Dovecote

by Oleson, Anne Britting;

  Star snarled.

  Stokes jumped back, dropping his hand quickly. “Stupid dog.” He peered down at Star, and then back up at her. “That’s Giles Trevelyan’s dog.”

  Gwynn set a reassuring hand on Star’s head. The low growl faded, but the dog still bared her teeth at Stokes. “It was.”

  “What the hell are you doing with it?” Stokes took another step back, his fists tightening by his sides.

  “Star is a good guard dog.” Beneath her hand, she could feel Star’s coiled tension. She was ready to strike if need be. “She keeps me safe.” The dog growled again, low in her throat.

  Stokes took yet another step away, his eyes never leaving the dog. “Well, you keep it away from me, do you hear? If that mangy thing comes after me, I’ll kill it, see? And I’ll be within my rights. So you’d better keep that animal under control.”

  “Leave me alone, Stokes,” Gwynn retorted sharply, “and you’ll have no problem at all. Don’t touch me, don’t even come near me. Do you understand? Stay away from me.”

  Shaken, she bent to whisper to Star, rubbing her ears. “Let’s go home, okay?” She turned away from Stokes and the stall and the curious eyes, but not before she heard the shout.

  “Crazy woman! All I was trying to do was help!”

  48

  STAR ONLY RAISED herself to a sitting position at the knock, looking up expectantly. No barks, no growls. Gwynn moved the chair and opened the door.

  It could have been the first time Colin had appeared; he stood with his back to the door, looking over at The Stolen Child. He turned slowly.

  “I’ve brought the firewood.”

  Gwynn kept both hands on the door. “I didn’t order any firewood. I don’t need any firewood.”

  His hands were in his pockets. “You will before the week is out. You don’t want to be cold.”

  This would have been what it was like for him, bringing wood to Gwynn Chelton. Colin did things for her, even when she didn’t ask. Because she was a lonely, frightened, bitter woman. Gwynn felt the blow to the gut.

  Star slipped out the door between them.

  “Let me get the gloves,” Gwynn said, resignedly. “And the money.”

  Colin cast her one sharp look before turning on his heel and heading back down to the truck, where the barrow was strapped to the top of the load.

  HE POCKETED THE notes without looking at them, without a word. Gwynn peeled off the work gloves and then twisted them between her hands, watching Colin heft the barrow easily up onto the remains of the wood in the bed of his truck. He took one more look over her shoulder at the cottage.

  “I think,” he said at last, “you had better tell me what happened.”

  She was silent.

  Colin moved impatiently. “You owe me that, Gwynn. Just that much.”

  She put a hand on Star’s head, to steady herself. Star moved away from her touch. Gwynn looked down, surprised: Star had never done that. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to raise her eyes to Colin’s face. A good face, she had thought on that day a lifetime ago when she had met him: strong, with determined bones, but kindness around the eyes. She stared. The eyes. The steady gray, honest, eyes. She had forgotten that. She licked her lips nervously. How she had forgotten that.

  These were not the eyes of Tommy Chelton.

  Colin did not touch her. He was waiting, willing her to make the first approach. But she couldn’t. She held back, feeling another touch on her skin, feeling revulsion and disgust. She couldn’t help it.

  “You called me by his name,” Colin said now.

  “I—I didn’t know what I was saying,” she whispered. “I wasn’t—myself.”

  He nodded, as though she were confirming his suspicions. “No. You were—her. Weren’t you? The other Gwynn.”

  The other Gwynn. How awkward. How unbelievable. How strange to hear the words from someone else’s lips. “Yes. She was—with me.”

  “She came to you in a dream.”

  It sounded ludicrous. Yet it was true. Words failed Gwynn, and she lowered her eyes, twisting the gloves in her hands until her fingers hurt.

  “Did she tell you—what had happened?” Colin too seemed to be having trouble speaking the words.

