Barnsdale kitchens - Having been delayed upstairs by the unexpected arrival and attentions of Fraulein Vaiser, Allen worried he would miss Marion, and their arranged meeting for the gift of coffee and tobacco from the kitchens. Thankfully, she was still present when he arrived.

Hurriedly, and to the point, he shared the necessary code with her to convey the detention of Mitch.

"But why should I need that," she asked him. "I told you, Geis is to have released him. Today, he promised. He is back at La Salle's already, no doubt."

"S.O.P.," he told her, with a shrug. "'Standard Operating Procedure'. Best not to question it too closely. I try not to. HQ needs to know, anyhow, what has happened." He tried to assuage her questions. "We can code summat tomorrow to share his release." Allen rubbed his hands together as though readying himself for something. "Now, will we be leavin' directly, or would you like to go over it once again for luck?"

"You," Marion said with authority, sizing him up and down. "Will be going nowhere."

"Howzat?"

"You are not invited along." She dropped the pitch, but not the intensity of her voice. "We've a house, here, with what may well amount to a spy among us. And she's looking for you. And if you think for one moment after this afternoon I have any intention to being alone with you, anywhere NEAR the Nightwatch..."

He cut her off. "Already found me, actually."

"What?"

He shrugged. "Threw herself at me, bold as brass, she did." He couldn't help but let a little of Gable's rapscallion sneak into his cock-eyed grin.

Dryly Marion surmised, "And am I to suppose that you were more than happy to catch her, once thrown?"

"Easy, there." The tenor of his voice showed he resented the label of easy mark.

"Gracious! Has Robin surrounded himself only with fellows of his same ilk?"

Allen's grin vanished. "Now, that I will not have, Lady Marion. I shall assume it's your injuries talkin'. In the time I've known Robin, that we've all (save Mitch) known Robin, there's been only your name on his lips, no matter how he may have acted for the better of the unit. Which is not to say he hasn't more than had his chances. Why, Abby Rufford only all-but propositioned him just last week..."

Marion's face looked as though he'd popped out of a hidden corner and said 'boo!', so unexpected was this news of Robin's unnecessary fidelity. "Wha-"

With a disruptive sound, the swinging door into the kitchen opened with a rather deliberate motion, and Eva Heindl entered the room. Both Allen and Marion turned toward her. Despite the late hour she was still dressed for the day (as were they), her eyes missing nothing about them, nor the room around her, but her face remaining still in that charming cast of the Vargas girl. The kind of girl most men (most lords of the manor, even) would be far-from-displeased to encounter when raiding the icebox, the liquor cart.

"Eva," began Marion. "It is late for you to be here."

"Mr. Allen," said Eva, turning her gaze to the man she knew in his capacity as the Kommandant's (her frequent paramour's) chauffeur. "Excuse us, please. Let me get Marion returned to bed. The night is quite late, her many hurts and stresses over the last few harrowing days no doubt keeping her up. As I know you would not wish to." Her lips pressed together with concern, but also with a definite air of a kiss-off about them.

Hastily, Allen agreed, and got himself back up the servants' stair to the men's hall, thankful he had already stowed the coffee and tobacco, expertly concealing them upon his person.

"I have not yet had a chance to thank you," Marion told her friend and former ladies maid.

Eva lightly shook her head. "You need not. I did it for Lord Nighten." Surprisingly, she referenced Marion's mother, her old mistress, "and Lady Miranda. Did he come to know you at dinner?"

Marion reached up to feel at the rough ends of her shorn hair. "He did not seem to." Her eyes strayed everywhere, unsure where to look with the confession. "But he was not uncordial."

"No," said Eva, already knowing that Sir Edward had tolerated the meal well. "I stayed in case I would be called for." She smiled reassuringly, and moved to put her arms about Marion. "It will not last," she told Sir Edward's daughter things Marion already knew. "None of his turnings do. You know that better than us all."

Marion accepted the hug.

"Tomorrow, if you like, we will take the tongs to your bob," Eva put a kind name on the style, "and reclaim it for fashion."

Marion rolled her eyes ruefully. "Oh, Eva, how many summers, for how many years, did I pout that he would not let me cut it in the style of the day? 'At least to the shoulders' I would plead with Mother, thinking she could change his mind for me. And now...when it is done, I want nothing so much as to have it back."

"Of course," Eva turned momentarily wise, and with her wisdom, rather wistful, "we want most that which we cannot have back."

