ALDERNEY - Treeton Camp- 1943 - The day was not hot, but Allen Dale's level of comfort when in a uniform had always been quite low. This particular uniform, made to fit another man and not yet tailored to his own measurements, might have made a right proper-looking chauffeur out of its original owner, but on him it no doubt looked a fright.

Its previous owner had been rather rotund of belly, and short of leg.

Kommandant had demanded an appointment for him with a Peter Port tailor later that very afternoon to see to the over-abundance of fabric in the coat, and the dearth in the trousers' hem, but that had not yet come to pass, it still being early. It would mean a trip across the waters before it might be seen to, following a dismissal from Kommandant himself stating that he would have no further use for his new man, Dale Allen as was, today.

Until such time it was to be polish, spit, shine, buff. Polish, spit, shine, buff. Something besides an endless string of fags to pass the time waiting for his new boss.

Presently he was on his back (lap blanket upon the ground to protect the fabric of the uniform) trying to examine the hard-to-see back of a tyre for a potential puncture. Construction upon this island's military buildings, sheds and huts ever on-going, and so recent still that nails might be found nearly anywhere. And tyres ever at picking them up.

Dale had not been at his duty long when he noticed something nearby blocking out what little sun had been helping his examination along.

He cricked his neck just so, in an effort to see who was there - preparing to jump up with a ready-excuse in case it proved to be the Kommandant - and was surprised to see instead of familiar Jerry jackboots, the ankles and lower calves of a woman. A woman in a rather fetching pair of modest heels.

For a long moment (likely felt by only himself) his mind stalled out at gathering any further information about the person now between himself and the sun's rays.

"Why, you're not LeBeouf," he heard a voice say, its tone one of curious - tentative, even - surprise.

The shade of the sun (to the woman's back) briefly kept him from seeing her face, but he quickly adjusted at being addressed by her, and her face came into his view easily enough.

"LeBeouf?" he said, turning on the blanket until he was able to right himself. "Nah, he's done for. Gaming debts, 'twas said. Got 'im a broken leg, 'think it was. Ankle at the very least. Won't drive for weeks - if not longer." He pulled himself up to standing, gave a harder-than-it-needed-to-be tug at his uniform's coat to compensate for the billow of fabric in the belly, and stamped a foot to bring the trouser hem as low as it might fall. "Bit shoddy yet, I know, me in his kit."

"His what?" she asked.

"Kit," he said, recognizing now the accent in her speech. Russian, he thought - Eastern. He made a mental note for the gang that more than Germans were populating this island, Alderney. Though in what capacity he could not be certain. "His rig," he offered as explanation, her face still registering confusion. "His clothes - his uniform."

Along with her dawning understanding, she gave him a quickly buried look of concern, as though she did not think much of his griping about his present attire. As though it were embarrassing to her and she disapproved of it. But as much as he saw this, read this in her face, he also saw that she was at learning to keep such knee-jerk reactions to herself. To shade what she really thought.

This, far more than the woman herself, interested him.

Her attire was not lost on him, though. He had not seen a woman dressed so nicely since the unit had dropped into France, and due to an operational mix-up (and possibly some of Mitch's haphazard navigational calculations) ended up dead-center in Occupied Paris, nearby several fashion ateliers that catered to the Nazi high command's local mistresses.

She wasn't dressed high-fashion by any means, but her frock was new and nicely pressed - and its style current - not the four-to-five-year-old style Islander women wore for lack of any alternative.

"Dale Allen," he grabbed for his hat from off the Duesenberg's bonnet so that he might put it on his head and then in turn gallantly tip it to her.

"Anya Grigorovna," she replied in kind, but he noticed that even in the announcing of her name something about her seemed closed, perhaps slightly haunted, as though a spectre hung behind her, over her shoulder that only she could see.

"And how does the day find you, Annie?" he asked briskly, slipping in a wink to try and get a smile - or at least the beginning of a smile - out of her.

"Things are quite out-of-the-ordinary," she told him, her gaze turning distracted. "Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer has proposed marriage, and he has busily devoted the morning to planning a party in celebration of his engagement at his estate on Guernsey."

At this unexpected but potentially useful snip of news, Allen allowed himself to muse aloud, hoping to get a hint of her loyalties. "Hmmm. Kommandant won't like that, now will he? Skivving off administration, derelicting duties to - ?" he waited a beat, two beats, to see if she would correct him, call him out for lack of respect in his tone.

Well, no particular love for the lieutenant on her part, then. "Who's the lucky girl, then?"

"She lives on Guernsey…at his estate," Grigorovna said - and if he wasn't mistaken there was a dryness in her tone, like an irritation in her throat. "From an old family of English nobility."

"Local celebrity, then, wot?" he smiled for her (as she was doing none of her own), winked again to let her know that he thought it cracking good luck a local girl would go for a Jerry officer.

"…Lady Marion," she finished, her face reacting not at all to his turned-cheeky antics.

"Lady Marion-" he echoed her, his own heart starting to grow a bit cold at what he feared might be the surname to come. A name he had heard with startling regularity since he had first met Robin Oxley.

"Nighten. Her father is Lord Nighten. Herr Geis' estate was once theirs. Surely you have heard of it - the - great house at Barnsdale? I understand the gardens there are quite unmatched." Her face, which was, he had decided, likely quite pretty when she didn't look quite so on the cusp of anxious, tried to pull into a hopeful expression but began to slip back into its creases of interior study.

