Alderney - Marion could hear men's (soldier's) voices outside the Harbormaster's office, shouting about the Kommandant's driver, wondering where he was, as the Kommandant was shortly to be coming ashore, returned from a brief time spent on Jersey.

She stood behind a brought-in medical screen of gathered white fabric on a metal frame, meant to grant her some privacy while the German's best doctor on the Islands had examined and tended to her. Stitches in her scalp and on her cheek. Cleaning and binding her feet, her wrists. Salve for her mouth. Nothing, of course, could be done for her hair. She found herself thinking about Robin's Sarkese rector, La Salle, hoping that they were able to get him to the doctor on that island to have his ears properly looked after.

His ears, which were Geis' doing. Geis, who had no trouble mixing a brutal search for an escaped prisoner with trying to find someone to officiate at his wedding. Her wedding. Their wedding.

It had proven harder than she had expected, knowing what evil he had sown on Sark, and yet letting him touch her, carry her, even. He had not kissed her. She must truly look bad. She had not located a mirror in the La Salle farmhouse to examine herself in, she had had only Robin's and Mitch's eyes in which to see her reflection. Robin's...no, she must not think along those lines. Mitch's...Mitch, who was heaven-only-knew-where. She came close to stamping her feet in frustration before recalling their injury. Allen Dale had better bloody well show up for work and get to it, and start doing whatever it was he did, and find out where they had Mitch. Even still they were going on about him, about Allen, speculating on his whereabouts, outside.

She heard a hand to the door, and from where she sat obediently behind the screen she knew it was Geis.

His voice was calm, soft, and entirely out of place in this martial setting. "Marion?"

"I am not...decent," she announced to warn him away, lying.

He held his position at the door. "I have spoken to the doctor. He said I may...that I may see you." He stalled for a moment, realizing the inappropriate way that might sound, taken at face value: 'I might see you, when you are not decent'. He tried again. "That is, that you may see visitors."

She remained seated so that she was not visible over the screen. She made no move to pretend at dressing (she already was), nor did she speak.

"If it is your hair, my darling...You have never...when I saw you being returned by that fisherman..."

She cut into Geis' halting attempt at sharing his emotions with her. "Where have you taken him?"

"Who?" He had not caught up, his mind still mired in how to express himself to her.

"The fisherman. He was just a simple man. He helped me. You're not going to keep him long, are you?"

"Him?" Her interest in the man who affected her rescue was understandable, but he had no use for fishermen in this moment. "Don't think of him. I am sure he will be rewarded for his part in your rescue."

But she persisted. "Will you interrogate him?"

His brow wrinkled and he shook his head to clear it. "What?"

Sounding close to defiant, but also hesitant, she asked, "Will you interrogate me?"

He did not answer her, instead she heard him moving across the floor, his boots and parts of his uniform making noise in the otherwise empty room. He did not have to step around the screen. He was easily tall enough to see over it, and find her there, dressed in some clothing that had been provided (she did not wish to reflect on where it had come from, from whom it had been stolen, or whether its owner was still alive). It did not fit very well, but it proved clean and little-worn.

Her feet could not yet fit in any shoes. A matron (from one of the camps, she assumed) had presented her with a pair of men's slippers, medium-large to accommodate the bandages. She had yet to put them on.

She smelled of medical pasting and alcohol, iodine, and bandages. And when she looked up at him, over the screen, perhaps he could see something in her eyes of the uncertainness she felt in his presence now, following her intimate knowledge of the encounter he had forced at La Salle's farm. Perhaps he could see as her newly wary eyes registered the sound memory that rang in her ears, "You have not seen him, then, enjoying his work at the camps."

The look she gave him from where she sat, behind the screen, took his breath away. There was something about it entirely unfamiliar, but deeply stirring, though he could not understand what that something was-that it was unvarnished emotion-that it was truth, with which she so rarely gifted him.

He grabbed the screen, which was on wheels, and sent it rolling into the wall. He did not break eye contact with her. He did not want to lose the moment. He stepped to her and gathered her as gently into his arms as he knew how to do, taking breath only when he felt her, finally, at last, un-tense and accept his strength, his embrace, about her. "I will let no one hurt you further," he promised, his own heart beat-skipping with the pledge. "You are so precious to me, Marion. These past days have been...I would not allow myself to lose hope that I would find you." He smiled bittersweetly, though she was too close to him to see it. "That you would be...well."

She replied more prickily than he had expected, tension re-coalescing about her. "And so I seem so 'well' to you?"

"The doctor said you would heal. He said that, by your own admission, you suffered no...intimate injury while you were captive."

"And on that account, are you more relieved for me? Or for yourself?"

