Mr. Dickens and His Carol

by Samantha Silva

When one’s whereabouts are hard come by, a city is an impression of itself, a kaleidoscope of not-quite-right things, a variegated jumble of place and memory, all that is and once was.

Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.

Eleanor threaded and twisted her fingerless-gloved hands, worrying her way to an answer. Dickens followed her gaze outside, where some small change in the weather had split a seam in the fog. The clock tower where they’d first met peeped over steep roofs in a navy-blue night, as if saying hello. It seemed to hold up the bright winter moon all by itself. And she seemed to find in it the thing she wanted to say.

Dickens stood in front of her, full of restless energy. “Exactly. I deliver it to the printers tomorrow, first thing. At last done with the tyranny of deadlines and pages and word counts, in short, the sufferings and torments of those who are bound to the life of the pen. It will be a new life.”

Choked with feeling, he looked at her. “I know that of late I’ve pitied myself a poor man—poor in love, in riches, in prospects. But I’ve learned, in these days of your absence … that whatever I suffered was a poverty of my own vision.” He raised his hand; she pressed hers to his. Their foreheads rested, one against the other. “My dear Cate, forgive me for not seeing that I am rich in all ways … Wealthy beyond all imagining.”