GUERNSEY - Eva Heindl woke slowly, her mind cataloging sensory information to inform her of where she was before she opened her eyes.
As a rule, Kommandant Vaiser slept little, and that rarely away from the fortress of his commandeered estate on Alderney. And so when she was with him, she, also, slept little-if at all. The mere fact that she knew herself to be waking from a restful night-into-late-mid-morning informed her that she was not in his presence.
A small flex of her back told her she was alone at the moment, no small brothers, no growing-gangly sisters sharing a crowded mattress with her, as they would have at home.
No smells from a smoking cottage cuisaenne fire, no varying sounds of others breathing. No sharp (always sharp, staccato) poke from seventeen-year-old Daniel to wake her and set her (along with the others) about her work for the day.
The linens, the light touch of lavender liked by Lady Nighten on the bedclothes, still employed even after her long absence: it was Barnsdale. But certainly not her old room in the women servants' dormitory hall. Too much sunlight for that. Sunlight, intoxicating in its warmth, like a thick fragrance that one might smell if only one worked hard enough to do so, strained and breathed in at just the right moment.
But it was illusion. The sun had no discernable scent, no true caress. She had only forgotten to pull closed the blackout curtains last night in Lady Marion's room, where she occupied the low trundle.
How long since she had slept at Barnsdale?
It had been years. The occupying Germans had 'liberated' her from her post in service here with their Summer of '40 arrival, due to her family's German strong heritage. She had only shortly been returned to the Nighten staff at the time, coming back to work only with Lady Marion's unexpected arrival back on the island that March to look after the injured Sir Edward.
The previous year neither Marion nor Lady Nighten had come for holiday. Lady Nighten because the divorce had become final in the courts. Marion because she was abroad. It had been only Sir Edward and Master Clem, come down from London.
And it had been that lazy holiday of May '39, boat-building near the secluded inlet on the Barnsdale holding that had led to her being tumbled, repeatedly tumbled, into a cliche. The maid, inamorata to the lord's son.
She thought of (tried to recall, anyway) those days; light, clean, airy and heady with pollen, all Guernsey en haut bloom, fecund with possibilities.
Not knowing he (or anyone) was nearby, Eva had walked down to the inlet to fetch back water to the cottage for washing. Without a lady at Barnsdale, she had not been required to work (nor to draw a wage), and so she did what she could to help at home, her overtaxed mother's health not being what it had once been.
She walked, as was her girlish preference at the time, barefoot toward the bank of the deep-enough-to-support-a-vessel iaoue on its way out to the sea, pushing back vines and green-with-life branches that caught on her hair and skirt. No doubt she had looked of nothing so much as a country peasant girl, backward and unsophisticated to his cultured and educated eye.
It had been several summer holidays since she had seen him-since he had seen her, his work in England keeping him busy and unable to get away.
Her mother (who believed in all manner of numerology and fairy stories, potions for bounheur, luck or healing) had always wagged a finger and told Eva she had been drawn there that day-never mind trying to talk her out of it-something deep and primal had called out to her daughter to fetch water from just that spot, at just that time.
Eva had not bothered to ask if that same primeval urging had kept her from wearing shoes, as well. It was the lack of shoes that seemed to have first caught his eye, her foot taking a cut from some harsh-growing gorse.
It was his looking at her, from where he stood planing lumber for his coming-on boat that had distracted her as she put her foot down to wash the streak of blood away in the fast-moving stream.
He winked, and it was as if the force of the cheeky gesture traveled to her across the open space between them, through the hanging vines and leafy branches like a ripple in a puddle, and physically knocked her over. She fell into the stream's shallows, wet all-over, her simple peasant skirt already tucked up into a belt to ease walking through high grass, now soaked, and three times as heavy.
She had never been in any danger of being swept away, though the stream was fast-running, but still, in his athleticism, he quickly covered the distance to her to offer a hand up and out.
Laying in Marion's trundle, Eva thought about that hand, about her acceptance of it. Large and commanding, the hand of a man used to getting his way, used to swaying any opposition to his way of thinking easily, without much trouble. Commanding, but sympathetic, the grip infused with just the right amount of pressure, of reassurance, when taking a woman's, a lady's. In her memory it had become so much more than a simple gesture of courtesy. And it had begun something as yet unfinished these years later.
