GUERNSEY - Barnsdale windmill - 2:15 a.m. - Marion set down the needle to engage the 78rpm and send its verboten sounds out over the Nightwatch airwaves. Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra swung out on "Take the 'A' Train".

All about her she noticed the growing amount of space in the half-cellar, her precious stores against the privation of the Occupation diminishing. Fewer barrels, fewer jars. So much here distributed by her in the last months of ever-increasing hardship for Islanders. She thought of how in the past each supply, each treasured piece of her stash had stood in her mind as a reason to tolerate Geis, to go through with the promise she had given him. She had believed that if she could take that distasteful future and bend it to her will, her desire to spread charity, spread hope among the populace...perhaps it could be justified. Perhaps she could hate herself less for it.

And so what had today wrought? A ridiculous morning with Eleri 'shopping' in St. Peter Port. (Although, Marion recalled, perhaps an unexplored possibility to do some good on a medical front at Ginny Glasson's canny suggestion.) An afternoon sacked out in her bed. And an evening...an evening wherein she had set about emotionally eviscerating the most powerful man in her immediate world.

Until Father had coughed. If Marion had been of a more sardonic and jaded bent she might have smirked. A slight compression of the lungs, a throaty expulsion of air. All it had taken for her to feel, quite strongly, the end of her lead rope. To remind her to heel. That what she did had consequences she was not prepared to pay. Or rather, that she was not prepared for him to pay.

It broke her heart to imagine Sir Edward put out of Barnsdale, or worse, imprisoned, oblivious as to why he was being mistreated, in proximity to nothing familiar, not family, not staff, not surroundings, not, even, respect he had known his life entire.

To imagine herself put out of Barnsdale...another matter entirely. A welcome dismissal, she could almost believe. Freedom from chains and expectations, from Occupation-made masks threatening to fuse to one's true self. But for Edward, she would disappear...somehow.

A child's dream, she knew...invisibility. On these islands, during this time. She had told Robin as much, though he did not wish to hear her.

She thought again of the dressing-down she had given Geis, of how, at that portentous cough of her father's, some of what she had wished to say seemed to stick quite dryly within her throat, still glued there, unsaid, these long hours later.

"And there we've heard, Mr. Hitler," she sometimes like to pretend as though Geis' Fuehrer was a listener, addressing him directly, "Chick Webb and his orchestra perform 'Stompin' at the Savoy', which you will recognize refers to the renown Savoy Ballroom in New York's Harlem, also known as 'The Track'. It was Mr. Webb who introduced the world to a wonderful Negro singer in Miss Ella Fitzgerald. That particular instrumental was followed by "Take the 'A' Train", named for the New York City," she swallowed back 'tube' before dangerously slipping up, "subway line that travels non-stop from midtown to Harlem."

She clicked the mike's transmit button closed, and proceeded to spin the next record. A breeze seemed to have crept down the unlit stairs, stirring the air of the so rarely disturbed half-cellar. At the accompanying sound of Robin's voice in the dark Marion did not (though his presence was unexpected) even stiffen in surprise.

"The Nightwatch speaks of these places as though she has been there," he said, stepping to the edge of the small pool of light her lantern threw upon the uneven flagstone floor. "I forget sometimes that she is so well-traveled."

Marion looked at him. At what she could see of him in the dark: ivy cap, oversized dogtooth jacket, the lapels fraying. "She does not," Marion assured him, speaking of herself in third person.

"And so you have been there? To Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom?" he asked, "...with the Mertons?"

"Yes," she replied truthfully, though with a hesitance that surprised herself. "Before you were dead, and then, after." Her eyes would not stay on his. "But not with the Mertons."

"No," Robin shook his head circumspectly. "Sir Walter and his wife would not likely frequent such...nightclubs, one supposes." His eyebrows steepled in a look equal parts hangdog and warily curious. "Is it common in America for single girls to do so? Travel about New York City's subway, its boroughs and nightclubs, alone? Without escort or chaperone?"

"No," she told him, without trying to conceal the truth. "Not alone."

He chewed a bit on his lip. "And if I were to ask if you had stepped out on the sly with young Susie Merton as a lark?"

