Dovecote

by Oleson, Anne Britting;

  Gwynn slipped in behind the coffee table piled high with books and settled. “Not at all, Mr. Scott.” The old man did not seem to share his daughter’s cagey ways. She must have come by her nature from her mother.

  “Martin. Call me Martin. Nobody calls me by my name anymore. That’s one of the horrors of old age. They turn you into your father.”

  “You are my father,” Mary shot back.

  “Go fix tea, you obstreperous girl,” he ordered.

  Mary glanced at Gwynn with the slightest raise of the eyebrows before disappearing back down the hallway.

  “And don’t you be raising your eyebrows at me, girl,” Martin called after her. He winked at Gwynn. “Blasted girl. Always has to have the last word.” He shifted against the mounds of pillows, and a spasm crossed his face, quickly bitten back. “I’m an old man. She oughtn’t argue with me so much. But she’s the most argumentative child there ever was.” He laughed. “Got it from her old mum. That woman would argue with me until she was blue in the face, even when we both knew she was as wrong as could be. Contrary, that’s what it was.”

  “You miss her,” Mary shouted from somewhere down the hall.

  “And she eavesdrops. All the time. Where’d she learn that?” Martin shook his head. His hair was fine and wispy, snow-white, standing about in clouds.

  “Mr. Scott—Martin—you called it Dove Cottage.”

  Doves. Again.

  “Oh, aye, that it used to be. Until Tommy Chelton died, and Gwynn changed the name. Took some getting used to.” He frowned, then shook his head, as though he had no idea he’d provided a vital piece of information. Though perhaps he didn’t know. Gwynn wasn’t sure, either, why it was vital, just that it was. “So what is it you want to know, then?” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You haven’t got a bit of whisky on you, have you?”

  Gwynn shook her head, surprised.

  “Damn.” He winked at her again and sat back. “So. Is it Tommy Chelton I hear you’re interested in?”

  “Tommy Chelton,” she repeated, nodding. But she was still distracted. Dove Cottage. Doves.

  Mary returned with the tea tray. She shoved the pile of books aside and slid the tray onto the table. Her face was still stern, though there was an unfamiliar quirk to the corner of her mouth.

  “It’s Earl Gray,” Martin said, holding out his frail hands for his cup. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s the only kind I like anymore.” There were tiny cookies on a plate next to the tea pot, and he nodded to them. “Try those. Lemon drops. Nobody makes them like Mary—she has her mother’s secret recipe.”

  “He can’t eat them,” Mary said. “Gets his blood sugar up. But if I don’t put them on a plate for a visitor, it gets his blood pressure up.”

  Martin shrugged. “One way or another, it’s all going to kill me anyway.”

  “He’s always saying that,” Mary said, handing Gwynn a cup, then pouring one for herself before perching on the edge of the sofa. “But he’s far too ornery to die, this one.”

  “Listen to her,” Martin said, feigning shock. “Just listen to this child of my blood.” He took a sip of his tea, slurping mightily. “Now, back to business, young Gwynn. You want to know about old Tommy Chelton. Or I should say, young Tommy Chelton that was.”

  “He died young, didn’t he?” Gwynn asked. “The solicitor said he thought sometime in the 1950s. That would have made my aunt a widow in her twenties, wouldn’t it have?”

  “1951, it would have been.” Martin nodded, took another slurping drink of tea.

  “You’re awfully sure, Dad,” Mary said suspiciously.

  “Looked it up, didn’t I? After you asked me?” He snorted. “Had that battle-axe of a nurse you keep having drop around here get out my scrapbooks for me. A lot of noise she made about it, too, as though I were asking her to do something obscene, or against union regulations.” Again that sly look in Gwynn’s direction. “I finally had to pretend to a heart attack to get her to do what I asked.”

  “Dad!” But Mary wasn’t as shocked as she sounded.

  “1951. July of that year. Tommy was never quite right after the war, everyone said. I don’t think they quite remembered what he was like before the war, actually.” Martin gazed up at the ceiling, as though trying to read history there. “He wasn’t really a nice man. I never knew what Gwynn saw in him. Older than she was, too, by some ten years or so.”

