"Feathers for Nellie" by Melanie Page

[ShortStoryContest]

The following story has been selected as a featured runner-up in our 2015 short story contest (Contest Theme - "The Self-Destructiveness of Vengeance and Hate")

"Feathers for Nellie" by Melanie Page

Elsie Paddow trudged her slow way through the High Street. Six days a week she swept and cooked for the squire’s land agent and his daughter. It was not onerous work but she would be quitting soon. For now, God be praised, with the Armistice signed, two of her three sons would at last be coming home. Last night had been a grand party with the whole village in a frenzy of celebration. She had danced and laughed, laughed as she had not done since she was a slip of a girl, and cried a little too. She had not counted the glasses of cider. An end to war was worth getting drunk for.

As she walked, she passed tables still covered with the detritus of an evening well spent. It was an orderly mess for the local dogs, who had gone on short rations these past four years, had made free with the broken meats and dropped hunks of pie or cake. Further along the blacksmith’s wife and several of the tavern chits were already busy folding tablecloths and brandishing brooms. Beyond them were the bare tabletops set on trestles that has been the scene of joyous abandon just hours earlier. Fay Guerdon, her hair wrapped in a scarf and a tray of empty glasses in her hands, called out a greeting but Elsie had no energy to do more than wave this morning. On any other morning, there would have been shopkeepers opening their doors and greeting each other warmly, but everyone was tired it seemed. The village too showed the weariness of the troubles that had so recently ended. Bunting still hung from the half-timbered rooms that jutted out over the street and there were several nasty puddles in cobbled corners where some folks had imbibed a bit too much.

Elsie felt her stomach lurch again and she promised herself a little mug of cider, just to set her to rights, once she reached the Old Lodge. She made her way up the churchyard lane and past the pitted laneway to the Russell place before turning in at the Lodge gates. The sun was a slugabed too today, with heavy cloud obliterating what little sunshine managed to brave this November morn. To Elsie, the old house looked gloomy, the bare trees slapping against the Georgian portico in the chill wind.

There was no one in the antiquated kitchen when she let herself in and no sign that anyone had used it since she washed up from lunch the previous day. Nevertheless there were smudges of mud and a few shreds of crushed grass where someone had walked through without particular care. A broom and a cloth took care of that. No doubt Fellows or his harpy daughter had come in this way and were still sleeping off the excesses of the evening. Well, they would want their breakfast soon enough. She took the cider jug from the larder and poured herself a dram, then another for good measure. When the thumping in her head had eased a little she picked up her polishing cloth and the beeswax and lavender mixture that Miss Fellows preferred, then made her way into the dining parlour.

A cacophony of deafening shrieks filled the house. Shouts from upstairs and several ripe oaths followed, but the shrieks did not stop. Eventually Fellows came down in his ratty robe and threw the parlour door open, then fell to his knees. When he could speak, he sent Elsie flying from the house. She took the lane at a run, her aching head and deliberate feebleness forgotten. She ran straight for the manor where, between her hysteria and her shortness of breath, she got little more than the basics across. Squire Eldridge put down his serviette, sent a man for the doctor and saddled up himself. He took the shorter way through the spinney and the grassy acre where Arthur Russell had kept a couple of goats.

This was a damnable way to welcome a peaceful world, he mused as he rode silently into the bitter wind. Last night he had believed all his hard work, nursing this rural enclave through all the death and horror of war was finally over. This morning death and mayhem had come calling. Not for the first time he cursed the twist of fate that made the welfare of this corner of merry England his responsibility. Just then he saw a girl exit one of the barns, clutching her shawl more tightly to recapture some of its warmth. It was May Russell, going about the interminable chores of farm life irrespective of celebration or despair. Once he had dealt with whatever awaited at the Lodge, he would call on the family and discuss the lease. He had been content to let sleeping dogs lie, putting off the evil day when they must acknowledge reality. Still the farm needed stability and a man’s strong hand. Margaret would understand.



