ALDERNEY - By all things just and holy, he would never again be able to stomach any man by the name of Joseph.
His mind retreated, se defendendo.
The English hospital ward had been airy. Sunny, even, by turns. Still, this far removed from that injury, that time, Mitch could smell something of the tincture of that unforgotten air if he concentrated hard enough. Something clean, but more antiseptic than truly fresh.
Naturally, they none of them in the unit received visitors. Only, each other.
Allen had been taken off that day by the doctors, driven somewhere to see yet another specialist.
Mitch had spent the morning, well into the early afternoon, alone, only the occasional nurse for company - and brief company it always proved to be. He had taken out Cora's letter. He could not say specifically why - why he had kept it, nor why that day had so called to him to find and re-read it.
Melancholy, Mitch supposed, coupled with the nagging of pains he was only beginning to understand might well be with him for a long while, if not forever. Loneliness. The unit's patriotic agreement to remain 'dead men' cutting him closer to the quick than the others, his relationship with his mother, the widowed Lady Sophie Miller, so close, so tender. And, he was finding, far more central to his life -his dependably cheery nature - than he had expected.
And so, the self-loathing need to re-read Cora's 'Dear John' letter. '15 June 1939', it began. He could all but have recited it. 'My darling Mitch, You have been away so long. Do you remember me even a little bit?'
As was her way, she shared news from home, pedestrian facts about the price of this or that, a new hat she had wished to buy. Her ongoing quandary of whether to pursue war work of some kind. And then, just before the closing. 'I am sure you will understand, you dear, dear boy. Things have changed so much at home since you left to join the service. I know it has not been so very long by the calendar, but it has by my heart. And I do not doubt, though you are too much a gentleman to say, also by yours. Mother and Father both think it best we no longer pursue our engagement. Though, of course, they, as do I, wish you all the very best. You always have, and always will, deserve the very best. Cora'.
No declaration of love, nor even sincerity. No closing of any kind. As though she had signed it just in case he had, perhaps, been engaged to multiple girls, and she were just making sure he knew by which one he was to be thrown over.
He thought of her, of Cora, fourth daughter of Lord and Lady Winchester, their title and fortune entailed away from them as they had birthed no sons. Surely he had seemed the answer to their dilemma. He had not even made their acquaintance prior to his uncle's finally settling the inheritance of Bonchurch upon him, and not another of his male cousins.
Cora, the future Lady Bonchurch.
Their courtship, though not lengthy before he had applied for a commission in His Majesty's service, had been one marked by great vivacity, and to any observer, great like-mindedness. Everything pleased them. Her red hair and freckles in just the right, just the most charming, amount pleased him. His fine teeth, and smile, she said, pleased her.
No one could have debunked the pairing of them. Despite her family's need of him, of his title, he loved her (he thought he had loved her a great deal), and her affection for him would have taken a far-better actress than she was to fake.
Her written rejection had come at so unexpected a moment those months ago, for it was late fall, now, the first Christmas soon to pass wherein they would all have to learn to celebrate as dead men.
He wondered. At news of his 'death' would she mourn him? This (by her reckoning) ex-fiance? Would she feel relieved to have escaped before his funeral (whatever, however, that might be managed and performed)? Or would she regret her letter of months prior? Wish that she had simply waited, letting Fate take its course? If she had, she would not have had the smudge of a broken promise on her conscience. On her reputation.
He sighed. They would have had such perfect children, little red-headed cherubs (the girls), little red-headed tykes (the boys). He was thinking on these dolorous thoughts when an unexpected breeze against his privacy curtain signaled a visitor.
It had been Robin. He was up and about, but not by much, still in a wheeled chair that required an orderly or nurse to push him about.
Without any real encouragement on Mitch's part, Robin rattled on without any real focus about this and that, allowing Mitch to remain introspective, and deeply mired in the wretchedness of Cora's old letter. He asked Mitch no personal questions. (Mitch usually more than willing to volunteer personal information when no one else was wishing for it.) He did not inquire as to his injuries, nor his present state of mind. (Again, Mitch usually sharing such information with anyone speedily upon encountering them.)
