Once More Unto the Breach

by Meghan Holloway

  Infection was imminent, and I dreaded it more than I had dreaded cauterizing the hole the bullet had gouged into her. I tucked the knife back into my boot. I kicked out the fire, donned the rucksack, and lifted her into my arms. Her head lolled against my shoulder, and Otto stood on his hind legs, propping one front paw against her thigh, to nudge his head under Charlotte’s elbow. Her arm slid over her side and hung limp.

  “She will be fine, Otto bach.” The conviction in my voice was as much to reassure myself as it was him.

  The way was difficult, but I had hauled sheep across treacherous terrain my entire life, and my grip was sure even when I slid several times climbing the scree field. Otto climbed ahead of me, fleet of foot, picking out the way.

  We crossed the mountain as the sun reached its zenith overhead.

  Charlotte stirred when I placed her on the ground and knelt to tie the crampons around my boots.

  “Rhys?”

  I leaned over her and cupped her cheek in my hand. “I am here.” Her skin was cool to the touch, clammy and colorless.

  She smiled at me, but then her eyes slid closed.

  I patted her cheek. “Stay with me, fy nghariad aur. I need you to stay with me.”

  “I will.” Her voice was a mere murmur, and I had to strain to hear her.

  When I started across the glacier, Otto moved to follow me but slid on the snow and ice. He leapt back and paced beside the glacier, whining.

  “Come, Otto. Come.”

  He would not, though, and began to bark frantically.

  Charlotte jerked in my arms. “Otto? Where is he? Here, boy.”

  “He will not follow us onto the glacier.”

  “Don’t leave him. Please don’t leave him behind.” Her voice was agitated, and she struggled to look over my shoulder.

  “Shh. I will not.” I turned, careful not to lose traction on the precarious slope, and made my way back to the poodle, whose tail worked frantically as I approached. “You fool animal.” My voice was soft. “Willing to take on an armed soldier but afraid to venture onto ice.”

  Once I had him situated, I started across the glacier again, dog draped over my shoulders, woman cradled to my chest. Across the glacier, I placed Otto back on his feet and put away the crampons before gathering Charlotte in my arms again and beginning the long trek across the tundra down the ridge.

  I had to rest when I reached the top of the gorge. There was no way I could carry her down the rockfall in my arms, unable to watch my footing. I shed the rucksack, tucked our identity papers into my pocket, and secured her holster and Colt to my thigh. I tied Charlotte’s forearms together, looping her bound arms over my head. I pulled her onto my back and secured her against me with a length of rope.

  The climb down the gorge was grueling. Several times, Charlotte roused enough to hold onto me, but the majority of the climb, she was limp against me, saved from slipping off my back by the ropes knotted securely around us.

  By the time we reached the overhang and the creek bed, the sun stained the sky red and purple as it descended toward the horizon. Charlotte had begun to tremble.

  I cut the ropes binding us together and eased her onto the ground. Otto and I drank deeply from the overhang cascade, and I dampened Charlotte’s dry lips but was leery of trying to coax her to drink.

  She was in and out of consciousness, and when I checked her wound, she whimpered as I lifted the bandages. The cauterization had held, though, and the hole the bullet had punched through her flesh remained closed.

  I wrapped her back in our coats and the blankets. She moaned when I lifted her, and I pressed my lips to her brow. Her skin was warm and damp.

  The kilometers passed quickly underfoot, and Otto stayed close at my side. We reached the track leading to the village as the deep blue twilight faded to the black of night. The moon was in its last quarter, waning into its crescent. Its light was enough to illuminate the track at my feet when it climbed high enough in the sky to not be veiled by the forest. The shadows were deep and cool, and they grew deeper when a smattering of clouds crept across the stars.

