"There is a necessary inertia encountered in all imprisonments. In a solitary confinement this is particularly true. Muscles once sprung with strength and purpose grow slack. Bones begin to feel less substantial. The walls, and especially the doors or other openings about one take on an air of inpregnability, as if leeching a prisoner's own power, own will. A will which is no longer actionable.
The mind, then, is all that is left. Some men fixate upon women, and their desire (far less satiable than even that of the hunger and social contact denied hourly) - or upon a particular woman. Others pine for what they recall of home, or of safety. Others still feed themselves upon revenge, upon hate and outrage. Many fall into a bottomless vacuum. It is these, especially, captors love.
Myself, physical incapacitation birthed in me powers and exercises of the mind in regard to recall and memory that before soldiering I would not have thought possible. Every molecule of potential energy unable to be unleashed multiplied within my consciousness as added acuity. I was more alive, more awake, more focused when a captive than ever before.
And when Gisbonnhoffer had me brought to the cupboard in his office and chained there, thinking he would break me by sheer force of his own perceived supremacy and influence, he did me the greatest possible of all favors: he gave me something to do twenty-four hours every day. He gave me a pastime, and I put it to good use.
I listened.
The most insignificant detail, numbers down to the final digit, I drank it in like an alcoholic who had been trapped at an all-night Temperance rally.
And the Germans liked numbers. They worshipped documentation, reports and specifics.
They did not imagine it (did not even know I spoke German), but in that cupboard, shoeless, unbathed, unfed or watered, I was swiftly becoming their encyclopaedia.
And when it was time, I would see myself delivered into Allied hands; open, and ready for the reading."
- Thomas Carter, notebook #6, year 1943
GUERNSEY - Thornton's Cottage - following Liberation - 1945 - She heard nothing. Saw nothing, no one. It was as though she were the last girl on earth. A day - possibly two - following her first night here she had thought she heard cannon fire, but decided she had imagined it. Modern-day weapons of war would sound little of antique cannons, she assured herself.
There had been a surrender, then, she had to assume, if the British Navy had come as her father's driver had predicted. She would have rather loved to be there, watching in excitement as they pulled up to the harbour. Celebrating. If not in person, then perhaps from the upper floor of Frau Glasson's salon. It had a good view of the harbour. Would there have been a parade? A band? Gay colors - something?
No party, no view. She read, reminding herself of a time when a good book was the perfect companion to a solitary meal. She had been solitary enough in those days, in her life at Ripley Convent School. In some way she perhaps relived them now. The quiet, only Nature's noises. Work, of a kind, everything that must be done for herself: washing, mending, tidying, cooking what she could, trying to find things that might be burned for heat or light.
And reading. She was haunted by the texts Mr. Allen had left her. One day they would seem to her, friends - the only intimates she now had. The next they were her enemies: stories of places and lives that held nothing in common with her own. Plots sprung with reason, with purpose and Fate. Her own plot; alone and pointless, drifting without any idea what might come next.
Her father's driver the only other person alive to know where she might be found.
Perhaps he was dead, a victim of the islander violence he had predicted would befall her.
No, escaped to France, more like. Perhaps with her father; evading capture, punishment for their part in the Occupation.
She dreamed the books, the small lives of Middlemarch village, their grandiloquent problems. She dreamed of what India might be like, though she had never seen photographs or paintings of it that she could directly recall. She dreamed exotic; the darkness and uncertainty of caves, of the things that might transpire there, of ancient, overgrown ruins.
She dreamed Peachtree Street in the city of Atlanta, a place, perhaps, more to her ken. Burnt to the ground in the face of an advancing army. She dreamed Tara plantation, still standing like a stone monument to horror, to loss.
And she dreamed Marion.
How could she not?
She lived in Marion's house, this cottage that lady's final earthly abode. She slept on what was left of threadbare and rodent-bitten linens, abandoned here for a year when their mistress had never come home.
"Elerinne," she sometimes said her own name aloud, standing at the hearth, imagining Lady Marion just beyond the open door, returning. Imagining it was Marion's voice addressing her. Simply to hear some sound, some human noise.
The cottage worked on her imagination so.
At night, sleeping, she would see Joss Tyr's hand, the familiar scar trauma to the skin from the original explosion that had lost him his fingers. She would see it clasping Lady Marion's, as though it were trying to pull her up from a sucking whirlpool, the base of her finger that had usually worn a slender ring following Sir Edward's death bare, the skin there light, different, so that its outline could still be seen, though the jewelry had been taken from her.
Eleri could envision these things, but knew they were conjecture - a way of her mind reassembling the pieces of what she had seen. The psychic and Lady Marion had not been clasping hands, the blood from the deep slice taken out of Marion's arm was not enough to create a whirlpool, to drown her. No, she had not seen the lady's hand to note the presence or absence of that ring.
Some nights Tyr's hand would flex, spring to life amongst that grisly pile. It would twist back onto his wrist, what fingers were left giving a balletic flourish and producing a blooming rose, magically sprung from the palm, a lone floral remembrance to mark the spot of Lady Marion's passing.
Eleri awoke startled more often than not, but she was almost a twelve-month away from tears and crying jags. Her haunting had become matter-of-fact. Work-a-day.
She lost track of the days early on. She was not long in realizing that the clothing Mr. Allen had packed her off here with was the hardy, still-durable uniform of the Convent. Putting it on, no longer filling it out, she began to wonder if she were falling backward into the past: Imperial India, Confederate America, Provincial Loamshire.
She pondered on the trio of texts he had left her with. Was there a message in them? Something more than mere words to translate and pass the time? Was Mr. Allen, like Passage's doctor Aziz, telling her that they could only truly be friends when the Germans were forever driven out of the Channel Islands?
