A/N: I hesitate to mention it (as I hesitate to relive the horror of it) but when I originally posted the prior chapter of this story it would seem I uploaded an uncorrected copy. In fact, the very copy on which some of my notes of what was to come resided. It was a colossal blunder, but I righted it as soon as I learned of it. Because of this, if you were among one of the seventeen readers to encounter that problem/glitch, I encourage you to re-read Chapter One, and more importantly, to scrub any memory of that slim outline that made it online by my error from your mind forever.

IMPERIAL COLLEGE, LONDON ﾖ 1998 - Journal of Geologic Interests of the Empire - It was hardly an article to take anyone by storm, keep any of its meager readers from sleep that night. It had been printed quietly in a little-known scholarly publication (not usually circulated far beyond their own 2500-or-so alumni) funded by the Royal School of Mines. Hardly the stuff worthy of dinner conversation. Only, the discreet declaration that a recent expedition to acquire samples from the nineteenth century-abandoned mines on the Channel Island of Sark had been put indefinitely on hold, in the light of some discoveries made within the shafts there having nothing at all to do with minerals or rocks or geological findings of any kind.

In fact, owing to what had been unearthed, the entire project had been handed swiftly over to the neighboring history and anthropology department. Under their supervision the site would be excavated, any artifacts found catalogued and conserved. The surprising knowledge that, apparent even to a novice, people of very particular purposes had been inhabiting the mines (retrofitting the shafts to their requirements) as recently as the middle of the twentieth century would need studied; interviews with the locals would have to occur. Further research would be required. And funds. Always there would be a need for more funds.

For future updates, do be so kind as subscribe to the monthly flyer disseminated by the local history museum on neighboring Guernsey, which would be proctoring any future inquiries, funded locally by the well-respected Jodderick family trust.

GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate - 1985 - Cate Pyle-Howard tried very hard to swallow down the European-standard bread and cheese provided for fast-breaking here in the communal breakfast room of her lodgings. (It proved to again be a local cheese, soft and fragrant in smell.) Tried not to focus on the lecture she was set to give later that afternoon. To focus on neither the (terrifying) act of speaking publically, nor the fact that was certain to dismay her contemporaries: that her three-year-old, carefully planned and half-outlined treatise on Hugo's exile to this particular island had fallen to bits shortly after she had landed and taken up residence at this very bed and breakfast.

It had been mere hours after she had first been allowed to review certain early manuscript pages for his Les Miserables (his own, personality-filled annotations still visible in his corrections scratched upon them) that her course here had been so suddenly altered.

It had been easy enough to see upon her initial arrival that Barnsdale House had once been a tastefully opulent summer home to some 'veddy veddy' upper crust British noble family. Unfamiliar as anyone from Minnesota might be with the aristocracy, even she could see that. It had been her own thirst for history that had first brought her to engage a room here here instead of taking up lodgings over one of the many cheery pubs in St. Peter Port with views of the harbor, which would have put her closer to where the manuscript sections were kept, and closer to the work she had, for more than eighteen months now, anticipated doing.

That was before she had awakened every morning to the picture.

There, in the bedroom she had been given to use as her own for the time she was here, was the picture. A woman and a stallion - at least she thought the horse a stallion - the 8x10 horizontal image in black and white 'painted on' with colors as had sometimes been done in the past. It was apparent the photo was meant to commemorate some victory of horse and rider. The lady cradled an engraved cup, the horse wore roses, the lady clutched more in a bouquet. Her riding jacket had been painted-in as red, her eyes blue to the point of being startling in their intensity.

But Cate did not doubt that even without the help of the put-on color those eyes would have proven startling.

Though it made no sense that it would do so, the image captivated her. She began to look forward to returning to her room, if only to re-examine it - to get lost within the border of its frame.

One day when her host, the house's proprietor, had stepped in to bring her clean towels and new soaps, he had caught her staring at it to the detriment of several sheaves of notes she was meant to be transcribing on her IBM Selectric so that they might be sent off for review by her Minneapolis thesis committee.

"Have I said, Ms. Pyle-Howard," he asked, "this was my father's room, you know?"

