by K. C. Finn
Blod made to shout at me but Idrys waved a serious finger at her. She shut her mouth slowly and sniffed in her angry sobs. At last Bickerstaff seemed to realise her pain and put an arm around her. She sank into the side of his body in silence.
“Even with the most basic equipment, it could still be done,” he said in a low tone, “if they get him to a doctor in time.”
***
I was taken back upstairs to rest and I hoped that perhaps my sleeping mind would take me back to the Resistance, but had no luck. I was out cold for another few hours of sheer blackness until I managed to haul myself out of bed for dinner. I dressed this time and clunked my way down the stairs, feeling confident that I was rested enough to go back to Henri for an update as soon as the meal was over. To hell with what my mother had said, I hadn’t done enough until I could give Blod and Idrys better news.
I froze in the doorway to the kitchen. Mum was sat in my space at the table, fretting over a hole in Leighton’s school jumper. When she turned and smiled at me I could see all the sadness and apology in her face. Nothing she had done was out of spite, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back at her. I said hello to her in a quiet, flat tone and settled myself in a seat a bit farther away.
“You’re early, Mum,” I commented, trying to sound bright as I eyed Mam stirring up the gravy, “The wedding’s not for three more days.”
“I had some time off, so I thought I’d come and lend a hand,” she explained.
“Very kind of you,” Mam said. She turned and beamed at me. “Oh your mum’s brought the most beautiful flowers and real chocolate for the cake! Blod’s going to flip!”
I shot Mum a glare. What a bald lie it all was. She was here to keep tabs on me so I couldn’t go against her will again. She knew that I knew, I could tell by the way she looked down at the table, unable to keep meeting my eyes.
As the rest of the family settled in for dinner, the mood became tenser still. Idrys and Blod hardly touched their food and Bickerstaff was lost in thoughts so deep he didn’t even notice Ness stealing all of the potatoes from his plate. Idrys kept looking at Mum with a glint of steel in his eyes, waiting for Mam to spin out the last of her chatty conversation so he could strike with a line of his own.
“I believe we have someone in common Gail,” he said in what seemed like a casual tone, “I knew your father, Reginald Arkwright.”
“My goodness,” Mum replied with half a smile, “what a small world it is, with Kit coming to stay here, of all places.”
“Good job she did,” Idrys added quickly, “she’s been a godsend this girl.”
“Here, here,” said Mam, oblivious to the real conversation happening beneath the words, “very useful to have around.”
After dinner Idrys persuaded Leighton to help Mam wash up with the promise of a trip to the cinema, which left the rest of us free to coerce my mother into the little sitting room. Bickerstaff and I were the last to arrive as we limped along at the rear, taking up the whole sofa between us and our crutches. Mum was outnumbered, but she gathered herself with a deep breath as Idrys closed the door.
“I’d been to check on things just before I got here,” she said, giving the old farmer an apologetic look, “your grandson is still alive.”
“Thank God,” Blod muttered, putting her pretty face in her hands. Bickerstaff reached out and rubbed her knee gently, but his face was still totally focused on Mum.
“Where are they treating him?” he asked.
Mum bit her lip. “On a submarine, I’m afraid.”
“Are you mad, woman?” Bickerstaff blurted, “A pressurised space is no place for a man who’s been stabbed through the chest!”
“We didn’t have a choice,” Mum pleaded, “if the boys hadn’t got on that sub, the next one we could arrange for England would have been after Christmas. There’s nowhere you could hide a man in Ieuan’s condition for that long, he’d have died.”
“Do you at least have a proper doctor?”
Mum nodded. “There’s one on the submarine. It’s a fully manned vessel, lots of people trained to help with injuries.”
“Getting stabbed isn’t usually the speciality of doctors who practice underwater,” Bickerstaff griped. He thumped his one remaining leg hard. “God I wish I could look him over and advise you.”
Mum’s gaze snapped up, her eyes suddenly brighter.
“Actually you can.”
***
I wasn’t privy to the full details of how it worked, all Mum would tell me was that there was a way for psychics like us to pull another person’s consciousness into our heads and take them with us wherever we went. She had done such things with Dad all year, letting him snoop on people and places with her across the whole length of Europe to gain information to help the Free French. She had never tried it with anyone but him though, so she took Bickerstaff away with her to another room to try it out in private. Astonished as I was that there were yet more things I could learn to do with my powers, I was bitter that she wouldn’t let me see how it was done. I had a feeling she would be reluctant to teach me anything that would allow me to get into more trouble during the war, so I made a mental note to see if I could figure out the method with Henri sometime in the future.
After his first consultation with Ieuan, Bickerstaff was visibly shaken and practically green in the face. He had to lie down for a little while before he was collected enough to tell us what he had seen and even then his speech was stunted and breathy. Ieuan was in a critical state but there was every chance he could still survive. He had been pierced clean through the chest but the blade had only brushed against his lung, puncturing the chest cavity and causing it to temporarily collapse. Medics had been able to re-inflate his lung into a weak but working order, the problem now was the risk of internal bleeding. Ieuan kept suddenly rupturing inside his chest and the medics aboard the ship were finding it hard to keep stemming the blood and they had not found the source of the bleeds. Bickerstaff had recommended some medications based on what they had on board the sub to help his circulation, but the treatment he really needed wasn’t available on board.