But did he not understand that if the Germans were gone, then very likely, she, too, would be? Was there any good to be had in a vague, long distance notion of friendship?
She had not realized that she was always at waiting for him until he never came.
Looking over to where Middlemarch lay she told herself, No. No hidden message. She doubted he had ever even read these books. More likely simply pulled them down on a whim from where they sat shelved together (grouped together she did not know how) upon Sir Edward's library shelves.
They had merely been the right length. That was all. Mind to the task, finish them and then hazard venturing out.
Seeing someone. Making contact.
Carefully she closed the pages on Rhett Butler bidding to have just one dance at the hospital bazaar with the in-mourning Scarlett.
Food was not so routine nowadays as she would wish to read her way through a meal. The books would wait - Rhett Butler would wait - as did she.
There was little choice in the matter.
Hoboken, NEW JERSEY - 832 King's Court - Spring 1954 - Allen Dale found himself, quickly enough, seated at the Carter family kitchen table. It was not grand, as the Nighten's formal dining room at Barnsdale, nor lavishly set as he had encountered that space during the first half of Occupation. Nor was it cozy with intimacy as La Salle's kitchen and trestle table had always been - men at sharing what there was to be had, both of food and of thought, dishes that were a mishmash of material and style, cutlery that seldom matched; few among the cups unchipped. Then, La Salle had never reasonably expected the need to feed and supply nearly ten men in excess of himself within his home. Not to mention the silly insignificance of matching china patterns, or similar crockery, to a blind man.
Eating then was often enough accomplished in shifts, though for the sake of camaraderie as many as possible sat together at table. Dishes and plates had to be waited upon, cups for holding soups or stews. Spoons and forks used as indiscriminately as possible. Oft was the time he had noted Johnson making use of serving-sized utensils in order to ferry food to mouth.
And the special care that had been gone to for Djak - so that she had not had to share dinnerware, her own tiny saucer and mug - fork and knife that had come on her person (their origins remaining unknown) - how she had washed and tended to them with her own hands, those pieces never being shared once Carter had informed the unit of her Gypsy wish for separation in that regard.
Nothing like that, here. Everything needed for a meal, each in its proper place. Yet his eye shot to the hooks that hung the dainty teacups on the hutch. Besides the empty hooks, after accounting for the cups currently in use, one additional hook empty, its cup sitting, more clutter than display, below it. Its handle mended but unable any longer to bear its own weight.
He did not allow himself to dwell on the image.
An older woman was at the table, now, her knuckles, swollen with age, snapping beans for a future meal.
"Babushka, this is Allen Dale," Carter had introduced him to his elderly - yet far from frail looking - grandmother.
She was seated next to the daughter, Zara, at the table he had shared short days ago with Carter as the flyer had eaten breakfast. In the late morning light, the girl Zara's hair had lost none of its startling whiteness. Her eyes were clear and bright, and edged (though not fully shot-through) with an intensity to rival her father's.
The grandmother's posture, her complete air of self-possession immediately recalled to Allen's mind the new information that Carter was, in fact, not only a Russian, but a prince. Allen had but a moment to recollect this and to encounter her - he could think of no better word for it than 'presence' - wondering if Carter's princeliness made her, wot, a queen? when, in response to the introduction, he blurted, "Your Worship," as way of greeting.
There may have been a momentary hitch in the smoothness of that exchange, but the old girl regally (truthfully, he felt in that moment he was meeting with Queen Victoria, though the woman opposite him was decidedly less plump) extended her hand, which he took, and at a loss, raised at least partly to his mouth in salute, if not in actual physical contact.
Granny's eyes quick-focused on his face, and he knew that, however foolish he might have looked, she had the good breeding to take his greeting in the spirit it was meant, rather than in the bumbling way it was delivered.
Nearby the sink, he heard something of a snort at this interlude, and before the moment became further gruesome, Carter introduced his mother, an Olive Carter, whose bearing (thankfully) was pretty much matched by any of one-thousand women you might meet on the subway traveling downtown any day of the week.
"You know my son from the war," she said, making a final pass with her cloth in drying a dish. A skepticism - possibly a fear - lingered in her expression.
"We have greatly enjoyed your greeting cards," Queen - Babu... - Grandma said.
"My cards?" Allen asked, brows contracting, not yet done being flustered.
"From your island," Zara interjected helpfully, her face pleased, expectant.
"My island? Oh! John." He got his mind around it. "Nooo, I'm not Johnson," he corrected them. "You're thinking of Johnson, on Sark. Christmas cards."
Granny's face grew intent. Her eyebrow spiked sharply downward at its head. As much as Johnson interested her, someone else other than Johnson apparently interested her even more.
"My son does not bring around his military friends," the mother interjected, and Allen was now able to discern that it was bruised feelings that so colored her tone, the sense she had been locked out of Carter's life.
"Who are you, then?" Granny asked, greedily, her eyes lit like a child ready for a story. Her hands paused over the bowl, mid-bean.
"He's Kommandant's driver," Carter spoke before Allen could, turning back toward the table from where he had been engaged in getting himself coffee. He took a step toward the last open chair of the four.
"Kommandant's - " the old woman stalled out. Her face fell, her expression blanked.
Allen's appetite, any pleasure or relief he had experienced in the last hours, evaporated: water droplets on a scalding griddle. His tongue felt of fire.
Olive Carter noiselessly dropped her dishtowel.
The pupils of Zara Carter's young eyes dilated and shot over toward her father's for explanation.