Yes, she had recalled something of his saying that. "But your mother," she countered him before fully thinking her statement to its conclusion, "you said she had been in service here -"

A roguish twinkle jumped into the eye of the fortysomething Mr. Heindl. She found herself noticing that not a drop of good looks were wasted on him, rather, he made good use of them all. Dark hair, a robust build. At twenty-five she could not recall having found a man his age ever handsome. In fact, she could not recall have paid any attention to a man of his age in such a way ever before. She would have thought they all seemed too much of her father. But somehow the sight of Mr. Heindl conjured suspicions of possible fatherly devotion within her not at all.

"Yes," he nodded to her blush of realized faux-pas. "That is right. But it is a room that has served many people in the ensuing years. Even," he lowered his voice conspiratorially, "an SS lieutenant." What there was of English in his island accent pronounced the rank, 'lef-tenant'.

"No!" she exclaimed, her eyes straying back to the picture.

At her half-horrified response his Gallic slyness came through in both his expression and his words. "The sheets - and the mattress - have since been changed," he assured her, his joking smile a little more arresting than she would have liked to admit.

But even his present proximity could not deter her from getting answers about the photo. "And the girl, the woman in the photograph? She looks to have been of some importance around that very time." If she was not mistaken, the cup she held was engraved 1939.

"Indeed," he walked over to consider the framed photograph himself, lifted it up and took out his handkerchief to give it a polish. "She figures into it all. She is my aunt - my father's sister. And she was both that lieutenant's fiancee, and the Nightwatch."

Assuming he meant her for some war-era air raid warden or such, Cate asked, "What is a 'nightwatch'?"

"No, of course you will not know that," he announced as he replaced the picture, winking at it in conspiratorial salute. "There are few enough still living on the islands that recall it themselves, I've no doubt. But I should not be troubling you and keeping you from your work..."

"No," she had eagerly disagreed with his offer to leave her alone with pages of notes that now seemed to hold so much less interest for her at present.

Seth Heindl moved to reach the bell pull and ring (she presumed for tea). "Are you familiar with collaboration?" he asked. "With the Islander term 'Jerry-bag'?" he asked further, his eyebrows raising in the question, the animation in his face making it obvious that he was one who enjoyed both a good mystery and a good tale.

"Tell me everything," she had said, reaching for clean, un-marked paper, and her trusty Mont Blanc. After that, the notes came as swiftly as the masterful story he told could leap from his lips.

Which had brought her to this day: a public abandonment of her research on Hugo's Guernsey exile, and an impending presentation in its stead based on her recent delving into female islanders' collaboration (some necessary, some enthusiastic) during the Second World War; what it had done to the Guernsey bailiwick then, what troubles ensued due to it after V-E day - that ensued even now.

As for the Nightwatch? She had chosen not to mention the Resistance radio broadcast in her present paper. No, she needed more information. Another semester at least on these islands to better research her. No mere paper would do such a woman justice. No, with her Cate Pyle-Howard felt certain she had the material for a doctoral dissertation on her hands.

And lots of very exciting days (and nights) of further research ahead.

Chicago, IL ﾖ Kniaz Street Temple - 1972 - Fourth-grader Tobin Abramowitz practiced what he would say to his father as to why he had no intention of writing the report assigned to him at that Tuesday evening's session of Hebrew School. Firstly, in his ten-year-old opinion, Hebrew School was no place to be taking on further homework - no matter what the new rabbi might say.

The rabbi had been a committed Zionist, his father had told the family, his interest in and his commitment to a separate Jewish state had not waned in the years since such had become a reality. So it should be of no particular surprise that he wished his students to be schooled in the politics and social issues, in the ordering of that nation.

But a written report? Tobin reached for the Encyclopedia Britannica from the public library shelf. Who cared about the Yad Vashem? This Heroes' Remembrance Authority? Not quite the Justice League, now was it? Being declared 'righteous of the world's nations' did not sound particularly super-heroic to a ten-year-old.

It wasn't exactly being bitten by a radioactive spider, or when angry morphing into a giant green meanie. Heck, it wasn't even flying around in an invisible plane. 'Righteous' - definitely something unimaginative grown-ups might care about.

Now, wait. He ran his finger over the sentence again. What was this? Nazis? Non-Jews risking their lives? Saving people from...extermination? Now that sounded a little bit more Captain America. A little bit Superman - a little bit Stan Lee.

