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.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008306120

Author’s Note

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

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

PART I: The Beginning

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

PART II: The Middle

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

PART III: The End

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Afterword

About the Publisher

PART I: THE BEGINNING

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