The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  Alfred Walker swore.

  ‘Bloody bastard. You had it all along. Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Fortune had it,’ said Stone, staring at the petty thief with his black eyes. ‘Got it from the lieutenant in return for news about the orders. Swapped it with me for an orange and a tin of syrup.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Stone.’ Walker’s eyes were wild now. ‘Why didn’t you give it to Promise? Or back to Svenson. Could have saved the whole bloody mess.’

  ‘Nothing was going to save us,’ said Stone then, gathering in his dice, the green cloth by its corners. ‘That boy always wanted to go to war. He got what he deserved.’

  The three young folk left without playing a last round. Alfred Walker, the petty thief. His girl, Dottie. Her friend, Daisy. Hurrying away into the future, whatever that might be. Stone stayed for a few minutes gathering in his treasure. A penny and a thruppenny bit. A cigarette and half a crown. He left as he had arrived, sliding from the alleyway into the crowd, a heave and swell of young men and girls swirling in front of the dancehall, sweaty and elated at the thrill of being alive. He was almost home, down on the far side of the river, when he came across another ghost. Coming out of a pub alive with men holding pint glasses and beer bottles, jostling against each other in a raucous, jovial crowd. Jackdaw. His face pale, eyes huge, still lost somehow without Promise by his side.

  George Stone knew that this pub was one where men came to meet men, seeking solace, amongst other things. He’d often come here and waited on the far side of the street, to see if the boy would appear. Now his hand tightened around the little cap badge in his pocket as he began to follow Jackdaw through the crowd. Jackdaw was quick, a young man slipping between the gaps, disappearing then appearing again, his sleek cowl of black hair. Stone pushed his way through, stocky shoulders pressing against damp wool here, the stink of sweat and coal. He thought he might not be able to clear the space between them, would watch Jackdaw vanish like all the young men who had gone before. Then there was a sudden cheer as men with pawn tickets on their lapels appeared to join the throng, marching in a mock parade towards the bar. Jackdaw hovered for a moment on the edge of the crowd, looking for a way through, and Stone caught him then, brushed against the younger man’s coat, felt it once beneath his thumb before he let it go.

  Jackdaw always had been the one who wanted a medal. Not for him, but for his friend. Except George Stone knew it was never soldiers like them who got the brass. It was men like Second Lieutenant Ralph Svenson. Or Captain Godfrey Farthing. Silver crosses with a crown on each corner, a ribbon in white and purple silk.

  For Gallantry.

  Or something like that.

  There weren’t many things Stone could do to make things better. But he could do this. A small thing, dropped into a pocket, back where it belonged at last. A lion raising its paw and the motto of the London Scottish.

  Strike Sure.

  PART SIX

  The Inheritance

  2016

  Records, if one can be bothered to dig, tell their secrets, all laid out in black on white. Who paid whom, with what, and when. Sometimes even why.

  Solomon Farthing recognized the book immediately when his aunt who wasn’t really his aunt pulled it from beneath her Chinese robe. One of Godfrey Farthing’s ledgers, a thin volume with an ancient leather spine, inside the truth about Thomas Methven’s fifty thousand. Or at least a version of events.

  ‘I found it after you left, Solomon,’ said his aunt. ‘When I was clearing the place.’

  Of a shirt without a collar. A fur coat made of squirrel. A brass cornet dented at one end.

  ‘But I studied his ledger at the time,’ Solomon protested. ‘There was no mention of a debt owed to a Thomas Methven.’

  His feet in their fuchsia socks were roasting now at the idea that he might have missed fifty thousand back in 1971, for a completely different start in life.

  ‘That was a different account,’ his aunt replied, placing her hand on the book’s cover as though to demonstrate her prior claim to whatever it contained. ‘Godfrey kept this one hidden in the glass cabinet, on the shelf beneath the ladies’ gun.’

  Pearl inlay for a handle, dark eye pointing at Solomon’s heart. Camouflage of a sort.

  ‘But what has this to do with poor Mr Methven?’ Mrs Maclure sounded bewildered.

  ‘Probably nothing,’ Barbara Penny muttered from her seat in the depths of the sofa.

