Haifa, Israel – 1956 – Some might have been surprised to find a Mediterranean resort town positioned directly upon the sea, built in tiers up the side of Israel's Mount Carmel. Streets and buildings were modern, wide, paved for easy travel, and the pulse of the city's inhabitants seemed to more than mirror this forward-looking attitude. No one could accuse Haifa, and those working at expanding it, as living in the past. Post-war it was growing by leaps and bounds, new people arriving every day, new construction, new ideas, new vision.
There were sandy beaches to accompany the warm weather. Sunglasses, here, proved more an essential item than a mere fashion choice. On the hottest days, men wore short-sleeved shirts to their jobs, dress pants hemmed up to the knee.
Immigration was robust among Arabs, Jews, and Christians, with Jews presently in the majority. The British had relinquished their command of the area nearly a decade ago. The New Haifa Symphony Orchestra, though in its infancy, illustrated the sincerity of the recent and persistent call for authors and poets—creative and artistic spirits-to make this spot their particular cultural home, despite its being also known as an industrial city and shipping port.
The sheer number of new arrivals, ever-changing faces in its crowds, made fitting in-or going unnoticed-effortless.
Following a little less than a week of reunions and introductions among the expanded gang, and Freyga Tuckman, Robin and Marion had retreated to the North, to Haifa, and the snug two-story within view of the water she had been sharing with the children.
"How is Seth?" Marion had asked Robin, the only person from her past life she directly requested information on.
"My nephew is a fine young man, now," Robin told her, with no small amount of pride, seeing the surprise in her eyes that he would name him as such. "He has been away, serving in Her Majesty's forces, but returned home, unscathed. You may ask Eva all you wish to know," he had assured her before they had rallied with the others before they departed Jerusalem. "She has come with Mitch."
This was news to Marion. "Eva and Mitch? That cannot have pleased his family—nor his associates." Her brow wore a check of concern.
Robin waved her worry away. "I think you will find his happiness, however gotten, pleases all his associates that can possibly matter to him."
"And he is come here, still and always your second?"
Robin nodded. "And John, and Wills. Allen has come, also, with his wife?"
Here Marion made no sign of even trying to hold back a scoffing snort. "Allen Dale a husband? I should not wish such a one as him on any woman living."
Robin was enjoying himself, perhaps just a little too much at her declaration. "Then you shall be pleased to know 'tis Eleri Vaiser to whom the dubious honor fell."
Several long minutes of Marion disbelieving he was speaking truth-and not merely teasing her-followed.
The reunited Oxleys' was not by any means a worry-free transition, the journey overland back to Haifa proving but the start. Nonetheless, the children were accustomed to change, Marion having moved them frequently for both safety and anonymity in their earlier years together, their sojourn here in Haifa nearing three years in length. That they were all still together had proven much more important than their immediate surroundings.
"You see," Marion had explained to Robin (as so very much yet had to be explained to and shared with one another), "once liberation happened, the older children had had no schooling, no lessons other than what those of us in the camp had time or good health to teach. Anneke, I taught myself, but I began to think we would do better finding a school, and a place they could think of as 'home'. But that came later. Early on I moved us out of fear of being found out—I was never satisfied they would not be sought out again—and myself as well," she laid her hand upon her arm's tattoo. "I was convinced we had to escape Germany—and possibly even the Continent-entirely."
Such action was not hard to understand, Robin agreed. When one is hunted-has been hunted-one hides. Following betrayal, one turns inward, not out. The days and months following V-E Day were not so stable as to inspire limitless confidence among those who had been so devastatingly targeted.
