Cecilia Or Flight From A Shadow

by Catherine Bowness

  “No,” she told it, “stay precisely where you are. There is really no point in your setting off in a panic. Stand still!” she added in a less persuasive but more authoritative voice.

  Waldron jumped down and, coming to the edge of the road, held out his hand to her.

  “Give me the horse,” he said, “before it drags you down the mountain again. Is it one of the ones that were drawing your carriage?”

  “Yes. We fell off the road. The others are down there.”

  She handed the reins to the Earl with relief and took the hand he held out to her. He, passing the horse to a junior groom, helped her up on to the road.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked, dropping her hand and drawing her into his arms.

  “No; only suffering from a want of nerve – and spirit.”

  “Oh, whatever you’re suffering from, I cannot believe it is that. Is that the rest of your party down there and have you ridden this beast up here all by yourself with no saddle and wearing entirely the wrong sort of clothes? I hardly think those the actions of a person short of nerve – or spirit.”

  “I did not mean to run away and leave them behind,” she explained miserably. Now safe, she had begun to shake violently and her teeth to chatter so that she could barely speak.

  “I assume you came to fetch help,” he said gently, still holding her in his embrace, a refuge she found so entirely to her taste that she had no desire to leave it.

  “Endymion made a sort of sled,” she explained, “and I was riding this horse in order to make sure it went the right way, but the thing fell apart and then he told me to go on – so I did.”

  “Wise advice. Are any of the others hurt?”

  “The coachman is very bad, I’m afraid. He is – or he was when I last saw him – breathing but insensible. I think Mama may have broken her ankle, but everyone’s injuries may be worse now. Can you see them?”

  She struggled but, although he loosened his arms, he did not remove them.

  “Yes. I can see your brother – he is bending, trying to mend the sled, I assume. I think your mama is sitting on something or other and your sister is beside her.”

  “What about Mario?”

  “I assume he must be the person lying down. There are three horses too.”

  “Yes; two were injured in the fall. We were trying to get the other two to pull us up, but they broke apart; that was when Endymion told me to go on. What shall we do? Can we fetch them?”

  “Yes, of course. I would like you to sit in the carriage – you’re very cold and your clothes, inadequate when you began your adventure, are soaked. Leave it to us. I’ll discuss the situation with the rest of my party and we’ll contrive something. We’ve brought ropes as well as horses accustomed to walking up and down mountains without roads, which your nags were not.”

  He led her to his coach and, when she had climbed up the steps, suggested she take off at least some of her wet clothes, adding, “Whatever you do or don’t take off, I strongly advise you to remove your shoes. Why the devil are you wearing shoes in any event? Have you no boots?”

  “No; but I did not expect to be climbing a mountain when I set off. I thought I would be sitting in a carriage.”

  “Indeed, but it was not a well-made or well-maintained one. You must still have been very cold.”

  “Oh, I was, but I am quite accustomed to that.”

  “No doubt. Now, please stay where you are; you can do no one any good by standing at the side of the road and becoming agitated. Leave it to us."

  “But I …”

  “Do you not trust us to do our best?”

  “Yes, of course I do – and I am persuaded you will be able to achieve much more than I could. It is just that, sitting in the warmth and not knowing what is going on, is likely to be quite disagreeable.”

  “No doubt,” he said again, “but life and its vicissitudes are often disagreeable. Please do as I suggest, Miss Moss. I cannot of course order you to obey, but it will be much easier for me to do what I can for your family if you will keep out of the way. Take off your shoes and stockings, put your feet on the brick, which I hope is still warm, wrap yourself in at least one of those rugs and try to think of something wholly unrelated to your family being at the bottom of a ravine.”

  “They are not at the bottom,” she pointed out.

  “No, thank God. If you had fallen to the bottom I do not think there would have been much anyone could have done except consign your souls to the Almighty.”

  He took her hand, clad in a sodden glove, and pressed it.

  “Take off your gloves too!”

  “Yes, my lord,” she replied meekly. “Thank you.”

  “Not at all. It is part of my diplomatic duty – rescuing my fellow countrymen and so on. Courage!”

  He stepped back and shut the door.

  It was now fully dark outside so that all she could discern through the window were lanterns bobbing up and down as the men uncoiled the rope they had brought. She wondered to what they would tie it and found herself selfishly hoping it would not be the carriage in which she was sitting, although she supposed that the vehicle itself, along with its six horses, could probably comfortably support the weight of at least two men.

  She took off her sodden gloves, shoes and stockings, as well as her coat, and wrapped herself, as instructed, in one of the fur rugs. Then, with her bare feet on the warm brick, she applied her attention to what she could see from the window.

  She could hear the men shouting at each other and gathered that the rope was being tied to one of the other carriages. She supposed that inns in the Alps must be equipped for mountain rescues and that the men would know what they were doing.

  After a while the voices faded and she guessed the men were in the process of descending. The six horses harnessed to the coach in which she was sitting stamped their feet occasionally and she heard the junior groom, who had been left in charge, speak to them from time to time and intermittently shout back at someone holding the other horses.