  He almost understood. Almost. There was still that gap between knowing and knowing. Gwynn wondered if it were even possible for anyone to understand. Then she shook her head sharply. Martin understood. Yet Martin had loved her great-aunt, despite everything. Even though he had pushed the feeling aside and had married the woman who was to become Mary’s mother, he had loved the other Gwynn. Enough to understand now. Enough to feel her presence through another person.

  “It wasn’t that,” she choked out, still twisting her hands. “She didn’t—tell me.”

  Gwynn could feel Colin’s sudden stillness, his shock at finding out the thing he’d known all along, but hadn’t want to face.

  Because he loved her.

  She saw, from the corner of her eye, his hands lift slightly from his sides, and then fall again, helpless. Then ball into tight, furious fists.

  “And it was rape.”

  His word fell like a bomb, making a crater between them, a crater she couldn’t pass over. Not now. Not yet. Maybe never. She nodded.

  “And you—felt it.”

  There it was. Gwynn recoiled, expecting his recoil as well. Feeling dirty and shamed and angry and a mix of everything that couldn’t be explained to anyone who had never felt anything like it. Feeling like the young Gwynn Chelton had, all the years ago: the shame and the horror that Tommy Chelton had exploited to get his way. The shame she had not been able to envision for Lucy, her younger sister, the girl who had gone blithely off to America with her flyer husband, safe from Tommy, unaware of what had been sacrificed to ensure her safety and her happiness.

  The hands were still fists, and she could see, shaking with impotent fury.

  “I’m sorry, Gwynn,” he choked at last. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. I never would have made it worse had I known. Please believe that.”

  She nodded, still watching her hands.

  “You poor woman,” she heard Colin whisper. “That poor woman.”

  “COME WITH ME,” Colin said, the door to his truck open, his hand on the guitar case.

  Star lay on the pavement at her feet, seemingly relaxed, though her brown eyes never left Gwynn.

  “Come deliver the wood. Come to the gig,” Colin said. Almost pleading, though she knew Colin would not plead; it wasn’t his way. “Come back to the flat.” He paused. “Come away from this house.”

  “I can’t,” Gwynn said.

  Her throat felt raw. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands, crossed her arms over her chest. She was cold, though the sun shone weakly now, and there was no wind.

  He leveled his eyes on her, the gray the same color as the sky, as the sea the last time she’d sat on a bench overlooking the water. With Martin. Martin lying in the hospital, the monitors ticking away the messages his much-weakened heart was sending out. An even gray. A private gray. Colin waited for her to speak, to explain further. She couldn’t. She couldn’t let those words out over the rawness in her throat, the soreness in her entire body. If it was her body.

  Gwynn wondered, for a panicked second, if this was the way her great-aunt had felt, every time she had looked at the young Martin, when he had returned home from the service. She wondered if the expression on Colin’s face was the same one the other Gwynn had seen on Martin’s.

  Hurt. Uncomprehending.

  She felt the dizziness again, the nausea. She reached out a hand and clutched the side of Colin’s truck to steady herself. At her feet, Star lifted her black head, brown eyes on her. She whined, once.

  “It’s all right,” Gwynn whispered, as much to herself as to the dog. She closed her eyes.

  She opened her eyes, Colin was closer, the gray gaze still on her face, but he still did not touch her. “I will catch you,” he said carefull
y, “if you fall, Gwynn.”

  “I won’t fall.”

  He waited. Slowly Star lowered herself back to the pavement. The dizziness passed.

  “Because,” Colin said at last, as though after a great decision, “I love you.”

  “PLEASE,” HE SAID after a time. They still stood on the pavement. Star still lay beside Gwynn’s feet, still on high alert. The afternoon was growing cooler, and Gwynn found herself shivering. “Please come away from here. Stay at the flat.”

  “No,” she answered.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor. Hell, I’ll sleep in the truck, or at one of the guys’ places. Just come away, Gwynn. Look what’s happened to you here. This place is bad for you.” Colin took a deep, agonized breath. “This place is evil.”