  Spits of snowflakes fell, visible in the tepid moonlight, disappearing before they reached the ground. My shirt grew damp where Charlotte was pressed against me from the heat radiating from her. The craggy mountain path undulated along the river and smoothed into the road leading to Cluses. When we passed through Sixt-fer-à-Cheval, the village slumbered, homes shuttered against the night. I saw no sign for a doctor, no indication of a hospital. And I knew Charlotte required more care than a village physician could provide, so I kept walking.

  My shoulders began to ache, but I lengthened my stride and tightened my grip. Charlotte began to moan, murmuring words I could not make out. I clutched her close and spoke to her of home. Of the stone fence in need of repair, of the musty pungency of the Balwens when they were wet, of the cottage my grandfather’s great-great-grandfather had built, of how the wind made the hills sing. I told her about Owain as a child, about the time he had tried to milk the neighbor’s bull, about when the raft he had built had started sinking in the middle of the cold river and I had to swim out and fetch him.

  Hours later, when I passed the cemetery on the edge of Cluses where I had buried the infant, she was burning with fever and delirious.

  The approach of the sun was lightening the eastern sky when I reached the hospital. I tried the door only to find it locked, and I pounded the frame with my boot. “Open up! I need a doctor!” I continued to shout until I heard footfall on the other side of the door.

  It cracked open to reveal a young woman. “Monsieur—”

  I shouldered my way into the hospital, and the young woman scrambled after me as I strode down the corridor.

  “Monsieur, vous ne pouvez pas—”

  A dour-faced nurse exited a room into the hallway, and I almost plowed her over. Her eyes rounded, and she caught hold of the blankets wrapped around Charlotte in an effort to right herself. When she caught sight of Charlotte’s face, she questioned me in French.

  “Please. I need a doctor now.”

  She nodded and addressed the woman trailing after me before turning back to me. “Come. How was she hurt?”

  “She was struck by a bullet in her lower left side. Yesterday morning.” I followed her as she led me down the corridor and turned right into another wing. “I cauterized the wound. She would have bled out otherwise.”

  “Place her here.” She led me into the surgery and gestured to the operating table in the room.

  I laid Charlotte on the table and cupped her cheek in my hand. Her brows and lashes appeared stark in her colorless face, and she did not respond when I whispered her name.

  A group of doctors and nurses hurried in as I was ushered out.

  “You will need to wait in the main corridor,” the dour-faced nurse said. She glanced down, and her smile was gentle. “Your dog as well.”

  Otto trotted at my heels as I retreated from the surgery wing. When I slid down the wall to sit on the floor, he curled up beside me and rested his muzzle on my knee. I placed a hand on his head and leaned my own back against the wall to wait.

  _______

  She threaded her fingers through my hair as I rested my cheek on the swelling protrusion of her belly.

  “I think I can hear them within.”

  She shook as she laughed, and I rolled over to see her face. She smiled at me, face tender. “You are daft, you are. And why are you so certain it is ‘them’?”

  I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to her stomach. The fabric of her dress was soft and worn, her skin beneath warm and fragrant. There was movement within her belly, like a moth’s wings beating against the night or the flutter of a curtain in the wind. A breeze swept over us, heavy with the scent of heather and spring-fertile soil. “I can feel it.”

  She traced my brow with a gentle finger, and I carefully wedged my arms under her to embrace her fully. Peace was an uneasy burden,
but it was lighter to bear when touching her, the ground still chilled from winter beneath the blanket upon which we sprawled, the sun picking its way through the branches above to dapple us in light.

  “Dadi! Dadi!”

  The small voice was tremulous and distraught, and I sat upright. Owain’s short, sturdy legs bore him down the hill toward us at a pace that almost tripped him, and Rhiannon darted in front of him, barking, to slow his pace.

  I caught him in my arms as he reached us. His face was grimy and streaked with tears. “What is it, machgen i?”

  He held his hands cupped to his thin chest, and at my question, he opened them and held them out for me to see. In his square, pink palms lay a delicate bird’s egg, broken in half. “I only wanted to see it, Dadi. I did not mean to hurt it.” A sob quaked in his chest.