An hour later old Doctor Elliott dried his hands, grim faced. George Fellows was heaving his glass of brandy into the sink and Sir Thomas looked inclined to do likewise. The constable had been sent for but, as local magistrate, much of this would fall on the squire’s shoulder. He surveyed the horror, the two bodies now laying on the floor to facilitate the doctor’s examination. Why the hell would anyone kill a sweet girl with so much to live for? Was the attack aimed at her fiancé? And why, given the man had been in the village but twice? He was only here for the celebration and to have the first reading of the banns.

“George, I want you to come to the manor for a few days.” Sir Thomas laid a gentle hand on his agent’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t be here alone. If you think of anything relevant, who might wish Nellie or her young man ill - anything at all - write it down for me. I will let his kin know. This is a beastly bad business when we should be rejoicing!” Fellows could only nod. His daughter had been the least of his considerations for so long yet, at this moment, she was his whole world. He stumbled out and the doctor whispered something then followed, crunching over the frosty ground. It was still barely ten o’clock.

The squire passed through to the formal parlour. Elsie Paddow perched on one of the striped jacquard chairs looking ill at ease. Normally she dusted and swept the dog hair from the chairs, then left the pretty room in peace. She, in her rusty gabardine skirt, mop cap and old apron, was a decidedly incongruous note. There was another on the sofa opposite her. One of the larch green satin cushions was missing, the right one. In this precise room its absence stood out like a banner. Eldridge said nothing though his eyes flicked to the spot. Elsie sniffed again.

“When did you get here this morning Elsie?”

“Weren’t more th’n quarter past eight, Sir. Well, say twenty past to be safe.”

“And there was nothing out of the ordinary in the kitchen or the grounds.”

“House was quiet, Sir.” There were no escapees from bedlam wandering the village and certainly no one else could have committed the horror in the next room.

“Anything at all, Elsie? Was there anything out of place, inside or out?”

“There were naught but a trace of mud on the kitchen floor, but I cleaned it up first thing. Only thing were that I don’t know why it were there.” She frowned, “None use th’ kitchen door, ‘cept me, an’ sometime Miss Fellows if she is… was goin’ out to her herb garden, but then she wears them patens in the scullery.”

Silently Eldridge filed the information away. “And was the door locked this morning?”

Elsie just looked at him. “I never knowed Mr Fellows to lock his doors, Sir, although he would put th’ bar across if there were a bad wind, for th’ catch were none too good.”

“But you know where the key is?”

“On th’ hook by th’ pantry, Sir.”

“I will be locking up when I leave. You go now and I will let you know when the constable says you may come and tidy up.”

Elsie rose, looking at once relieved and reluctant, but then the squire bethought him one last question. “Can you think of anyone who disliked Miss Fellows? Or might wish her harm?”

“I would not speak ill of th’ dead.”

“So there was someone?”

“Only a baker’s dozen, Sir.”



Eldridge opened the door of Miss Fellows’ bedroom and stepped carefully through, ducking to avoid one low black beam. He took in the old tester bed with beribboned counterpane, oak dresser and ladies writing desk set in the dormer window facing south. The bed had not been slept in. The squire saw nothing out of place, nothing that would not be in any young woman’s boudoir. He took the spindly chair and stared out the window into the desolate morning. A slim red morocco journal sat on the writing desk and he opened it to where a white feather served to mark yesterday’s date. To his regret it proved to be more of an aide-memoir than a recounting of hopes and dreams but Eldridge slipped it into his pocket anyway, in the hope that it would give him an inkling of what could have happened. The guest bedroom where Mr Alexander had been sleeping yielded little more than small valise filled with clothes and some shaving tackle.

After locking the doors, he mounted up and then considered who he might call on before returning home. It was little more than half a mile to the Russell farmstead and he left Oakleaf with fourteen year old Sarah, the baby of the family, who promised to rub him down and give him some hay. He let himself into the warm kitchen.

The place was clean, but despite the appetising aroma of soup simmering on the hob and bread rising in the pans, there was something amiss. Eldridge knew this house, and indeed, most of the farmsteads on his property, as well as he knew his own. He had run in and out of this house from his boyhood, one shared with Arthur Russell and his brothers. His roots in the place went back to a gift of land by King Henry. Theirs were even deeper.