"Well, we must wish them both joy, then, eh? Many happy returns and all that."

To this she said nothing, and he thought it was quite possible she had not marked his saying it at all.

Her eyes had gone to ground, flicking here and there, unsettled, distracted at best. When she did finally speak, it was not in direct reply to him, but on a tangential topic, about which no one could have much of an emotional investment one way or another. "I am come because the Lieutenant says Kommandant's driver's is to journey to Guernsey later today, and I am to liaise with you about returning here before you go so that you might carry the invitations to be properly posted."

"And that is very true," he wagged his head, agreeing that he was indeed bound later for Guernsey and that tailor, trying to push away the disturbing thought that not only was Oxley's girl on these islands but that she was consorting with - making plans to marry - a Jerry lieutenant. "I shall be delighted to see you again, Annie. And carry your invitations."

"They are not mine," she said, and he was struck with the sudden willfulness that seemed - out-of-nowhere - to flare within her pupils. "I should not hold such a party."

She turned away from him to walk back to the command hut, but stopped short, and turned back to elaborate. "That is, as a prisoner of Treeton Camp, I have no means by which to celebrate any thing large or small, good or evil. I live by my masters and do as they bid me. That is all. I meant nothing more."

"Right-o," he said, perhaps too quickly agreeing with her (literal) about-face, do come out and see me again, he thought, even in his concern for Oxley's affairs able to tag her as a potential asset. And certainly later this afternoon, as he was collecting the aforementioned invitations, planning to nick one to hand-forge a copy of (something at which he had always been adept), confirm this lieutenant's fiancée's name, and use that forgery as a means into that sure-to-be Jerry-filled swank soiree.

Later, driving Kommandant to another camp (not yet dismissed from his duties), Allen found himself replaying their brief interaction in his mind. 'My masters,' she had said, 'as a prisoner' she had said. This Anya Grigorovna had no reason to harbor any love for Jerry, then. She had not seemed the sort to feel beholden to her captors, for all they had outfitted her and kept her tidy and seemingly fed - away from the harsh toil and life of Alderney's other camp laborers. There had been an edge of fear about her, yes. But there, too - he took heart from it - had been that flare of defiant willfulness, that desire to set him right about her position, about where her loyalties might lie (even though for all she knew he was an eager collaborator). Yes. Anya Grigorovna was a woman that he could convince to take a risk, a woman willing to take a chance.

She was the very sort of asset he was so desperately in need of.

There would at least be that to bring back as news to the gang, perhaps blunt (though not enough, he could be sure of that) this news about Oxley's girl.

Probably best to bring that unsettling bit to Mitch, first. Trial run, there.

"Driver!" Kommandant's voice brought him back into the moment, the way it had of bouncing off the interior of the car.

In the backseat, Kommandant Vaiser held his forehead in his cupped hand. "Leave me," he said in a begging tone, his voice cracking. "Here, I shall commandeer another car when needed. I can bear the sight of you no longer. Come back tomorrow, stitched a-right. I shall look at you again, then. Decide if I can tolerate this tailor's handiwork. This? Take it," he thrust several Reichmarks into the front seat, where they fluttered down next to Allen like leaves from an autumn tree. "And get yourself barbered. A mustache, yes," he addressed Allen's full-face beard, grown among the unit's rough time sneaking about the brush and shadows on Guernsey, "but all this?" Vaiser swept his free hand along his own upper cheeks to illustrate, "I banish. Perhaps something small, discreetly debonair about the chin - if the man can cut it correctly, carve it out of this…Island undergrowth you rustics seem to prefer. And a pair of decent boots," he added with another flutter of bills. "If you cannot find a worthy pair, buy the best you can, and tomorrow I shall order others from France. IF I approve the rest," he gave a gesture of his hand to signify the totality of Allen's appearance. "Need I mention a proper bath?" and then to himself, "humph, one never knows, out here on the very fringe," he rolled the word around in his mouth, "of civilization." He cocked a brow at Allen as he stepped out, unaided as Allen held the door for him, onto the planking of his central camp's office hut. "A hot bath." And with a final, skeptically distasteful but not wholly-disapproving glance behind, he strode away in.

GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate - 1943 - Marion Nighten sat among the allowed-to-remain-under-Occupation-Code books and papers of her father's second-floor sunroom. Lord Nighten drowsed in a nearby chair.

She found she could not help looking at him accusingly, even as he slept - as oblivious to her quandary as if he had been awake in his ongoing state of dementia.

She needed someone to talk to.

Someone capable of a dialogue.

She had just returned from a long walk, and it was early in the day for her - well before luncheon (and her having been up last night with the Nightwatch). Her eyes ached. Her mind, her very reasoning - if it could do so - ached. She had thought of nothing but the prior evening's unpleasant (but should-have-been-expected as an eventuality) event.

Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had been in a fine mood. Perhaps, too fine. It had irritated her that she had grown able to read him so well, so intimately. He was a man of great reserve, oft-times possessing an unearned (and distasteful to her) hauteur. On some occasions he could provide little more than a series of sneers for those around him (though never for her). On others he was more relaxed, more at attempting to be pleasant. But he was always awkward socially. Even when that society were only the two of them, alone (times she tried as cleverly as possible to avert from happening).

Her demeanor toward him was always constant: cool and detached, but never cruel. Never deliberately engaging him, nor pushing him away. She had seen her mother often enough treat people she had disapproved of in just such a way: but a hair's breadth removed from dismissive. It was a certain talent, in a very refined skill set.

