The Gamekeeper's Cabin

Present Day – 1973

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

George nearly missed it as he stumbled home from The Royal Oak, cane in one hand, hipflask clutched tightly in the other.

“One for the road, thanks Bev,” he’d slurred as she rang the bell for last orders an hour earlier. He’d caught the look she exchanged with Ed – he wasn’t stupid – but she’d taken the flask from his trembling hands nonetheless and poured out the usual double measure of cheap Scotch.

“You take care now, George,” she’d said to him on his way out.

“Dark out tonight, you sure you’re alright walking?”

George hadn’t bothered dignifying this with a response. He’d been navigating the woods on the Peckham estate since he’d taken his first steps in them more than 75 years ago. He might be equally unsteady on his feet these days, but he always found his way home. Raising his cane to acknowledge Bev’s concern, he’d pushed through the pub’s heavy wooden front door into the bracing December air.

He hadn’t been to the old gamekeeper’s cabin in years. Built in the early 1800s, the tiny stone cottage had stood proudly by the lake for over a century, housing four generations of Miltons, of which George was now the last. The last Milton. How sad. Was it sad? George wasn’t sure. In a way it will be a relief when his flawed gene pool finally dies out. A pity he couldn’t have passed on his mother’s half of the genes without polluting another generation with his father’s. Not that there’d ever been much chance of settling down and having a family. The war had put paid to that.

George wasn’t sure what made him turn down the path to the cabin – he usually took the main gravel road through the woods to his little flat above the newsagent. Maybe it was the date. One of the punters at The Royal Oak had made a comment about Heath’s announcement of the three-day week going down in the history books and it jogged George’s memory that today was December 13th: the anniversary. How many years had it been? Fifty? No, closer to fifty-five. How time flew.

As if his feet have been reprogrammed to follow their old well-trodden route, George veers right, along the narrow dirt track that leads to the cabin. An early cold snap has made the hard ground mercifully easy to walk on and he shuffles across the dead leaves and curling bracken, using his cane to check the path ahead for obstacles that might trip him. Falling alone out here in the woods would almost certainly result in pneumonia, and it was all downhill from there. Any doctor worth his salt would tell you that.

George is prepared for the sight of the crumbling cottage, overgrown with ivy, rotting from the inside out after years of neglect and harsh Shropshire winters. But the candle in the window – glowing as brightly as it did every night his mother lit it throughout his childhood – is an unexpected gut punch. George sits on a fallen tree stump next to the path and takes a fortifying swig from his hip flask. He must be imagining it, surely. The cottage has been empty for years. George had boarded it up after his parents died, carefully nailing panels of wood over the front door and downstairs windows to warn away lost hikers who might be tempted to use it as a safe resting place. He can just about see the boards, rotting now with age, but still mostly present. Impossible then, for anyone to have scaled the crumbling staircase and lit a candle in his old attic bedroom window. More to the point, why would they? Only his mother had ever done that.

A faint murmur drifts across the rustling leaves and George strains his ears to hear it.

“Come home, George,” the voice whispers.

“It’s time to come home.”

The candle flickers in the window, its flame beckoning him toward the cottage like a bony outstretched finger.

1903

“It’s time to come home, George,” his mother’s voice calls from the front door of the little stone cottage.

“Dinner’s ready!”

George, tucked inside the hollowed-out stump of an old oak tree, pretends not to hear. The meaty aroma of rabbit stew is wafting in his direction and making his stomach growl, but he knows his father will be home any minute and he’d rather starve than face another hiding.

Soon enough, a hulking, bearded figure in a flat cap and heavy boots storms through the cottage door, banging it behind him so hard that George can hear it rattling on its hinges. He doesn’t need to creep any closer to hear what his father is saying - the Peckhams can probably hear him from the manor house all the way over the other side of the lake.

“Where is he, the little bastard?”

George’s mother’s voice is soft and timid, so he only ever hears one side of these conversations. They always sound the same.

“Won’t trap, can’t shoot, scared of the dark… bloody nancy is what he is. Always pithering about with his sketch book. Needs a damn good thrashing, turn him into a man.”

George hears the crash of a bottle slamming onto the wooden table and flinches. There’s no calming his father once he’s on the whisky, though he can hear from the sing-song-y murmur floating through the window that his mother is trying.

“Probably isn’t even mine, the pigeon-livered little runt.”

When George hears the crack of knuckle against bone, he’s unable to stay silent any longer. Scrambling out of his hiding place, he flies through the cottage door, tiny fists pounding uselessly on his father’s well-muscled back. He never knows whether his efforts prevent any split lips or broken bones or whether he just earns extra for himself, but he always has to try.

