Disavowed, p.12
How the Belle Stole Christmas: Historical Romance Stories Inspired by Classic Films, page 12
They left the last of the wide streets and plunged into a maze of grim alleys, and at last, the relentless journey ended. They stood before a dilapidated tenement, its dark silhouette blocking out the bleak night sky. Silas stared at it, dread and anticipation warring within him. The weight of the spirit’s guidance hung heavy in the air, and he knew, with a certainty as cold as the winter night, that he was about to confront the full consequences of all he had done.
The ghost led him to a door at the end of the hall on the third floor. Then, in the blink of an eye, Silas stood in an even smaller, more dilapidated room than the last one he’d visited. In the far corner, Grace pulled a threadbare shawl tighter around a young girl’s thin shoulders and smoothed a lock of dark hair from the girl’s sweaty brow.
“Hold on, my darling,” she murmured. “Be strong. We shall have brighter days.”
The girl shivered and coughed, her small body shuddering with the force of it. Her face was pale and ghostly in the sputtering candlelight, but her eyes were vivid green, much like his own.
Emmaline. If this were the present, she must be nine or ten, but she was so thin and frail that she looked much younger. Still, she was alive. Thank God, they were both still alive. And the ghost had shown him the way here. Which meant he could find them again.
Grace’s hands trembled only slightly as she turned to the meager fire and scooped some thin broth into a cup from the pot hanging above the flames. “Emmy,” she said, gently lifting the cup to her daughter’s parched lips, “here, drink a bit of this.”
Silas stood near the stove, a specter in the gloom. The chill air gripped him with icy fingers, but he could not move. The cramped room pressed in on him from all sides, making him feel as though he couldn’t breathe. There were no windows. Not a single one. Near the bed, the flame of a single candle fought against the darkness. It cast long shadows over Grace’s drawn face as she watched the child struggle to swallow.
The ghost hovered behind Silas, its presence inescapable.
“So much spirit in one so frail,” the ghost intoned sadly. “Without intervention, her fragile light will soon be extinguished.”
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked the ghost tremulously.
The ghost shook its head sadly. “They don’t know. Grace doesn’t have the money to ask a doctor to look in on the little girl.”
Silas swallowed back the lump in his throat. This was his fault. All of it. He had so much money and so many resources at his disposal, yet his daughter and the woman he’d loved were shivering in the cold, teetering on the brink of starvation. How had he let it come to this?
Emmaline sank back against a lone, lumpy pillow, her spindly limbs frail beneath the rough covers. “Will there really be better days, Mummy?” she asked, her voice both hopeful and resigned. “By next Christmas, will it be better?”
Grace hesitated, her silence showing a brief crack in her brave façade. “Yes, my darling,” she answered at last, the words soft but fierce. “We shall have brighter days by next Christmas, I promise.”
The broth was no more than a few spoonfuls, but Grace offered it to Emmaline as though it were a feast. Silas watched in silence, wanting to turn his back on this sight that was too painful to bear. However, the ghost’s stern gaze held him there, making him witness the consequences of his actions.
The room was still but for Emmaline’s labored breaths and the occasional clink of the spoon against the cup. Grace’s care was patient and unwavering, a stark contrast to Silas’s earlier selfishness. He could see now what he had done—how his carelessness, selfishness, and indifference had reached across years and miles to settle in this room, into their very bones.
If he’d left Grace alone, she’d have stayed in service, perhaps married a handsome footman, lived a life so much better than the one he’d sentenced her to. How she must have loved him, to have risked ending up like this, because she’d probably understood far better than he what making love to him might cost her.
He wanted to speak, to call out to them, but they couldn’t hear him. His presence felt like an obscenity amid their struggle. He longed to be gone, and yet the need to stay, to witness and repent, was even stronger.
The spirit shifted slightly, drawing Silas’s attention. “She works long hours in the mill and must leave Emmaline here alone. She worries about her all the time, but her meager pay has left her with so few choices. Her greatest fear is that she’ll return home one day to find that Emmaline has died all alone.”
“I’m going to help them,” Silas said fiercely. “This will be their last cold, hungry night.”
“Unless it’s already too late,” the ghost said, its eyes filled with sadness.
“Is it?” Silas asked, guilt nearly consuming him. “Please, Spirit, tell me that I can change this.”
In response, the ghost merely gestured once more to the scene before them.
“Do not be sad, Mummy,” Emmaline whispered. “Shall I tell you a story?”
“I would love a story,” Grace replied. “But only if it won’t tire you out.” She put the spoon down and climbed into the narrow bed, pulling Emmaline against her chest and drawing the thin covers over them both, shivering as she sought to get warm.
Emmaline smiled weakly and nestled against her mother. “Once there was a princess who lived in a castle with only cobwebs and rats to keep her company,” she began, her thin voice clear despite the rasp of illness. “But she made friends with a mouse, which changed everything.”
“Did it now?” Grace asked, leaning back against the headboard and letting her eyes drift closed, finally letting herself relax. “How did it change things?”
“The mouse found things for her.” Emmaline’s brows knitted together in concentration. “Lost things, like treasures and...” She paused as a deep cough wracked her thin frame, the sound rattling Silas’s very soul. “...and love.”
