Name: Solomon Handy
Age: 66
Occupation: Florist
Chosen: n/a
Guardian: n/a
About
On the edge of the village Solomon Handy's modest, impeccably clean one-room house is surrounded by flowers, and behind it is a greenhouse larger than his entire home paneled with priceless glass, and the tiny single-stall stable where his donkey is housed, against which leans his wheeled flower cart, its sleek black sides painted in red and yellow scrolls and ribbons.
Solomon Handy's days are invested in the care and keeping of his flowers. The persnickety rare blooms he sells to the florists, and the others--the daisies, lillies, baby's breath--he packs onto his cart each morning as the sun rises, carefully selected and sheared before the dew has dried. On a busy corner he wraps the blooms in newsprint or pins them to lapels or tucks them into ladies' hair, collecting coins into his tin change box and thanking each customer with a broken-toothed smile. To little girls wide-eyed at the rainbow-clad market stall he gives away the rain-bruised or less-than-perfect roses; to old men he gives the flowers left from the day before to take to their wives, whether they be at home in bed or freshly buried in the churchyard.
Most people given to spend time in town know Solomon Handy's name. He has been a fixture here for 40 years on the same street corner, selling flowers even when the snow begins to fall. Old ladies who have been buying a carnation for their bosom nearly daily for four decades totter by with canes and beam proudly as he compliments them on their choices. And there is something about Solomon--some sincerity, some innocence--that makes his compliments better than mere flattery. When Solomon Handy gently places a bloom into silver-white hair and says, "You look beautiful, ma'am," his customer's cheeks pink, and her lips curve upward, and there is, for a moment, something of her faded loveliness in her face. She will carry it with her through the day. Solomon Handy's flowers are more than mere accessories, because they are sold by Solomon Handy.
But some people tell stories about Solomon Handy. People hint that he is "not all there," or suggest grim things about the scars on his neck and hands, visible at the edge of a cravat or a cuff. Certainly few are friends with Solomon Handy, and no one knows what he does when he is not tending his flowers, or why on some days, inexplicably, his cart fails to materialize on the corner, leaving dozens of gentlemen with bereft buttonholes. People tend to blame it, naturally, on his background--on the color of him, the strange history of him.
And there is the other matter of his winter disappearances, when Solomon Handy boards up the little room and the greenhouse, and puts his spotted donkey into the care of a neighbor's stable, and walks out of the town and away--to somewhere. It is a testament both to the love and fear of Solomon Handy that he has never come back to broken panes in his greenhouse.
No one is really quite sure about Solomon Handy. He goes about his business and vanishes like a migratory bird with the snow. And when he goes hunting, Solomon Handy does not take a gun.
Appearance
Conveying the impression of a sturdy young man whose aging never quite outstripped his fitness, Solomon Handy stands straight and tall, with only the barest suggestion of a hunch in his broad shoulders. His deep brown, lined face is shaven mostly clean, with a bristling shock of white sideburns jutting from either side and emphasizing the thick line of his masculine and unrefined jaw, and his dark eyes are sunk into deep sockets at the edges of which are hard lines, as though he has spent a life squinting frequently at glittering water. This, combined with a blurry star tattooed into the web of his hands, has led some to surmise that he was a sailor in his youth--that perhaps this is how a man who came from so far away (as evidenced by his dark skin, and his meticulous, strange accent) ended up in Sunderland.
Certainly he has the rolling gait and proud bearing and disciplined, self-assured voice of a navy man, and he wears his scarf in the military style. He dresses plainly, but keeps his cuffs tailored longer than is perhaps stylish, as though to hide his wrists; even in the too-long sleeves his hands are coarse and massive, and seem unsuited to the delicate work of raising and handling flowers. The stark contrast of the powerful man with his dainty cart overflowing with blooms is an appealing one, and has lent considerably to his mystique, as have barely-visible scars at his throat, leading some to whisper at a prisoner past and an escaped hanging. Others dismiss this as mere fancy. After all, who can imagine Solomon Handy doing something to get himself hanged, let alone escaping the noose?
