When Marion awoke, for the third time that night (the first of those times that she did so deliberately), she could only vaguely recall the toasts Eva had effectively steered her downstairs toward, the in-German well-wishes like clangorous nonsense being shouted at her as she stood obediently next to Geis. The glasses in the guests' hands morphing into something quite other as they raised and toasted with them, their voices echoing the toastgiver's in beneficent thoughts to her and Gisbonnhoffer's joint future.

Playing it back in her mind, the whole scene brought to her memory more than one chilling newsreel of pre-war speeches Hitler had given. "Heil, Geis!" she imagined the guests tonight had been shouting, "Heil, Marion!", "Heil the future Frau Gisbonnhoffer!"

No one had seemed to be the wiser about her condition (not including the Kommandant, who persisted to toast and re-toast, all the time his eyes googling at her over his champagne flute as she would have to drink to each new well wish, each 'congratulations').

But she had made it through.

At present she was still teetering on tipsy, more toward tipsy than not. And her bedside clock showed her (at one-thirty in the a.m.) that if she did not hurry, she would prove late for the most important appointment of her day-er, night.

She stepped to the armoire and, avoiding even looking at the bottles hidden in it, pulled out something to wear on her covert excursion: very well, jodhpurs and a checked camp shirt it was. Though how she would explain such an outfit were she caught in it at this time of night, she knew not. Well, best not to get caught out, then.

With herself dressed and her destination set, Marion's thoughts were freed to turn to other contemplations. Her mind (still a bit on the foggy side) could not help but fill, overly fill, even, with the idea, the concept that Robin was not, in fact, dead. Without humor, she noted that it was really, quite really very much like something he would do. Some elaborate prank he would pull. It would make a great tale to be told at his club. Some Tom Sawyer - Huckleberry Finn moment wherein he is revealed to be looking down, quite alive, upon his own funeral proceedings. In such a scenario she was not quite sure whether she was cast in the feisty Becky Thatcher role, or as the disapproving Aunt Polly.

Marion marveled that she did not feel she could be happier about it, more festive; that Robin was not only alive, but somehow, miraculously near her. The world had seemed to become so very vast in light of the war; acquaintances, friends, shipped or evacuated to far-flung corners of civilization.

Her own self, sequestered here, few places quite as out of the way as this one. And yet, here is Robin. By chance, he seemed to indicate, by purest serendipity.

As she raced across the park, through occasional stands of trees, and skirted the small woods, her mind could not help but gloomily remind her; it is one thing to feel very dirty and very alone (as she had these past months of occupation as they turned into years). It is quite another thing when you come to know someone else (someone once so very, terribly, almost ridiculously, important to you) is watching on as you slowly suffocate your soul. That person, that someone else, with no understanding, no comprehension as to why you do it, or even whether you are doing it willingly or under duress.

Marion wondered if she had been as he had expected to find her. (For it seemed obvious to her that Robin knew whom the Marion was his men were absconding with from the party.) Had she seemed to him old? Worn? Used-up? She knew she had not seemed fun. Not light and jolly, as they used to so often be when together, not able to be charmed.

Perhaps he had thought to encounter her acting as more of a war widow, draped in black for him, still mourning his untimely passing. Grief yet held about her as she had learned her lesson, accepted her responsibility in the killing of him, in having, by her trans-oceanic journey, driven him to go for a soldier.

But she was not about to commit suttee over Robert Oxley, to throw herself on his death pyre, a widow-sacrifice. Firstly, they had not been married, and though he had wanted, randily, to play at it often enough as though they were. She had never been one for such make-believe then, and would never have taken on such an unearned title now. She had never worn the mourning black, not beyond the funeral itself.

Secondly, her life had shown her swiftly enough upon her return home that she could not just throw it away, nor box herself up, solitary in her grief. Only scant weeks after Robin's funeral, her father's staff at their summer home here on Guernsey had sent a telegram to her mother that Sir Edward had suffered an accident and needed family, needed someone to aid in his possible recovery.

