Allen Dale woke for the Nightwatch. An inveterate habit no longer unusual; he did so most nights, no matter the fact that Lady Marion's illegal Guernsey broadcast was long ago terminated, the invader which it flouted soundly defeated and dismantled. Still and all, he woke for it. Nothing to listen to most nights but the sounds of emptiness in his head.

He woke to noticing that they still clung together, the two of them, like drowning men to a lone life belt upon an angry sea. Clinging - neither one more than the other - without regard to the heat still standing all about them, the muggy tropical air strong enough to penetrate the third floor and well beyond.

Toward the open doors onto the balcony, the long thin curtains hung lankly, no breeze of relief to trouble or muss them. Sounds of the city at two a.m. drifted up, what colored lights were burning reflecting off the buildings opposite. Sometimes, blinking.

Nearer the shore, the final party of Carnaval would still be in full swing.

He felt no less tense than he had before they two had arrived at the bed, but yet, more centered. More determined in what he was about to do, the lasting decisions he was on the cusp of making.

Allen looked down at Eleri, at what he could see of her, occluded by their embrace which he had no immediate desire to break. He seemed to see her years ago, as an infant, a child. And further on, growing into a girl. But as he watched in his mind's eye his feelings were not particularly parental ones, but they were ones of protection, of a desire to shield the hungry heart, the soul (he supposed) of her.

What was Eleri, really, but another casualty of the war, a conflict long in coming-on, the causes of it rooted in the very way her parents behaved toward her?

What was he, really, but a soldier unable to carry a weapon for two-thirds or greater of that war? Who had learned (and had had to re-learn many times) to step back from conflict when it was just that conflict, that desperate coming-to-a-head of hostility and disagreement that he most needed to take part in?

It didn't matter that she had, as he had once predicted to himself, grown into a beauty. It would not have mattered if she were homely (although perhaps he would have been slightly less likely to find himself on the spur of the moment making love to her), there was something about her over which he felt possessive, responsible for, and whether it were her self, her body, or only her condition in life he would perhaps never be quite sure, but there it was: Kommandant's daughter meant something to him. A large and important something.

And he knew he was a fool for allowing in the sentimentality of it, not shrugging the feelings off as he could (and had) with so many others like them. But he knew he was not so foolish as to think that just because in this moment he felt tender that he would always feel so, or that she would make it easy for him to feel so once she woke.

But overwhelmingly he found that he did not mind, any more than he presently minded her intimate proximity in the pervasive heat.

So, fool he was.

To add to his folly, or at least what Allen Dale, in his usual waking hours would dub 'folly', he took a moment and, thinking of his French Catholic Gran's voice, addressed the ceiling of the hotel room.

"Mon Dieu," he began, using the French he had so often heard her speak in her prayers. "I know we do not, generally, speak, but I know you to be on quite friendly terms with Blind La Salle of Sark, and I daresay he might vouch for me somewhat were you to ask him. Stephen's a good man. One of your best, really, and I think he would understand what I need in the coming days to do. Let me do it, Lord. Let me get it right, well and finally. After that, I can die. No complaints. Whatever regrets I have left after this, I accept. Whatever penances I have incurred, I accept. Without argument. Only, grant me three days. Maybe four. I know I've only a lifetime of screw-ups and mistakes to offer You in payment for it, but…"

He hurriedly tacked on what he thought he remembered of the Pater Noster.

Still in this frame-of-mind, the hour-long span of the Nightwatch not yet spent, in the wake of his present thoughts, he turned his face back toward Eleri, still sleeping and ignorant of all that had passed within his mind and between him and Heaven.

He spoke to her in the French that she loved best, just as one might speak to a slumbering child; assurances and affirmations of tenderness and hopes for the child's happy future, somewhere along the way his soft words growing into pats and caresses.

She lay in his arms, and he in hers. Fait accompli.

