Cecilia Or Flight From A Shadow

by Catherine Bowness

  Making her way towards the voices, she came first to Mrs Moss, who was sitting up, not obviously much hurt although clearly aggrieved at the sudden and disastrous turn their journey had taken.

  “What the devil ..?” she began accusingly as her daughter reached her.

  “Are you hurt, Mama?”

  “I have turned my ankle – indeed I think it may be broken - and hit my head but I daresay I will survive,” she finished with an air of disappointment. “Where is Phyllis?”

  “Quite close, I think. Can you stand? We can find her together.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t wish to. Leave me here and go to Phyllis.”

  “Very well.” Cecilia was about to set off but hesitated, not liking to leave her mother alone in the snow. Looking back, she saw her parent’s hand outstretched, in spite of its owner’s instruction to leave, in a touchingly pleading gesture.

  She turned back and took the hand but raising her mother to her feet proved impossible.

  “I wish you will get up, Mama,” she said impatiently. “It cannot be good for you to remain sitting in the snow.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what else I can do; I cannot get up. Where are we? How the devil are we to reach Geneva now?”

  “I have no idea, but I suppose we must try to climb back up to the road and hope someone comes along who can pick us up. Pray get up, Mama, and help me to find Phyllis – and Endymion!”

  Thus appealed to, Mrs Moss did stumble to her feet, hanging on to her daughter’s hand as though she were drowning. Her considerable weight almost pulled Cecilia down again and would have done if stronger hands had not appeared from behind to assist.

  “Thank God you’re still alive!” she exclaimed when she saw that it was Endymion.

  He steadied his mother until she could stand without swaying before saying, “There, Mama; I don’t think you’re too badly injured.”

  He brushed the snow off her, picked up her hat, which was lying nearby, shook it and replaced it upon her head.

  “The coachman is very badly hurt – and so are the horses. I’m not sure what to do for the best,” he went on, now addressing Cecilia.

  “If the horses cannot stand, I suppose you will have to shoot them,” Cecilia said bleakly; her usual concern for dumb animals had been momentarily driven out by her anxiety about her family. “There’s bound to be a blunderbuss or something somewhere, but you can’t shoot Mario. What has happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. He’s lying half under the box and seems to be insensible – at least I can’t rouse him. Will you come and see what you can do?”

  “Yes, but I must find Phyllis.”

  “Oh, she’s all right. I’ve already dusted the snow off her; she’s over there.”

  He pointed past the main pile of wreckage and added, “Everything seems to have fallen out of your trunk – you can’t have done it up properly. Anyway, I’ve wrapped her in several shawls and coats and things and told her to stay where she is for the time being. Come, Mama, let’s get you to Phyllis and you can wait together until we decide what to do about this new calamity!”

  The three of them made their unsteady way towards where he had left Phyllis. The ground, where it was level, was hard for the snow lay only an inch or two thick upon it. Fortunately, it seemed they had all landed, apart from the unfortunate coachman, in a sort of ditch filled with pine needles.

  Phyllis greeted them with pleasure. She was sitting on one of the seats, which was facing away from the wind, and was wrapped in a multitude of shawls and coats, had a hat upon her head and seemed, now that her whole family had been reunited, perfectly happy.

  “Do you think we will be able to climb all the way back up?” she asked, pointing up the mountain to where, some way away, they could see what looked like the edge of the road.

  “I think we will have to unless someone happens to notice us - and even then I don’t see how he could get down. Anyone driving along the road would be looking where he was going not down the mountain.”

  “Yes, but he would be bound to notice the skid marks leading over the edge,” Endymion pointed out. “The real danger is that no one will come past – at least until tomorrow – and we’ll probably all be dead by then. I haven’t seen anyone but us - and Waldron, although in point of fact we’ve not seen him - either yesterday or today.”

  “No, because it’s really too late in the year to be travelling this way. It was foolish to embark on such a perilous journey,” Cecilia said. She was, as usual, feeling horridly responsible for the fact that they had set off on such an ill-fated journey and wished they had gone south instead of north.

  “You should have let Waldron come behind us,” Mrs Moss said, not for the first time. “But you always know best, don’t you?”

  “Well, he will probably come back looking for us when we don’t turn up at the next changing post,” Endymion said reassuringly.

  “It will be dark soon,” Cecilia pointed out, unwilling to be soothed. “So that, even if he does come looking for us, he won’t see us – and, in any event, how could he rescue us? I don’t like to think about whether we will be able to survive a night out here.”

  “Are we going to die?” Phyllis asked.

  “No, of course not. I’m just giving way to low spirits,” Cecilia said at once, cursing herself for voicing her anxiety in her sister’s hearing. “Where’s the coachman?” she went on.

  “I’ll take you to him,” Endymion said. “You stay here with Phyllis, Mama.”

  Mrs Moss, whose ankle hurt but whose spirits had improved since she had been able to lay the blame for their misfortune on her elder daughter, mercifully accepted this command without argument. Recalling that a good mother’s duty lay in reassuring her children, she put an arm around her youngest child and murmured something unintelligible into her ear.