  “How long had they been married? In 1951?”

  He pursed his lips and thought a moment. “Seven years? Something like that. He was home on leave, recuperating from some wound I don’t remember. They married up, and he went back to the front. Not sure where he was stationed. I think he might have been a gunner of some sort.” His blue eyes flickered to Gwynn and back. “I was only here off and on myself, anyway. I was stationed outside of London.”

  Mary shook her head. “All that secrecy. The war’s been over for a few years, Dad. You can say it.” She put her tea cup in her saucer and sat back. “Bletchley Park. Dad was C and C.” There was pride in her voice, and a bit of marvel.

  “All I know is that I had a bit of an eye for Gwynn myself back then,” he said, as though Mary had not spoken. “Came back on leave and found her married off, just like that.” The expression in his brilliant eyes grew mournful. “She looked terrible when she told me. As though she’d had the life squeezed out of her. Never heard her laugh again.”

  Now Mary drew back, and the tea cup clattered gently against its saucer. Her face was drawing in, closing down in that look Gwynn found so familiar. The measuring face. “You never told me this, Dad.”

  Martin lifted his pointed chin. “Not something you tell your daughter, is it? About your first love?” He coughed gently. “But then I turned my eyes elsewhere, and they lighted on your mother. A good woman. And there you have it.” Yet he seemed to have withdrawn momentarily, into a past where they could not follow, and at least on the part of Mary Tennant, certainly couldn’t understand. “And then there you were, my Mary, a prize worth keeping.”

  For a long time no one said anything. From the corner of her eye, Gwynn watched the color wash in and out of Mary’s face. Mary sat stonily, her hands gripping her tea things. She saw Gwynn watching her, and she put her cup and saucer back on the tray on the table. Her lips were pressed together, her jaw fixed.

  “Then he died,” Gwynn prodded finally. “Tommy Chelton. In the summer of 1951. You said he had a difficult war?”

  Martin shrugged, and in that moment, he looked like his daughter. “As difficult as anyone else’s, I suppose—except mine, of course, because Bletchley was a relatively comfortable berth.” His mouth, too, thinned out. “A bully, Tommy was, before he joined up. All through school. Sometimes the army’s a good place for someone like that—a kind of legalized working off of aggression. But he came home, after he was mustered out, and he was worse than before. People don’t remember that part.” He sighed, his lips still tight. “You come home a war hero, and everyone forgets what you were before. Everyone forgives your behavior afterwards. And he played it, too. Oh, yes. Tommy knew how to profit from people’s sympathy.”

  The bitterness in his voice was a surprise.

  “He was an angry, cruel man, was Tommy Chelton. Don’t you believe anything other, young Gwynn,” Martin said. “That’s why his killing himself like that came as such a surprise to everyone.”

  Gwynn caught her breath.

  “He killed himself?”

  The blue eyes blazed into her face.

  “Hanged himself. Up in that old dovecote behind the cottage.”

  19

  “I NEED TO sit down,” Mary said as they crossed the park and came upon a bench.

  Despite her own disquiet, Gwynn looked at her with concern. She had never seen Mary Tennant shaken out of her steadfastness, not even at finding a stray man sleeping on the sofa when she let herself in to Gull Cottage first thing in the morning. Unflappable. Until now. Mary planted her feet squarely on the grass—no
crossing of legs for her—and gripped her purse with both hands. Gwynn herself felt unwell: dizzy, a bit frightened by what she’d learned.

  “Did he—did what your father said about my great-aunt—upset you?”

  Even more surprisingly, Mary laughed. “That old goat? Oh, never. Flummox me? Always. He can’t help himself. He loves to wind me up.”

  Gwynn sat back. “But you said—he’d never told you that—”

  Mary shrugged, her eyes on the gulls which strolled about them brazenly. “And wasn’t he adorable, the way he tried to reassure me?” She laughed again. “He comes out with these things, you know. Maybe they’re true. Maybe he was friendly with Mrs. Chelton before they both married others. Who really knows? He cut a figure back then, that old man. Doesn’t look it now, but he was quite the blade.” She shook her head, tossed a glance back at the row of cottages they’d just left.