  Solomon’s aunt frowned at this interjection, flipped the ledger open to the first page, smoothed it down with one sweep of an embroidered cuff. Her hair was gleaming like a freshly sharpened blade as she fixed her eyes upon the small congregation.

  ‘Well,’ she declared. ‘Do you wish to see or not?’

  All the ladies crowded round then. Margaret Penny in her red shoes, dead fox draped about her neck. Mrs Maclure still clasping her posy of spring roses, somewhat wilted now. Even Barbara Penny, grumbling and wheezing like an old accordion as she heaved herself to a standing position with the aid of her grey NHS stick. Solomon had to fight for his place by the coffin – a dishevelled Heir Hunter and the remnants of Edinburgh’s Indigent Rota gathered around Thomas Methven’s wooden box as though whispering a few parting words to the dead man before he was finally carried out. But it wasn’t prayers or even secrets they were concerned with at the last. Rather row after row of copperplate – all the Ins and all the Outs.

  The first page of the ledger contained one neat entry after another in Godfrey Farthing’s careful script. Each line began with a total inscribed on the left, a sum copied across from the ledger Solomon used to watch his grandfather tot up at night. This was followed by a simple calculation – one tenth of the week’s takings deducted – then a new balance noted on the far right of the page. The next page was the same. And the one after that. A tenth of everything Godfrey Farthing ever earned, siphoned off over fifty years of running his pawnshop, until the old man got a cough one day, was laid out in his own coffin the next.

  ‘It must be thousands,’ breathed Mrs Maclure.

  Possibly fifty, thought Solomon. Or something very near.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ said Margaret Penny, fox head dangling close to the ledger as though it wished to get a good look, too.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ Barbara Penny stomped her stick on the carpet. ‘It’s a tithe, of course.’

  ‘For the church!’ beamed Mrs Maclure, raising the three spring roses to her cheek. ‘He always was very devout, Mr Farthing. Went every week.’

  Our Father who art in heaven . . .

  Incense and candles dripping. Grey stone rising. The touch of an old man’s finger to the cold of the martyr’s cross. But despite the truth of Mrs Maclure’s declaration, Solomon Farthing could tell by the giddy eddies of his heart that this was not the reason his grandfather had set aside one tenth of all he’d ever earned, year after year, after year.

  As though to confirm that his instinct was correct, Solomon’s aunt dismissed Mrs Maclure’s suggestion with a snort.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘No one gives their money to the church anymore. Too many bad apples, spoiled it for the rest.’

  ‘Who did he leave it to, then?’ Margaret Penny demanded.

  But her mother was ahead of them all, as befitted an old lady who had spent her life making every penny count. ‘Someone called Mabel. That’s what it says here.’

  There, at the bottom of each page, a running total of all the deductions. And next to that the name of the intended recipient.

  Mabel Methven née Kerr.

  Money set aside for a rainy day, perhaps. Or a new hat. A smart pair of gloves. Or to pay for a child that never had been hers. Beneath his fluttering fingers Solomon Farthing felt the rough weave of a folder of paperwork, inside a newspaper cutting offering a child for sale.

  WANTED: Home for a baby boy, 6 months old. Total surrender.

  As though signalling the end of a war.

  He saw again his
grandfather standing on a village green, still wearing his khakis, handing over a child to begin a new life.

  ‘I’m assuming this Mabel is related to our Thomas?’ said Margaret Penny, her voice as dry as the finest Fino.

  Solomon looked up, found himself face-to-face with Margaret Penny’s fox, black eye winking at him as it caught the light. Yes, no, maybe, he thought.

  ‘Sort of,’ he replied.

  Everything came out then: all Solomon Farthing’s carefully acquired paperwork spread across the top of the dead man’s coffin. A birth certificate for a boy born to a Daisy Pringle in 1918. A field postcard from a soldier to the girl he left behind. An advert cut from a newspaper in 1919 offering up a child. Then there was the flyleaf from a Bible detailing an unofficial baptism – a baby boy who came in as one person and left as someone else. Also a pawn ticket, no.125, that small slip of blue, the prize that connected it all.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Mrs Maclure, peering at the treasure trove strewn across Thomas Methven’s last resting place. ‘You have been busy.’

