A/N: Fair warning - don't bother to read the following without reading what has come before. Don't start here, this is Story Four of four. Go back, check out Story One: Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, and we'll be glad to have you once you've caught up with the rest of us.
*The quote used in the story summary comes from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen.


'Til I Come Marchin' Home
"Don't sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me,
Don't go walkin' down lovers' lane,
Don't give out with those lips of yours,
'Til I come marchin' home.
"

Hoboken, NEW JERSEY - Spring 2012 - "I gotta say, I'm really not the best person to tell this story..."

The late morning sun came in through the smaller of the two windows in the kitchen, which had been only slightly renovated since the neighborhood had originally been built. The sink-side table was unused to being cluttered with much other than things that fit into the lazy susan that occupied its center, but today its surface wore everything from newspaper to copier print-outs, laptops and no fewer than six cups of coffee in various stages of being drunk.

"If you truly feel that way, then let's just think of it as having a conversation," the interviewer suggested reasonably, removing his half-glasses and squinting one studied eye at Alex Armstrong, thirty-three, where he sat across from him at the kitchen table of number 832, a brick two-story the perfect exterior match of every other house for five square blocks.

"Easier said than done," Alex replied in a nervous attempt at humor, "'just a conversation' - with your lighting crew, three cameras up and running, and all these damn power cords taped down to snake around the floor to the point I can hardly find a spot to rest one foot flat." He cracked a smile. "I can hardly get over you being here," he added, pointing out the relative celebrity of the man now interviewing him.

"Just...tell me about your grandfather," the half-glasses went back on, the grey head inclined toward its tablet to consult his notes, "you're named for him, after all."

"Hardly," Alex dissented, though politely. "You'd better fire whoever wrote up your background on this one if you think that. Grandpops' name wasn't Alex at all - it was Thomas, like yours - with no middle that we know of. I remember that from when they were trying to think of what to put on his headstone." His shoulders came up. "But again, I'm not the one to know, really."

"Lorrie," the half-glasses threw over his shoulder, beckoning one of his interns or assistants, "just one more time; you're certain this was well-vetted?"

"Checked it three times, Sir," presumably Lorrie assured him.

"It's just, Mom's not always herself anymore," Armstrong was muttering to himself, "we didn't know she'd go and take pneumonia after her hip replacement, and be unable to make this interview for you..."

"It's alright, Captain, there's a great deal of human interest to the story, coming at it from your angle: recently-returned-from-war soldier sharing the story of his soldier grandfather. If you're good to go on - " he motioned to one of the cameramen to indicate there was no need to stop filming.

"Yeah, no, I'm good. I mean, I'm nervous, but who wouldn't be - with you in his kitchen? Just...it's all hard to get my mind around. I've only been stateside about two weeks and here you," the sweep of his eyes took in the entire production team, "all are, I'm wearing make-up and you're saying you want Pops to be in your new book - what were you gonna call it again?"

"We're thinking: Guardians of the Greatest Generation. Focusing on the caregivers of those still living and the caretakers of others' legacies. How their loved ones' stories have affected and informed their lives."

Alex drummed his fingers against the table, unable to fully settle his nerves. He felt more high-strung than before a fire fight. At least then he knew what was expected of him. "That's good. No, really it is - I like that."

"So the house is yours, then?" the half-glasses renewed his questioning on an unimportant front, attempting to settle the younger man.

"Nah, it's Mom's. Me, I don't really have a place. I've been more or less active duty since that first summer after graduation. No need for more than a bedroom to occasionally crash in when I'm on leave."

The interviewer glanced about the kitchen, down the short hallway toward the front room and gesticulated with a stylus, "And this was also your grandfather's house."

"Yeah, I guess it always was. It's been with the family going way back."

He looked out, over the top of his half-glasses, pleased with himself. He had backed his subject into just the sort of question he had wanted to ask. "And what sort of a man was he?"

"Pops? Hard to say." Alex took on a reflective tone. "Kept to himself a lot, but an old man in a house with five loud kids - I'd probably shut the door to my room, too."

He added a prompt, a verbal nudge to get more. "He liked to fly."

