SARK - "They are looking well, La Salle," Dr. Battley gave his final assessment on Stephen's healed eardrums. "It is a credit to you that in your earthy work here you never contracted any infection."

"And a credit to Cousin Alex's help." La Salle never passed up a chance to promote Thomas Carter, his (to the glad-to-look-the-other-way eyes of the Islanders) new hired man, Alex La Salle, come to help from Jersey in the wake of Dick Giddons' death those weeks ago.

"Yes," the doctor agreed, having, on his way here, passed that very man at work out among the fields of La Salle's tenement. "Mmm. The less said there, doubtless, the better." Battley began to stow his instruments in his black satchel. "These types of injuries may take as long as three months in the healing, and here it is a little less than two and you've recovered. Would that all my patients were blessed with such robust recoveries."

"I have heard that those on the larger islands suffer," La Salle offered, "from an inability to heal, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of proper medical necessities readily on hand."

"Yes," Battley agreed, the set of his mouth grim at the knowledge of that truth. "It was, you know," he went on, letting the grimness fade out of his expression, "ReichKaptain Lamburg himself who authorized the medicines for you. No doubt they came straight from a German dispensary." The doctor sized up his patient's reaction to this. "Does that not make you uncomfortable? To take from the occupiers?" As an aside he mumbled, "not that they did not owe it to you, having brought on your injury in the first place."

"Perhaps, then, I may give you this," Stephen stood and reached into a kitchen shelf, pulling out what of the medication he had not had to use, "and you might find further ways for other Sarkese to benefit," he cracked a smile, "from, as you say, the Germans' ongoing munificence."

Battley took the glass bottle and tube of cream from La Salle's hands and grasped them in his own, like the treasured gems of his profession they were. His eyes began to swim in tears. He had been (of necessity) attempting to practice his healing profession without such needed supplies for so long. "God bless you, La Salle," he said, with sincerity, before recovering himself and his usual skeptic's point of view.

Stephen smiled on, not having to see Battley to know that the man had been touched by the gift, the former rector's hand reaching out, catching air, until it collided with Battley's upper arm, and he was able to give it several strong slaps.

"Before I go," the doctor set into warning him, "your 'friend', the German lieutenant from Alderney? The author of your ailment?"

"Gisbonnhoffer?" La Salle volunteered the name he was not likely to forget anytime soon.

"Yes. No one knows why - not even Lamburg, I'm told, but he is at uncovering marriage records on all the islands. He arrived here several days ago planning to ransack what he expected to be Sark's own civic archive. Much as he has done, rumors say, to the abandoned one on Alderney."

Stephen attempted to understand. "And it is your conclusion that he is trying to locate marriages between Jews and Gentiles? And any children of such? You think he might somehow plan to use Louise's ancestry against me?"

"No," Battley replied reasonably. "I do not have any idea what the man might be about. Only, Lamburg asked around and then had to inform him that all such records on Sark are held within individual parish ledgers. That there is no general depository for such. With a considerable show of anger, the Lieutenant returned to Alderney. But I do not expect his curiosity is satiated."

"So you anticipate him coming for my register?"

"I do not know what to expect from a German's twisted mind, La Salle, but any fool would know you ought be on your guard, when the dog you once deviled is looking for bones - and you have such a choice example sitting on a shelf in your best parlor."

The kitchen door scraped open, revealing that it had begun to lightly rain outdoors. Thomas Carter passed through the door and into the kitchen. Though it was raining he was not even much in the way of wet.

The Doctor's eyes clearly showed how unusual he found this man's arrival. In the Islands' climate, if one simply gave up farming when the slightest of showers broke out, one would certainly accomplish little - in work, in travel, in anything.

"Alex!" La Salle welcomed his 'cousin' back into the house.

"Doctor," Carter acknowledged the other man, anxious to be out of the visitor's presence.

But the doctor excused himself quite quickly enough, without showing any personal dread of, or distaste for, the light rain.

When he was gone, Carter attempted to apologize for interrupting the two men. "I am sorry, Stephen. It is as we feared. The hair dye simply will not bond with my hair. When a rain comes up it begins to wash away, staining my shirt, and unmasking me for the man I am."