Carter was taking a long pull on his coffee, insensible to the drama he had incited, but when Zara's eyes snapped to his, he seemed immediately caught up to speed on the horror and confusion his remark (while utterly truthful) had sparked within the women of his family, who knew little if anything of his time away from them; a few sparse - and rather terse - words and two, decade-later Christmas cards from Iain Johnson all they had to hang onto from his time captive and then hiding among the Channel Islands. To meet someone he had known during the war - to have this man, like a codex to their son, grandson, and father in their own kitchen was miraculous to them. To have him, then, outed as being somehow in league with a German Kommandant...
"Undercover, of course," Carter clarified, though he did it without fanfare, stutter or tease of any kind. "He was involved in my escape." He sat down his coffee cup.
The room, as a whole, relaxed, Allen - who had not consciously known he was holding his breath, exhaled with the force of twelve hard years. A knot inside him that had always seemed an untangle-able double proved to be, in that moment, (in Carter's blunt, direct hands) but a slip, and slid smoothly straight as silk against uncallused skin.
Of course.
What shocking brevity, what an easy statement. What casual matter-of-factness with which it was both rendered and received.
But such truths were not meant for sharing, no matter how good, how liberating the doing of just that might be. Allen's eyes shot over to Carter's. But Carter's eyes, never exceptionally readable, clearly said, when they met with those of the Kommandant's driver, 'this is my house, my people. If you trust me, you may trust them.' And Allen recalled with relief that this was a man whose truth he had never known, never fully puzzled out for all these years. The man who had not broken. Brought back to his mind the alikeness to Carter in young Zara's face.
"Do not worry, Kommandant's driver," Granny said, "Olga," she hitched her chin toward Carter's mother, Olive, "and I would not have survived a month at Court had we not known how to keep another's secrets." She smiled, and something fetching bubbled up in her eyes. In that moment, Allen could tell she had not only been a very handsome woman in her day, but that she had been clever enough to know how to use it. To master it.
Immediately he felt more at home, more about himself. He felt half-kin to her.
"Dangerous work," Granny commented, approvingly, "do you have any family?"
"My gran was French," Allen told her. "Not the proper kind, though." He smirked. "She raised us. It was knowin' her language, and her 'dirty' accent, wot got me my place in intelligence work." He let a slip of flirt into his grin at this admission. Yes, he was definitely getting his feet back with old granny, here. "I have no family, now - save a sort-of brother unable to stay out of the lock-up."
"A man your age ought to be married," Granny commented, and he saw Zara smirk, enjoying the moment, probably expecting him to squirm.
Carter continued to drink his coffee, perhaps relieved their considerable female focus was not upon him.
"My wife has left me."
"Then you will find another," Granny announced matter-of-factly. She had a way of sighting you down one plane of her nose, sizing you up. "Better than this one who would not stand by you." Her gaze intensified. "There are such women," she assured him. "I know. I stood by mine through a great many - great many - things."
"And you saw to it that he paid you back with interest for every one," Mrs. Carter added archly.
Zara spoke up. "You met Carter when he was escaping?"
Allen felt his eyes skitter back over toward the girl. He had not expected her interest. "There was a Russian girl," one shoulder shrugged. "A prisoner there. She came to me one day to say they had an RAF man they were keeping without treating him as a proper POW."
"She told you she recognized him?" Granny's voice was sharp with the query. "That he was also Russian?"
"He was an American, Mara," Carter's mother chimed in, hitting hard on the word 'American'. "His squad was made up solely of Americans."
Carter quietly interposed himself, without addressing his rebuttal to anyone in particular. "Things could only have been worse had the Germans discovered my Russian connections. They had little enough personal humanity left to render them humane toward others, and if you will recall, Russia had not signed the Geneva Convention. Connection with them would have gained me nothing."
Allen spoke up to add, "I only learnt that it were she - this girl - who had recognized him once the islands were liberated and I was back in London reading his de-brief. It was not the first time she had come to me with information, that not usually about anyone she knew or had history with."
"He is speaking of Anna Lendova."
Allen's head jerked around, back to Carter. "Wot's that?"
"The Baroness Anna Grigorovna Lendova. 'Annie', as you called her."
"Wot? Anya? A Baroness?"
Granny shook her head. She was obviously familiar already with some facts of this story. "At her age, it is unlikely she ever had cause to use her title, much less live under it and reap the rewards, much less the respect to which it entitled her."
"She would have lived under the Reds," Carter agreed. "Doubtless why she introduced herself in the familiar. Her family name and title would only have further served to make her a target."
"And she knew you?" Zara asked, unfamiliar with the story or the name.
"She claimed to have known my father," Carter answered her evenly. "It is said we look much alike."
"That is what Babushka says."
Allen had a moment to wonder where Carter's father was, if Zara did not know him, and found himself re-hearing the pilot's earlier words in regard to what happened to another lost, disappeared person from his earlier life; 'The war. Wars. The annihilation of an entire class system.'
"What was he like?" Zara asked.
"Carter's dad?" Allen answered her. "How should I know?"
"No," she replied something almost stern coming into her tone. "During the war, when you knew him. What was he like?"
Allen cast a glance over to the man seated next to him. He felt the weight of the expectation of all three women fully upon him. "Very much as he is now, I suppose. He's...Carter. That's all. Enough of a non-mystery to be mysterious. And he used to smell fairly more of barnyard than he presently do."
"Barnyard?" Granny clucked in surprise.
"I was hidden in plain sight upon a farming tenement, Babushka. Chores of an agricultural nature were a necessary part of the illusion. We could not all," the slightest shadow of humor flirted 'round the edge of his tone, "as did Mr. Dale, gamble and flirt our way through the war in our militarily-assigned task."