"Sometimes," Robin shared, "I think the orderlies may well get lost among all these long corridors..."
Mitch's temper with Robin was (without valid reason) to the boiling. Though he had not mentioned his black mood to his friend, he seethed that Robin had not detected it, not asked after it, not empathized with his (unspoken) dejection. "Want to get lost, you say?" Mitch sniped, striking out at the man he'd risked (and gladly) his own life to save, his tone quite poisonous, "Why don't you bloody well start practicing now?"
Robin's jaw tucked under for a moment. It appeared as if he might ask some question as to the unexpected remark. His eyebrows contracted, and his eyes took on the cast of a particularly petted dog unused to mistreatment. He could not leave on his own power. The orderly presently in charge of moving about his chair had gone for tea break.
And so they had sat there, Mitch deeply awash in high dudgeon, Robin gobsmacked into silence, but unable to take any physical action in response.
Trying not to shout in pain, Mitch thought again of Robin's eyes in reaction to his unexpected lashing out. And he knew he could not do it, not as he had planned. Rage, fury, wrath. They were not truly available to him. Hatred of Robin was beyond his reach. Always had been. No doubt, in some part that very fact incensed him more from time to time than true hatred might, when he might wish it were not so truly unattainable for him.
And so he had lost his grip on it: this thing that he had depended upon keeping him alive through this present torment. And losing his grip, the floor fell out from underneath him.
Then, he screamed.
Allen Dale, masquerading as Dale Allen, Nazi-employed chauffeur, drove up to the Treeton Camp and began waiting outside the Kommandant's car as he had been instructed to do upon disembarking at the harbor. Herr Kommandant was somewhere inside, in a meeting. Allen was to attend on him once it was concluded. Everything back to normal.
Here came Anya Grigorovna. She was clean and tidy as ever, but something about her face appeared unusually drawn, pinched in a way he had not noticed before. Allen paused for a moment, wondering if he saw it so only in relation to the well-fed cheeks and curves of Marion, and even the still-coming-on figure of Eleri Vaiser, the women with whom he had spent so much time over the past two days.
Uncharacteristically Anya made a direct beeline to him and the car, not bothering (as usual) to conceal her interest in arriving there.
"Hullo," he called, friendly as always.
"Mr. Allen," she began, quite earnestly.
Perhaps she had news of Mitch, knew him to be there already, even before he had planned to ask her.
"Mr. Allen, what news have you for me?"
Right. The flier, and perhaps the Gypsy boy - doubtless both on her mind since Carter's very public escape. The Gypsy boy, he seemed to recall, was a friend of hers. And her a woman with very little contact among anyone friendly.
"The very best kind," Allen assured her, patting at his uniform pockets to locate his matches, fag already between his half-parted lips. "None." He gave her a wink.
He had expected her to visibly relax at this information, in the knowledge that the man she help escape was safe, no longer, even, being sought by his former captors. She did not.
His own face slightly fell at her lack of demonstrated relief. "What's wrong, Annie?" He could not afford subtlety. She was allotted so little time to be out-of-doors.
Her eyes had trouble steadily holding onto his. They anxiously flicked about everywhere. "There has been a fast-working illness since last I saw you. It swept through my mother's cell bloc." Her eyes shot heavenward. "She died three days ago. Herr Geis has been at his post so infrequently since the escape, I...I took it upon myself to look into files I am not meant to see. I was searching for news of my father, my other family here. I wanted to get word to them, somehow. To tell them of my mother - "
Allen resisted the gut-impulse to reach for her hand. All this sadness, and no one for her to share it with, penned up here in the officers' administration building. His spoken prompt was just above a whisper, "And?"
"German files do not lie, Mr. Allen."
Her unexpectedly solemn face now held context for him.
"What I found showed me: my family is dead. Everyone I came here with, gone. Extinguished. My uncles, my aunt, even cousins." Her brows drew into a wrinkle as she referenced Gisbonnhoffer. "He knew, all along - if he had cared to look - and he never even told me. I am alone." Her eyes came back to his, tears having gathered in them. "I am ready to go," she told him, her voice's strength disappearing into murmur, "as you have always said I might."