"Well," said Stephen, trying to comfort the pilot-in-hiding, "even if it runs out entirely, your 'tache," he referenced the (also dyed) florid Imperial-style mustache that had been cultivated across Carter's face in the interest of concealment, beginning on his upper lip, the whiskers growing broader and thicker as they joined with his robust sideburns, "your 'tache will serve us in a pinch."

Unconvinced, Carter accepted the cloth La Salle offered, blotting at the now running-from-his-temples-and-neck dye - burdening the former rector no further by mentioning that the rains also affected his eyebrows and already-referenced mustache much the same.

GUERNSEY - Elerinne Vaiser had rarely felt so happy. Certainly with the nuns at Ripley Convent School she had generally felt safe, and even, perhaps somewhat (in a sort of inspecific way) loved. But for the most part she had felt bored, like she was waiting for life. Waiting to be called out into the actual living of it.

She was a Vaiser (though she did not care to think of that fact) - she could paint her will on a canvas of any size, but the larger, preferably, the better.

She had not wanted to stay here, on these poxy little islands. She had wanted to see Berlin, or Paris. Salzburg, even, would have been an improvement. And she had wanted to join Yanick. How silly that name sounded to her now. What had she been thinking? She did not doubt he was a fine man, a man with admirable ideals. But one did not set off to throw in one's lot with such a huge unknown. For all that she had learned of him in their brief encounter, he could have been married already. She had been a child. A foolish, unworldly child. She had not known what love was. What it could be.

But then, she had not known - not really known - a man like Joss Tyr.

She could not attend his shows enough, could not often enough stop by Ginny Glasson's shop, where he seemed to be found most frequently when he was not onstage.

She was enamored of him in every possible way. Nights she dreamed of what he might look like without his face paint, without his prosthetic wooden fingers. Sometimes the dreams were horrific, sometimes achingly beautiful. Always, never enough. There had to be more.

Never enough invitations to Cabaret Alstroemeria. And once there, always far too many irritating soldiers asking her to dance (with Mr. Allen's tutoring she had quickly become more than proficient), asking if they might bring her a drink, never leaving her alone when the top billed act (the new sun in her Galilean solar system) took the stage.

But even so, even in loving (like a grown-up, she told herself, loving) Joss Tyr, longing to be only his, she could not fully banish from her mind, from her hungry heart, the romantic darkness of Herr Geis, so infrequently at Barnsdale anymore, and when present so rarely in a humor fit to be interacted with.

If she had not so respected and revered Lady Marion, she would have tried to love him, tried to heal the tear in his heart with love from hers. But he was meant for Marion, Eleri was convinced. And Marion for him. She would no more have interposed herself between Tristan and Isolde.

SARK - La Salle had come with them that day, hiking to abandoned Le Moulin, where Wills' work was nearly finished. Djak had watched with great curiosity as Reddy stripped off and re-fitted the gears that turned the millstone to run counter to themselves, and that would allow Johnson, with no small amount of effort, to defy the prevailing wind of any day, and turn the sail-less vanes opposite it.

The signal's implementation would allow the unit to communicate with Marion that they needed to make contact with her face to face, its use faster (and less dangerous) than a trip to Guernsey in person. Marion, of course, had had the Nightwatch at her command, able any night to pass coded messages to (or for) them.

It had been decided that, save in gravest emergency, Le Moulin's new signal would be available for use during certain hours only (so that Marion might know when to look for it); two stuffed crows to be situated on a bare vane to signal greatest trouble: a sign that Lady Marion (Djak had learned better than to think of her, or refer to her, as the rom baro's wife) should seek the safety of immediate shelter by going into hiding at a pre-ordained location until one of the unit could come to her.

Crows were a natural choice, after all. Their sleek black feathers stood out nicely against the weathered wood of the old mill. And plopping the decoys into place often encouraged a larger grouping of the actual birds to stop for a sit as well. Crows being so abundant on the island that they gave their name to the Sarkese people, who wore 'les corbins' as their moniker among the other Islanders.