Within seconds of entering he could feel the change in the place. This had been the heart of the house when Arthur Russell was alive, a noisy cavern that ran across the whole rear of the house, with three doors opening out of the northern wall, the middle one into the farmyard and the others into the scullery and washhouse respectively. Now the chairs stood neatly pushed in at the wide pine table and at one end a woman sat plucking a chicken.

“Good morning, Margaret.”

She looked up and acknowledged him with a nod. “Squire.” She bent her head to her work again.

“Are all the girls here?” He pulled a chair out from the table, reversed it and sat astride. He had liked Margaret Russell from the day Arthur had brought her home, a sweet girl from good farming stock but with brains too. She had encouraged Arthur to specialise with hens and with the recent shortages had been known to wink at the loss of a few eggs or put the disappearance of an old hen down to ‘foxes’. In a small part of his heart he regretted the fact that Russell had seen her first. They had been good friends these past two decades. He had been willing to offer her a shoulder to cry on but she had shrugged off compassion, kept her pain to herself and had gone about her work with steely determination.

“They are. And Jack. He’s mending the bottom of the west barn door. Do you want him?”

“I’ll certainly talk to him later. Did you see anyone out and about last night, Margaret, between here and the Lodge?”

She raised the back of her hand to her forehead and pushed back a lock of hair that straggled from her loose bun. The lines bracketing her mouth tightened, as though with tension or pain. “The whole village was out and about last night, Squire. You were there yourself.” Her voice was not contemptuous, it was dull, resigned, but resentful too. She had been struggling alone for too long, even the joy of recent events was not enough to lift her out of her lassitude.

“What about after the party subsided?”

“There were folk stumbling home into the small hours but a fair few of the heavier drinkers slept in the hayloft or the stables behind the tavern, lest they fall into the weir. Jack told me so when he came in this morning, for he was one of them.”

“Who was the last you saw or heard?”

“Old Lockhart went past, must have been close to midnight. He was singing Tipperary. After that I went to bed.”

“And you saw nothing unusual after that? Heard nothing?”

“Nothing til Elsie screamed like a banshee this morning. Then she flew up the lane like the hounds were after her.” She didn’t seem particularly interested. Her hands had completely denuded the headless hen; she turned it over, checking her handiwork before picking it up by its bound feet and hanging it in the larder.

“Yes, I’m afraid she had a shock. There has been a death.”

She looked up at him at last. “Mr Fellows has gone to his reward, has he? That’s to be regretted.”



The door opened and young Sarah came in, followed by Jack Tyler, Margaret’s son in law, his wife Annie and May, Annie and Sarah’s seventeen year old sister.

“Give Squire a mug of cider, Annie.”

“Nere mind tha, Annie,” Jack Tyler’s slow words were still slurred by the bullet that had shattered his jaw in the Somme. “Sit and put tha feet up. Mind the babe.” He reached under the sink, pulled out a small flagon and poured two mugs. Jack had been something of a larrikin when he and Annie had been ‘walking out’ but eighteen months in France, not to mention the months in hospital, had sobered him. He was fast becoming the mainstay of this property. “’Ere’s to ya guud healt Squire.”

“Thank you, Jack.” He turned to the girls, hovering at the other end of the table. “Where is your sister?”

“Bette stayed on at the tavern last night to help clear up, Sir.” Annie looked from her mother to her husband and ducked her head.

“I see.” He looked around at the honest faces he had seen grow from flaxen, freckled scapegraces into hardworking farmers. These were good people. If anyone could help him, he was sure that they would. “There was a tragedy last night at the Lodge and I need to know if you saw or heard anything that might indicate who was responsible or tell us just what happened. Did you all go out to the festivities?”

“We did. The girls and I came home a little after nine. The moon was still out but we saw no one else come this way. The girls went to bed and I walked around the barns, given that Jack was in the village.”

“I suppose you did not like to risk Annie’s health, out so late.”