In his labor on the boat, Clem had not removed his shirt, but wore it, for the most part unbuttoned, casual braces holding up his workmen's trousers.
She recalled a sort of shock, a sort of shiver at seeing him so, attired so much like an average Islander. In the sunlight the blue of his eyes (not so similar to Marion's as to be unsettling) seemed to glint like glass until it had become at times almost hard to hold his gaze.
His laugh in the open was easier than it had been among the drawing rooms at the estate, less pitched for properness. His hand, which she would never have encountered in her duties, much less the strength of his arm, his embrace, felt invigorating, unexpected, like a particularly brilliant sunset.
"Come, Eva," he had chuckled in a deep, jolly way, "we must get you home."
"I do not think, Master Clem," she replied, more saucily than she was generally used to speaking, "a dousing in water would be seen as such a great emergency, there."
She had not immediately realized her unexpected dip had not only left her skirts clinging about her legs and her peeking-out-above-her-knees thighs, but that the water had climbed well up the side of her bosom, damply outlining the lower half-circles of those well-proportioned curves.
Clem had seen. And he looked at her in a way she had noticed local men do of late, but she did not respond to his glance as she would have to theirs. Something inside herself that she had not yet fully understood told her not to toss her head in reply, but rather to lower it, returning his look through her eyelashes. In uncertainty, she gave a tentative tug with her teeth on her lower lip. Her right hand went self-consciously to smoothing her half-wet hair.
This won her the smile of his obvious satisfaction with what he saw. "Then let us have luncheon," he declared, "and let the sun see to your drying off. Attends," he bragged, producing bread and cheese, a small bottle of local wine, "I shall make it for you, while you sit idle as the lady of the house."
They had both laughed at this, his pretending to serve her after her years of service to his family.
There had been little they had not spoken of that r'levaie, nor on the days to come, her daily trips to bring water back to her family's cottage as regular as his visits to work further on his (now very slowly progressing) boat. Save one topic: they never had discussed or acknowledged the dangerous undertow they both felt swept into by the other.
He, as the elder, no doubt understood it better than her. He had been a man for some years, not just anywhere, but London; a man of the world and of its pleasures. She had only just fully stepped from girl into young woman, but an Islander girl, rural, inexperienced, willingly helpless when Sir Edward's son, the man she had respected, the man whose mother (who thought highly of her son) she had intimately served for many years, took it into his head that day to pursue her. Had she understood the concept, then, 'flattered' would have been too shallow a term for her urgently instinctual response to his attentions.
And though they had not spoken of the chemical reaction that day seemed to have initiated, it was not long before their summer-tanned skins did any necessary communicating and communing on the matter there, in easy sight of the watercraft's abandoned hull, among the tall grass.
She tried to recall details of their physical intimacy. He had never been harsh with her, never selfish. But had it been satisfying? Had it been emotionally intimate?
Certainly it had been frequent enough that summer. One might even say, robust, but of course that was a word one might often apply to Clem Nighten in any task to which he set his mind and his considerable charisma. There was no reason why his tumbling her should have proven any different.
But her memory of their carnal embrace was cobwebby, clouded with inexact recollections when it came down to it. Like a past shrouded in mist, about which one could sing melancholericly, but about which one had trouble locating substantial reminiscences of.
Had she loved him? For a summer, certainly. No doubt well into the autumn, after he had returned to London, to his life. To his world. Her world, a holiday to him.
Was their story ended? Their affaire-de-coeur fini? To that, as ever, she could but answer a resounding, 'nennin.'.
"Dame," she called, not too loudly, to the mattress above her as she stirred to meet the day. "Dame. Marion!"
Marion lay in her bed, that familiar, (in days past, comforting) spot at Barnsdale, so little altered of what there was about her since the carefree holidays of her childhood, her young adulthood, even in the wake of the Occupation.
She let her mind skip over the stash of liquor in her armoire, like a needle on a scratched record, to slip past that knowledge like a song she didnt care to hear at the moment, a sad, slow song, when she was instead in the mood for a foxtrot, a Gene Krupa drum solo.
