#scroogeverse

But on her very first morning, the fire had been so generously stacked that she'd had to remove her second shawl by half past nine. Despite the December chill, if one crossed the office threshold with their eyes closed, they might think they'd stepped over some magical barrier and stumbled into a spring day.

When she'd mentioned the seemingly small observation, her predecessor Mr. Cratchit had laughed from behind his desk — his new desk, commissioned solely for him — and said only, "You'll get used to it. He overcorrects."

As she pinned up her hair, she realized that she was truly beginning to understand what Mr. Cratchit meant.

It was a Thursday in late February, and the counting house was quiet in that particular four-o'clock way — the way that meant the city outside was deciding whether to go grey or golden before dark.

Constance had her head down over a column of figures, her pen moving in small, precise strokes, her lips doing the faint unconscious arithmetic that Mr. Cratchit had told her was exactly what Mr. Scrooge used to do, which she found both flattering and slightly unsettling.

She heard him before she saw him.

Not loudly. Ebenezer Scrooge was not a loud man — he was more the sort of man who had presence, the kind that preceded him through doorways. He moved through the counting house with an old deliberateness that she suspected had once been cold authority and was now something more like careful joy. As though he were still slightly amazed that the world let him participate in it.

"Miss DoGoode."

"Mr. Scrooge." She did not look up immediately, because the column was at a sensitive juncture. He had learned to wait. This, she suspected, was new for him.

Nonetheless, she admired him for it. She'd met so few men who harbored the potential.

She finished, then looked up. "Yes sir?"

He was standing at his customary distance — not far, not near, precisely the distance a man stands when he has decided not to stand further away but hasn't yet committed to standing closer. In one hand he held two cups of tea, which he extended toward her with the slightly formal air of a man who had not done small gentle things for long enough that they still required a degree of concentration.

"Magda sent over a pot," he said. "Apparently our kettle here does not meet my maid's strict standards for quality."

"Few things do," said Constance, accepting her cup. "She sent it, yet you're making rounds with it rather than have her climb the stairs, I'd imagine."

"The woman has a knee," he said, as though this were an argument.

"She does. Two of them, in fact." She'd never known Magda to have knee problems. Regardless, Constance wrapped her hands around the cup. "Thank you, Ebenezer."

The name still did something to him. She had noticed this weeks ago and had filed it away under things to consider later, which was where she put everything she wasn't ready to examine in the direct light of day. His expression did not change, exactly — Ebenezer Scrooge had a remarkable face for not-quite-changing — but something in it settled, like a house accepting the weight of its own walls.

He pulled his chair from behind his desk with the same deliberateness and sat at the angle he had recently begun to adopt — not turned away, not turned entirely toward her, but a compromise that she found rather endearing for a man who had once, by all accounts, treated human warmth as a fiscal liability.

"How were the Aldgate accounts?" he asked.

"Sorted," she said, "though I have a question about the Irving ledger."

"Ask it."

"Later. It'll want your full attention and you have the look of a man thinking about something other than the Irving ledger."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a cart clattered over the cobblestones. The fire popped, sending sparks as big as red flies skirting over the polished floors.

"I was considering," he said, with some care, "whether you might like to attend the Foundlings' benefit concert. On the fourteenth." A pause, precise as a decimal point. "With me."

Constance took a sip of her tea and regarded him over the rim.

She had known this was coming in the way one knows a season is changing — not because of any single sign, but because all the small signs had been accumulating, quietly and faithfully, like interest.

Not just signs like the tea or fire, though those were heartily appreciated. The way he had rearranged his morning to ask her opinion on a question of trade law that she was fairly sure he'd already known the answer to. The way he sometimes seemed to lose the thread of a sentence when she reached across the desk for a document.

They way he'd opened her home to her during her time of need. How he'd kissed her (on multiple occasions) and vowed to protect her when her devil of an ex-husband had tracked her abroad to drag her home. Blessedly, their romance had not reached its crescendo following the New Year holiday. Far from it.