“Mother said we should leave,” May spoke for the first time. “Mrs Latimer was talking about lighting a candle to thank God that her boys were finally coming home. Anyway, she told us to get our things.” A flicker of something like anger crossed Margaret’s placid features and she frowned at her daughter.

“Did you happen to see Nellie Fellows or her fiancé?”

“I saw them dancing outside the tavern and she was talking about a wedding at Advent,” Sarah piped up.

“You did not speak to them or see them later?”

“We did not.” There was a hint of truculence, a touch of belligerence in May’s attitude.

“May,” Annie spoke up sharply. “We do not speak ill of …” she closed her lips abruptly.

“Were you going to say, ‘the dead’, Annie? I had not said that Nellie Fellows was dead.”

Annie had gone white. “No Sir, not the dead. I’ve tried and tried to keep the girls from saying wickedness about her. She was ‘most always kind and friendly when we would meet her in the village.”

“But you did know she was dead?”

Annie put her hand to her throat and looked, very deliberately, down at the table. “You said a tragedy, Sir and Elsie…, well, she was saying wild things as she went past.”

Eldridge left the farm ten minutes later with little more information. The younger girls had turned mute and Jack just sat with his arms folded across his chest. He would read the journal and write to Connor Alexander’s people. The Admiralty would know where to find them. And even if George could not suggest a reason, the squire knew someone who could, someone who had access to the most scandalous, wickedest, most accurate gossip in the village.



“Get on with you, Sir!”

“Mrs Rouse, I am not jesting. Please have a seat and tell me anything you might have heard about Miss Fellows.”

With trepidation, as befitting one who would never normally sit in the presence of her employer, Mrs Rouse perched on the edge of a dining room chair and pushed one stray pin back into her greying coiffure.

“Well I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she set quite a few people’s backs up, that one.”

“How exactly? She was away at school until the very summer that the war broke out.”

“She came swanning home, expecting to be the belle of the ball. Only there weren’t, any ball. She didn’t go to London and be a debutante, she went to work in the office of that new munitions factory they built out at Fenly. She was too delicate for the land army but she had education so it was the office.”

“And she was disliked for this?”

“Oh, not at first, but when she was working in a nice office and the rest were working sixteen hours in high summer, dropping into bed and doing it over, day after day, they didn’t appreciate her. She kept talking about how everyone had to contribute, do their bit to fight the Hun.” She tsked.

“In her journal,” he opened the volume and flipped back a dozen pages, “she said that it was good to see the results of her efforts, and that her small acts of encouragement had made a difference. What do you think she meant?”

Hilda Rouse tsked some more. “She was forever following the example of that other one, the writer lady. She gave out feathers, white feathers to boys not in uniform. What, what have I said?”

“Hilda, tell me everything you know.”

“About the baroness, Sir Thomas?”

“The baroness, the feathers, any boys who might have received one? Anything.”

Mrs Rouse settled herself more comfortably on her chair and launched into her narrative. “The baroness who wrote about that English lord who saved Frenchies in the revolution, she started a trend for girls to give white feathers to young men who should have been off fighting.”

Eldridge scrunched his brows. “Baroness Orczy gave out white feathers. Symbolising cowardice, I take it?”

She frowned, “Encouraging them to serve their country and protect their womenfolk.”

“I’m sure her encouragement was appreciated. And so, Nellie has been giving feathers to our village lads. Anyone in particular.”

“Most all of them, Sir. She didn’t give one to Mr Ian when he was down from university, for anyone can see that the army would not have him, with his sight as poor as it is, but most all the single lads.”

“And did anyone take her to task for it?”

“Izzy Howard did, Sir, gave her a right dressing down, despite the difference in their stations, for she was that angry that her young man was being called a coward. The army turned him down for flat feet though he looks hale enough. Miss Fellows was nice as pie about it though and said she was very sorry.”

“So, no lasting rancour?”

“Not from Izzy, though she was curt for a while.”

“What about from others.”

“May Russell all but slapped her in the churchyard a year and a half ago, Sir.”

“I see, tell me more about May.”

She shook her head. “I cannot, Sir, for they neither of them would talk about it to anyone else. Both white hot with anger they were and as far as I know they’ve not spoken since but pass each other in the street like they were there alone.”