It was here that all chatter of Carter and the war was interrupted by the arrival of Ken Armstrong, the inept, twitter-pated mechanic Carter had referenced to him the night before. He was, of course, a young chap. Clean cut. Short years ago he would have been wearing a soldier's uniform. As it was, he was in a plain white t-shirt and cover-alls rolled down to the waist, a baseball cap tight in his hands upon entering the kitchen.
It did not escape Allen's (nor Carter's) notice that the first person he both looked to and greeted was the young Zara.
After his additional 'how do you do's, a chair was found and he was seated to Allen's other side and given a plate of his own from which to eat. As conversation continued all around him, Allen could not help but notice that from time to time Zara's gaze rested in the mechanic's general direction - usually when his head was bowed toward his plate. The former undercover man could not help but think that perhaps, despite Carter's usual, dependable astuteness about things around him, that in his assessment of Zara's total disinterest in the mechanic her father was somewhat in error.
"This list, wot's that about?" Allen asked, bringing them back to topic.
"The lists?" Granny (though he had not been addressing her) took the lead. "During the war as people were displaced, made refugees, herded into camps or disappeared, people began to make lists. Who was last known to be where and the like. Each community has one. White Russian, Red Russian, Poles, so on. The Jews have, perhaps the most. But no single list is complete."
"Nor free, then?"
"True. The list keepers want paying for what is supposed to be their carefully kept information. Time was, many of them would wait at the harbor to add to their lists' information from those landing from Europe." Granny nodded, for a moment lost in the memory. "Standing among aid societies and porters. Waiting to either buy your information, or sell you theirs."
"In the early days they were meticulously hand-copied," Mrs. Olive Carter spoke up from her spot near the sink. Her voice had changed its pitch and lost its familiarity even to her own family. Her mother-in-law was taken aback by this brief speech that revealed her daughter-in-law had not, then, forgotten the days of scrambling for information about her lost-to-the-Bolsheviki husband. A quiet held the room for a moment. "I daresay they are typewritten now."
Carter did not rush to follow up his mother's surprising participation in the conversation, but after a moment added, "I visited a certain such man upon coming home, shared with him what I could of names from the places I had been and the people I had encountered. Such as Anna Lendova."
Allen was all curiosity. "So they know she was at Treeton Camp? And then moved to work for Todt on Jersey?"
"Yes. But someone else may well have since told them more."
His eyes lit up. "So we go and hunt down the man with the list?"
Carter nodded. "Essentially. And then decide what to do with the information, or lack of it such a list might provide. You have monies to do so?"
Allen scoffed. "I've put by enough money to open my own railroad company. Only, until a few months ago I did not realize that I had been saving it by - not wanting to touch it - because it was really for the finding of her all along." He exhaled. "I am ashamed to say it has taken me so long to take up the search."
Carter sat down his now-empty coffee cup.
"And you told them of our Djak?" Allen asked, his mind going full-steam ahead. "She searches all of Europe now for anything that might be left of her people, her family clan."
Carter looked back at him, his face for a moment blank, taken off-guard. He was uncharacteristically uncertain. "No. A Gypsy list? I don't know anything of a Gypsy list."
"But we can get Djak - Seraina - and her brother Djakob on a list. And I could," he brought his fist down in an affirmative thump on the table, "I could quote the names of half or more of Treeton Camp, and fifty or a hundred from Lackland and each of the other camps in turn. List them in my sleep, I swear. Find me the right bloke to dictate to and..." Lor, it would feel like throwing over baggage to lighten the cargo on what might yet prove a sinking ship.
"Dva Balalaiki," Granny spoke up. "It is said to be a Romany restaurant in the city. If it truly is, it is a starting place to help this 'Djak' and her brother Djak."
"Gypsies serving non-Gypsies food?" Allen looked to Carter for confirmation. "Sounds a bit off to me."
"With so much of your culture stripped away," Carter commented quietly, "survival begins to take precedence over folkways. Even over Rom purity laws."
"She saved your grandson's life," Allen piped in, feeling the need to explain his Gypsy friends' importance, "did our Djak."
At this announcement, which the occupants of the room ate up hungrily enough that Allen knew for a fact that Carter had clearly shared nothing of those days with his family, Carter turned to face Allen and replied levelly and with significance, while holding his gaze, "she was not alone in that."
The meal wore on after that, other topics brought up and dismissed with the speed and pace of women talking, until Allen could not help but notice the over-full feeling in his stomach, and realize he could not count the number of helpings he had been served since being seated.
"Stop emptying your plate," Armstrong whispered to him, conspiratorially, "if you're done. As long as you clean it, old Tamara will take it as a sign you want more."
How badly he wanted to belch. Immediately he laid down his fork, the plate in front of him still holding food. Gratefully he noticed Granny gave him no more.
He let a few moments slip by before returning to his business. "And this bloke with the list," he asked Carter, "he'll deal squarely with us?"
"Yes."
"Not bein' funny, but money for names written on paper - names which we cannot be expected to generally recognize, other than the ones for which we search - how can you be sure he'll be honest?"
Carter threw a cold, forbidding glance in the direction of Armstrong before answering. "Seems to be under the impression I'll kill him if he isn't."
Oh-ho! That was rich stuff, Allen chortled to himself, watching Carter half at stalking the lad making googly eyes over his daughter. An interaction too rich to be wasted on just one person. Such sights made one long for the gang. Now, they'd truly appreciate such a moment, such an anecdote.
He sighed. The gang.