"We came here," she went on, "and I liked it. They liked it. The schools would teach them Hebrew, learn them something of their heritage. But I do still worry, Robin. I still fear terrible things: so many Jews living together. Will another slaughter begin? Everyone coming together here, in this part of the world—will it make finding them easier? Are the children not safer as far from here as possible? Not safer were they in the center of America, raised on a corn farm, where no one knows their past? Their birthright?" she asked, finally having another mind with which to share such concerns. "But I knew these things I could not give them. I knew I did not wish for them to become adults without access to their inheritance. An inheritance the Germans wished to obliterate. So, I have, largely, swallowed my fear and come here, bought this house, worked to settle in to life as everyday people. Monies from my jewelry I invested have bought us something of security where coin is concerned," she gave a light shrug. "Several people in government here employ Magda Blenheim for her translation skills from time to time. I have considered offering private language lessons to others, though it would feel very public to do so, very—giving something away about myself, and I fear it." He could almost feel the tremor she held back at the mention of what, if taken on, would be a rather public enterprise.
It was information like this, stories and motivations, that Robin craved. There was none among the war-assembled family he did not pester for it. The three boys, Ari, Ben, and Luka, were somewhat less interested in giving it, their time being filled with their studies, wrestling one another, expecting Robin (as Jack) to tell stories of his thrilling escapades, and various chores Marion expected of them.
Ari, particularly, remained highly skeptical of Robin's presence still among them. Marion assured Robin (a bit off-balance at not finding himself universally adored) that such behavior was unsurprising in a sixteen-year-old, particularly one whose childhood had been defined by the sadistic treatment of the women in his life at the hands of male camp guards.
Anneke proved to be Robin's best source, only just behind Marion.
"We were not social, you know," Anneke had said to him, her regret at this evident in her tone, "when we first came here. We hardly went out, we saw no one. Of course, we have no family to visit, to introduce us to others socially. And one day Mutter," she used her name for Marion, "said that even though we keep our own house, and quite well, thank you, we should have someone in. And that is how we found Trischka. She knows everyone. She taught Mutter to be a much better cook!" Here, she laughed.
Robin noted that was clearly a story to be asked about another time.
"So, it was not that we needed a housekeeper. We needed a friend. And she has been that to us."
"Trischka understood the children," Marion told him over afternoon tea when he brought the domestic up in conversation, the children absent.
He had placed his newspaper down as Marion poured for them, her own papers, of which she was translating, also set aside. The afternoon was sharp with color and light, the sea visible through the sitting room's near windows, the heat of midday dissipating.
Earlier in the day he had called in at the British Consulate, without Marion-their first true separation-to check in on any communication or business there that might need to be of concern to him.
When he arrived back at the house, he found Marion sitting alone, doing exactly nothing, other than staring at the door he entered through.
Her face drawn and colorless, she looked very much like someone sitting vigil with a corpse.
He did not have the courage to tell her that as much as she clearly had feared he would not return, so had he worried that when he arrived back, she might have gone, leaving him to enter an empty house, devoid of those he had come to care for so much in such a little time, abandoning him to despair again.
She had witnessed him arriving back, and their eyes had, perhaps, told each other exactly what qualms, what doubts needed banished between them, but they had not spoken. She had risen from the chair and gone to make tea, he had walked his hat to the hook where it stayed when he was indoors.
And now they were at tea, speaking of when the family had first met Trischka.
"Ben became frightened in the market one day." Marion chilled to recall the incident. Eleven-year-old Ben, recognizing a face in the crowd. A fellow prisoner. Yet, for him it was not a happy moment, but a fearsome one. He had frozen, unable to move forward or back, his boy's mind overloading his emotions, his instincts. Before she could get back to him from where she was a few steps ahead with her market basket, he had turned and begun running, trying in his fright to find somewhere to hide; behavior that would have saved his life in Schleswig-Holstein, but which here only confounded vendors in the market, a growing boy trying to conceal himself among their produce crates. "Trischka saw, and knew how to be a help," she told Robin, her tone pleased. "She, too, survived the camps. There are many like us, here. Liberated, but with difficult pasts. I hired her that day." She took a drink of tea. "She will not press your slacks to your liking, though, I do not doubt," she warned Robin as she soundlessly replaced cup in saucer. "She's no valet. But she can mend a ripped knee in the boys' trousers, and that has proven far more valuable to us, I daresay."
