The air of the sitting room/foyer seemed permeated with the fallout of the lack of a prince in the story. Save the bedrooms, though, there was no place else to be, and as she did not wish to encounter Connor in close proximity to another bed, Bronte returned to sit out the time before dark. Long moments passed in silence.
"Bronte," he said, finally, trying to make conversation. "Sounds a bit like 'Brunty,' a good Irish name."
"It's Greek," she said, succinctly, "it means thunder."
"So you're Greek, then?"
"It's my husband's name," she said, flatly.
His head jerked just an inch or so, as though someone had dropped a pin into a crystal glass and he could only just hear the tinkling. "And what does he think of all this?"
"He's dead," she said. She'd said it a thousand times, easily, since her arrival on the Continent, since her first conversation away from home. But somehow, saying it to Connor was different.
She thought about offering him her standard widow cover story, about how Jack had taken a chill and been carried off--after all, that's how Germans believed Brits died, right? From gout and chills, and maybe cholera. Something that rendered their perceived impotence more so, something weak and pitiable. Something about which the Germans, who thought themselves as a nation robust--and superior--could gloat. Sons of Britain didn't die valiantly fighting for all they were worth, launching themselves, along with brother RAF pilots, into the German-dominated night sky to stop the Blitz--win the war. No, Deutschland, she thought, they were all milksops. Down to the last man.
But not Jack--not her Jack, the real Jack. No, not Jack. But she didn't tell Connor either story; not the lie nor the truth. They had promised no lies, and the truth--for all that she felt the familiar compulsion to share it--did no favors to those in their line of work. Instead, "I am alone," she said, "with my child."
"But how can you have her a part of this?" Connor asked, as any sane person might--as anyone who knew even a quarter of the way the Nazi world worked--might.
"How can I have her away from her mother? Her only parent?" she asked, his question as absurd to her as British mothers who shipped their children by the trainload off to Scotland, as though the English countryside could never be invaded, as though it were impervious to future atrocity. "I cannot protect her if she is not with me," Bronte said. "Nothing about the world can now be guaranteed, no safety assured--anywhere."
"But to have her growing up around this--around--what you do--" he was getting dangerously close to being thrown out of her suite, and nightfall not yet arrived.
"What I do," she said, "is none of your business." She knew he wanted an explanation, wanted her to tell him everything, to expose herself in a more intimate way than she already had. But she would not do it.
She had realized, even before the Witchblade had entered her life, that as a snapshot the life of Elizabeth Bronte would make no sense, would seem to be filled with lies and bad decisions and improper loyalties. She knew this, but she lived for the larger picture, the mosaic; which up-close seemed shattered, fragmented and incomprehensible, but which, from a great distance, coalesced into something decipherable to the human eye. She did not yet know the amount of distance that would someday be necessary in order to correctly view her actions and choices in the spirit and under the pressures in which they had been made.
She had given up her life what seemed so long ago now, just as Mabel was a little baby, so that her child would have a New York City, a Paris, a London. So that her child would have a good world in which to live. The lengths to which she would have to go to accomplish this had not been apparent to her at the time. She knew more now, of the things she would be made to abandon, the dark places to which she would be required to journey. She would've liked to think she knew all such places, but the Witchblade would often teach her it was not so.
She was not used to defending her life: she could number on only three fingers those who knew the truth of it. And their concern was less for herself--or for Mabel--than for the exquisite perfection of the cover story a widow traveling with a young child could provide an agent, and how far such a set-up could further the mission.
Connor's concern and indignation was at once both an unwelcome judgment, and the encapsulation of every fear, every torturous decision she had encountered where her child was concerned since the day the war began.
To find herself questioned at such a time, when so much of her mission's success--her and Mabel's very lives--depended on the next hours, and on the memorized Nazi radio transmission being placed into the right hands on her return to Berlin, was enough to make the Witchblade pulsate eagerly on her wrist, in anticipation of combat to come.
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...to be continued...
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Disclaimer: I do not own Witchblade, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;)
by: Neftzer (c)2003
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