The dove that had come to Djak that day, though healed and well enough to fly, would not leave. Thomas Carter had announced he believed it had imprinted on her, it now thinking Djak to be its mother, or life mate. The pilot took tremendous (for him) humor from this, as he still believed Djak to be a teenaged boy. So now, a young boy with a bird for a child, or a bird for a lover. Royston shared similarly in enjoyment of this paradox.

Wills worked hard, putting in place the final touches of his re-engineering feat. He saw Djak again at play with the still-unnamed dove. He was having a harder and harder time with his Romany, now. Though his skills in it increased (as had Djak's in English), he found himself still tripping over the use of simple pronouns due to Djak's hidden gender.

Certainly this would not have proven a problem between the two of them. Both knew what she looked like without her skivvies. But Carter was proving a quick study-by-proxy, and was picking up more and more Romany. Wills feared the day was not so far off a grammatical slip (if a slip of no other kind) would prove the Gypsy girl's unmasking.

In the dusty light of the windmill's interior he spied her above him, walking a high crossbeam like a circus acrobat, following her friend and constant companion, the dove, who settled higher and higher in the wooden windmill as though egging her human friend on, seeing if the nimble girl would match his avian daredeviltry.

Wills could hear the dove coo, and the girl singing - somewhere between a hum and a melodic groan one of the songs she had explained to him of her people. It was about separated true loves, spurned bridegrooms, and a Romany woman as beautiful as the night sky's curtain of stars.

Of any evening, as those of them tasked at La Salle's hunkered down there (Allen at the Dixcart, John and Royston oft times still trying their hands at retrofitting the mines to be of future use), Djak would sing, or spin tales for the four of them present, Wills doing his best to translate (and do justice to) the old Romany poetry that made up her people's songs, their ancient story tales.

Days, when she must not to be out-of-doors, John, himself handicapped from much travel afield due to his own eye-catching looks, had set her to learning to read English via Louise La Salle's found journals.

John would sit next to the Gypsy (whom he knew to be a girl), dwarfing Djak with his size, towering above the page she studied to read aloud; Stephen sometimes at work in the house, listening in, sometimes seating himself to better take in his wife's trivial notations on the industry of their farm, the occasional sidenote added only scattershot-ly of their lives.

It had been an especial treat, allowing Djak to come today, to travel away from the farm in daylight.

"Wills," La Salle called to him from his seat below, the terrain and architecture too unfamiliar for him to feel comfortable moving around without a guide, "I have told Djak, and so I tell you as well: the time has come for making cider. I can smell it on the wind. Especially here, up higher than I usually climb, the distant winds converging at this place, carrying the news on it."

Stephen did not mention that he had deliberately been putting off the undertaking, it seeming to him (as in times of old) like a celebration, a harvest-task. And his heart (and those of Robin's men) heavier than any would admit at no news being able to be sorted about Mitch's mysterious whereabouts.

Allen's best contact had been transferred out of the Guernsey bailiwick, his other sources swearing ignorance of any Sarkese fisherman ever at Treeton, much less knowing where one had been presently put.

There had been a terrible stand-off one night where Royston briefly seemed to imply that it was no longer in Allen's best interest, as current lackey to the German occupiers, to spy for the unit - for Mitch - with any accuracy. That perhaps he had been drawing more than simply his earned wage from the Kommandant. Intimations of pay-offs, of betrayal, imploded like soundless bombs into the air.

Understandably this suggestion, however slight, however much the product of worried, over-tired minds all 'round, had not been taken lightly by Allen. And it had fallen to Robin three days later to seek out Dale at the Dixcart, smooth his wounded feathers and coax him into some version of a reconciliation with (an almost immediately repentant) Royston.

Yes, thought Stephen, it was time for making cider. He had, perhaps, delayed it too long.

ALDERNEY - Gisbonnhoffer recalled the first day he had set foot on Alderney. The haunted quality of it. There had only been, what? Seven? Six? Six people that had not evacuated in the wake of the Reich's coming Occupation force. Six people. The rest of the island was like...he did not know with what to compare it.