To most, this behavior - while straddling the line of discourtesy - would signify, and the person in question would find elsewhere to go, other company to join with.

But to Herr Geis? Well, he seemed oblivious to its implications. It worked on him not at all in this way. If anything, he seemed to expect and enjoy it. The more detached, the more supercilious she allowed herself to be, the more he (in his own, insular way) seemed to revel in it, as though she were a monarch not much given to condescension (and a graceless one at that), and he fortunate among all her subjects that she would deign to sit across from him at table.

Marion had once thought of dropping this affectation altogether, only to realize it had become a sort of armor for her, this impassiveness, the disingenuous smiles, the lack of true feeling showing in her eyes. It was as though it were another part to play, another mask to take on.

But then last night he had asked her to take it on - to take him on - permanently.

He had made several small jokes throughout the evening. A single joke would not have sparked her particular notice. Perhaps he had simply had a good day. But several? And all before the fish course? They were not dining with other officers. She and her father were the only two present that might be entertained by such attempts at wit.

Dinner had ended, and Gisbonnhoffer had asked her to walk the grounds with him. She had consented, because the act of being consistently agreeable to his desires was the only hope to perhaps, sometime in the future, deny him, and still be empowered to regretfully decline such a walk or similar imposition.

They had been by the fountain, within sight of the promenade. She worked always, on every such occasion to keep them within in clear view of the house.

"Marion," he had said, and she sensed more than truly felt him lean closer toward her, the smell of his after-dinner cigar foregrounding the dessert wine's aroma still upon his tongue. The hair cream used to keep his hair in place. None were unpleasant smells on their own, but together they coalesced into the smell of him, and so she fidgeted mentally at their nearness - but made no observable actions to give herself away.

"You recall, as do I, the call to deport all officers of the Great War, all peoples not born on these islands?" he had asked.

"Why yes, of course I do. I recall very clearly how instrumental you were in seeing to it that my father was not removed." She let herself look up at him through her lashes, though she agreed to hold his gaze only briefly. Any such reference of his to that 'favor' - as he saw it - could only mean his ego was in need of further thanks or that she was about to be 'indebted' - in his eyes - to him further. "How I was not sent away."

He smiled. He had liked that, the words she had chosen, the credit she had given him in bringing the Nightens under the protection of the Kommandant.

"It has occurred to me that we live together here, now, very like a family," he said, in what amounted to him as deep reflection. "I have long desired such a situation, and with the war lasting on, and our troops not yet in London - " (it was rare that he referenced any shortfall on the part of the Reich, much less spoke to her of military matters) "I feel like I could best protect you, and your father, if we were truly family. Legally."

She tried to let only the meaning of the words he used and not their intent wash over her. Tried to be a stone made smooth and frictionless under years of a brisk stream's running current.

"Herr Geis," she said, "You wish to adopt us through the courts? How very generous of you." Her tone was dry and not at all flirtatious. "I do not understand the legalities, of course, of such a petition, what with my mother and father still living…"

But he took this deflection as a flirt, nonetheless. And even in the semi-darkness, no light escaping the black-out curtains at the house, she could see that he smiled.

It was a soft smile, a smile devoid of artifice, absent of that manufactured hauteur.

It caused her mind to startle; the alteration in him so abrupt, so unusual. It was as though for an instant she dropped her mask of impassiveness, and for a several moments she was looking at him through no lens, no preconceptions.

"Mari-on" he said almost sing-song, shaking his head slowly, smile still on his lips. "You cannot be insensible to the fact that I am -" and here the smile left him, the altered demeanor left him. He fell back into being the Geis she knew; unnecessarily intense, insecurity masked by what he thought was a show of strength, a man often done in by words, "-in love with you." He stammered slightly over the 'you'.

It sounded of a phrase he had never used before in his life, nor read in a book, nor written in a poem. His next words were rendered in a tone of his own, a tone that he chose but that was nevertheless bordering on grim. "We must marry."

Perhaps it was what his understanding told him was appropriately grave for such an auspicious conversation. Perhaps it was that his voice dropped into an unusually (even for him) low register and lost much of the expressiveness a modulation in tone would have given it.

She did not believe she only imagined the grim tincture in the phrase, though she knew from experience he would not have heard it that way.

He paused a moment and seemed to be waiting for her to speak though he had not asked her a question.

When Marion again found her voice she had explained to him that no respectable English girl would be able to give immediate consent to any proposal, but that he must wait several days for her to give her answer if they wished to proceed properly.

It had been the first excuse (the first deferral that she could manufacture) that had popped into her head. Of course there was no real truth to it, but English customs always seemed to charm the German Lieutenant, and this one (as with so many things throughout the evening) left him again laughing.

"I will give a great party to announce it," he had declared, in his head going forward and making grand plans for his yet-unaccepted proposal. "I shall invite everyone in command. Prinzer himself, and I shall find you a jewel for your gift."

As Marion sat now in her father's sunroom, she had produced a lengthy mental list of other quaint customs she wished to invoke to further delay her reply, to mire it deeply in perpetual postponements: She could say yes, but add the condition that they would not marry until the war was over. That he must obtain her father's consent. She could point out that all Nighten monies were banked in London at Lloyd's (untrue), and so he could have no dowry of her as the branch in St. Peter Port was shuttered in the Occupation and inability to communicate with London. But as she went over them, one by one they all began to sound of schemes that would only work in a storybook.

