The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  But Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson was the one in charge now. He stepped forwards to stand right in front of Godfrey, spoke softly as though they were sharing an intimacy that must not be passed to anyone else.

  ‘Look, it was an accident. Too much high spirits. My fault really. Got carried away, took a pot shot.’

  ‘You shot it?’

  Godfrey stared at Ralph. Discharging a weapon outside of battle was a punishable offence. The boy could be cashiered before his career had even begun. But Ralph didn’t even blink, just nodded his head, those strange translucent eyes staring back.

  Godfrey woke in the night knowing that something wasn’t right. He lay for a moment beneath the rafters of the farmhouse. The rain had stopped, no more constant pitter patter on the roof. He looked across to the far side of the attic room, knew at once that Ralph’s bed was empty, blanket pushed aside to expose the mattress stuffed with straw. He listened again for the sound that had woken him. A cry. Like a creature caught in a trap. It came again, more muffled this time, Godfrey’s whole body suddenly alert, the sound somewhere inside the farmhouse, not outside as he’d first thought.

  Immediately, Godfrey was up, swinging his feet over the side of his narrow bunk, pulling on his trousers. He tried to light his candle, one match, then another, his hands too shaky to get the wick to take. He left it in the end and crept down the narrow stairs in the gloom, his feet bare. In the small square of hall, he stood to listen once more.

  The door to the parlour stood open, Ralph’s wooden cup on the mantelpiece, Godfrey’s writing things on the table by the stain. Opposite, the kitchen was cold, the faint smell of embers rising from the stove. There was a dark patch on the table where Stone had attempted to scrub away the chicken’s blood. Godfrey frowned at another smell he recognized. Not woodsmoke or the faint stink of cabbage being boiled into soup. But skin and fat roasting, the unmistakable scent of burning human flesh.

  He found them beneath the floorboards, the rug in the back room rolled away to reveal a thin square of light. The trap door to the cellar, once loaded with boxes of apples hidden in sand, now stacked in sparse formation with the few rations they had left. The three men were gathered towards the back of the empty space. On a shelf next to them was a paraffin lamp, its low glow seeping towards Godfrey across the beaten earth floor.

  Archie Methven was sitting on a wooden chair salvaged from the parlour – the one Godfrey normally chose as his own. Methven’s shirt was pulled to his waist, trapping his arms, as though he was wearing a straitjacket. His shoulders were exposed, muscles rolling beneath his skin. Godfrey could see the wound, below Methven’s collarbone on the right-hand side. Livid. A raw mess. Like all that had remained of the rabbit once it had gnawed its foot away. Archie Methven’s chest was palpitating, one rapid breath after another as he gripped the seat of the chair. His knuckles formed a tight ridge of bone, white tipped, on either side. His mouth was stuffed with a stick to stop him biting his tongue right off.

  George Stone stood behind the injured accountant, a hand clamped each side of Methven’s head to hold him still. He was wearing his apron again, but not for cooking this time. An old-style barber surgeon, Godfrey thought, someone who would trim a man’s hair in return for two cigarettes, then pull his teeth for three. Ralph Svenson stood next to Stone, holding something metal in his hand.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Godfrey’s voice reverberated around the dark walls. Archie Methven made a gargled sound in his throat, flashed his eyes in Godfrey’s direction. Ralph’s face was stark in the glow from the paraffin lamp. He suddenly looked much younger than his nineteen years – a boy again, frightened of what his father might say. Stone didn’t even look at the intruder, just bent his mouth towards Methven’s ear.

  ‘Careful now,’ he murmured. ‘Careful.’

  Then he nodded at Ralph, who moved in towards Methven, touched the tip of his metal instrument to the other man’s flesh. At once the accountant jerked and struggled, the sweat cold on Godfrey’s back as he watched Stone stroke Methven’s hair over and over.

  ‘It’s all right now,’ the cook kept saying. ‘It’s all right.’

  As though he was the man’s mother, come to comfort him in the night.

  ‘What the devil?’