Grace wrapped the blanket more securely around Emmaline’s shoulders. “Don’t push yourself too hard, my darling.”
But Emmaline shook her head, insistent. “I want to finish the story.”
With a look of resignation mixed with admiration, Grace settled back. “Go on, then.”
Through it all, Silas remained silent, absorbing the details with an intensity that belied the emotional distance he had trained himself to maintain: how thin and pale Emmaline was, how gently Grace reassured her, how much like him, like Grace, the girl looked. He clung to each observation, mourning all he’d missed.
“Tell me, Emmy,” Grace encouraged, her voice the only softness in the room’s harsh edges. “What else did the mouse find?”
“It found courage,” Emmaline said, her smile as bright as it was sad. “And then, it found a family for the princess.”
Her words cut into Silas. How easily she shaped her hopes and fears into something beautiful.
Emmaline looked at her mother with eyes far too large for her thin face. “Mummy, do you think we can find such a mouse?” she asked, her voice small and earnest. “Do you think it will find us?”
“We have all we need right here,” Grace replied fiercely, glancing around the sparse room before letting her eyes rest on her daughter. “We don’t need a mouse to show us that.”
“But what if the mouse wants to?” Emmaline asked.
Silas flinched at her words, her unknowing invitation. Did she somehow know he was lurking at the edges of their meager existence? Or was her young heart simply generous enough to let him hope so?
Silas felt something break inside him, a shattering as profound as it was silent. The life he had resigned himself to—barren, unfeeling—collapsed under the weight of all that he had missed out on. The ghost’s stern presence bore down on him, leaving no room for denial or escape.
He took a step toward them, driven by desperation and the urgent need to make things right. The spirit’s unwavering gaze followed him, a faint trace of pity in its fathomless eyes. Silas faltered, uncertain, reaching for them once again, even though he knew it was futile.
Unlike before, this scene was really happening, right now, in this moment. His daughter was sick, perhaps even dying, across town from his well-appointed home. He could still help them. Silas knew that this time—perhaps the last chance he would ever get—he could not fail them.
They would have brighter days. He would make sure of it.
CHAPTER 6: TANGLED WEEDS AND TILTED STONES
Silas awoke again in his bed, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He’d been standing in Grace’s tenement room … And then he’d been here. The Ghost of Christmas Present had shown him what he needed to see and then abandoned him just as its associate had done.
The room had grown so cold that frost etched the corners of the windows. Silas’s breath hung in the dim air. Had he been gone for seconds or hours? He sat up abruptly, every sense on high alert, as the door swung open, an impossibly slow arc that filled him with dread. A figure emerged from the hallway—its deep, midnight robe obscuring any suggestion of form, a face hidden beneath a heavy cowl.
The final spirit glided toward him, this one more terrifying by far than the others before it. Silas searched the shadows for escape, for meaning, for anything but this dark apparition of what might yet come.
A slow chill spread through his chest, a sensation of suffocation. The ghost’s robe rippled with a soundless motion, each thread woven from the essence of night itself, trailing a darkness that swallowed even shadow. The candle trembled, then flickered again, mirroring the churning in his gut. This was it—the final harbinger of his fate.
Silas’s hands gripped the bedding, knuckles white, skin nearly as pale. The terror this spirit roused bore down on him with such force that he wondered how he did not collapse beneath it. He did not want to know the future. He was terrified to find out he’d failed yet again, that Emmaline had not survived, that Grace hated him.
Silas’s mouth opened in a shallow gasp, not of surprise—no, not after what he’d already seen—but of futile protest, a sound barely escaping his lips before being choked by the bitterly cold air.
The tattered hem of the ghost’s robe curled around the guttering candle, and it submitted at last to darkness, snuffed out by the shadow that even now wound its fingers toward the hearth.
Finally, the spirit loomed over him, seemingly without a face or a voice.
“Are you the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?” Silas asked in a shaky voice, somehow already knowing that it would not answer.
The spirit merely took his hand, and suddenly they were in a cemetery.
Fog spilled across the tombstones, shrouding everything in gray until even the distance between sky and ground disappeared. A path, barely visible, wove in broken lines of tangled weeds and tilted stones, and Silas found himself walking upon it, led by the dark spirit. His footfalls were hollow, noisy behind the silent gliding of the specter. Finally, the mist parted, revealing a small, weathered headstone.
The name—Emmaline Hollybrook—carved itself into his vision, stark and shattering. He dropped to his knees, the cold, wet earth imprinting its finality on his skin as he reached out a trembling hand. A second figure emerged from the shadows, and he knew before he saw her face, knew by the droop of her shoulders and the absence of her joy, that it was Grace, older and deeply alone.
His breath caught, and Silas fought to reclaim it. No! This cannot be! He refused to believe it. The spirit paused, its dark presence casting shadows tangled with the low mist.
His eyes filled with tears, and the letters of Emmaline’s name blurred and refocused, stark white against the gray, an accusation and an elegy etched in stone. He traced them with unsteady fingers, the rough surface grazing his skin like a wound torn open. Eleven years. That’s all she’d had. Christmas Day one year from the present.
