Page 73 of An Enchanted Moment on Ever After Street
I hate having to leave Darcy, but the best thing I can do is get out of the way and let them help him.
I extract Mrs Potts from his arm and keep her bundled in the jacket as one of the red-clad rescuers appears at the top of the embankment and makes his way down to us. Another one has rigged up a rope system, and between us, he, Mrs Potts and I haul ourselves to the top of the embankment, while three other men attached to sturdy-looking ropes head downwards with first aid bags and a stretcher.
I hear Darcy talking to them and the one who came down for me wraps one of those foil blankets around me, puts a big hand on my back and walks me towards the clearing beyond the Full Moon Forest where the emergency vehicles had to stop.
Ambulance lights are flashing on Ever After Street. I don’t think I’ve ever been wetter in my life. I shiver inside the foil blanket, and someone brings me a cup of tea while I sit at the back of the waiting ambulance and assure them I’m not the one who needed rescuing. They’re even kind enough to give Mrs Potts an arbitrary check-over, and tell me that although I should take her to the vets for peace of mind, it doesn’t look like anything a few packets of Dreamies won’t fix. A kindly paramedic wraps her in a foil blanket too and no one gets scratched as she passes her back to me.
‘Well, life is never dull on Ever After Street, is it?’ Cleo plonks herself down beside me and wraps her arm aroundmy shoulders, reaching over to tickle Mrs Potts under her bedraggled chin.
We sit in silence and watch the activity all around us. The rescue crew are everywhere. The police have already arrived with hazard tape to cordon off the broken fence. A policeman is on the phone to presumably someone at the council, who is having their ear chewed off about insufficient fencing. Witt is pacing and Ali is wringing his hands together, and all I can think about is Darcy and what he’s been through tonight. Surely his two worst fears – being seen so publicly and being injured again, and he’s had to face both of them because of me, and I don’t know how to help him get past that.
And then they’re there. A team of red-suited men are carrying Darcy on a stretcher between them, and he looks even paler in the flashing blue lights up here, and the blood from the cut on his head looks scarily bright, and I watch helplessly as they strap him into the ambulance, and one of the paramedics holds the door open for me.
‘I’ve got her; you go with him.’ Cleo gently takes Mrs Potts out of my arms and murmurs to her. ‘She can come home with me and I’ll open the shop tomorrow, Sadie’s taken over at the festival, Mickey and Lissa are…everywhere. Don’t worry about a thing here.’
Just when I thought I couldn’t cry any more tonight, it sets me off again as I wonder how I got so lucky to find such a good friend and work in such a supportive community.
The paramedics cover Darcy with foil blankets, strap an oxygen mask onto his face and put an oxygen monitor on his finger, and I sit on the bench with my hand on his thigh, just about the only place I can touch him without getting in the way, and desperately try to reassure myself that he’s going to be all right.
21
There’s a certain kind of humiliation to sitting in a hospital waiting room in a mud-stained yellow satin Belle dress. Everyone recognises both the dressandthe fact that you must’ve had a pretty bad night to end up in A&E without a chance to change, and I get sympathetic looks from adults and excited looks that quickly turn to terror from children when they recognise my dress and then their little eyes fall on my leaf-ridden hair and mud-smeared, tear-stained face.
They take Darcy straight through from the ambulance and won’t let me accompany him any further. I get sent to a waiting room and a kindly nurse makes me a cup of tea and gives me a packet of wet wipes to clean myself up, but it’shoursbefore a doctor finally comes out, and I’ve paced so much that I’ve probably worn a hole in the flooring that squeaks under my wet shoes.
He tells me they’re admitting Darcy for observation overnight due to the head injury and the effects of mild hypothermia, and that his ankle can’t be set until the fracture clinic staff are back in work tomorrow morning. They won’t let me see him because visitors aren’t allowed at this time of nightin case they disturb the other patients on the ward. The last thing I wanted to do was leave him alone, and I make the doctor promise to tell him I’ll be back first thing in the morning.
It’s nearly 1a.m. when I get a taxi back to Ever After Street and I have never been so glad to see lights still on in the castle. I don’t even have to knock before Cleo comes out and envelops me in a hug.
‘Mrs Potts is fine,’ she says quickly. ‘One of the festival guests happened to be a vet. He was dressed as Captain Hook and gave me his hook to look after while he checked her over. Quite an experience, I can tell you. Witt needed to warm up too so he lit a fire and rubbed her dry in front of it. Ali brought her chicken from 1001 Nights – he’s her new best friend now.’
She leads me to one of the cosy castle living rooms and we poke our heads round the door to see Ali dozing on a sofa in front of a fire crackling in the hearth and Mrs Potts purring on his lap, looking like nothing ever happened.
Inside the castle, Witt and Sadie have started clearing away the debris from the book festival, and I intend to help, but a wave of tiredness washes over me as the adrenaline from the evening’s events dissipates now I know Mrs Potts is okay, and while Darcy is definitely not okay, heisin the best place possible.
I gather the clothes I was wearing earlier and strip out of my ill-fated Belle dress, and Cleo insists on walking home with me and taking the long way round, becauseno oneis cutting through the forest again tonight.
She makes us both a cup of tea and toast, and won’t go home until I’ve had a hot shower, changed into my warmest pyjamas, and got Mrs Potts settled. It’s the early hours before Cleo leaves, and I fall into bed gratefully, counting down the hours until morning, because seeing Darcy again can’t come soon enough.
It’s gone 11a.m. before they finally bring Darcy back from the fracture clinic and put an end to my endless pace-a-thon in the waiting area, and as a nurse walks me down the ward, the sight of him sitting up in the hospital bed makes my eyes water with tears of relief.
I pull the privacy curtain round and stand at the end of the bed and lift a hand in greeting.
‘That’ – he inclines his head, meaning my tears – ‘is not a good start.’
‘They’re good tears,’ I sniffle. ‘Because you’re…’
‘Don’t finish that sentence.’
‘Perfect.’ I finish the sentence.
‘Something I’ll never be.’ He blushes and just the simple act ofseeingDarcy blush is enough to start me off yet again, so I busy myself with dumping the bag containing the change of clothes I’ve brought for him at the side of the bed and pulling the visitor’s chair as close as I can get it.
He holds his scarred right hand out and I wrap both of mine around it and cling on, and for the very first time, he lets me look at him without anything between us. They’ve obviously given him a shower and put him in a papery hospital-issue nightshirt. His head has been stitched up and there are a line of butterfly bandages holding the wound closed, and now it looks angry and swollen with splotches of blue-purple bruising starting to show around it. His left leg is wrapped in bright-white fresh plaster from the toes to the knee, and there’s gauze taped to his arm where they must’ve put an IV line in last night but have now removed it.
There are dark circles under his eyes and he looks like he could sleep for three years and it still wouldn’t be enough and he is, without a doubt, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.
I kiss his hand. ‘How are you?’