She shook her head.

"No," he agreed with regret, his assumption confirmed.

"Come, and sit," she encouraged him, showing him a nearby crate just beside her of similar height to the one she occupied.

He ringed the table that held the lantern, microphone and record player, careful not to trip over any wires, and accepted the offered seat at her side, his expression still tinted with guilt and regret.

Without him asking, she switched her hips just so, until she was cattycorner to him, her back fitted between the divot well where his collarbone extended out into shoulder. At this angle their height was very alike. The fit of their two bodies together as effortless as always.

He had not offered himself for such a pillow, but he did nothing to complain at her unexpected, snug proximity. His nose breathed the scent of her hair, hidden beneath a printed headscarf.

The still-new-to-her scratch of his beard tickled at the base of her now-exposed neck, her own hair usually covering that sensitive area.

His hand came up toward her injured cheek as though instinctually. He did not make actual contact with her hurt. "See," he told her, referencing the visible stitching of the German doctor on Alderney, a small scissors' prick where she had startled just as the man had been tying off. "Even when they try to help, they hurt you."

Marion said nothing. She could not see anything of him as she sat so closely against him. But she could feel his breathing, could smell something about him that spoke of life. Of Robin. Even as the not-original-to-him dogtooth coat's scent, the fragrance of ocean and fruits de mer, were not things she had ever before attributed to him, nor things of which she had any past memories to associate with him.

As their eyes looked off into the same direction, at the patch of night sky visible through the doorless cellar entry at the top of the steep stairs, Robin broke the soft silence of intimate contact that had sprung up between them. "What's it like," he asked, never having been there himself, "New York?"

Marion did not have to think long to answer. Referencing the record she had spinning just now, playing where they could hear it, "It's Gershwin," she told him, wagging her head in wonder that it could be parsed out so easily. "It's Rhapsody In Blue."

1939 - Late Fall - New York City - Harbor Pier 59 - She should have had questions to ask Freddy of what he claimed was the best way home - across the Atlantic - he had been able to find for her. But she had had so few answerable questions in the days - nearly three weeks - since their visit to the British Consulate.

Three days ago he had taken a train out to Long Island, and the Belmont Park Race Track. She had declined to share the trip. Apparently it had been a fruitful one on several fronts, and he had met up with an old acquaintance.

When Fred had said she was to go today, she packed, she paid her hotel bill, directed one of the many restaurants at the Waldorf-Astoria to prepare a sack lunch for her, and followed him into a waiting cab.

Packing had seemed so strange; looking at clothes, gifts she had bought for her family in the time away - things like her record collection (quite swelled with albums from her time in America) that would have once been so very, very dear to her now seeming...unimportant. Why pack? Why take anything? None of it mattered. Clothes of any sort could be gotten anywhere. Gifts seemed to represent happier times, hopeful reunions, the most important of which she would never experience. Her and Beau's equestrian awards and once-dear-to-her newspaper clippings of their triumphs seemed like hard-to-explain children of an unwise affair. And records, music...a pastime (once, a passion) that seemed now to stir her not a bit. Not even the saddest of songs.

Truly, she had packed for Fred's sake. To help him feel some sense of normalcy about her before he set her on a ship (she assumed it would be a ship of some ilk) bound for England, possibly not to arrive - nor return to America. Crossings in the current world climate, Europe at war, were perilous at best. Deadly at worst.

He had not tried to argue her out of going. Fred was never much one to believe he had what it took to change her mind, once set, on any subject. He had, instead, thrown heart and soul into locating some sort of passage, however dodgy.

"Wish't'goodness I could go with y'all," he told her. "But Lucky George'll have none of me, unless we're throwing dice. 'Bout all I could do to get him to take you on." He threw a sidelong glance at her where she shared the backseat of the cab with him. "He likes women, though. The prettier the better. Only," he warned, "stay in your cabin as much as possible."

"You don't trust him?" she asked, more conversationally than curiously. Curiosity had long abandoned her.