After his father passes out in the little parlour downstairs, empty whisky bottle by his side, George’s mother tends to him. This is his favourite part of the day, just the two of them in the tiny attic room, his mother singing lullabies about mice and rabbits while she applies soothing comfrey poultices to bruised skin.

“Will you light the candle for me tonight, Ma?” he asks her.

He asks every night, though he knows she’ll remember. Far worse than having to assist with his father’s pre-dawn trapping expeditions is the prospect of getting lost in the woods on his way home. His father takes sadistic pleasure in leaving George to navigate the large estate by himself in the dark, so his mother does what little she can by lighting a candle to show him the way.

“Of course I will, my darling,” she tells him, kissing his forehead and ruffling his hair.

“There’ll always be a candle waiting for you here to guide you home.”

……………………………………

Present Day – 1973

She’d been true to her word, recalls George, as he stares at the candle, mesmerized by the way the light flickers through the pitch-dark wood. Every night for ten years he’d followed the tiny glow back to the safety of his little attic room, carefully snuffing out the flame before his father returned in the early hours, filling the little cottage with the smell of soil and blood and fear.

Then the war had broken out, and George had seized his chance to escape. He was only 15 at the time, and a scrawny kid at that. Far too young to enlist, but they all were back then – him and the Peckham boys and the rest of the lads from the village. He’d hated leaving his mother behind, but duty had called and not even his father could argue against Kitchener’s patriotic entreaty.

“Maybe it’ll turn you into a man,” had been the impassive response when he’d brought home a copy of the enlistment papers. “Prove I haven’t raised a milksop.”

His mother had cried and knitted him a scarf and a pair of thick woollen socks to pack alongside his meagre belongings and off he’d marched. They were all supposed to be home by Christmas but that didn’t happen, of course. George was the only one from the parish who’d made it home at all. And his father, more’s the pity. He’d learned from his mother’s neatly-written letters – those few treasured communications that made it all the way to the front line – how his father had enlisted shortly after George himself and been returned home six months later, minus his left leg, which lay forever buried in the thick mud trenches of the Somme. George had felt no pity when he’d read that, just a twinge of envy. Had his pocketknife been sharper, he would have considered cutting off his own leg to avoid the horrors that lay ahead.

The candle is beckoning to him again. George stamps his feet on the hard ground to try to drive out the cold that’s seeped through his boots and numbed his toes. He takes another swig of whisky and coughs as the liquid burns his throat. Should he follow it that last stretch along the path? He pushes himself off the tree stump and takes another couple of tentative steps forward. A solitary owl hoots loudly from somewhere behind his left shoulder, making George jump. He drops the hipflask and curses, fumbling around on the path to save the last few precious drops of whisky before they spill into the undergrowth.

It had been a night much like this when he’d finally returned from the war – chilly and clear, with a touch of frost in the winter air. George had imagined the moment over and over since his departure a lifetime before. It sustained him during his darkest moments in the trenches, the conjured-up images of a victory parade though the village, flags waving from windows, children cheering from their parents’ shoulders, his mother rushing out of the cottage door to greet him. By the time he was on a train in France, discharge papers in his breast pocket, George had long since given up his dreams of a victory parade. What would be the point, with Edward and Carl now blown to smithereens and Tommy suffocated in a cloud of mustard gas? Even the Peckham boys couldn’t buy their way home, drowning in shell holes on the pock-marked expanse of No Man’s Land long before old man Peckham could exert any influence over their fate. His mother though… George never gave up hope of seeing that slender aproned figure rushing out of the cottage door to welcome him home, a loaf of freshly baked bread on the table behind her.

But the cottage had been dark when George staggered the last few steps along the path all those years before. There was no candle in his bedroom window, no flour-covered apron or aroma of freshly baked bread, no smoke billowing out of the little chimney above the parlour.

His mother had been lying in the cot by the fireplace. She was thinner than George remembered, sallow skin tight around her hollow cheekbones. Her once shiny chestnut hair was now dull and greying, tied back to reveal a chain of faint purple bruises across her throat. George saw matted blood on her scalp gleaming darkly in the light from the small oil lamp on the dresser. He could smell the familiar sickly odour of death from across the room and knew that he’d arrived too late. As he stood hesitantly on the far side of the little parlour, his mother’s eyes flickered open, and a small smile spread across her pinched face. A bony hand reached out from under the tartan blanket, and she beckoned her son toward her. George had to lean in close to hear her speak, for her voice was little more than a whisper.

“You came home,” she murmured, clutching his hand with surprising strength.

“I knew you’d come home.”

