Chapter Text
Marley was dead, to begin with.
Specifically, Jonathan Paracelsus Marley, an unfortunately named and overly curious lawyer for the Upton family of London. One of his last thoughts, before a steak knife had pierced his heart with more vigor than skill, was that he should have just been a doctor like his mother wanted.
Quite a lot of people were dead, in fact, and their deaths have no bearing on this story. True, the unfortunates all shared a connection to its leading lady and her brother shortly before their untimely demises. But, as she would be quick to point out, that commonality proves nothing. Plenty of people in this world know plenty of others, and if six or seven of those people happen to meet brutal, bloodstained fates…well, stranger things have happened.
Still, the universe, as if anticipating just this moment, had indeed linked the death of Mr. J.P. Marley with the lives of Sir Thomas Sharpe (Baronet) and his sister Lucille. Thus, some dozen winters after their brief acquaintance, it would be appropriate- if irrelevant -to say that Marley was dead, to begin with.
And Lady Edith Cushing Sharpe, not dead, was arguing a point of semantics.
“It’s just a joke,” she said without turning from the desk by the window. Even the scratching of her pen against the page continued as she spoke. “Dickens doesn’t really have strong opinions about the phrase ‘dead as a doornail.’ The whole point is the absurdity of examining idioms too closely.”
Her husband stopped pacing back and forth before the fire and ran a hand through his unruly brown hair. “But it’s a fascinating question, isn’t it? Why do we say something is as dead as a doornail? What’s so dead about any type of nail, really? Where does the saying come from?”
“Would you argue that they’re alive, then?” came a cool, even sally from a very straight-backed armchair not far from the hearth. “I’d be quite curious to hear that logic.” Lucille glanced at him over the top of her book, face as unmoved as ever.
“Well, no-” Thomas stammered.
“So it’s rather a moot point.”
“No, Edith, you see, I’m simply wondering when people started-”
“I’m not sure I’d ever write ‘dead as a doornail,’ personally. It’s a bit clichéd, isn’t it?”
Throwing up his hands, Thomas collapsed onto the sofa. “I yield, I yield! You two are impossible. Get your teeth into an argument and there’s no reasoning with you.”
What appeared to be a small, brown-and-white feather duster with legs raised its head from where it lay curled on the hearth rug. The little ball of fluff stood, shook itself, and padded over to sniff calmly at Thomas’ shoes. With a sigh, he reached down and scooped it up.
“We men must stick together, musn’t we, Dante?” he said with mock gravity. “With two such formidable ladies in the house.”
A tiny pink tongue applied itself vigorously to Thomas’ nose.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The nominal lord- or rather, baronet -of the house hastily drew back from the onslaught of doggy kisses and returned Dante to the worn carpet. Not, however, without a good scratch behind the little beast’s silky, wing-like ears.
“Why were you reading that drivel, anyway?” This from Lucille, who at last set her volume of French poetry aside to focus fully on her brother. “It’s not even the best of Dickens- not that I’m fond of his work in general.”
Thomas shrugged. “ ‘Tis the season, I suppose,” he said carelessly.
Now it was Edith’s turn to look up, glancing sharply in his direction. “Really?” she asked. “Is it? I knew it was winter-” this with a brief look at the sleet turning the ground into a scarlet slurry outside “-but surely it’s not that long since November. It can’t be Christmastime yet.”
“December 17th, my darling. The calendar doesn’t lie.”
The desk chair creaked as Edith stretched, flexing her ink-stained fingers with a slight grunt. She rubbed at a place on the small of her back that had Thomas wincing sympathetically. Humans are creatures of habit- even hours-long writing habits that leave them aching every time.
“It was rather a relief not to fuss with all that last year,” she said. Her glasses joined her pen on the desk beside a butterfly-shaped ink blotter, and she pushed her chair back and stood. The steps down from the mezzanine creaked as she descended, skirt held carefully up behind her. When she reached ground level, she plopped herself unceremoniously into an overstuffed armchair by the hearth. Squarely between Lucille’s seat and Thomas’.
Lucille raised an eyebrow. “I would have thought you’d love Christmas, Edith,” she said. “All that gold and glister and good cheer. Not to mention ghost stories.”