Alex shrugged his agreement. "He ran a small charter company - Cessnas, mainly - out at one of the smaller airports. Mom used to complain he did it more to keep flying than to make any money, but always good-naturedly. I guess weeks would go by without him taking on any jobs. Kept it up nearly into his eighties."

"And did he ever talk about the war?"

"The war? Hell no. He didn't talk to us kids much at all," Alex shared without bitterness, "And me being the youngest, well, me probably even less. That's why I wish Mom could be here to talk to you."

"Your mother and he were close?"

"The closest he was with anyone, for sure. They were...it was like they had a sort of shorthand. In fact, it was a lot like what you see - if you've seen it - among soldiers on long deployments: understanding of situations and of what needs have to be seen to without the exchange of words," he rolled his eyes, dissatisfied with his explanation. "It would be so much better if she were here doing this."

The interviewer continued to ignore Armstrong's protestations. "Were you aware your grandfather, Thomas Carter, was twice nominated for the Victoria Cross?"

"No." An echo of disbelief entered Alex's expression. "Refresh my mind as to what that is?"

"The highest honor in the British military. His nominations did not, ultimately, result in the award. But still." The half-glasses slid further down his nose as he gauged the other man's reaction to this news. "To-date it has never been received by an American."

The front end of a chuckle came from Alex's chest. "That right? What would he have done to impress them so much?"

"Some recently declassified documents have come to light showing that following a stint where he was held as a prisoner against the Geneva Convention - not as a proper POW - he managed to fall in with an elite forces squad of Brits. A shadow unit designated 'dead men'. Somewhere during that time - '43, '44 - he came into possession of knowledge about a German plot to assassinate King George. The information he provided MI-6 helped foil the plot."

"Whoa. Good for him."

"I don't suppose you have anything of his that might be from his time flying with Eagle Squadron?"

Here the younger man nodded his head with his first display of real confidence. "Well, I had that idea before you got here, so I dug out the boxes Mom stored of his personal effects, but, you know, to be truthful there's nothing here," he gestured over to some cardboard filing boxes in the corner, "that I can see that would interest you. Some old pictures of Mom, pictures he clipped from magazines of planes, and about twenty-five notebooks of his scribblings."

"Notebooks?"

"Yeah. That was one of the things he did when he went into his room and closed the door, I guess. I never really got a look at them until yesterday. But none of it's in English. Some French and German, I think - I took Spanish in school. And, I guess when he got older his mind was going, because the further you get into them he just starts scribbling gibberish."

"Gibberish?" the interviewer asked, standing to request permission to go over and see.

"Help yourself," Alex offered. "I don't expect they'd interest anyone beyond Mom."

After instructed, two production assistants began to rifle through the stacked boxes, withdrawing several notebooks, scanning them for passages and taking them over to the girl Lorrie for review. At a gesture from Lorrie, in a snap one was brought for the interviewer to examine. He looked down at it and smiled.

"This would certainly clinch it if nothing else - " he said, his voice awash in satisfaction.

Not following, Alex asked, "How's that?"

"Not gibberish, Alex," he asserted. "It's Russian. Likely pre-Revolution Russian. Which confirms what I said earlier, that you were named for your grandfather: Prince Alexsei Igorovich Komonoff - the boy who became Thomas Carter. No records of Thomas Carter exist prior to Alexsei and his family fleeing the Reds and coming to America with his mother and grandmother. Grandma didn't change her name, which helped us in the researching of him. They had lived a privileged life in the land of their birth, Russia having easily the most powerful aristocracy in the world at that time."

Alex did not have to announce himself for speechless, his face did all the telling. Grandpops? A Prince? A Russian Prince?

"Can you give us a little of what's in the notebook, Lorrie?" the older man requested.

Lorrie lifted the first of three she had on her lap, each seeming an exact, uninteresting copy of its twins. "They're pretty clearly all-but complete text of a memoir. Portions are in French and German - amazing penmanship throughout - nearly calligraphic - but the bulk is rendered in Russian. Here's something from early on; 'As a young boy it was generally expected that I would be taken with the notion of sailing, and while trips on the Standart were enjoyable and when he was well the tsarevich made an excellent captain, there was something about when the yacht was faced into the wind, trips when the ladies would retire indoors so as not to take a chill that I found so invigorating. Flight seemed the next logical step. The best way to keep feeling that wind against my cheek. And while for some years I was content to imagine being aloft in hot air balloons, their meandering journeys began to hold less sway over me once the true era of aviation was born, and I discovered it.'"