  Now, at last, she raised her head and looked at him. Willed him to understand the urgency. “I’ve got to stay. I’ve got to see this through.”

  Colin stared at her for the longest time. At last his shoulders slumped and he turned to look down Eyewell Lane, defeated. “But what is this?”

  Gwynn could only shake her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Gwynn Chelton needed something from me. Needs something from me. That’s why she left me the cottage. There’s something I’m supposed to do here, Colin.”

  “But what?” His voice was rife with frustration.

  “I don’t know,” she could only repeat. The conviction was growing, had been growing for some time now. “I don’t understand yet. But I think I’ll understand soon. Whatever it is—it’s coming soon.”

  “Let me help, then.”

  Gwynn shrugged. “I don’t know how you can. I don’t know if you can.”

  Colin turned back to her, opened his mouth as though to speak, but no words came. He took one deep ragged breath, then another. His eyes—those eyes, the steely color of the November skies—studied her face; he might have been memorizing her features, her expression. It would be so easy, she thought despairingly, so easy. Just to throw it all up, to hurl herself into his arms and take the protection he was offering. To give up, to give in. She knew, though, that she couldn’t. She owed something to her great-aunt, who had trusted her to figure out what she was supposed to do. She steeled her spine and the expression on her face.

  Finally, he nodded. Once. “Well, there it is, then.”

  He took one last deep breath, then leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Then he climbed into the cab of the truck, started it, and drove off up Eyewell Lane. She watched the taillights until they disappeared over the rise and he was lost to her sight.

  “Come on, then, Star,” she said, fighting back tears. Star got to her feet and followed her up the steps and into the cottage.

  49

  IN THE DREAM that night she found the note on the kitchen counter.

  Gwynn. Dovecote. T.

  . . . the T incised into the paper by the pressure of the pen and the writer.

  It was not the kind of note her father had sometimes left for her mother, letting her know where he was; it was not the kind of note her mother left when she’d gone down to the shops, to let the three of them, her children, know not to worry because they did not find her bustling in the kitchen.

  It was a command. Gwynn recognized it as such. As always, she told herself she would not jump to his bidding, would not go, just because he ordered her to. And always, her mind veered immediately to the consequences, and immediately away again. Of course she would go. Tommy knew she would go. He counted on the power he still held over her. Counted on it, and relished it. Silently—for who was there to talk to, anyway?—she slipped the note into the pocket of her dress and went out into the back garden.

  The roses were dead, the flower heads torn from their thorny branches and crushed underfoot. For a moment she stared, dumbstruck. Every single flower, every single bud. The varietals she had planted and tended so carefully over the past seven years, the bushes she had planted in place of the child she had lost. Petals—pink, red, white—torn apart and flung to the ground, and then ground into the mud, with enough anger to destroy any semblance of beauty. The work of burning fury, burning hatred.

  She wanted to run, to flee out the side gate and down onto Eyewell Lane, back down into the village to her parents’ house; but she knew what her father would say, what he had said the only other time she had gone home, crying, unable to bear life with her husband anymore. You chose him. You made your bed. And now Lucy was gone, off to the States with her American flyer husband, safe. It was the sacrifice she had made, to spare her little sister, who would never know. That one time, she had squared her shoulders against her father, stiffened her spine. She would not go back to her father again, would not abase herself.

  Instead, she would go up into the wood. She passed through the gate, which stood open for her as if party to the invitation—the command. Gwynn wiped her sweaty hands on her dress as she made her way uphill through the trees to the clearing, where the dovecote hunched close to the ground, dark and menacing. There was something wrong, she thought; there was something missing. It took her several moments to realize: the doves. They were silent. She had never come up here when they had been silent. Always there had been that underlying muted conversation between the birds, the ruffling of feathers as light as a breath of air in the trees. There had never been silence. Something was wrong.

  She forced herself to go on.

  She nearly stumbled over the first bird.

