the cottage, a short story

I dreamed this last night.  I had to get it written down soonest.  Tissues for the end warning

The cottage

“Charles, there is a letter from my great-aunt along with confirmation that she left me the cottage and Fluffy,” I said.

“Fluffy?  That outsize cat she wore about like a tippet? I wonder she didn’t leave the cottage to him,” said Charles.

Charles is what my great-aunt Hetty referred to as my ‘gentleman friend’ which is closer than the modern appellation of ‘boyfriend’.  Charles has his boyish moments but he is definitely a gentleman.  And it is as well that he was brought up that way, and with a firm set of ethics, because in business he is a slippery customer and sails as close to the wind as his morals permit.  He is fairly feline himself, and Hetty took to him because Fluffy did. Charles grumbled about orange hairs on his customary silver grey suit, but I did not notice him dislodging the cat.

“Actually,” I said, “She said in her letter that she would have left Fluffy the cottage if she thought she could get away with it, and for me to inherit after him as he has no heirs of his body which he acknowledges.  She had him neutered when he was a kitten so I doubt he has any heirs of his body at all.”

“How old is he now?”

“Nineteen?” I hazarded a guess, counting on my fingers.  “Not a bad age for any cat.  He is half Maine Coone, I don’t know if that makes a difference.”

“Who is looking after him?”

“A paid companion, until I get there to take over,” I said.  “She told me I need to live in the cottage for Fluffy’s lifetime, and ask my gentleman friend to do something about the cows, but not to be frightened by them.  Surely she wasn’t losing it?  I don’t believe she has ever kept cows.”

“We can drive down this afternoon if you like,” said Charles. “I’ve never seen the famous cottage, she has always visited you.  Let me put through a couple of phone calls so I can take time off; you pack for both of us, you know what I like.”

Charles has no need to work, but the idea of being idle is anathema to him. However, he is amenable to the idea of holidays, so long as he does not, as he puts it, lose the finger from the pulse.  As I write freelance articles, it matters little where I am to do so.  Charles told me that I did not have to work, and I asked him how he would feel if told he could take his finger off the pulse.  The look of wild horror was answer enough.  He is a control freak but he is my control freak.

The journey to the East coast was uneventful, and Gippestowe was much as I had imagined it.  It was once a seaside resort and the Victorian parts were a decaying grandeur, like an old lady a little too fond of her sherry, and gone to seed.  The modern part was the port.  Hetty’s cottage was just below the lowest bridging point and was an anachronistic architectural gem between the concrete 1960s bridge and the derelict warehouses which nobody seemed to either own or cared to demolish, surrounded by chainlink fencing, and looking very ugly. 

Charles frowned.

“That diminishes the value of what looks like a genuine 14^th century mercantile house,” he said, disapprovingly.  “I wonder who owns that rubbish?”

 I assumed he meant the warehouses, not my aunt’s cottage, which is what she always referred to as a messuage, a walled property. It had about a quarter of an acre of land, which is big in a town centre, if not large by the standards of Charles’ country house where we  usually live.

We parked, and I took the keys the solicitor had sent, to let us in.  The lock was modern enough.  A teenage girl looked up from where she was working, writing something.

“Oh!  You’ll be Miss Cubitt.  I’m Tracey; your aunt let me do my homework here in return for helping with Fluffy.  My ‘A’ levels are coming up and I have five siblings at home.”

“Tracey, please feel free to continue to use the house for peace and quiet,” I said.  “And perhaps you can help me with Fluffy’s routine.”

Fluffy unwound himself from Tracey’s feet, plodded over to me on solemn quiet pugs and then launched himself straight into the air.

I was used to this, and caught him with a grunt at his weight.  He had not gone as high as he usually did; poor old boy, he was slowing down.

I hadn’t said a thing! But he growled at me anyway and swiped a velvet paw at my nose.  I settled him on my shoulders. It seemed the right thing to do.

Charles and I left Tracey wrestling with angular momentum and explored.  It was a house which was full of odd corners.  Oddly, the only window which looked directly onto the dock was the attic window, a room which encompassed the whole area under the eaves, though it had been properly boarded out, and plasterboard over the eaves suggested that Hetty had made sure it was a space which could be used.  One window looked downriver, one looked upriver, and one onto the garden.