"Trust him?" he half-snorted mid-inhale, smoke billowing out of his nostrils. "That sorry old ex-rum runner? Thing is, Sugar, anyone we can find to agree to take you home is exactly that: un-trustworthy. Lucky George is better than some. But he's not your friend."

They were close to arriving at the location he had directed the cab to. Fred reached into his suit coat and pulled out an embarrassing wad of American cash. "Not your friend, nor mine. Give him a third now. The next when you know you've come halfway. The rest only when you set foot on English soil - or dock. Either should do. Keep it on your person at all other times. And please," he cracked a smile, though she did not return it, "don't gamble more than half of it away with the crew."

Marion accepted the huge bulk of tightly rolled bills. She did not tell him that back home in England she was required almost never to carry cash, the Nightens having everything in their lives billed to them, any incidental monies held by the chauffeur or housekeeper until they were needed. She had never seen this much money - British or American - in her life. Yet he handled it with the casualness of unstarched handkerchiefs.

They exited the taxi, and the driver proceeded to unpack the car's trunk of her baggage.

They were arrived at the agreed-upon slip. The vessel there was rough from use, more so than mere travel might be responsible for. Much about it smacked of disrepair. The half that did not smack of numerous rough crossings made by it. On the upper deck (there was, indeed, only a single deck) she could see a large man. At the sight of Fred on the wharf below he both grimaced and smiled in a combination of what appeared to be anticipation.

She could see the moment had come. "Take this." She pressed an old finishing cloth taken from Beau's leather grooming kit bag into Fred's hand. "It should pay you back for most," she referenced the cash he had just handed to her.

Fred responded to her with a look of confusion, until he felt the weight - the unmistakable weight of Cartier craftsmanship - within the cloth, knotted just as it had been the last time he had been shown it. His eyes registered comprehension of what it held, and concern at her parting with it.

"And cover some of Beau's expenses." Here, at that saying of his name, her voice caught in her throat. "Don't stud him out too much," she ridiculously cautioned the seasoned horse breeder. "Keep his stock valuable." She looked at him, surprised to see something of smile begin about his lips. "He will pay for his keep, I think. When he is healed you must let him have his head at steeplechase again..."

"Marion, honey," he stopped her, not telling her what she already knew - that there was no one in the equestrian world, save her, that would ever be able to ride Saracen's Beau recreationally, much less to competition victories.

"Freddy," she told him, recalling their minds to one night in a Nicholasville barn, "you should have asked me your question again."

At that he flicked what was left of his self-rolled cigarette to the ground and put his hands to both her upper arms, almost as though he might shake her. Instead, he hugged her arms with the firmness of his grip. She could feel the reassuring strength of his hands through her coat and sweater.

How many times these past weeks was she only able to rise in the morning because of Fred's steadfast tending of her? His determined nature and unerring sense of direction, of propulsion, in life?

"No," he told her. "Not now. But someday." He recited a line from a popular song they had danced to after a late supper just the night before. "Let's say goodbye with a smile, Dear/For awhile, Dear, we must part...We'll meet again/Don't know where, don't know when/But I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

The large man she had sighted on the deck had descended to them at the level of the pier. She felt his eyes upon her.

"No," the man told Fred, shaking his head. "She'll never do. Fall sick before we've gone ten knots. Best leave her here with you, eh?" There was a decided French Canadian accent to his speech.

Marion nearly spoke up in dissent, until a firmer squeeze of Fred's hand on her arm alerted her that his other hand was already reaching back inside his jacket.

"What's this?" Lucky George asked, feigning ignorance as Fred withdrew another roll of cash, and presented it to him.

"That - in addition to the agreed-upon amount - should take care of any potential medical bills - or inconvenience, I reckon."

The two men stared at one another for a moment.

Lucky George then let out with a piercing whistle, and several stevedores appeared to cart her steamer trunk and luggage up the gangplank. George, however, did not follow them as they retreated to the ship. "Miss - ?" he said.

"Marion," she told him, deliberately leaving off her title and family name at Fred's previous instruction.

"Miss Marion. You have your fare for me?"