George squeezed back as tightly as he dared, afraid of crushing the fragile bones between his fingers. He had the hands of a man now, rough and dirty like his father’s.

“Where is he?” he’d snarled, rougher than he intended. “Where is that old bastard?”

His mother shook her head slowly. George fetched a glass of water and held it to her dry lips so he could hear what she had to say. Her breathing was slow and laboured, and George could see that the effort of speaking was exhausting.

“I lit the candle for you, George. Every night. Except… tonight… But I knew you’d come home.”

George had held her hand while she died, tears streaming down his cheeks. He should have been there to protect her. He should have come home sooner. Kissing his mother’s dry forehead, George drew the tartan blanket over her face. He stood alone in the cottage for a moment, waves of grief and anger washing over him in turn. Anger won. He was his father’s son, after all.

The trap wasn’t easy to dig into the hardened earth, but George was determined. He knew the exact route his father would walk from the pub back to the cottage and calculated that he’d have about an hour to prepare. He would have preferred to use the thigh cracker – an outlawed poaching deterrent with razor sharp teeth that would have caused the most short-term satisfaction – but it was unfortunately easy to escape from. George had no intention of letting his father escape. He locked the chain to the tree closest to the front door, covered the trap with dead leaves and waited.

War didn’t appear to have changed the gamekeeper much, aside from the stump where his left leg had been. He swaggered along the path toward the cottage, face hidden in the shadows under the familiar tweed cap. George caught a waft of stale body odour and whisky and felt his fists clench tightly underneath the sleeves of his jacket. He’d taken the double-barrelled shotgun from its mount inside the cottage just in case, but he hoped he wouldn’t need to use it. Far better for his father to suffer.

……………….

Draining the last few drops from his hipflask, George stumbles to the end of the path. Was it here? Yes, he remembers the birch tree – it still has a groove notched into the trunk where the trap chain strained against its captive’s desperate bid for freedom. George runs his fingers over the uneven bark. How long had it taken, in the end? Six days? Seven? His father had cursed and bellowed at the beginning, but there was no one around to hear. The Peckhams had moved away before the end of the war, heartbroken at the loss of their sons and disinterested in the fate of their country estate. And no one walked through the woods back then – his father had made sure of that with his illegal poacher traps. George had sat on the cottage doorstep, toying with the key to the lock, watching his father struggle.

The candle is still flickering in the bedroom window. George is almost underneath it now, standing unsteadily on the path outside the front door, where his mother had never come rushing out to greet him and his father had slowly perished on the cold winter ground. He was a hardy bastard, George had to give him that. Lesser mortals would have succumbed to exposure long before they died of thirst. Not Jack Milton. He hadn’t looked half as intimidating by the end though. All skin and bones, stinking of faeces and stale whisky. He’d crooked an emaciated finger at George on the last day, reminding George of his mother lying on her death bed, beckoning him over to say goodbye. George had obliged – his father was far too weak by then to pose him any harm. But whatever Jack had wanted to say to his only son had been thwarted by dehydration. His tongue had swollen so fully that he was unable to spit out whatever poisonous last words he’d intended. George had unlocked the trap and dragged the body into the cottage, pushing it down the steps to the cellar where his father had kept all his poisons and traps. A fitting end to a despicable man. He’d wanted to give his mother a proper burial, but the ground was frozen solid by then and digging a grave had been near impossible. Instead, he'd dressed her in her one good navy woollen dress and created a shrine around the little cot with the few belongings he could find. She hadn’t been a particularly religious woman, but he placed a hastily constructed wooden cross on the pillow next to her head, just in case. Then he’d boarded up the cottage and walked away for good. Until tonight.

The candle beckons George. He places the empty hipflask on the stone step and uses his cane to wrench off the rotting boards covering the door. They pull apart with little effort, but the presence of the trusty old nails tells George that no one has attempted to enter his childhood home since he left. So how then, could the candle have been lit? Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps his whisky-addled brain was playing tricks on him, fuelled by the realisation that today was the anniversary of his emancipation. He’d come to think of it that way, over the years. A twisted sort of celebration that his mother was finally at peace and he himself was free from his father’s reign of terror.

The door creaks open in a cloud of ancient dust. George peers across the threshold, hesitating to set foot on the worn coir entrance mat. There’s just something about the flickering… surely it was too much of a coincidence that the flame looked exactly like a skeletal finger? Both his parents had summoned him at the end – he can only hope that it’s his mother waiting for him on the other side. The alternative is unthinkable.

Wishing he’d saved a bracing mouthful of whisky, George steps into his childhood home. The door swings shut behind him. A faint murmur drifts through the cottage, but though George strains his hardest he can’t make out a single word.