  “Hush now.” I took the broken egg from him and set it aside. “Some things we have to pay extra care with for they are easily broken.”

  He burrowed against my chest and wept as I leaned back onto the blanket. Rhiannon settled at our feet with a sigh. Aelwyd rolled to her side and rubbed our son’s back until his crying lessened into snuffles and he soon grew heavy and limp against me.

  “Promise me something, Rhys,” she whispered once Owain was asleep.

  “Anything.”

  “Promise me you will look after Owain.”

  I turned my head to meet her gaze. “You know I will always look after all of you.”

  “I know. But after Owain especially.” She gazed at the boy as she caressed his tousled hair. “His heart is gentle. It is one of those things that is easily broken.”

  I rested my hand on my son’s back, and my palm and fingers spanned the narrow width of his young frame. As warm and sturdy as he was, he felt fragile beneath my rough hand. His back rose and fell in easy rhythm, and Aelwyd placed her hand over mine, interlacing our fingers. “I promise.”

  The hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present and made me realize I had fallen asleep. I blinked bleary eyes at the woman crouched before me. It took me several moments to recognize her with the absence of the habit and veil.

  “Mother Clémence.”

  “Just Berthe. I think that part of my life is over now.”

  She sat on the other side of Otto, mimicking my pose with her legs stretched out before her and her ankles crossed.

  “The girl? Angelique?”

  She had lines etched into the skin around her eyes and mouth, and they deepened with her slight, bittersweet smile. “She did not make it.”

  “I am sorry.”

  With her head bare, her short hair exposed, she appeared fragile and vulnerable. “I comfort myself with the knowledge that she is no longer so tormented and her pain is eased. She was a tortured soul since…” She took a deep breath. “I could not protect her here, and God, for some reason, chose not to. It is enough to make an old woman bitter if I did not cling to my faith.”

  I had not had any faith to cling to for decades now, but I offered her what comfort I could. “The children are safe.”

  She met my gaze, and the lines about her face softened. “I am thankful. They would not have been were it not for you.”

  “Were it not for Owain.”

  She dipped her head. “Of course.”

  “How did he become involved in this?”

  She searched my face. “He did not become involved. He created this network of schools and abbeys to hide and transport children across the country to safety.”

  I leaned my head back against the wall. “His network.”

  “Oui. The Gravenor Network. That is what we have taken to calling it.”

  “How did he start it?”

  She stroked a hand over Otto’s back. “He would never say. It is not safe to do so, and he did not seem to be one who was keen to talk about himself.”

  “No, he was not.”

  “But his wife told me that he began with art in Paris. Working with the Rothschilds, the Veil-Picards, the Seligmanns, a man by the name of Kann, and with a group from the Louvre. One day in an attic, he found a group of children. Their parents had hidden them before Vel' d’Hiv.”

  “And that was the beginning.” I rubbed my forehead and pinched the bridge of my nose. “How many children?”

  “With the ones you took to safety? Five hundred twenty-seven. That I know of.”

  I closed my eyes, staggered.

  “I am thankful you returned. I have had some news.”

  I straightened and turned to her, but she avoided my eyes.

  “Sévèrin has been found. She is in a hospital in Lyon.”

  “And Owain?”

  I knew her answer even before she met my gaze and shook her head.

  4 September 1943

  Dear Nhad,

  The factories and railroad yards were bombed yesterday by the Allies.

  Hope and horror is a heady mixture.

  -Owain

  xxi

  Henri

  “There was a misunderstanding,” Klaus said, though his smile spoke otherwise. “He did not agree with the way we were treating his wife.” He kicked the man on the floor. “It seems he killed one of my guards.”

  I glanced into the room behind Klaus and took in the carnage. The guard was sprawled on the floor, his face a pulp of blood, bone, and tissue. The woman’s condition made my gut churn. She was tied to a table, obscenely splayed as if on a butcher’s block. Had she been my wife, I would have caved the skull of the guard brutalizing her as well. I knelt beside Owain and rolled him onto his back. He was beaten and maimed almost beyond recognition. He was breathing, though, and the bullet wounds in his arm and leg would need attention but they were not lethal.