Allen, as was his way, smiled his confidence into those tear-filled eyes. "Then we shall get you out, as I have always said," he almost added 'my girl', before recalling to his mind that she was not a woman to lightly treat so. "I shall put my friends on it this very day." With an unpleasant twinge, his mind brought him back to Mitch. "Only..."
"Yes?"
"Only, can I get you to stick it out just a bit longer? Two days? Perhaps less. Quite possibly far less. Only, there is a man being held here, and I must find him. More important than the flier that we find him, and get him out."
One could see her going through recent detainees in her mind. "The Sarkese fisherman?" she asked, her tone understandably disconcerted.
"The very one! Is he already released?"
"No. Not yesterday, and no one has left the camp the entire day, not since Herr Kommandant arrived."
Allen slightly bit his lip, all but having forgotten the unlit cigarette he had left hanging there. "Will you do it, Love?" He winced inwardly at the endearing term, but he needed every ounce of persuasion on his side - on Mitch's side. "Will you do it...for me?"
Anya's mouth gaped for a moment, his request not expected by her, so many times he had attempted to cajole her into escaping (only to have her resist on account of her family), yet here he was begging her to stay on. Her eyes slid over toward the nearest guard, whose stance had become wary, as her time to return indoors grew near.
"Yes," she said, almost as an exhale, but not one of relief. "I will stay for your friend. I will find where he is for you, and how you may best help him."
"Good girl," Allen told her, his own relief such that he did not mark the painful resignation on display in her lonely walk back toward Gisbonnhoffer's office.
SARK - Iain Johnson felt oddly nostalgic for this small patch of an island. The scant hours he and Royston had just put in below-ground, attempting to map and vet the structures remaining in the long-abandoned mines on Little Sark had left him colder, more antsy, more desperate for fresh air than he could recall in all his years in the Scots collieries where he had made his living prior to the war.
And so, it had been such a relief to ascend from the darkness (darker than usual, as they had no proper mining tools nor headlamps between them) to the snap in the air that told one, without a doubt, that one was on Sark.
He had grown, not without noticing, fond of the island, almost aggressively so. Had he been given to poetry or sketching, doubtless it would have become his main muse and inspiration. Had he been given to much conversation he might have bored his fellows with talk of it, the thousand ways it called to him.
As was, he held the growing love of it within, knowing the only thing that stood in the way of his giving himself wholly over to this land were the Jerries that occupied it. And so his war (in loving this island, its simple commerce and uncomplicated people) had become far more personal since Unit 1192 had found themselves stranded here, without possibility of imminent escape. It was, for him, as if the Jerries had invaded and occupied Scotland itself, and he fought and schemed to foil them with the same vigor and commitment as if they had. For Sark, he had found, had come to match (if not threaten to replace) Scotland in his loyal heart.
"You think too much of blowing things up," he scolded Royston.
"And you, too much of patching things up, anymore," Royston bit back, exasperation rather than anger in his tone. "I do think," only with John would he express himself in such not-quite-certain terms, "charges placed properly, and in calculated consideration of what locations we wish to enlarge, will buy us both the space and the concealment needed for a long, covert entrenchment."
The day had been above-average windy. Their crossing of the isthmus at La Coupee had proven to require enough attention in order to keep from being blown away entirely that their conversation (such as it was) had fallen silent for the length of that segment of their journey back to La Salle's. It was, more or less, the only time Royston had stopped his tongue from wagging about his grand plans for the abandoned mines.
"There is not much wrong with La Salle's house," John had gruffly protested at one point. He, himself, was uncommonly fond of the place. It had been a long time since he had found himself in an actual and true home. It lacked only a woman, he thought, to feel fully homey.
"Only that it has no place to hide us all should the day come."
"Aye," John had agreed, never one to dissent in the face of reason. "But your thoughts on the matter are motivated at least as much by your wandering sailor's soul as by concern over our fate should we all be caught out there."
Not answering, Royston had again returned to planning more explosions.
