Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  Of course, her mother’s instincts were right. The music box was too beautiful, the letter in the envelope was too thick: its effects were immediate.

  When Jack Langridge came home, his daughter was weeping in her room. The door was locked and his wife was standing outside it, wringing her hands and pleading with their daughter.

  ‘Evie, open the door! My love, please, open the door!’

  Langridge stomped down the dark hallway. Never a moment’s peace from these women. ‘What in God’s name?’

  ‘It’s that Tait boy!’ his wife said. ‘He’s written her a letter!’

  Evie wailed from behind the door. ‘No! Shut up!’

  ‘A letter?’

  Mrs Langridge glared at her husband. She’d never defied him or argued with him or pressed a point in all of their twenty years of marriage; but he was an oaf, had always been an oaf. ‘Do you need it spelled out? He’s broken their engagement!’

  ‘Be calm, woman,’ Langridge said, though he was shocked at the way she’d looked at him. He rapped on Evie’s door with hard knuckles. ‘And best be calm in there, too.’

  ‘Oh, go away, Daddy! I hate you!’

  ‘Fine.’

  He did just that. Went to his study, poured a Scotch. His daughter’s sobbing still reached him, muffled by the walls between them.

  There’s a war on, for Christ’s sake.

  Jack Langridge downed the Scotch and poured another.

  HANGOVERS

  It had stopped snowing by the morning. The sky was pale and windswept, the light sharp off the bright snow and the O’Farrell brothers squinted out across the white ground. It’d melt by the afternoon.

  ‘We can’t hang about,’ Wilson said. ‘We’ll miss the muster.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’ll be no good for the ride.’

  They’d already made a breakfast of tea sweetened with condensed milk, and Joseph had made damper and then Wilson had fried some bacon with a knob of lard, the brothers wiping up the pan with their crusts. Gabriel Tait didn’t stir the whole time, not even with the smell of frying bacon, which had hooked the brother’s hangovers and made them salivate.

  ‘I’ll get the horses ready,’ Wilson said.

  ‘you’d better saddle his, too. He’ll need it later.’

  Joseph went back into the hut. He tried Tait again, shaking him firmly by the shoulder, but the boy was deeply, drunkenly asleep. The cuffs were still hanging from one of his wrists (the ratchet arm had caught again) but they’d at least managed to get the leg irons off. Joseph pulled Tait’s blanket up to his chin and added a log to the fire, then collected their things and rolled their swags and picked up his brother’s rifle and put everything outside. He filled a jug with snow and put it on the floor beside Tait. There was some tea left in the pot, some damper and bacon, too.

  ‘See you later, mate.’

  Outside, Wilson waited with the horses.

  ‘Reckon he’ll be right?’ Joseph said.

  ‘yeah,’ Wilson said. ‘Just the one track to town. Not that hard to follow.’

  STENDHAL

  After the first barrage, the boy beside Gabriel Tait was instantly killed, hit by shrapnel in the neck and chest. His eyes were still open, unbelieving.

  Tait’s ears were ringing. The world was one enormous crazy high note, a clutch of piano keys struck by a giant’s fist. He couldn’t hear the German cannons and machine guns, still thumping shells and bullets into the ground, into sandbags, into men. He could only see the horror of his surrounds, inside the high-pitched whine in his head.

  But what Gabriel Tait knew, what passed through his mind in the last moments of his life, was that the dead boy beside him had a silver ring under his tongue. And in his blood-soaked breast pocket there was a letter from his sister.

  She’d sent the silver ring folded inside a passage from Stendhal. It was from Les Privilèges. The boy’s older sister had been studying in Paris when the war began. She loved Stendhal and she loved her brother. She’d translated the passage for him. It was an offering to the gods, a prayer, a hymn, a wish that would never fail to resist death. A guarantee: enshrined, worded, printed, unimpeachable. She loved her brother very much.

  Article 8: Whenever the privileged person shall carry, for two minutes, on his person or wear on his finger, a ring that he has briefly put in his mouth, he will remain invulnerable for whatever duration he determines. Ten times a year, he shall enjoy the sharp eyesight of an eagle and will be able to run a distance of five leagues within an hour.

  She’d sent the ring and the letter to her brother, and the boy had shown it all to Gabriel Tait just now, read the letter out and popped the ring under his tongue, laughing.

  And then the shelling began.

  It was 19 July 1916.