Dovecote

by Oleson, Anne Britting;

  She opened the door to him, and his glance flickered immediately over her shoulder, back into the room from which she’d come.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “You have company?”

  She, too, glanced back into the dining room. “No. Why?”

  He only shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She saw now that on top of the tools in his box lay a short-handled pry-bar.

  “Not much time,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Gwynn opened the kitchen door to the jungle of brambles, which seemed to lunge at them threateningly. Even the ones she’d fought back previously seemed to have grown up with a vengeance; she couldn’t tell where she’d stomped them down and shoved them aside. Colin stepped out, switching the pry bar to either side, beating the brambles back. Still the thorns sprang out and dragged at her clothes. Irrationally, she felt as though they didn’t want them anywhere near the rotten door. A shiver traveled down her spine; she shook her head, trying to rid herself of the thought. A thorn caught at her wrist, drawing a ragged bracelet of blood. She put it quickly to her mouth.

  “I’ve been out here several times,” she said. “I keep fighting this stuff back, but it’s like it’s the thorn around Sleeping Beauty’s castle—it grows up stronger, thicker.”

  “Brambles grow up, gate won’t open.” Colin’s tone rose slightly. A question.

  “What?” she demanded.

  He didn’t answer.

  At the gate she paused, listening. There was no sound from the other side.

  “I poured nearly an entire can of penetrating oil into the latch and the hinges,” she told him, stomping back more brambles so there was room for them to stand side by side at the high stone wall. “Left it for twenty-four hours—more—as per instructions. Nothing.”

  Colin held his head to the side, evaluating. The wooden gate was aged and black, punky with damp. He ran an exploratory hand over the metal and the wood, tracing the line where they met. “It looks as though I could put my hand through it, it’s in such bad shape.”

  “But you can’t.”

  Colin shook his head. “I can’t.” He bent closer, examining the lock, and then the hinges. The metal, oil notwithstanding, had moved far beyond rusty red to pitted black. Again he ran his hand over the fittings, then held up his fingers, stained as though with old blood. He tried the latch, which did not turn. He pulled it with a sudden jerk; there was no result. He didn’t seem surprised.

  He stepped back, looked down. “Why do you want to open this?”

  Gwynn was determined. “I want to see what’s out there.” She raised her chin.

  Colin met her gaze, his own unreadable. “Why’s that important?”

  She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell him. But it was. “It’s the only gate. The only way out. Or in.”

  After a moment, he shrugged and set down his tool box. “If we open this, we might not be able to close it again.”

  It wasn’t reluctance in his voice. It was a warning.

  Gwynn said nothing.

  “Some doors aren’t meant to be opened.”

  “Let’s do it,” she said. Firmly.

  Now he bent over the tool box, rattling things around until he withdrew a long-bladed screwdriver. With the tip he scraped away at the rust filling the screw heads on the latch. He tried to turn them, leaning into the handle with his full weight, but the door resisted him again.

  The screws were rusted solid. But she had known that.

  Carefully Colin returned the screwdriver to the tool box and picked up the crowbar.

  Suddenly the air around them was filled with the crying of the doves.

  SCRAPS OF ROTTED wood lay at their feet from the now-scarred door. Colin had pried the latch apart, the tongue mechanism now hanging lopsidedly from the planks. He inserted the tapered end of the crowbar into the gap between the door and frame and pulled back; the door edged toward him a few inches, scraping and sticking in the ragged grass at its base. He handed the bar to Gwynn, grasped the wood, and dragged inward inch by inch.

  The door let go so suddenly the Colin lost his grip and fell back. The blast of air that came through, almost as though it had been trapped out there, almost as though it had been waiting, rushed at Gwynn and was so foul that for a moment her sight darkened, her breath caught in her throat, and she staggered backward before it. The rain spattered around them, the sound sharp on the damp and dying leaves. The smell of decaying wood and grass and leaves filled her nose, and she wiped a hand across her face, trying to rid herself of it. The smell clung to her, to her hair, her clothes.

  “Come on, then,” Colin said.

