Miss Marley: A Christmas Ghost Story – A Prequel to a Christmas Carol

Christmas 1843 and two orphans, Jake and Clara Marley peer into the window of Mr. Quoit's toy shop, admiring a large doll's house that looks like their old home in Hampstead. Clara wishes she could just curl up inside it, rather than sleep in the dark alleys of Covent Garden with the other beggar children, but even those alleys are better than the workhouse they'd found themselves in just months before… Every night, before they go to sleep, Jake says to his little sister 'Tomorrow will be better.' Jake is determined he will claw his way out of poverty, and will drag his sister with him. Finding a cut-throat victim, stabbed and dying, is Jake's chance of a better life, even if it means leaving the man to bleed to death in the darkness. But as Jake reminds Clara, 'He'd have stepped over our bodies to get in his carriage…' From there, Jake begins to build the fortune that will see him doomed for all eternity –a fortress of wealth that will keep the world out, and keep Clara in…