Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [70]
We had not gone ten steps, though, before the water's chuckle grew to a roar. I watched branches and then a whole tree float past us. I spied a heron flying above a weedy nest caught in the stream. The bird swooped low, calling and calling to the fledglings trapped inside. When the water reached my breast and my wet cloak threatened to pull me down, I tried to turn back the way we had come. But the current battled me so fiercely, I was forced to cling to my horse and let her carry me ahead.
The spray and the noise of the flood were fearsome, and with each step my hands nearly slipped from Felicity's broad back. But it was not until we were halfway across that I saw the goat and fully woke to the peril I was in. The old nanny, who must have thought, just as we had, to cross the stream at its narrowest point, was sailing like an ungainly bark downstream. She wore a bell that rang as she struggled against the torrent. She swept past us, bleating in chorus with the bell, and I thanked heaven for my horse's size. When the poor doomed creature's head disappeared under a swell, I closed my eyes and prayed. By the time I opened them, we had nearly gained the far bank. Then, just as we got close enough to smell the sweet woodruff in the woods beyond the shore and to touch the broken timbers of the bridge that floated past us, Felicity stumbled.
Perhaps she stepped into a hole on the river's bottom, or maybe one of the wooden beams that surrounded us knocked her off-balance. Suddenly, in less time than it takes to tell, I had lost my good horse. For as she fell, I went tumbling, too, and though I tried to grab hold of the reins and pull myself back to her side, I could not. Instead, I found myself caught up in a great rush of water that rose beneath me and then swallowed me whole.
I tasted brine and grit and watched great shadows flit past me under the brook. They may have been fish or turtles, but, spinning and choking, I fancied they were mothers and babes, carried past me by the same current that held me in its sway. Spun round and round, in fear for my life, I mourned only two things: as I was dashed to the bottom of the stream, my hands and feet raking clots of mud, I yearned to undo the moment I had turned Felicity toward town that morning. As I prepared to die, I pictured myself pulling her short, instead, and leaning down from her saddle. I saw myself bending to Leofric, who whispered in my ear what he had wanted to tell me at the stables. "Do not go," he begged, tears in his eyes. "Do not leave me."
My other regret, the last thing I thought as the river pummeled and tossed me, was how sorry I felt that I had not kissed the baby Ebba on her forehead, had not set a tiny seal of forgiveness there—a damp print of love.
When we are most in need of His salvation, and are most repentant for our sins, the Good Lord comes to our aid. For as I felt my world grow black and my will to live snuffed out like a candle, I was suddenly pushed once more to the surface of the water. There, I grabbed one of the floating timbers, a plank that, thank Providence, was still attached to the bridge's foundation on shore. From this desperate perch, I looked out to where Felicity now scrambled in the middle of the flood. I shouted her name above the water's din, but though she thrashed and paddled furiously, without her four great legs set on its bottom she could not fight the river.
Imagine, then, my anguish as I saw my beautiful mare swept like the nanny before her, kicking and splashing, downstream. In vain I called, in vain I reached for her tangled reins which, for a moment, danced under the current in front of me. What I retrieved from the swirling foam was only a trailing vine and, caught in its tendrils, the torn cloak in which I'd ridden here.
I cursed