Palestine – 1956 – Robin Oxley's Rooms – Allen Dale had returned with Eleri to find and tell the others among the unit: Marion was found, contact made, and Ox now with her. All others involved could stand down.
Nearly as much backslapping ensued as did concerned questions about anything and everything Allen had managed to observe during the reunion.
But in truth, he had very few answers of any specificity to offer. In place of his ability to respond to questions about Marion's state-of-mind, Robin and her plans going forward, when they might make an appearance publicly, whether the children traveling with her were hers, Eleri attempted to share, at length, what she believed she had emotionally apprehended during her span at his side.
It may well have all been rubbish, faultily deduced, but Allen watched the whole of the group eat it up like a child to sweets.
And in Eleri, Allen discovered he had found someone who could actually (and possibly even pleased-ly?) match every fret Mitch muttered with a breathless, happy reply. To Mitch's manic worry, her manic, romantic optimism.
Said Mitch; Marion was no doubt planning to depart later this evening, to head back from whence she had come, and strand Robin once again.
Said Eleri; oh no, my Lord Bonchurch. Marion was clearly too transported, too peacefully enveloped in the Earl's overwhelming affection for her to ever consider such a thing. Had you but been present to see it for yourself, you would not doubt me on this point.
Allen felt his eyes seek out those of Eva Bonchurch, so they two might share the camaraderie of a raised eyebrow at this entertaining new dynamic sprung up between their spouses.
Everything felt like a holiday, a true holiday. None knew where Robin and Marion had got off to, but it did not matter. Much like the days of the war, the absence of Robin and Marion did nothing to dampen the unit. So long as they two were together, in concert with one another, there was naught to be regretted. Naught of which to fret. And early afternoon tea—a high tea, even—was ordered with every possible tidbit and savory listed by the restaurant's maître d'. It would take the group some time to make their way through them all.
A veritable wedding supper, Allen thought to himself. They would no doubt all grow fat with their celebrating.
He leaned toward his also seated wife, and gave Eleri a cheek kiss she was not expecting, whispering to her that he would be back in a tick.
In response, she turned and beamed at him. She did not have to explain: today? Following the events of today no one was bothering anymore to look askance at her. (Which was not to say they wouldn't do so again at some future date, would never again do so, only that for today that unpleasantness had been shed) and Eleri clearly was basking in it.
Allen walked off as though toward the restaurant's lav, but instead took the lift up to the floor that held Ox's room, and without any complication had the lock picked in a trice, with naught but a paper clip he had a habit of carrying in his trousers among his change.
He had pulled out Robin's traveling bag from within the room's slender cupboard, set it upon the bed and opened it when his ear caught the hinges on the door too late to properly react.
He saw the muzzle of the pistol before his eyes noted who held it.
If his breath caught, he was professional (if semi-retired) enough to masked the sound of it.
Within an instant, the pistol's aim sagged by a full quarter inch.
"What are you doing in here?" Marion asked, from her position holding the gun.
She had literally caught him with his hands in Robin's bag. Again, his professionalism kept him from using stalling words to give himself time to regroup after the surprise of her entrance.
"Countess—" he said, using her rarely-referenced proper title. He paused before going on. Though he was not wearing his spectacles, across this short distance he was able to nonetheless get a good look at her.
She was trim and healthy, her features hard as she looked at him, but not so aged as to be troubling. The scent she wore suggested to him money and privilege. Class. And though he had not marked it specifically earlier during her reunion with Robin, her familiar-to-Allen self-possession when faced with him, with Kommandant's driver, and Ox's man, showed in her person.
"It's not what it looks like," he offered her no more in-depth an explanation. "Where's Robin got to?" he asked, his forehead piquing into a frown.
"He sent me up," she told him, "He's downstairs, arranging something with the desk."
"Right, right. Good," Allen agreed. "Didn't think to see the two of you here anytime soon."
"Clearly," she agreed, her pistol not replaced into her handbag, but no longer ruthlessly aimed toward him, either.