  Godfrey’s eyes were wide in the pitch and gloom of the cellar, the flicker of the lamp throwing shadows all around the walls. Stone released Methven, whose head rolled back on his neck, took the metal instrument from Ralph and moved away towards a corner, a sudden hiss rising from a bucket of water near the floor. Then the old sweat turned, wiping his hands across his apron, eyes steady when he glanced at Godfrey for a moment before moving back towards the shelf where he had an emergency kit laid out. Field dressings and a couple of sachets of Lamels for the pain. Tape, gauze and a bandage made of crepe. Stone began tidying the kit as though it was nothing more than the remains of a supper. Ralph came to stand by Godfrey at the bottom of the cellar steps. The boy’s hands were trembling.

  ‘The accountant’s been shot,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told you. An accident.’

  ‘I thought that was the chicken.’

  Ralph blinked, a flicker of his normal demeanour. Godfrey understood at once. The chicken was the alibi, so that he would not find out.

  ‘Who was it?’ he said.

  Mishandling one’s weapon was a grave offence. Shooting a fellow soldier even worse. But Ralph didn’t say anything. Godfrey nodded towards Archie Methven stripped and sweating on the parlour chair.

  ‘What the bloody hell were you doing to him?’

  ‘Trying to take out the bullet,’ said Ralph. ‘It was Stone’s idea.’

  Of course, George Stone, the old sweat, seen it all before.

  ‘Did he get it?’ Godfrey asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  They both looked towards the shelf. Most of Stone’s makeshift surgery was already gone, disappeared beneath the folds of his apron or into some secret cupboard carved from the wall. But there on a mess tin brought down from the kitchen Godfrey could see the remains of the bullet, a smear of blood glistening in the paraffin glow.

  ‘Why the red-hot poker treatment?’ he said.

  ‘Cauterizing the wound.’

  It was Godfrey’s turn to be silent now. Subterfuge was not unknown amongst the men – for card games or Crown and Anchor, for illegal rum rations or an extra round of tobacco. But this was of a different order. One man shoots another and a senior rank tries to cover it up.

  ‘There will have to be an inquiry,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ Ralph put his hand on Godfrey’s arm, the first time they had touched since they shook hands on his arrival. ‘You know what it means.’

  Ralph’s grip was tight, that of a man much older than nineteen. Godfrey looked into those clear eyes for a moment. They both knew exactly what it meant for one of their men to be blamed for the shooting of another. Then Archie Methven groaned and Godfrey shrugged Ralph away, moved to crouch by his accountant instead. For a brief moment he laid his hand on Methven’s head, a man who had served with him for almost eighteen months now. Then he looked across the dark space towards Stone, found the old sweat staring back at him.

  Later that night, while Archie Methven tossed and pitched on a pallet bed made up by the kitchen stove, Godfrey stood in the doorway to the farmhouse breathing great lungfuls of cold air to escape the impending scent of rot inside. He stepped away from the stone porch, into the yard, realized suddenly that his feet were bare, icy mud oozing between his toes. He had nothing but a shirt and a pair of breeches to cover him as he moved towards the lane down which he had marched his men to safety only two weeks before.

  Would it never end, Godfrey thought as he watched a thread of light seeping over the horizon. This constant effort to do the right thing – ignore the mistakes and punish the wilful, keep the men together at any cost. He had realized long ago that he was not the sort of leader to make his ow
n decisions; a captain who left it to others to tell him what to do. Dispatch. Retrench. Attack. Defend. But here in this small slice of paradise, there had been no one but him to decide. And it had come to seem almost impossible now.

  Godfrey turned back to stare across the empty yard, the taste of something bitter in his throat. What would happen, he thought, if he was the one to go next? Eight men left behind to defend against the enemy. Or fight it out amongst themselves. Nothing left of him but a walnut shell and a set of crumpled orders that he should have acted on but had not. Disobeying a lawful command given by his superior officer. Penal Servitude. Or worse. Six men from his own unit fiddling with their rifles until they were given the order to shoot.

  It was then that he saw it, hidden in the shadow of the barn. Two boys touching. Another small gesture of defiance in amongst the muck.

  Jackdaw had his hand on the back of Promise’s neck, as the other boy bent to retch and retch again into a pile of old straw, eyes glittering like a sick fox in the night.

  ‘We have to tell, Ned,’ Promise was saying. ‘We must.’

  Jackdaw held the other boy’s shoulders, pressing his thumbs into the bone.

  ‘Why should we? You know what’ll happen if we do.’

