And after the blindfold's rough application (it caught unpleasantly on her earrings), she saw less, still.
Not the sculpted evergreen shrubs as she was handed over the marble rail and passed scratchily through them. Not the four exquisitely landscaped fountains that ran in the east park, nor the statue of di Rossi's "Janus" as she was carried past it, slung over a large man's shoulder like Father Christmas' mythical pack. She began to form an idea that they were on their way into the estate's complex box hedge maze, its impressive eight-foot hedge height, long their head gardener's pride and joy.
At the blindfolding she had been swiftly and efficiently bound, hand and foot. She could have attempted resistance-a scream, even-but found herself too curious: where was this Brit-spoke isle collaborator, her 'cousin', taking her?
And who was this other man he was working with?
It was not long before they stood her up. As much as a girl bound at the ankles while in high heels could be stood up, and yet be expected to stay so.
"Wotcher got for us, Dale?" she heard another, a third, now ask.
Her ears and nose told her the gate crasher was emptying his tuxedo's pockets of hors d'oeuvres and other finger foods from her party.
She didn't seize the moment to protest, she simply stood, her senses buzzing, wondering what would come next.
She could smell summer: loam and mulch, pollen on the wind, and behind everything else, always, the sea.
All about her a scramble ensued for the scavenged goodies, and the big man who had carried her (judging by the low pitch of the voice, an almost growl) instructed the others to each take an entrance to the maze and guard it.
Unless her senses and memory utterly had abandoned her, she thought herself now situated within the central heart, the target center, of the maze, to which there were five distinct openings (or, if you'd rather, exits). Five, because the landscape architect had been superstitious, high strung, and bored of even numbers. And had once cut himself his own path through the maze when he had forgotten the best way out. So, at least five men.
Even over the hedge, the music from the house could still softly be heard. This would be the sort of scene for lovers, her mind told her. This was where a privacy-seeking engaged couple, a smitten twosome, might sneak for an intimate interlude during their own party.
Someone removed the blindfold. Her eyes did not have to accustom themselves to the light, as without moon or stars there was none.
Not only had the fraying fabric of the blindfold caught on her earring, at its removal it snagged, and her earring tore, just enough that it hurt, that there would be some trace of blood there. She felt the queerly warm oozy drip beginning, with her bound hands unable to blot it away.
The shapes of several men surrounded her, dutifully watching the access points to the heart of the maze. The light from their cigarettes proved the only true illumination of their faces.
It was impossible to tell much about them from how they were dressed, as it was too dark to even discern that, but she easily located the massive man who had carried her across the park, noting that unlike the others, he preferred to chomp on a cigar. Her 'cousin' was only now lighting a match to his smoke. He was closer to her than the others, and the immediate spark of the match's chemical reaction as it burst into flame flared into her eyes uncomfortably, but also, for a moment, seemed to fully reveal the open ground directly in front of her.
There, on the stone bench some fifteen feet opposite where she stood-the one which the lovers in her brief imagining would use-was seated, no, more 'was draped' a man with a face to wipe all others from her mind.
He was lean and tall, no, more 'whip-thin', she thought, though the darkness may have betrayed her eye on that point.
His eyes were clear and quick; his hair was short, as a soldier's might be required to be. He had no smoke of his own, not between his lips, nor his fingers. She had a flash of those fingers, the way they used to absentmindedly caress a certain engraved cigarette case, as though they required always, ever to be busy, to be occupied at something. Those fingers lay quite relaxed, now, unclenched, immobile; at rest. His cheeks and chin were bearded, the color of which was surprisingly darker than that on his head. The beard (of a thickness beyond that of simply not shaving for several days) should have made her identification of him more difficult. It did not.
"You are dead," she said, her eyes snapping to the right of him, and another man, ever at his side. "And so are you."
"I told them not to bind your ankles," the seated man, clearly their leader, responded.
Marion persisted. "I went to your funerals. Your mother," she put the full force of her gaze on the one at the right, "wept so long the surgeon had to order her a draught." She saw him wince more than slightly at the news.
The leader stood and walked to her, himself bending to untie her ankles, then her hands. As he knelt to the ground to remove the scarf used in the binding, his hand, rougher, probably, than she would recall it, for a long moment cupped her lower calf, sliding down sensually (far too sensually) toward her ankle. The callus of his palm picked on her silk stockings.
She knew what he would be thinking: Yet unladdered nylons, new as new could be, their seams straight and unmended, their condition pristine, nearly three years into a harsh occupation? How had she managed that? How felt it to secure them to her garters, to feel how their luxurious form snugged to her inner thighs, how their very existence pointed to an intimacy, an understanding with the devils in uniform?
The music still played. Mellow, now, romantic, even. How many songs had passed since she was taken from the terrace?
He stood. Any questions his inappropriately familiar inspection of her had sparked remained unspoken. "Dance with me, Marion," he said, offering her his hand. His always unrefuseable hand.
She let it hang there. Did not allow hers to join it.
"Robert Oxley, first son of the Earl of Huntingdon," the name she had never expected to hear again, much less herself say, feeling like a foreign language to her tongue, "died while on His Majesty's service three years ago."
"Nay," he disagreed, hand still extended. "'Twas five." His eyes shot heavenward, as if recalling the facts of the affair. "Of extreme coronary distress, the day his fiance sailed for America."
"So later that month, this walking corpse enlisted-without even asking her opinion, much less her leave to do so?"
"A man needs a woman's consent? To fight for King and Country?
She did not answer his question. "I have the telegram announcing your passing." Ah, she betrayed herself, there.