  “What in the world shall we do?” Cecilia asked as she and her brother walked away.

  “I’ll see if I can make some sort of shelter with the remains of the carriage and you three can huddle in there while I try to climb back up to the road and hope to stop someone – anyone – driving past – possibly Waldron. I don’t think he’ll abandon us.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I’m sure not. Come on – courage!”

  It was the first time her little brother had taken responsibility in such a grown-up way and Cecilia, not much comforted because she had severe doubts about the success of such a venture, was nevertheless cheered.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Dym,” she said, tucking her hand into his arm.

  “Lord! What praise! I shall remind you of that next time you complain that I’m useless.”

  “I won’t – I won’t ever complain of that again. This is very bad, is it not?”

  “Yes, terrible. Now, look, here is poor Mario – and he’s still not come to his senses.”

  As he spoke, they reached the body of the coachman, which was half under the almost intact box of the coach.

  Cecilia kneeled down beside him and put her hand on his face.

  “Mario, can you hear me? Pray open your eyes,” she besought but received no response.

  “I’ll get this off him,” Endymion said. “You stay there and comfort him.”

  “I don’t think he can hear me,” Cecilia said, lifting the man’s wrist and trying to find a pulse. “Do you suppose …?”

  But Endymion did not reply because he was trying to lift the box away from the man’s body.

  “Shall I help?” she asked. “The most important thing must be to free him.”

  “Has he got a pulse? If he hasn’t, there’s probably not much purpose in our killing ourselves moving this damned thing.”

  “Yes, although it seems very faint. Really, Dym, I don’t know much about pulses or how you’re supposed to check them, but there is something fluttering there, and his chest is warm. I put my hand inside his shirt.”

  “Good. No, I can lift this, but it would help if, when I’ve done
so, you can get him out of the way – rolling should be easier than trying to pull him, I should think. We can decide what to do after that. Put your hands on his back and push when I tell you.”

  She nodded and, kneeling in the snow beside the coachman, inserted her hands under his body and braced herself to push at the right moment.

  Endymion, meanwhile, squatted down close to the box, put his hands under one end, straightened his legs and heaved. The box rose a little way at one end, and he shouted, “Push!”

  Cecilia pushed.

  Mario was not a big man and did not possess a heavily muscled torso, but it nevertheless proved impossible to move him. He seemed to be embedded in the ground. She was conscious, as she strained to do her part, that her brother was holding up the end of the box with difficulty; if she could not move the coachman out of the way, the box would fall on him again, probably extinguishing what little life remained in him.

  “Stand up!” Endymion advised. “You might get more leverage that way! I can’t hold this damned thing much longer.”

  “I think I’ll try to pull him,” she said, rising and going to the man’s head. She bent down, put her hands under his arms and, backing away from Endymion and the box, pulled with all her might.

  Much to her surprise, the body began to slide across the snow. She saw, when she had moved him well away and Endymion had let the box fall again, that the reason why she had found it easier to pull than to push was because the coachman had been lying in another narrow declivity so that she had been trying to push him over a small ridge.

  “Well done!” Endymion said, coming to join her where she knelt beside the stricken man.

  “What shall we do?” she asked, raising an anxious face.

  “God knows! Perhaps I should have trained as a doctor. Shall we try turning him over, see if the air goes into his lungs better when he’s facing a different way?”

  “On his side perhaps,” she suggested. “Do you suppose he has hit his head? Is that why he’s still senseless?”

  “Probably. I can’t see anything obviously wrong with him but then we don’t know what’s going on inside, do we? Let’s turn him over.”

  It was not difficult to roll Mario on to his side when they were working together and when he was lying on a level piece of ground.

  As soon as they did so, they saw what had been concealed while he was on his back. There was a trail of blood in the snow which, on closer examination, came from a wound to the back of his head.”

  “Oh, dear Heaven!” Cecilia exclaimed.

  “There is not a great deal though, is there?” Endymion asked, parting the man’s hair and feeling carefully amongst it.

  “No, but I suppose he may have cracked his skull and damaged his brain,” she said on a long note of despair.

  “He may have done,” her brother replied, adopting a calm tone designed, no doubt, to stop his sister’s rising hysteria. “I’ll see if I can find something to bind it up,” he went on, “and fetch some more of those clothes strewn across the mountain so that we can wrap him up warmly. I don’t see that we can do much else,” he added, “unless perhaps he had some brandy stowed away in the box – along with the blunderbuss.”

  “Oh, shall I look?” she asked, beginning to recover something of her usual sangfroid.

  “No, you stay here with him and I’ll look. We must do something about those horses too.”

  The horses had ceased to scream, perhaps also beginning to emerge from their first panic-stricken reaction to tumbling down the mountain with a disintegrating carriage attached to them.

  While Endymion went to search for brandy, Cecilia crouched down beside the coachman and earnestly besought him to open his eyes or at least, if he could not manage that, to make a noise of some sort so that she could be certain he was still alive. She spoke in Italian, hoping that his native language would penetrate his injured brain better than a foreign one.