"Here," Marion felt the need to bustle, to shake off sad and contemplative thoughts, less they lead to ill-advised secret-sharing. "Let me send you, at least, with some meat and cheese, some of our precious coffee for your mother, your brothers and sisters." She chatted on, "You know, I shouldn't bring it up, but," Marion spoke without her usual restraint, "in your mother's ill-health I was quite surprised to learn upon returning to the island that she had added another to your family."

Seeing through her friend's desire to make herself useful, Eva waved away the gift of foodstuffs, ignoring the impertinent inquiry about her youngest brother, but four years old, born only just before the Occupation. "There is no need. Herr Kommandant more than sees to our brood."

Marion could not conceal her surprise. "Though he has never met them?"

"Sacre! Non."

Marion's thoughts turned retrospective. "Who would have ever thought, Eva, you and I-romantically linked to two such men."

"Better me than you, I think, Cherie," Eva commiserated. "You would not last the afternoon with Herr Vaiser. You would not be content to keep your tongue busy to butter your bread. You would fall, quite quickly, to wagging it in your own head, and then where would you be?" Her words were not quarrelsome, only bemused. "No longer his loose woman, but rather his camp prisoner." In a gesture of familiarity, she reached to tuck Marion's hair behind her left ear. "We must be thankful Herr Geis is less demanding of a pretty face with such a will such as yours behind it."

Marion had not intended to mention it to anyone, the paper that she still had about her person, but in this abbreviated moment with Eva, she felt compelled to show her. To share something, though she and Eva, anymore, had devolved into far-more of a surface relationship than they had enjoyed pre-Occupation, when Eva lived in service at Barnsdale, the first person Marion would see on waking, the last before sleep. Now they shared so little, certainly not intimate details of their Jerry lovers. Marion could only guess how far Eva had let herself go with Vaiser, how deep she might be into him for. And what she could guess of that she owed more to understanding Vaiser and what he would require of a woman, what it would take for a woman to become his favorite (as Eva was well-known to be).

And Eva knew not the whole of her story with Geis. For all Marion knew she might think they lived here already as man and wife (enough of Guernsey thought so). She might think, even, that Marion had formed an attachment to him. But there was always an enduring air of goodwill between the two women, of neither side casting stones. They did what they must, and neither took the other to task for it, nor tried to quantify whether her friend had gone too far, broken faith with her own self.

Marion withdrew Geis' telegram from where she had it, and held it out to Eva, whose German emigre grandparents had left her with very well-spoken German to her credit, and passable reading skills in the language.

Eva took the paper in her hands without speaking or asking a question, and read it, her eyes moving efficiently over the birthday greetings from Greta Gisbonnhoffer and children to her husband.

Her eyes raised to meet Marion's, though her head remained bent, and she gestured to Marion to follow her into the smaller (less easily spied upon) larder. Holding the telegram she asked, "do you love him?" She had never asked such a direct question on the subject of Gisbonnhoffer before.

"No," Marion responded, feeling like an over-swollen balloon inside her had mercifully deflated.

Eva re-folded the paper and handed it back to Marion. "Does it matter to you?" The Kommandant, after all, had a current wife back in the Fatherland, possibly other children in addition to Eleri.

Marion's shoulders drew back. "I would have married him, Eva. You know that. I would not have said I would if I did not intend to carry through."

Eva's brows flicked up. Her tone remained smooth and untroubled. "And the now-bearded dead man I spoke with two days ago, out at the windmill? That I gave Master Clem's boat to help affect your rescue?" The air in the larder prickled with electricity at her reference. "You would not have said yes to him if you had not intended to carry through."

"No," Marion whispered, slowly drawing her tongue along the back of her lower teeth. "I would not."

"You cannot marry one dead."

"No."

"You cannot marry a man already a husband."

"No."

"Then I think you will find yourself a spinster," Eva predicted, a furrow to her brow, "soon fallen on hard times, like the rest of the island."

Marion's reply was nearly breathless. "I know."

No explicit advice had been requested, but Eva (ever more insightful, more gifted with discernment where men were concerned) saw clearly that it was in order. "Do not bring this up to him until you are alone."

"Why?" Marion (so not like Eva) questioned. "Shouldn't others know what he clearly planned to dupe me into? Should he not be outed as an unprincipled bounder? Is that word even strong enough for what he had hoped to accomplish?"

"In past times, oui." Eva commiserated. "I would call the papers-and the constable-myself. But do not make the mistake of publicly tweaking the nose of a powerful man. What he might tolerate from you, Marion, when alone, and from you in public..." she shook her head slowly. "In this instance they may prove quite dismayingly dissimilar."