This had carried them onto the fringes of La Salle's tenement, enough time having passed in their absence they could be fairly certain the service held for Dick Giddons had concluded.
They spied the house in question in the near distance, the figure of someone, a man, yet at the grave they two and Robin had dug out just that morning.
As they mounted the last stile before the barnyard gate, John finally answered Royston with the sentiment he had been answering him with in his head for the last two-thirds of their journey. "Still," he declared, "I would sleep better in this underground castle you have conceived if we could find an Islander who knows the shafts, the layout, and possible structural weaknesses."
"Well...aye, John, aye," Royston agreed, "but where're we gonna hunt up a gran'da who's enough of his mind to recall tunnels and galleries of summat dug a hundred year ago?"
"Tush," John called him down, no longer engaged in the discussion, having recognized the form sitting alongside the grave. "Get yourself to the house, then, Man. Tell the others all about it."
"But you'll be along, right, John?"
"Shortly," he assured Royston. " I willna tarry longer than necessary."
Royston struck out in the direction of the stone farmhouse, cheered, no doubt, by sight of the chimney's smoke, the flowers set in the south-facing window to designate that it was safe to approach.
John turned himself in the direction of the grave, which had been covered both with dirt, and also a thick topping of large stones. It was Blind La Salle who sat upon the hem of the stones, his knees apart, his elbows to them, his face toward the sky.
Other than the mound, the grave was yet unmarked by cross or headstone.
Stephen had heard the limp in Royston's gait upon the barnyard ground, and knew him to be walking with another. It was no great leap to perceive that it was John. "I am undone," he told the big man. His voice was unfamiliar, unsteady and uncertain in a way Stephen's voice simply never was. "I believe, actually, John, that today, this day, this grim, grim, day, has taken from me everything I had left to give. The very last...anything...that I had been saving to help in enduring this occupation, this...separation." He did not say Louise's name, but it hung heavily in the air about him. "A three-legged chair will still support weight, if somewhat unevenly so. With Dick...without Dick - my chair is knocked down to but two legs..."
John looked down to the blind rector, this man he had so greatly come to respect. Without speaking in reply to Stephen's speech, he simply lowered himself down onto the hem of the stones mounding the grave, took his place at his friend's side, and prepared to listen.
"Dick was third son of another tenant. His first brother would inherit, his second, run the fishing boat for the Giddons' family. Each tenement here is plotted as large enough to support, and be worked by, a single family. As he grew, there was nothing for him on their farm. I took him on here. It was my intent, always my intent, to declare him my heir. Such rights here may not pass to a woman. And I knew, he was such a good boy, such a blessing to us, I knew he would care for Louise - let her live on here - should anything happen to me. He had become so like my son." He paused, having never said the words with such finality out loud, "the only child I would ever have."
Stephen rubbed at his face with his hands like he was attempting to scrub something from it. "There was such peace in that. In knowing such things were settled." His mind circled again and again over things he believed he had mis-calculated, disastrous errors in his judgment, fear that his own pride, his own self-satisfaction in his counsel might prove his downfall. "It does not usually bother me, you know," he spoke to John as though the larger man might answer. "Being without sight."
In the distance two gulls called for one another.
"But I could not even navigate my own vessel to bring her back home." In his fretful actions, he withdrew his clay pipe from his shirt pocket and began to idly play with it in his grown-fidgety hands. "Would you take me, would you cross the Channel to help me bring her home?"
Enough silence passed that John knew he would have to answer. He shook his head, never one to offer an untruth. "I wouldna. 'Tis suicide to attempt a crossing in such a small boat. For if the waves and the capricious weather do not sink you, U-boats and Jerry patrols will."
Stephen's shoulders had begun to shake as he listened to John tell him exactly the facts that he already knew.
John took his hand, and laid it across the former rector's shoulders.
