A/N: Please consider this brief bit part of an incompletely posted Chapter Six. (In my plan there is certainly meant to be a second section to it for it to be whole and as conceived, so this is Ch. 6-A; Ch. 6-B to come.)

There has been an unexpected death in my immediate family.

"We lived like a family; my mother, grandmother and Zara. Certainly, to all outward appearances we were so: a collection of relatives agreeing to make a life together, to share space and common concerns. But in the years since the war I had worked hard to forget: there are other ways in which to be related. That more than blood ties might obligate you toward another. That the past remains a living thing inside many of us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not: a garden, growing lushly in the daylight, informing our days by producing that upon which we nourish ourselves, or, mushrooms, proliferating in the damp of total darkness, fed upon manure, smelling strongly, and potentially poisonous unto death.

That inasmuch as affection might bind two people—or a group—together, so might difficulty. So might disaster." - Thomas Carter, notebook #17, year 1954

Hoboken, NEW JERSEY - 832 King's Court - Spring 1954 – Once again the phone rang, the particular series of rings in the party line distinguishing it as meant for the Carter family rattling up and down the hardwood of the first floor hallway.

It was half-past midnight.

Ring, ring-ring. RIIIIIIIING. It begged to be answered.

Olive Carter stood in the hallway, staring at Bell's device with a horrified expression seared into her face. The light from her nearby bedroom cast the only illumination into the hallway; little more than a long, slender-but-fanning-out shaft slanting from the open door behind her.

"Someone is dead. Someone. I know it. For what other reason would a call arrive so late?" she bemoaned, "Who could it be?" loud enough so that her son and granddaughter overheard her as they descended the stair.

Even in Olive's woken-from-sleep state no trace of her prior life existed within her voice. No telltale accent or immigrant's awkwardness in phrasing. In the intervening years since her arrival in America her transformation into what she understood to be an American born-and-bred had become complete.

Her aged mother-in-law wondered at times whether Olive even recalled that she had not, technically, been born in New York State, as she tended to answer whenever asked. Wondered if Olive had gone from knowingly fabricating the late Mr. Carter, her fictional husband, to full-on thinking he had once existed, rather than remembering that she was in point of fact still married to the father of her son, a man who had become inextricably trapped in a warring Russia that had soon devolved into a closed Communist State. A man who could very well yet be alive. Alive, but unreachable, hidden from them by that Iron Curtain.

Olive's mother-in-law had long clung to that notion, that unverifiable possibility. Hadn't Alexsei, after all, returned from the war with news that he had met a woman who claimed to have known him?

The phone rattled again. Answering Olive's present fears, her son reminded his mother; "We don't know anyone," between rings.

"Certainly not anyone we would need to be told of past nine o'clock," echoed in agreement as Tamara Sergeiovna labored down as far as the lower landing, where she reached for the steadying grasp of her great-granddaughter's hand.

Olive's only child, Thomas, made a purposeful movement toward the phone, casting his eyes from one woman in his household to the next, their nervous (fearful, even) expressions of what the unexpected call might bring, what chaos or tragedy it might throw their world into not lost on him.

He lifted the bell-shaped receiver to his ear, holding the slender neck of the telephone to bring the trumpet-shaped microphone portion to his mouth.

"Hello?" he enquired of the device, his tone not entirely conversational, as always with him, potential confrontation ever at the ready.

The line crackled in his ear. "A Mr. Allen Dale calling collect for Mr. Tom Carter at this num-bah," the operator chipperly sang out, no 'er' in her 'er's. "Will you accept the charges?"

Atlantic City, NEW JERSEY – 6th Precinct's Drunk Tank – after midnight – His mind was no longer victim of the fog of alcohol that had seen him attempt to tussle with a Bobby. Correction, a cop.

Might've been better if it had been.

"Dale!" the officer manning the single phone available for lock-up calls shouted, and Allen Dale stepped forward the few paces from the front of the queue. Correction, line.

Something about getting pissed- Correction, drunk-seemed to bring out the Brit in him, seemed to wipe away the fact that he had come to this country following the war and the formal disbanding of Unit 1192 nearly seven years ago, and not simply just yesterday. As though inebriation had the effect of reducing him somehow to his purest form, which for him was apparently nearly one-hundred percent London guttersnipe, not a bit of polish about him.

