Marion engaged the hot and cold taps, letting them run apace into the claw-footed porcelain tub. She cast a glance back over her shoulder through the open doorway toward Robin, still asleep in the chair. He did not stir.
Since the night of her kidnapping by his man, Allen Dale masquerading as her 'cousin', she had heard nothing of his unit's movements or action on the islands. She did not even know if Guernsey was the location they considered their home base. Which was good. It was excellent. Certainly they would operate better and more safely by drawing little attention or suspicion to themselves.
More than once, though, since that night she assented to dance with him as she broadcast the Nightwatch, Marion had nearly convinced herself she had seen him. More than several times: among the stalls at the market in St. Peter Port; walking among a crowd; browsing among the stacks at the library (what was left of it); once, on a bicycle in the capitol city's traffic. It had not been dissimilar to when she had first returned to London upon receiving the initial news of his death: the pervasive (but deceptive) feeling that he was still everywhere about, and that he might turn up, or she sight him at any moment.
Robin had brought her the news of Geis' new orders, that night of her engagement party. And his information had proven sound. Geis had left for that duty on Alderney at the camps all but immediately the next morning. That had been nine weeks ago. She had not seen him since, letters and gifts brought to her by German couriers their only contact, as no inter-island telephone system yet existed. The Lieutenant's absence had proven a huge relief to her, coming so close on the heels of his hope to celebrate (rather, 'seal the deal' of) their engagement in a physical fashion.
Marion bent at the waist to situate the metal tray bath caddy closer to one end of the tub than the other (in an effort to shield a lap), and draped a towel over it, so that it looked of a little table replete with tablecloth, and turned the taps to 'off'. It was a far-fuller bath than she would usually draw for herself.
She poured in some salts she had for just such occasions: Epsom, and removed her fancy (but rather ineffectual) French soaps from reach, replacing them in the dish with something tougher and less perfumed of lavender and rose petals.
Why was Robin here? Now? Surely he would not risk such a visit unless it were absolutely necessary-or unless something were gravely wrong. But if something were gravely wrong he was proving awfully cavalier about it, letting himself drop off to sleep so. Well, time to go find out.
She took one last look around and walked back into the bedroom, thinking that she ought, probably, to "just in case" arm her pistol, which she had placed back in the armoire. There was no telling who might have followed him, for all that she felt her house safe enough at present.
Marion observed as the slight clicking sound of the pistol's barrel curiously brought Robin immediately out of his slumber.
His eyes, open and alert, immediately snapped onto her form where she stood by the armoire, registering that the pistol was in her hands. They then took in the relatively bright level of light in the room.
"Is this safe?" he asked, without other salutation, his breath a bit rushed.
She shrugged. "I am well established as a night owl."
"So I well recall," he replied, working one of his shoulders over and back again trying to stretch out his sleeping-in-a-chair kinks.
They were proving all-business to each other, no chatter. No 'how-do-you-do's.
"You would not easily waken," she informed him. "I thought something wrong." She had finished with the pistol.
Robin looked drawn, concerned, not a speck of humor about him. His eyes seemed to alert her that he was wrestling with what he must say next, and the idea of it gave him a rather sour stomach.
She took the moment to seize on his obvious indecision. "I have drawn you a bathe. I suggest you make use of it, as you seem to have the time to do so," she indicated his sleeping, meaning for it to come out as a light-hearted jibe, as though he had been being lazy. But due to his air of internal vexation, the dig fell flat. "The water will cool soon enough to unpleasant," she added, more quietly.
"Until recently," he told her, obviously making an effort to hold back in whatever was so fretting him, "we have been washing in the sea or what safe waters we might find." He seemed to wish to explain his grubby condition. "Of late is has become too cool, and sometimes, too dangerous to do so."
"No worries," Marion assured him. "I bathe nightly at this time. The running taps and creaking pipes will signify nothing unusual to anyone. My bath shares a common wall with father's. If we play something along the lines of what is now acceptable music, I think we shall trouble no one-any more than I might usually do on my own." She stepped to her record player and dropped the needle onto an Edith Piaf album.
"Heaven bless your nocturnal ways," he said, his expression, for a moment, turning almost sweet. "I do not know, quite frankly, as long as I have constantly had them on, if these duds will agree to part with my flesh. But, we shall see. Or, rather, I shall see."
Assuming his comment for an invitation to impropriety, she told him, "You are a wonder, Robin." She had not marked the fact that his comment provoked no sparking of his eyes as it might usually.