"Right," he said, seeing no reason to bluff any longer, she was obviously not about to leave him alone to finish his task.
He withdrew his hands from the bag, and the jewel case with them, that case he had trafficked across the Atlantic earlier in the week.
"Your grandmum's necklace," he said, snapping the case open to reveal it to her among the velvet lining. It was an impressive piece of highly yellow gold and elaborately carved coral. To re-acquire it had cost him well more than a pretty penny.
"And why do you have it?" her head shook a light no, I don't understand this, as her shoulders gave a shallow shrug.
"I don't—that is, Ox tasked me with tracking down who had bought it, and getting it back."
"That cannot have been easy—nor inexpensive. I recall what was paid for it. You did pay for it? Tell me you compensated the buyer for it-"
He didn't bother to decry her expectation that he had pinched it. Thought he could have, easily enough. Pinched it. Without a trace. "There's nothing he won't do for you, Marion," he strove to assure her, not mentioning that it was his personal checkbook that had covered the costs of this particular article, nor that several other similar deals to recover her liquidated jewelry heirlooms were still in the works.
She craned her neck (imperceptibly, but he was keenly focused on her enough to mark it) to better see the necklace. She had never thought to lay eyes on it again, its large, intricate center medallion carving a gift from Sir Edward's father to his mother in the first years of Victoria's reign.
"I's just putting it here, in Robin's bag—not sure of when I'd see him again."
Her brow pinched at this. "Why would that be?"
He shrugged, "gang's only here through the end of the week," he told her. "We're all of us everywhere about, now."
She gave a slow nod. It had not occurred to her, that Robin's unit might now be far-flung, not all bedded down together like a near-family as they once had done at La Salle's.
"You look—fit—" he said, the realization that he was overstepping himself coming directly in the wake of him having spoken.
"And you look," she told him, unimpressed at his clumsy, barely socially acceptable attempt to praise her, "recognizable."
"Naw, I mean it," he said. "Last we saw—chap in Kentucky gave Robin a sketch of you in your camp—" he reached for it still folded in his shirt pocket, and held it out toward her, not bothering to explain Robin held the original, and Eleri had copied this one.
She did not take it from him, but glanced toward it, something of trouble descending upon her face at seeing it. Her eyes fluttered.
"Goodness," she said, all breath and no (as usual toward him) bite.
"You've filled back out, though, haven't you?" he asked in what was meant to be a reassuring rhetorical question, but which instead came out as awkwardly as his earlier comment about her appearance.
"Why do you carry that?" she asked, clearly as suspicious about him traveling with a sketch of her as she was at him trying to leave the jewel case here—not leave with it.
"We've been lookin', you know. Carried it 'round to some villages just beyond the city, in case you'd taken rooms there. Tryna sort you."
"For Robin," she said, her eyes leaning toward skepticism.
"Yeah, for Robin!" he declared, just short of throwing his hands up in a 'not me' gesture.
After a moment's silence, she nodded her assent.
"I suppose I should thank you for Grandmama's necklace," she said. "As well as apologize."
"Apologize?" he replied without thought. "Wot?"
"Tyre iron," she said, pointing out the general spot on his nod in the air between them. "Just there."
His hand shot back to the place of impact. "Oh," he said, sounding of agreeing.
"And the fact I left you to it," she replaced her pistol in her handbag, "knowing that when Robin discovered I hadn't gone with Stoker's sub he would have taken you apart tooth-by-tooth. Of course," she continued, deliberately meeting his eyes, "I hadn't known the rest. It was you who came to Alderney, wasn't it," she placed no true question mark at the end of her sentence.
"Yeah," he said, his eyes abruptly hoping to fall upon a carafe of water, a tray of liquor—something in this room to wet his throat.