It was a relief to him to step clear of the persistent singing of the man to his rear, who had, in his intoxication, been at re-chanting the same tune ad nauseum.

"A greyhound who had lots of speed was surely bound to fail/For morning, noon and evening, he was chasing his own tail/He was running around in circles, Running around in circles/Getting nowhere...getting nowhere/Very fast."

The chap started up again.

After two hours of this in lock-up, unable to duck the sound of this man's voice, Allen's dismay must've shown clearly on his growing-hung-over face.

The officer gave a grunted chuckle. "A regular of ours," he shared with humor in his eye. "Thinks he's 'der Bingle'."

Irritated guttersnipe he was, the cop's attempt at humor rubbed Allen the wrong way, and he fell back on a snide retort. To which, of course, the copper took exception.

"Well forgive us all if it ain't Danny Boy," the cop turned sarcastic in the face of Allen's scorn and unmistakable accent.

"I'm not Irish," Allen protested, disbelief in his brow at how few Yanks could tell an Irishman from a Cornishman from a Scot from an Afrikaner.

The cop registered irritation at Allen's verbal slap, and returned to his former grumpy self. "Yeah," he returned, "well, unlike you, Bub, he'll call his 'Bob Hope' and be outta here in no time." He gave a momentary grin more gritted teeth than actual smile.

"Nice," Allen replied. "Nice," knowing that this was the same cop he was going to have to ask to get into what had been taken from him upon his arrest so that he could find where he had several weeks ago written the only telephone number that he could now think of to call. Correction-ring.

Hoboken, NEW JERSEY - 832 King's Court – "Brief spot of trouble is all, no biggie," Allen attempted to assure Carter over-the-phone once the former flyer had agreed to accept the charges for his call.

"You want someone to bail you out." Carter had a bald way of simply stating what you wanted, rather than asking.

"Well, it would be nice. This is no place to spend one's spare time."

"Why use your one phone call on me?" Carter asked, not for a moment taken in by the light-and-carefree tone Allen had affected since the operator had given the line over to them.

He heard Dale give a hard scoff.

"I'm not like you, now am I? No mum, no grandmumma. It's not like I got anyone else to call, is it, now?" Dale's voice turned harsh and darkened. "Everyone I know is an ocean away or six feet under. You're it, Carter. It's you, or I have to call the ex if I want to get outta here." There was a pause as his voice modulated into something resembling a plea. "Don't make me do that."

Carter could imagine the former chauffeur shaking a bowed head.

"I don't wanna do that."

"What's bail?" asked the former Flight Commander, as in the old days every bit as alert as if it were noon and him contemplating a day-trip down to Atlantic City, rather than gone midnight.

ALDERNEY – Treeton Camp – September 1943 – Daylight fell through the incompletely joined horizontal planks that made up the shared wall of the freestanding officer's double privy, dust and ephemera swimming in its shafts.

Jerry fag clamped between his lips, the Kommandant's driver was taking a piss. Staring down into the blackness of the pit that descended from the hole before him, he heard the rough wooden door to the other side open and familiarly slam shut. Heard the wooden block's squeaky turn to prevent the door being opened from the outside—a small privacy few of the men bothered themselves with. The doors had been fashioned to hang shut, helped along by a spring, after all.

The wall separating the two halves of the small building was as breezy and as made up of unfilled chinks as those facing the exterior—a privy too airtight a favor to no one.

It should not have surprised him to hear the other person every bit as well as if they had been standing directly next to him. However... There was a shuffling, and then a stop.

"Mr. Allen," came the clear but quietly intense sound of a voice—a woman's voice. "I see you there!"

Though nearly at the end of his task, Allen jumped as though the exposed part of him had been stung by a bee. His eyes shot over toward the dividing wall, the space lit well-enough that he could see the concerned eyes of Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's secretary without needing to strain, and could discern that she, certainly, could see rather more of him than he felt comfortable with in that particular situation.

Immediately he bounced on his heels, efficiently pulling up his trousers and stowing himself again within his chauffeur's uniform.

It took only a moment to do so. Out of sight, out of mind. Re-composed, he stepped directly toward the wall and the pair of eyes so inconsistent with the tacit barbarism of such a place. Such a war.