She was, in that moment, hanging, suspended mid-waking, mid-sleeping, in that tenuous place where what is dream and what is reality mix and simmer with strange interactions.
Her mind, all night, had never yet let go of a song she had chosen to play on the truncated Nightwatch, not entirely sure why she had picked it.
It had been for Flight Commander Thomas Carter, and his secret daughter, Zara, in response to a feeling she had gotten from him, an intangible sensation. The Helen Forrest vocal for Artie Shaw's orchestra that she had on record was, of course, not about the love of a father for his child, but, something told her it applied to Carter nonetheless. "Come a rainstorm, put your rubbers on your feet/Comes a snowstorm, you can get a little heat/Comes love? Nothing can be done/Don't try hidin', 'cause there isn't any use/You'll start slidin' when your heart turns on the juice."
Of course, there was no way to dedicate it; no smart way. And so, as much as she had played it for them, this father and daughter who had never met, she played it for herself, and perhaps for Edward, too. Love for him had brought her here, had kept her here these years until... "Comes a headache, you can lose it in a day/Comes a toothache, see the dentist right away/Comes love? Nothing can be done!"
Rolling to her back, Marion fell into memory of the night before, of Allen Dale catching her out in the park as she tried to sneak back to her room upon returning from the Nightwatch.
She had gotten in a good swing, thinking he was up to his tricks of earlier in the day, but surprise was again on his side, and he cleanly ducked, declaring he was only there to warn her Geis had arrived at the estate, and was still up and about.
She had mumbled an apology, half-heartedly. It would have felt quite good, actually, to clock Robin's man's jaw.
At this news, she increased her attempt at stealth upon entering the house, using (though warily) the servants' stair to the second floor. Arriving there, she cracked its door open, only to spy Geis leaning his head into her bedchamber door. Her heart pounded wildly as she tried to think of some explanation that in her post-kidnapping condition she would be (rather than in her bed) wandering the house fully dressed at three in the morning. Fortunately, he did not tarry long in that position, and finally moved on to his own (Clem's) room.
As soon as she was sure he was well-inside, she walked as soundlessly as possible to her door, hand to the knob, when she was startled by another person in the corridor. Eleri Vaiser.
"Lady Marion?" Eleri called in a curious whisper.
"Eleri," Marion put on her best imitation of a disapproving nun as the girl approached her. "It is very late, and unseemly that you are not in your bed."
"I thought I heard something, someone saying your name."
Marion decided to go with the truth. "It is Herr Geis. He has arrived at the estate."
Eleri's eyes grew large with the possibility of having stumbled onto a romantic interlude. "So you were speaking to him?"
"No, Eleri," she didn't need this girl thinking she was up to no good in the wee smalls. "I was asleep."
"Oh," said Fraulein Vaiser, confused by the disharmony between Marion's statement and her obvious attire. "Is it the custom, then, for the English to sleep in their clothes?" A mark of puzzlement crept onto the girl's brow.
Marion sighed. "You are sleepy, Eleri, your eyes play tricks on you. Now please, retire until morning."
"Yes, Lady Marion."
"And Eleri?"
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"I spoke to the chauffeur."
She did not have to see Eleri's face to note the frozen moment in the girl's shoulders, her back to Marion where she had been returning to her bed.
Marion allowed the seconds to pass, deliberately letting the girl swim in the potential turmoil of Marion knowing what she had been up to in the male servants' hall. Marion took a breath. "He does not know where your scarf is."
"Yes, my lady."
Marion's half-slumbering mind slipped away from reminiscence and into the imagination of conjecture, locating her again in her bed, only now it appeared to be early evening, the setting sun framed by the pulled-back black-out curtains.
She looked to the comfy bedside chair she had once found Robin in, only to see Fred Otto sitting there, rolling himself a cigarette.
"Freddy?" she asked, trying to think of how to politely ask him what he was doing there. Like the flick of a match being lit, her brain blazed for a moment with the image of Robin, the night of her engagement party, draped over the stone bench at the hedge maze's center, that feeling of being gut-punched when seeing something you knew was technically impossible: the dead man you loved alive, now present, before you.