"Why...How can..?" He felt speechless in the wake if her righteous antagonism. This was not at all her melting in his arms, letting him care for her, tend to her as he had envisioned (even, anticipated). He paused for a moment to gather himself. "You are angry with me," he concluded. "That I did not, that I could not, protect you. You take this to mean my feelings for you are not genuine. It was for you that I attempted no violence toward the prisoner. It was for you, for fear of his hurting you, that I did not stand in the way of his escape. In taking no action against him I have gravely put myself, and my position here, at risk. This, I did knowingly for you." But he read it in her face. He had failed her, and she blamed him for what had come next. "Certainly I could not expect a man who flies under the British flag to treat a citizen of the Crown, a woman, at that, in such a way." He did not withhold his simmering outrage. Were she not still agreeing to stay in his arms he would be pacing the room. "What he has done to you is inexcusable. It is pitiless, the treatment you have been subjected to, you, a Lady, a noble-the very soul of what he is to defend, to protect! RAF Flight Commander Thomas Carter is lower than a beast. I shall split his guts if ever I see him again."

"You shan't," she said, her voice smaller, less sharp.

"How so?" He had no intention of interrogating Marion, nor letting anyone else. Even so, he needed her story of what had taken place. There were papers to file, reports to dictate, the Kommandant to appease.

She looked as though she were about to bargain with him. "You will release the fisherman back to his family? And his livelihood? Today?"

He crafted patience into his tone where there was none. "Very well, as it pleases you, Marion. He is only in custody because the Kommandant is on a tear with regard to the loss of the RAF pilot, and also a Zigeuner, a Gypsy, laborer has gone missing. Bringing the fisherman back to Alderney is merely a conciliatory measure to placate him. A political move. Your fisherman is a pawn, only. Gladly I will surrender him to your wishes." He must've said the right thing.

"The flier kept me gagged so that I couldn't speak. He took us to a cave, and we stayed there. I was bound. As last night came on, but before the tide filled the cavern, he uncovered an outboard motor boat hidden there, with electric torches to signal a ship. He cut my bindings, leaving me at the mercy of the cave and the tides, and himself braved the Petit Russel to meet up with his fellows, who had come for him in a U-boat-I mean, submarine. I saw him no more, nor his hidden boat."

He looked to her bare hands, the bandages below them at the wrist. "And your ring?"

"Lost," she said, her gaze steady, "I know not where."

"So you were all along in the caves?"

"Yes, until I found the fisherman this morning."

Geis slid his hand into a pocket inside his uniform's coat, producing a brightly colored scarf as a magician might, to charm a child, but with less panache. He extended the gift to her, nodding. "For your hair," he said. "Your wounded pride. I thought you might wish something." He tried to smile encouragingly.

Gingerly, she took it in her fingertips. Her acceptance of it touched him in a way he would have found difficult to articulate. "I must ask, because the Kommandant will expect to know: How did you come to Alderney that day? By what means?"

"A boy, from a family Cook used to buy from on Sark, the Giddons'."

Gisbonnhoffer's back straightened at the name.

"Their son, Dick," her eyes were cast down, as though chastened. "I bribed him to bring me, for your birthday."

"Yes..."

"And then the flier, he, he killed him, and took the boat." There was something almost wondering in her tone.

He had heard the meat of it, then. "Alright," he crooned, wishing her again deeply in his embrace. "That is enough for now."

Marion let herself tap into real emotion of the event, used it to her advantage to sell the entirety of the (partially) fabricated story of her kidnapping. "No," she protested. "His death was my fault, and the young officer's. Had I not so hot-headedly pursued coming to see you...Had I..."

"They would be alive? The pilot, still my prisoner? The Kommandant not at planning how to reprimand me? You must not think this way, Marion. Such thoughts can consume one. And I," he struggled for the best words, "I treasure that you longed to be near me to the point you resorted to bribery."

He looked at her and saw it. For all their engagement, their imminent wedding and future life together, there was yet something more for him to surmount in their courtship: he did not fully have her trust, her confidence. Not after this.

Of course, Marion had always been cool, aloof, supercilious, even. It was her way, and as a noble lady of considerable rank, her right and privilege. It was one of the things that had first drawn him to her. Her deeper personal emotions, like his, were not always easy for her to access. To someone less perceptive than himself it might be difficult to discern them. If she felt she could not trust him fully, if she felt that he had failed her, that he could have in some way prevented her capture and mistreatment, she would strike out at him, masking her insecurity in his abilities as anger.

But she offered no further acting-out comments or near-challenges to him, and he was hopeful the storm had passed, that the rend in the fabric of their liebesgeschichte was on the mend, and her justified indignation at him had been satisfied.

"Looking for Kommandant's driver, Lieutenant," chirped a random solider as he stuck his head through the door he had opened, unbidden, and into the Harbormaster's office.