"But a tick," he called to mind the press of time, though she was usually cautious enough for both of them, information she passed able to be shared quickly, discreetly, and in full view of the guardhouse during her brief, permitted visits outside the officer's building.

Certainly her following him to the privy being about as different from their usual interactions as possible.

"I will not apologize," she informed him. "Though I see I have startled you."

He ignored the question she raised of his momentary (and uncharacteristic) modesty. "Will you not be seen comin' in here?" he questioned, looking about him, this shed that amounted to a toilet rough and disgusting, for all that it was 'officers only'.

"It is where I am expected to…" her voice trailed off, even in the midst of the harsh truths of her life, unwilling to be purposefully coarse.

Allen held back a wince, a talent he was putting to almost 'round-the-clock use since the unit had become stranded upon these oppressed islands.

"Yes," he agreed hastily, trying not to show irritation that her captors would not even offer her the privacy and gentility of a loo of her own, even were it to be only a chamber pot, instead forcing her to go bog among their own filth and excrement. "Well then, best be to it." He crouched down slightly to bring his eyes to a level with her own. "For certain they know how long I been in here a'ready."

Her eyes (all that he could see of her face, save what there was of the upper bridge of her nose dividing them one from another) were wide with alert, more than a little like an animal that knows it is being stalked, attentive to any sound or fluctuation about them, a rabbit ready at a moment's notice to dart away. Alderney was flush with wild hares. Here, he thought, here he had found yet another.

"A man at the Lackland Camp," she (unaware of his inner dialogue) referenced another of the island's prison camps, this one the Kommandant's Alderney HQ. "Your man?" she asked uncertainly. "If his name is Windhover, and he supplies Kommandant's table...his safety is gravely compromised. The Kommandant and Lieutenant have discovered his anti-Occupation activities. He is to be found guilty of spying by a military court, and is to be taken into custody before curfew today."

Would it never fail to kick him in the gut? This topsy-turvy new life wherein rather than being an operative run by a higher-up he was now himself at running a growing-more complicated spy network? And all the while putting on mask after mask after mask in order to conceal-even from what should have been his compatriots-his own, true loyalties? And the existence of the unit?

He was a short-grift to them, the islanders he met, the Jerries. On-the-make, Black Market, bit o' gambling, get you what you need. Anya Grigorovna proved to be one of the few among his contacts who believed-seemed to intuit on some level, though he frequently worked ('til this point) to de-bunk it-that he was a touch more than a mere chappie looking to score and get ahead for purely selfish reasons.

"You gave chase all the way out here, risking yourself, just to tell me that?" He let false joviality (though it sounded entirely persuasive) coat his question. "If he's done for, he's done for," he told her, not admitting that he had any connection to Windhover.

"Risk?" she asked him, her eyes wide with disbelief at his casual response to her news. "The life of a man? A good man? In the face of that, how can I think about risk?" In her passion she had slipped the fingers of her left hand over the slat at her eye level, trying to bring her face closer to the partition that separated them, to better take the measure of him.

"How can you not?" he intently whispered. "They've got you by the short-" he paused, awkwardly editing himself, "end of the stick, here. You daren't risk yourself more. Kommandant and his lieutenant are dangerous men."

"And so you will just stand by?" She sounded of a child confused by her sums. "Do nothing?"

"Do nothing? Aye," he agreed to the course of non-action. "As I did when the British government went to war, and asked the island men to fight." He dressed his statement up in relaxed, careless informality and non-concern. "Why else do you think I am still island-bound? A healthy bloke like meself? If I did not choose to fight then, why would I do now?" He gave an exaggerated nod. "Do nothing? Aye. As will you ere the day come this dogsbody should run afoul of its master."

"As you will do if I am caught and disappeared?" she asked him, but she did not accuse him.

No, he read the rest in her eyes, though she did not speak it, her nascent understanding of his queer, reversed hypocrisy.

Even as you stand here, she was thinking, invested enough in the risks taken by a mere prisoner to whom you have no connection that you are at wasting valuable time scolding her?

With only her eyes on his, with no other observances or information to go on, she had caught him out as a fraud. Partially his fault-he was too moved by her plight, too affected by her out-of-place presence here among such horror that he often tripped up in playing her off. Partially her own shortcoming: she was far too willing to believe a man noble rather than a coward, rather than an opportunist willing to profit from the suffering of others, so long as he did profit.