  He had pulled the door open perhaps a foot, and now he squeezed through the opening. Clasping the metal bar tightly, Gwynn took a desperate look around the overgrown garden and followed.

  “Do you smell it?” The fetid stench would not leave her nostrils.

  He looked down on her speculatively. “What?”

  His expression gave nothing away. Gwynn felt defensive. “The air—the smell—something rotten, dead. Dead for a long time.”

  Instead of answering, he pushed his way forward.

  Out here it was darker and wilder. The trees grew together overhead into a canopy that kept the light dim and weak and sickly. The rain beat on the remaining leaves as though on a metal roof. Gwynn was surprised to find no brambles—they had apparently confined themselves only to her side of the wall. Most of the trees that lined a vaguely defined path were young, their trunks not that thick around. She had the sudden feeling that if she were to shout, the sound of her voice would be deadened, swallowed.

  She could no longer hear the doves.

  Colin was waiting, looking about them measuredly.

  “Never been out here,” he said. “Which way?”

  It was, after all, her determination that had brought them through the wall, though it had been his brute strength. Still holding the pry bar as a weapon, she stepped past him and made for a path, dimly visible through the ferns. Further along she could see a shadow, a structure whose definitions she could not quite make out.

  It was like walking through cotton batting. The air was thick and damp and silent. Even their footsteps were muffled. Gwynn’s skin felt clammy, and she shivered despite her coat. She hefted the iron bar in her hands, testing out its weight for a weapon, and unable to explain to herself logically why she should feel the need to carry one. She only knew she had to have a look at this dovecote—she knew instinctively that the shadowy building would prove to be just that—and at the same time she felt anxious at the thought of it, and fought the urge to turn back. She knew Colin was just behind her, but she dared not turn and look at him, in case—in case—it wasn’t in fact him. Or that he’d disappeared entirely. She wanted to speak to him, if only for the reassuring sound of her own words, and his reply—but her voice was trapped in her throat.

  The building was in a slowly-shrinking clearing; the trees had not yet overtaken the sky above it. She and Colin burst into it, but with surprisingly little change of atmosphere: the sky was still ominous, the rain falling steadily. The dovecote was long and low, wooden, unlike the stone ones she had seen online, with the roof sagging in the middle, tiles broken and fallen away. A door at the near end hung half-off its hinges; next to it, a window had lost most of its small panes of glass, the remaining ones jagged like broken teeth. A ragged piece of canvas, black with age, flapped listlessly against the frame at the side.

  The only sound was the rain against the broken roof, and the sharp sound of Gwynn’s own breathing in her ears. The dark maw of the door beckoned her. Unable to look away, she took an unsteady step forward.

  “Don’t.”

  Colin’s voice, and yet no. He gripped her arm.

  She stared down at his hand, then up into his face. His jaw was set, and he was not looking at her but at the dovecote.

  “Don’t go in there.”

  The sound in his voice made the hairs on the back of her neck
prickle, and it shocked her to realize how close she had been to breaking away and entering the black unknown of the door.

  “WHERE ARE THE doves?” she gasped at last, shaking.

  He looked around the small clearing, and up at the sky.

  “There haven’t been any here for years,” he said.

  BACK AT THE cottage, Colin put the tea kettle on while Gwynn went upstairs to change. Her clothes and hair were soaked, and she used one of the rough towels to try to rub some warmth back into her skin. It didn’t seem to help: the cold was embedded in her very bones. She donned a fresh pair of jeans and a thick sweater, and left the bedroom light on when she went back down.

  Colin had stoked the fire. He handed her a cup of tea. There was a surprising sharpness in it, to her tongue.

  “Whisky,” he said at her expression. “Bottle in the cellarway.”

  She didn’t ask how he knew that; probably he had been Gwynn Chelton’s alcohol supplier as well.

  “Drink it.” He had his own mug, which he lifted slightly to her in a wry toast before taking a drink.

  She let the fire spread, down her throat and into her belly, then outward.