Okay, so maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all.

GUERNSEY ﾖ Summer 1946 - "Madame La Salle!" Louise heard over her shoulder shortly after she and Little Stephen had disembarked from the boat that had brought them to Guernsey, where they would wait for the Sark ferry to take them well and truly - finally - home.

She turned away from the flower stall she was marveling over to see who had called to her. Almost six years away from the islands, and only occasional trips to Guernsey prior to that did not make it very likely she would encounter someone she knew today.

"Why, Nurse Glasson!" she said, surprised to see one of the few people she might recognize on the large island, the nurse who had assisted her during several of her miscarriages, which had medically necessitated Stephen bringing her to the larger island's hospital for care.

"No, no," the other woman shook her head. "No longer 'nurse', only 'Ginny' now."

Louise smiled, pleased to see a woman that represented only generous compassion to her, and none of the sadness of those past lost pregnancies.

"You are come home, I think," Ginny took in the battered valise and smaller bag Louise had set down to free her hands to browse the day's selection of flowers.

Louise nodded. "And you?"

Ginny cast her eyes out to the Channel horizon, one hand resting nonchalant upon her hip. "Haunting the docks every day, waiting for my youngest to return."

Louise's gaze followed her line of sight. "Gone for a soldier?" she asked.

"Yes, the Army. And not due home until next Tuesday. But still something calls to me to check every day, lest he was able to secure passage sooner."

"Travel is complicated by so many displaced persons trying to get home," Louise commiserated, knowing first-hand that post-war wanting to get somewhere and actually arriving had become stickier and more crowded than ever before. British papers were filled with reports on packed-to-capacity railways, and food shortages - ongoing petrol rationing. Even the end of the war had not yet changed that.

"I see you have a young charge with you," Ginny noted, and then stopped, taking in Little Stephen's bright hue of hair. "No. Can it be?"

Louise nodded, unable to hold in a smile of pleasure.

Ginny matched it with a beaming one of her own. As mother to three sons she could not help her heart from leaping with joy at the realization that after so many disappointments Madame La Salle would now know a similar happiness. "And does he know?" she asked, eagerly, after Reverend La Salle.

Louise cast her eyes down. "It hardly seemed the thing to announce in a letter - after five years of letters that could not get through to be delivered."

Ginny nodded with a woman's understanding. Then her nursing past came to the forefront. "And you had no...complications?"

"Only in being apart from my husband," Louise assured her. "We passed a tense and lonely war working a farm in Scotland. And you?" She looked toward the shopping streets and saw what was formerly Lotte Glassman's beauty salon marquee was now re-painted to read 'Glasson's'.

Ginny gave a small smile tinted with grim. "A necessary change of vocation, I'm afraid. You will hear things," Ginny advised her, her voice at a pitch less likely to carry. "About me, about many of us left behind. Do not always believe them for the whole truth." She lingered over her statement before rushing on. "Even so, with the return of peace my shop has lacked in customers. My son and I have decided to resettle on Alderney. To see what sort of life we might make among the ex-pat islanders, and others, who will return there."

Still taking in everything around her, Louise commented, "We heard so little of the islands while we were away - I hardly know what to think upon being returned. It is wrong to expect nothing to have changed, and yet - on Sark -"

"Yes," Ginny tried to put a brave face on things for the sake of Madame La Salle, "perhaps you will find the alterations to be less jarring there. Though they had their own scandals - their own moments of embarrassment. During the final days of the war even the most highly ranked Germans sought out islanders to bribe into hiding them from the imminent arrival of the British - and their obviously already set-in-stone arrests for what they had spent the last five years bringing down upon us, on the prisoners they had transported here from Europe to work and die as their slaves. In this matter, Sark was seen by them as choice real estate. Better than the Minotaur's labyrinth."

The hardness, the bitter in Ginny's voice, as it washed over into her stance spoke directly to Louise's heart. "God comfort you in your memories, Mrs. Glasson - Ginny," she offered her, the only appropriate response she could think to give.