  In spite of the hot brick and the fur rug, it was not long before she began to feel exceedingly cold again. Probably it was a combination of delayed shock and immobility. She added another rug to her wrappings and, perhaps rather belatedly, sent up a request to the Almighty.

  It was hard sitting inert in the carriage in undeniable safety and comparative comfort while worrying about the others still exposed on the mountain. She wondered if the Earl himself had gone down on the end of a rope and supposed he must have because otherwise, surely, he would have come back to report on progress. She did not think he was the sort of man whose life had involved much dangling at the end of a rope so that it was not long before she began to worry about him almost as much as about her family.

  She was, in addition, extremely anxious about Mario who, it seemed to her, had been very badly hurt. He, of course, had been sitting on the box when the coach skidded off the road and must have fallen from that at once, very likely hitting his head on a rock on the way down. Although there was a thin coating of snow, it provided only a smooth surface to slide upon and was not by any means thick enough to act as any sort of a cushion.

  It was an enormous relief when she heard voices approaching again and saw lanterns moving around outside the coach. It looked as if at least one of the stricken party had been brought up.

  A moment later the door was opened, and she saw the Earl outside with Phyllis in his arms. He thrust the girl into the carriage, saying, “You will find your sister in here, quite safe and, I hope, warm. She will look after you and we’ll have your mother here in no time.”

  “Oh, Cissy!” Phyllis cried, throwing herself into her sister’s arms.

  “Are you hurt, dearest?” Cecilia asked anxiously.

  “Oh no, only bruised. It is nothing! Thank you, my lord,” she added, remembering her manners, just in time, for he was already shutting the door.

  “Not at all; I won’t say it was precisely a pleasure because I have to admi
t that climbing down – and then up - a mountain in the dark cannot truthfully be described as pleasant, but it is satisfying to see you safely reunited with your sister.”

  “Oh, yes,” Cecilia agreed, “thank you, my lord. Are the others unhurt?”

  “More or less. Someone is bringing your mother up as we speak. Your brother refuses to leave until we have your coachman safe at the top. We have decided to carry him up tied to some of the planks which Mr Moss used to make the sled; as he is still insensible, it is hard to tell just how badly he is injured.”

  “But breathing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the horses? You won’t leave them down there, will you?”

  “No; when we’ve got all the people up, we’ll attach the ropes to the horses and encourage them to walk up of their own accord. Ah, here is your mother now. Mrs Moss, let me help you into the carriage where you will find both your daughters quite safe and warm.”

  The Earl stepped back to assist Mrs Moss to climb inside. She looked cold and distressed. Having made it inside, she fell, groaning, on to the squabs.

  Mrs Moss, after dedicating at least a minute to sighing woefully, recovered sufficiently to express her conviction that the Earl had only set out to search for them because he could not bear the prospect of never seeing Phyllis again. She, the proud mother pointed out, was the first to be rescued by him, carried up the mountain in his lordship’s own arms.

  “Who carried you up, Mama?” Cecilia asked, rather nauseated by this description.

  “I am not certain of their names but believe them to be employees of the next inn – the one where we were supposed to meet Lord Waldron.”

  “I own I’m looking forward to getting there,” Cecilia said. “Poor Endymion must be excessively hungry for it cannot be far off time for dinner and we have missed nuncheon altogether.”

  “He has done well,” Mrs Moss admitted, settling herself comfortably between her daughters. It was not often she praised her son, preferring to reserve her compliments for her youngest daughter. “He tried to rescue us all by himself.”

  “He did indeed,” Cecilia agreed readily. “And got us part-way. It is only a pity that his invention failed and you all fell down again. When you were brought up, Mama, did you see what had become of poor Mario?”

  “Mario? You mean the coachman? He was still insensible – I shouldn’t think he will ever recover and it’s my opinion it serves him right!”

  “Oh, Mama, that is a little harsh!” Cecilia exclaimed, although she was not surprised at her mother’s dismissive attitude. It was one of her mother’s least appealing traits that she was inclined to view servants as of little account except insofar as their actions either ameliorated or harmed their employers’ comfort. In view of their own situation, frequently forced to engage in menial work, this perspective struck Cecilia as irrational.

  “Do you mean he will never wake up?” Phyllis asked. “Why does he deserve it?”

  “He was foolish enough to attempt to carry us over the Alps in that boneshaker of a carriage, which fell to pieces the minute it was put under the least strain – and I daresay he was not looking where he was going, which was why we skidded.”

  “I don’t suppose he owns – or owned – the carriage. I should imagine he was merely employed to drive it. I do wonder though what caused the accident. I do not recall the wheels skidding or driving over anything in the road.”

  “I cannot see that it matters precisely why it happened. The fact is that the vehicle proved wholly unsatisfactory for the terrain and he was an excessively poor driver.”

  “There was a funny noise just before we left the road,” Phyllis said. “A sort of creaking.”

  “It creaked all the time,” Mrs Moss said dismissively. “The windows did not fit properly so that there was an appalling draught and a horrid flapping which gave me the headache.”