“If they don’t find the source of the bleeding he’ll need a transfusion soon from the continued blood loss,” Bickerstaff explained in his usual emotionless voice.
“Or he’ll just bleed to death?” Blod asked, her hand on his shoulder. He just nodded at her. “Then what can we do?”
Everyone started talking over each other, but I heard none of it, my mind reeling with something that Bickerstaff had said. The source of the bleeding. The thing that was causing the ruptures. I thought hard about everything I’d seen and felt that awful night in the tunnel.
“Stop,” I said loudly. Everyone fell silent. I looked to the former doctor as I gathered my words carefully. “Could some kind of object stuck in his shoulder be causing these rupture things?”
“Definitely,” he said with a nod, “What do you know?”
“When I could feel it all happening,” I gulped dryly, “The blade came back out and he started to find it hard to breathe. But there was something else, something sharp under the back of his shoulder. I felt like I wanted to pull it out of his body.”
“An obstruction,” Bickerstaff mused.
“A piece of the blade left behind pr’aps?” Idrys suggested.
The men slowly started to nod. Bickerstaff leapt up, totally forgetting his fake leg until Blod came to steady his wobbling form. He approached my mother unsteadily and took her arm.
“We have to go again, now.”
***
It was hard to believe that between all the life and death conversations a wedding was slowly coming together in the background. Everyone who was in on the plan to save Ieuan operated in shifts to cover for one another, doing their special duties like pressing clothes and arranging flowers whilst whispering updates to one another from Mum’s latest trip to see how he was doing. I wasn’t allowed to see anything, of course, so I spent the next three days passin
g on messages and quizzing Bickerstaff about what was really going on. When Blod wasn’t around he was willing to tell me the truth: Ieuan had almost died the first time they tried to remove the foreign body in his shoulder. Things didn’t look good.
It was the night before the wedding that I sat in Blod’s room with her, helping her put her hair into overnight rollers for a perfect set of blonde curls at the chapel the next day. We were talking about simple things, nice distracting things like how pretty Ness would look as a flower girl and how we could put some flowers over my crutches to make them look less hideous in the photographs, when suddenly Blod fell silent. I knew she had returned to her worries about her brother, so I kept quiet too and tried to finish her hair. I had just put the last roller in when she exploded into a fit of tears.
“How am I supposed to go and have the happiest day of my life?” she sobbed, turning to me with anger in every muscle of her face, “Ieu’s dying. He’s dying and we’re yur doing nothing!”
She slammed her fists down on her bed and I caught her by the wrists to calm her down.
“You heard what Mum said,” I tried to soothe, “that sub is due to surface in England tonight, where all sorts of proper doctors and equipment are waiting.” I rubbed her wrists with my thumbs. “He’s made it this far.”
Blod nodded a few times, scrubbing tears from her eyes roughly.
“It’s lucky you were there to feel that bit of blade that got stuck,” she said quietly, “or he’d most likely be dead already.”
I thought bitterly about Mum not wanting me to be there at all, how if I had just done as she said and stayed away, Henri wouldn’t have even known to rush down the tunnel and help them to get out. The thought of Henri sent a pang straight to the centre of my chest. Suddenly I wanted to cry too. All the horrible things he must have seen and now he was all alone on that submarine, time ticking away until he could set foot on safe ground once more. When he left for war I had promised to be there always, but now we were truly apart.
The door to Blod’s bedroom opened and a breathless figure clunked in, shutting it behind him.
“Oi!” Blod cried, her hands rushing to her hair. “You’re not supposed to see me now! It’s bad luck!”
Steven Bickerstaff heaved with the effort of hauling his false leg and crutch up Ty Gwyn’s stairs for the first time, but when he looked up at us he was grinning like a madman. He shook his head, gasping for breath.
“No love, it’s the best luck,” he began, clutching his chest, “they got the blade fragment out. The sub’s surfaced in Cardiff docks. He’s stable.”
Blod leapt off the bed so fast she nearly knocked me to the floor, rushing to Bickerstaff and throwing her arms around him. He wobbled precariously and held onto her, trying to keep himself steady as she kissed him all over one side of his face in utter joy.
“Cardiff’s in South Wales, isn’t it?” I asked.
Bickerstaff nodded as Blod let him go. “It’s a fair drive, but Idrys says we’ll go down tomorrow right after the wedding and see him.”
Blod settled herself beside me again on the edge of the bed, clutching my hand for a moment. “Thank you,” she began with a huge grin, “both of you. You’ve done so much. Now get out of my room! I’ve got a sack-load of beauty sleep to catch up on for the morning!”
She pushed and shoved our limping forms from the room, but we took her enthusiastic brutality with a smile.