Dismayed at her own, unintentional response - not wishing to discomfit Madame La Salle, Ginny worked to shake off the gloom that seemed, now, so often to undercoat everything. "May you find Reverend La Salle well," she said. "I would say 'happy', but I can think of no man who would not be so in light of the news you bring to him." She smiled and ruffled a hand through Little Stephen's hair before making her goodbyes.

SARK ﾖ Creux Harbour - Although for days her impatience at her trip home had been nearly impossible to curb, Louise found herself, once on Sarkese soil, combing Creux Harbour for the boat with the freshest and most promising catch rather than making a bee-line for the La Salle tenement. She was determined to prepare and eat Channel fish tonight, and she meant to have the day's best on her table. In doing so she did notice that the slip usually appointed to their boat (piloted in Blind La Salle's stead by young Dick Giddons) held an unfamiliar vessel. It gave her a second's pause, but five years was surely a long enough amount of time for Stephen to have plausibly arranged to have it docked elsewhere.

She had arrived on the ferry that also brought the small island's mail, and its docking had brought with it a small flurry of activity. Once she had her fish, her arms now also filled with flowers she had purchased from Guernsey's harbor-side stalls, she found she had no hand to offer Little Stephen as they walked together. She was turning to a stall that sold rope (as well as cleverly knotted rope bags perfect for some of her parcel overflow) when she caught a flash of a blue wooden wagon wheel, ringed in metal, as it made its way up toward the shopping street and where the mail would be brought and held for distribution.

She nearly called out Dick's name before her eyes settled on the broad bulk of shoulder that sat the driver's bench. Despite Stephen's rich cooking there was no way slender Dick Giddons could have so altered, no matter the interim passage of time, though for all that those shoulders were quite broad, like all Islanders the frame of the man they belonged to showed signs of undernourishment, consequence of half a decade of meals missed and meals left wanting. Even a year after liberation.

"You! There!" she called to those shoulders, grabbing Little Stephen's hand so that he could keep up as she chased after the wagon. "You're driving my wagon!"

The wagon came to a halt and the owner of the shoulders turned around.

Even in his lost-bulk state he was a man of substantial size. Perhaps not as giant as Goliath, but the fierce look on his face warned one not to doubt the aptness of the Biblical comparison. He wore a full beard which carried more grey in it than did the hair on his head, and grew in only patchily on one side (the other side thickly robust in comparison), betraying that underneath its covering sat a significant amount of facial scarring from a past accident.

The ferocious and untamed look of him set her back on her heels for a moment, but she did not back down from her shout.

Iain Johnson turned 'round in his seat to see who it was shouting along the track-side. It proved to be a smallish woman, accompanied by an even smaller boy child.

"This is La Salle's wagon," he offered her freely. "I drive for him."

"Good," she told him, with a crisp nod of acceptance at his explanation. "Then you may drive me as well."

"Yes, I..." he stalled out, willing to drive her wherever she need to go out of courtesy if nothing else, but as usual somewhat tongue-tied around members of the gentler sex. "I am bound for the mail, as I expect a letter from some friends -" It had been too long since Djak and Wills' last posted letter, "and then on with this load of grain to La Salle's tenement." He had stepped down to help her up into the seat beside him, and toss the small lad lightly onto the sacks of grain behind. "Where may I drop you?"

The whisp of a woman looked up at him, her eyes registering some emotion he could not quite puzzle out. "At the house will be fine," she replied.

They drove on a ways as he tried to decipher who she might be. La Salle had occasional visitors, of course, but generally on-island. Could this be some cousin of his? He noted the slender golden band worn on her left hand, added to it the La Salle-reddish thatch of hair on the boy.

He was still pondering on her identity - too backward to simply ask it of her - when he picked up the post. Thankfully there was a letter addressed in Wills' dependable script, bearing exotic stamps, and cancellation from the city of Prague. Arriving for La Salle along with a Guernsey paper was another letter written in the (to him, now) undeniable hand of Madame La Salle, which he had memorized long ago from reading her pre-war journals aloud to Stephen once Djak (whose job it had often been) had left the island in pursuit of finding what might remain in the world of her family. Out of deference to Madame La Salle (a woman more real to him than the lady with whom he now shared the wagon's seat) he placed that envelope on top of the bundle of post, which he asked his new passenger to hold as he climbed aboard to drive them on to the farm.

She gasped at seeing the envelope.