"And so it was you who saw—" she elided, or possibly just stumbled, over the sights Alderney had held that morning, "what there was to be seen, who returned to tell him—"
Allen gave a hard squint, and neither agreed nor disagreed to her thinking him the crucial witness in the matter, not knowing, so far into their conversation, how to introduce Eleri into it.
"'Twas I who told him," he said, a sick feeling like his stomach dropping out even at the mention of the event.
"And he didn't believe you," she knew well enough to intuit.
"No," he agreed, his voice so low as to be almost beyond the threshold of sound.
"And it was you who found out your report was wrong? That you had been made to believe a lie?"
"Yeah. That were me, too."
"And this you did not tell him?" her voice was soft, itself, not accusing.
"I had my reasons—I—"
She stopped him with a raised hand, "he has told me them."
"He's dead," Allen said, not at all referencing Robin.
Her eyes made it clear she had no doubt of whom he spoke. "That you, too?"
"Aye."
"Thank you," she said, and it set him a bit aback; she would thank him for taking Gisbonnhoffer's life? But as she went on, it became clear she was speaking now on a different tack.
"Thank you for the time," she said, and her voice for a brief moment threatened to sound full, and complicated by emotion. "I needed it. I wasn't—I—I don't think I could have done this yet, then." But her voice recovered quickly. "I daresay I don't know how I shall embark upon it now. We are to dine at eight with your unit," her hands parted in a gesture of futility. "How shall I do that, Dale Allen?" she fell back to his inverted alias used on the islands. "How shall I appear out of thin air to a group of friends who have been searching for me—carrying an image of me with them at all times—trying to track me—for years? Do I stand before dinner and give a brief lecture on where I've been and how? Must I field questions about it all night? Repeat the important bits one-on-one to each present? How do I bloody well do that? Socialize with Robin's dearest companions?"
If Allen's mouth gaped at this unexpected flood of conversation, it did not do so for longer than a pulse beat. Something in her plea for his wisdom knocked the spanner out of his usually dependable, lightning quick wit, letting its greased gears once again turn, and he left their awkward, earlier patter behind.
"Then, don't," he said, as matter-of-factly as anyone might. "You're not wrong, that's a complicated arrival and meeting to be damn sure. If that's how it makes you feel, don't do it."
"It's what Robin wants," she told him, one shoulder arching higher than the other. "Certainly, I am not the one at the front desk even now arranging it."
"Nah, be fair," he advised her. "Robin is out of his head at having found you. He'd order a parade down the High Street with you as Grand Marshal if he thought he could manage it. He'll not fret if you send him to dinner alone. He'll not fret if you go, but let it be known you're not ready to chat or be chatted up about where you've been. He'll not fret so long as he knows that you're with him. And as for when, or if, you talk about everything to the rest of us? It's like that there necklace, ain't it?" he threw out his hand to illustrate her Grandmum's coral, "Maybe you'll wear it again, someday. Maybe the memories it brings mean you won't. But it's summat you can choose to put on or take off—at your will, Marion," he didn't even stutter when he used her name.
"After the past—" he stalled out on referencing it more specifically, "you ought at least give yourself the right to choose what you want. And have things that way," his eyebrows raised as he awaited her response.
When she did not offer a reply, he went on. "You know, take off with Robin—back to wherever you're staying—forget about us. I've told them all he found you. That's what matters to us. The rest is just…" and he dropped an old Guernsey proverb best translated as 'icing on the cake'.
He got her to chuckle at his terrible, slurring pronunciation.
"You know, Marion," he said to her, tilting his head to the side, and seeing if he had any more luck yet on his side, "first impressions can be bloody awful, 'specially when they begin with…"
"A kidnapping?" he could tell she relished something about bringing that night up again. Listing it against his ledger column.
"An' end with…" he wondered if she'd say it and finish his sentence.
"A blow to the head…"
This time as the exterior door knob turned and the hinges swung open, both were attuned enough to pivot toward the sound.
As Robin entered the room, his face looked close to breaking, so broad was the smile upon sighting his wife among the people and things there awaiting him.
...tbc...