  “I don’t speak Italian very well,” she apologised, alternately rubbing his hands and stroking his cheek. “But I must say I don’t think the carriage had been well maintained. Did it, I wonder, start to crack and fall apart before it left the road or was it just that you drove, inadvertently of course, over a particularly icy patch?”

  Since he did not answer, nor stir in any way apart from the faint pulse which continued to flutter, she was left to ponder her own question which, having posed, she found to be of surpassing interest, although it did not, of course answer the really important one of how they were to survive a night halfway down a mountain with a wounded man.

  When Endymion returned, clutching an armful of clothes, she saw that he had found a bottle of brandy.

  “Oh, do you think that will help?”

  “I have not the least idea, but we can, I suppose, do no more than try it. Here, wrap him up as best you can and bind his head, although it is not bleeding much.”

  “No, that is what is particularly exercising me,” she admitted. “It is such a small wound that I do not quite see how it can have knocked him out to such an excessive extent. It makes me anxious lest it is something inside which has been damaged beyond repair. We know, unfortunately, that it is often the injuries you can’t see which can prove the most devastating.”

  “Yes, but it is foolish – and not at all helpful – to jump to conclusions based on one grim experience,” he reminded her, looking up from his task briefly and meeting her eyes. “Courage!”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She had finished binding a portion of one of her petticoats around the man’s head and now joined her brother in wrapping him in several of her mother’s gowns.

  “Now for the brandy,” he said. “Hold his head up a little – we don’t want to choke him.”

  The coachman was lying on his side so Cecilia moved up close to him and pulled him against her so that his head rested on her breast.

  “There – I should think he’d consider that worth coming round for,” Endymion said cheerfully. “See if you can open his mouth a bit more.”

  “Oh, that is not difficult; see, it just falls open with his head at this angle.”

  “So it does.” Endymion opened the bottle, leaned forward and, taking the man’s chin in his hand, inserted a few drops into the gaping mouth.

  The effect was immediate and startling. Mario coughed and began to struggle, flinging his arms and legs about so that it was all Cecilia could do to hold him.

  “He’s not choking, is he?” she asked anxiously.

  “No – at least not seriously. It’s just the shock of the brandy. It does that to you, you know, at first.”

  “It can’t be the first time he’s tried it; he’s quite old.”

  “No, I’m sure he’s tried it before, but he wasn’t expecting it this time. Here, let’s give him some more.”

  With infinite care, the young man instilled a few more drops into the man’s mouth and followed this up by slapping his cheeks a few times.

  “Come on, man, say something!” he exhorted.

  The coachman did not exactly comply, but he groaned and coughed some more so that his attendants began to feel more optimistic.

  Chapter 14

  Cecilia and Endymion were so delighted by the coachman’s faint indication of life that they exclaimed with joy and Cecilia enquired whether he thought he could stand.

  Such a question was perhaps a little premature as the man, although breathing, did not appear to be able to speak; indeed, it was doubtful if he understood the question or if, in fact, he heard it. His ability to cough had at first seemed to be a notable advance on his previous condition but, disappointingly, he did not appear to be any more conscious than he had been before.

  “Oh, dear,” Cecilia said. “I don’t believe he has quite come to his senses yet. What are we to do, Dym? I think we should try to climb back up to the road, do not you? But I do not see how we are to get him there.”

  “Neither do I just at present, but I will try to think of something. I suppose we should
count ourselves fortunate that we did not end up at the bottom.”

  She nodded, following his eyes downwards, and said, “Shall I fetch Mama and Phyllis so that we can all huddle together?”

  “No; you stay here and minister to poor Mario while I fetch them. But, first, I will try to do what I can for the horses.”

  She watched him as he walked across the snow towards the four animals which, now that they were no longer afraid they were going to fall any further, had ceased to scream. The pair which had been in front had managed to get to their feet although it was apparent that, in spite of no longer being attached, they had made no attempt to go anywhere. They stood impassively, their reins trailing in the snow around them, while their companions, still encumbered by the broken remains of the shaft, lay upon their sides where they had fallen.

  Cecilia, watching from a distance, was afraid that her brother would make the decision to shoot these two which, recumbent, looked as though they might be badly injured. He did not, at least not at first. He freed them and stood back while they struggled to their feet. He then examined them carefully, one by one, feeling their legs, stroking their necks and even laying his head against their chests, after which he left them where they were and returned to his sister.

  “I think those two that were lying down are quite badly injured and may have to be shot,” he admitted with a grave face. “They were a rotten set of spavined beasts when we set off and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it didn’t turn out to be their incompetence which sent us over the edge, but I find myself reluctant to shoot them. They seemed so grateful to me for releasing them.”

  “Oh, no, pray don’t!”

  “I’m wondering if the two that are unhurt could carry us – or some of us – perhaps in relays - back up to the road,” he went on. “They must be more sure-footed than we, I suppose. Would you like to try first? I don’t like to put Mama on either of them – or Phyllis – unless there’s someone at the top to receive them; and I don’t want to leave you here while I try my luck.”

  “What about Mario? Do you think, between us, we could get him on to one of them?”