There had been no real question of their engagement, of course. Geis was already at planning a party to announce it. Two and a half weeks he felt he would need for the planning of it, for the invited to be contacted and to reply, other soldiers to make arrangements so that they might leave their posts and attend. Two and a half weeks so that he might have the ability to send for things to arrive by several supply ships from France.

The only real question for her, the appointed fiancée, was to decide if she were going to resist it, or accept it.

Rejecting it without consequence seemed unlikely in the extreme.

So she had risen early this morning and sought-out Eva Heindl. But the other girl, her friend, had only happy congratulations to offer her. Eva could only see (and rightly so, perhaps) that marriage to a German officer on these islands, in these times was to have status, to have security; food to eat and protection from want.

And during their conversation, Marion was more aware than ever that even had Eva disapproved they two had never spoken out to each other about the German Occupation and its occupiers. Neither of them truly knew the others' heart about such matters. And it was too dangerous now to wade in to such deep and troubled waters. This was not to be a truth they were ever to share.

She had walked past Mr. Thornton's path, considered going to see him. She knew he held no love for the Germans. Knew him to be a good man, albeit one who had for the most part led a simple life on his patch, here. But as she contemplated a visit, she found she could hear him already, the answer he would give. That he was nobody to counsel a Lord's daughter in what to do. That she must follow her own mind.

So she walked past the turning.

Back at Barnsdale, she had gone up to the abandoned nursery near the servants' quarters, tried to conjure Clem in her mind. Those rare times when they were children that he had agreed to play with the baby (her) and mock-slay dragons come to carry off the princess (her).

She allowed herself the luxury of imagining him battling Geis to the Marquess of Queensbury rules (he had boxed to some acclaim at university) - in a fair fight, of course. There was much blood and a great many well-landed blows in her daydream, and naturally, Handsome Clem would triumph in the bout.

Further, she imagined Clem and his other MI-6ers parachuting in in their business suits laden with their secret information and re-taking the Island, sending Geis and his fellow Germans running out into the surf, wild to escape capture.

It was the nursery, after all - few places more suited to such preposterous flights of fancy.

She had even walked past the downstairs sitting room which contained her mother's harp. Let herself shallowly wonder what her mother might say, before vetoing the effort and deciding that as far as Lady Miranda was concerned, any proposal was better than none at all.

And that of a man in a position of power? With future prospects? Better than most.

She resisted the urge to walk over and attempt to topple the heavy harp, as if her mother had been present to voice these very ideas aloud.

Marion felt out-of-sorts, but spent of anger. She wanted to be able to take Geis on head-on, as Clem might in a boxing ring. She wanted to hand-letter a notice advertising the Nightwatch and leave it lying about where a German might find it (such as among the dated magazines at Ginny Glasson's shop) and carry it to someone in command that it might outrage.

She wanted an outlet of defiance, but could see none open to her, and with the day barely begun (much less the night coming on) she could not even release her raging sentiments out onto the open (but forbidden) airwaves.

She thought quite suddenly of children that might come from such a union. Of the fact that she would have to alter her name to Marion Gisbonnhoffer.

Would such children, like Hardy's Tess', be "Sorrow"? What sort of mother could she, Marion, be to such children? Conceived against her desire, in an act absent her free, unfettered will? Children never able to truly know their mother - only this shade she maintained in front of Geis. This shade she would have to maintain even in front of them. What sort of people might that birth?

No.

Children, at least, she could prevent. Eva had once confided in her as much (as one high profile Jerry-bag to another) - that Hilda had the means to protect against such eventualities.

Very well. That was then decided: there would be no children from such a marriage. She was research-savvy enough to concoct a medical backstory of some reliability to explain Gisbonnhoffer finding himself with a barren wife for who even the most advanced medical treatments for fertility would fail. (Though of course it might be some time before that information would need come into play.)

It might be years.

She tried not to think about years.

Marion knew herself well enough to know she was not of a romantic bent, with no reason (which she would credit) to worry that the day might come (war over or not) when she might find herself loving someone of her own free will; of how a marriage of necessity might complicate such a development. Marion Nighten had loved only once, and the present closed condition of her heart left her firmly convinced she would never do so again.

LONDON - West End - Mayfair - Lord Nighten's Georgian Townhouse - Late Summer 1937 - "Chin up, Tigs," Clem was urging her, the rumble of laughter dancing about in the bass timbre of his voice. "You look positively green about the gills!"

They were at the dining table, a small but formal party which included the Earl of Huntingdon and his heir the Viscount. Clem was at her elbow. Her gown was satin, a cool mint - nearly silver - green.

Therefore a green complexion might at least be pleasing to the eye in such a situation. Despite what it might say of the state of the mind resting behind it.

"I say," Clem barked with the early on-set of celebration, his glass already raised even as he was standing to join Robin Oxley who had already stood for making his wholly unexpected announcement, "bold as brass, Rob! Or shall I say, now, 'Brother' Goodfellow?"

Marion felt more than saw her mother's brows draw together in distaste for Clem's repeated usage of common slang. Cockney rhymes had no place at Lord Nighten's civilized table.

Inured to his mother's disapproval in this particular habit of his, "To Tigs and Goodfellow!" Clem sang out.

"To Marion and Robert," Sir Edward said, his tone deliberate and crisp with propriety as he interjected the more appropriate names of the couple whose engagement was about to be toasted, his glass raised.

Robin Oxley's face, having burst into redness and unaccustomed near-flummox the moment he got his news out, maintained its high coloring above his impeccably starched white collar and tie.