SARK - La Salle's Tenement - Eve of Liberation - 1945 - He could not hang on very long, in his mind, to where he was. Probably it was a bedroom, he told himself. Probably. Maybe it even was, as it often seemed, the upper-floor bedroom of La Salle's farmhouse. Then again, it was perhaps a safehouse - undistinguished, one of many - on the French mainland. But if the 'where' was this fluid, this undependable, the 'when' was even more so.
He heard voices - the walls were not so thick - from time to time and the speakers seemed to take little enough care to be quiet. They spoke of food, of meals, of cooking. In response his mind produced a small roster of facts he had memorized: Alderney averaged 2700 prisoners. Prisoners, if they are to work, must be fed. Very well, to menus: half a litre, milkless, sugarless coffee to break their fast. Luncheon: half a litre cabbage water. The evening meal: a second half-litre of cabbage water, and a one kilo loaf of bread to be divided among every six men. Excellent! Just the calories the Reich had scientifically deduced were needed to keep such prisoners working twelve hour days, seven days a week. No waste, his mind said, great want.
Why would he know such things? Why recall them now? Was he being kept on Alderney? In one of the abandoned homes there? Had he raced to that island in the wake of Marion's disappearance as had been his gut intention? Had he then been captured, as Dale had warned he would?
Dale. He thought he saw him, even now, a shadow in the harsh, overpowering backlight of the window's sun. 'You take the word of Vaiser's daughter?' he railed, unable to keep himself from pacing with such outrage that the floorboards, the upper-floor beams did not jostle at his heavy step. 'Or, more likely, you take her money? His money? We all know you do that!' he spat.
"I have been," Dale had answered, calm but clearly impatient with not being trusted, "there is nothing left to see. Whatever proof existed last night, it is disappeared, and most effectively."
Sharply, "And have you not asked?"
"Where I could," he stumbled, trying to reply in all haste, to put to rest any further attack on himself, "of course, of course - but there is a level above which I cannot safely inquire. Not until she is missing longer than a single night, a woman I am not to have any present contact with. It is too much to risk."
"For yourself, you mean. You have never cared for personal risk! Never thought a moment beyond yourself!"
"The gang, then," Allen scrambled, "It is too much to risk to the safety of the gang."
He was a flurry of verbal attack, "If I did not yet have the sense to realize you are one of but a few hopes left to find out what is going on, I should have your traitor's heart cut out by my own knife!" He breathed raggedly but deeply. "If she is dead, there is a body. If there is a body, we shall find it. I go to Alderney, I go to Guernsey. I dredge the Atlantic if I must."
"Ox, I know you're in command," Allen appealed, "I don't dispute that. But you can't risk everyone - you can't risk our jobs here on denial and revenge over your best girl. You just can't."
"My best girl, you arsepot? You collaborating Nazi bootlicker?" And here he wailed, "She was my wife!"
No, wait. He could hear Mitch's breathing. Yes, and that step - it could belong to none other than Bonchurch, and his newly irregular gait. It was not that day, then. His clothes did not smell of fire and smoke. His body had not the strength and capacity for violent anger it had then. He was so tired, so worn.
The conversation downstairs resumed again, and he let the words, though his mind hardly comprehended them, wash over him again.
"What will you be happiest to have again?" someone had asked. "Some things we may see again as soon as tomorrow afternoon."
"What, that soon?"
"Guernsey is liberated today. No doubt a ship will be tasked here by tomorrow."
"I know La Salle will say, 'tobacco'. His pipe has become more a prop than a way to smoke."
"No, not tobacco," La Salle smiled, a look of relish upon his face. "Sugar. Sacks and sacks of it. I shall never be without it again."
"Starch," Johnson chimed in. "I've worn naught but wilted shirts for so long my skin won't know what to do with a properly ironed and starched collar and cuff."
At this surprising revelation, Wills looked askance, himself chiming in, his tone one of relish, "the Royal Mail."
"Bonfires," Djak added wistfully, thinking of a time before nighttime displays of light were forbidden - not to mention being afield at such times. Quickly she also added, in a half-tone, "and jewelry."
Allen laughed as he passed by the discussion on his way upstairs. "I shall buy you the first string of pearls I see," he promised her, and ruffled her hair as one might a young boy's, though hers was no longer as severely short as it had been when first she had come to them.
"And you, Allen? What of you?" La Salle called after him.
"Oh, I dunno," Allen turned his head to answer back, now between the walls of the stairwell, "tea, maybe? Proper tea?" he was distracted.
"Tea?" he heard Mitch before he saw him, perpetually seated these last long days, outside the closed door of the bedroom that housed Robin. "That is a weak and un-thought-out answer."
He lightly scoffed through his nose. "You've a better one, I presume?"
"A bath, you idiot. A plenty-of-soap, endless hot water, steam that goes down into your lungs bath. We are every man Jack of us filthy to the point of repellence."
"Yeah," Allen hastily and absentmindedly agreed.
Mitch was not taken in by his usual nemesis' acquiescence. His head inclined ever so slightly as he realized this was no mere social visit. "No," he said.
"No, what? I haven't asked anything."
"No, you can't go in."
"Sorry. Needs as must."
"It is one day. The ship will come. He is half mad with starvation and exhaustion. I do not think he even knows entirely where he is." He warned, "He can be of no help to you."
"Must," Allen repeated. "It's Vaiser."
Mitch's posture spiked. "But you are at babysitting him."
"Was."
Outrage. "You have lost him? Robin is in no shape to take on the physical demands of a search!"
Allen let the wounded irritation of his pride and coming-on impatience with Mitch come through in his tone. "No, I did not lose him. But he's found himself a shelter on-island I'll not easily stay undercover and extricate him from."