Bickerstaff pretended that he’d had a letter from a colleague in Cardiff General Hospital so that we could break the news about Ieuan to Mam. I was front row centre to see her reaction and she didn’t disappoint me. First she attacked Bickerstaff with a hug so fierce that he actually fell right over on his backside after she let him go, then she ran around kissing each one of us with joyous tears pouring down her cheeks like some great waterfall of relief. She picked up Ness; already half adorned with her flower girl outfit, and swung her around the kitchen until the paper roses that had been tacked to her skirt came flying off in all directions, covering us all in pink petals. As a final act, she burst outside to shout to the heavens and thank God himself, only to find herself ankle-deep in the first full drift of December snow.
“Ooh!” Ness cried, running out after her to play in the white blanket all over the yard.
Leighton followed suit, throwing himself face first into a huge drift that had piled up outside the nearby barn. I looked out at them with a nervous kind of joy in my heart. I had never actually walked in snow before. I hauled myself out gingerly, stepping down into the cool, powdery stuff, feeling my feet make a deep print before I set out with more confidence. I looked back at my tracks after a while, the crutches making it look like two peg leg pirates were walking side by side. Even Blod came out to enjoy the drift without moaning about what it might do to her shoes, throwing a snowball at Bickerstaff that he deflected with his false leg, which almost came off totally from the impact of the throw.
The whole contents of the house were still outside in the fresh morning when a lilting voice called over from the path:
“Oi! I thought you lot had a wedding to go to?”
All heads turned to see Thomas racing towards us in his fine navy uniform, his bags discarded in the snow. He went straight to Mam, turning the tables on her for once as he half picked her up in his excitement.
“Oh Thom! Ieuan’s home!” she exclaimed, delighted to have another person to tell, “He’s in hospital in Cardiff!”
When Thomas pulled away from the hug his young face was a picture of shock. He looked around to Blod and his grandfather, both nodding to help him accept the good news. It took quite a few moments, but eventually it all sank in. He swore quite loudly, but nobody told him off, then threw himself backwards into the snow and laughed up at the morning sky. Ness leapt on his stomach and covered him in slush, which to Mam and Blod’s horror was also all over her dress.
“You little mochyn!” Blod cried, pulling her away from Thomas and dragging her up to see her soaking wet hem.
And that was when the real work of having a wedding began.
***
The preparations had been hard, but they were nothing compared to organisation of the big day itself. The ceremony was at the chapel at half past twelve but it was gone nine by the time everyone was dried off and breakfasted after our time in the snow. Mum was a whirlwind of activity, shooing Mam away from the kitchen for her to get ready whilst she took over making the sandwiches and sorting out the other foodstuffs for the party at Ty Gwyn straight after the service. A visit to Cardiff or not, Mam would never let anyone set off with an empty stomach.
It was my duty to help Blod get into her dress, but everything was such a blur and a rush that I spent most of that time close up to it adjusting hems, fixing broken seams and resetting her golden curls once we’d secured her veil. In fact I didn’t actually stop to look at her properly until some hours later when we were outside the chapel with Ness, waiting for Idrys to come and walk her in. It was then that I saw the long, flowing white skirt of the gown. It was as bright as the snow all around us, something shiny in the material was reflecting the sun that had broken through the clouds above. Blod’s perfect skin was like porcelain against the dress save for a pinkish glow in her cheeks as she stood catching her breath in the cold air.
“You look perfect,” I told her, smiling widely.
“I should think so, the amount of time it took us.” She was grinning, but clearly agitated. “He’ll be in there, now won’t he?”
I caught on to some of her worries and nodded. “Of course. It’s not like he could get away, not at his speed. Even I could catch him.”
Blod laughed out a few nervous breaths, clutching her bouquet that matched the paper roses on Ness’s quickly-repaired dress. The little girl was looking up at the sky, watching the clouds break with her familiar look of concentration. Blod and I followed her gaze.
“I wish Dad could’ve been yur to see this,” Blod mused quietly, “but at least we’ll
see Ieu tonight.” She let out a little sigh. “I reckon every family only gets one miracle, and Dad would’ve never wanted it to be the other way round, for him to be yur and Ieu gone, so there you go.”
“I think we’ve had a few more miracles than that, if you think about it,” I added.
Blod nodded at me and squeezed my shoulder.
“I’m going to try and remember that, and be less snappy with you from now on,” she said with a laugh.
“Good plan,” I replied, “Save all the snapping for your husband.”
We were still laughing when Idrys came out of the chapel and told us we were ready to go. Ness was lined up to go first, a basket of paper petals in her hands ready to scatter, then Blod would take her Bampi’s arm to walk down the aisle. I couldn’t really carry the dress’s train and use both my crutches, but Blod had asked me to, so I was going to give it a damn good try. The first thing I caught sight of as we entered the church was Bickerstaff waiting in his bottle green suit. Unable to stop himself he was already watching his bride approach with the biggest smile I had ever seen him wear. If I hadn’t ever met him before, I’d have sworn he was the happiest man alive.