Now, he was inviting her to make public appearances with him. Not as a clerk. Not as a house guest. As ... someone else.

She was not a twenty-year-old girl. She had been married once, too long and not well, and had spent decades in Manhattan society learning the difference between men who wanted an ornament and men who wanted a person. She had given up on the latter category that last fateful December, packed her remaining self-respect (and two crumpled dresses not appropriate for English winter) and crossed the Atlantic with the firm intention of becoming entirely self-sufficient.

And then she had met Ebenezer Scrooge and taken a job in his counting house. A true Christmas miracle.

And now, he was asking her to a benefit gala. In February.

"The fourteenth," she repeated slowly. "You are aware that is Valentine's Day."

He met her gaze with the particular steadiness of a man who has decided that embarrassment is a luxury he is no longer willing to afford. "I am aware."

"The Foundlings' benefit."

"It is a cause I have supported the last few years," he said, which was true — she had seen the ledgers. "And the program includes a string quartet playing. You mentioned once that you—"

"Played," she said. "Yes. When I was young and had more evenings. Though I was never good enough to play many pieces. My hands were too clumsy for it." She looked at him for a moment longer than was strictly required by the conversation. "I would like that, Ebenezer."

Again, that almost-imperceptible settling.

"Good," he said. And then, because he was still learning the grammar of this — of softness, of wanting things without immediately taxing them — he added, rather gruffly: "The Irving ledger. You had a question."

"I do." Constance set down her cup and reached for the file, smiling at her figures. "Page eleven. The third entry from the bottom."

He leaned forward, and for a while there was only the scratch of a pen and the comfortable conspiracy of two people doing good work in a warm room.

The fire, finally blazing after spending many winters starved, wreathed the pair like a halo.

The Foundling Hospital's great room had been dressed for the occasion in a way that managed to be both charitable and celebratory — ivory candles in iron stands, garlands of early hothouse flowers along the gallery rails, and an audience composed of the sort of Londoners who gave money to good causes and liked, reasonably enough, to be seen doing so. The string quartet was already tuning in the corner, small disciplined sounds escaping into the general warm noise of the crowd.

Constance stood at Ebenezer's side in a gown the color of midnight-navy, her red hair pinned with a simplicity that had taken considerably more effort than it appeared, and watched him work the room.

This was the other thing no one had warned her about.

She had expected the generous employer, the careful man, the one who overcorrected with coal. The man who stuttered when he was nervous or had the take deep breathes before meeting with the particularly taxing clients on his calendar.

She had not expected that Ebenezer Scrooge, when placed in a room full of people he genuinely wished well, became something close to — she searched for the word — luminous was too soft. Formidable was too hard. He was simply, thoroughly, present in a way that commanded attention without demanding it, shaking hands and asking after children by name and laughing — actually laughing, a sound she had catalogued and privately treasured — at something the hospital's director said to him near the punch bowl.

He was, she thought, what happened when a man of considerable intelligence finally decided to apply it toward happiness.

"You're watching me," he said, returning to her side without looking at her first, which she was also beginning to expect.

"I am observing the room," she said with cheerful mock-innocence. She delighted in watching him roll his eyes, and relished even more that she was one of the precious few to observe such lapses in decorum from him.

"You were watching me."

"Well, you were the most interesting thing in it." She accepted a glass of white wine from a passing tray and offered him one, which he took. She made sure to choose a chalice of red for him, since she knew that was his preference. "You know everyone here."

"I've had occasion and privilege to make amends to most of them," he said, with a dryness that did not quite conceal the thing underneath it. "It's a useful way to build an acquaintance."

"That does not seem to be your only motivation."

"No, but the convenient interest cannot be ignored, madam."

Constance considered this. "I think that may be the most Ebenezer Scrooge remark you have ever said to me."

He looked at her then — that direct, evaluating look she had learned was not coldness but its precise opposite, a man paying close and serious attention.