“If that were all of it, I would have. I did once, as a child.” Cutting a slice from the loaf of bread on the tea-table, Edith skewered it rather harder than necessary on a long fork and held it before the flames.
“What happened?” Thomas asked.
“Growing up happened. A hostess’ work is never done at Christmastime- not with parties for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s, Twelfth Night. All sorts of people we absolutely had to socialize with, who I’d just as soon have never seen again.” She sighed. “Didn’t your mother have to do all that? I would have thought, even just to keep up appearances…”
Thomas snorted. “Appearances could be kept up just as easily by sending appropriate cards and pleading illness,” he replied. “And, to be fairer than she deserves, she wasn’t always wrong. The kind of illness that comes from a bottle of laudanum.”
“There were parties.” Lucille’s voice sounded distant as she stared into the flickering fire. “A few. You were very small, Thomas- you wouldn’t remember. They paraded you around like the Christ-child, then handed you to Theresa to be bundled off upstairs. I was sick with worry until you came back.”
For a moment, the only sounds in the room were logs crackling and the moan of the wind in the eaves. Memories, as heavy as the clouds above, were a constant companion at Allerdale Hall. And every bit as ready to burst, and drown its inhabitants. Thomas’ eyes didn’t leave his sister’s face, his muscles tensed as if prepared to move at any second.
But she only gave a little hum and settled herself more comfortably on her stool. “You’d know more about Christmas than I, though, wouldn’t you?”
When he blinked at her quizzically, she added, “Whitehaven, Thomas. You told me.”
“Oh!” All at once, a smile broke across his face. The genuine sort that crinkled the skin around his eyes and lit them up like candles from within. “Yes, that’s true. Aunt and Uncle didn’t do Christmas by halves- crackers and plum pudding and a tree with glass baubles. A table tree still; they were very traditional.”
“And gifts?” Edith asked. Her eyes twinkled impishly as she neatly snatched her browned toast off the fork and took a bite. “Somehow I can’t see little Thomas waiting long to dive into his sugar mice.”
Thirty-five-year-old Thomas, reaching for a queen biscuit off the china platter beside the bread, chuckled slightly. “They didn’t exactly know what to make of me, I’m afraid. Not much interest in toy pistols or tin soldiers. And I had five cousins, so economy was king. They’d usually hand me some windup trifle or other and a bit of marzipan. It did the trick.”
“Mind those crumbs,” Lucille interjected mildly. “I just swept the carpet yesterday.”
Edith glanced up at her. “What about you? Any fonder holiday memories?”
Only to wish she’d bitten her tongue as that tension instantly rounded Thomas’ shoulders again, and the temperature seemed to drop in defiance of the glowing fire. Lucille, for her part, went very still. And very still, for her, was positively frozen by anyone else’s standards.
“No,” she answered after a silence that seemed to last a hundred years. “There’s nothing festive about hours of sermons in an unheated chapel. The Ladies’ Charitable Commission always took good care of us, though.” A wry note entered her voice. “An orange apiece. Weren’t we lucky girls? And mustn’t we work especially hard in the laundry, to repay their kindness?”
For a moment, even the warm opulence of the library shrank into a mean shadow of itself. Edith never understood how a happy moment with her beloved spouses could peel back like a stage-set and reveal three broken people huddling together in an icy ruin. As if, she sometimes thought, she were living two lives at once. Impossible to tell which was real- she knew which she’d prefer, but in the times when the storm broke…
She reached across five feet of carpet and seventeen years, and took Lucille’s hand. “You’re here, my love. You’re safe.”
“The oranges were always withered. Clara took sick from black rot in hers, once.”
“I’m sorry.” Edith’s thumb gently rubbed her knuckles. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Lucille shook herself a little, and shrugged. She squeezed Edith’s fingers absently, then raised her palm to press a kiss to it. “It was a long time ago. I can’t abide ‘Angels, We Have Heard On High,’ but otherwise it is forgotten.” Her voice had grown breathier and lighter than usual- as if somehow stripped of substance.
As if she were trying to pull herself out of it.