“And her fiancé, how was he received?” Eldridge had not liked the boy himself, when Fellows had brought him to dine at the manor.

She stared scornfully at her employer. “That one were pinchbeck, Sir. He might have looked like gold, but he would have tarnished fast.”



Eldridge took Oakleaf for a slow amble up to the vestry door. Humphrey would be on his way to evening prayer and this would be the best time to catch him. He cast him mind back over the past several years and the changes in the Russell household that would have contributed to young May’s enmity. When the war started, Margaret Russell had been a vigorous woman in her late thirties, busy with a farm and five growing children. Within four months her husband had suffered an apoplexy and for another year he lay in his big bed until the winter took him. She struggled on, with only the children and a couple of elderly part-timers for help and then her son had signed up, just before Christmas two years ago, a month after his eighteenth birthday.

He had seen little of the family in the months since, he recollected. It was not surprising for everyone was struggling to make twelve hours do the work of twenty four and there was precious little jollification in the village, with the notable exception of last night. Even the celebration of Jack and Annie’s wedding had been muted, he recalled, by the telegram they had received after Passchendaele. Yet there must have been something significant to rile mild May Russell to violence.

His cousin came around the corner of the church and waved. “Tom, I missed you at the manor today when I came up to see poor George. Do you know anything yet?”

Squire Eldridge shook his head. “I’ve spoken to a few people and so has the constable, but the officers from Fenly aren’t well known here and most people won’t give them the time of day.”

“Indeed.”

“No, the doctor says they were killed about midnight, give or take an hour, and they were last seen dancing at ten thirty. The Russell women apparently heard nothing and they are the closest neighbours. One assumes that Nellie was the intended victim, given that Connor Alexander was hardly known around here.”

The vicar drew in a deep breath and let it out again, then turned and matched his steps to Sir Thomas’. “You are probably right, but the fellow was not always a gentlemen and there were a few men, and girls too, I suppose, who had no love for him.”

They slipped into the old stone church and Humphrey Eldridge pulled his worn green surplice and stole from the rack. “He attended a couple of the dances at Fenly and there was more than one girl complained of his attentions when he’d had a drop too much. He would target the shy girls, those who wouldn’t make a fuss.”

“So you think that it was one of the girls he injured, or a jealous boyfriend?”

“I don’t think anything of the sort. From what George could tell me it didn’t sound like a crime of passion but one of cold, calculating fury.” He paused, “Go into the church. After the events of today you need prayer more than almost anyone in the village. It’s very sad that we have grown so accustomed to evil hundreds of miles away, we forget that evil can be as close as our own hearts.”



Morning saw Sir Thomas back at Acorn Farm. He ran May to earth in the western barn, replacing the nesting straw. She paled when she saw him shut the door but bobbed a curtsey anyway.

“Good morning, Squire, are you here for some eggs?”

“No May, just a few words. You know that when there is a murder, the police ask questions about who might have wanted to hurt a person. Now, a little bird tells me that you and Nellie Fellows were at outs and have not been speaking to one another. Is this true?” A reluctant nod.

“And so what sparked it?”

She looked down and twisted her blunt fingers in her apron, “I got a letter from Paul, Sir, from Belgium, not long after he got there. He was saying how it was, lots of trenches and the noise and the smells and the lice.”

“And why did this make you angry with Nellie?”

“She had given him one of her little feathers sir, four actually, and called him a coward when he said he couldn’t go to the war. But m’ mother had given eggs and hens to that toff from the recruiting board in Fenly so he wouldn’t be called up. She said the farm needed him more than the war did.”

“And is that why he went?’ he asked gently, “Because Nellie called him a coward?”

She shook her head. “Paul always wanted to go. Jack went right away. He would have married Annie ‘afore he went, but he said that by the time they called the banns the war would be half over. Paul wanted to go then, even before m’ father got sick, but he were too young. He were only fifteen when Jack left. When she gave him the feathers it was like…,”she paused and raised her eyes, looking around the barn as though the words she sought might be hiding in the rafters, “an excuse to do what he wanted all along. But in his letter he regretted it. Said if he had known there were just as many lice in the trenches as in the poultry barns, he might as well have stayed here.”