  “I will need help carrying them up to the street.”

  “But of course.” Klaus was once again the genial host, nodding for the guards to assist me.

  The guards helped me carry the pair out of the tunnels but would venture no further than the basements for fear of being discovered. I hid Owain in the boiler room and then climbed from the ruins with his wife cradled in my arms. She was unconscious, limp and startlingly light. Her bare, dirty feet bounced against my thigh as I hurried through the streets.

  When I entered the hospital, I needed only to call for help before we were surrounded and the woman was relieved from my arms. I slipped away before anyone could take too much note of me and returned to where I had left Owain.

  He groaned as I carried him into the nearby building. It had been a shop before the war, but it was abandoned now. Juif was painted in yellow scrawl on the boards nailed into place over the broken storefront windows. I had found the building upon returning to Lyon, and the upper floor was comprised of five apartments, empty save for the barest of furnishings.

  “Sévèrin.” Owain’s voice was a raw, ragged whisper.

  I responded to him in English, remembering how elementary his French was. “She is safe.”

  He was difficult to carry, all arms and legs pared down to bone and sinew from the starvation he had undoubtedly suffered in the hands of the Gestapo. I remembered the strong boy he had been when I first met him, quick to smile but quiet and reserved. I had mistaken him for a schwächling until I realized it was not weakness I sensed in him but kindness. His hands had given away his background even before I learned that he hailed from a sheep farm in Wales. He would not be using those hands, reduced only to palms and thumbs, any time soon.

  I managed to get him up the stairs and into the barren apartment I had set up camp in while I waited and watched to see if Klaus remained in Lyon even with the Allies firmly entrenched in the city. I had stolen medical supplies from the very hospital where I had taken Owain’s wife, and I was well stocked. I knew that if he were still alive after being in Klaus’s company, he would need medical attention. I had been correct on that account.

  I removed the bullets from his arm and leg while he remained unconscious, cleaning
the wounds and sprinkling sulfa powder over them. I bandaged his hands and his face, coating the gaping hole of his empty left eye socket with the powdered drug as well before I wrapped the bandages around his head. I felt a surge of disgust for Klaus’s methods. Rococo, frivolous, and utterly lacking in subtle nuance.

  I coaxed Owain into swallowing several sulfa pills and then dragged one of the two chairs in the room close to his cot to wait. I would allow him time to rest and begin to recover before I performed my own interrogation.

  25 December 1943

  Dear Nhad,

  Nadolig has been a difficult time since leaving home.

  But today, I became a husband.

  I look forward to the day I can bring Sévèrin home.

  -Owain

  xxii

  “She needed multiple transfusions, and we are still concerned about septic shock. We are giving her penicillin for the infection.”

  I followed the dour-faced nurse into the recovery ward. Otto trotted at my heels.

  “You expect her to recover, then?”

  She hesitated. “The surgeon who worked on her was a student of Dr. Churchill in America. I believe we can hope.”

  The recovery ward was quiet and empty save for the bed in the far corner.

  “She has not awakened yet, but that is not unexpected.”

  I nodded, unable to speak, and she place a hand on my arm before retreating.

  Otto approached the bed cautiously, sniffing Charlotte’s fingers. She lay on her back, a sheet tucked around her, arms alongside her body. Had she had any awareness, she would have hated the position. I had never seen her sleep on her back.

  Otto licked her fingers and then climbed gingerly onto the bed to curl around her feet. I pulled a chair to the bedside, wrecked by how small and fragile and wounded she appeared. Her hair was spread across the pillow, and the honeyed gleam was dulled. The freckles on her nose and cheeks stood out in stark relief in her colorless face, and dark shadows formed bruised half-moons under her eyes.