She was about to tell him she would be glad to make the first of three payments to him when they were once on board and underway, when the hand of Fred's still upon her upper arm drew her toward him, and she allowed herself to be caught in the full grip of his farewell.

Although he had kissed her many times (and not without her consent) on cheek and forehead, it was the first fully romantic kiss they had ever shared.

She tried to recall what it was to kiss a man. A man not Robin. She had done so in the past, of course. But not many men, and not, all told, many times.

Unsurprisingly, she found herself unable to fully engage in the act. Her mind, certainly, was not in it. And Fred had none of (among other things) the abandon with which Robin would have been able to coax her into flouting the so-public venue with such a display of affection.

Fred tasted of...Fred. He seemed more than proficient in the act. And as his friend she wanted - so very much she wanted - to be able to please him. To leave him here on this pier, in America, with a memory of something more than sawdust in his mouth.

She knew that what she would do next was wrong. That it was betraying something within herself. But she took a moment and imagined herself at a very different pier. An English berth, an oceanliner, and a departure where the man she loved had not come to see her off. Had offered no kisses, no flowers, no bon voyage or luck to her, to Beau.

She had wondered often if Robin knew she had seen him, as she had stood on the deck with the Mertons, confetti flying, handkerchiefs waving as they pulled away from the dock, headed out to sea.

Among the crowd gathered far below - his telltale silver roadster nowhere in sight - he stood...with Mitch, of course, at his side. He blew no kisses, he didn't wave or cheer. He glared at the boat like one might at a rival Viking's lit funeral barge.

She wanted to shout to him. To will him to make eye contact with her. But she was far too far above, too distant, and if he had caught sight of her he had finished his gazing by the time she spied him. The Mertons milled about her speaking of dinner and cocktails and whether one might need one's full mink or simply a nice stole once out on the open sea.

She watched Robin, even as the dock retreated from view. What if she had kissed him in that moment? If, somehow, it had been possible to do so? Would she still have gone? Would he still have hated her (for she thought he had) for going? What would that kiss of temporary farewell have tasted of? Would it have had the power to persuade him to join her? Would she have wanted him to do so?

And so, she thought of that never-shared kiss, thought about it on that New York City pier, the lips of Fred Otto of the Lexington Ottos receiving the bussing with which she had been unable to grace Robin's.

She had never known if Freddy had felt the falseness of that embrace. At her act of perhaps, betrayal of Robin's memory, tears of surprisingly still unspent grief threatened to slip from her eyes and dampen her cheek.

Before that could happen, she felt Fred pull away.

"Someday, Sugar," he said, his voice not quite at its usual strength. Had he been another man he might have threatened the still by-standing Lucky George with harm if she were to be mistreated in any way on the coming journey. He did not.

He did not stay to watch the ship weigh anchor. He walked straight to the cab, threw a laid-back wave in her direction, and as the taxi expeditiously pulled away, she could no longer see his face from the shadow cast across his cheeks by his hat.

"When was the last time you saw England?" she asked Robin, the considerable length of Gershwin's Rhapsody still playing.

He considered and seconds passed, in his way finding it hard to recall in this moment any other time. "February," he finally told her. "Around St. Valentine's Day."

It seemed so recent to her, as though he might have said, 'last week-end'. "And you arrived here - that is - you were stranded in April?" Knowing just how much of the record remained, and just how far things between them might go before she would have to switch it out, she let her head turn so that the ear of her uninjured side rested on his shoulder. "Where were you before that?"

"For two months we were in-country, in France, where we had been dropped." So casual, so routine, he said it. Dropping into an occupied country from out of the sky, only a bit of rope and silk to soften one's fall.

"So you have been away from home for almost nine months, now."

"No," he disagreed, jutting his chin with the thought. "It no longer feels much like home to me."

"How so? Is London so very changed since the war? Is it - are there - very great differences...in the landscape? The people?"

He brought his arm about her waist, letting his hand set on the upper curve of her hip. It felt as though he were settling in to tell her a story. "It is not London that has changed, though the war has certainly left its mark. It is only, as a dead man one finds London - the necessary need to avoid one's old haunts - one finds oneself, perhaps, so very changed. Hopping from the homefront to the battlefront to the underground front can be disorienting. It is better here." His hand gave her a little pat. "We are at war. We do not forget it. We do not go on brief holiday from it. Anymore than do the Islanders."