"Marion," Robin told her, like a man only half-alive, and that half beyond exhaustion-both physically and mentally. "You need fear nothing of me. I am not feeling vaguely amorous tonight." He dragged a straight-back chair away from her letter-writing desk and placed it alongside the doorway to the bath, situating it with its back to the wall. "You must sit, though, as we must make use of this time to speak." He patted the seat of the newly arranged chair, illustrating to her where he wished her to sit during their conference.
She removed her shoes, and watched as he sat on the barely-substantial-enough-to-hold-his-weight stool trimmed in crinoline at her vanity and unstrung his boots quietly, not letting them drop to the floor, and proceeded into the bathroom.
As he had requested, she took up her position on the straight-back chair to the sounds of him, over her right shoulder, testing his theory about whether his clothes would agree to come off.
She caught the sounds of the bath water being disturbed as he lowered himself slowly into it. The small sounds he, himself, made in response to the soothing heat and Epsom, and the enveloping comfort of the water.
"Your men are here, also?" she asked, testing the waters conversationally.
"They are on perimeter outside, much as we employ wherever we are of a night. They will sleep by turns, watch by turns."
"And so you need be in no hurry?" Why was it so important to her that he have a moment without hurry, without worry or urgency or pressing engagement elsewhere? Why did she wish so strongly in her very core that he bathe and be allowed to fall back to sleep-even if only for an hour?
At her spoken question he was instantly wary. "Unless you've a reason to hurry me along..."
"No! No." She tried to assure him, "The staff are asleep, and too tired, I assure you, to go about nighttime spying on us. The Nightens are far too dull to inspire such attention. Geis has no reason to suspect anything of us. As long as you were undetected in your arrival, I think us...as safe as anywhere on the island. Safer, certainly, than some places."
There was a momentary silence.
"I am-" he began, a new topic, if his change in tone were to be believed.
"Robin, this is foolish," Marion interrupted him, her bum already out of the chair. "Why can't I just-"
"Marion, don't," his tone commanded, quite harshly. "Do not come-"
It was too late. She was into the bathroom (knowing that she had placed the tray caddy in a spot over his lap to save either of them any modesty they might feel).
His commandment fell away from his lips, unfinished. Her continuing planned protestation over the absurdity of speaking to him without being allowed to look him in the face turned to vapor.
"What," she asked, her tone like that of a ghost as she encountered the mangled flesh of his left side, "is that?"
"I told you not to come in." His eyes were cast away from her gaping stare, but there was nowhere for him to go, to hide. He was trapped in the bath. "I did not think you would come in." His mouth stretched into an ever-thinning line.
That is the other Marion you are thinking of, she reminded him, but only in her own head. She watched with keen, almost grotesque interest Robin's expanding-and-contracting-with-breath left side, the scarring there brutal, though healed, the mark he bore speaking of something, some violence endured far worse than even this disfiguring flesh could imply. "The plane crash..." she began the explanation for him.
"Happened," he affirmed. "A lucky break for HQ," he asserted, some bitter to his tone.
"The others?" she asked, of the newspaper-dubbed 'Saintly Six'.
"You have not seen John-that is, Iain Johnson, in the light of day. The beard he wears covers his scarring, save where it grows patchily on his right side, where his face was most-badly burned-melted like candle's wax-by the fire."
"Airplane fuel," she said, hollowly, more than a little to herself. How many times she had imagined-had she lived-that crash, walked herself through the possible horrors of it, the names of those five other men in her mind; and Robin, dying, writhing, in torment, in unspeakable pain, gruesomely killed in the wreckage and ensuing fire?
"Royston has retained something of a limp, and Wills has lost all hearing in his left ear."
"Dale?" she asked.
"Left sightless for six weeks from the fumes. Thought he would be blind evermore." He chuckled once, though ruefully. "Still managed to find the right place to pinch on all the nurses."
"And Mitch?"
He brought his eyes back to hers. "Thought we would lose old Bonchurch altogether. He was thrown clear of the debris and wreckage, as he had been the one nearly set to jump. But he turned himself 'round and rushed in where angels fear to tread to pull me out before the fuel ignited. Had quite a chunk of steel in me, just there. I do not think anyone at MI-6 expected us to survive, much less be of any use to them."
"MI-6?" she asked, her mind further ahead in assembling the puzzle than she realized. "Then, Clem...Clem knew."
Robin spoke to try and stop her conclusion jumping. "I do not know that..."
