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VANESSA LAFAYE was born in Florida and studied in North Carolina. She moved to the UK in 1999 (having been deported once) and is the author of two novels, Summertime and At First Light. Her debut Summertime was chosen for the Richard and Judy Book Club in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Award. Vanessa passed away in February 2018.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Vanessa Lafaye 2018
Vanessa Lafaye asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008306120
This story is one of pure invention. I have long been fascinated by Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, finding new meaning and new dimensions with every version that I have studied. However, the one character who intrigued me the most, the one on whom the whole tale seems to hang, appears in only three brief scenes: Jacob Marley.
Doomed to drag his chains across the earth for all eternity, yet determined to help Scrooge avoid his fate, Marley seems to me an extremely complex character. I wondered what Marley had done to deserve his desperately severe punishment. Surely, I thought, it would take more than what he quotes to Scrooge – the fact that he neglected his fellow man and never left the counting house?
Since Dickens chose to deny us any more insight into this enigmatic figure, I started to wonder about Marley’s life story, an exercise which gradually consumed my imagination. I wanted to understand the events which shaped him, which led him to be the man he is as Scrooge’s partner – and then to regret this so bitterly that he returns from the grave to put things right.
I have invented a sister, Clara Belle Marley, to give us the answers to these questions. I confess that the idea of inhabiting Marley himself felt too much like trespassing. Through the eyes of Clara, a character purely of my own creation, I can tell my invented story freely.
That said, I was so conscious of the love and reverence felt for the original, that it was almost impossible not to be paralysed by self-consciousness as I wrote this. I hope that other devotees of A Christmas Carol, and Dickens’ work in general, will grant me license to explore Marley and his unseen, yet pivotal, role in this classic tale.
Vanessa Lafaye, February 2018
Contents
Clara Belle Marley jostled among the other children for a spot in front of Mr Quoit’s toy shop window. The small boy with the crutch was the only one to whom she gave quarter. The rest got sharp elbows and a hard stare. Her ankles were sunk in melting snow, and she had wet snowflakes on her shoulders, but she did not care. For a few spare moments, this was her place of escape.
Her eyes swept over the painted boats, the toy soldiers, the porcelain-faced dolls with their unblinking stares, the rocking horse with real leather reins, the spinners and hooters and trumpets. For pride of place was taken by a doll’s house. But not just any doll’s house. With its blue slate roof, white rendered walls, and red front door, it was the image in miniature of all they had lost. Hampstead House had been a happy, comfortable home, which the doll’s house replicated in every detail. The furnishings were sumptuous,