Thomas glanced from one woman to the other, before hurriedly cutting in. “Yes, well, I always wished you were there, in Whitehaven. But there really is no place like home, is there? Any more tea left in the pot?”
But a germ of an idea had blossomed in Edith’s mind- and germs, as everyone knows thanks to Mr. Lister, grow like wildfire.
“It really is a pity,” she said slowly, “that Thomas and I knew proper Christmases and you never have.”
Aligning her book more precisely with the edge of the table, Lucille huffed a little through her nose. “Really, Edith. It doesn’t matter. I have far more important things now than a lot of tinsel and cheap fairy-dolls.”
“It can be lovely, though. We could have a wonderful Christmas here, just the three of us. Greenery around the house, candles everywhere. Carols and food. Mulled wine.”
“We don’t drink. You know that.”
Edith was undeterred. “Mulled apple cider, then. The American kind that’s not fermented. And hot chocolate- I know you love chocolate.”
Thomas caught her eye. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought there was something strange in his gaze. Something like…hope?
“I can make chocolate whenever I like, without a lot of noise and fuss,” Lucille replied primly.
It had become an old game, only a year on. Getting Lucille to accept kindness was war, a battle like no hardened general had ever known. And in wartime, even underhanded blows are fair game. Edith summoned as much sweetness as possible to her voice, turning the full force of her wide amber eyes on her wife.
“Thomas would like it, I’m sure,” she said. Lucille blinked, and she mentally awarded herself ten points. A chink had opened in the armor; now to deliver the killing blow.
“Wouldn’t you, Thomas?”
If ever a more fervent prayer had been sent up than Edith’s silent plea for her husband to take the bait, she’d eat her favorite slippers without sauce. When she heard a faint sigh from the sofa, a tentative flame of triumph flared to life in her heart.
“I…yes.” Edith could have done without the sheepishness in his voice, but alliances were not to be sneezed at. “I have- wished, often, that I could give you a better past, Lucille. I know I cannot. But I try every day to give you a better future.”
“Is Christmas so marvelous, then? So splendid that I can’t pass another year without it?” Her words were faintly scornful, but the tone wavered. She almost sounded a bit stunned, her green eyes wandering from Edith’s face to focus on nothing in particular.
Storming the gates and overwhelming the defenses- Edith thought, again, that “marital” and “martial” had the same letters for a reason. But what else could be done, when one loved the most headstrong of warriors? She shifted in her seat and clasped Lucille’s other hand, gripping them both tightly.
“As I recall, when one doesn’t have to entertain a lot of useless people, it is. And we can make it our own,” she said quietly. “I- we want you to have this, Lucille. We want you to have something good to remember.”
Thomas cleared his throat softly. “Excuse me,” he said, with just a hint of amusement. “I believe it’s two against one here. Namely, two lovely ladies who don’t like Christmas against one poor but very determined gent who does.”
Edith turned back to him, fighting to suppress a grin. “Are you proposing a challenge, Sir Thomas?” she said, the picture of mock indignation. “And at this festive season, no less? What about peace on earth, goodwill to men, buying on credit from Sears and Roebuck, and all the other traditional sentiments of the holiday?”
“To hell with them,” Thomas intoned gravely. “I intend to out-Christmas the both of you, or die trying.”
Two faces turned in Lucille’s direction. She stared at them for a long second. She smoothed the front of her skirt very deliberately. She poured herself another cup of tea with her usual serenity and grace, and Edith began to suspect she was drawing this out on purpose.
Only after she had taken a long sip, settled cup and saucer back on the tray, and dabbed at her lips with a lace-edged black handkerchief did she finally say, “What a lucky thing that I grow holly in the kitchen garden.”
As Thomas rose, kissed them both quickly, and all but sprinted towards the stairs, Edith thought she saw the slightest hint of pink rise in Lucille’s cheeks. With no small satisfaction, she took another bite of her toast, not even noticing that it had lost almost all of its warmth.
Sometimes, a gift can be given in such a way as to leave the recipient unsure that it was intended for them. But just like the blade that had ended the unfortunate Mr. Marley, she sensed that her gesture had hit its mark.