She spoke on, not hardly aware anymore than she shared this room with anyone else, much less with Robin. "He sent me the telegram. Signed it with his name. With his sympathies." Her eyes blinked several times in quick succession, as if trying to get her bearings.
"Marion, stop," Robin would have reached out to her had she not been so far away. "I do not know that he knew. That he even yet knows. I have not since seen him, and perhaps his security clearance is not so high that he would have been made aware of our survival. Of the ensuing cover up of it."
She shook her head at all other possibilities. "Clem knew." She would not be persuaded otherwise. She had been betrayed. By her own brother. "Does your father know you live," she asked, a coldness settling about her as she, for the second time in two months, had to reorganize all that she believed true in her world.
"No."
"And so he thinks himself without a son, without a family?"
"If I survive the war, I shall be the first to alert him otherwise-no doubt with delivery of a hefty bill from some shop or other." But he did not laugh at his small joke, instead he hissed, as though something hurt or stung.
Marion's head snapped around at the noise he made.
"'Tis only the water's salts," he tried to convince her.
She stepped back toward the doorway, and made a quick but thorough inspection of his back. There, just above his lowest ribs, sat a cut of some four inches, festooned with stitches. "Who has been practicing their embroidery on you? The Scotsman, wasn't it?"
"It was John-how did you know? He is our medic."
"The way the stitching is tied off. It was done by someone with quite large fingers."
"And so it is a clumsy job?" He winced as the salted water again invaded the cut. His words were playful, but his tone muted. "I shall have yet another blemish to explain to young ladies who interrupt me in the bath?"
"If it will heal," she probed at it lightly with her fingertips. "I do not think it will give you further trouble. But I do see how having it would have impeded your sea-bathing."
He remained facing away from her, speaking to the far wall. "You do not ask how I came by it."
"'Tis best that I do not know."
"Unlike how you know," he turned the moment on a dime, "how you've imagined the crash was? For I saw it just now in your eyes: comprehension, and horror."
She did not tell him how she had found herself obsessed with such accidents, how she had read flight manuals, accident reports, anything she could get her hands on at the time to elucidate to her, to educate her on what his final moments might have been like.
He had not stopped speaking. "Marion-it is wrong for your eyes to ever look that way." He hung his head, his eyes now studying the bath caddy tray. "I am...sorry...to have caused grief. To anyone. To Bonchurch's mother, to the Earl, even. But mostly to you, Marion. If I had had faith in you-faith that what became of me still might have mattered to you-perhaps, perhaps I would have refused to be complicit in their cover-up of us six."
Perhaps, she thought (it struck her as a dangerous thing to admit, even to herself), had all that not happened I might never have cast off my pride and acknowledged fully and for certain how much I did. Care.
She had found a cloth and a small basin, which she filled with un-Epsomed water, and brought the mildest soap she had with her back to the end of the tub, and without asking his consent, she began to wash the area of the stitching, hoping it was not too late to yet do some good and fend off any coming-on infection.
He did not speak to again warn her away, nor to flirt with her. He did not comment on the fact that this intimate moment of succor was certainly not something he could have likely expected from that Marion of the past. He simply let be.
The plashing of the water and the noise of the drips as she wrung out the cloth were the only sounds in the room.
She could not see his face, though it was probably for the best. She put her trust in his earlier declaration that he was not of an amorous bent this night, and her actions she certainly did not intend in any such a way. She did move from the area of the stitches to his back entire, noting how clouded the water in the tub had become as the dirt soaked out of his skin. As she brought her hand with the cloth up to his right shoulder for the second time, he caught it, in earnest, with his.
The cloth she had held plopped wetly into the bath water.
She froze. And tried to take it back, determining to retreat again out of the room until he was finished with his own ministrations, so certain she was she had overstepped and wakened a sleeping dragon.
"I am here," he began, his tone (surprisingly not at all randy) sounding unfamiliarly of defeat, "to ask you to do something I would counsel you against."
Marion relaxed her hand onto his shoulder, did not fight against his grip on it, but did not reply.
"Because there is no other way, no plan I can think up without needing you, and a man's life-and the lives of who knows how many others depend upon it."
She looked to his hand, grasping hers. "Go on."
"Eagle Squadron 121 Flight Commander Thomas Carter had to bail out over the Atlantic near Burhou, abandoning his burning Spitfire to the ocean. He was shortly captured and taken to the Alderney camps, where he has been more or less continually tortured since. It is our intention to rescue him."
She asked the first reasonable question that occurred to her. "How do you know your information is accurate? Perhaps he will not talk."