"No," Mitch said again.
"Yes."
"Abby?"
Allen nodded. "She's never sparked to me. I might get it sorted if I dropped my cover, but..."
"We're not to, at any cost. I know, I know," Mitch fretted.
"He's bloody catnip to her," Allen encouraged.
"I'm not sure he can even stand," Mitch shared of Robin's condition.
"Have John and La Salle mix him up something. Strong as can be. I'll go in, see how much he can understand. We've not much time..." Allen put his hand on the doorknob.
"This is unfair," Mitch wailed, though not to Allen directly. "We are to be rescued! One day more, only one day! Can these barbarians not leave a good man in peace?"
Abby Rufford's Tenement - It had been no easy employment to get Robin cognizant and onto his feet. In the first moments of his entry to the room, Robin had barely even opened his eyes, only saying, "arsepot bootlickers," to him, trying to assure him that he did not think him one.
Still, the closer Allen guided him to Rufford's, the more like his old self he became, if a very, very weak and peaky version. Before they were in sight of the house, Allen had to turn back, so as not to be seen.
"Last chore, Ox," he assured Robin. "Matchpoint tomorrow. Ship to arrive." He almost said 'you', but changed the pronoun at the last moment, "We'll rest, then. Promise."
His commanding officer had not responded, but walked up the track to the house steadily, if not with the spring his step had once afforded him when taking on any variety of mischief or risk.
The widow Rufford answered the door. Her delight upon finding him to be her caller was evident.
"Robin!"
"Abby, you can't do this," he wasted no time cutting to the chase. "Where do you have him?" His eyes shot, inquiringly, about the property without and the room within.
She leaned in more closely to him. "Come now," she tried to assure him in low tones, "a woman can make money with such an enterprise." She tried to catch his attention. "Money so valuable she would not even be afraid to share."
"So that is why?" He squinted. It was a very bright day. "You have taken on hiding him for money he has promised you?"
"Better. Gold. Which he has, even now, on his person. I have seen it."
Robin cocked an eyebrow, allowing her to go on.
"He has already given me a share. More to come in two days' time." She saw the disapproval begin to bleed across Oxley's face and tried to hold it back. "What does it matter?" She wheedled. "The soldiers will land tomorrow. Let him hide here a day, two days. I will get my gold and His Majesty's soldiers will still get him. It's a ruse, is all. A well-paying trick." She leaned in more closely, as though sharing a lovers' secret. "What harm can there be in it?"
Robin did not immediately pull away from her intimacy. "What harm?" he asked. "What of the people he has gotten this gold from? What of them?"
"And what of my children these past years?" she asked, pulling her face back and away as though he had slapped it. "What of their suffering? Gold might buy them futures. Might buy us all futures - however it came to be his. My oldest only might inherit this land, perhaps my second might help him work it. Once they two have wives and children of their own perhaps I might manage to stay on with them - but what of my others? Where can they live? Must my daughters marry other Sarkese - if only to gain a home and a living? And my other sons - work another man's land their entire lives, never having anything of their own? This is my chance. To provide for them. To at least give them a choice in the leaving or staying here. I'll not get another one."
"No," he said, his mind weary, even, for the rebuttal, but growing in strength the longer he chastized her. "You'll not get another choice, to remember the children and their parents from whom this man took their lives and their livelihoods. Whose gold it is he offers you. Their stolen jewelry. Their teeth. Is this the taint you wish to gift your children? And as for the present harm in it? What if he got free of you? Of where you are hiding him. Got free, then, perhaps, somehow, of the entire island? How, then, would justice ever be served in the names of those children, those parents? You gamble in a dangerous game whose stakes you do not even understand." He scowled, no patience for any other expression. "Now show me to him, and introduce me as the man who will better serve his need to hide on his eventual way to escape."
"Wot's all this? Neighbors come calling?" the Kommandant cheerily sang out when the widow Rufford and Robin pulled back several hanging rough blankets made of sacking in the barn. He looked a bit ruffled about the edges from his escape and abandonment of his men on Alderney, but in spirit he seemed especially chipper.
"No, no," he agreed easily enough, "Little Mother, let's take our chance with this new fellow. The same arrangement, I assume?" he asked Robin as to acceptable payment.
Robin nodded, allowed himself a moment to muse on Vaiser's future hiding place at La Salle's. "It should do for you nicely," he assured the Kommandant. "Only it has...I must confess," he shrugged, "a rather shitty view." His exhaustion was such, task accomplished, that he could not even smile at his own pun.
LONDON - The Tripp Club - Members' Overnight Suite - 1955 - "I had not expected you to arrive bearing me gifts," Robin Oxley quipped to his brother, Mark was at packing his case as he was to leave London the next day. Unlike the old days before the war, he had engaged no valet to assist him with the task.
"No, Old Man," Mark gave as good as he got, had learned a teasing smile to compliment (if not to entirely match) Oxley's, "they are for Madame La Salle. I use you only to courier them to her."
Robin raised a finger in correction. "Madame Johnson, you mean."
Mark shook his head, taking a seat upon the bed next to the open case. "Yes, of course. It is difficult to recall the change."
"It is not so recently altered," Robin gently chid him, adding two shirts still in their laundering paper to the case, finding a spot to nestle the brown-paper wrapped geegaws Mark had handed to him. "Perhaps you'd best schedule your own trip before too long. Young Stephen will have forgotten the very look of you."
Mark smiled. He felt it unlikely his biggest fan and cheerleader was apt to do so anytime soon. "I confess," he changed topics, "to some surprise that the Ministry is letting you go. Will Britain be safe without you prowling the globe?" He gave a good-humored scoff, "Will the world?" making light of his brother's mostly-clandestine employment.