  “Yes,” Cecilia agreed, frowning in an effort to remember the sequence of events immediately prior to their plunge down the mountain. It was difficult because the initial shock, when they left the road, had rapidly been superseded by her panic-stricken search for her family. This, once she had found them and ascertained that none was seriously hurt, was followed by the realisation that they had landed a long way down a steep slope – so far that she could not imagine how they would be able to climb up again.

  Then there had been Endymion’s frenzied attempt to fashion some sort of a vehicle to convey the weaker members of their party back to safety. He, she thought, could probably have climbed up by means of his own legs and it was possible that she might have done as well, but there was little likelihood of either their mother or Phyllis, who was not particularly robust, having been able to reach the road. They could not, in any event, have simply abandoned the coachman - and carrying him would have been impossible.

  But she had been too taken up with undoing at least some of the harm that had befallen them to spare a thought for how the calamity had occurred. Now, pressed up against her mother’s warm and ample body and wrapped in a number of fur rugs, she had leisure to consider the sequence of events.

  They had set off a scarce ten minutes after the Earl’s party had swept out of the courtyard and, although well aware that they would of necessity travel more slowly than he, she had fully expected to join his family in a couple of hours when the horses would need to be changed.

  It had been no more than half an hour later that the accident had taken place. But what had caused it? She did not recall a bump or indeed a skid; there had been no loss of control on the coachman’s part, or at least none which he had tried to correct. It had happened very suddenly and, now that Phyllis had mentioned it, she did recall an unexpected noise not related to the continual flapping of the unsecured window or to the poor springs. It had been a sudden tooth-grindingly loud creaking, which progressed rapidly to a shriek as of iron scraping against iron. This was swiftly followed by a violent lurch, which must have been what took them off the road.

  They had, when their descent began, been inside the carriage where they had been thrown about like dolls in a box, repeatedly bumping their heads against the roof and sides of the carriage. The coach had eventually broken apart with an ear-splitting sound as though it had been smashed with a giant hammer – and after that she had fallen free, tumbling over and over down a mountain whose rocky side was only covered by the thinnest sheet of snow until she landed, along with the others, in a gully where the snow was, fortunately, deep enough to cushion their landing.

  Chapter 20

  Seated in a row in his lordship’s carriage, the three women soon grew warm beneath the pile of rugs; unfortunately, their tempers also kindled.

  Phyllis repeatedly asked where Endymion was; Cecilia’s patient reply that he was still engaged in bringing the coachman up would satisfy her for no more than a minute or two before she would recommence her fidgeting and demand once more to know whether he was safe and why he was not with them by this time.

  “I am certain he is – and will be here shortly,” Cecilia told her for the tenth time.

  Mrs Moss, possessed of a less tolerant disposition and inclined to concentrate on her own discomfort to the exclusion of others’, lost her temper and told her younger daughter to ‘put a sock in it’, at which the girl burst into tears.

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t turn into a watering pot now of all times!” her mother exclaimed. “What in the world is the matter with you?”

  “I’m worried about Dym,” the girl said, subsiding into partially suppressed sobbing.

  “I am convinced there is no need to be,” Cecilia told her, reaching for her sister’s hand and, in the process, disarranging the rugs once more.

  “Now, look what you’ve done!” Mrs Moss exclaimed, turning her ire upon her elder daughter and hitching up the rug irritably.

  “I am sorry, Mama,” Cecilia said contritely. “Does your ankle pain you very much?”

  “Yes, it is intolerable,” the older woman
responded, adding a dramatic groan as proof of her suffering.

  “Let me move the brick into a better position. It is not very warm now, but I believe simply elevating the limb should prove soothing.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to walk properly again. You know that an injury sustained at my age is far less likely to heal?”

  “I did not know and, really, Mama, you are not so very old! We will get a doctor to look at it as soon as possible.”

  “Just because I do not look my age,” Mrs Moss said, struggling to defend her youthfulness without abandoning the notion that she required special consideration, “does not mean that my bones are any younger.”

  “No, of course not. It may only be sprained, you know. The physician will be able to tell, and no doubt bind it up so that it does not hurt so much.”

  “Physician? How can we afford such a thing? And, in any event, where in the world is one to be found up here?”

  “Of course we can afford to pay for one if we need him. And people up here must surely require medical attention from time to time – I am certain the inn will know where to send. There!”

  While she had been speaking, Cecilia had, at the risk of once more disturbing the arrangement of rugs, been kneeling on the floor, moving the brick and carefully placing her mother’s injured foot upon it. Mrs Moss flinched and uttered a little scream.

  It was not much more than a quarter of an hour later that the door was opened once more, this time to reveal Endymion.

  “I thought you’d like to know that everything of any value has been brought up now. Mario is laid out in the other carriage, still insensible, your trunk has been repacked for the third time, Cissy, and loaded on to the back of the coach – as has mine, which, fortunately, hasn’t had its contents immersed in snow.”

  “And the horses?”

  “They’ve been brought up too. Waldron is about to set off and I’ll follow with Mario. Here’s his lordship now, getting back on the box. The coachman will have to go forward at first – just until he finds a suitable place to turn; and don’t be frightened if you seem to be sliding about a bit.”