  “I believe you,” Gwynn said.

  “It’s just exhausting sometimes, keeping up with him. He’s always trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “And succeeding?”

  Mary tilted her head in assent. “But I can’t let him see that, or he crows over it abominably.” Now she turned her brown eyes—obviously inherited from her mother—on Gwynn. “But he managed to give you a shock, didn’t he?”

  He hanged himself. In the dovecote. Behind Dove Cottage.

  Gwynn had forced herself to go back, to look inside the dovecote. There had been nothing there. No feet scraping the dirt floor. Nothing. She had imagined it all. She had imagined it.

  She nodded, swallowing.

  “Do you suppose it’s true?” she asked, her throat thick. “That part, about Tommy Chelton hanging himself?”

  She had imagined it.

  Mary looked thoughtful, her dark brows drawing together. “Probably that part is true. I wonder why I didn’t remember that? We’d have to check.”

  “The newspaper?”

  “I don’t think so. 1951? Even if it were in an obituary, the language would be coded. Subtle. ‘Died suddenly at home’ or some such thing. Cagey back then, newspapers were.” Mary was still frowning, sorting this out. “No. I’ll have to ask around, see if anyone can back up Dad’s story. How about Jamie Simms?”

  Gwynn shrugged. “He said he’d research that if I wanted—but I thought I’d dig around a bit myself before I paid him to do it. And you really don’t remember? You said you were just a child then.”

  Mary shook her head. “I have a sense about it, his dying and people talking, hushing when we children came into a room. But I might be imagining things, too.”

  Gwynn didn’t think so. A less imaginative, more practical person she had never met. She wished desperately to be more like Mary. She also wished that the visit with Martin Scott had not been cut so short—that the visiting nurse had not made her daily appearance and hustled them out of the room. “I’d really like to see a picture of him. Of them. All of them. I need to know more.”

  Mary levered herself up from the bench. “I know. I’ll try to wrestle those scrapbooks of his away sometime.” She looked at the sky. “Let’s go, before the rain starts again.”

  THE WEEKEND WAS the most difficult, when Mary didn’t come in for her two hours in the morning. Gwynn busied herself Saturday with rearranging more furniture, with boxing up things and setting them by the door for the next run to Oxfam. The wood in the shed was getting low, though she put off calling Colin Moore for another load; she wasn’t sure why she felt uncomfortable, but she wasn’t quite ready to speak to him again. She had not seen him since the night of the Pig Iron gig; she wanted to talk to him about what she had found, but she wanted, too, to pretend none of it had ever happened. She wanted to tell him about the dovecote, but she did not want to admit she’d gone back. Twice.

  What would he think about the former name of the cottage? About Tom Chelton? She remembered the almost irresistible pull toward the half-closed door of the dovecote, toward the darkened maw, and shuddered. She remembered Colin’s hand on her arm, the urgency in his voice when he held her back. She remembered the cold. Most of all, she remembered the feet, swinging gently, toes in the dirt—feet which were not there, feet which she hadn’t known had ever been there. She didn’t think she needed any verification of Martin Scott’s story beyond that: evil had occurred in that dovecote. Thomas Chelton’s suicide. If there were actually such a thing as an unhappy spirit leaving an imprint—and she didn’t believe it, she didn’t—surely there would be one there.

  Unhappy spirit. Yet—yet. The dovecote didn’t give off the sense of unhappiness. There wasn’t the miasma of despair one might expect. It was something else. Something angry, vengeful. Something malicious. She thought of the putrid stink that forced its way in through the gate they’d broken open. The smell of evil.