"Why should they not?" Robin asked the air above Mark's head. "I have given them, nonstop, the last decades of my life globetrotting about their business, packing at their bidding, ready at a moment's notice, asking few questions. You pointed out only a moment ago I have forgotten certain items of my shaving kit. Do you know, the last times I saw aftershave in use? Once, to have it poured into an unfortunate hole incurred here," he illustrated his upper arm, but did not peel back his shirtsleeve to reveal the year-old scar, "and the second, to find it necessary to swab out a gut wound on a colleague? He was no older than you, I should think, and though the antiseptic did its job, he did not last out the week. Myself, I shan't have the stuff about me any longer. And I shan't be bothered to shave again." He did not mention aloud that his wife had always preferred him bearded, did not mention that it was to support a disfigured Johnson's own need to grow a beard that he had first grown his. But he did not leave these facts out because he was becoming any more accustomed to glossing over them, only because Mark knew such trivia already, and rather intimately at that. Robin finished his declaration only a shade less grimly than he had left off. "A leave of indefinite absence is hardly unmerited on my part."
Mark rolled the corner of his lower lip between his teeth as he considered, and asked curiously, "What shall it be like, do you suppose, traveling again as a private citizen?"
"What," Robin asked, "the luxury of non-military aircraft? The lack of smuggling weapons into other countries? Or prisoners out of same? The knowledge that once there I shan't be about my usual," he shared something he had never confessed to Mark, but which the younger man had nonetheless begun to suspect, "horrific interviews with still-bruised survivors? Poring over reams of paperwork hunting for the next clue, the next charge that can be brought against their aggressors? Tracking the dregs of humanity? Dreaming the dreams - as recounted into a tape machine - of the damned? What shall it be like?"
"Rather sounds of a vacation," Mark replied cautiously.
"Rather sounds of an indefinite retirement," said the spy named Oxley. He reached down to touch the corner of silk fabric peeking from one of Mark's now-packed bundles for Madame Johnson. He tapped at it with the tip of one finger. "Rather sounds like finding a life."
GERMANY - Schlesweig-Holstein Labor Camp - 1944 - For the most part the guards and matrons kept their distance at night, the barracks and their unpleasant mixture of unwashed, wretched humanity, and packs of vermin combining to make sending in regular patrols and setting watches more than merely unpleasant. If the women prisoners kept within their assigned blocs once dark fell until sun rose, they could be reasonably certain these scant hours might provide them with a tenuous, momentary shred of unchaperoned freedom.
"Tell us another," they had asked the woman, their voices hissing into the sightlessness of complete dark.
"About the giant!" one had called in a stage whisper.
"No, the sailor!"
The voices grew nearer as they convened upon the wood-bedded triple bunk which their favorite storyteller occupied.
"The cocky ladies' man!" begged an older woman with a Bavarian accent.
"One where they kill the Sheriff!" came the smallest voice, that of a child whose existence had to be hidden during daylight hours in order to protect his life.
"Oh, no," disagreed the woman to whom they all had appealed. "No. Jack-the-Lad doesn't kill the Sheriff," she replied, utterly serious in the face of the boy's earnest request. "Not yet, anyway."
A moment of silence fell, as though all listeners took a breath to consider this statement.
"The Gypsy boy-girl," was called out.
"Yes, yes! And the Templar Knight she helped escape," another concurred with the choice.
"Very well, then," the storyteller agreed, her bunk creaking as her visitors settled themselves in for the tale (and the relative warmth of numbers). "Once upon a time that was not so very distant from now, in a land so small and unimportant you will never have heard of it, there lived: an evil Sheriff, his black knight, and a roguish outlaw with a gang merry, mischievous men..."
"His name was Jack-the-Lad," the little boy could not keep from prompting, receiving a chorus of 'hush' from the rapt audience.
The storyteller smiled, a rare-enough expression in this place. "His name was Jack-the-Lad," she agreed, "sworn from a small boy to fight tyranny, evil, and oppression wherever he found it."
"At the risk of his own life," the boy again chimed in.
She nodded. "At the risk of his own life, but never that of others'..."
SARK - 1955 - "Though this ground be not consecrated," Johnson assured his former commanding officer regarding Blind La Salle, "he always thought this island entire a holy place, he used to say."
He came the short distance to where the graves of Dick Giddons, and now La Salle had been laid to eternal rest, having heard the dogs announce Oxley's arrival, and knowing that Robin always broke his journey from the harbour to the farmhouse at this spot.
Robin never brought flowers, a remembrance to place upon the plots there. Louise had more than seen to it that there was no need. She had sewn the ground with wildflowers dug up from other spots, and here they had flourished. When one stood upon the small patch, one was calf-deep in them, their explosions of color and variety of shape and scent.
As Johnson had expected, there was Robin, his back to him as he looked to the several markers sticking up from the sea of blooms and buds.
Dick Giddons, the oldest. One cenotaph each for Roger Stoker and Richard Royston, installed after the war - Stoke interred under good English soil by his wife Evelyn back in Britain. Royston left to the sea, the marker here the only to reference him. And La Salle, the patch's newest addition. Yet not so new that the ground had not flattened above his coffin, that the flowers had not similarly overtaken his plot, that his stone was not already coming-on weathered.
It was there Robin stood contemplating his old friend's brief epitaph: 'yet shall he live' scored into the stone by a master stonemason - not simply a counterfeit one as he had found it expedient to portray now and again during the Occupation.
"He told me once he had never doubted his faith more than in my - in our - situation," Robin offered, though he did not turn around.