  ‘What’s all this rubbish?’ demanded Barbara Penny, her chest whistling with a single high note, as though she preferred the past to be hidden, rather than laid out on display for all the world to see.

  But Margaret Penny seemed enlivened by the ephemera of Thomas Methven’s life. As though suddenly he had become a real person, rather than just another case.

  ‘Is this his family tree?’ she asked, indicating Solomon’s crumpled piece of paper with the rough sketch of where Thomas Methven had ended and how he had begun.

  ‘Yes,’ said Solomon.

  No point in hiding anything now.

  Margaret Penny traced her finger from Thomas Methven’s dates up the dotted line to those of his adoptive mother and father, Archibald Methven and Mabel Methven née Kerr. Then she ran it horizontally towards the names Daisy Pringle and Alec Sutherland, Thomas Methven’s real parents as far as Solomon Farthing was concerned. After that she came back down, one solid vertical line descending from Daisy Pringle to her second child – a girl called Iris Fortune, Thomas Methven’s half sister, his living next of kin.

  ‘So you found a relative to claim the money, then,’ Margaret Penny said.

  For a moment Solomon Farthing could not tell whether she was happy at the outcome, or somehow bereft at losing a client she had believed her own.

  ‘Well, Mrs Fortune hasn’t signed yet,’ he mumbled. ‘A small matter of provenance to sort.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Margaret Penny’s reply was sharp.

  ‘She wishes to know where the money came from,’ said Solomon. ‘Whether it’s dirty or whether it’s clean.’

  ‘Oh, Iris,’ sighed Mrs Maclure. ‘Now there’s a difficult woman. Always will say black if you say white.’

  ‘Well,’ said Barbara Penny, giving her stick a shake. ‘If the cash did originate with Godfrey Farthing, it couldn’t have come from cleaner hands.’

  Solomon tucked one flapping cuff inside the sleeve of his tweed jacket as though compelled to smarten up now that his grandfather’s good name had been invoked.

  ‘You knew him, did you?’ he said, though he didn’t really need to ask.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Barbara Penny. ‘Used to give me an excellent rate for my silver apostle spoons whenever I was short.’

  ‘Very generous with the poor.’ Mrs Maclure nodded her agreement. ‘Always let them have their coats back for a Sunday service.’

  ‘Told a good story,’ said Solomon’s aunt, her face suddenly soft.

  Solomon felt affronted then, as though he was a boy again, left out of some secret circle of acquaintance in which his grandfather had been another man entirely from the one that he recalled.

  ‘What stories?’ he said. ‘He never told me any stories.’

  Not at bedtime. Or at any other time, if it came to that. His aunt made a dismissive gesture in his direction.

  ‘You only had to ask, Solomon. But you were too caught up in your own business most of the time.’

  Scrapping. And thieving. And trading cigarette cards for ha’pennies. Throwing jacks against the wall. An orphan boy in short trousers ducking and diving his way through the closes and passageways of Edinburgh, while the girl who was supposed to be looking after him sat on the steps of a pawnshop licking at a lollipop, eavesdropping on her mother and an old man telling it all.

  ‘Well, the story I want to know is why Godfrey Farthing left his money to Thomas Methven’s mother,’ said Barbara Penny. ‘What was their relationship anyway?’

  It was then that the young man appeared.

  He arrived all out of breath, holding a packet of pink wafer biscuits to celebrate an old soldier’s last moments before the coffin and its occupant were burned for good.

  ‘Am I too late?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Solomon’s aunt, a wry tone to her voice. ‘Mr Methven seems to be having trouble getting to his ultimate destination. He has been delayed by this gentleman.’

  She indicated Solomon, where he sat leaning against the corner of Thomas Methven’s coffin, mopping at his forehead with a blue kerchief. The young man blinked at the unexpected guest. Solomon Farthing, not part of the Edinburgh Indigent Rota. At least, not yet. He came over and held out his hand.

  ‘How nice to see you again,’ he said. ‘Pawel. We met at the nursing home.’

  The boy with the lovely brown eyes.

  ‘And what might your role in this drama be?’ demanded Margaret Penny, tucking her fox inside her lapels.