Lorrie dropped that copybook and reached for the next. "'At times I think my life has been defined by women, or at least by the absence of men - the loss of a father, the death of a Tsar. When I opened the trunk of the stolen auto, what I saw was a Gypsy boy huddled inside, attempting escape. Did she really look so much of a boy in that moment? Or did my mind simply need her to be a boy - need to uncomplicate, however slightly, the relationship that would grow there? I already had one troublesome female unconscious by my hand in the front seat of the car, I did not need another. What I needed was an ally - though I was too self-contained to admit it.'"

"Can you tell what that's referring to, Lorrie?"

Lorrie squinted at the page, but it did not immediately offer up any answer. "Notebook's cover says 1943."

"So, something intriguing from his time on the Channel Islands..." the interviewer deduced.

Alex broke in, "I didn't know he was deployed in the Pacific theatre - "

"No, no," the half-glasses shook their head. "Small islands between France and Britain. One of the times he was captured."

Incredulously, "One?"

"He spent much of his time in Finlandメs Winter War imprisoned, no doubt trying to keep his status as Russian nobility hidden from his Communist captors."

"Finland?" disbelief. "He was some kind of a mercenary?"

Lorrie cut in, speaking up, this time without being prompted. She held up the first page inside the front cover of the notebook so they could all see the date.

"That's only about a year before he passed away," Alex offered. "He lived here at home until he died, surprisingly fit and healthy until his last breath. Mom went in one morning with his breakfast and found him where he'd fallen back onto the bed from where he had been seated, changing out of his pajamas. She always said it looked to her like he'd just taken off - his spirit flown right out of his body, his body blown back onto the mattress like a fallen leaf caught in the rear thrust of twin engines."

"He seems to be trying to give a picture of his family, here," Lorrie said. "'Joe and Ken are very much like their mother,'" he writes of the boys, "'but I fear the youngest, Alex, is most like myself. And not only in his looks and fair hair, which Babushka would no doubt have doted on, as she did on mine. He is far readier to fight than his bigger brothers, and frequently over lost - even pointless - causes. But I confess in my age to envying him when the fire is truly stoked in his eye, in his youthful belly - what I know would be the familiar thump of outrage in his heart. Envy - for all that I know some of what such tempests will cost him. Such fires are forever banked within me now. As for him, one prays for such a boy turning into a man that the world will continue to reside in peace, but my own life has shown nothing if not that a man of war will find and pursue conflict at any cost, his own country, his own people, at making war or not.'"

The half-glasses pulled their head around to get a better look at Alex's reaction. "You had no idea of any of this?"

"I told you," Alex said, a smile of interested befuddlement on his face, "I was never entirely sure he could even tell us apart. The only person I ever saw him really connect with was Mom. Not that he was bad tempered with the rest of us, only...to-himself, even when he was at the table with us all. As for knowing about his service record - he never talked about the war (either one) - he never talked about the past." His eyes lit for a moment with memory, "Still, about five years after he had died we got a very strange letter in the mail. But it more added to the mystery rather than explained it. I remember Mom writing me about it." He turned his face back toward the boxes. "I think there's a copy of it in there." At the interested looks of expectation from his guests, he rose and shuffled through one of the boxes until he found it, and handed it over to the interviewer. "Lawyers were involved somehow. Mom didn't know how to feel about it, but in the end she did take the money."

"Money?"

Alex inclined his head to encourage the other man to open the envelope and read for himself.