"Is that an objection?"

"Not at all." She touched her glass to his. "In fact, I find Ebenezer Scrooge rather worth knowing. Among other things."

He said nothing, but his jaw did the thing it did when he was preventing himself from smiling prematurely.

Finally, almost mercifully, quartet began.

They had found two chairs toward the end of a row near the tall windows, slightly apart from the main body of the audience in the way that happened when two people were, without quite discussing it, arranging to be alone together in a crowded room. The program opened with Haydn — civilized, warm, and structured — and Constance felt the music settle into her the way it always had, like a key finding a lock she'd forgotten she had.

She became aware, after a few minutes, that Ebenezer was not watching the musicians. He was watching her.

Not the way she had watched him — analytically, with affection held at a careful arm's length. He was watching her the way the fire watched a room. Steadily, and with what she could only describe as commitment.

She did not turn her head. "The quartet is there," she said quietly, nodding toward the musicians. "If you'd like something to look at."

"I've seen quartets," he said, equally quiet.

She chanced a soft grin. "And you haven't seen me?"

A pause, in which the cello said something plaintive and true.

"Not like this," he admitted softly. Almost boyishly. "Not — in a place like this, I mean to say."

"You are going to invite tabloid gossip."

"Fantastic kindling for the office fire."

She turned then. He was closer than the chairs strictly required, having achieved, over the course of the first movement, one of his small sovereign distances — not far, not near, the distance of a man who has made a decision and is giving the other person the courtesy of time.

"I spent a great many years," she said, keeping her voice low, "in rooms very much like this one. Brighter ones, in fact. Fuller ones. I was considered ... " she chose the word precisely, without vanity, " ... an asset. To dinner parties. To the season. To other people's social ambitions." She looked at the quartet for a moment. "I don't think anyone in all those rooms watched me the way you just were."

"How was I watching you?" he asked. She heard something careful in it, something that cost him.

"As though I were the answer to a question you'd been working out for some time."

The second movement began, quieter than the first.

"That," said Ebenezer, after a moment, "is tolerably accurate."

The concert's interval came with more punch, more conversation, and a great deal of noise that neither of them particularly wanted. By unspoken agreement they rose from their seats and drifted toward the far end of the gallery, where the candles were fewer and the garlands thicker and the crowd had not yet thought to follow.

The city was visible through the venue's towering windows — London in February, dark and amber and entirely indifferent to the occasion, its lights scattered across the black like a second and messier sky. Constance stood close to the glass and watched it, and felt him come to stand beside her.

"I owe you a confession," he said.

"Only one?"

"Tonight's particular confession." He was looking at the window, at the city, at the dark. "I did not select the Foundlings' benefit because of the string quartet."

"I know," she said, but was delighted to hear it all the same. "Or, I'd hoped."

"I selected it because it is a cause I care about genuinely, and I found that I — " He stopped. Started again with the precision of a man redrafting a ledger entry. "I wanted to show you this benefit. This room. I will continue to strive to be a man worthy of people's praise, despite my many decades of wrongs. I ... hoped you would enjoy the evening. Enough to join me for many more in the future."

Constance was quiet for a moment. Below, a carriage moved through the street, its lamp swinging.

"I do hope I have not underwhelmed you," he said suddenly. "Though I'm certain the soirees of Manhattan have raised the bar to soaring heights. Perhaps I'm foolish to hope I can compare."

"Ebenezer," she said. "You personally deliver tea to your associates because you said Magda has a bad knee—"

"She does! Cross my heart."

"—You stack the fire until I have to take my shawl off. You asked after the name of my childhood cat three weeks into my employment and remembered it the following week without prompting."

"It's hard to forget a black cat named Sugar," he murmured, his tone soft but his smile genuine. "Sugar Cookie DoGoode, if memory serves me right."