The dates beneath her name gouged the truth deeper into his conscience, marking not just the brevity of her life but the interminable length of his guilt.
The spirit lingered, offering no relief. Silas bowed his head, tears streaking down his cheeks, and then turned toward Grace.
Silas’s heart constricted at Grace’s evident sorrow. Her features had aged in this desolate future; every line and shadow seemed carved by years of sacrifice and solitude. A single, wilted flower dangled from her hand, its petals as pale and fragile as the life for which it stood. He watched as she knelt by the grave, placed the bloom with a gentle, deliberate movement, and let her fingers linger on the stone, an echo of his own desperate touch moments before.
Grace straightened slowly, and Silas saw the full extent of what he’d done—and what he’d failed to prevent—engraved upon her. It was there in the way she wiped the rain from her brow and in the silent set of her lips. Where once she had carried herself with grace and defiance, now there was only a hollow dignity, the pride of one who endured what she must because there was no other choice. He tried to call out, to break the silence with some sound of contrition, but the gravity of her grief swallowed his voice.
Grace turned away. Her shoulders slumped, and he saw in them every moment he wasn’t there, every piece of himself he’d withheld and could not reclaim. The flower wilted further, and his eyes stung.
The spirit hovered, immense and unyielding, as Silas focused on the listless sway of Grace’s dress, the soft crunch of her footsteps on the path, the vast, silent absence she left behind. He stood like another grave marker, petrified by what his neglect would cause, and felt the deadening weight of consequence settle into his bones.
At last, the distance swallowed Grace, and the ghost turned its attention to Silas alone, the hollow intensity of its silence nearly more than he could stand.
“Can I change it?” Silas asked, dreading the answer. “Please, tell me I can still change it.”
In response, the ghost turned and led him farther into the cemetery, to a plain wooden box ready for burial.
His nephew Benedict moved toward the casket. The rain made his careful steps even more deliberate, but he never faltered. His coat was soaked through, but he stood ramrod straight, the weight of being the new Earl of Coldharbor obviously pressing heavily upon him.
Silas knew with cold certainty that he was the one in that pine box. No one but Benedict would care enough to be here on the day he was put to rest.
The spirit loomed close, watching, and the water dripping from Benedict’s hair marked the only passage of time.
Benedict put his hand on the coffin and said something. Silas could not make out the words, but he thought he knew what they must be. Benedict had cared for him, had tried so hard to build a relationship between them, despite being rebuffed time and again. He was probably speaking kindnesses that Silas had never earned.
Benedict finished and turned away, disappearing into the mist. It was so hard to watch his nephew’s retreating form. Even harder to know that someday soon this cold ground would take him as well.
Silas’s whole life had been wasted. He had nothing to show for it. Nothing at all.
He searched the thick fog for a path that led anywhere but here, desperate for a different direction or another chance. The fog and the spirit pressed in on him until Silas could see only the dark outline of the ghost and the accusing white of the gravestone. And then the vision folded away, leaving him once again cold and alone in his bedchamber.
CHAPTER 7: CHRISTMAS MORNING
Silas bolted upright, breathless. Memories of those solitary graves still clung to his mind with cruel tenacity. He tore away the blanket’s smothering weight, heart drumming, pulse wild.
Is it too late?
He needed to know. Leaping from the bed, he stumbled to the window, shoving the drapes aside, allowing the day’s first light to slash through the dimness. His hands trembled against the icy pane, hope building within him as the realization that it was Christmas morning dawned.
His father and the three ghosts wouldn’t have come to him if there wasn’t still a chance for him to do right by the family he hadn’t even known he had. Why show him what they had if there was no way to change it?
He jerked away from the window, his breaths ragged and sharp. He had to move. Had to do something, anything. His mind was churning with all he’d seen during the night. The light. The spirits. Those final, dreadful graves.
No. I won’t accept that outcome.
He had been given time. A luxury. A miracle. What would he do with it? The morning light bathed him, and he stood there, letting a strange feeling—hope?—settle over him.
Warmth kindled and spread through him, easing the tightness in his chest. And then… he smiled. The fragile thread of hope twisted itself into something solid, something real.
The darkness receded with each breath, with each beat of his heart. The room, once oppressive in its silence, now hummed with the raw, fierce possibility of change.
Is it too late?
No. His spirit soared with the knowledge, new and exhilarating. No. I can change this. I can change all of it.
He rushed to his dressing room, where his valet stood silent and ready.
“Merry Christmas, Harris,” he said, startling the man, who wasn’t used to Silas saying anything to him other than terse instructions. “Find me something warm, for I am going out this morning.”
“Merry Christmas to you as well, my lord,” Harris said with a tentative smile. “Will you be celebrating with your nephew?”
Silas almost said no, but then he thought about Benedict standing by that cold, lonely grave, the only one who’d given a damn about him, and changed his mind. He needed to do better by Grace and Emmaline, it was true, but he also needed to do better by the man who had never given up on him, even when he’d given up on himself. “Yes, I believe I will, but I’ll also be going to the East End, so set out an older pair of my boots.”