"'To the person or family of Thomas Carter, service number 2265483236Z:
This letter has taken much time to come to you, and as such is true I genuinely hope it finds you in enduring good health. Upon my death (my husband having pre-deceased me) I have instructed my solicitor to locate and contact you, Sir, and to dispense with the bulk of my estate into your sole keeping - or that of your heirs, should it be necessary.
Our own son, Hans, died before my husband passed, and as our daughter has long been comfortably married she is in little need of additional support.
Our name may be unfamiliar to you (to your family), and we have lived under assumed aliases for many years now. However, along with that necessary change we were left with other, more pressing reminders of the war. Most notably my husband's recurrent and harrowing night terrors. You will have known him as an officer who served out the war on the Channel Island of Alderney, in particular commanding the Treeton Camp, there. I do not doubt your memory of him will be a decidedly unflattering one, as your name and even your service number figured prominently into his nightmares. I have little trouble recalling them myself as they were so often chanted and screamed in his sleep. It is because of this I have sought you out.
I am not so senile in my age yet not to know that monetary restitution can do little to repair that which it seems was taken from you during that time. Know that you have my (and my children's) deepest apologies and regrets - if not my husband's. Please think of me as,
Your obedient servant,
Gretchen Glueck Gisbonnhoffer (alias de Lisbon)
Santiago, Chile
'"

The interviewer seemed to come to a decision with the reading of the letter. He shook his head, as if to banish disbelief from it. "It now seems clear to me, Alex, that what I first thought would be a standard excerpt section of the main book is obviously far more than that. I'd like, if it's okay, to have Lorrie stay behind and catalog your grandfather's things - perhaps interview your mother when she is feeling more herself. What we've got here: the flight of Russian nobility when he was still a preteen, a distinguished flying career with the RAF in Eagle Squadron, imprisonment and escape onto the Channel Islands - this letter from his captor's wife, the monetary bequest and these notebooks of his memoirs? We're looking at something book-length just about him. Easily. So what do you say?"


Cincinnati, Ohio - Eden Park - 2000 - The Behind-the-Canvas tour group obediently followed their guide, Helen Cera, along the many corridors usually off-limits to guests of the Cincinnati Art Museum.

"We'll just stop in for a short moment," she told them, "and check out our conservancy department." She smiled down at one of the younger faces on the tour, a girl just over twelve attending with her parents, "which is where paintings are brought for cleaning or repair. As some of you may know, handling such art can be a tedious process. Larger works can take years to clean. Famous works in need of repair might even require the hiring of out-of-country professionals. Today we are stopping in to see the cleaning of Renoir's 'Brouillard - Fog - a Guernsey', an oil on canvas with a rather exciting history around the middle of the last century."

She brought them to an efficient halt at the workstation of a white-headed man, magnifying glass strapped to his forehead, every manner of interesting substances surrounding him, multiple implements with which he could tackle the job of cleaning the canvas.

At the vibrations in the floor from the group's approach, he turned and smiled, waved a hand of 'hello'.

"This is Daniel Heindl-Bonchurch," Ms. Cera introduced him. "Some of you may recognize his name from his own works, which are not unknown to collectors." As she spoke to the tour group, her hands moved in tandem, translating what she said to Heindl-Bonchurch so that in his deafness he might understand. "If he will agree, I will let him explain..."

Daniel set down the items that were in his hands, smiling to himself how the museum staff was so polite to have people on hand proficient with sign language. It was nice to be understood, even though it was unnecessary for him to be signed to. He had gotten by for decades on lip-reading, and managed well among those who knew him with his own, non-standard signing. Of course that had been before he had encountered a larger slice of society.

His hands began to draw in the air, telling the history of the canvas he had been specially contracted to work upon.

"Although this painting has a long history on the island of Guernsey, my home and birthplace, when the Germans landed in early July of 1940 to invade and occupy the islands, it was cut from its original frame," he signed, "and smuggled out with the evacuating children back to England for safekeeping away from the Third Reich and its endless lust for acquiring objects of art."

As usual he enjoyed the reactions and even the ensuing questions from the tour group. When they had gone he turned back to his work. No matter how many times he looked at Renoir's rendering of his home, its coastline sloping down to the sea - the fog often found there - he seemed to see into it more deeply. Today it reminded him that he had been away for too long. America had been enjoyable. He was glad he had come. The Downs was certainly lovely this time of years as well. But he found he was not in the mood for an English country house. No, this painting, this view captured by Renoir put him in the mood for a cottage. One with a still-poky chimney.

Yes, it was time to arrange for going home.