“Den?” asked Charles.

“I think so,” I said.  “A desk looking out onto the garden and ottomans at the other two windows.  Though the view of the warehouses is less salubrious.”

“There is at least the sweep of the river,” said Charles. “I find the bridge less appetising.”

“Sometimes looking on the bustle of human life is good,” I said.

“I expect there are ants’ nests in the garden if you like that sort of thing,” said Charles, rudely.

I ignored him. 

We had settled in nicely for a couple of days when we had our first caller.

He was a man whose clothing was a bit too studiedly expensive, and he had a moustache.  I don’t like men with moustaches, so I was not charmed by the brilliance of his ultra-white smile.

“Miss Hannah Cubitt?  I’m John Devlin.  My commiserations on the loss of your grandmother.”

“Great aunt,” I corrected. “Aunt Hetty told us she was going to die on the sixteenth; sometimes she was extraordinarily accurate.  Her diary was in her effects and it says on the day of her death ‘Expecting to be run over unexpectedly; will stay in all day.’  She was killed by a hit and run driver when putting out the dustbin.”

“Terrible,” said Mr. Devlin. “The carelessness of people these days.  I had no idea she had family; you’ve not visited before.”

“No, Hetty liked visiting people and disliked her own routine being put out of kilter,” I said. “You will pardon me, but you don’t seem like a friend of hers.”

“Oh!  I am a neighbour in a manner of speaking,” said Devlin.  “I own the warehouses next door; and I wanted to purchase this house so I can make a clean sweep of demolishing everything.   Your aunt would not sell.”

“So I should think,” I said.  “This is a listed building, so you could not demolish it anyway.  And I’m not selling either.”

“Your aunt was eccentric; surely a young lady like you ...”

“I’m eccentric too,” I said.  “Good day.”

Charles was standing on the stairs, out of sight of the door, listening.

“That was very revealing,” he said. “Why do I think that if he bought this house, a tragic accident would see it demolished, or burned to the ground?”

“He has plenty of room with those two warehouses to demolish them and develop,” I said.  “And if he goes for the current trend of dockland luxury flats, the quaint medieval building next door would be a selling point.”

“Moreso if he owned it and turned it into a museum-cum-tea-shoppe,” said Charles.  “And you could do worse than consider that yourself, employing people like Tracey, though you’d have to have her certificated for food hygiene.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I don’t think Fluffy would like it, and he has been Hetty’s loyal companion since she found him in a drain and popped him in her pocket to drive him home.  That was in the days when her main vehicle was a huge motorbike,” I added.

“I’m going to miss Hetty, even though I only met her a few times,” said Charles. “She was one of a kind.  And you’re the same, which is why I love you.  Why don’t we get married?”

“You only want a legal share of Fluffy,” I teased.  “I swore I wouldn’t be a gold digger and marry someone so financially out of my league.”

“Oh, well, you’re a land owner now,” said Charles.  “It evens the score.”

It didn’t, but it was nice of him to say so.

“Well, I need to nip back to the city for a day or two,” said Charles.  “I’ll be back tonight if I can, but don’t worry if I can’t make it until the weekend.” He kissed me and departed.

Hetty’s house really was like a museum.  I found a playbill from 1789 in a bookshelf, and one wardrobe was full of her grandmother’s Victorian gowns.

I almost had to try one of them on.

Fortunately her grandmother had not been a lady with a nineteen inch waist, though I found I still needed the corset to be able to get into one of those beautiful dresses.

And then I heard a noise downstairs.

It was not time for Tracey to arrive, she was at school; and Fluffy was with me.  And he, fool cat, took a flying leap for the top of the wardrobe, dislodging a box of something which cascaded all over me.  I was later to discover that it was a box of Georgian wig powder.

I hastened out of my room onto the gallery which surrounded what Hetty called the vestibule, which I would have called a great hall.  I heard a gasp; down below a man with a petrol can in one hand and newspaper in the other dropped both, and fled.

I could smell petrol.

I phoned the police first, and then Charles, and sobbed all over him.

“I’ll be there inside two hours,” he said.

The police arrived before then, and gave me a funny look.