Six weeks had passed since Freyga Tuckman's Recognition Ceremony. Marion fretted that without her and Robin being able to produce a copy of La Salle's marriage ledger they were corrupting the children's minds—and possibly that of her neighbors-by sharing her house.
"Poppycock," he said, holding in a chuckle at how much he sounded of his father. He planted a kiss atop her head. "Returning from the dead is commonplace, anymore. The unit and I broke the tape first, naturally, ahead of the curve, but in this present world it is hardly a great scandal anymore when a thought-lost spouse turns up on one's doorstep. We have explained to the children," he attempted to persuade her. "They are bright children. And what of the legality?" He was having fun, now. "We remarry here and I am a bigamist, married to Magda Blenheim AND the Lady Marion Nighten. Or, it is complicated by the fact of our various deaths. And certainly, that would not go over. No, I say: things are things. We are wed. If the children need proof I shall go have John hunt it up for them in LaSalle's garden, and bid Clem to send me a copy of your last passport to establish your identity. But I daresay that seems a far step to go just to convince children who have not even whispered the first syllables of doubt as to who I am and what we are to each other."
She did not take the bait at his mentioning Clem. "Ari is skeptical of you," she reminded him.
"Yes," Robin agreed, though no longer with any great concern, "And Anneke would not care if we were wed or no." He took a deep breath. "She probably takes that after me," he said, a twinkle in his eye whenever he teased about the children sharing his physical lineage.
Marion had not yet reached the point where she felt settled enough to join in this particular silliness.
Trischka had taken to Robin as most women did: instantly and completely. He was the apple of her grandmother eye. Only her own gone-before husband eclipsed him in her mind.
Robin found that Trischka proved also a good source for stories from the last three years or so, and he lost no time in requiring them all from her, no matter the inconvenience of her expected duties.
And often as not having Marion give them both an exasperated dressing-down when the day's laundry was not yet hung upon the line, yet his notebook brim-full.
During the days, the boys went to school, Anneke to a job in a local shop, while she decided whether she might go on to a training school for some more specific occupation. Marion and Robin were left alone inside the ocean-front two-story.
When the weather was right for it, he and Marion walked the beach. They read, or rather, Marion attempted to read while Robin paid no attention at all to his chosen novel and instead stole long, studious glances at her.
And sometime, several weeks in, they found their way back to bed. And they loved.
Marion, who had never given herself space to imagine she might be physically treasured again; Robin, whose once-broken body had returned to health, but who had turned his back on physical intimacy in a Marion-less world.
They found such times to themselves just after luncheon, Anneke still gone, the children not yet expected home. It was a practical solution, as on any given night any one of the children might show up with a nightmare, or simply a need to be near Marion—Ben's night terrors still an un-shaken remnant of his unnatural childhood.
This afternoons-to-themselves proved a blessed solution, to have a brief nap after, but to reawake and continue with their day still feeling the arms, the tenderness of the other ever about them. Always careful to lock the bedroom door, though they were alone.
Yet it was not always Ben who had terrors.
Marion felt herself, as though she tossed and turned, unable to free her limbs. Something was holding her back, something terrible. What chased her in the dream was unformed, black with darkness, and mute.
Deaf to her cries.
She screamed for Robin until her throat bled. But Robin was dead, stupid girl, she said to herself. Robin Oxley is dead and you cannot have him.
Luka! she cried, as the baby Luka fell from her hands, swallowed up into the obscurity of the mute thing hunting her.
She began to thrash harder. And yet she was being held, prevented from fighting.
She came to herself, waking in the bedroom of her house in Haifa. The curtains showed the light outdoors, just after midday. She panted. Her mind tried to center and locate her: Luka was not an infant. Though small for his age, appearing only seven or eight, he was a strong-enough bespectacled ten-year-old. He had not been swallowed into the darkness. She had not let him be.