He had not meant to wake her, but such attentions as gentle treatment and the speech of sweet words in her life were rare, and when she did awake it was pleasantly, and willing for what proved again naturally to follow.

1945 - Schleswig-Holstein German Labor Camp - Surgery/Dispensary - The dead body of the woman lay on what passed for an examination table, situated between two women who stood, each to one side, looking down at it. The camp nurse, Freyga Tuckmann, grabbed for the rosary hanging 'round her neck, worn (or was it hidden?) inside her blouse.

The second woman offered no protest (but also did not join in) as she silently recited a prayer and kissed its cross.

"We knew it was serious," she announced, "but they would let us do nothing for her."

Tuckmann, an older woman with steel-colored hair under a muted headscarf, shook her head, refusing to accept her assistant's apology. "It is not your fault, Magda. Do not let their evil poison your mind into thinking you failed her. Or yourself. Their wickedness is their own." She paused, but did not sigh. There was too much of sighing anymore. One could hardly find breath for it. "We stand against it when we can. But we never accept fault for what we try to, and yet cannot, change."

The younger woman, addressed as Magda, listened to the older woman - as she always did. Her eyes were, as usual, bright with intelligence and keen of observation. So much so that Tuckmann had more than once noted that in the presence of guards Magda angled her face down, averting her eyes, cloaking them in shadow, lest such visible acumen draw unwanted attention to herself. It did not help that those eyes were blue - a sticking point with others in the cell blocs, those impossibly blue eyes that were said to be a siren song to German soldiers now inculcated with the notion of Aryan beauty.

"They are keeping you from us," the younger woman said, referring to the length of time since last she had seen her medical mentor here in the labor camp's small (but sometimes desperately needed) dispensary.

"Yes," Tuckmann agreed. "They are letting me come to you less often," her eyes scanned the shelves of the small room around her, what had always been scant supplies now all-but exhausted, no one even pretending at an interest in re-stocking them. She looked back to Magda, wondered again at her friend's life before the war, before her time at this camp - the way the file she had been given on her (from which to pick an assistant) did not seem to reflect much in the person to which it had been attached. What would her life look like in a world where the war was over? She never spoke of family, never of a home or work.

She spoke of the past not at all. Nothing of life before this place.

It was not so strange. Enslavement affected each differently. From the woman who could not stop talking about old times - to the woman who believed she would see all those she loved again - to the young woman who spoke of nothing more distant than last year.

Freyga turned to wash her hands in a nearby basin after having touched the body. "Change is coming," she told Magda, feeling it important such news no come as a surprise. "The balance tips, I think," she confided, her tone quiet, her face as always in these times soberly sincere - but not unkind. "One hears things. Feels things. There is much they are not telling you. But you must be prepared."

"For what?" the younger woman asked, curiously, but her question was quickly set aside as the upper chest of the dead woman moved.

"What is this?" Sister Freyga hissed, keeping her voice low, as any of the German officers who proctored the camp might be passing by the door at any time. She stepped over to open up the dead woman's worn dress, revealing a tiny, undersized baby nestled inside a crudely improvised sling.

The Sister's eyes flashed over to the younger woman's. "You said the baby had died." She waited for an explanation.

"She begged me, Sister," Magda protested. "It is her husband's child. And she knows - knew - not when she might see him again. She would not be parted from it. I-I don't know how she's even been feeding it. Indeed, I thought it was dead. Some time ago."

The child, small as a toy and obviously as fragile as the white china of its skin, knew better than to squall at being taken from the immediacy of its mother's body (even had it had the strength or the lungs for a wail). It was a camp baby, after all. Silence meant survival.

The Sister lifted the child into her arms, as she had with so many a baby in her lifetime- but never one of her own - shockingly light as a feather, and pulled aside what passed for its nappy to discern that it was a boy. As her hands held it, she crooned to it for a moment, sounds in that unknowable language that had comforted many a babe in good times and bad.