  ‘The captain won’t let it.’

  ‘That’s not what Stone says.’ Jackdaw’s reply was fierce. ‘And he’s the one who should know.’

  The two boys were silent then, standing close, face-to-face, hip bone touching hip bone, wrist touching wrist. Then Promise’s lips glistened in the moonlight as Jackdaw leaned in. Godfrey found his heart beating like a wild thing as one boy kissed another, Jackdaw and Promise merging into shadow as they fell back against the barn’s dark wall.

  Two

  Captain Godfrey Farthing woke from a dream that told him the end had come at last. Bertie Fortune, walking towards him across the walnut shells, salvation in his hands. The shells crunched beneath the lucky man’s feet, shifting and rattling like the bones of a thousand dead men piled up year after year.

  ‘Have you got it?’ Godfrey heard himself saying.

  But Bertie Fortune didn’t reply, just got closer and closer, holding something in his hand. A walnut shell, perhaps, freshly cracked to reveal its tiny brain. A wristwatch forever keeping time. Or that little silver cap badge, glimmering in the sunlight.

  Strike Sure.

  As a lion raised its paw.

  Godfrey could feel it then, shrapnel shifting beneath his skin, the wound in his chest swelling and spreading as he waited for Bertie Fortune to reveal his treasure for all to see. The lucky man’s eyes were upon him like two dead pebbles. Like George Stone’s in the cellar. And James Hawes looking at him from across the field of play. Three men staring at their captain, as though Godfrey was the enemy and they held the guns. There was the sudden stink of cordite in his nostrils, the pound of his heart as if it might break free. Then the sweat on his neck, though Godfrey knew that the air outside was cool, rain pricking his skin as a man’s thick hands were placed upon his sleeve.

  ‘Sir?’

  Waking to grey light filtering from the window high on the gable wall.

  James Hawes was standing by his bed in the attic. Godfrey lifted his head from his pillow, heard the sound of men in the yard, the rattle of dishes being washed in the kitchen as though it was just another normal day.

  ‘Is it Fortune?’ he said.

  But Hawes shook his head. ‘No, sir. It’s Methven. I think you’d better come.’

  The accountant had got worse in the night. Wrapped in Godfrey’s thick coat, he sat by the range in the kitchen shivering and shivering, nothing to stop the convulsions that ran through his body from his crown to the soles of his boots. Breakfast was already long past as Godfrey crouched next to him, tried to ignore the heat pulsing from the injured man’s skin. Stone had improvised well, but there was no doubt in Godfrey’s mind that Methven’s wound would start to rot from the inside out soon enough. There would be nothing left to do then but cut his arm right out of its socket, watch their accountant die from loss of blood if they could not get him to a field surgeon first.

  He slid a glass phial containing three grains of morphia from his pocket, showed it to the injured man.

  ‘We’ll have you in clean sheets before you know it, Archie.’

  Methven gazing at his captain as though Godfrey was an apparition – the Angel of Mons, perhaps, reincarnated from the very beginning of the battle to the very end. Godfrey saw the way Methven’s eyes flicked to the glass bottle in his hand, like Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson, always seeking something that was out of reach. Glory. Or salvation. Or medicine for the here and now. Godfrey held the phial close to Methven, the tablets inside like tiny crystals of salt.

  ‘You can have some, Archie. But tell me first. You won’t get anyone into trouble, I just need to know.’

  A Jackdaw.

  A Promise.

  A Second Lieutenant.

  The name of the man who had wielded a rifle, then melted in amongst the rest.

  A tangle of words and phrases unfurled from Methven’s lips. A name, followed by another name. And another. And another after that. Men long gone, disappeared into mud, into shell holes filled with rifle oil and the remains of a corpse, the slick taste of clay on their lips. Men loaded onto trains back to England, or left to rot in graves marked with nothing but a stick. Archie Methven was doing the reckoning. Counting them in and counting them out again as though his whole war had been nothing more than a profit-and-loss account, a fevered recitation of the lost.

  Godfrey placed a hand on Methven’s arm to try and still him, his own fingers fluttering as though to match the trembles of the sick man. He felt in one pocket of Methven’s tunic, then the other, held something out for his accountant to see. A little notebook with its blue horizontals and red verticals – the record of who owed what to whom. Godfrey saw Methven’s eyes focus for a moment, flare in recognition, then slide away to gaze at something over his captain’s shoulder instead.

