Page 33 of The Magic of Provence (A Year in France #3)

The forest didn’t feel peaceful today.

There were horrors lurking in the quiet stillness and bloodstains on the churned-up carpet of dry leaves and acorns.

Didier’s brother Alain was there. He had shifted all the donkeys to another area in the forest.

Apart from one.

Mary lay on the ground, barely alive, with a hideous, deep gash in her neck that still had a slow trickle of blood escaping.

Fi knelt by her head, so horrified she was barely able to breathe. She smoothed the hair away from the donkey’s eyes that were half open but had an ominous milky glaze to them.

‘Oh, my God…’ she whispered. ‘What’s happened?’

‘A sanglier has attacked her.’ Christophe’s tone was grim.

He took his stethoscope out of the kit he’d brought from his vehicle and he bent his head but hesitated for a moment before putting the ear pieces in to listen to Mary’s heart and breathing.

‘Alain thinks she was defending her foal. She’s just given birth. ’

Fi gasped. She looked sideways at Alain, who was standing close to Mary’s back feet but he hadn’t been following the conversation in English.

‘ Le bébé ?’ she asked, her voice cracking.

Alain’s face folded into deeper lines and he turned his head to look down at what Fi had thought was a sack he’d packed the electric fencing into. It became even harder to drag in a new breath as she saw a tiny hoof resting on a fold in the sack.

‘See if it’s alive,’ Christophe said quietly. ‘I’ll stay with Mary. I don’t think there’s anything we can do for her. She’s lost too much blood.’

Fi knelt beside the sack and peeled back the folds.

The newborn donkey was lying on its side, completely limp.

Its coat was still damp and so dark it was almost black, but it had a white belly and chest. It was automatic for Fi to reach out her hands to touch this beautiful little creature who had a muzzle that was also white except for a black smudge around the nostrils and…

oh… there was white fluff inside ears that were also limp, flat against its neck.

The baby’s eyes were half shut, like its mother’s.

But it was warm.

And when Fi moved her hands to the foal’s ribs and pressed gently, she could feel a heartbeat.

‘It’s alive,’ she told Christophe. ‘What should I do?’

‘Keep her warm,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

The sack wasn’t enough. Instinct drove Fi to scoop the baby into her arms so that she could share the warmth of her own body.

She curled her back to wrap it even more securely into her arms, and it was only when she could feel the chill of the damp beginning to recede that she lifted her head to see what Christophe was doing.

He was very close. He was also kneeling on the ground and he was also bent over.

He had Mary’s head on his lap and he was stroking her face.

She could hear the comforting murmur of his voice but couldn’t tell which of his languages he was using, and she could also hear the awful sound of the last breaths before Mary’s struggles were over.

Then there was only silence.

It felt as if the forest around them was absorbing the death with a serenity that simply gathered it into the circles of life that had been repeated endlessly for thousands upon thousands of years.

Nobody moved for a long, long moment.

Alain had turned his back, his hand over his eyes.

Christophe had Mary’s head in his arms, his own head bent so far over it they were touching.

Fi had tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched Christophe.

As if he felt that gaze, he looked up and his eyes held hers.

The moment they were sharing was bigger than the tragedy that had taken place here.

The bond of friendship and trust between them was experiencing a fire that was forging it into something so much deeper that Fi could feel it in every cell of her body.

It was in this precise moment that she knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that she would never feel like this about any other human on the planet.

She loved him more than she had believed it was possible to love anyone.

She was in love with him.

She had no choice but to silently, privately, gift her heart and soul to this man.

* * *

It was Christophe that broke that intense eye contact.

But the private moment of communication had given him not only the strength to think and move swiftly but the resolve to try and make this somehow less distressing for Fi.

The depth of emotion in her eyes had stolen his breath. And his heart. If they’d been alone, he would have taken her in his arms and held her the way she was holding that foal, but what she had in her arms was also the clear direction to take them out of this nightmare.

‘We have to help the baby,’ he said.

He examined the foal briefly, listened to its heart that sounded unexpectedly strong, ran his hands over the small body to make sure it hadn’t also been injured by the sanglier and dipped the stump of the umbilical cord in some iodine.