“So why did you and Nellie fight?”

Her face darkened. “She were smugly swanning around, telling all and sundry about how she was so pleased to be working in munitions. She said as she was helping to make our war effort possible. I told her that she was doing more harm than good. Any one of the fellows sent home with a blighty could have done her job but she got my brother sent off and who would feed the soldiers if there were no eggs? She said bullets were more important than eggs and then I told her she should try eating one.” She looked down, proud but chagrined, “We never spoke since.”

“You didn’t harm her, did you May.”

A tear slid down her cheek. “No sir. She was stupid about the war and men going off to fight, but she were never mean. I never even hit her.”

He put an arm around her and she snivelled into his shoulder. “I know.”



By lunchtime, Eldridge and Constable Drake had interviewed half the village. Most had celebrated so ardently that they were still unclear as to their own movements on the night in question. Kate from The Four Bells had paid careful note to the men who had dossed down in the barn. It was needful she said, in case there was a fire. She swore than none of them could have stirred till morning, not even for the last trump. While some farmsteads lay beyond the manor, few would have gone past the old Lodge to get home, not when it would have meant fording the river in the dark. They all told him solemnly that they had gone home by the roads and he believed them. The beasts drawing most of the wagons knew their way home in the dark in any case and it would have been folly to go cross-country.

Fay Guerdon from the smithy said that far from acting all lover-like, the happy couple had appeared to have had a tiff. “And I don’t wonder at it either, Squire, for she caught him bothering Bette Russell and if Jack Tyler had not been snoring in the barn, that Alexander fellah would have been picking his teeth up out of the cobbles.” That, she thought, would have been a little shy of eleven.

He thanked her and went back to the manor. The telegram from the Admiralty told him that Alexander was unlikely to have enemies related to his work and that they would notify his kin.

He took his tea into the study and shut the door. It was obvious to him where the indications were pointing and yet there was no real logic. Neither Nellie nor her fiancé were any threat. Their wedding was three weeks away and then they would be gone. While certainly brutal, the murder did not have any hallmarks of premeditation. So was it then a crime of opportunity? Who had opportunity? Sir Thomas took one sip, set the delicate china cup down and proceeded to think furiously until his Earl Grey grew cold and dusk fell.



Eldridge took the trap with him the next morning when he went to Acorn Farm. It was still. He saw one of the girls enter the far barn with a basket so he tied the pony’s harness to the railing and went into the house. Margaret Russell stood in her kitchen kneading the dough for the day’s baking. Over and over her right hand lifted the dough and folded it, her left working sinuously to punch it down and turn it.

Her face was shuttered. She was not pleased to see him, nor fearful nor resigned. She was simply distant.

“Good morning Sir Thomas,” she said formally.

“Good morning, Margaret.”

They looked at each other. After more than two decades of living a mile and a half apart, of seeing one another almost daily, they knew one another so well that one might assume no words needed to be spoken. Yet it appeared that he did not know her at all. Could one person ever know another? Once he would have said yes. Certainly this morning she had divined his thoughts. Still, he could not simply put her in the trap and drive off either. He twisted his soft cap in his hands and nerved himself to ask the most difficult question of his life. He need not have bothered.

“You are here to ask me why I killed them, then?”

She did not pause, continuing to work the dough even as she talked; fold, punch, turn, fold, punch, turn.

He felt his stomach rebel, “Why did you kill them, Margaret?”

“I’d hated her, wanted to kill her for a long time.” Margaret said prosaically, as though it were the weather forecast. “I knew about the feathers. Not that she’d given one to my Paul, but that she was in the habit of giving them out. Mary Howard told me so when Nellie and Izzy had that set to.

“She was a fool, Nellie Fellows, anyone could see that. She thought a gun made a man. Look at who she chose to wed. A greater waste of tailoring I’ve yet to see, but he could talk. Putting on airs about his work at the Admiralty. He was good for nothing more than carrying files and clipping Churchill’s cigars.” She snorted. “I had a good man who worked himself into the grave trying to do the work of three when the two hired hands enlisted.”