Marion watched only him as the others toasted.

He looked to her as though he had just taken the Argent Arrow, soundly trounced the challenger in the Tripp Club's storied cricket match. And surely the men at table were congratulating him in similar fashion.

She felt more like she had been struck without warning by an arrow - pinned into a situation she was not expecting, for which she was not fully prepared.

Not yet.

Robin's eyes searched hers out repeatedly, wishing to join with hers in this happy moment, but each time she refused to make hers available to him. Only returning to look at him when his attention was settled elsewhere.

Upon the conclusion of the toasts, the men of the party bore him away like a national hero into the smoking room, laughing, still congratulating, and Clem slapping his back so much it was sure to bear the bruises of impact tomorrow.

She was left in the far-more sedate parlor with her mother, the Earl's dinner partner (invited by her mother to keep numbers even) Lady Lytton, and Clem's present paramour, French-born Lise Montrose.

It was short moments before Marion realized, swirling about her, that although their conversation revolved around her, around her wedding, it did not include her in any way.

In fact, Marion had never felt quite so superfluous to any occasion in her life.

She sat through what seemed like three-quarters of an hour of it, but which might have been nothing more than ten minutes all told, marveling at this French girl who had more ideas about bridal style and betrothal presentation than any unengaged girl really ought be possessed of.

Marion excused herself as if to the powder room, intending to walk just about anywhere else within the house - most preferably several floors away.

She had gotten as far as the second floor, beyond the large for-show stair, and down a hall. Even so, it was a main hall: wide as rooms in a poorer family's house, ornamented here and there with furniture for sitting, potted plants and objets d'art for observing. It was, of course, the standard by which all other passageways in Mayfair townhouses were to be measured (and in comparison found wanting), the arrangement and placement of the furniture, and the art on display overseen closely by her mother. But Marion felt the need to locate herself somewhere more intimate, the walls closer, the ceiling lower. Less art, less formality in the cushions upon chairs. None of the doors in this part of the house would give her that: she must ascend higher. Such a room as she sought would leave her feeling cozier: less alone, less like someone perhaps cut loose and soon to be adrift. Closer quarters would feel of a smaller world, a world more able to be managed.

Shortly, she heard a sound, the sort of sound no discreet member of the Nighten staff would ever make. In response she stopped dead-center in the upper-floor hall.

It was not a loud sound. It was both the sound of someone practiced at sneaking about, but also practiced in knowing how to sneak about in this very house. Usually with the help of Clem's man, Percival.

"Marion, I will follow you to your bedchamber if necessary." Robin's voice was low, but neither flirtatious nor fully-threatening. It was both patient and impatient at once.

In her present mood, her reply could be nothing but arch. Even as she turned 'round toward him, she did so only in anticipation of wheeling about again, leaving him only her impeccably straight back with which to discourse.

"Is that to be the way, then, of things from now on?" she asked, not bridling the acid in her tone, despite the fact she well knew he could not bear to be spoken to in such a way, a tone of disdain the fastest route to stoppering his ears, and severing his willingness to listen. "You, to make the decisions unilaterally? And me, left to swim about hoping to locate a calm amongst your wake?"

Robin let out a breath that showed this was not at all the reception he had expected to meet with. "You are cross with me!" he cried in confused surprise.

She watched his face, even though she did not mean to do so. (She was supposed to be pivoting on her heel and turning her back to him.) But it was such a face! And even in her irritation, the lines about his eyes that telegraphed that her mood had somehow hurt him startled her, surprising her in their ability to do so.

"You cannot be cross with me," he pleaded, his tone half-amazement that she was so, "this night of all nights!" There was almost an unvoiced laugh to it, but a disbelieving one.

Her response was at her lips as though she had been at rehearsing it for half of the hour past. "I most certainly can be cross with anyone whenever I feel like it."

His face came to a stop. He paused a moment as if to study this reply.

Marion stood, watching him, undistracted by their surroundings, unable (she felt) to pull back on her reaction to him, but similarly unable to execute that dramatic turn of her back toward him and walk away.

Robin spoke now like a detective in a stage mystery, as though he were in the very act of discovering the answer. "But what could there be about tonight to possibly make you cross?" he said, and she could tell he was fighting against the urge to bury his knuckles in the hair at the nape of his neck as aid to his thought process. The way he must have done when cribbing for an exam at university.

But raising his elbow so was sure to put his jacket and shirttails a-jumble. And though Robin Oxley was a man with a singular ability to focus in life - and she did not doubt he was focusing just so, here - he was never one to work against the good tailoring of a stylishly cut dinner jacket.

She saw the way the backs of his fingers (never gladly idle) itched at the pad on his thumb.

"I have snuck away from the cigars just to be with you, to find you - that we might…be together!"

She looked at him and wondered for a moment if she ought to point out the distinct unpleasantness of finding oneself compared by one's love to a round of cigars. Even if, in the end, one did win out over the smoking. She let it pass, zeroing in on the heart of her irritation instead.

"How could you not have gone to my father before announcing us to everyone?"

She could not see the hurt that flooded her own face at this question.

"How could you wound his pride - his feeling of decency and appropriateness - so? I thought - I thought you and I had agreed to devise a stratagem to use when approaching him, how to handle your request. How to make him feel…included."

Her annoyance had caused her to over-speak, beyond the single first question. She did not like it when discourse got out of hand and what had, in her mind, seemed reasonable and succinct - and wholly justified - now sounded defensive and if not rambling, then long-winded.

