Gwennie

Doctor Harris murmured: ‘Good lord, extraordinary thing,’ when he found a dove inserted in the anus of young Gwendoline, and, as he pulled it out, he dislodged three feathers, which fluttered and swooped down to the crimson rug beside the bed.

He had been summoned to certify her death after she was found in her bed that morning cold and rigid, with horror in her wild, wide-eyed stare. The contorted posture of the body led him to investigate further. Bruising indicated to him that force had been used in a vicious assault on the poor girl.*

The night before, when Gwendoline went to bed, she pulled back the bedclothes to find spread out before her a human heart, a glistening coil of entrails and several unidentifiable organs and lumps of flesh. She gasped, and then the stench of blood and excrement reached her and heaved bile up into the back of her throat. Suddenly a figure with a maimed face rose up in front of her, gripped her hand and shouted.

She fainted and fell to the floor.*

Earlier that day Bert Hughes trudged through the grey, whimpering with fear.

Death was all around him.

Then Death came for him, shrieking, and swatted him aside.

Several months before that Gwendoline Bowes-Lytton said to her friend Harriet: ‘A little bird told me that Daphne Smythe did her first yesterday. I can’t let dreary old Daphers be one up on me, so I sent Briggs to the columbarium this morning and told him to get three. The bloody man whined that it was a long way to go at his age and asked what I wanted them for. Damned cheek! I told him that was none of his business and sent him hurrying there with a flea in his ear. Any more insolence like that and I’ll have a word with daddy about him. Servants these days…Ah, he’ll do for starters.’

Bert Hughes was striding through the drizzle, his threadbare jacket soaked, and a snail-trail of grime from his hair oozing down his neck. He didn’t care about being cold and wet, because he had finally landed a job and could now do the decent thing and marry his Flo before the baby came.

Gwendoline and Harriet stood in his way. Several passers-by stopped to watch when Gwendoline shouted: ‘Why aren’t you at the front, man, doing your duty for king and country fighting the Hun?’

As Bert blushed and cringed, she reached into her reticule and thrust into his hand one of the three white dove feathers there.

by Paul Murgatroyd,