She paused again, offering Gwynn the opportunity to join in the conversation, to agree with or refute her judgment about her intelligence. Gwynn remained steadfastly silent, bending her head only to gaze into her empty teacup. She wanted more tea, or rather, the scalding of more tea on her tongue that would let her think about something other than the pains everywhere else.
“But he’s not here. Our young Colin. I have to say I was hoping he would be—that the pair of you had stopped being so stupid. Still, he’s not here, and here you are, stark on the downstairs sofa, wrapped in a blanket, looking like death warmed over. It’s fairly obvious to me that something very bad has happened, and I rather think”—she coughed, and looked uncomfortable, but plunged forward anyway—“that you ought to tell me about it.”
Grasping the duvet more firmly around her bare shoulders, Gwynn leaned forward painfully and set her empty cup on the table. It said something about the situation that Mary did not immediately reach out to set the cup on its saucer, or on a napkin or a coaster. The uncomfortable urgency of Mary’s desire to help was sinking in, and Gwynn blinked once, twice, and tried to find her voice. She threw a quick glance to the wing-backed chair, where her great-aunt was sitting, ankles crossed, hands folded tightly in her lap.
Gwynn stared so hard that Mary’s own gaze turned toward the chair, and then back again, puzzled.
The older Gwynn shook her head slightly, just once. Gwynn blinked, and her great-aunt disappeared.
“I can’t tell you,” Gwynn whispered. Her throat felt thick.
“Can’t? Or won’t?” There was hurt in Mary’s voice. She took a long deep breath. “I hope you know,” she said stiffly, “that I’m your friend. At least—I’d like to be your friend. I tried my best to be a friend to Mrs. Chelton, and she resisted me all the way. I figured that was her business—if she wanted to stand off, then she wanted to stand off. But I could still be kind. I could still do what I could do for her.” She cleared her throat. “I would hope you understood that.” She lifted a hand, let it fall back into her lap. It was the most helpless gesture Gwynn had ever seen from Mary, and it tore at something deep in her chest.
“I can’t,” she said again, miserably. “It’s not my secret to tell.”
Mary turned sharply to look at her. “Whose secret is it, then? Is it Colin’s?”
“No.” This time the tearing was huge in her chest, and she nearly cried out. His face. His expression. “Colin doesn’t know anything about it. He can’t know.” The words sounded both foreign and familiar to her, in her voice, and in another voice. “I can’t tell him what’s happened.”
Gwynn’s words. But to whom had she spoken them, after she’d stumbled away from the dovecote? No one. The answer, the heart-rending, sickening answer—one that Gwynn knew instinctively to be true—was no one. Her great-aunt had never told anyone what had happened that afternoon with Tommy Chelton up at the dovecote. Her great-aunt had carried the cancerous secret of her violation to her grave.
“And you can’t tell me.” There was infinite sadness in the words, but resignation as well, as if this had all happened to Mary before. With another deep breath, she straightened and stood. “Well, then, if I can’t be of any help, I guess I’ll have to get back to my work.”
The disappointment was so thick in the air as to be palpable.
Gwynn couldn’t help but feel she had, once again, failed. Somehow.
At the kitchen doorway, Mary turned back. “Is there anyone you can tell?”
Gwynn stared at her, the words ringing in her head. Because suddenly she knew the answer, knew what her great-aunt wanted her to do.
“Yes,” she whispered. She hoped Mary would not ask who, because she could not tell her the answer. She simply couldn’t.
Then Mary slowly nodded. “Then I guess you’d better wash and dress and go tell them, then.”
The kitchen door swung closed behind her and slapped in the frame.
37
SHE DRAGGED HERSELF upstairs, but on the landing,turned right into the spare room, which was still torn apart from cleaning and boxing up donations, the bed unmade. Here she lay down on the bare mattress, meaning to catch her breath, but the exhaustion caught her unawares, and she let her eyes close. Just for a moment. Just a moment.
