “He has been... different. What shall I tell him?”

  “I would be happy to join the captain for dinner.” I want to forgive the captain for my treatment. Burdened with duties such as he is, I wish to excuse his insolence in light of ignorance and duty.

  Mouse’s face lights up. “One hour, miss.” He reaches to close the door to leave.

  “Mouse?” I call him back. “Please call me Sybrina.”

  A playful expression makes his eyes dance with the mischief I have so often seen in him, and he bows in confirmation before exiting.

  At eight o’clock on the nose, a crewman comes to my door.

  “I am to escort you to the captain’s quarters.” I follow slowly, cautious of my steps. The sailor seems hurried and frustrated with my speed. I could have used his arm, but he did not offer it. At the entrance to the quarters, the sailor takes his leave, clearly annoyed at his task and ready to be on to other things.

  I peer in to the lavish chamber. A table is set with the finest china and small candles are interspersed among a fine rack of lamb. This must have come from the captain’s personal food stores. I am honored that he would want to share such a feast with me. The complete back wall of the captain’s quarters is a window from floor to slanted ceiling. It must provide such a wondrous view in the daytime of the miraculous sea.

  As I move into the room, the captain stands in proper acknowledgment of my station. The gesture takes me back to a time when I was comfortable in my own skin, and scoffed at those who looked at me with mocking eyes. I curtsey and smile, not wanting to harbor ill will to the man. With any luck, my conduct exhibits that I do not. I can empathize that it cannot be easy running a ship of this size with crew and passengers.

  A tall man in a black suit, finely made, enshrouded in the shadows of candlelight, turns away from the windows to face the room. It’s the minister. He’s here.

  “Good evening, Miss Sybrina.” He bows regally and my stomach clenches with the excitement of his presence. A flush flows across my body, and I am embarrassed.

  The captain pours a decanted red wine into a glass and hands it to me. “I hope you are well, miss,” the captain says without a hint of malice or contempt.

  “I am recovering. Thank you.” I accept the wine and sip it. It is tangy and sweet, a fine Chianti.

  “Please sit.” The captain flourishes his hand in a motion to steer me toward a chair by the table. The back is deeply carved with scrolls of flowers; the artisan who made these chairs is very talented.

  “Thank you.” I sit and the captain pushes my chair in for me.

  I place my glass at the top of the setting and feel the heated gaze of the minister on me even with the distance between us. I glance up at him. He comes to the table and sits, all the while never removing his eyes from mine.

  “You have earned quite a place among my crew,” the captain notes.

  “Sir?” I question, taking my solid attentions away from the minister and placing a half ear on the captain.

  “The sailors here think highly of you.”

  “Thank you, sir.” What a bizarre inference.

  “You might think you were a water nymph,” he adds, and such words give me a start.

  The minister’s face morphs into something unexplainable—an irate madness. His eyes become glass-like crystals like I’ve seen them before. The captain stands to cut the lamb and laughs grossly off cue. I feel a sense of relief when I realize his words are a vain attempt at a joke.

  “I’ve been told here by the minister that you’ve been doing a bit of schooling,” Captain Stokes utters.

  “Yes sir.” The captain picks up my plate and places a hardy piece of meat upon it.

  “Potatoes?”

  “That would be lovely, thank you.”

  “What kind of schooling would you be doing in England that you can’t get in the likes of Boston?”

  “My particular area of study is medicine.”

  “Like
a doctor?” he asks through a laugh as he serves the minister.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I slice through the meat and take a bite. It is delicious. It’s been so long since I’ve had a formally prepared meal with all the trimmings or been without nausea. I watch an exchange between the captain and the minister; it’s subtle. Silence hurls its heavy weight in the room. I view the captain’s chambers as I savor my dinner. A small perfume flask sits on a table by his desk. I admire it.

  “What a beautiful perfume bottle, Captain, did you come across it on one of your many journeys?” I query politely.

  “Holy water,” he says with his mouth full. He finishes chewing and continues. “A priest who took passage on my ship gave it to me as a gift.”

  “Sybrina?” the minister addresses me. “Would you grace us with a reading from a novel I perchance have?” His hand rests on a book I did not notice on the dinner table beside him. “It is a novel by Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol.”

  “I have read it. A moving ghost story.”

  “Yes. Would you read to us? I am sure the captain would enjoy such a treat.”

  The captain’s face tenses up with a wrinkling one can only compare to a rotting peach. I contain my laughter, not wanting to insult him, but his countenance is comical. I finish my last bit of food and wipe my mouth with my linen napkin.

  “I would love to,” I affirm with a genuine smile. He slides the book across the table to me. The leathery cover is soft and the pages pristine. Purposely brushing his hand with mine causes a flush to creep up my face. “Where would you like me to start?” I entreat, wishing to recompose myself.

  “At the beginning. It is always good to start there.” I smile again and turn the pages, past the copyright to Stave One: Marley’s Ghost.

  Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

  Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

  Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

  The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

  Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

  Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

  External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

  Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

  But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

  Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

  The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

  “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

  “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

  He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

  “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure.”

  “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

  “Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

  Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

  “Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

  “What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such
a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

  “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

  “Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

  “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

  “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

  “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

  The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark forever.

  “Let me hear another sound from you,” said Scrooge, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation. You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” he added, turning to his nephew. “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”

  “Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.”