Marion took a moment to try and absorb Eva's counsel on the matter. As long as they were being open for the moment about their world, she chanced to ask, "And do you not wish to inquire about Mr. Allen-and the servants' stair-earlier?"

Eva produced a modest put-on sigh. "I am all but exhausted sussing out two men in a single night. Let us save the chauffeur for another tete-a-tete." Her brow grew uncharacteristically forbidding as she warned, "I would have technical difficulties tonight," she did not say where, or in what way, "were I you. I would reference them early on, and cut my signal well before the hour finished. In this way I might attempt to explain my absence over the last several nights." Her eyes held Marion's gaze.

Attempting a blithe reply, Marion lifted her own tone to match that of a happy hostess. "Will you stay the night on the trundle? Can your mother do without you? I would offer Mother's suite, only-Fraulein Vaiser."

"Thank you," said Eva, not minding that she had received no concrete reply to her warning suggestion, and kissing each of her friend's cheeks for luck as Marion stepped out to the Nightwatch.

It was some time later (not too too much later) that Allen Dale was once again in the kitchens, post-shower, nosing about, determined to find what he expected to be the illegal wireless set of the Barnsdale estate.

Truly, he wished to hear the Nightwatch. To assure himself Marion would get the necessary code fitted into the night's transmission. His mind would not let him accept that in an estate of this size there was no contraband left to be discovered. It was Marion's house, after all. If she wasn't living a double-life, stowing smuggled or outlawed devices behind the risers of her steps, among the canned goods, the racks of wine in the cellars, well, then who could you depend on?

He had been going about his business quietly enough when he heard footfalls above his head. Heavy, they were clearly male, and of someone with a right to be where they were: they were far too deliberate to be those of another someone sneaking around.

He let the cellar door creak slightly open, faked an ineffectual whisper, calling the name of one of the scullery maids he knew had taken a shine to him. Hearing nothing, he called her name a second time, as though he were one-half of a planned rendezvous.

"Mr. Allen," he heard Gisbonnhoffer's voice, bored, instructive. "You may come out. Gladys is not here, as you are expecting her to be."

"Wot?" Allen popped up the last stair and into the kitchen pretending at annoyance. "She has played me for the fool the last time, I'll tell you that. A man doesn't mind losing sleep for a little summat worthwhile, but jigger me if she didn't stand me up again."

Gisbonnhoffer was standing near the butcher block, cutting bread and cheese for himself. His back was to Allen. He ignored the chauffeur's verbosity where his anticipated peccadilloes were concerned. Geis' tone and manner were drier than usual, less conversational, if possible. Though he spoke to Allen, he did not turn to face him. "The Kommandant had you bring the Lady Marion home?"

"Yes."

The officer turned only his head to see Allen's face. "And he has installed his daughter here, also, in my house?"

"Seems like."

"How does she fare?"

This time, Allen did an admirable job of submerging his previous grin under an impenetrable facade of casual disinterest. "Fraulein Vaiser has taken rather a forceful liking to the place, I would say, Sir."

Gisbonnhoffer let the knife slice hard through the bread, and into the butcher block, the sound of his simmering disgust a loud 'chop' on the wood. "I meant, of course, Lady Marion."

He turned, and again he was only a back for Allen to speak to.

Once more, lackadaisical indifference. "Right. She is tired, and mending. She did come down for dinner, but I daresay no one has heard from her, nor troubled her since shortly after that time. Kommandant's engaged her to travel to St. Peter Port tommor-today, and chaperone his daughter while at the shops."

Gisbonnhoffer swore, his jaw immediately tense with unexpressed irritation. "That is not what she needs."

"Sir."

"Get to your bed, Driver," he sneered, though he had no particular authority over Allen, the Kommandant's driver, save that he was a German, and Allen was not. "I shall soon enough take to mine. We each have our duties, though I cannot be made to understand why an injured woman must be expected to hew so closely to hers."

Alderney - Treeton Camp - If he could close his eyes-if he could keep them shut-the room (intra muros) would not be there any longer. The space would cease to be sensed by him, and therefore (ergo) as an inevitable result (ipso facto), it would no longer exist. He would not be here, he would be instead, in statu quo ante bellum.

London, 1934 - They had already been so very drunk. Drunk as lords, so the saying went, though they were neither yet lords, though destined one day to be so.

It was meant to have been a celebration, commencement at last from university, and in the wake of his accomplishing such, Mitch's finally being cemented as his uncle's, Lord Bonchurch's, legal heir.