“Going to a party, miss?” asked the SOCO officer.

“No, I ... oh, I was messing about trying on some of the old clothes in Hetty’s closet,” I said.

“I wager chummy took you for a ghost in that grey lace with the powder all over you,” he said.

“Powder? Oh! Fluffy knocked it off,” I said.  I glanced towards the mirror over the mantel of the fireplace. “Oh!” I added.  A grey face with tear streaks looked back at me, and grey hair.  “No wonder he fled,” I added.

They found fingerprints on the petrol can, which suggested that whoever it was would turn out to be some low life.  I mentioned the offer to buy from Mr. Devlin, but they did not seem hopeful of tying the crime to him.  They asked about my boyfriend and my own will, and were confused when I laughed at them, until I explained that a piddling little cottage in an obscure seaside town was small potatoes to my lover.  And that as he had asked me to marry him, he would be a fool to kill me before he was an unequivocal beneficiary in any case.  I was more certain that it was Devlin.  Why he wanted me out and to have the cottage was the puzzle.  I was more angry than afraid; Fluffy had been at risk as well as me.

Charles arrived home as promised, not much more than two hours later, and we locked the place up like Fort Knox.

We were in bed later when I heard cattle lowing.  Charles was straight up the ladder into the loft, as naked as the day he was born.  Really he was poetry in motion, as athletic as any cat. I confess, I purred.

He was down shortly after, looking grim, and dialled a number.

“Coastguard?  I think you may want to intercept the Mary-Anne, coming down the River Gippy.  I have reason to believe she is carrying illegally raised veal. Yes, my name is Charles Rosier, I am residing currently at Old Guildhall Cottage, Gippestowe.”

He came back to bed.

“Veal?” I said.

“Your great-aunt was spot on that I can get that sorted out,” said Charles.  “I know a few people.  I could see, just, the loading of them.  I suspect they are being raised in conditions not legal in England, and it’s a short crossing to Europe.  Avoiding one lot of customs by keeping and loading them from a secluded warehouse would net him a mint.  I wager that the views of decaying inner walls we can see through the windows of the warehouse  by the street are painted canvas, and the same for anyone passing up or down the river on the other side.  No wonder the chainlink is so sturdy; it is to keep the cows in.”

“But why did he want the cottage as well?  He can’t pull it down, and if he burned it down, there is no way he could use the land, as it would be visible.”

“I suspect he feared what you might see,” said Charles.  “And I do wonder if your aunt reported hearing cows to the police.  They seem not to have taken her seriously if so, but if her niece also reported such noises?  I doubt Hetty could get up that ladder, too, for the one window facing the right way, but you might do so.”

“Then why did he kill her?  I assume he did kill her,” I said.

Charles shrugged.

“Didn’t you say that he had no idea what relationship you had at first, and seemed surprised that she had relatives?  I expect he expected the place to fall into disrepair through being empty.”

Fluffy crept down between us at this point, purring up a storm, so we gave up talking to pet him.

His feat with the powder had, after all, quite possibly saved my life.  The young thug with the petrol can might have threatened me had he not thought me to be a ghost.

Mr. Devlin was shortly under arrest, and the cattle in the warehouse taken away by the RSPCA, and I told them that I believed my great aunt had reported the sounds of cattle to the police and had been ignored. 

Writing off little old ladies as senile and hearing things is not a good habit to get into.

Charles was back in London for a day or two, and I was sitting at the dressing table when I looked not at my own reflection, but into the eyes of my great aunt.  She winked at me, and mouthed ‘Marry him’ to me.

“I will,” I said.  “I had decided to say yes.”

She smiled.

And then Fluffy leaped past me, right into the mirror, and arranged himself around her neck in his usual fashion.  And he winked at me too.  I gasped, and then all I saw was myself.

I turned round.  Fluffy was on the bed, curled up, looking as if he was asleep.

He was dead.

“Thank you for saving my life, Fluffy,” I said.

I swear, I heard a purr.

We buried him in the garden, with full honours, and Charles had a tombstone carved, saying “Fluffy, a brave and loyal cat.” 

We moved in full time.  The house in the country was just a house.  This was family.  And Charles bought up some of the waterfront which belonged to Devlin, to make a larger garden.