  The more she learned, the more she wondered: had Tom Chelton really been an unhappy man? A bully, Martin Scott had called him. Who had had a bad war. Martin had thought her great-aunt Gwynn the unhappy one. I never heard her laugh again. He had spoken with such sadness, too, as though all his memories of the other Gwynn, up to that point, had been filled with laughter. Then, a sudden marriage to a cruel, angry man—without explanation—and then, seven years later, an unhappy death, and the beginning of a miserable widowhood. Surely, though, if the marriage had made her great-aunt Gwynn miserable, then her husband’s early death would have freed her? Yet both Mary and Colin had told her that Gwynn had remained miserable, had tried desperately to hold people at arm’s length, and had, for the most part, succeeded. What had truly happened there?

  Death and the dovecote.

  And what did the dead dove on the step have to do with anything?

  GWYNN DID NOT sleep well.

  Her great-aunt came to her in a dream, her hair white, her eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses. Her face and hands were lined.

  How can you keep him out now?

  Who?

  Tom.

  Where is he?

  He walks. You opened the gate. You’ve let him in.

  He’s dead.

  That doesn’t matter to him.

  Gwynn wrenched herself awake, trying to escape the old woman. The bedroom was dark save for a rectangle of reflected light on the ceiling from the street below. Beneath the duvet her skin was damp with sweat, and she found herself breathing heavily, as though from a run. The travel alarm on the bedside table showed 1:47. Her ears were straining for any sound, but she heard nothing save the roaring of her blood in her skull. She was alone, she told herself. She was alone. Slowly she tried to regulate her breathing, her racing heart.

  “Calm down,” she said aloud.

  Then the bedroom window burst, glass splinters flying everywhere.

  20

  GWYNN CLUTCHED THE duvet around her shoulders, huddled in the chair. The lights of the police car still strobed through the windows, splashing color across the ceiling, flashed back again by the mirror in the dining room. An officer in a yellow safety jacket pressed a cup of milky tea into her hands. She took a sip automatically and found it liberally sugared. Overhead, she could hear the other officer moving around in the bedroom.

  “Are you sure there isn’t someone I could call?” The officer had taken out a small notebook and pencil.

  She shook her head, reaching up to touch the side of her face where she felt an itch, and found blood. She stared at her fingers dumbly.

  “You must have taken a bit of glass there,” the officer said. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

  He suggested the paramedics, and she waved the idea aside.

  “So tell me again what happened.”

  “I don’t really know. I was sleeping. Something woke me, and then the brick came through the window.”

  “Something woke you. A sound? Could it have been someone moving about out in the road? On your terrace?”

  The second officer came stomping down the stairs and entered the room. “Whoever threw that didn’t throw it from the road, unl
ess he was some sort of Olympian. No, he came up, probably onto the terrace.” He cleared his throat. “You were here alone, Mrs. Forest?”

  “I live alone, yes.”

  He looked at her. “That wasn’t what I was asking.”

  Gwynn met his gaze, a dull anger in her chest. “Yes. I was alone. I woke. Someone threw a brick through my bedroom window.” She held out her bloody fingers for him to see.

  “Some hoodlum from the pub?” the first officer suggested.

  “Probably,” the second answered.

  “The pub was closed,” Gwynn objected.

  There was a sharp knock at the front door. Slowly the second officer turned back into the entryway and slid the bolt.

  “Gwynn?”

  She hadn’t seen Colin Moore for almost a week. He pushed past the officer, into the sitting room and circled the sofa to her side. His grey eyes went immediately to her face, and she put the hand up again.

  He dropped to his knee before the winged-back chair and pushed her hand away from her cheek. With gentle fingers, he probed the cut, and she gasped at the sharp pain.

  “Glass?” he asked, throwing the question out to the room at large.

  “And you would know that how?” the burly officer demanded.

  If Colin Moore ever tossed contemptuous glances, it would be now. “The curtains waving outside the bedroom window.” He turned back to his examination of the cut at her temple. “There doesn’t seem to be any in there now. It’s not a big cut—I don’t think you’d need stitches, but I’ll take you to the surgery in the morning just to be sure.”

  It was the most words, Gwynn thought, she’d heard out of him since she’d met him.

  “And you are?” the younger officer asked, pencil at the ready.