Seeing Fred in that chair was not as sizeable a punch, not as stunning a blow, but the base sensation was similar.
Fred smiled at her, slowly and companionably, as was his way, standing up from the chair to kiss her forehead. She smiled at the salutation, though somewhat uncomfortably, not understanding how it was Fred could be here.
"Easy now, there, Fred-O," she heard, only to see Allen Dale rise from the stool at her vanity and approach her bed. He was no longer in his chauffeur's uniform coat, but still in its trousers, wide at the thighs, jodhpur-like and black. He wore only a sleeveless undershirt, and was already smoking a cigarette, down now to but a stub.
He approached her on the bed, and she watched herself, quite horrified, allow him to slide his left hand underneath her hair to the back of her neck (no injury there in this dream-state), at which she tilted back her head and accepted his kiss. Her confused, horrified mind tried to protest with words, but he had already stepped back toward the windows.
At a sound of water she turned to look toward the bath door, only to see Thomas Carter step from the tub still in his tattered RAF gear, cumbersome deployed parachute strapped to his back, saturated with water, as was he, drenched. He walked toward the bed, dragging the chute behind him like Dickens' Marley dragged his chains.
He put one knee into the mattress, plopping the waterlogged chute onto her duvet. She leaned away from him before he, too, could claim a kiss, but his hand was too fast for her, and he had hers in it and to his lips just as she turned to her right, trying desperately to find a direction to look that did not hold another unwelcome trespasser.
To her right, propped up on a single elbow, shirtless under the bed's top sheet, was Geis, his fingers stroking her right arm as a lover might absentmindedly (or pre-amorously) do.
He had not to lift himself up very far to meet with her neck, which he took possession of with his lips, until his kisses began to descend.
It was then she noticed she had no clothes on, even, to come between him and her. She was bare as a Renaissance-rendered Eve, her hair (no longer shorn as by Carter) hanging for the moment conveniently shrouding each breast, her hips below unfamiliar, almost hoop-like, round and symbolic with fertility. Her mind shouted at herself to get free of the bed, of the four men who did not belong in her room. She looked to the door that led to the corridor, the main stair beyond.
It burst open, and Robin stood framed within it, not yet inside the room, machine gun in his hand. He was in full-combat gear, down to his helmet, dirty with mud, salt sea and Dunkirk sand, and he looked as though he no longer quite had the power to keep himself upright.
He looked at her, his eyes inhumanly blue in contrast to the brown of his gear and its grit, and she wanted to shout, to tell him this was not what it seemed.
Immediately to the rear of him appeared a flock of newspaper reporters and photographers snapping photos and shouting questions at her, at Robin, whom they addressed as the Viscount.
Geis continued to kiss her, his mouth traveling ever lower, Carter again saluted her hand with his lips, Allen looked as though he would step toward the bed again to repeat his transgression, and Fred smiled as his tongue flicked out to seal the rolling paper on his smoke.
And in the last corner she had to look, the last place left to probe for hope, for rescue from this terrifying place, from which she could not move, the Kommandant stood, casually propped against the wall. Upon catching her eye he leered for a moment, clearly enjoying the view. Then he raised his left hand, still a good distance away from her bed, and blew her a kiss.
Marion screamed.
"Dame," she heard, not too loudly, from the mattress below. "Dame Marion!"
"Eva, Eva," she cried in knee-jerk response to the familiar voice as she came out of the nightmare. "Did I scream? Did I call out?"
"No, Marion, no. You have said nothing," Eva told her, now on her knees on the trundle to bring herself in sight of the mattress above. "Made no sound. What it is?"
"Do you think," Marion asked, unable to relate the dream, unwilling to try, "do you think we are responsible for our dreams?"
"No, I am sure not. Mere would say we may not be responsible for what we dream, but that our dreams will tell us who we are on the path to becoming." Seeing the dark cast of Marion's eyes at this pronouncement, she rushed to temper it, "but of course, Mere sees omens everywhere."
Marion let several moments pass as her heart settled before responding. "Yes," she agreed, thankful for the less-dire turn of conversation, "and Mr. Clun always credited her with divining the best days for garden parties. And she has always faultlessly predicted when the horses will foal, or new babes in the village make their debuts."