  It lay in the path, soft silver wings spread awkwardly, its beady red eye open and staring, its neck bent in an impossible way. A few steps further, two more, their necks broken, their small bodies tossed to the ground as so much trash. Near the closed door, another.

  The silence was terrifying.

  SHE COULDN’T OPEN the door. But she had to open the door.

  She lifted a shaking hand and pushed, gently at first, and then more firmly. As the door slid inward across the dirt floor, the light traced a path on the rotted straw. She took a hesitant step into the dovecote, her eyes blind at first, but then slowly growing accustomed to the darkness.

  “Tommy?” she called.

  Her voice didn’t echo, but seemed to reach out into the dark barn until it was swallowed whole.

  No birds. Not even a rustle. She licked her lips nervously. “Tommy?” Her voice cracked.

  She dared not step outside the pale box of light that fell from the door behind her; her shadow stretched forward into the darkness. The birds were dead. She knew that. All the birds were dead, all with their necks broken. To tread into the dark barn was to tread on their small, cooling bodies. She found herself shaking. Cold.

  “Tommy?” This time her voice was a whisper.

  Slowly she became aware of the slow creaking noise from the depths of the darkened barn. Steady, as though something were being moved gently by the wind. She closed her eyes, took a step forward, beyond the safe square of pale light on the floor. Her foot touched something soft—a dead dove—she stopped for only a moment, then slowly brushed the carcass aside with her shoe and took another step into the dim interior.

  Slowly, slowly, her eyes grew used to the darkness. She saw the movement first, before her brain understood the shape. The dark form turned gently in the stillness, assuming a human outline, and she froze, paralyzed, watching the pale moon of a face turn to her. The eyes were dark holes, but it was the distended neck, the ligature biting into the flesh, the knot beneath the ear, the stretched rope leading up into the invisibility of the rafters overhead that told her everything she needed to know.

  As the moment stretched, she registered it all: the overturned chair a few feet away from the place where his toes just barely scraped the ground, leaving trails in the straw and dirt below. And the creak, the slow even creak of the rope as Tommy’s body turned away from her, and then slowly back.

  GWYNN HAD NO idea how long she stood there in the dream. No idea how long she stood there in life. No idea. But she knew that Tommy, alive and now dead, would be with her
forever. And that, perhaps, had been his intention.

  She fingered the note in her pocket. Gwynn. Dovecote. T.

  When she woke, she was still cold. She understood now that she’d never be warm.

  50

  IN THE MORNING Gwynn let Star out after she’d eaten. Star didn’t mind the rear garden, but navigated her way through the brambles as through a maze, to do her business along the stone wall. Gwynn shut the door after her, knowing she’d come back when she was done, and would scratch gently at the door until let in again.

  Gwynn was tired. The dreams had exhausted her; she had awakened in the small bedroom to find the duvet tangled around her legs and her skin clammy with sweat, her heart pounding as though she’d been running, as she had been, away from the dovecote, away from Gwynn Chelton’s dead husband.

  Just as she’d done, six years previous. How she’d run away from Richard’s blood-suffused face, his distended neck, the noose that held him suspended just above the grass beneath the apple tree. Back to the house she had shared unhappily with him, to the telephone, to dial 911. He’s dead, she had cried into the receiver, I think he’s dead. Please come. The police had arrived, and the rescue, and Richard had indeed been dead. Except in her dreams, where he reappeared nightly for months. Hanging. Those months when she had described the dreams and the reality to a counselor who had done nothing for her except recommend tranquilizers, until she’d finally quit going.

  Gwynn Chelton, she knew, had not had the benefit of counseling, nor of tranquilizers. Gwynn Chelton had probably braved her dreams alone for all those years. No wonder she had ended her days as an unhappy, unfriendly woman. Tommy Chelton could not have capped their bitter relationship any more effectively.

  THE TELEPHONE RANG in the sitting room, and, somewhat unwillingly, she went out to answer it. Mary.