"No, the intelligence is sound. It comes to us by way of Dale, who drives for the Kommandant. Eagle Squadron is made up of Americans who wanted into the fight, and chose not to wait for their country, signing up with the RAF instead. As to this soldier's talking? Everyone breaks, Marion," he turned his head 'round so that he might see her. "Everyone. We must get to him before he does."
"So I shall get a key? Something from Geis? And you and your men will-"
"No," his eyes were so hard in reply it felt they were boring into the back of her skull. "We will not be there. You must go alone. You are going to be kidnapped."
She lightly scoffed. "Why would Geis kidnap me?"
At that he turned the rest of himself about at the waist to meet her question. But still the hand held hers. The intensity of his gaze held. His eyes widened slightly in answer.
"Oh." So it would be a bluff-the flier meant to 'kidnap' her and use her as his means out of the camp. "So I am to be a hostage."
"As I said, if I could think of any other way to get onto the island and affect his rescue, I would have done so days ago. I would be there right now. However, in two days it is the fourteenth of October. Do you know what day that is?"
"Thursday?" She looked at him. "What?"
"Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's birthday, I am reliably told." His eyes narrowed. "Are you saying you did not know?"
"It rings some sort of a bell," she told him, now herself bluffing, "if a distant one."
Robin outlined the plan. "It has been arranged for you be taken to Alderney by a chap we know (whom you will confess to having bribed), because you are so terribly desperate to be reunited with your lover, and spend that birthday with him. Our chap's boat should also prove a reliable means of escape. But Carter (and you, his hostage) shall have to abscond with and pilot it on the return journey, as our chap will have to stay behind to sell his story, and keep his involvement with us secret."
Marion did not agree to the plan, instead announcing, "the water has cooled too much. You had best get out, or you will be set for a chill."
"No doubt," he said, not pressing her for an answer, looking down to the discolored water he was set to leave behind, "I shall prove less-insulated than before, as the layers of dirt surely shielded me somewhat from the cold."
She left the room before he stood up, closing the door softly behind her, and went to the tray of food the staff had left out to think about what he had proposed.
From the side of the bed that was furthest from the door leading to the hall, she pulled out a rarely-used trundle bed. The staff, thankfully, always kept it impeccably sheeted and tidy.
When Robin reappeared from the bath, re-clad, somewhat ridiculously (but what could you do?) in his filthy clothes, she offered it to him.
"It will serve better than the chair," she assured him. "There is some short time left before dawn, and when you must leave."
"And so you are up, just such as this, always after the Nightwatch?" he asked as he put a knee into the low trundle mattress.
"Yes," she assented.
"I shall think of you, thus," he said, the first smile of the night playing at his lips, "after you stop transmitting: brunched, bathed, and bedded down."
"You listen to the Nightwatch?" she asked, a peculiar feeling of flattery coming over her.
"When we are near a wireless. The lads are quite curious who the American girl on the islands is. Dale, I believe, is most-especially taken with her."
"Well," she responded, that peculiar feeling not yet abated. "I shall surely tell Fred's sister Josie the next time I speak with her."
"Who?" he asked, confused by her reply. "Fred?"
"Oh," she sighed," just...some people I used to know."
She turned and tried to settle herself on the bed among the sheets and comforter.
Robin's mind, or at least his conversation, veered away from the question mark of Fred and to present worries. "Will your people not note that this has been slept on?"
"Easily fixed," she promised him, as she turned off the light, the black-out curtains over her windows making the room deeply dark, indeed. "Before leaving in the morning I shall spill something on my sheets," she reminded him of the tray of food that had been left out for her. "And explain that I had an accident while eating in bed, and so moved to spend the rest of my night on the trundle."
He smiled into the dark, impressed at her ready reply. "And you are not afeared of my potentially taking advantage of you in...a situation such as this?"
"No, for I now know," she referenced his stitches, "just where to strike you to bring about the most hurt. Do I not?"
"Marion," he lightly chuckled. "You are cold."
"Yes," she agreed, nodding into the darkness. "And that is why I must work very hard to convince Geis that something must have stoked an ardor within me," she sighed, "making me so very desperate to see him that I have bribed a boatman to ferry me to Alderney."
She could not see Robin's face now in the darkness on the trundle mattress below, nor know how fearful he was of this "no other way" plan, as if Marion were instead speaking of the boatman Charon taking coin to ferry her across an expanse not of the Atlantic, but of the river Styx to Alderney, the Hades beyond. And that he had condemned her to such.
...TBC...