"Out, Private," Gisbonnhoffer barked at the man. "He'll be here, directly, I've no doubt. I've only just left him near-enough his billet on Sark."

"Left him?" came the unexpected (but predictably sharp) voice of the Kommandant himself. "And why on earth would you do that Herr Lieutenant? Was it him you appointed to continue the search for the flier? Was it his boat-the boat that he and other essential Islander workers use to journey here each morning-that you commandeered to ferry your girlfriend to a doctor's appointment? Oh, how-d'ye-do Lady Marion? Hard to see you there, wrapped in the arms of my oh-so-busy Lieutenant. Daring new coiffure, I see. Interesting."

Gisbonnhoffer did not snap to attention with quite the level of immediacy the Kommandant had come to expect. Instead he rose slowly, removing what remained of his embrace of Marion, reached for the screen to replace around her for some version of privacy, and pressed several tablets into her palm, indicating a pitcher of water and a glass sitting on a metal tray at a nearby table. "The doctor said to give you these. They will help you sleep, and restore your strength."

"When you are finished, Herr Geis!" the Kommandant acidly prompted.

"The fisherman?" she asked, accepting the tablets and water obediently.

"My gift to you, Liebe." Geis rose, going around the screen and walked to the Kommandant.

"I am of a mind to send you personally to retrieve my stranded driver, Gisbonnhoffer."

Geis held his tongue as he held the door for the Kommandant. In opening it, he nearly collided with Underlieutenant Diefortner, who had clearly taken the decking of the wooden steps so quickly he was all but out of breath. "Personal message for the Kommandant!"

"He is here," Geis lorded over the Underlieutenant, relishing the moment, his tone rife with hauteur.

"What is this?" Vaiser questioned with impatience. "Personal message from whom?"

"The Lady Adalgisa, Baroness Bachmeier," Diefortner consulted the message for the full name of the sender.

"Pardon my indecorous curiosity, Sir," Gisbonnhoffer asked, going out on a limb with the question, "but why would the wife of Gruppenfeldmarschall Baron Diederich von Bachmeier be contacting you personally?"

"Because, you idiot lovebird," the Kommandant spit out the abuse, "you useless, mindless pig in need of a good rut to clear your head, she is my ex-wife."

"Your ex-wife, Sir? I thought she had taken Holy Orders and joined the Church?"

"Yes, yes," Vaiser waved his hand at the slight inaccuracy of Gisbonnhoffer's memory and information as he bent his head to read the message himself, "that is Delphinia. Number two, as it were. Sister Mary George or something or other, now." He shook his head dismissively at the thought, "Adalgisa had the bad taste to re-marry after the divorce, and in doing so, to climb the ranks. Which is why I will be unable to refuse her request now, as it comes from the wife of my superior officer." He lifted his head back up to them. "It would very much appear that today I am made, most regrettably, a father." Vaiser stomped off the wood landing at the top of the harbormaster's office with gusto, and down three steps, before he paused and cocked his head, as though he were hearing something eerily in the wind. But in a moment the sensation had passed, and he was back to stomping, expecting the sounds of the lieutenant's and underlieutenant's boots to echo his, theirs only slightly behind him, as he made with haste for the docks and the item left now, at this ominous message's arrival, in his sole charge.

Geis had left, the Kommandant had left. She was alone for the first time in...since...the night before the morning of October fourteenth. Convinced Geis would do as he promised with regard to Mitch (there could be no good reason to detain him further), Marion gave herself leave to think of her father, of Edward at Barnsdale without her. That had not occurred since before the July Occupation nearly four years ago.

Earliest Spring 1940 - London - Brook Street - Tea at Claridge's. The Nighten name enough to be given a table, without sending word ahead. No need to take the tube to Bond Street, the Reading Room was near enough the Mayfair house for her to walk, or be driven.

The first course: watercress and cucumber sandwiches in a time so unconcerned with rationing the crusts were cut off and thrown into the rubbish bin before they ever appeared at table. Cheese savories to cause the palate to salivate, merely at the word, 'savories'.

The second course: scones, baked-fresh, with jam. And, for Clem, Devonshire cream.

The third: sweets, when sugar was ridiculously abundant, and for Clem, port.

Outside it lightly rained. The kind of rain that might ruin a hat with a peahen's feather, had she forgotten her umbrella, which the chauffeur, thankfully, had not.

The hat, a lovely camel-colored design that hearkened back to the cloche style, had been utterly saved from ruination. It matched the piping on her blouse (cut in a silhouette helped along by shoulder-pads), and the color of her high-waisted skirt. It was a muted ensemble. But it had been (for her, and the European world) a muted Spring.

She had called the meeting of the two of them, his Vauxhall Cross job keeping him so busy now she seldom saw him to speak to. Out of habit she reached a hand to the back of her knee, hidden well-under the tablecloth, and adjusted the seam on her stockings through the high slit in her narrowly-tailored skirt.