Eva smiled. "I will tell her that you think so well of her talent," she replied. "Thank you for inviting me to a bed last night."
"Of course. I would have done so without regard to your being out past the early curfew."
"The Kommandant's chauffeur could have driven me, likely with impunity, three-quarters of the way home."
"Yes," Marion half-scoffed, "the Kommandant's chauffeur. I suppose now I must say something in regard to him."
Eva's face showed her attentiveness in the matter. "Oui?"
"Let us say he has the lips of a scoundrel..."
"And the smile of a rogue..."
"Put together they are like as not to cause both him, and us, future trouble."
Eva cocked her head to ask, "Fraulein Vaiser?"
"Can you suss her so easily?"
"Let us say that if I were her age, and the Kommandant's driver who he is...it would seem a natural coupling, though perhaps not a lasting one." Eva paused for a moment and added, "but I have also seen him perform small acts of kindness when he believes no one is looking. Judge him for his improper treatment of you in the stairwell," she lightly shook her head, "but no further than that. Like many islanders anymore, I believe there is more to him than may easily be seen."
At this, Marion chose not to comment, Eva's perception spooking her momentarily. Her expression grew unintentionally furtive, studious, even.
"Something has changed," Eva intuited, her brows constricting, Marion seeming before her eyes to become more burdened, even, than the night before in the larder.
"Herr Geis has returned."
Eva moved into action. "Then we must hurry with the curling tongs, and ring down for breakfast."
"No," declared Marion, wearily. "Not right away." Her face had taken on a level of resolve, and with it, a queerish, infrequently seen peace-not the simple study in placidness she had worn for the years of the Occupation like a hat's netting veil, partially concealing what lay behind it.
She looked at Eva. "I am sick," she said in non-sequitur, the words on her tongue bitter as horseradish, causing a similar tearing in her eyes, "of never doing the right thing."
Nonetheless, Eva opened the door to the bath, engaged the taps in the tub, and set towels and soaps at the ready for her one-time mistress.
ALDERNEY - Agony. Of the Specialist Joseph variety.
Mitch thought of the Guernsey families, the names of which he had not always known. Thought of their faces when they had spied the offerings of potatoes, on rare occasions bread, and on rarer, flour sacks, on their doorsteps.
Sometimes it would be a young child, reacting as though Father Christmas had only just missed placing the anonymously-given benevolent gifts of Unit 1192 in their stockings. Sometimes a mother, clutching still-dirty vegetables reverently, as though they were Holy Communion wafers, prayers streaming from her lips like the tears from her eyes. Or the man of the house, warily scanning the tree line, the horizon, uncertain whether to trust such unexpected bounty.
What he tried NOT to think of were Black Market contacts, local Resistance leaders, and, always, England. England must stay buried, at any cost.
If he was to be exposed as Resistance, the line of that had to stop with the Islands. It must not reach across the Channel. It must not implicate his fellows.
In devising a stratagem they had all agreed: once found out they had at least two weeks' freedom left; at most, two months before the Jerries would likely have them to the last man, their lives, their modified mission of disrupting and spying on the enemy, over. It would be La Coupee for the unit. One final, far-from glorious (if one embraced living as more glorious than death) last stand.
No, don't think about the gang. Don't think about their faces. Don't. Think instead of the dark feathers of cormorants mounting on the Atlantic wind into a pale morning sky. Of woodlands scented with wild garlic, and briar rose. Think of home. Of Sark.
Think. You were born a Guernseyman. A simple fellow. Your home, your boat, is on Sark. Sark is where you wish to return. Casting a rod from the rocks to hook bass, bream, red and grey mullet. Think of the honeysuckle coating the countryside. Lonicera japonica.
Honeysuckle, for inconstancy.
Heavens, no! Don't think, for goodness sake, don't think of inconstancy.
...TBC...
A/N: To date I have had Eva speaking occasional words of French. (She is far more French/Norman as an Islander than the German her actual physical heritage implies.) Herein, she has begun using D'guernesiais/Guernsey French. So...
cuisaenne - kitchen, iaoue - water, bounheur - luck/good fortune, r'levaie - afternoon, nennin - no