As they had never spent such a close or lengthy interval with one another, he had never encountered her this intimately before; never been able to read so clearly how close she was to sussing him.

Again, without confessing any connection to this soon-to-be-arrested Windhover, he warned her; "only, pray this chap-in-peril of yours knows no names to give them, or that he dies before he can reveal them. That is what you may do." His mouth shut and turned hard for a moment. Not letting it rest like that for too long, he again turned breezy. "And tell me again why you will not let me contract an escape for you from here." He let his eye half-wink, as though he were asking no more than if she cared to share his hiding place in a round of Olly Olly Oxen Free.

"I will not leave my family," she replied, and he saw the second knuckles of her fingers retreat though the slats as though she were drawing back from him, from his tonal shift, leaving only the tips of her fingers and the rounded ends of her typist's nails. "I have nothing else in the world, nothing of value, or of connection, and they are here, so for whatever it is worth, this has become my world. I share it with them."

It was a reasoning he, with only barely-a-brother left as relation to him in the world, could barely fathom. To choose against flight-against self-when her obvious civilized gentility, her very humanity, was at odds with everything by which she was oppressed here.

He did not reply, and made an effort to not again meet her eyes, casting his glance toward the door, knowing he was cutting it close, his spending a reasonable time at the privy without the guardhouse noting it, or an officer arriving needing a turn at the pit.

"I needn't say," he told the air in front of him, "but give me time to put some distance..." As he pushed wide the door on his exit, the tips of those fingers, that hand-this woman in peril he could never touch, whom he could not comfort, and who would not even allow him to plan her eventual rescue-caught at the edges of his forward vision, and he settled for allowing himself the frivolous momentary lapse of letting his left hand alight for half-a-moment at the slat upon which her fingertips rested. It may have seemed a gesture without thought, without significance. A man pressing his hand into a wall as leverage against opening a door with his other.

But such a door needed no amount of strength to swing it wide, and insignificant gestures of utility rarely caused him, hours hence, to chasten himself for employing them.

It had been the half-shadows in that limited light cast upon her lids, what he could see of the light freckles on the bridge of her nose, he told himself. A 'last round before closing time' sentimentality that had overtaken him, the realization that she had not likely had even an instant of connection afforded by the kindness of a human touch in longer than he probably understood. The utter lack of realization within himself that he, also, was in need of such a touch, such a connection. Of some acknowledgement of what was real.

After all, it was only a palm, the pad just below his dexterous fingers, placed upon the pads of her fingertips. There was nothing erotic, nothing sensual or flirtatious to it. Not even soft. No, in regular life there would have been nothing to it, a mostly rough collision of skin that had lingered one heartbeat too long to be considered accidental.

And hours hence, when he did chasten himself over it, it was an uninteresting decision he had reached. He could not let his instincts lead him so close in the direction of compromising himself-or of misleading her-again.

She was, no matter what she might believe, a woman still with things to lose. And he was a man who must further divorce himself from exercising his basic decency, and not only in matters involving the fragile welfare of imprisoned females.

Anya Grigorovna might well have devoted more of her time to reviewing the unexpected moment that had transpired between her and the Kommandant's driver in the officer's privy that day, had a quarter of an hour later she not witnessed a man whose familiar visage would have been shocking enough to find in this hellish place, had he not also been laughing on the wrong side of his face.

Atlantic City, NEW JERSEY – 6th Precinct – OUTSIDE – "You cannot have taken a cab all the way here? From Hoboken?" Allen asked Carter incredulously when they had exited the station, his temporary freedom won. "I saw you've a car." He pulled up short. "Haven't you a car?"

"I've a car," Carter agreed, before getting into the taxi.

Allen followed, not relishing the idea of reimbursing Carter the fare for a two hundred-mile roundtrip cab ride from Hoboken.

The cab drove off with them into the night, at returning them to its point of origin, Allen unable to come up with a better solution at present.

It was not long before it came to a stop, though, perhaps ten minutes. Allen, who had been resting his head gratefully against the car's non-jail interior opened his eyes, and registered the surprise of seeing Carter exit. The rear door remained open, and Allen shortly came to realize he was meant to follow. Stepping out, he found them stopped just outside a large open hangar, a small airfield in the distance. The cabbie had pulled up to the hangar door, and Carter was handing over money.