“When did you find out that she had given Paul a feather?”

Her face crumpled. “Not til after we got the telegram. I was going through his things, I gave some to Jack that fitted him and the rest to the Vicar. It was in the little carved box his father made him. I didn’t know she’d given him one until then, that she’d deliberately pushed him towards that bloody shambles. I thought I had him safe but he went into Norwich and signed up.”

“You believed that she had killed him?”

She shook her head. “No”, she said, but her voice was brittle as flint, “the Germans killed him, but she pushed him.”

She turned. “If you push a boy who is sitting on the edge of a well, Squire, and he drowns, do you blame the water for drowning him or the one who pushed him?”

“But that was a year ago. You didn’t kill her then? Why not?”

She looked at him and there was a feral gleam that he swore he had never seen in a woman’s eye before. This was the fierceness of a tigress. “I wanted to. You’ve no idea how I ached to kill her. Or to hurt her. I killed two chickens, drained them into a bucket and took it to throw over her front door, but I stopped myself. It was wrong.”

“Why was it wrong?”

She shaped the loaf and set it in a proving pan then pulled out a chair at the table. She was wearing her best navy worsted work dress today he noted idly. She sat and gestured to the chair opposite. At that moment the door opened abruptly. Annie Tyler stood in the doorway looking from one of them to the other, a sickening uncertainty written plainly on her mild features.

“Mother?”

“Please sit down, Annie.” Eldridge spoke, as to the child that she had once been. “I should tell you that you are too late. Your mother has confessed to killing Nellie.”

There was a groan and Annie slumped against the table. Eldridge guided her into a chair and took the one beside her, putting one arm lightly around her. “It was because of Paul, wasn’t it?”

Annie raised her head in puzzlement, “How did you know?” The door slammed back and Jack and Sarah pushed in, Bette and May panting a minute behind them.



They sat around him like a stone circle, Eldridge at the foot of the table and the others arrayed around it. They all looked to him to hear his verdict. “I didn’t know,” his eyes caught Annie’s as he spoke. “I only suspected, right from the first, that someone from this family must have done the deed or at least have known who did so. By the very nature of things, most people were readily accounted for. Families arrived in the High Street together and left together. Those in the barn Kate can vouch for. The only other person who was close enough to the lodge and whose whereabouts was not accounted for was myself. I rode home alone after most of my household had returned in the wagon. And then there was this family.”

He looked from one face to the other. “Did you know of her hatred for Nellie?”

“We knew.” It was May who answered. “She wouldn’t talk about Paul though, wouldn’t hear his name mentioned. She would lay in her bed with the windows open and look across at the lights in the old Lodge. Sometimes she would walk abroad at night.”

He turned. “You never did tell me why you did not throw the blood over her door. Why was it wrong?”

She shrugged. “They would have pitied her and seen me as some unhinged, grief-stricken mother. It would have been grief then, but not the other night. That was justice.”

Eldridge sighed. It was close enough to his own musings. He took a deep breath. It was time to get this over with. “When considering a crime, we are told to look for means, motive and opportunity. It was clear that this was, what we call, an opportunistic crime. Someone who had a motive, with the means to do murder easily to hand, was given an opportunity they could not resist. Margaret, indeed, several of you ladies had the opportunity. Jack you were accounted for, sleeping in the barn. Bette stayed the night in the tavern. Margaret, Annie, May and Sarah returned.”

“Annie, your mother said that you girls went off to sleep when you returned and I did not think that you would go out across the open field in your advanced condition. Margaret also had told me that she had been out that night, checking the barns which was normally something Jack did. But when he checked the barns, I’m assuming he did what Arthur had always done; take the shotgun to deal with foxes.”

Jack nodded, his face pale.

“So, we have means to commit the murder and a golden opportunity. That left motive. Nellie had given out scores of feathers but only a few of the boys who received them actually enlisted. Several were deemed unfit for duty, at least three were still too young and some were already engaged in war work of one kind or another. Of the ones who received a feather and enlisted, only Paul has been killed. Two are prisoners and two more have been invalided home.