Quiet, without sounds of any population. Even the birds, the animals, muted. Homes left as though families might return at any moment. Doors locked against the coming invader. Pets, livestock without keepers. Mail in the post office yet to be delivered to residents no longer in residence. Shops in villages with their wares on display but no one to sell to, a laundry with rows of men's shirts ready to be picked up. A butcher shop with its contents on the cusp of spoiling. A newspaper office with the press half set, ready for the next day's paper, never to feel the printer's devil roll ink over the letter tiles.

The perfect conquer job. Everything for the occupier: all the spoils, without the pesky national populace to contend with. Most beds on the island cleanly, crisply sheeted, as though made ready for visitors. Larders stocked, coal scuttles filled.

His mind recalled this to him as he walked into the island's abandoned central public archive, looking for Underlieutenant Diefortner among the stacks and cabinets of the collected civic records of Alderney's now-scattered population. Something in the air of the place easily gave away how long it had been since it had been used, opened up, bothered with at all - like one would imagine the undisturbed, airless tombs of the pharaohs.

In the end it was the slightly-better-lit area where Diefortner was at reviewing certain records that gave his position away.

"You have had success in your time on Sark?" the man of lesser rank inquired of Geis as way of a greeting.

"Success? On Sark?" Gisbonnhoffer strongly scoffed. "The place is anathema to the German mind. Efficiency to the Sarkese, doubtless, means bedding down your pigs with your children. Washing your clothes with your potatoes."

"And?"

"And possessing no convenient (or even logical) centralized collection of your civic annals. Rather, letting each priest, each pastor - practically, each pinner," he spat the word, "keep the sole copy, the lone assertion or proof of such records within sundry ledgers scattered - without thought to rationally situating them - all about the island."

"Shelved inside their primitive privies?" Diefortner asked, dryly. "For when they have run short on paper?"

Never one to much relish a joke told by another - particularly the (to his mind) often self-congratulatory Diefortner - Gisbonnhoffer did not laugh. "The notion of the record in question being found there is a far-fetched one, to be sure," Geis spoke to reassure himself as much as to explain to the Underlieutenant. "Continue here, and I shall, with the Kommandant's blessing, hie myself to Guernsey, where he has made known I am to arrive to oversee the search of their records for marriages among women seventeen to twenty-one over the span of years you were similarly tasked to find. If it comes to it that we must pore over Sark's cursed ledgers as well, we shall set Lamburg on having his pig farmers dig them up from ancestors' graves, their grandmothers' knickers and wherever else they might be hidden. We shall, finally, have found something of the Reich's work for him to do." At his own joke at Lamburg's expense, Gisbonnhoffer gave a steeply slanted smirk.

Diefortner paused for a moment and looked up from his scanning of ruled pages. "A glorious cause it is, after all. But how will you know, of the assertions we will compile - how will you know which one concerns the Nightwatch? The Kommandant himself confessed he has no understanding of your method."

"I daresay it shall be apparent to all of us," Gisbonnhoffer lied to cover his true motivations, not liking to think how much of his hard-won reputation he had staked on the discovery of Marion's (utterly unrelated to the Nightwatch) imprudent early marriage. Not, in truth, liking to think he would discover anything, or, that he, in fact, would.

But, after much trying (and agonizing), he found that he could not sleep, could not give himself over to true rest until he knew for certain whether the Sarkese fisherman had spoken truth. It had been weeks, the Nightwatch his only companion in those early hours. When he had finally hit on the notion of using the angle of searching for her as a way to gain right of entry to search the islands' records, he embraced the scheme, not letting himself look too closely at what, in the end, it might gain (or lose) him professionally. He could only think of Marion. Of knowing for certain.

Of knowing whether she had brought him so low over a transgression of which she, herself, was equally guilty. There was no reading it in her eyes. In his few trips back to Barnsdale since his final encounter with the fisherman, he had tried. But there was no alteration, no notable softening in her limited attentions to him. The deeper part of her now seemed beyond his comprehension. He second-guessed (in private) every word, every gesture, every interaction they shared. And so he was convinced, that, as would be any good German, he must put his faith in the record-keeping, in the paperwork. In the end, the documentation would out. The documentation would end his quandary - one way, or the other.

Again, he attempted to settle his reservations about this precarious lie spun to gain access to the islands' records. The Kommandant himself, after all, had stumbled more than once in the unmasking of the rebel broadcaster. And had not seen it affect his position one bit. Yet.