"Howzat?"

"I have beat the mail."

He could feel nervousness descend upon her. "Beat the - ? Then you are Madame La Salle?" Strangely, he felt in an instance as though he were meeting both an old friend and an auspicious benefactor. With a degree of uneasiness, but also of delight, he broke into laughter. "We have had two letters from you, Madame," he assured her. "...since the island was liberated, but never yet one telling us when you might manage passage back to us." He blushed more than a little red at his unintentional usage of 'us'.

"With so many displaced persons trying to get about these days it can be hard to travel," she offered in explanation. "I brought us back as soon as could be upon our release from the WLA."

John gave a nod of understanding, and jerked his head to indicate the boy. "And who is the little man?"

"This is our son, Stephen," she said, not lingering over the announcement but letting her eyes convey a look of importance at it. "He likes you," she smiled, "I can see it. He has spent all of his years in the North - in Scotland - and he's feeling more at home now hearing your accent than I think he has at any other point on all our journey, -"

"Iain Johnson," he provided his name for her, "but most just call me John."

"John," she said, setting her face into the wind off the sea, her hands still holding the delayed news of her already accomplished arrival.

He was greatly relieved to find that she was not a frantically chatty woman, and though they passed the remainder of ride to the farm largely in silence, it proved a companionable one.

"There are no photographs of you at the house," John had mentioned, by way of his not knowing her upon sight.

"There wouldn't be," she had politely assured him. "Stephen has no need of them, so I took what few there were with me." Originally she had consistently referred to her husband as 'Reverend La Salle', but hearing his own, friendly way of speaking about her husband, she soon enough devolved into using the familiarity of his first name as well.

When they had arrived, he watched; the closer they got to the farm and the farmhouse how intently her eyes took in everything that they surveyed, looking, he was certain, for the changes time and hardship had brought. Neither a rock wall nor a tree branch seemed to escape her review.

"Could you," she had asked of him, "could you show Little Stephen the barn? While I -?"

She did not have to finish the sentence. Of course a man would like to reunite with his wife in private. And of course his wife would wish to first speak to the father of her child about the child also privately. And no request of Madame La Salle would he, Iain Johnson, ever refuse.

The little lad strung along behind him as he led him on a tour of the barn nearest the house.

"So, you're to be 'Little' Stephen, are you?" he asked him.

"My father is Big Stephen, Mama says," the lad answered, showing the Scots in his thick words. "But he canna now be half as big as you, can he?"

John fought back a chuckle. "He is big in other ways, laddie," he assured the boy. "He is one of the greatest men I have ever met."

"He canna see, you know," the little man chatted on, both feet on the bottom railing of a sheep stall. "He won't be able to see me." He placed his young elbows on the next rail up. "I think I shall like being invisible. Do you like it?"

"Look here, my man," John took the child's question to heart, "I have never felt less invisible than when I am near your father. He can see right to the very heart of a person. And when he sees you he shall think you better'n ice cream come a Sunday afternoon, or warm cider on a chill island even."

Little Stephen, in his childlike way giving no greater weight to John's more serious words than to his lighter ones, moved on to the next stall. "Have you a pig barn?"

"What's that?"

"Are there any pigs here on your island?"

"Pigs? Aye, there be something of pigs here."

Giving an exaggerated, five-going-on-six-year-old sigh of relief, Little Stephen declared, "Good! I should be sorry never to eat pork again."

Realizing for the first time the little lad's total unfamiliarity with what his life was about to become, with what his new home might or might not provide him, John swallowed down a hooting laugh, and spoke to allay any further fears. "Aye, pork a-plenty when wished, and Father Christmas, too, shall have no trouble findin' yer stocking though you've moved it to the farmhouse chimney, here."

The child smiled in reply, and John let himself take a moment to reflect that, actually, Blind La Salle's gift (and a fine, smart and healthy little gift it was) had arrived somewhat early this year.

Louise La Salle felt like she would never stop looking - stop seeing - everything she loved around her so sharply, the smallest patch of grass seemed like an old, dearly missed friend.

She found herself not at all surprised when the kitchen door opened from the farmhouse. In her head, in her memory, she could all but hear her husband, from where he had been within, announcing to her as he so often had in the past that something - he did not know exactly what - in the wind, in the air's scent, its elemental balance, had changed, and he would just step outside to see what it was.