And Robin. She would have cringed had she not still been somewhat in the grip of her dream's fear. Robin was holding her. It had been the very embrace of the man she called for that she fought against.
The fight sprung in her muscles went out of her.
"Shhhhhh," Robin soothed. "It is 1956, the war is over. You are safe, the children at school. Sweet Anneke will be home within the hour."
"You are here," she added, before he could.
She recalled to mind his bi-weekly trip earlier in the day to ring his steward. Some business to which he had to attend.
"Will you have to leave?" she asked—they never spoke specifically of the immediate future. The question felt awkward to voice, made ungainly by her unshakeable apprehension. "Is there some duty you must go away to perform? Some job the government will require of you?"
"No," he said, easily and without equivocation. "I am done with leaving." He planted a kiss on her bare shoulder.
She gave no reply, his answer enough.
"You once said," he spoke after several minutes' silence, "That life isn't always about being happy. That it's about doing the right thing. And so, you are in luck, my darling. You have spent your life doing 'right things'. And now I shall spend the rest of mine seeing to your reward: making you happy. It shall be my only employment. And that, Mrs. Oxley, Countess Huntingdon, is the right thing."
She turned her face toward him. "So, you need never go away?"
"Never," he said with a squeeze and a stroke of his knuckles lightly down her bared back. "When you are ready, come home with me."
This she had not expected, and her brow knit together. "You wish to return to England? To Kirk Leaves?" Surely, she thought, surely, he would not expect her to return to London.
"Well," he began, and his voice was so conversational, so charming, she felt his request could be nothing more, certainly not a ruse. "I must confess there is something there that might be of moderate interest to you, so perhaps an English country holiday is in order for us...and our brood."
His hand had come up to the side of her face, and she brought her hand up to lay atop his, her sapphire ring threatening to tangle in her hair. She allowed the mere pressure of his touch to turn her whole body back toward him. How precious his face was to her, its hills and valleys—the lines his smiles drew upon his skin. That he was no longer the young man she had once left in England mattered to her not at all. She could not even see that he was a man of some age, now. That same flicker of life within him, the way he looked at her and how she felt she was seen in his eyes—banished all else in such moments.
She found a very unexpected smile pulling at her lips. "It is true I was always so very fond of Kirk Leaves," she said. "It is enough into the countryside—surely none would bother us- I think I would like to see it again...if you truly do wish to invite us."
"Invite you?" his words were a laugh, as though she'd attempted a tickle rather than a spoken response. "There is no such formality needed! What is mine is yours, as I recall as clearly as if it passed just an hour ago: 'with all my worldly possessions do I thee endow'. Which means that he," he stopped a moment to lend the pronoun even more significance, "is also yours."
"He?" What was Robin up to? Was he speaking of Seth? Of some other person of whom she did not know?
He did not even attempt to tamp down the smug tone of his reply; "Crusader's Arrow."
The look on her face grew nearly as transforming as the one the moment her eyes had first found his that day six weeks hence.
"Beau's..." she began, before running out of words.
Robin's tongue played with the corner of his lower lip, just before he bit onto it, making her wait for her reply. "Crusader's Arrow, out of Lardner's Ring, by Saracen's Beau."
The question leapt out of her like an unexpected gush of breeze. "How old?"
"Hmmmm. Not quite three."
He knew she was about to bombard him with inquiries. To shield himself, he threw up both his arms, though clumsily, as they were wrapped about her in the bed. His hands the only free bits he could motion with. "He looks of his father, with the speed of his dam. Ask me no more on his specifics, for you know I've no head for such things. You shall have to see him for yourself."
She could hardly believe what he was telling her. "I have not sat a horse in more years than I can count."
He let an eyebrow flick up. "I have heard absence from such an activity does little to dull one's former proficiency." He gave her a look. A familiar look.
She looked back at him.
"What?" he pretended innocence.
"You are thinking, 'as in other things, as well'."
"And if I am?"