  “I shouldn’t have had you open the gate,” she said at last, staring at the fire behind the stove’s isinglass window. “We shouldn’t have gone there.” She felt confused, angry, surprised at her own reaction. Fearful. How could there have been such menace in an abandoned, falling-down building? Yet she had been drawn there. Mesmerized. She thought of how her feet had wanted to keep going, through the door into the depths of the dovecote’s darkness. How it had taken Colin’s restraining hand to keep her from entering. She had been seduced.

  Melodramatic ass.

  Gwynn tried to shake the feeling that would not quite let go.

  “Finish the whisky,” Colin said, his grey eyes on her. The clock on the bookshelf rang the hour. “I’ve got to get to the gig. And I think you’d better come with me.”

  10

  GWYNN RODE IN the cab of the truck with a guitar case between her knees.

  “Gig?” she managed at last.

  The Compass was down by the water; when they eased the truck off the road, the lot was nearly full.

  “Pig Iron,” was all Colin said.

  She was still shaky as she slid out of the cab, but he took the guitar case from her, and held her by the arm. Inside, the pub was warm and noisy; at the far end, three men were setting up on a small stage.

  “Pat, Mike, Davy.” Colin nodded at each by way of introduction. “Gwynn.”

  “You’re late,” the man named Davy said. He wore a watch cap over his grey hair, and had an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He held out a hand to Gwynn. “Pleased.”

  “Held up,” Colin said, setting down the guitar case and grabbing a loop of cord.

  “Can see that.” Davy laughed, and Mike grunted. Pat barely looked up.

  “Get yourself a pint,” Colin suggested. “I’ve got to help here.”

  AT FIRST GWYNN didn’t recognize any of the songs Pig Iron played; seated at a small table in the corner, nursing her pint of Swift One, she found she was barely paying attention anyway, and she felt vaguely guilty about that. She looked up as they launched into a cover of “Lullaby of London.” They were, she thought, pretty good.

  What had happened out there at the dovecote? Gwynn wished she knew. She might have been able to convince herself she had imagined the entire thing, but for the fact that Colin had been there with her. He had felt it. Or at least, he had felt something. And he had seen her reaction. She felt again his hand on her arm, and looked down. She looked up at the stage once more, and he was watching her, his hands moving between chords as though with a mind of their own.

  He had warned her. He’d warned her on the phone, and again before he’d pried the latch of the gate and dragged it open. His words hung with her: we might not get it closed again. Nothing had been out there, save the building, slowly falling to ruins in its tiny clearing. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it hadn’t been—this. Maybe to have her curiosity satisfied, that was all. To be able to turn to Colin and say, “Oh, a dovecote. I’d heard there was one out here,” and then to return to the cottage. All done. Yet despite there being nothing out there—there had been something.

  Now the gate was open.

  When they’d returned to the garden, Colin had put all his weight against the gate and shoved it back into its place in the wall, where, the hinges buckled, it no longer fit. The latch destroyed, there was no way to lock it back up again.

  Gwynn wished there was.

  She wished she hadn’t urged him forward.

  And where were the doves?

  SHE FOUND AN answer in the final song of the second set. Pat stepped forward to the mic, Pat, who, she had noticed, had remained as far in the background as one could get on such a small stage, with his bass guitar. His voice, when he sang, was a high tenor, lighter and higher than Davy’s had been—Davy, who, looking sulky now, had picked up a melodeon.

  O, don’t you see that lonesome dove

  That flies from vine to vine

  He’s mournin’ for his own true love

  Like I will mourn for mine

  Like I will mourn for mine, my love

  Believe me what I say

  You are th’ darling of my heart

  Until my dying day.

  The song, despite the beauty of Pat’s rendition, called up goose bumps on her arms. Gwynn looked up, and found, once again, Colin watching her.

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the cottage, well after midnight, Colin seemed uncomfortable. Wary. Gwynn let him go inside first, let him look into every room.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said when he returned to the entryway.

  He looked unconvinced. “I don’t like this house.”He had his hands shoved into his coat pockets.

  “Really.” Gwynn wished she could convince herself. She opened the door for him and stood aside. Suddenly she felt the truth of the matter. “The house is just sad. It’s the dovecote that’s—angry. I’ll be fine.”