Robin observed her as she spoke. His brow did not fully crease, but began to steeple in tension, sympathetic to her own.

He did not speak it, but she could read it in his face, his internal curiosity over the double standard she had represented to him since the day he had officially proposed upon returning from France and taking that knee at the Needle: that she was Lady Marion Nighten, a girl who did not in any way feel she needed her father's assent to her choice of a marriageable young man, and yet that she should so ardently pursue capturing it, with all the gusto and planning one might put in to a successful coup d'état. In very much a similar way insuring a smooth transition of power, keeping the country stable and economically viable. And the former leader - though blind-sided - passively content.

Then Robin smiled, more than a little pleased with himself. She could not understand why, but he seemed to feel he had captured the upper hand. "Why, I daresay he felt most included. One-hundred and ten percent a necessary cog in the process. The very spindle by which all others must be turned."

Her brow furrowed. She failed to see how springing such an announcement on her father as dinner concluded would make him feel at all involved in the making of it, for all that the announcement took place in his own home. Robin's grasp of situations was not usually so muddled.

"But without us holding that war council? Agreeing on a plan?" she railed, wondering why he could not understand her irritation in the matter.

She exhaled a scoff as she looked at him, perfect in his presentation, only that small dint in his bow knot to testify to his humanity, to prove he was not merely a walking, talking advertisement for Savile Row, or worse yet, his own newsprint photo from the society page. Charm and dash, position and rank, more than a little devil-may-care, and all the things that could get a gentleman of nobility so very far in life and yet leave him with so little substance to show for it.

"Had you any plan? Any thought behind your actions? Or merely that you wished the attention, the glory of standing up at a dinner and shocking them all within an inch of their very lives at your brazen disregard for their feelings?" She did not try to hold anything back. She feared a lifetime of such disagreements. "For my feelings?"

She did not know where that last question had come from.

Her feelings? This wasn't about her feelings. It was about Robin. Choosing to behave one-sidedly. Selfishly ignoring the gentlemanly decorum that was so important to her father - in favor of speed and flash.

Speed and flash: Robin Oxley's maxim, no doubt, hidden somewhere amongst the Huntingdon flora upon the family crest.

Abruptly, she saw Robin's face flow from growing confusion to understanding, like water that has been troubled but becalms instantly.

"My sweet Marion," he said, his shoulders visibly relaxing. His hands wanted to immediately reach for hers but for the moment thought better of it. "The axis about which my universe heretofore rotates. I did meet, most solemnly, yesterday afternoon with your esteemed father. In this very house. I have done nothing - behaved in no way - without his express consent." Mouth closed, his lower lips pushed into his upper, his lids lifting his eyebrows in a 'how will she take it' gesture.

"You-" she stalled out, still distracted over her own lips saying that Robin had hurt her feelings. "You were here, visiting with Father? I must have, I didn't know. I was-"

And here he grinned, enjoying the rare treat of calling her out. He glanced to the side of their standing confrontation and she could see him wishing to drop onto the nearby settee in a manner that would be a positive affront to both the fixture's pedigree and planned utility. But he did not.

"You were sleeping," he teased. "Or so I was informed upon my arrival. Assuming that 'not receiving visitors' at one in the afternoon means to your staff what it does to my fathers'."

"But you met with him alone-" she stammered, finding it hard to come down from her well-kindled frustration, "and without a plan-"

"Not at all," his response was smooth, like a seasoned trainer approaching a nervous filly. He knew what he was up against now. Knew just how to combat it. "I brought my second, a man revered in his own right."

"Bonchurch?" she asked, incredulous. "Who reveres Bonchurch?"

"'Twas the Earl, Marion. I brought the Earl to plead my case. To his closest friend."

She got lost for a moment, sidetracked in contemplating the unnamable frothiness that appeared in his eyes when he got the chance to counter an expectation as he just had.

"And did he?" she startled herself back into the moment. Back, she hoped, toward the well-earned righteous indignation she had been feeling toward him.

"Well, he was a bit hard on me when it came to character references - rightly so, I do not begrudge him it. But he kept the lion's-share of his reservations to himself. Bless him for that. Though he argued nothing quite so eloquently as your own mother." He went on, without pause. "The whole thing exhausted one as though we were at line-by-line-ing upon drafting a peace treaty."

"My mother?"

"Lady Nighten was a wonder," Robin shared in praise. "I daresay she could coax a rusted zipper back onto its tracks with nothing save the wax of her eloquence. I daresay I have never heard her speak so articulately upon any subject in my life."

Marion's mind snapped to suspicion. "What on earth did she say? Something about how they'd best accept you as they may never get another offer? About how pleased she was I'd settled on a future Earl?"

Robin suppressed a half-smile, listing out the main points of Lady Nighten's pitch. "She said that it would be a crime against Love, and against your own will to refuse to bless our marriage. And that Edward should be happy to know that you had made your choice, rather than him having to guess at mapping out your marital future for you. That no one had believed in her and your father's romance, and that it was their duty in their turn to believe always in other impractical couplings. And that he should be dead chuffed you'd snagged yourself a rich Duke. I mean an Earl. And that I should drink less and kiss you more."

"Did not." She did not realize that her own shoulders were relaxing at the sound of his voice and content of his speech. That she was no longer trying to recall to herself that it was her intent to turn and walk away.