She paused. "I have seen a great many true things about you. Those are worth their weight in gold compared to frivolities or long guests lists filled with strangers. It would be my honor to attend events like this as often as possible, especially if I had such sterling company at my side for every string quartet."

They turned from the window in tandem.

This close, she was reminded — as she occasionally needed to be, in the daily proximity of the counting house — that he was a tall man. Not imposing, precisely, not any longer, but there, in the way that set her feminine heart buzzing. His eyes in the candlelight were a mercurial shade of blue and fixed on her with the full and rather overwhelming force of his attention.

"I should like very much," he said, with the careful diction of a man who has rehearsed nothing and is doing this entirely in the present tense, "to kiss you, Constance."

Her first name. In public.

"May I?"

She had expected, if it came to this, that she might feel some of the old wariness. The Manhattan drawing-room instinct, honed over years, that cataloged men's intentions the way she cataloged ledger entries — looking for where the figures didn't quite add up.

She felt none of it. Even now, after a whirlwind romance and months of shared affections, her excitement and adoration had not dulled.

"Please do," she said, "before the second movement starts."

Rich laughter came first. Then ... He kissed her the way she might have predicted, had she been paying attention to all the evidence: deliberately, and with great care, one hand coming up to her jaw with a virtuous tentativeness. He smelled of wool and woodsmoke and the faint ghost of good ink, and the city went on below them utterly unconcerned, and the candle nearest them guttered once and steadied.

While she had been kissed by many men, she had never been kissed by one who meant it quite so much.

When they separated, it was by very little. His hand had not moved from her jaw. She suspected hers had found the lapel of his coat at some point without her authorizing the action.

"Well," said Constance.

"Indeed," said Ebenezer, still in a daze.

From the great room below, the quartet resumed. The third movement, which was warmer than the second and considerably less restrained.

"We'll miss the music," she said, making no effort to move.

"We can't have that," he teased, also not moving.

"You were not even listening before, you devil."

"Careful, madam. I have been informed that I overcorrect."

It was her turn to laugh. It was a real one, the musical kind that had once filled Manhattan parlors and now suited a draughty London gallery rather better. He looked at her the way he had looked at her during the first movement, except now with the additional quality of a man who has stopped conducting himself at a careful remove and has decided to simply be in the room. To savor the sights, and sounds, of her.

She took his arm, and with more reluctance than they felt safe to vocalize within a public venue, they slowly went back to the music.

The carriage ride home was comfortable in the way that things become comfortable when a tectonic shift happens between two people and neither has any desire to shift things back.

For example, Constance dared to lay her hand in the crook of his arm. She had first placed it there on the steps outside the Foundling Hospital with the same naturalness with which she did most things, as though she had simply decided and that was that.

Ebenezer had covered it with his own hand , keeping it warm before and after carriage door closed. Even more charming than the gesture was the fact that, being a mature gentleman, he had not made a production of it. This she appreciated enormously. She had known men who treated small intimacies like achievements requiring acknowledgment. Ebenezer Scrooge treated them like facts. He did not require any recognition to taking her hand or angling his frame so he blocked the chilled winds from caressing her. The acts of service for her were their own reward.

During the ride, the city moved past the window in a series of flares and shadow. A chiaroscuro of smog-lined clouds, lamplight glinting on wet stone, and figures bundled against the cold making their various determined ways home. Constance watched it with the particular fondness she had developed over the past few months, an affection she hadn't anticipated for a city she'd arrived in with purely practical intentions.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

She considered. "How wonderfully lucky I feel that things worked out."

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Lucky is one word for it."

"What word would you use?"

He looked out the window. In the dimness of the carriage he was all strong lines and shadows, and she was struck again by the fact that he was a remarkable looking man. Not handsome in the easy, uncomplicated way of men who had always been handsome. Something more earned than that.

"Unlikely," he said finally. "I would use unlikely."

"And yet here we are."

"And yet here we are." He looked back at her, and the carriage turned onto a familiar street.