"I have not the words any longer to express how much I need her here," Stephen declared. "For every triumph," he cleared his tear-clogged throat, "and I know we've had many, and for every tragedy," he did not reference Dick outright, "I find myself frightened. For everything that comes to pass, it further separates us. Estranges us, even. The things, the life we were meant to share - I want only to live that again. Even if it had to be here, during these times. Even if it means selfishly condemning her to suffering so that she might be by my side." He gasped quietly, his speech further exhausting him. "There, I have said it. I'll speak on it no more. Today is a day of mourning, and so I mourn." He stopped, as though he were indeed through, only to complete a quick intake of breath before adding, "the others have drummed it out of Robin, John. Mitch has been taken to Alderney for questioning, has been detained. Allen was there when it happened." Stephen's lower jaw began to shudder. "And so, in thinking I knew what was best, convincing the Lady Marion to go with him, I have lost us Mitch...to an uncertain future."
John deeply inhaled at the unexpected news. He reached for Stephen's pipe, and using both his hands (his arm now removed from his friend's shoulders), he re-packed what tobacco there was left in it, added just a pinch of what he had remaining in his own pouch. This done, he replaced the pipe, ready to light, in Stephen's hands.
After this action a beat passed. John thrust his chin to the afternoon sky, and let out with a stream of Gaelic, his rumbling tone reverent, unlike the usual times when he chose his mother-tongue to express anger or condemnation. "My gran used to say that to us often. The English, I believe, is "whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith." He continued to look beyond the barnyard, at the Sark landscape, knowing quite clearly what the nature of the mountain he would pray to see removed was.
Here, Stephen took over, using his shirt cuffs to dry his eyes, as his handkerchiefs were all left behind in the house. "Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye shall receive them, and ye shall have them." He reached out and found John's shoulder, using a handhold there to lever himself up from where he had been sitting. They two passed some time thus: Stephen standing, his face to the wind, John seated upon the edge of the grave, each with his own thoughts.
The wind switched its direction, and Stephen sensed Robin heading over in their direction from where he had left the cozy indoors of the house. "Do you hear that, Robin?" he asked, more of his usual self returning, "'And when you stand praying,' it is written following, 'forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses'."
"As I have said, Stephen," Robin spoke out to the man gently, "I hold you no grudge. The responsibility in the matter is not yours."
The rector disagreed, shaking his head. He had not been at asking forgiveness in the taking of Mitch. "It is Mr. Carter I recall to your mind, Robin."
Predictably overlooking the rector's repeated request for reconciliation between him and the flier, Robin looked to John, and seeing the grim set of his mouth discerned that Stephen had told him the dismaying news. "We wait for Allen," he added. "For what information he might bring."
John nodded, resolute, and the three men walked as a group back to the house.
GUERNSEY - Sir Edward, Lord Nighten looked at his only daughter's photograph. He had removed it from the album and he held it within his slightly shaking grip. She could not have been more than eight when it had been taken. The small white lapdog of his wife's (what had it been called? Caesar?) had squirmed at the last minute, blurring a large percent of the otherwise impeccable studio picture. But not, somehow, Marion's face. That illuminating endowment of natural intelligence showing there much as it had in life. Distortion, obscurement all about her, but Marion: firm, strong, present. And always: aware.
His girl.
"Father," she used to call him. Never Poppa, never Papa. Always serious in her address of him, formal. And yet, in her interaction with him, exactly the opposite. When she was at home, his knee was never chilly, his side never lonely, for she was there. And so often the perfect companion.
Miranda had said he spoiled her. "My dear," he had told Lady Nighten, "if taking her with me to chambers, or to my office to hear debate and reasoning among the best minds of our time is spoiling a child...by all means, I should see all England's school-aged children spoiled so!"
And of course Miranda had laughed, her perfect, warmly enchanting laugh reserved only for his (few- and far-between) foibles.
In retrospect he ought to have displayed more eccentricity if it would have won him more of that precious laughter.
He lifted the photo up, placing it in a row with photos he had also selected of his son, Clem, and Lady Nighten, his beloved wife. All of them - how could it be? All three, his precious family entire, dead. Lost to him.
"Do you not miss them some, Eva? Your mistress, the young master and Lady Marion? Tell me you do." He spoke out to Eva Heindl who had been at making and pouring his afternoon tea.