His intellect sparked to that. He chose to taunt her with it. "But not Bonchurch's?"
She looked to the other man. "No, not Bonchurch's."
"Well, then," Robert agreed. "Perhaps I am dead, but Bonchurch, Bonchurch was only put forth so by his government to ensure that his future clandestine work might remain so. And perhaps, in that work on the Continent, and in his flight from a pursuing enemy convoy, his watercraft was hulled beyond repair, and yet he-and some other friends-found their way here, a welcoming port in such a storm?"
"When?" she asked of his hypothetical strings of 'perhaps'es.
"Four months ago."
Marion recalled the night quite clearly. The sirens, the dogs. The searchlights on the beaches. "We thought someone had broken out of the Alderney camps."
"No," piped in her 'cousin', the one called Dale. "Someone broke into the islands. And that someone..." He threw his hands out to indicate the others, "was us."
"Very well," she replied, as though indifferent to this news. "You have taken your time to come calling."
"A man can hardly stand to miss his own engagement party."
She threw him a hard look.
"What?" he asked, that old impudence all over him. "I do not recall our engagement being broken, Marion, only, slightly bent. Or have I gone and queered your pitch, just as you were hoping to commit bigamy?"
A rough-looking blonde man chimed in. "Illegal, that. Even among the Krauts, I've heard."
"Royston would know," Robert informed her. "Upon news of his death, his wife quickly moved to marry her lover."
Royston. That name rang a bell. She put it together quickly, from the obituary and newspaper clippings (most of which, long ago she had memorized).
"Yes," he saw her thoughts, the understanding as it blossomed in her eyes. "We are all of us dead men."
Her gaze shot from face to face around the hedgerows. The sum of the downed training plane stood all about her: Robert Oxley, Mitch Bonchurch, Allen Dale, Richard Royston, William "Wills" Reddy, and the large man, Ian Johnson.
Then there had been no accident, no Saintly Six; 'heroes before they got the chance to enter the fray'. All six were present and accounted for, and certainly, most certainly well into said fray.
Robert continued speaking on Royston's wife. "Fortunately, the government offices found some-inadequacy-in their paperwork, and the 'bereaved' Mrs. Royston found that should she do so, she would not receive her proper widow's pension."
"Though I am not sure why he should want her back, after cutting such a caper," interjected Dale. "And over his dead body, too."
The blonde man grumbled something to himself in reply, under his breath.
Robert no longer waited for her to take his offered hand, he reached for hers. In doing so, his fingers ran into the sizeable gem, an emerald, she wore on her left hand. His mood, until then, moving toward convivial, shifted immediately into icy cool.
"So," he challenged her, "the stories are true."
"Stories?"
"That you wear a certain Mrs. Stein's-a certain current occupant of the Alderney camps-well-known bauble as a love token from your lieutenant." He all but spat the last few words.
"Robin, I-" she did not know what she was planning to say.
Cuttingly he stepped on her words. "Oh, it is 'Robin' now, is it?"
She held her tongue. She would offer no explanation in exchange for harsh treatment. The past years here on Guernsey had shown her how anger could stopper a man's ears, willfully make him limit his comprehension, his capacity for sympathy.
"The lads," he went on, "are worried of you, but I said, I promised them that if I could but speak with you we would know...whether we dealt with you as an enemy, or an asset." Always the effective speaker, he turned his head toward her, almost as if for emphasis. He had not studied law for nothing. "But I see now that I do not know. That sussing out your loyalties-knowing your heart-is no longer the child's play I once knew it to be." He added a virtual knife twist to his conclusion, "not the child's play I once so happily knew it to be."
"You know," said Wills, his voice even, but his words threatening, "they have a word for collaborators that's not very nice.
"Yeah," agreed Dale, "'collaborator'."
The other man threw him a withering look, shaking his head.
"Very well, lads," Robin spoke as though he were wrapping things up. Turning to her he offered, "please accept my apologies in advance."
Bonchurch popped the cork on a champagne bottle Dale had apparently also managed to smuggle out for them in his seemingly bottomless pockets.
"Apologies, why?" she asked, her tone laced with irony, her injured ear still throbbing. She reached up to remove the heavy dangle earring, which was only exacerbating the tear. "I cannot imagine what for."
Robin held out his hand to take something from Bonchurch. "Because the best plan to explain your mysterious disappearance from the party involves us, of necessity, seeing that you get quite pissed."
Cheerily, Dale spoke up, holding an imaginary flute, "chin-chin!"
Marion took the metal cup (clearly rousted from someone's kit), and in a single gulp drained it, the bubbles, upon swallowing, going straight to her nose. She surrendered the cup for another filling.
"As I recall," she called him out, "you rarely used to drink out of anything less exotic than a lady's slipper."
She did not warn them, as she might have, that it had already taken more than a politely social amount of liquid courage to get herself to the point she was able to even come down to her own party that night.
"And as I recall, you never once offered yours for the tasting."
She did not mention that with this champagne she was now mixing her liquors, or that, should they find they needed more alcohol to accomplish this task, quite an assortment could be found (in quite a healthy-or rather, unhealthy- amount) hidden in the clothes armoire of her bedroom.
Robin held the re-filled cup. He raised it in a toast. "To you. To your fianc. To...happily ever after." He took a sip, and handed it back to her.
Even in the darkness of the night she could not escape the black cast of his face in response to his own words, nor be certain which fianc (himself or Gisbonnhoffer) he did, in fact, pretend to, or genuinely wish well.
...TBC...