There, towering like a lone cenotaph at the edge of a graveyard, a familiar building peeked past it's crowd of brick-lined neighbors.

Scrooge Manor, not a formal name but rather one Constance had privately named it upon her first arrival, sat at the end of the street in an attitude of solid Victorian permanence. It was large, rather more than one man required, and had clearly been lived in for decades with more attention paid to function than comfort.

Magda had once divulged that, before Constance had arrived, the parlor had contained exactly three good chairs (none of which matched), seventeen candles of varying heights, and a writing table positioned with the clear conviction that natural light was a sentimental indulgence.

While the exterior of the building was still imposing, the heart inside was much different now.

Even since she'd arrived, she'd noticed even more gradual changes. There were real lamps by every chaise and reading chair. A small painting she'd admired in a market in Clerkenwell had appeared on the study wall one morning without comment. Books rearranged on the lower shelves to make room for hers.

The housekeeper, Magda, had retired for the evening, leaving the hallway lit and the parlor fire banked. In her particular interpretive tradition, that meant it had been built up generously enough to warm the room until well past midnight.

In addition to not having a bad knee, Magda was also not naive. As such, she knew when to make herself sparse.

She liked to imagine there was a time where Magda and Ebenezer had communicated primarily through fires. The woman definitely had her work cut out for her.

Upon ducking in from the cold, Constance got started unpinning her frostbitten hat and hair in the hallway mirror. "It feels wonderful to take all this out."

Her red hair tumbled down her back, and almost instantly she felt more like herself.

Meanwhile, she watched Ebenezer in the reflection as he shrugged off his coat and hung it with the habitual precision of a man who had lived alone for a great many years. There was something she found deeply affecting about the small solitary habits of people who had spent too long by themselves, likely because she knew something of how that felt. The way they arranged things just so, not out of inflexibility but out of the long practice of having only themselves to arrange things for.

"Brandy," he said, not a question, already moving toward the study.

"Small one," she said, following on eager tiptoe.

While the whole manor was splendid, his study was her favorite room.

The parlor was more comfortable, and the library more impressive, and her very own Blue Room cocooned her in cobalt comfort that had soothed even her drug-addled soul, but the study was where Ebenezer actually lived. It was where the desk was worn at the right edge from forty years of his arm resting there, where the bookshelves held an idiosyncratic collection that ranged from commercial law to poorly-shelved poetry to a battered copy of Robinson Crusoe so old the spine had simply given up. Where the fire was always lit earliest and banked last. Where he did his correspondence in the evenings, and occasionally read aloud to her from the newspaper in the tone of a man lodging a formal complaint with the world.

For all those reasons and more, she had taken to spending her evenings here rather than the parlor. He had never suggested it and she had never asked — it had simply gradually become the room they were both in.

He poured brandy at the sideboard with the practiced economy of a man who had always been precise about quantities and now permitted himself on certain evenings to be somewhat less precise. He brought hers to the chair she had occupied with increasing regularity, the one angled toward the fire with its view of the window, and settled into his own across from it.

They sat in the way they learned they could only with each other, by relishing unperformed silence. The fire spoke at intervals, and outside, the city was settling toward midnight.

Constance turned her glass slowly, like a glassblower examining work pulled from the fire, and looked to him.

"Tell me something you've never told anyone," she said.

"That's a considerable ask for 11 o'clock." On command, the knell of the city bell tolled.

"11:30," he amended.

"You knew what you were getting into when you invited me to a Valentine's concert." She tucked her feet up beneath her, which was not parlor behavior but this was not the parlor. "Tell me something small, if you like. It doesn't have to be enormous."

He was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was taking the question seriously.

"I talk to Marley," he finally said.

She didn't immediately react, which somehow made him more nervous.

"Not—" he considered his words, "—not as one talks to a ghost. I know the difference now. But sometimes, when I'm working late and the house is quiet, I find myself narrating. To him. Old habit."

A brief pause. Then, he huffed out a laugh. "I imagine he finds it tiresome. His torment continues, even now."