"It's rather lewd." Said the woman, she narrated for herself, lying nude in her bed less than an hour before tea.
"But a compliment, nevertheless," he made as though to nibble on her shoulder. "A very decided compliment."
"You." She scolded him, "Have spent too much time around your man, Dale. I suppose you see the children as the makings of some new gang of yours?"
He gave a shrug and a grin. "Don't you think they—and their Mutter—would make a cracking one?"
She meant to smile in response, and she nearly did, before something inside her took a step back. And in her voice Robin heard something of a small girl, in the way that fear can boil us all down into children. Worried, uncertain, needing protection.
"Can we wait—wait to travel until the school holidays? I should like to see your Crusader's Arrow straightaway, but it feels like—it feels like I need just a little more time." With you, she thought. A little more time like this, just us—with you.
He began to kiss her again, a peck here, a caress, there. "No one need know you for yourself, if that is what you prefer. We may travel fairly incognito. We need not entertain. A week at Kirk Leaves, perhaps two. We needn't settle in to nesting there, if you'd rather not. The staff will not likely recognize you. None remain from the years before the war." He worked to assure her.
"So you say," she replied after considering his proposal, maturity returning to her voice, "but in my time away from England so much cannot have changed that staff no longer spy upon and gossip about their employers."
"And what will they say?" he asked. "Other than the Earl has brought home a beautiful woman and her four children, and is shockingly sharing his entire wing of rooms with her—and is blindingly, unprecedentedly happy? If you wish to give them a true shock, I shall order the cottage folly readied for our sojourn. We'll keep Arrow nearby in paddock. You can visit him every morning without having, even, to dress."
She felt his teeth smiling, his lips less able to kiss her skin simultaneously.
"And if you will agree to ride him—in a state of undress—?"
"Ari would make an excellent horseman," she announced, ignoring his flirt, her mind racing ahead at rather different possibilities. "I've often thought. He has just the right command for it."
Robin knew better than to disagree with Marion when it came to horseflesh. "He would need a good teacher. Is he not rather old to begin such lessons?"
She grabbed his arms, gave them a squeeze. "What a joy it would be to teach him. To teach them all."
"You have the time, Darling," Robin assured her. "I can have the steward find the right mounts for all of them, you need only tell me what he ought look for. Or, you may wish to shop for them yourself…And as for you, you've got yours. I am told 'twas Josie Otto who broke him to saddle; that like his father, he was intolerant of a man's hand on him."
Unable to help herself, Marion began to pepper him with further questions about Crusader's Arrow. Robin waved them all off until she fell silent.
Marion glanced at their surroundings, the calm quiet, the empty house, this space she had made for herself and the children, the safety (thus far) they had found here. How as complex and tenuous as her and the children's happiness were, here they had been able to see happiness root and grow, like orchids in a greenhouse. Disturbing that balance was not a thing to take lightly.
"We will wait, though," she added. "We will not go yet. Not, just yet." She grabbed him tighter.
"Marion, are you—" Robin turned her so that she fully faced him, "choosing me over a horse? And not, even, just 'any horse'?" As he threw her long ago assertions back at her he could not have sounded more pleased with himself. "Let the record show—" he pretended to announce.
"Yes, yes!" she agreed without shame. "I choose you, Robin—over the horse. I choose you," and attempted to smother him in kisses.
He offered no feasible defense against her onslaught. Nor wished to.
But it was not overly long before she paused in her attack. "You will, though, won't you," she asked, "have your steward send photos? Several, perhaps, several good ones?"
He groaned, and thrust his head deliberately back upon his pillow, but without true bitterness. "I shall engage a professional portraitist if you will only go back to what you were doing, woman."
"Happily," she said, truly meaning it. "Quite, extraordinarily happily."
...tbc...
A/N: Should you like to see some art for the Don't Series, check out hashtag #the don't series on tumblr. I just posted an art commission that was a portrait of Marion. I'm there as nettlestonenell.