"Certainly, my lord," she agreed with him. "I miss the family, as do we all. But Marion," she stepped to the row of photos he had assembled like plots in a cemetery and withdrew Marion's, "Lady Marion will be home before nightfall, Sir Edward. She has but stepped out to do a bit of shopping."
He looked at Eva. She was such a charming girl. A peaceful companion, really. How nice, how relieving, how reassuring to know that Marion would soon be home.
After Eva returned it to his hand, he brushed his thumbnail over the photograph he had been contemplating. Brutus! He recalled in a flash. Of course! That foolish little Maltese had been named Brutus.
SARK - Djak eyed Stephen as the blind man set about making part of the evening meal. He moved with an unexpected grace and confidant carriage about his own kitchen, knowing where everything needed was, every ingredient or utensil for the appointed task. But her eyes became little more than slits each time his hands came in contact with the food to be served. As he measured milk into a glass, his first finger bent over the lip to inform him when it was nearly full. As he cut potatoes, his hands were constantly rubbing and playing across the pieces on the cutting surface to show him how well he progressed in that work. Necessary flour was measured by its weight in his bare hands, added to the mixture he was stirring in just the same way.
Wills sat across the table from Djak, his own eyes as keenly attuned to hers as were hers to watching Stephen. He could not figure why she might be so cross at the sight of their generous host concocting them what was sure to be a very filling, well-made supper.
If he were to take, as Robin insisted, this person, this girl, for his liver, he needed to understand her. Her feelings in this instance should not be such a conundrum to him.
Carter, seated beside Djak on the long bench pulled up to table, had not taken notice of the Gypsy boy's particular attentiveness to Stephen, but he could not mistake the intense concentration Wills Reddy was directing the boy's way.
Carter turned to Djak and asked a brief, three word question. Getting a longer answer, he turned to Wills, to sort it out for him. "He's upset by how much the staretz is touching the food with his hands."
Wills' look did not lighten but a little at this intended illumination.
Carter continued, "The Rom, they have very set rules where cleanliness is concerned. Even in a kitchen, even with what would be to us clean hands, for them it is almost a religious commitment, their adherence to their particular purity laws."
"So even though Stephen is Gadjo," Wills asked, using a new word from his syllabary, "non-Romany, this necessary use of his hands makes Djak disrespect him?"
Carter turned and asked another question of the boy, whose eyes still did not stray from Stephen and his work. "No," Carter replied. "He does not disrespect the staretz, only, would prefer to prepare his own food."
"What's that you keep sayin'? Star-Etts?" Royston asked, from his post monitoring the barnyard from the window, like them all, anxious to sight Allen returning with news.
"Staretz," Carter considered. "It's a word...a Russian word for, someone with a great degree of moral authority. A holy man."
"Well, little man's got that right, hasn't he?" John asked, eyeing the Gypsy.
"Got more than that, looks like, lads," Robin sang out, having circled 'round to the back of Djak, and seeing a peculiar form there under the large shirt of Wills' she now wore.
Before Djak knew she was the subject of her rom baro's speech, he had his hand down the collar and back of the shirt, and had plucked, of all things, a small leather-bound book from within. Quickly, but he held it too high out of her grasp, she tried to snatch it back.
Wills sighed, certain she would never be taught not to take things that weren't hers.
Carter suppressed a chuckle, unable to keep himself from being charmed by the boy's persistently acquisitive fingers. Having been a prisoner himself, in more than one war, he knew better than the rest the at-times deep desperation in such situations. The feeling of needing something of one's own, or the despair of not being able to get, find, borrow, or beg the one thing (whether it was paper, string, or a single match) that one required. He found himself a little taken with this boy's way of stockpiling odds and ends for the uncertain future. Certainly he would have found it hard to take the kid to task over it. "La Salle himself has spoken that what is his is the boy's as well," Carter defended the boy's action to the others.
"Aye," Robin (for the very first time) agreed with him. He had the small book cracked open, his eyes to the page. "But I think in this matter Stephen might likely change his mind."
"What matter is that, Robin?" Stephen asked, wiping his hands on a dishtowel.
"This would appear to be property of your wife."