Tish had been with them, and Constance Brace-Bingington, without whom Tish never seemed to go anywhere. Beatrice Something-or-other, and the very pretty, game-for-anything Joan Throckmorton. Always four, was Robin's preference. Four better than three, three better than two. Best insurance (he claimed) against getting bored with any one girl. Even numbers to keep from anyone feeling too left out.

The bottle (the most-recent bottle, that was) had proven in possession of a decidedly stubborn cork-or had it been, just, a particularly uncoordinated (at that hour, at that level of intoxication) set of fingers?

Anticipating its imminent popping, Robin had already moved on to requesting slippers from the girls, ready for his share of the bubbly.

Mitch had looked at Constance (his eyes actually wishing to look to Tish, though hers seemed to settle more than he would have liked to realize on Robin's unnoticing ones), thinking he saw an opportunity to impress her.

He opened the automobile's door that they had all so recently slid out, and he presented the recalcitrant bottle to Robin.

"My dear Viscount," Mitch mimed as though they were christening a ship, "the horror (hick), I believe, rather, that is to say...the honor is (hick) all yours!"

Understanding his intent, Robin had held the bottleneck down to the doorjamb, and Mitch shouted, "in the name of His Maj-(hick)esty!" with a pickled grin and a triumphant slam.

A very unpleasant commotion ensued. Tish began shouting (more outraged than terrified) that there was blood on her evening gown. Beatrice Something-or-other began to weep inconsolably. Joan had fallen asleep, and woke not even for the chaotic din, and Constance began to tipsily (and inaccurately) recite Lady MacBeth's 'out damned spot'.

Robin swore quite colorfully, without a thought to the girls, no longer any trace of floating off to happyland about him, and Mitch began to fear that, though Robin's finger was obviously broken-the tendon in it likely severed by the jagged glass (all that was left of the shattered bottleneck)-he was about to be punched in the face.

"I only hope," Robin had said, hexing him through clenched teeth as Mitch (cold with the abruptly sobering violence) drove them like lightning to the nearest surgery, "that you will someday feel my pain, Brute."

Mitch found he needed an emotion that was not despair, one that was not exactly hope (of which there felt little when in the grip of the machine), nor peace. He suckled on the memory, brought his mind to recall that when Robin had put a curse on him so, he had, at the time, been cradled in the lap of one Tish Lavely, who had, with shocking speed, gotten over the indignity of the future Earl of Huntingdon's bodily fluids ruining her attire.

Her lacquered fingernails combing through Robin's hair, stroking at his temple. Attempting to soothe, to give succor. Well, Mitch had seen Robin take far worse (though generally not due to his own blunder), and live through it quite well without a spot in a woman's lap. Much less the lap of one Tish.

Mitch gnawed on his remembrance of that night like a dog on a bone, wishing there were more meat left clinging to it. He stoked the fire of anger, of hatred, of the green jealousy that can so often and so easily turn red between men. He let it pressurize inside him until he could not hardly be contained by the German's restraints, such was his rage, his readiness to physically attack the man that had wronged him so.

Fury, Mitch thought, this is the thing. Not patience, not belief in oneself, not 'King and Country'. No, this is what would carry him through. Staying alive to give Robin what he had coming.

Barnsdale - Sometime after the Kommandant's driver had (at his order) retired, Gisbonnhoffer wandered about the grand stone house, always surprised by some new knick-knack, some detail in a painting, some whatnot in a display case that he had never before noticed.

Mostly aimless in his indoor ramble, he did find himself after a time gravitating toward the main stair, the balustrade open on the second level to the bed chambers, a second-floor sitting room directly at the head of the stair, the bedrooms behind the railings, men's to one half-hall, women's to the other. He came to the door that was Marion's without much conscious thought. He had always wondered why she had never moved herself into her mother's larger, more elegant suite after the Occupation, after it would have been clear her mother was not to be arriving for a visit. Certainly such a space would suit, and would have housed them both more than comfortably. The larger bedstead would have easily accommodated his height.

And now she had lost access to it, with the enforced addition of Vaiser's unexpected brat. And so there was yet another person to come between Marion and him, in addition to Edward. To interrupt their meals, invade their evening privacy, to interpose themselves, stealing Marion's conversations, attentions and intimacies that he wished to be only his.

He leaned his forehead into the wooden door, beyond which she slept after nights of captivity, once again in relative safety.