Once the cabbie had pulled away, Carter walked toward Allen, holding out a small packet until Dale took it into his hand.

"I can't have this in my house," Carter told him of the item he had found resting in the bottom of his bathroom bin. He walked past Allen and made his way toward one of the nearby parked planes, and began to ready it for takeoff.

Casting little more than a sideways glance at the item that had been returned to him, Allen opened the wax paper packet, letting the fine powder within it spill onto the side of the pavement, among the dandelions and crab grass. There was no longer any room in his mind for such a detour. He crumpled the now-empty packet and tossed it toward a skip at the side of the building.

Carter continued his work for a bit, until it became apparent to Allen it was time to board. Without invitation, other than the fact that Carter did not warn him away, he made the few steps up and into the small plane.

He turned to proceed to his left and what stood for the cockpit, when something stirred in the plane's rear, among the second (and last) row of two seats. Thinking it, perhaps, Carter's dog, he peeked over, only to find a sleeping girl.

Her hair, in the prerequisite ponytail fashionable for a girl of her age, glowed white in the dim light, she was stretched out across the seats and a box in the aisle to support her midsection, bobby socks upon her shoeless feet.

He could not tell in the light if she were pretty, only that the color of her hair was so striking as to draw the eye.

"What's this, then, when it's at home?" he half-accused Carter of abducting what he assumed was a clear stowaway.

Carter threw an unsurprised glance toward the rear of the plane as he took the pilot's seat and continued to ready for take-off. "That is Zara," he said, fiddling nearby the altimeter, "my daughter." He proceeded to jot something down in his logbook.

Allen had no need to hide his gob-smacked expression. "Who's been at keeping secrets now?" he did accuse, taking a second glance at the girl behind where he stood in the narrow stub of an aisle. "She must be fifteen, easy."

"Spot-on," Carter replied, though without shock or admiration for Allen's typically quick-study, and Allen noted that more British-isms, more Limey sentence construction crept into the former RAF man's speech every moment he spent with him.

"You are an enigma," he scoffed. "All that time, little tyke at home and you never said. You never once said." He paused for a thought. "Did you not know?" he asked.

"I knew," Carter confessed. "By the time I'd been shot down over Burhou, I knew."

Allen climbed forward, into the empty seat beside the pilot. "Not over the water," he said, almost under his breath, a plea.

"It's night," Carter told him, by way of concealing what flight path he planned to take, an eye to examine his passenger's suddenly apprehensive face. "Few lights to be had at this hour once we're out over open country. It all looks like ocean, then. Black."

Allen gulped.

"That why you don't go home?" the man without curiosity, the man without questions, asked, implying that he understood from all that had transpired, all conversation that had passed between them, that Allen had a desire to return home, and nothing keeping him here. Except possibly a dread of water, which to return to England he must travel either over or upon.

"Maybe," Allen confessed, feeling the plane lift, the pull of gravity before they were fully airborne. "But I like it here. I like America. Actually, think it's my kinda place."

Carter could have pressed for more information with 'run of back luck, then?', but remained silent.

"Don't you like it? You're a Yank. Born and bred, wot? You've the means, surely, to go where you'd like," Allen had already tallied what he thought of Carter's financial standing after his visit to 832, "should elsewhere suit your fancy."

"I suppose it is the best possible fit." There was something of a slight shrug about Carter's pilot shoulders.

"Best possible?" Allen questioned the less-than ringing endorsement. His mind settled for a moment on the girl sleeping behind them. Then it flitted about, making connections to other things from the past, stringing them together in a web of what he knew or understood of Carter.

"You know how to keep a secret, Carter, don't you?" he began. "Why, I've heard it from the gang more than once you not only speak English, German like you were a baptized Lutheran, write French so prettily Ox thought you were sketching a seascape, and we know you've got summat of Russian down, for all that you barked the occasional phrase to Djak before she could talk to us herself. And I heard Stephen once say you could speak Serquiaise as though you'd had a Sarkese wet nurse. And that within only months of being on-island." His eyes narrowed. "When I come to your house you sounded like baseball and apple pie and kick the can. You were so American I hardly thought I knew you a few times. And yet now, you've gone back to how you sounded with the unit. More British than not, really." His brow contracted as he considered Carter's ability to chameleon into his surroundings. "You a Jew?" he asked, thinking he had sussed it. "Left Europe for America before the war? Wills always thought you might be. Would explain a lot, he thought." His gaze was keen, ready to gauge whatever answer given.

