Simon by Rosemary Sutcliff

into a man’s heartstrings, when it has bred him and his forebears.’
    ‘Umm,’ said Simon. ‘I know.’
    ‘What says the Good Book about every man sitting under his own vine and his own fig tree?—Not that the place was ever our own; we held it from Squire; father and son holding it from father and son.’
    ‘Mixed farming?’ asked Simon.
    ‘No, bulb farming. Spalding be a great bulb district. That pheasant-eye there—’ He nodded in the direction of a starry clump that had evidently strayed from the garden behind them and was growing in the long riverside grass. ‘We used to grow a-many like that; tulips too, and daffy-down-dillies; all for the bulbs, you see. Folks mostly thinks of bulbs coming from the Low Countries, and so they did in the first place—a good many of ’em, anyways—but nowadays, when your mother buys jonquil bulbs for her garden, ’tis as like as not they come from Spalding.’
    Having got started on the subject of his heart, he talked on for a while, about the little holding in the Fens that seemed to be the one thing in the world he really loved. About the business of bulb farming, the care needed in their storing, the difficulty of breeding certain flowers true to type; until it seemed to Simon that the man beside him was no longer Corporal Relf, the warrior-prophet of hell-fire that he had come to know, but a new friend, a peaceable man who grew things, and found joy in the flaming and feathering of a tulip petal.
    ‘I suppose your brother is carrying on the holding until the war is over and you can go back to join him?’ Simon asked presently.
    There was no answer. And when he looked round the new Corporal Relf was gone, and the old one back again, with his dark face set like a stone. ‘No, sir,’ said Corporal Relf, in a grating voice. ‘Henceforth, I am Ishmael. There is neither vineyard nor fig tree for me.’
    In the appalled silence which followed his words, Simon heard very clearly above the murmur of the weir a distant splurge of laughter from the tavern behind them. ‘I say, I—I’m sorry,’ he blurted out at last. ‘I wouldn’t have said that if—’
    Corporal Relf went on staring at the white flowers of the pheasant-eye beside his booted foot. ‘Nay now, there’s no call for that, sir,’ he said harshly. ‘Word-of-mouth don’t make the matter no worse.’
    Simon never afterwards knew quite how or why his Corporal came to be telling him the whole unhappy story, unless it was because of the kingfisher. He only knew that the other had laiddown the stub of his bread and cheese, and was talking, quickly and bitterly. ‘’Twas this way: we did pretty well with the bulbs, my brother and I—better nor ever our forebears did. We even managed to save a bit, and none of our forebears ever managed to do that. And we saved to the end that, if need be, we might one day buy the holding. Old Squire had no son nor any near kin to follow him, and well we knew that when his time came to be gathered to his fathers, we should see the Manor go to strangers, and maybe the holding ours no longer. For that end, we lived lean, and went without all else, wife and children included; all that could come later, we thought, when the holding was safe. We got all of thirty pounds together at last, saving and scraping, adding a bit each market-day, and hid it in the hole in the house-place wall. ’Twas a good hiding-place, and we used it for other things beside the money; we’d been at work for years breeding a double white hyacinth, and at last we had succeeded, and we hid the bulb there too, ready for planting time. But man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward, saith Job in his wisdom. ’Twas just after that the war broke, and Cromwell was gathering his men against Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood, and I joined him, that I also might smite the Amalekites. I hadn’t been gone but a few weeks when word reached me that my brother was dead. Died of a marsh fever, he did; and when