  ‘Pawel did the honours with the needle,’ said Solomon’s aunt, small gleam of a smile. ‘He’s got a very neat stitch.’

  Pawel blushed at the compliment. ‘Just a favour, for a friend. We all loved Mr Methven. Wanted to help at the end.’

  ‘Why on earth did you sew the money inside his suit anyway?’ asked Margaret Penny. ‘Couldn’t you have just handed it over? It would have paid for his funeral, at least.’

  ‘And my new hat,’ grumbled Barbara Penny.

  ‘And the flowers,’ said Mrs Maclure. ‘They cost an absolute fortune these days.’

  ‘Who would I have given it to?’ said Solomon’s aunt, raising her arms to the ceiling as though to call on a higher power than even she might wield. ‘It belonged to Mabel Methven. She never took it, so it belongs to Thomas Methven. And Thomas Methven is dead.’

  They all looked toward the coffin then, as though to remind themselves of that fact.

  ‘You could have kept it,’ mumbled Barbara Penny. ‘I would have done.’

  ‘If you’d told me about it back then, I might have been able to help get it to the rightful owner,’ Solomon complained.

  He still felt aggrieved at the idea that his grandfather had accrued a fortune and not passed it on to him.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ Solomon’s aunt who wasn’t really his aunt dropped her hands and rapped them on the coffin lid. ‘I tried to get in touch with you at the time, Solomon. But who knew where you were, always flitting from one place to the next. In the end I wrote Mr Methven a letter offering the money to him. Never did get a reply. Probably tore it up and scattered it on his compost heap, if those rose bushes are anything to go by. They look as though they’ve been well fed.’

  There was heavy silence in Thomas Methven’s living room at the idea that the dead man had once turned down a fifty-thousand inheritance to cultivate his roses instead. Then Mrs Maclure sighed.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why would Mr Farthing save all his money to give to Mabel Methven. Was she one of Mr Farthing’s customers?’

  ‘Not quite . . .’

  They all looked towards Pawel then as he rummaged in his pocket, took something out. A notebook, its pages stiff with age, blue horizontals and red verticals inside, amongst other things.

  ‘It belonged to Mr Methven’s father,’ Pawel said, handing the book to Solomon. ‘His name’s on the inside cover. You were asking if he’d left anything else behind. I found it af
ter you’d gone.’

  A notebook hidden in the underwear drawer of one of the nursing home’s other inhabitants.

  ‘Mr R. had it,’ said Pawel. ‘Seems he likes to borrow other people’s stuff.’

  Solomon remembered it then, an old man winking at him as he shuffled down the corridor at the nursing home, eyes a sudden startling blue. He turned the little notebook in his hand, saw how it fitted neatly in his palm.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a story,’ Pawel smiled. ‘I’ll tell it, if you like.’

  Records, if one can be bothered to dig, tell their secrets, all laid out in black on white. Who served with whom and when and why. Sometimes even what they did next.

  It was Pawel who did the explaining, as the ladies of Edinburgh’s Indigent Funeral Rota drank it all in.

  ‘I helped Mr Methven with the research,’ he said. ‘All the men his father served with. What happened to them in the end.’

  Ten men, plus their commanding officer, of course. Captain Godfrey Farthing in charge till the last. Ten lines on a tree that spread for some and withered for others, none of them knowing from day to day what might come next. Not a chart fully tabulated, all boxes complete. But a story that would resonate down the line if anyone chose to tell it, speaking across the generations to people who weren’t even conceived of yet.

  It was like doing the Reckoning, Solomon thought, as he turned the stiff pages of the little notebook. All the soldiers he had stumbled across on his journey into Thomas Methven’s past, counted out then, counted back in again now.

  Archibald Methven, married to Mabel. An accountant after all, just as Eddie Jackson at the foundling school had suggested, if the neat record in the notebook was anything to go by, a thorough list of who owed what, to whom, and why.

  There was the school teacher’s namesake, Private Edward Jackson, listed in the notebook as Jackdaw, just as Solomon had known him, too.

  Also Bertie Fortune, Iris Fortune’s father-in-law, the man with the cheery grin and the ill-fitting suit, a section’s lucky man.