"What?" the former rector's hands immediately extended into the empty air directly in front of him to receive the item, his hands trailing along the binding, and the unadorned cover.
Robin helpfully explained what he had seen of its contents. "'Twould appear our Gypsy boy has located your Louise's diary."
"Were there more?" Stephen asked, his face showing anticipation he made no effort to conceal. "Many more?"
Carter looked at Wills, who attempted to ask Djak the simple question in Romany.
"Djak found ten, possibly more just like it." Wills had steered away from the use of pronouns, so easily mis-said. Taking a breath, he used one here, "he took this one, he says, because it had the most blank pages."
Stephen's hands shot to the spine, trying to discern the non-Braille numerals stamped there. "What year," he asked, like a dehydrated man begging for water, to any who would answer. "What year?"
Robin brought his hand to still La Salle's, removing the blind man's to slightly lower on the spine so that he might see and report what the stamped golden numbers read. "Nineteen-forty," Robin announced, though all in the room had already suspected it.
"John," Stephen called out to the unit's medic, where he sat in his usual place, also looking out the window, grimly anxious, never one to fully trust another's standing watch. "John - read a page. February. Read something in February."
Robin extended the book to John, who took it, not at all certain as to why he was called upon to read aloud.
The small volume looked no larger than a checkbook in John's hands. The handwriting within proved straight and legible, the kind that would've gotten high marks at any grammar school. It curled with a woman's touch, and he found himself almost to the point of burying his nose for an instant to scent the journal's pages, but stopped himself just in time. He readjusted his proximity to the page, trying to cover for his instinctual behavior by making as though his eyes were adjusting to the small script. "17 February," he began, "cooler than last year's winter..." The entry went on to detail mundane happenings on the farm, an inventory of eggs, milk, comments on the progress of cheeses aging, which cows were fresh for breeding and the like, with a few personal sentences at the end.
Upon listening to it (the supper forgotten, the outside world forgotten) Stephen's face had become nearly beatific.
"Without intending to," Carter murmured to Djak, "you have done a good thing. These are the writing of the staretz's deported wife. You have made him very happy."
Djak inclined her head for a moment, accepting the unexpected praise, and followed it quickly with a question. "Who then," she asked pragmatically, "is to have the blank pages?"
The boy's surprising response almost knocked Carter off the bench they occupied. "If you want paper so badly," he promised, working to suppress signs of humor, "I'll speak to them about finding you some. After you show the rom baro where the other volumes are located."
"Well, I do not want the others," Djak informed him. "They are all quite full of writing."
"Naturally," Carter agreed. "You will be the only one disappointed by that, I assure you." A smile crept slowly across his lips, and he gave up fighting against it.
At the reading of Louise La Salle's small journal, its brief, unexciting entry, the room had taken on a momentary (doubtless imagined) glow. Though the men of the unit had never met her, though there were no photographs or drawings of Madame La Salle to be found in the house, her home nonetheless retained something of her, in the arrangement of her few knick-knacks, the knitted cozies and handmade lace, the table runners and other things she had handcrafted for her home. And of course, in the strong memory her husband carried of her.
They stayed in this house, using her things, living, to some degree, the life she had been forced to abandon. They were a society of men, missing home, missing that feminine something that seemed to them all to delineate what 'home' meant.
Robin (the least acquainted of them with such a concept of 'home') was the first to break the snug silence and speak, his mind to Mitch, to Marion, to twenty-thousand other present-day concerns. "Nineteen-forty," he echoed, catching Wills' eye. "Would that I could turn back time so easily."
A moment passed, Wills holding his gaze. "Wait," he asked. "Say that again."
"What?" Robin repeated, "'would that I could turn back time'?"
"Yeah," said Wills. "Ask me again later. I think you have given me an idea." The communication officer's brows knit together in thought, and he rose to plate his portion of the supper, removing himself from the others to another, quieter room that he might better think out and plan his potential idea.
...TBC...
A/N: You will find the quoted passage in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 11, verses 23-25.
Songs, Books, and Films have been updated in my Author's Profile, now current through Chapter 13. (Of course, no songs were used in this chapter...)