THEY WERE IN the shop, Gwynn trying to fit the coupons to the available goods, and to the things on her mother’s list, her younger sister laughing with someone up near the front counter. When Tommy Chelton slipped into the row of tinned goods behind her, at first, frowning at the near-bare shelves, she didn’t see him. As he drew closer, the skin at the back of her neck prickled. She whirled. Her eyes fell on him, and she felt the flush of blood rushing to the surface, the nausea building in the pit of her stomach. She tried to step past him, purposefully looking away, but he moved sideways and blocked the aisle.
“You can’t avoid me,” he said.
“Let me pass.”
There was another peal of laughter from Lucy at the front, full of the immeasurable joy of being sixteen. Tommy smiled slyly and tossed a look over his shoulder to where Lucy stood. “You know what I want,” he said, his eyes following her younger sister’s movements. “You know you’re mine.” He was smiling when he turned his black eyes upon her. “You know you haven’t written to Martin since you followed me up to the dovecote.”
He couldn’t know that. Her own eyes flickered to his, and his expression told her he knew his shot had hit home. The nausea was rising in her throat. Again she tried to get around him; again he slid to the side and blocked her way. When he stared at her she felt his touch on her skin, the searing pain that tore her in two.
His fingers trailed along her inner arm, and she jerked away violently. “Don’t you touch me,” she hissed, a cornered animal.
Again Tommy only smiled. “You know,” he whispered, leaning in so close she felt his breath on her cheek, “you want it.” Then he laughed, perhaps the ugliest, most chilling sound she had ever heard. She quailed before it. “Meanwhile, maybe I’ll find someone else who is more accommodating.”
Before she could unravel what he might mean, he turned on his heel and made his way out of the aisle. Closing her eyes tightly, she leaned her forehead against the shelf, trying to control her shaking. Then she heard another laugh from Lucy, and her heart constricted. She nearly flew to the end of the row, scanning the front of the shop for her sister. She rounded the corner just in time to see Tommy jostle Lucy at the counter; he swiftly apologized, and then, with a movement that made her nerves scream, he ran a steadying hand down the inside Lucy’s arm. Then he tipped his hat, lifting his eyes past Lucy to give Gwynn a black look before leaving the shop.
GWYNN CRIED OUT, huddled under the duvet in the spare room. She barely registered Mary coming upstairs to look in on her, before she tumbled back into troubled sleep.
GWYNN FOUND HER eyes drawn to the calendar tacked to the bedroom wall.
Nearly a week late. She stared in despair.
She turned away just as Lucy bounded up the stairs and into their room, to throw herself across her yellow coverlet. “You know that Tommy Chelton?” she asked, chewing the side of her thumb.
Gwynn pressed her palms into her eyes, her entire body recoiling at the name. There was nothing in Lucy’s voice save the richness of silly laughter. “Yes,” she managed. Barely. “I know him a bit.”
Lucy rolled over and clutched her pillow to her thin chest. “He asked me if I liked doves. This afternoon, when I was at the lending library? I said I did, and he told me he raised them, and maybe I’d like to come see them sometime?” She laughed. “He’s ever so much older than I am. More Gareth’s age. I can’t think why he’d even talk to me.”
But Gwynn knew. She stared at her Lucy’s downy arm, where Tommy Chelton had run his hand down the pale skin, knowing Gwynn would see, knowing Gwynn would know.
It was a threat.
She thought of his leer. She thought of his hands on her younger sister. Her innoce
nt sister. She put a shaking hand to her belly.
Late.
In the morning she vomited up her breakfast almost as soon as she had eaten. Then she dressed herself carefully and made her way up Eyewell Lane to knock on the blue door of Dove Cottage.