"No," he agreed that he had fabricated the last part, "but I saw the end of my drinking days in her eyes, Marion - much as I see them in yours. And it is not an unhappy vision, I might report." He smiled. The end of his drinking days in her eyes. It was at once a line and yet not a line. With Marion, he had happily discovered he could speak such things and actually mean them. And yet, what would have left other girls already a-swoon, with Marion oft proved little more than opening ice-breakers she lived to shoot down.

"And so you met with my father, my mother, and your father-" she scoffed, "was Clem there, too?"

"Murder, no!" Robin reacted. "Clem? Helpful at trying to influence your father? A grim proposition, that. He cannot even get his pocket money increased. I doubt he shall have such champions on his side when it comes time for him to ask to marry - the lovely Lise Montrose or whomever else is to come…"

But Marion had managed to find her way back to being snappish. Recalling to her mind Lise Montrose at present planning her nuptials with her mother and Lady Lytton had helped the transition. "So you found you didn't need me. That you could manage this on your own. And so you did."

"Marion-" Robin almost laughed with the name, so deliberately she tried to misconstrue his actions, "you willfully misunderstand. I did this on my own FOR you, not without you."

And then, there was no longer any laughter. This was a serious thing to him, a thing of planning and intention. It was important that she see that. That Marion - that his fiancée - not walk away from him this night without understanding him. Believing him to be something in this instance that he was not. "To surprise you. To show you that I could be depended upon. That I could behave in a civil manner. That I could, if need be - if only for an hour or so - be the man your father wants to see his daughter marry. I did it for you." His eyes had begun to threaten to fill with water, so much did he want her to understand the difference between what she thought he had done, and what he had meant to be at doing.

"I love you, Marion," he said. "I want nothing more in life than your counsel and company at every turn. But this, I - I wished to do this for you. To prove myself not worthless, as you are so frequently encouraging me to do."

And there it was. And she could not deny it, even as it was couched in an almost boyish combination of tearful frustration that Robin be taken seriously. That he had found a task, however brief, however negligible, that he could manage - command, even, on his own. It had been but a few hours' occupation (at best) in which he had to employ his charm and manners in defense and promotion of himself. But he had done so, he had won over her father. He had chosen the right voices for the task, the Earl and her mother. He had not been trying to exclude her from this moment, or from moments in the future. He had been trying to show her something of what he could be. To prove that she might reliably depend upon him. That she was not making a giant mistake marrying a man who spent more hours behind a nightclub's table than behind a desk, who spoke of politics only in private (and only when she brought the subject up) and never in public, who - like much of his generation - had never been in charge of anything or completed a single important undertaking in life since leaving university.

"Kiss me," she said, seeing this, understanding this. Understanding him. "Now. Kiss me now."

"But downstairs, the Earl, he has a bracelet of my mother's - it's - meant now to be yours," he said, "and he - " he cast an eye backwards from whence he had come, as though able to see the Earl waiting to make the gift of it to Marion, his newly-engaged son watching on.

"Stop talking, oh," she told him, crossing the short distance between them, her hands reaching up for his closely-shaven cheeks like a child reaching out for promised sweets. "Must you always be thinking of decorum? Just…stop talking."

Marion had gone to her bedroom to further weigh the logistics of Geis' proposal; outside the Nightwatch windmill the closest place to a sanctuary she might have anywhere on the island.

She felt dull - as opposed to bright, cloudy with lack of polish. She felt of one fighting so hard to save part of herself, to keep part of Marion living within her. The Marion she had liked being. The Marion that had once, long ago, been loved. Been loveable.

And now, here, all that she was about to become, all lightness and possibility of joy to be subtracted from her. Deficit from the start. And she now doubted that she had ever had that much in her to begin with - not left on her own. She had needed another to draw it out of her, to open her up like a bottle of wine set out to breathe, as a bottle of champagne cannot bubble without a corkscrew's turn.

Certainly not a task of complementing her to which Geis Gisbonnhoffer was much suited. Or would ever prove much suited.

Her, married to Schutzstaffel.

War or no war - rather, war on or war ended - it would not change who Geis was, what he had chosen to stand for, to stand with. It seemed a stark inequality, that Geis might be allowed to embody who he was indefinitely, and yet she, Marion, felt remade by each new cruelty practiced upon these islands, every imposition upon her person, and that now, here she was, contemplating her own complicity in accepting the tainted mantle of Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer's wife; an unseverable connection. Linked to him 'til the end of life. Blessed by clergy, the bond real even if the wife who entered into it was, in many ways not. At least, was no longer. Real.

Which had brought her here, now arrived in a room with her father. The only conduit to wisdom she might find. But he was locked away today, absent from her, his mind a jumbled morass of truth aligned wrongly with time. He thought them on holiday, believed they had just arrived at Barnsdale from London, himself tired from the journey.

She continued to watch as he slept.

She knew what he would answer her.

She knew it like she knew her sums. The only question to ask in any situation. In every situation. It had gotten him through much in his Parliamentary career, even in his private life: "How can I do the most good?"

And there it was. The only possible answer. Rebelling against Gisbonnhoffer's desire to wed her would do no good at all, not for her personally. And it would benefit no one else, either. She would lose her home, her father (who would also lose his home). She would lose access to and ability to perform the Nightwatch.

Her refusal would come from a purely personal desire. In this place where personal desire brought one not among those in power nothing.