‘It’s a girl,’ he told Fi. ‘And the best thing we can do for her now is to make sure she gets some colostrum.’

He found a small basin in a sterile package in his kit.

He splashed disinfectant on his hands and then on Mary’s udder and teats.

He knelt beside her, totally focussed on milking as much as possible of the valuable first milk.

It was a horribly grim task to have to do – he could already feel her body cooling beneath his hands – but he clenched his jaw and kept going.

This colostrum contained all the nutrients, extra calories and, most importantly, the antibodies that were vital to give a newborn mammal the best chance of survival.

Alain emptied an unopened water bottle he had so that Christophe had a container to transport the milk, but he left a little in the basin and filled the syringe again.

Fi held the baby’s head up as he slowly trickled some liquid into its mouth, but it was too weak to swallow and it dribbled out to drip onto Fi’s arm.

Christophe got some sterile tubing and, as gently as he could, he fed a soft tube in through the foal’s nostrils to get it as far as the stomach.

‘Can you hold her with one arm as if she was standing up?’ he asked Fi. ‘And keep her head higher than her body with your other arm?’

He needed both hands to hold the tubing and put the nozzle of the syringe inside to push in the fluid that could mean the difference between life and death.

Alain stood behind him, watching. They had a conversation in French that Christophe didn’t translate for Fi.

Alain told him that he would take care of Mary and bury her, here, in the forest. He said that the rest of the herd was safe and that he thought they’d helped fend off the attack but none of them were injured.

He shook his head as he watched the care with which Christophe was feeding the foal and wondered aloud how he would be able to look after this orphan on his own.

Christophe told him he couldn’t. That, being a vet, he was better placed to look after it and that Fiona would help him.

She glanced up, hearing her name, so he switched back to English. ‘I’ve told Alain I will care for the foal. I said you’ll be able to help me. Is that okay?’

‘I want to take care of her,’ she whispered. ‘I want to take her back to La Maisonette so I can look after her myself.’

‘We will take her back there,’ Christophe agreed.

‘It’s a better environment than the veterinary clinic, but I will need to help you.

As you can see, the feeding is more than one person can do alone and she will need feeding a little bit but often.

Every hour or so for the next few days. And nights. ’

Fi nodded. ‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘If you can show me what to do.’

Her gaze hadn’t moved from his. ‘I need to save this baby,’ she added, so softly he almost couldn’t catch her words.

Not that it mattered. He could see exactly how important this was to her and he loved the fierceness he could see in her eyes right now.

The determination to protect – and love – this helpless orphan.

She was the person anyone, human or animal, would want by their side in whatever battle life could face you with.

Christophe was going to be by her side for as long as it took.

End of story.

* * *

Fi sat in the back of Christophe’s car with the foal in her arms, its nose tucked under her chin.

She could feel every breath the baby took and breathed in the scent of its fluffy hair.

She could feel the soft muzzle pressed against her skin and, at one point, she was sure she felt the lick of a tongue.

The foal must be breathing in her smell too, she realised, and feeling the security and warmth of being held.

A bond was forming and it was remarkably similar to the kind of bond she felt when she was near Ellie’s baby, Bonnie.

It was an emotional ocean that, for her own protection, she’d barely dipped her toe into so far, but this was different and she had willingly thrown herself into it.

Oddly, she didn’t feel as if she was going to drown.

The baby donkey could smell her and see her and feel her. She may have even tasted her and she could definitely hear the sound of her voice.

‘It’s going to be okay, hinny…’ she told her softly, again and again. ‘We’re going to look after you. You’re safe, wee one… I’ll keep you safe…’

Fi was quite sure about that. She desperately wanted this baby to live and she knew she had the power to make it true, because she’d had the power to make the opposite happen, hadn’t she? For her own baby. A wish that had come true so fast she hadn’t had the time to change her mind.

If only she’d known that she would never, ever be able to take it back.

That it would haunt her forever.

Saving this baby might be as close as she would ever get to something she didn’t actually deserve to get a second chance at – being a mother.