His mind hearkened back to that day, at this similar spot, the red agony that had colored his thoughts and at times it seemed, even his vision.
"Sorrow not," Stephen had offered to him, as was his way, to share scripture in times of crisis. "even as others which have no hope." Blind La Salle, wrestling with Robin's grief as much as was Robin, was crying as he watched Robin in a moment of anguish at Dick Giddons' grave, a place he had taken to coming in the absence of Marion having such a resting place for her own.
"No, Stephen," Robin had demanded. "If you err in your belief, then she is naught. If heaven exists, surely she is there, among it. But even you will not now lie, not go back on your own principles, for 'tis written," and now Robin did his own quoting, "in that place there is no marriage, nor giving in marriage."
Stephen did not disagree, his shoulders still shook. He reached out toward Robin.
"You think I mourn for her." Robin accused him. "They all do," he gestured back to the farmhouse, toward the far-off location of the mines. "I do not. I mourn for myself."
"I do not understand," the other man said, trying to.
Robin cast his eyes to what was called the heavens, toward the direction she - and a God he was never less certain might exist - might be located. "I was not finished with her!" he shouted, almost demanding, his voice loud and harsh and defiant, but also anguished. There was nothing nearby to use the sound's impact to create an echo, but he and Stephen both felt it, like a bird's call waiting to be answered, vibrating in both their chests.
"I know it is never easy when you visit us here," John said to his friend. "We are always so glad when you come."
"I am glad you found happiness here, John." Robin turned back and told him, wholly sincere. "On this island. I am glad I am not the only one."
"Come to the house, then," Johnson smiled. "My wife is most-anxious to feed you."
ALDERNEY - Treeton Camp - 1941 - "How do you like things here?" Kommandant Vaiser had taken the Lieutenant, an adjutant assigned to the Guernsey civil government, aside. They had just left a meeting discussing the coming deportation off-island of all non-native Islanders, as well as Islanders who had served in the Great War. They did not know one another very well, but Vaiser had determined to change that. Treeton was in need of better management, and he ever had his eyes out and searching for men in need of moulding. Rather, men bendable to his will.
"It seems a very...efficient operation, Herr Kommandant."
"Oh, we are very scientific, do not doubt it. At present we have twenty-seven hundred prisoners, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. We make prodigious advances on all projects."
"Impressive."
"Your English," Vaiser began, "it's very good, eh? Very good for a...hmmm backwoods shopkeeper's son?" His eyebrows flicked up. "Now, why would that be?"
Gisbonnhoffer's back stiffened. It was not his place to respond with annoyance, much less impolitesse to any question of a superior officer's. He cleared his throat, the only vocal sign of irritation allowable. "I had hoped, at one time...university in England. My family had visited there. I studied the language with that in mind; an education."
"And what was wrong with our universities?"
Rather than stumble in explanation, the Lieutenant remained silent.
"Funds fell short, did they? No study abroad for you? No pretty English lasses? No cricket? No tea and bikkies?"
Gisbonnhoffer winced.
Vaiser now cleared his throat. "The OberAdmiral required, of course, officers and men assigned to these islands who could speak the local language. Your talent has come in very handily in your interacting with the local civilian government and the proper steering of such. But I daresay your days among the island bureaucracy ought be numbered. Glory and prestige will not come to those tasked with counting tomatoes and fretting over the transportation of hothouse flowers, but among those commanding the workforce that is strengthening these islands for der fuhrer." His eyes glittered. "Do you know how I came by my own accent, Herr Geis? My..." he fluttered his hand, "effortless use of English idiom and slang?" His eyes narrowed. "If I chose I could blend in at Ascot, itself. You have recognized this, yes?"
"Ja."
"I learnt it in a prisoner of war camp following Verdun, doing sums and figgers at the urgings of my captors, man. Years of my life hearing the wretched way they spoke, the idiot rhythm and asinine content of their soft, half-empty minds."
Geis' eyes narrowed as he began to comprehend. "And so you now pursue them in your revenge?"
"No! I take my revenge upon them - upon them all - for what they did to the Fatherland, for the humiliation they heaped upon us, made us even think lowly of ourselves. It is for Deutschland I have again gone to war! Spent the interim years preparing myself for war! And we will level your English universities, your quaint, rolling countryside. Beggar," he spat it as though he said, 'bugger', "and despoil your English girls. We will have our revenge for the Great War. And we will have possession of Britain, and their people under our boot to show for it as well." He smiled with his mouth open, breathing through the part in his teeth. "You tell that to your precious rose of English nobility."
Gisbonnhoffer made as though he would protest at the Kommandant's inference regarding his relationship with Marion Nighten, however astute.
"No, no, no." Vaiser waved him off. "Quite right, quite right," he was docile now. "I'm sure she's not like the others. You may even keep her. And her cripple of a father, himself an officer in the Great War, herself born decidedly...not here." The bottom fell out of his voice. "Request a transfer to my command on Alderney," he said, his eyes latching on to Gisbonnhoffer's. "Do, and they may stay as they are. People in my employ do experience certain...powers. Distinct," again, the flutter, "privileges of station. Transfer to assist in the administration of the Treeton Camp and you can poke your leper all you like. You'll hear no more about it from me." His eye glittered, hard and unbreakable as diamond.
It was a power play, of course. He could have requested Gisbonnhoffer be tasked to his employ and have it carry through without a glitch or allowable protest. That, however, would smack of preference, of reward, even. No, make the man think you were holding something over him (though that something mattered little enough to you). Make him see the transparency of your machinations, how you could manipulate and exploit on a whim. Make that man think he owed something to you.
Then, then you might have him for life.
...TBC...