Unforgettable (Gloria Cook) - By Gloria Cook Page 0,7
a poetry group, meeting in an upstairs room of the pub, but the other two members, an elderly couple, had long ago died. The three of them had been disappointed not to attract new members.
Although virtually deaf, Corky was wholly sensible to vibrations on or under the ground and he swung his head towards Meadow Hill and sniffed and stared short-sightedly and sniffed and sniffed.
‘No sound of a vehicle or a pony, so it’s someone heading this way on foot, eh boy?’ Dorrie soon heard running steps thumping down the hill and she waited curiously to greet, as she supposed, a neighbour in some sort of hurry. Jack Newton’s farmstead and some of his tied cottages, and Honoria Sanders’ impressive property were further along from Merrivale. A moment passed and then Dorrie was watching the youth from Merrivale tearing her way, red in the face and puffing, his eyes wide and glittering, clearly in a panic.
Leaving Corky, Dorrie hastened to meet the youth, holding her hand out to him in a gesture of offering help. From a certain angle of the boy’s head Dorrie knew where she had seen someone like him before – in a photograph in the local newspapers – and she suddenly knew exactly who Finn was: the son of disgraced criminal Aidan Templeton-Barr, who was now in Dartmoor Prison. Dorrie understood why his mother had dropped the second half of her name and had not once showed her face in Nanviscoe.
‘Pl . . . ease,’ Finn flung the plea forward to her, his breath coming in painful rasps, just saving himself from stumbling and plunging flat on his face. ‘I’m in a terrible fix. It’s my mother . . .’
He came to a shuddering halt in front of Dorrie and grabbed for her shoulder, his well-built frame heaving from lack of oxygen, all the while staring into Dorrie’s eyes.
‘Now catch your breath. Finn, isn’t it?’ Dorrie said, her voice slipping into confident-kindly-in-charge mode. ‘Then tell me what’s wrong with your mother. I’m sure I can help.’
Panting wildly, his eyes huge in fright, Finn got out, ‘She – she’s having a baby and she says it’s coming right now! She says there’s not a minute to lose. She needs the midwife. Please, have you got a telephone? I couldn’t find where my mother put the directions to the midwife’s house. Do you live far from here? Can we go there now? I’m so worried, my mother’s so fragile.’
‘I live just there at Sunny Corner,’ Dorrie pointed the short distance to where the thatched roof and chimneys were peeping through trees. ‘I’m Dorrie Resterick. You run back to your mother, Finn. I’ll summon Nurse Rumford, and then I’ll be straight along after you. Can I bring anything you might need?’
‘I–I don’t know. Please hurry the midwife.’ Fear and anxiety rife in every inch of him, Finn turned tail and tore back up the hill.
Dorrie hastened home, as concerned for Finn as she was for his mother. She had learned from District Nurse and midwife Rebecca Rumford, who had called at Merrivale, that a woman and her son had moved into the tumbledown property. A pregnancy had not been mentioned. Rebecca Rumford, a born and bred Nanviscoe girl, was strictly observant about patient confidentiality. Merrivale had lain empty for seven years after its owner Elvira White had been discovered passed away peacefully in her bed by the postman. Shortly afterwards, the gruesomely murdered bodies of young courting couple Neville Stevens and Mary Rawling had been discovered in the gardens. They had been shot between the eyes in execution style. There followed the inevitable tales of ghostly haunting. Three years on, just before the end of the war, a one-armed tramp had broken in and slept there overnight. He was well known and liked in the village, a harmless veteran from the First World War, down on his luck. Known only as Freddie, and thought to have been in service before fighting on the Somme, he passed through Nanviscoe each autumn. Dorrie and Greg, like many others, gave him food and good used clothes or a blanket – he refused to accept anything new. Freddie had told Dorrie and Greg about his night in the abandoned property. ‘I’ll never do that again, sir, madam. The place is cursed. Heard all manner of weird and ungodly noises, I did, and I’ll swear on a stack of Holy Bibles I saw the spirits of that couple. Was them and no mistake, saw