Carter shook his head, 'no' and shrugged. "I had a Norman tutor," he confessed without elaborating upon how or where, his eyes to the instrument panel. "He taught me Old Norman. It was a hobby of his." He gave a shallow French shrug. "The languages of the islands are not entirely dissimilar."

"A Norman tutor?" Allen was incredulous. A tutor, that spoke of wealth, of privilege. It did not much speak of life at 832 King's Court, Hoboken. "What are you, really?" he asked, a disbelieving grin coming out onto his face. "Did you just drop from the sky one day?" He jerked his head back toward Zara. "Did she?"

"Come, Dale," Carter admonished Allen, dispassionately. "You played with lords. Is it so impossible to imagine there are others in the world beyond your Oxley and your Bonchurch? Beyond the Lady Marion?" There should have been a glitch-moment at the mention of her name, but such was Allen's on-going surprise there was not.

His mouth ran on ahead. "A lord? You lot? Not an English lord. Eagle Squadron was made up solely of Americans."

Carter took a moment to pull up on the stick, and then replied without conviction or regret. "Until I was thirteen I was Alexsei Igorovich, Prince Komonoff." He said it almost as though it were a disinteresting sidelight to their present conversation, though thirty-seven years later he no longer shared it with any distaste or bitterness.

"A ruddy Russian prince. All that time. Well, knock me down with a feather. What's that make her mother, then?" Allen asked regarding Zara.

"She has no mother," Carter replied.

"Thought kings or whatever tended to pick out princesses for princes to marry," Allen, finding this all highly amusing, verbally poked.

"I have never been married," Carter answered. "Zara's mother is dead. But yes, I knew from the age of ten whom my parents hoped I would one day wed."

"Really?" Allen asked, curious. "What happened to her?"

"What happened to everyone?" Carter asked rhetorically. "The war. Wars. The annihilation of an entire class system."

Allen was still on the joke. "And yet you've got your little princess asleep back there..."

"Zara is asleep back there," a slight edge of warning crept into Carter's voice. "She's not a princess, nor has she been raised to think she's one. She's an American girl. A child of the New World."

At that flare of warning, Allen knew better than to pursue Carter's former nobility any further, for his own amusement or otherwise. "Having to start frightening the boys away from her though, are you?" he asked of fifteen-year-old Zara.

Carter's eyes for a moment flickered away from the lit panel in front of him and cocked at an angle that telegraphed thought. "Wasn't. But then I took on a mechanic, Armstrong. He's turned twitterpated on me. Can barely concentrate on his work."

Allen attempted to commiserate. "And if you let him go you'll be short on help?"

Carter scoffed. "Oh, Zara's twice the mechanic he is. She could service this engine blindfolded and one arm tied behind her back. But she has no passion for it. She likes to fly. Why she came tonight." He gave a light sigh. "Fortunately she doesn't seem to have any particular passion for this Armstrong, either. He's to be twenty next month. Still needs help to change the oil." For a moment he turned smug. "Zara is not impressed."

It was not yet dawn when they arrived back at King's Court. Carter did not even ask Allen if he would be staying. He simply instructed Allen upstairs to Zara's room for what was left of the night. When Allen moved to protest that he would happily sleep on the downstairs couch, Carter reminded him that he was a man with a fifteen-year-old daughter, and Allen a somewhat notoriously sketchy bloke where women were concerned, and that he, Carter, would be sleeping in easy earshot of the bedroom assigned to him. So Allen found himself thankfully not in a cell, but among flowered wallpaper and feminine linens, on a bed with a lacy dust ruffle. He even surprised himself by managing to drop off.

He was fully awake when, at 9:30 he stepped to open the door and get to the loo to wash his face. It took no time at all before he was pulling the main level's loo door open to walk back into the hallway and see if he might scare up something for his aching stomach.

He nearly jumped out of his skin to open the door only to find Carter standing within inches of it, seeming to loom dangerously over him in the passageway.

It brought Allen immediately to attention.

"What is this all about?" Carter asked without preamble.