Safety which he provided her. A home, a standard of living which he saw to it she was able to maintain. Her comfort, her welfare, the sheets she slept on, the clothes she wore, the books her witless father read, the food she ate and the fires in each hearth to chase away cold: all of it his. All of it his gift to her. Elsewhere on the Islands he knew, he heard...stories of books burned to keep warm, flower bulbs ground to some approximation of flour for cooking, little access if any to medical care, men growing slowly half-crazed with lack. Not so here, at Barnsdale. Not as long as he, Geis Gisbonnhoffer, born a nobody, not even first son of a nobody, no money to travel Europe, none to send him to the English university that had accepted him for his studies... Not as long as Geis Gisbonnhoffer was lord of Barnsdale.

He brought his hand up to the wood near his face, palming it as though he might be able to feel her breathing through the door.

Ever something coming between them. The flier escaping with her, the Kommandant issuing him orders to return to his post, her being long gone when he had returned to the Harbormaster's office to find her, and now, this door.

He might well have been awake at such a late hour merely from pent-up thoughts of frustration had he not long ago in the Occupation trained himself to rise each night to listen to and track the Nightwatch, a fruitless habit now, as the Kommandant's Driver had informed him she was caught and executed.

And now, coming between Marion and him, her injuries. Her loss of faith in his protection of her. He recalled the fisherman. He had promised her he would release the man. He recalled that, now, too late to do anything about it. Still, what could an overnight in the holding cell do to him? Little harm. The man would likely be warmer than back in his shack on Sark. He assured himself. He had ordered Specialist Joseph to stay away unless called for. He would return tomorrow and release him, then. A day late, but as good as a promise kept.

Tomorrow. His time away from his post anymore was always painfully brief, the Kommandant liking him installed at the Treeton Camp. It would disappoint Vaiser, no doubt, once he and Marion were wed. He had no intention of bringing her to live on an island of prisons, nor of taking her from this place. Nor did he plan on being away from her for weeks at a time. The Kommandant would simply have to understand.

He rolled his head to bring the flat of his cheek in touch with the door, as though it held some warmth, some approximation of the living woman behind its knob and hinges.

He stopped himself short of saying her name, lest his sigh be louder than he thought and it wake her from her needed rest.

It would not be long until he would see her, not long until dawn, until breakfast, until they could speak.

He stepped away from the door, heading toward his own room where he knew sleep would not come easily, and he would have several hours yet of lying on his back tracing imagined shapes in the plaster of the ceiling.

October 18th - Guernsey - The States - The Bailiff had trouble concentrating in the morning's session. He was wrestling with what to do. What action to take, if any. Whether to contact Alderney's Island Kommandant, Vaiser, and request his assistance in the matter.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in his administration. He looked again at the piece of mail that had arrived, so ominously, in the morning's post. He cracked open the binder in front of him, just enough to see the leg of one in the string of paper dolls, cut so as to be chained together at the hands, their unmistakable skirts each listing the name of a Guernseywoman executed over the last week in Vaiser's hunt for the Nightwatch.

Of course, Jodderick did not need their names printed out for him in a sort of jester's scrawl. They had been playing like a stuck record in his mind since the list of them had been handed to him by Vaiser, who expected him to notify the families of their unexpected (and entirely undeserved) bereavements.

It was all Jodderick could do to now refrain from repeating them out loud, disrupting the session, chanting them like some twisted rosary as he shouted his peccavi for all to hear. But this sin, this mortal transgression wasn't his, surely. What could he have done to stop it?

He tried, he tried in his position to protect the Islands, to protect those among his bailiwick from their oppressors. It was Vaiser who had given the order. Vaiser's doing. It was he who should have received the paper doll chain of victims, the accompanying note that cryptically taunted, "Whichman watches you".

Yes, perhaps he would attempt to contact Gisbonnhoffer. There might yet be some goodwill left there. After all, hadn't he had introduced the lieutenant to his fiancee? Perhaps Gisbonnhoffer might be able to convince Vaiser to take a public stance that he, Jodderick, had no part in the matter. Something, anything to make his attache, poor Matthew, less ill-at-ease when opening the mail.

...TBC...

Technical note: When I code this for ffnet into HTML, there are certain inherent hiccups, for example, it takes my double dashes(-) and converts them-oh, it probably just did-into single ones.
Also, it rejects/leaves out any letter with an accent on it such as fiancee or tete-a-tete or the special accent on the 'c' in facade.
This segment seemed to have more than the usual amount of such words, so if I've missed fixing one (and instead of facade you are getting faade, or fianc instead of fiancee) please do PM me. I do like my work (at a bare minimum) to be clean and well-pressed. Thanks!