GUERNSEY - civic annals housed at The States - Suit-clad civil servants scrambled among the elegantly shelved registers dating back to times so ancient gloves were required in the handling of them. Marriages blessed by French kings, by Angevin royalty, by suspect English princes promoted to king when their warrior brother had died on the throne.

It had fallen to Matthew, first attache to the Bailiff, to coordinate the sudden ransacking of the island's records; the Germans, as was their way, setting their caps for certain information they required (as was also their way: immediately).

He struggled to maintain order and calm among those reporting to him, corrected someone looking in the wrong place here, re-shelved a volume in its rightful place, there.

A courier found him like this. The man passed him a packet to sign for, addressed to the Bailiff. In the flurry and distraction of activity all about him, Matthew signed for the packet, absent-mindedly removing the tied string to open it.

The explosion so quickly engulfed him, those around him, and the Hall of Records, its papers easily devoured, happily feeding the blaze - that he had not even experienced a moment in which his mind had registered the name signed onto this inferno's calling card.

It was two hours later when Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer arrived to find - quite the opposite of what he had expected. Rather than being located and ready for his perusal, the entirety of the island's records were still smouldering (an untold number destroyed beyond reading), the Bailiff's attache dead, immolated nearly beyond recognition, numerous others present at the blast injured. The Bailiff hardly able to express himself.

Usually, Jodderick would meet him - promptly at the pier if he knew him to be coming. Here, Gisbonnhoffer had to seek the Bailiff out among the smoky rubble, those working to clear it.

"There has been...an accident," Jodderick stuttered in telling him.

"So I see," Gisbonnhoffer returned dryly, his mouth unable to swallow back his acute (and unacceptable) disappointment. "Tell me," Geis seized on the moment, on the Bailiff's discomfiture, "was Lady Marion ever, in your memory, wed when she was younger?"

"Lady? Why - " Jodderick's eyes contracted, even in his shocked state tripping over the peculiar question. "I think - I believe - there was a - a time when she was known to have been engaged," he shared. "P-possibly..." he sounded less certain.

It was enough for Geis. Guernsey's documents, his best hope, were lost to him now. Standing among the recently decimated archive, this was the best corroboration of the Sarkese fisherman's assertion that he was likely to receive. Certainly it was enough with which to confront her. Her treachery. With the mounting evidence of her disloyalty.

The voice of the unsteady Bailiff broke into his swiftly turning thoughts. "What will you do, about the Whichman?"

Gisbonnhoffer reacted to the name like he might at a persistently irritating fly. "The Whichman?"

"'Twas him who sent the package."

"Meant for you."

"Yes," Jodderick agreed. "You will pursue him? Pursue retribution for what he has brought about here?"

Geis did not have to survey the damage to know his answer. "There were Germans killed?"

The Bailiff's mouth worked a moment or two with no sound coming out of it. "No."

"Then, no," he spoke as he might to an idiot underling, one needing educating of correct protocol. "The Reich will not pursue reprisals in this instance. Nor will we waste both time and man-hours on tracking down an islander who clearly enjoys killing his own people."

"Though - though it is clearly - obviously - a sign of Resistance? In direct payback for the Nightwatch killings? You will do nothing?"

Gisbonnhoffer looked the man straight in the face. "And neither will you," his voice fell as he moved his eyes significantly to the stretcher where the disfigured attache's body lay under a white sheet. "Have you not heard?" He gave the Bailiff a taste of the Reich's spin-ability, "more than one of the injured parties present has agreed to give evidence that your Matthew," he surprised himself by recalling the dead young man's name, "was himself the one fiddling with the explosives. And that it was his device - not yet delivered to you - that backfired."

The Bailiff blanched, his colorless face losing even more pigment. His skin became nearly transparent.

Gisbonnhoffer turned from the man he had once (proudly) imagined a friend, in the process irritated to notice the toe of his well-polished boot had been tainted with still-warm ash. With a solid stomp he attempted to shake it off.

He was for Barnsdale. For Marion. For the truth. And the judgment such brought with it.

...TBC...