On a day such as today, she certainly had reason to hope that her return might have charged the air of Sark with something - altered its composition - as surely as her being returned here found it (blessedly) re-configuring hers to the very bone.

She could not tell just how he looked at first, the bright coming-on-afternoon sun to his back, putting him in shadow. The gait was his own, was recognizable to her.

A cloud shifted, and he came into focus.

Like the man John (though she had not seen him pre-War), Stephen had lost weight he had yet to fully gain back. His clothing still hung ill-fittingly upon him (a shaming sight for the husband of a nimble seamstress). Shockingly, his short-cropped hair now belied his age: it had turned completely, prematurely white. Her eyebrows raised in alarm at this, as though opening her eyes wider would gift her with additional insight into his alteration. Yet nothing else of his appearance or physical self telegraphed frailty of any kind.

In her impatience, her need to see more of him, she threw any inhibitions into that Sarkese wind, and made her small stride into two of itself to reach him before he had put more than fifteen feet between himself and the house.

She channeled all her energies into meeting up with him, her voice - words of any kind - remained locked within her. She was only feet - shoes - on grass, only motion, deliberate in its arrival, in its long-imagined destination.

"No," she heard him whisper, saw his lips contract to himself in disbelief, "it isn't..."

Arriving opposite him, the wind pulling at the hem of her frock, her hands balling into fists, not knowing how to initiate contact with him after so long.

Her voice, her words, her greeting, now ready (she thought), abandoned her.

"Speak, Wife," Stephen asked her, only his elevated senses able to confirm her presence standing opposite him; her scent, the rate of her breathing, some other unquantifiable something that to him represented essentially her.

Her right hand reached up and toward the fraying, irregular edge of his shirt's worn-with-age collar, where she rolled it between her first finger and thumb. "Has there been no one to tend to you since..?" In the asking of it her mouth stretched against her will into that of a trembling lip, brought her whole consciousness to the cusp of unstoppable tears.

His hands found hers and he pulled her to him, her body alongside his. Immediately the sensitive pads of his fingers - his way of seeing - found her face, where she found her own lips impeding his progress with kisses. She did not know who was crying. Her face was wet, his hands were wet, both their bodies shook like a tree caught in a summer storm. But a single tree, a unified trunk without division.

She felt him drop to the earth and followed him there. "Praying, my husband?" she asked.

His hands enclosed hers in their mendicant folding and he answered her; "For all the others who will have no such sweet reunion this side of Paradise. In deepest thanks for ours. In thanks for - everything."

She could not know yet that his personal list of thanks included thanks for Gypsies and fallen-from-the-sky Russian Princes living as mere airmen, the sons of English earls, and Scotsmen with no clear intentions of again setting foot on Scottish soil any time soon.

The sight of him, the sensation of him was such that she could not spare even a glance over her shoulder to see how Little Stephen and his ad hoc guardian were faring. Her husband's white hair and irregularly slim appearance both shocked and fascinated her. His eyes, clouded and emote-less to others rested in their sockets like two old but faithful friends. "I have not come alone," she began, her words returning to her, her fingers moving to learn the changes in his face - the new valleys, the familiar rises - in the same way that he used to 'see' hers. "I have brought you your son."

PALESTINE - nation of Israel - 1956 - The interviews were being held as discreetly as possible. It had been something of a challenge to strike just the right chord in the rooms outfitted to receive those able to make the trip and have their version of events of what had occurred in the Schleswig-Holstein extermination camp - specifically the aid brought by one Freyga Tuckman, Gentile - preserved.

The war, for these people - former prisoners, those previously marked for death - was hardly a distant memory. The world was recovering, of course, but to those who had been held by the Germans, it would take a sight more than the passing of a mere decade before entering a darkened room stripped of furnishing save a table, chairs and recording devices, would not evoke memories of interrogation and torture.

No, just the right tone for these interviews must be found. For if eyewitness accounts could not be expeditiously collected the Yad Vashem (still in its infancy) would find unpleasant complications inherent in carrying out their appointed work of recognizing selfless heroism in extraordinary Holocaust rescues and aid of their people.

...TBC...