“Jus’ a minute Squire” Jack looked at him blankly. “Can you tell me how y’ knowed that it were the feathers that caused it?”

“I will tell you, Jack.” Margaret was supremely calm. No glimmer of emotion showed on her face, it was as smooth as ivory. No wonder then that she had been able to so successfully conceal her rancour from her family. “I heard them arguing long before I saw them. She was berating him for his licentiousness and he contended that he’d committed no crime in pinching the bottom of one of the tavern maids. But my daughter is not a tavern maid!” Bette blenched and looked away.

“In any case, Nellie put him straight and told him to keep his hands to himself in future. He told her what he really wanted and she was happy to give it to him.”

“I was following them. He stopped under the old oak on the corner. I just watched them, though it made me sick. Then he stopped fondling her. He said now that the war was over, he would think about her idea.” Her face soured as though she had sipped vinegar, “Seems she wanted him to train to be her father’s replacement, your agent in the village, Squire. She would have been living in that house, playing queen of the village to my dying day. I did not want to pay my rents and bend my knee to the bitch who’d killed my son.”

“I stepped out from behind a tree and pointed the gun at them. They were incredulous at first but I told them that they could go into the house or I would shoot them where they stood. We went in through the kitchen. I had a length of rope with me that I’d taken to secure the western barn door so I told him to tie her to the dining room chair. He wasn’t sober enough to take me on and she was just a coward. She sat there and begged me not to shoot her. So I didn’t.”

“He tied her to the chair for me and then I sent him through to the formal sitting room for a cushion, told him I would shoot her if he did anything but bring one back. He stood there with a bright green satin cushion in his hands and I walked up to him, put the barrel to it and pulled the trigger.”

There was a collective gasp and the younger girls clapped their hands to their mouths. Jack looked weary and Annie grieved.

“After that, he bled to death quite quickly.” Margaret had resumed her story as if it was of no account. “When he stopped moaning I tore open the cushion. I told Nellie Fellows that she had killed my son, killed him with her bloody feathers and her wicked words. Then I pulled out handfuls of the bloody feathers and shoved them down her lying throat.”



Annie was sobbing quietly beside her mother, one plump hand clutching at her mother’s worn one. “Mama, did you not realise that you would hang? That you will hang? Dear God in Heaven, how could you.”

Margaret just looked at her. “She killed my son, Annie. I couldn’t keep him safe, but I could do this.” She stood, “I thought about it, there, just for a moment, under the tree. It’s no good to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew it would mean the gallows.” She shrugged, “I’m not sorry. I would kill her again if I could.”

Annie dragged herself to her feet. She held her mother, kissed her cheek. Her sisters came up and did the same. Each had eloquent tears running down her cheeks but they faced their tragedy stoically, the way they had always done. Margaret touched each of her daughters then separated herself firmly from them and turned to Eldridge. “I see you brought the trap. I will get my coat, Squire. It’s cold outside this morning.” She paused at the foot of the stairs and turned. “It is Paul’s birthday today,” she said, every inch the proud mother. “He would have been twenty.”



One minute later as they sat, staring mutely at the pine table, the shotgun roared.

[DATo]

A nicely wrought story which adequately satisfies the conditions of the theme - The Self-Destructiveness of Vengeance and Hate. Being a Yank, and a consummate anglophile, I particularly enjoyed the British 'voice' and 'flavor' of this piece. The descriptions of the setting and characters were especially well written in my opinion. I had a bit of trouble keeping up with the cast as so many characters were included, but this certainly is not meant to reflect negatively upon the quality of story however. This was a well engineered plot culminating in an ending as subtle, abrupt, and explosive as the pull of a trigger.

Very well done! My compliments, and thank you for sharing.

[Melanie_Page]

Many thanks. Yes, there are a lot of characters and of course normally a short story has very few. I was aiming to reflect the complexity of village life where everyone is entwined with everyone else. Thank you for you comment. It it lovely to have feedback, especially when it is so complimentary.