  Godfrey turned, found Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson standing in the kitchen doorway. There was the faintest scent of lemon oil gone sour, the glint of a belt buckle polished to a shine. Godfrey found he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘The enemy will see you a mile off in that thing,’ he said. ‘Take a pot shot.’

  Ralph flushed, the raw colour of a boy. Most officers had long ago given up wearing anything that would identify them as such. It was a sign of Ralph’s ignorance that he was nutted up, flashing on his cuffs. But also a sign of something else, too.

  Godfrey felt a ridiculous satisfaction at having embarrassed the young man, if only for a second. Archie Methven rolled his head towards the window, began again with his stream of babble. But it was Ralph who spoke clearly this time.

  ‘What shall we do with him?’

  ‘What do you propose we do with him?’

  Ralph just shrugged. ‘We won’t be able to take him with us when we go.’

  ‘What makes you think we’re leaving?’

  Ralph smiled then, his strange eyes sliding towards the floor. ‘We’ll have to go eventually. Can’t stay here forever.’

  Why not, thought Godfrey. It was as good a place as any to take a last stand.

  ‘No one’s going anywhere,’ he said. ‘And certainly not with a man left behind.’

  ‘Fortune’s left, hasn’t he.’

  Heat prickled then, all along Godfrey’s collar. What did his second know about the arrangement he had made with his lucky man?

  ‘Fortune will be back this afternoon.’

  Ralph was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘You can stay with Methven if you want. I can take the rest.’

  Godfrey felt it then, fear curdling in his stomach. He knew that part of Ralph wanted this to happen – to march the remaining eight to the top of the hill and let fate make its call. Godfrey knew that most of the men would go if they had sight of the orders. Would rather take their chances on the battle
field, than face a bullet from their own side. Mutiny. Punishable by death, execution style. A single shot to the heart.

  Next to Godfrey, Archie Methven shivered, body rippling with a fever that came from a bullet fired by his own side, too. Godfrey placed his hand once more on the injured man’s arm as though to quiet him, stared at Ralph for a moment. How had it come to this, he thought, that his men could be so easily parted, cleaved down the middle by a boy barely out of school?

  None of the men had confessed. Not Godfrey’s cook or his temporary sergeant. Not his petty thief or his two A4 boys. Not even his new recruit. He had called them one by one to the parlour after breakfast, stood them in front of the table as he sat behind.

  It was just a game gone wrong. A mistake. An accident. An attempt to bet on the chickens. The last but one. The grey.

  They all said it, the same version of the truth. Until Godfrey felt it rise within him, his old man barking and thumping on the arm of his chair because Godfrey had failed to wipe his shoes at the door again, or bring his homework back from school. How was it, Godfrey had thought, as one after the other of his men slouched away, that he had become the accuser and his own men the accused? He couldn’t even rely on the A4 boys, two young men who had the most reason to let Ralph take the blame. Godfrey had tried Jackdaw first, a boy who found it difficult to keep his mouth shut if there was an injustice to be solved.

  He asked him straight out.

  ‘Did Second Lieutenant Svenson shoot the accountant?’

  Watched the boy bloom red.

  But even Jackdaw had insisted. An accident. A misfire. A slip of the thumb. Would not be moved however much Godfrey pushed. One A4 boy, joined at the hip bone with the other, never was going to let go.

  Promise’s mouth had been pinched when he was ordered in to stand before his captain, blanched about the lips as though trying to keep the truth in. But when Godfrey asked, he shook his head, too.

  ‘He didn’t mean to do it.’

  That was what he said.

  Still, Godfrey made the A4 boy turn out his pockets just in case. A search for the prize Fortune had mentioned – whatever it was that had set the chickens running in the yard. But Promise wasn’t carrying anything that could have been regarded as proper contraband, just the spoils of a town boy let loose in this strange place. A couple of pebbles from the stream. A piece of shell from an egg. The kind of things Alec Sutherland might forage from a hedgerow. Stuff of no value, but here in this forgotten Eden, the most important treasure of all. What was it about war, thought Godfrey, as Promise returned his small treasures to his pockets, that it always came back to the little things. The stuff no man could do without.