And certainly the former Mrs. Nighten was not about to forsake London for that. It was not the proper season for seaside holidays, she had informed her daughter, as though Sir Edward had picked not only a poor time to be visiting the family's island estate, but also a poor time to incur such an injury.

God save the world-God save us all-from silly women, Marion thought to herself, recalling the at-the-time utterly self-absorbed behavior of her mother.

Marion had arrived, and with some minutes to spare, her wristwatch showed her. She was at a little-visited corner of their property, where the crumbling remains of an old stone windmill, once used for grinding corn, yet stood. The inner base still surprisingly solid, though quite leaky up top in the rain; the windmill vanes half-rotted, unable anymore to turn the stone inside. But there was a nice, deep half-cellar to it. It was a place no one attended upon, no one paid attention to-a shell of what it had once been, now utterly without utility, without purpose, hollow and forgotten. And in that, perhaps, she felt a kinship to it, a feeling of something communal with it.

When the Germans had first landed, she had recalled its existence to her mind, and packed all that she could-that she had thought might prove useful in days to come-onto a cart, hitching the estate's Percheron draft horse, Dovecote, to it, and had pulled it to store here. She had left enough things behind at the house to satisfy the German notion of 'contraband'; two radios, plentiful books and record albums to make any Nazi contented that the Nighten estate, when searched and their verboten belongings confiscated, had not already been secreting plunder elsewhere.

And so it was all here, now, in the deep half-cellar of the windmill, so many things: some jewelry, glass jars of home-canned goods, spices, seed for future planting, candles, matches, hardy clothing made for hard use, several coats and slickers, several pairs of her brother's boots, his camping kit. And things she never would have guessed in her wildest dreams that she would treat so roughly, house so primitively: her record albums, her record player, their second best radio.

If you had told her the day would come that she would take to having to live so, that her mind would begin to intuitively to understand how and where to stockpile such things, she would have laughed.

Certainly she had not realized until it became necessary that she had, apparently paid attention when being told the best way to outfit an air raid shelter, a bunker of sorts.

Nearby, even, on an untraveled inlet, so tightly overgrown that it was not possible hardly to see it from shore, much less imagine that one could navigate the tight narrows of it, she had stowed (on dry land) the boat her brother, Clem, had been lazily building (no reason to rush the process) on his occasional holiday trips to the island. At his last visit, it had been nearly finished; only paint and lacquer were needed. But it had never been registered, therefore it was not sought when all boats were commandeered, not found and burned, or pressed into the service of the occupying Germans. Because as far as anyone beside herself, Clem, and her father, no one recollected it.

Tonight she stopped herself from going the short extra distance to check up on the boat. She had to get herself straightened out, sobered to the point she could do what she had come here to do.

Two a.m., and it was time. She was hunkered into that cozy-tight (as it was not raining tonight) half-cellar of the old windmill, all the tools she needed right within reach of her hands. She had taken out two quilts from where they had been wrapped tight in a tarpaulin, to sit on once they were placed on top of a small pickle barrel. She lit the mantle in the kerosene lantern on the crate before her, let the glass drop and adjusted the flame.

Facing forward, she pressed down on the transmit button of the once-chrome-colored (now tarnished) microphone, and spoke.

Marion's voice came out deliberately in the altered tones and pitch of one of Fred Otto's sisters; pure Southern drawl. Her mastery of it was flawless: "God Save the King, Vive la France, God Bless America. It's just now two o'clock...and welcome to the Nightwatch." She placed the needle to the record she had chosen to play (deliberately by a Jewish performer, despised and repudiated by the Germans), and disengaged her finger on the microphone's broadcast button, letting the music go out over the airwaves.

She sighed. She had no way of knowing how many (if any) listeners she might have. But she would wager, even with the betting likes of Fred himself, that more than one islander was up, even at this time, like her so many nights, in distress, unable to sleep, and possibly tuning his-or her-illegal radio to the frequency Marion was broadcasting on.

She heard a scratch near the un-illuminated cellar steps. Her mind flared, her reflexes still somewhat slowed by the liquor, but she had her hand to the small "just in case" pistol she kept near the turntable.

...TBC...