1940 - late June - Guernsey - Marion Nighten tried to avoid slicing the meat of her hand with the knife she was using to separate the canvas from its frame. Tried to avoid - Heaven help her - slashing into her father's Renoir. Thank goodness he had not had it hung in his bedroom. Perhaps he would not miss it much - or at all. It was hard to tell with his erratically presenting dementia. The children were to sail the next morning, a sudden decision by The States leaving little time to properly prepare. Children and elderly, those who might yet be left with Jewish heritage.

It was said the entire population of Alderney had already gone at the urging of their ruling body - abandoned their homes and possessions as if their island home were a ship going down, a movie house on fire, a lost cause.

She, herself, was stranded. Trapped by a father too ill to move, her own dedication to him for the past weeks as what was coming became more and more undeniable keeping her from escaping without him.

Today she had gone and sent a cable to London. It had taken hours to get a turn at the telegram office, everyone with money for such a task and with family or business interests to contact equally desperate to get information onto the under-Channel wires before it was too late.

She sent to her mother, care of Clem, at the Mayfair house. Moments later, exiting the office she was surprised to realize she had no idea what words or sentiment she had paid to have delivered. She could only hope it had managed to convey...whatever was appropriate in such a situation. Her deportment texts certainly had no entry to offer 'in case of imminent invasion and occupation'. War, after all, and situations unassailable by etiquette were not for 'today's young lady/tomorrow's woman'. War rarely came down to giving a spectacular and spot-on tea service, after all.

Coming back to Barnsdale House she thought to go for a ride. Everything seemed so futile at present, but as she walked into her father's sunroom and spied the familiar Renoir hanging there her mind filled with a multitude of news reports on Germans and their fascination with appropriating artwork. Stealing artwork. Although she had never felt any particular connection with this painting (it was a favorite of her father's - he traveled with it when returning home, packed it off to Lincoln Greene when he was there), she found quite strongly she had a vested interest in seeing the Germans did not get their hands on it.

And so she was unmooring it from where it had been stretched upon its tether a lifetime ago. And she hatched a plan to see that it was given to a child that was to be evacuated.

She rode for Mr. Thornton's cottage, certain that the older man would have more luck placing it than would she - where it would be obvious the canvas was valuable and the knowledge of such could complicate the smuggling of it off-island.

As she had reliably expected, Mr. Thornton willingly accepted the task.

"Are you making other arrangements as well, my lady?"

"Arrangements? What? To meet the boats?"

"No. I was only thinking..." he gave a sort of light clearing of his throat noise.

"Yes?"

"My lady," he began, "I have nothing here to interest the Germans. I've no daughter for them to compromise, no son for them to conscript. My property is so modest in size as to be known as nothing other than small." He gave a rumbly chuckle. "I've no fortune. I shall be well below their notice." His brows drew together, "But you - "

Marion waited, already knowing in her heart what he was soon to share.

"You will not escape their notice and their interest. Your property and fortune are large, your position singular upon all the islands. The larder at Barnsdale, the great house - is filled with just the sort of things a conqueror longs to pillage. To say nothing of your person, Lady."

She knew he only meant to caution her, and she valued him for it, her own father unable to comprehend what was to come, much less to offer her counsel about it. "The larder at Barnsdale is indeed well stocked at all times, with things as essential as flour and as frivolous as fine wine," she agreed. "And I think..." she only just now had fully birthed the idea, "there is no good reason at all that we ought leave such for the Germans to benefit by - I have made up my mind," she gave a strong nod to her head, "I shall stow what I can. A stockpile, what do you say? That we may make use of in future if needed, for ourselves or for the rest."

"There is the old windmill, my lady," Thornton agreed with a satisfied smile, "It is not far from here. You might go back that way, check in on it to see how it has held up. I have not been by there for many years," Thornton confessed. "But if you are going that way, perhaps you will take this and store it there for me - the only thing in my possession I can think of that might interest a German. It has been so long since I made use of it I cannot be sure it would even still work. Still, better to hide it than to hang for it." He guided her to a small shed behind his cottage, and opened the door. There, under several layers of sacking, and a good deal of dust, he revealed what to even her untrained eye could be recognized as a microphone and other amateur radio transmitting equipment.

"I will return with the wagon," she told him, turning to ride for Barnsdale and stable Gypsum so that she might fetch Dovecote and put her in harness for the coming task.

Quite suddenly it felt like she had rather a lot to do.

...TBC...