No one answered. With trepidation that nearly overpowered her resolve, she passed around to the gate in the wall and let herself into the garden. It looked, to her eyes, more barren than it had been before. She crossed to the rear gate, which stood open, a maw waiting to swallow her whole. Taking a deep breath and biting her lip to keep back the tears, she left the garden and entered the wood. The sounds of the cooing doves came to her as she drew closer to the clearing and the low building. The door was open. As she paused, staring at its hulking blackness, Tommy appeared in the doorway; he ducked under the lintel and took one step outside. Then he stopped, waiting, his dark eyes fixed on her face. His lips were twisted into a triumphant smile.
Gwynn swallowed and met his eyes and spoke the hardest words she had ever said.
“I will marry you.”
His smile widened. His teeth shone wolfishly.
She spun away quickly, fell to her knees, and vomited for the second time that morning. This time, however, nothing came up. There was nothing left inside her.
38
GWYNN WAS AFRAID Martin wouldn’t be there when she limped down to the bench at the waterside pathway. He had sounded unsure on the telephone, but that might just have been a function of his age, she thought, or his telephone demeanor. When she spoke her great-aunt’s name, however, his voice became stronger, more certain.
“You’ve found out something,” he had said.
“I don’t know.” Because what did she know? “I think so.”
“I’ll be there,” Martin had said. “I don’t have much time. Mary said she’d be by for shopping around four, so I’ve got to be back before she knows I’m gone.”
“Whenever you can,” Gwynn said. An unhappy conspirator.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Now she approached the bench to find him seated there in his suit and fedora, staring off toward the horizon. The sound of the murmuring ocean came to her more loudly as she drew closer; it must have disguised her footfalls, for Martin did not look over until she took the seat next to him.
They sat in silence for a few moments. The gray roil of the estuary before them was mesmerizing, an endlessly returning tide. The other Gywnn might have watched it, might have sat on this bench with Martin, all those years ago. Gwynn studied it, unwilling to speak of her great-aunt, now when she was finally here with Martin. He needed to know what she knew; but it would hurt him, the old man, now when it was impossible to fix. She shifted uncomfortably on the green slats.
Martin cleared his throat. He too seemed unwilling to open the conversation, and when he finally spoke, it was not about the elder Gwynn at all. “Young Colin was by this morning to fix a leaky faucet for me.”
Gwynn stiffened. She kept her eyes on the gray line between the gray sky and the gray sea.
“He looks like hell.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.
Martin tapped the back of her hand with a gnarled finger. “He’s a good lad. That’s all I’ll say about that.”
“I told you—”
“That’s all I’ll say about that.”
Now Martin sighed, his shoulders slumping. He suddenly seemed older, shrunken, almost fearful. “And the more I think about it, the less I want to talk about what you’ve discovered.” Again he sighed, deeply, and Gwynn was reminded of his tears, fiercely held in, when he’d shown her the photographs of the young Gwynn in his scrapbooks. She glanced at him, and saw him blinking against the wind. “I’m afraid of what you’ll tell me.”
His voice had grown so soft that she barely heard him over the breeze and the tide.
“Would you rather I not say?” she asked quietly. “She’s dead, your Gwynn. There’s nothing left to be done for her.”
Martin held out his hands. “I could try to understand her. That much I could do.” He shook his head again, then pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Sorry.”
They fell silent again. A seagull fluttered to a landing a few yards away and took a tentative step toward them, fixing them with its beady eye. Gwynn didn’t have the heart to tell it she had nothing for it; it would have to come to the sad realization by itself. It opened its yellow beak as though to squawk, but made no noise.
“And we saw her,” Martin broke out suddenly, violently. “Both of us. We’ve seen her in the cottage. She had a terrible life, and now she isn’t allowed to have a peaceful death? That’s wrong. Wrong. We have to do something.”
“But I don’t know what to do,” Gwynn protested helplessly. She looked down at her hands, balled in her lap. Useless hands.
“We have to find out what happened. We have to know. She must want us to know.”
Gwynn shook her head. “She had all those years, Martin, to tell you. And she didn’t.”
“Because she couldn’t,” he said roughly.
She looked at him and could see the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, openly, and he did nothing to hide them, nothing to wipe them away.