She shook her head. She was not angry, though her protegee had deceived her. The outrage in her initial reaction had merely been one of danger, of what hiding this child could cost Magda, of what keeping it alive may have cost its mother.

"This is not her husband's child, Magda. Herr Mueller was killed for trying to escape two years ago, now. His body displayed near the camp gate for all to see. Perhaps it was easier for her to think her son was Herr Mueller's child. But, no," she shook her head and a melancholy smile came to her lips. "This angel has no earthly father."

Magda gently closed Frau Mueller's blouse, her head nodding that she understood what Sister Freyga was telling her.

"You ought have told me, though," the Sister took her to task, but without venom. "I could have taken him - like the others. Gotten him to safety. But now? Now I cannot. They search me as I leave, go through my bag," she gestured toward her doctor's bag, perfect for concealing an infant. "There is no way I would not be caught. You must keep him," she extended the tiny, alert-but-eerily-silent baby to her assistant.

"I, keep him?" the younger woman accepted the child into her arms with the practiced ease of one acquainted with such medical duties, though only a short while ago she had had no such familiarity with maternal matters. But her face was puzzled. Her, keep a baby here - when the Sister had only just chastised her for letting another forced laborer do likewise?

"Herr Mueller's first name was Luka," Sister Freyga announced, pulling a packet of something ground-up from her bag. "Take this, dissolve it by the teaspoon - in milk - if you can find any," her nose gave the sound of a scoff. "If not, in whatever passes for water. Get him to drink it. We cannot be certain I will be allowed back anymore to the dispensary, much less into the camp." Something made her reach her hand out to the younger woman, and place it upon her shoulder as she spoke on. "The German interest in the welfare of their laborers lessens each day. They no longer care even if you are fit to work."

The confusion remained on Magda's face, coupled now with wary intuition. "What are you saying?"

"The Allies are coming," the Sister warned. "I do not know when, and I do not know in what numbers or from which direction. But they are coming. And when they get here…" Tuckmann was surprised to see not joy on her helper's face - not delight at possible rescue - but concern.

"When they get here?"

"You must go." How Freyga hoped she would take her counsel. "Once the gates are opened, you must fly this place - with Luka, now. There is no way of knowing what will happen. The workers will be liberated and the camp shut down, yes. But how will these soldiers see the children of their enemies? Our little angels? Will they treat them kindly? Will someone in charge decide they must stay in Germany - with their fathers? The children you and I have managed to place in safety, we cannot help any further. But the children - do not lie to me now - still here, hiding? I cannot see what their future might look like. Only, it will look far brighter away from here."

She knew there were several, older children who had managed to hide from the guards, or be kept hidden by their mothers.

"Even myself - what will become of me, Magda? Employed by the Germans? Accepting their coin and this position? Will someone speak for me? Say that I came here to do good? Or will they keep silent, let me be punished?" She spoke her thoughts aloud for the first time, giving voice to her own fears. "And Magda? You must not forget," she advised the younger woman, her hand going to the younger woman's cheek, though she had never behaved so familiarly before. "You will want to. And there is no shame in that, in wanting to skip over pain in the past," she thought of the girl's unspoken past that had never been referenced. "But do not allow yourself that luxury. Do not let Luka forget." She took it for granted that Magda would honor the boy's would-have-been father in naming him, and that he would survive, no matter the presently perilous state of his health and welfare.

The younger woman looked at her, and had she not been holding the baby, not been reeking with the effects of mistreatment and possibly lice, would have embraced her. Her eyes grew full, though no tears fell. "I will never forget you."

Freyga Tuckmann smiled. No matter what else life had given her to navigate over the past years, she had been happy with this sometimes odd, stoic-by-turns woman, this assistant in her work and duty.

Through her, in the darkest of worlds, she had still been blessed. "If God wills," she told her, removing the last of the meager supplies she had brought for the dispensary from her doctor's bag to leave behind, "we will see each other again."

…TBC…

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