Constance looked at him steadily. "I think he finds it rather dear."

Finds. Present tense. "You didn't know him."

"No. But I know you."

Something moved through his expression — complicated and quiet and not unrelated to the look he'd worn at the gallery window. He turned his glass in his hand.

"Your turn," he said.

She thought about it honestly.

"I was relieved when my marriage ended," she said softly. "Not immediately. Immediately, I was frightened and ashamed and convinced I had failed at the central project of my life. But later, when I could think clearly, I was relieved."

She turned watched the fire, feeling it work with the brandy to warm her sunny cheeks. "I had been so determined to be what that life required that I'd quite lost track of what I actually was underneath it. What I actually wanted. Coming here ... I finally remembered. Working. Having a salary of my own. Having an opinion about a ledger that someone listened to." She glanced at him. "Being of some use to something real."

"You are of considerable use," he said with sincerity so unembellished it landed harder than eloquence would have.

"I know," she said simply. Her eyes fell to the floor, shining with tears. "That's rather the point. I know it now."

The fire shifted, settling lower, throwing the room into a slightly warmer light. Ebenezer set down his glass and leaned forward, both elbows on his knees and hands loosely clasped.

"I want to ask you something," he said. "And I want you to understand that whatever you answer, nothing between us changes. At work. Here. None of it."

"Ask it." She smiled, stealing his words from before.

He met her eyes with the full and serious weight of his attention. "Are you still happy here? With me?"

She held the question for a moment, turned it the way she'd turned her glass, examined its facets.

"Yes," she said. "Genuinely. Are you happy with me being here?"

He seemed to require a moment with the word, as though happiness were a language he was still building fluency in and wanted to be sure he was using it correctly before committing.

Then quietly, with the absolute conviction of a man who had been to the bottom of himself and back, he said, "Yes."

The clock on the mantel marked the quarter hour.

Constance unfolded herself from the chair and crossed the small distance between them — not much, never much in this room — and sat on the arm of his chair in a way that was not entirely decorous and that she suspected neither of them cared about in the slightest. He shifted to accommodate her with the immediate ease of a man whose body had apparently already made several decisions his conversation was still catching up with.

She leaned her head against his temple.

He turned his face slightly toward her hair, lips barely gracing her there. His arm came around her waist with the same quality his kiss had carried. Tentative at first, then absolutely certainty.

They stayed like that while the fire talked to itself and the city outside went gradually, peacefully quiet.

"I should go up," she said, eventually, without moving.

"You should," he agreed, also without moving. He still had a few swigs in his glass left.

"I'm afraid Magda will be insufferably pleased with herself tomorrow morning."

"Magda," said Ebenezer, with great dignity, "is always insufferably pleased with herself. It is her primary characteristic."

Constance laughed softly against his cheek, ruffling his sideburn as she did so. He made the not-quite-laugh sound near her ear. The fire had burned to excellent coals, the kind that held their warmth long after the flame was gone.

She lifted her head. He turned his face toward hers in the same movement. They were very close in the amber light of the study.

This time, she kissed him — briefly, warm, with the confidence of a woman aware the man with his arm around her wanted her as much as she wanted him.

He closed his eyes for a moment after, in the manner of a man taking careful stock of his own good fortune.

"Goodnight, Ebenezer," she said softly.

"Goodnight, Constance."

She rose, took her brandy glass to the sideboard, and paused at the door.

"The Irving ledger," she said. "Page eleven. Third entry from the bottom."

He looked up from the fire quizzically, brow cocked.

"I knew the answer," she said. "I just wanted to see if you did."

She watched it cross his face — the recalculation, the arrival, and then the slow and rather wonderful dawn of a smile, the full one he still deployed sparingly and which was, she had decided, one of the finest sights available in the greater London area.

"Get to bed, Miss DoGoode," he said.

"Yes, sir."

She went to bed, smiling at the staircase all the way up.