She could see her brother sipping at his port, but could also see a tension in his hand where he held the glass. He wanted to be away, to get back to his job, his desk-whatever it was he was doing for the government these days. "I have been to see Mother," she said, thinking of taking another sweet.

"And?" he asked, returning his glass to the table.

She noted his handsomeness, as she always did. 'Handsome Clem', she had heard so often as a child it was a miracle she had not written a song about it. Ah, well, it was not like she disagreed with the summation. Even today she had watched more than one lady's head turn when he escorted her into the Reading Room. "She will not go."

"Well, you cannot be surprised. It is hardly the proper climate for travel. Despite your recent jet-setting."

She slightly scrunched her nose at him. Her trans-Atlantic trip had hardly been a mere act of daredevilry. "You would just leave him there?" She withdrew the telegram she had received to show him. She recounted its contents as he reviewed it, "Absent-minded, at times incoherent."

"He is a grown man, Marion. His recovery can be handled without us present." His handsome eyes showed the slightest level of unhandsome irritation at her pressing of the issue.

No wonder women stared at him...he had to be one of the last men of his age in all London wearing neither a uniform nor a wedding ring. "I have taken the liberty of cabling his doctor in St. Peter Port." She withdrew another paper from her pocketbook and handed it to him. Perhaps he was beginning to feel like he was back in the office, after all. "His physical injury may well be long-term. At the least someone must go and see to it he is brought to London. May I mention that we have yet, to this point, to hear from him?"

He scoffed. "You know how he hates to send telegrams. How awkward he is about it unless you, or his social secretary, are there to do it while he dictates content. Doubtless he has written to us in the post and it has simply not been received. And the Barnsdale staff have cabled, doubtless, because they wish an increase in wage, having been engaged now well-beyond the usual five-month holiday term during which we arrange all our comings and goings."

"Honestly, does that sound like Mr. Clun to you? Trumping up father's injury in order to strike for higher wages?"

"Well, no. But there you have it: father has Clun, and Cook, and Eva, and..."

"Eva?" her reaction was one of puzzlement. "Whyever would he have need of Eva? She is a ladies' maid. I doubt she is even working at the house."

"Yes, of course," he acquiesced smoothly, "I only meant to highlight that the Guernsey estate is well-staffed for any need he might have, and his doctor there also sufficiently educated to handle his recovery. C'mon, Tigs," Clem reverted to her childhood nickname, when she had developed a strong identification with Beatrix Potter's hedgehog washerwoman Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. (And had been similarly prickily.) He attempted to cajole her. It was something in the past in which he had shown no small talent. "The trip home is short enough for him. He will be back any day, I am sure."

"I agree." She doggedly seized on his assertion. "It is a short trip there and back. And so I shall go, shortly, there, and check on him myself. If he is so well-situated as you believe, I will make the short trip back."

"No," he said.

"And why not?"

"It is not a good time to be traveling, as I have said, and if you go..." he took a short breath, "you will not return."

Her tone was inquisitive. "Why should I not?"

"Because there is nothing of Robin Goodfellow there." He tried not to pause too long on the name. "I daresay I don't know why you came back from America. (Not to mention the fact you have yet to tell me how you did so.) There were no memories for you there of Robin. You were an ocean away from the war, and your letters seemed to show you were having a pretty good time. And yet here, in London-even in the country-I see it, we all see it, in your eyes; that you look for him everywhere. Guernsey and Barnsdale will not haunt you so. It is just where I would encourage you any other year (any other war, even) to go. But it is no time to be traveling. And I do not wish to have to get myself all the way to Guernsey to see you, Tigs. Stay in Mayfair, or go to the country, here."

She leveled her gaze at him. "Is there anything you can tell me, specifically, as to why I should not go?"

He looked defeated. She had called his bluff. "No. There is nothing I can tell you, specifically, as to why you should not go."

"Then," she announced crisply, "I leave tomorrow, three o'clock."

He swore. "You are more intractable than when you sailed with the Mertons. And I cannot, then, see you off. There is a meeting."

"It cannot be cancelled," she asked, without vitriol, "or rescheduled?"

"It cannot. I will have Percival go with you to the docks."

There was a long pause, when it was not apparent if a fight would erupt. If demands would be made, and, by Marion, ignored. She let the tension of the prior conversation roll off her, choosing only to retain the gist of it, and she asked a final, reconciling question, "Will he also kiss me a brotherly goodbye?"

Quick wits and sibling affection had done the trick. At the thought of Clem's button-down valet, Percival, rendering an affectionate buss to Marion's waiting cheek, older brother and younger sister nearly collapsed into undignified giggles.

...TBC...

*liebesgeschichte = love story