Time for an excerpt
Jan. 12th, 2012 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
persimmonfrost_____________________________
“Mr. Scrooge?’
“You have the advantage of me, sir,” Scrooge replied without looking up from the worn journal splayed across his desk. Time would tell if the stranger was worth the interruption.
The lightly accented voice replied, “If you please, sir, my name is Edwin Mayweather.”
Had Scrooge been afflicted with a sense of humor, he might have framed a reply along the lines of “And if I do not please, who shall you be, then?” But humor was a vice which Scrooge did not count on the debit side of his ledger. In fact, he counted no vices in that column having long been immune to lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath and all the rest. As for greed, he felt that it was an extreme position, in no way related to his wise and thrifty ways. He felt he did not so much love money as need it, as a man needs air and water. One could not live without money, at least not as God intended, so the need for it was hardly sinful. No vices, a few mistakes, nothing more. His considered opinion was that the seven deadly sins could be neatly distilled down into a lack of good, common sense. And common sense he had in abundance.
“What do you want?” he asked, eyes still fixed on the words before him, seeking a clue, always seeking.
“You were recommended to me by Mr. James Tillman, sir, as a man with a good eye for value.”
Value was one of the holy words in Scrooge’s litany, and heeding the name and word of Tillman had never failed to enrich him. “Is that a fact?” Finally he looked up and found that the man standing before him was of middling years, quite tall and startlingly handsome with vivid blue eyes, dark hair lightly shot with grey, and a complexion the color of aged meerschaum . “Have a seat, Mr. Mayweather,” he said, closing the account book.
Mayweather made himself as comfortable as he could in Marley’s old leather chair. Scrooge never threw anything out, and when the seat gave way, he merely put an old account book between it and the cushion and pronounced it “good as new.” The added advantage was that no visitor stayed long in Scrooge’s office. In truth most were disinclined to do so in any event for neither the office with its uniform dark walls, heavy dark furniture and windows so grimy they let in a pitiful amount of light, nor Scrooge himself (a man so much like his surroundings that he seemed to absorb what little light there was) reassured visitors that they were in any wise welcome.
“Now tell me what sort of value we are discussing.”
“A business opportunity, sir. An invention...”
“It isn’t one of those damnable steam-powered contraptions.” he asked, the memory of Robert Cratchit’s horrible death coming back to him suddenly. Since Robert had been cooked alive in an explosion of one of those steam monstrosities, Scrooge felt a persistent unease at having the Pacioli Accounting Engine on the premises. He did not like steam unless it issued from a tea kettle, and only constant reassurances from Ada Cratchit, who Scrooge now employed to maintain her husband’s invention, and the certainty that he would lose money by going back to using clerks instead of the engine, kept him from selling it.
“Not at all, Mr. Scrooge. It is rather a case of the electronic stimulation of crystal which produces a luminiferous aether. The aether in turn...”
“Is it an expensive process?” Scrooge asked.