How strange his thoughts sounded to her, as though he were choosing to be here. As though he had settled on it, on the Islands, as his cause; this man who had no tie here, not even as a one-time visitor prior to his unit's stranding.

She had not meant to ask it. She did not know why she did. Perhaps it was that he was telling her things. That they were not arguing. Perhaps it was that even after all this time, all the separate life between them she really, still wished to know. "What were you thinking that day?"

His voice was nearly sleepy with the calm of the music and her resting against him. "What day?"

"The day I sailed for America."

"That day?" He said it almost with a little laugh, but not a fully rueful one. How far off that day seemed to him. Truly, a day from his previous life.

"I saw you, you know," she told him. "You did come to the boat."

"You did?" he asked, giving her a squeeze. "Caught me out?"

"Mm-hmm."

He planted a kiss in her hair, for him the turbulent emotions of that day intangible to him in this moment. He spoke of them like an old man writing his memoirs; all recollection, no fire. "What was I thinking? Nothing good. I was thinking that I ought to storm the boat and demand you not go. That I ought to attempt to turn you over my knee like the spoilt child I thought you were showing yourself to be. That I ought to report you to Scotland Yard for having stolen a Cartier ring, whose promise you'd no intent to keep faith with."

At this she slightly pulled away from him so that she might see his face, and he hers.

"And, most upsettingly, that if I enacted any of those tactics that you would never wish to see me again. You must ask Mitch if you truly wish to know my black mood that fateful day. Doubtless he recalls it better than even do I. He took the brunt of it in your absence, after all."

"Mitch?" she asked, her eager eyes searching his face. "You have seen him? He was released and returned?"

Robin winced. "Your fiance, you may as well know, does not excel at keeping his promises."

Marion's jaw tensed at the news. She dug her hand into her pocket and again withdrew the growing dog-eared German telegrams, handing them over to Robin as if to further prove Geis' treachery.

Robin glanced at each briefly, not bothering to smooth them out to enable easier reading. "I could pretend to you it is the low level of light available, but we both know your German far exceeds my own. What do they say?"

She took them back from him. "They say that SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer not only has left behind a loving, faithful wife in Germany, but also...two small children." She gestured with the longer reply (written, unbeknownst to her, by Underlieutenant Diefortner), "and that their husband and father loves and wishes them well and cannot wait to again be with them."

Robin nodded his head. "And so he has attempted to dupe you."

Marion looked at him, herself now sitting fully independently of him. "That is all?" Her head cocked at the oddity of his nonchalant behavior in the wake of the news. "You are not ready to battle?"

Robin's face took on a bemused cast, eyebrow raised, at her seeming wish (uncharacteristic for her) for him to challenge Gisbonnhoffer. Why, he wondered, would she not sit back again, where they had been so cozy, so peaceful? "Oh, it is a venal betrayal, to be sure," Robin agreed. "But you must understand, Marion. From my point of view it is no worse that you are taken from me, from your own precious freedom, by a bigamist than by a Nazi, than by a man involved in unjustly subjugating others - than by any man that would break your heart - and possibly you - in the process. A villain is a villain. I fear that you have been among evil men so long you have forgotten there is any other kind."

He could not, rather, he thought it not best to point out that the news of Gisbonnhoffer's lack of respect for vows of any kind was at the moment an unexpected ray of hope for him. Yet another obstacle between he and the woman he loved surmounted. The German lieutenant removed as any true rival. Perhaps, thought Robin, without so much as the slightest assistance on his own part, his life was coming back from where it had been stolen.

"Yes," Marion agreed with him on villains and evil men - not knowing the further turnings of his mind. "Well, I do know something of a scoundrel," she eyed him, taking his measure like she would have in the old days. "I seem to have fallen in among more than my fair share of those here of late." Without a pause she added, "Your man Allen kissed me."

"What?" And now Robin sat up straight, absent calm, farewell peacefulness. "Well, I cannot have that, now can I?"