As Frau Gisbonnhoffer she could largely go on as she now did. She could find a way to continue the Nightwatch, she could stay in her home, her father could stay. They would be cared for. They would not go hungry. As Geis' family they would be protected. The food laid in at Barnsdale could go missing in small enough amounts, distributed among the nearby islanders. If caught out she could convince Guy that this was yet another English custom: a landed noble caring for his tenant neighbors. She could continue to build on what she had begun here.

She could take this, and do good with it.

One might - one must - find something of cheerful contentment in that.

Someday.

SOUTH AMERICA - Brasil - Salvador da Bahia - Hotel de Curacao - 1954 - When Eleri again slept, the hour of his own waking not fully past, Allen Dale slipped from her embrace and silently dressed. (Old-hat tasks in his life at which he was more than proficient. Slipping out and away from a girl's bed - and her arms - at all hours, dressing silently so as not to awaken drowsy, exhausted lovers.)

With the memory of long ago practice quickly returning to his limbs he lowered himself down from the upper floor balcony of his hotel room onto the darkness of the side alley below. He was seen by no one as he briskly left the Hotel de Curacao behind, able to locate just the right pools of darkness to obscure his journey out into the night.

He wore double clothing, two jumpers, two pair of trousers - for his work this night would likely prove a messy task, and his training recalled to him the potential necessity of shedding and casting-off layers quickly when needs must.

He could not have said how he knew that Gisbonnhoffer would also have been unable to sleep during the time of the Nightwatch, but in this belief Allen was not disappointed.

Taller than many of the Brazilian locals, Gisbonnhoffer was to be spotted easily enough among the raucous, all-night celebrations still carrying on (though with less energy, now) down in view of the Bay, not far from where Eleri had said his family traditionally took their rooms.

The moon was full enough to see by; lights and electric in scarce supply this close to the water. Clumps of people gathered, tall torches struck in the sand for light. From time to time a group would go a-marching, instruments to the front, crowd following in various stages of dance.

The noise, echoing off the Bay, could be heard at a great distance. Some present even had guns, shooting them off into the air (hopefully, into the air) in sporadic, explosive celebration.

As far as police presence, there was none to be seen, sensible locals having gone to bed long ago (peace officers having apparently joined them), their own revels concluded, no need to stretch them out further, squeeze at the dregs of joy any longer. Time for the celibate, sober Lenten-like days to come.

The sound of those left had become a wheezy sort of noise, the voices singing slurred but still raucous, loud by turns.

Carnaval was in its dying moments, but these celebrants would be here to make merry a little longer, until sunrise marked the true and final end.

Allen found another spot of shadow and observed. Gisbonnhoffer was among the revelers, yes, but though he maneuvered around and amongst them, he was like a sleepwalker: present, but absent. He spoke to, engaged with, none of them. They must have realized earlier that to invite him to do so was futile. None of them reached out toward him, either. Certainly he was not taking part in their celebration. It seemed more that he and they merely occupied the same geographical space. Then again, there were plenty of stoned-to-silence drunks among their jolly numbers, and they may well have simply taken him for another.

Allen waited for another song to strike up (his patience surprising even himself), for the press of bodies to come to a fuller boil of motion and dance and fever and the tangle of outrageous attire.

When Gisbonnhoffer walked into a swell of this, Allen found his moment. Knowing better than the trapped-in-the-chaos ex-German how to navigate slickly in and out of the press of a crowd, he sidled up to the back of the former Lieutenant and discharged his gun into Geis' back twice. Once to the liver and once to the lung, close enough to the heart to shortly matter, the shot to the liver (as he had been trained, as he had learned oh-so-well) just-so to sever the necessary artery.

There was no reaction among the crowd to the muffled gunfire. The drums and horns thudded and sang on in bright, brass joy. In celebration.

In the moment before Gisbonnhoffer could drop to his knees, Allen leaned toward his enemy's ear, and without showing the man he had just killed his face, hissed, his spotty-since-the-war German coming back to him in a burst of fluency: "'Twas Anya Grigorovna who stole the flier from you. Who bested you." He wasted no time on assigning Gisbonnhoffer German slurs, the saying of which would only lengthen his speech. "In her name I revenge her upon you. Know this as your punishment: where you're going you'll never see Marion again. You'll not live long enough to speak her name."

For several beats the music and the crowd dancing to it bore Gisbonnhoffer forward, keeping him upright and unable to fall. Allen hung back, expertly slithering his way out of the tangle of people, only pausing to glance back once he was in the safety of the shadow cast by a beach shack.

The impromptu parade of Carnaval celebrants marched on. Two or three men who had overindulged to the point of unconsciousness lay strewn in their wake. And one man — not at all dressed for such festivities - looking very little of the other revelers - had fallen, glassy-eyed and lifeless, blood draining from his lips onto the sand; friendless, alone, his mouth empty, even, of a last word; blessing, or curse.

Allen Dale found his way back up to his rooms' balcony at the Hotel de Curacao nearly as easily as he had found his way down from it, his injured-but-healing foot (though far from comfortable) giving him trouble only here and there, but seeing a light now on within that room he paused, his back against the building's wall, the curtain shielding him from what, or rather whom, was beyond. Other than from the natural exertion to be expected from scaling the wall to this height, his heart did not race. His hands did not shake.

He noticed this, inspected his right hand and trigger finger there in the dark, for a moment closed his eyes and breathed in as he held them in his left hand. And began to observe the woman walking about the room beyond the veil-like, thinly translucent curtain.

...TBC...
in Part Two of Chapter 23 "How Do You Say to a Girl"...