He had waited, he had expected an explanation. Simply, he was done dancing at a moment's notice without some reasoning being imparted to him. Certainly he had at this point more than earned the truth, the cause of all this.

When Allen answered, his motivation so much at the ready as to surprise even him, he found himself reverting with surprising ease into the sort of lingo one used when in His Majesty's Service. "I need everything you've got on Anya Grigorovna," he told Carter.

"Then I know a man with a list," Carter replied, ceasing whatever it was he could do that so effectively telegraphed menace. He stepped to the side so that Allen might exit the washroom.

SARK - La Salle's barnyard - 1943 - "You do not know our Allen," Johnson's voice tried to reason with Carter who still bouncing on the balls of his feet, no mind to the arm the big man had in a twist in an effort to steer the flyer away from Allen Dale, whom Carter had managed to batter with some force before he was brought under control by the unit's large medic.

"Our Allen would not have done so had he known the truth of this."

"What says he of Grigorovna?" Djak ran to get in front of Carter to ask him in her Russian. She had mistaken the Scottish man's use of 'Allen' for 'Anya', the woman whose ill-treatment had incited the unexpected dust-up outside La Salle's barn.

"He says it is merely idiocy on the part of all that led the chauffeur to entice her to stay and subject herself further to Gisbonnhoffer's assaults," Carter replied, his breath coming in gulps, as John's hold on him prevented his lungs from working as well as they might.

"So now that it is known he will go and get her, and bring her here to safety?" Djak's question was hopeful.

Carter shook his head in the negative. "Your rom baro's best man has been taken by the lieutenant," Carter informed Djak of Bonchurch's capture using terms the Gypsy could understand. "They believe she can be of use to them in getting him released. That will be this clan's priority," he referenced the unit.

Djak looked from Carter's only-now-calming-down face to the bushily-bearded one still holding him in abeyance.

Johnson looked down at the Gypsy boy with the friendliest expression he could muster, though at the moment he was rather distracted, concerned that Carter's rage-filled energy would outlast his own steady strength at restraining him.

"It is the wrong choice to us," Djak told Carter pragmatically, a crease at her brow. "But she is of our clan. Not theirs."

Clearly, in the wake of war and displacement, Djak had continued to think of the people he became involved with still in the method of his people; clan, family, relation.

Carter looked at the small Gypsy boy.

The fight went out of him, and he sagged. Thomas Carter, part of a clan? He wanted to employ the American idiom, 'speak for yourself', but he found that not only could he not immediately think of how to phrase it so that it could be understood in the Russian, he could not deny that his visceral actions of the last quarter hour threw such a disavowal of kindred connection entirely into doubt.

...TBC...

(in the second installment of same chapter)

A/N: Yes, two in one entry.
I am delighted to announce and encourage those of you that have been reading along that Netflix has available "Enemy at the Door", a 1980 UK series about the Occupation of the Channel Islands, filmed on location (Jersey standing in for Guernsey).

In particular, be certain to check out series two, episode seven, "The Raid", which was filmed entirely on *actual* Sark. It even has scenes at the real Dixcart Hotel, and Creux Harbour.

And, delightfully, it can be watched entirely as a standalone, without knowing anything of the series' characters or plot (it stands well-independently of those). It follows a British commando raiding party, hence the title.

Sark is beautiful and unique, and certainly this film shows it, although it seems to have been filmed in fall/winter, so there is not as much green nor as many wildflowers in bloom as I would expect from my own research.

And for the record, it would seem (for the British, at least-I don't know about the Islanders) the following pronunciations stand: Dixcart = D-cart; Creux = crow; La Coupee* = COOP-ay.

I would recommend without reservation both series/seasons of the show, keeping in mind that some of the production values/lighting are dated, a la 70s/80s BritTV (though being quite spot-on with 1940s period detail, hair and costume), but also mentioning that Allan-A-Dale's father, Alun Armstrong, guest stars in series one (playing a fast-talking Black Marketeer).

*La Coupee, as shown in the series, is a post-war La Coupee, which was altered/built-up to be less dangerous by German POWs still held and used as a work force on the Channel Islands for a time after the war ended.

The rest of Sark shown, though (despite the series being filmed in the late 70s-early 80s), is true to period, and as it was during the Occupation.