“I married someone else. There was always a part of me that loved Gwynn—there’s still a part of me that loves Gwynn. But I had made a vow to Mary’s mother, and I had to keep it. Gwynn knew that. She understood me, enough to stay away.”
“And now?”
Martin turned on the bench to look fully into her face, his blue eyes blazing with the strength of whatever emotions were wreaking havoc inside his frail body. “You found out what happened, didn’t you? That’s why you called.”
Gwynn nodded slowly. “I think so.”
Martin grasped her hand. His grip was remarkably strong. “How did you find out? You said there was nothing in the house. No letters. No pictures. Nothing written down. How did you find out?”
Quickly she stood up and limped across the path, to stare down at the roiling tide. It looked like she felt inside, boiling and churning, warning of a storm on its way in. She closed her eyes against it, but felt a sudden wave of vertigo—then the extraordinary pain inside, the one Gwynn had shown her, let her feel.
“She let me know,” was the only thing she could think to say.
“Tell me.” Martin’s words were a command, a throwback to Gwynn’s Martin in uniform. “Tell me.”
Instead she turned to look on his frail form, hunched against the wind on the park bench. “Did you have a brother, Martin?” She shoved her cold hands deep into the pockets of her coat.
He looked up, surprised. “Vern. He died.”
“When?”
Martin stared off again into the distance. He seemed to be waiting for the path of the question to be made clear. “When he was young. I don’t remember. Eight? Nine? Meningitis. One day he was fine, then he complained of a headache, and the next day he was dead.” For a moment Martin looked stricken at the memory, but the expression faded, the pain that of long ago. “Why?”
“You and he—you had racing birds?”
Slowly Martin got to his feet and took the few steps to her side. He stared into her face, intently. “Yes.”
“You wrote to Gwynn about them. When you were off at Bletchley. You told her about them.”
His voice was now deadly quiet. “Yes. I wrote her a letter.”
“She wanted—” Gwynn broke off, for a moment unable to continue. “She wanted to give you a gift. A racing bird. To show she understood. She wanted to get one to give you when you came home on leave.”
“She never told me that. After that letter, she never wrote back again.” His eyes bored into hers. “She never wrote back. And when I got home at Christmas, she was married. To Tommy.” He put out a pleading hand. “Did you find that letter? You said there were none.”
Gwynn shook her head. Looking into the wizened face, she co
uld not speak. Could not say anymore.
“Then how? How could you know this?” That question seemed to lose its importance as the realization broke slowly across his face. “Tommy. The dovecote.” His mouth worked, as though he could not bear to think the thought which now bore down on him, a freight train. “Tommy raised birds.”
They stared at each other for a minute. The pain again, between her legs, the tearing, the blood. “He raped her, Martin,” she whispered, and each word, she saw, hit him like a blow.
39
GWYNN BUTTERED A slice of bread and ate a bite over the sink, fearful of being sick. It felt as though she swallowed a brick. She set the bread aside on the counter and stared down the drain, queasy and dizzy.
Slowly she made her way upstairs, holding onto the sofa back then leaning heavily into the walls to steady her passage. She circled the marshaled boxes of Oxfam donations, then slid under the duvet on the unmade bed, fully clothed, exhausted. There she dozed fitfully, forcing herself awake each time the low-slung shadow of the dovecote appeared in her dreams.
You opened the gate.
She lost track of time, didn’t care. Somewhere her phone rang, and rang again every few hours, then stopped when the battery died. Sometimes she heard the clock. At one point she dragged herself into the bathroom, where she undressed and sank into the scalding hot water, then scrubbed herself until her skin burned red. Even as she did, she had the horrified feeling that she had done this all before. She wrapped herself in a towel and crawled under the duvet once more, unwilling to enter the other bedroom to find clean clothes, or even pajamas. She slept more. She was hungry, but she knew that if she ate, she’d only vomit. The house phone rang, and she ignored it.
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