  UPSTAIRS, IN THE bed which had been her great-aunt’s, she found herself wondering what it would be like to sleep with Colin Moore.

  The thought was strangely upsetting.

  She hadn’t slept with anyone since Richard, and he’d been dead these past six years. Celibate six years. That in itself was unnerving.

  Not, perhaps, as unnerving as the idea of that other Gwynn, widowed young—how young?—and who had lived on for fifty or sixty more years, sleeping alone in this bed. Perhaps her great-aunt had taken a lover at some point—she didn’t have to be alone just because she was widowed. Somehow, though—just somehow—Gwynn knew she hadn’t done that.

  Suddenly Gwynn was terrified. What if that happened to her? What if she spent the rest of her life repeating the history of her great-aunt? Widowed young, no children, always alone. Until she died, unhappy, friendless.

  In the darkness she clenched her eyes shut, trying to envision Colin Moore. Just his face, the steady gray eyes, the dark hair going to gray at the temples. But the image swam away from her mind’s eye, and she was left with nothing but emptiness.

  Damn you, Richard, she thought. Damn you for doing this to me.

  11

  “I’M GLAD YOU could see me on such short notice,” Gwynn said to the solicitor as he ushered her into the office after instructing his secretary to bring tea.

  James Simms waved her into a chair before his massive desk. “Oh, no, no, that’s not a problem at all.” He looked mildly uncomfortable. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad you telephoned. I’ve had a bit of a disturbing contact I’d like to make you aware of. Thank you, Miss Devlin.” This directed to his secretary, who looked about sixteen; she set the tea tray on the side table and swished out of the office, closing the door behind her softly. The tea ceremony occupied the solicitor for a few moments, during which, Gwynn noticed, feeling mildly paranoid, he glanced at her frequently, as if meas
uring her reaction to the disturbing contact.

  “I think I may be able to guess at who that might have been,” she said, accepting the cup and saucer from him. “Paul Stokes, from The Stolen Child?”

  Mr. Simms looked relieved as he slid behind his desk. He had poured himself a cup of tea, which he now set carefully to the side. He slid a large folder onto to his blotter, but did not open it; rather, he folded his long-fingered hands over it.

  “He has approached me, in my capacity as your great-aunt’s solicitor”—he cleared his throat and picked up a pair of reading glasses, which he perched low on the bridge of his nose—“as your mutual great-aunt’s solicitor, I should say, to make enquiries about the validity of her will.” For a moment he looked affronted. “As though there would be any question at all, as I drew up the document for Mrs. Chelton.” He glanced up across the polished expanse of the desk. “Have you met Mr. Stokes?”

  Gwynn nodded slowly. “I have. It was not a pleasant encounter. He was angry that I—a stranger, as he put it—would inherit over him, who had lived here all his life and had known our great-aunt. His last words were that I would be hearing from his solicitor.” She grimaced.

  “Could you tell me about it? From the beginning?”

  So Gwynn went through the story, thinking of the waves of fury rolling off Paul Stokes. “He said he wasn’t through. He said he would contest.” She set her cup of tea on the saucer, and it clinked. Punctuation.

  “He has expressed a wish to challenge the will in court,” Mr. Simms agreed. “I have yet to hear from his chosen solicitor, if in fact he has been able to find one to take his case, but I suggest, should you be contacted by one, you refer the matter to me.”

  “What are the chances of his success?”

  Mr. Simms shook his head gravely. “Very small, I would say. Mrs. Chelton owed no debt to Mr. Stokes. She owned her property clearly and without encumbrance, and was free to leave it to anyone she chose. The RSPCA, for example, had that been her desire. However, she chose to leave the property to you.” He pursed his lips, looking suddenly like the old man he would eventually become. “The will has been probated. I don’t see how any self-respecting solicitor would take on his case.” Again he looked insulted, as though it were unthinkable that anyone would question his work. “We made perfectly certain that everything was ship-shape and Bristol fashion before you were even contacted, Mrs. Forest.”