Marion's breath exhaled in a scoff of disbelief. "And so you are more upset with his behavior than Geis'?"

Robin pressed his lips together hard and shook his head. "Your Geis will have this set upon his list of wrongs, do not mistake me. But how can I have my gang forcing themselves upon you - it was by force, yes? Non-consensually?"

She let her eyes slightly bug at the insanity of his query. "Well, yes, of course."

Robin sighed. "If Allen has done it, then I must have a talk with them all. This sort of behavior must not become SOP." Somewhere in mid-speaking he had gotten his bearings, a teasing coming into his tone where burgeoning outrage had threatened to bloom only moments earlier.

Hearing this, Marion sparked to the alteration, herself choosing to view the incident with Allen differently as well. She mused. "Perhaps they are only wishing to be like you."

"Like me?"

She acted as though weighing it in her mind. "You have, in your time..."

"Yeees. If memory serves."

"Memory?"

He did not wait for a better invitation. He grabbed her to him as determinedly, but as gently (minding her recent woundings) as he knew how. "Know this," he told her, "there is nothing in my life that serves, as far as I am concerned, as impediment to being with you, Marion Nighten. Not war, not prior troth, not separation of time, not difference of opinion. I am as unattached as last you left me. And as steadfast in what I want." And for the first time in months he kissed her.

He did not kiss her long (though she would have let him), nor as passionately as he might have wished (though in that moment she would have matched him), the trauma to her person, even to her very lips, still fresh in his mind.

As he pulled away, Marion returned little peck kisses, though the act did hold some small discomfort in it yet. She let herself imagine Robin's kiss (no matter how truncated, no matter how reserved) washing away the misguided salutes of Allen Dale, the myriad gestures of affection she had received over the years at the hands of Geis, imagined herself as a chalkboard, erased in one sweep, one caress of Robin's hand: herself dusty with the past, but unmarked. "I no longer consider myself to be engaged," she told him.

"And do you, then, need to locate new lodgings?" His mind, as always, to them being together.

Having some small insight into what he might be thinking, she pointed out, "I know Geis too well to think he will give up so easily. He claims he will pursue a divorce from his wife. And I must think of father."

His expression curdled at this, but surprisingly remained under control. "And you know of no way to break with Gisbonnhoffer, to sour him on you only enough to lose his interest, and not enough to spark his ire that you might be free of him? You and your father?"

She shook her head. He had hit upon the very quandary she had been trying, in her mind, to reason her way out of. "It is only that he at present has let me have the deserved moral high ground. I could not end it with the true finality I wished," she looked away. "I could not risk father so."

"Finality," Robin asked, his soldier's mind piqued. "What, to kill him?"

She did not have to reply, 'no', her every muscle shouted it. "To sever all ties. That is all I want. My home." She looked away, soon the record would end. "My autonomy (such as even on the Islands it might be). To be left alone. To cease the masquerade where he is concerned."

She turned and looked back at Robin, surprised to see him smiling. "What is there happy - or funny - about this?"

"Well," he explained, "you cannot marry a man already wed. An observer might choose to see that as not...such a bad thing."

"Yes," and here she let a harshness creep in. "But another observer might choose to note that perhaps, had I not dealt with him so swiftly, believed yet another of his lies, I might have held my tongue until I knew for certain Geis had released Mitch. As is, I cannot even credibly go to him and re-petition for Mitch, or ask after his whereabouts. I have hobbled myself from being a help to you, when I could have perhaps done much good."

"No," he put her hand in his. "That I will not accept. The man is utterly without honor - even to you. You cannot have trusted anything he professes as truth. We will have Mitch out another way," his tone and delivery here were utterly persuasive, as only he could make them. "Allen even now has contacts at work on it. And I have brought you a possible way to expedite helping us." He set to explaining Wills' potential windmill signal, gifting her with the spyglass, but he had not gotten far in his pitch before she had to change the record and announce the day's news.

Sitting back on the crate she had assigned him to, relishing the chance to watch Marion at work, he could not even feel cross at having to wait.

...TBC...