GUERNSEY - St. Peter Port - There was nothing particularly tender about Ginny Glasson as she re-arranged the sheeting on her modest bed, but then neither did she bustle as to disturb its remaining occupant with her tidying.
The man publicly known as Joss Tyr had, after all, only a scant two hours ago joined her there (herself dutifully tucked in, as usual, following the Nightwatch).
She had by now grown used to her pillowcases and bedding showing signs of his presence in the more intimate areas of her life. Try as he might, he seemed unable to reliably remove all his stage paint, and some bit of it here, or smudge of it there, would show up, like a child had been left unsupervised with a painter's pastels in the bedroom.
There were even times she had noticed he would sweat the paints out, her not daring to ask him what ingredients his masking make-up might hold that his pores would so willingly take it in, and later, weep in rejection of it.
She moved toward the porcelain pitcher and matching basin that had been her grandmother's, on its stand in the small room's corner. The pitcher kept water cool for washing, and she checked to see that it was doing so now in preparation of Tyr's rising several hours hence.
She threw a glance back over her shoulder to him - the room never truly dark enough (the curtains never thick enough) for sleeping much after dawn - facedown in the bed, his back bared to the waist where only the sheet further protected his (at the word she almost laughed to herself) modesty.
He was not at all a handsome man by any definition, despite what might have been said of Count Werner von Himmel before his accident. There was no longer anything smooth or boyish about his features. And when his face was bare of paint, it was easy to see how the stress of pain and wear of frustration had carved a new face for him.
On a lesser man the facial scarring he retained from his accident might have gone largely unnoticed or forgotten, had he chosen to attempt to grow a beard over it. Instead, it had become part of the landscape of his face, as a performer his instrument, his canvas. The map of his commentary on the fractured world around him.
Theirs was not the intense relationship of intimate confessions and deeply shared personal secrets that it might have been had they been younger - had both their scars been less deep. But though he had never alluded to it, Ginny had known enough men in her life to know that - in his mind - the accident he had survived was the unmanning of him. And that there was good and abundant reason he removed the paint from his face only for the hours he spent alone with her in her modest boudoir.
Even so, she knew he was never fully relaxed with bare face in the presence of anyone.
She was too smart not to know that losing fingers and range of motion in one's hands would leave anyone feeling at times to have been made a monster - but for an illusionist, a soul with an artistic bent and thirst for wonder and beauty in the world around them, to be damaged so would be only next door to waking up a cockroach.
He must have heard her at the washstand.
"What news?" he asked her, opening neither eye. He sought to know, as his stage act conflicted with the Nightwatch broadcast.
She smoothed the back of her skirt self-consciously, in a womanish way wanting to appear her best, in case he might glance up at her. "Two fires," she reported to him. "Guernsey ablaze, last night."
"Two?" he asked, with surprise. The first eyelid cracked open. Even in sleep he kept the worse-scarred side of his face hidden, flat to the pillow.
She turned around, the washstand towel in her hands. "The archives at The States are still smouldering. And the Nightwatch reported the enemy had torched barns on the Knighton estate, leading to the death of Sir Edward. You have heard of him?"
Tyr rubbed at his eyes as he sat up in the bed, careful not to irritate the ever-sensitive skin of his scarring. "Certainly. I have read his monograph. After the published re-cant, of course. Prior to that few Germans had heard of him outside government circles. There was a boldness to his convictions I admired."
Ginny walked back to the bed, standing at its foot.
"And the Bailiff?"
She was surprised it had not been the first question he had asked. "Jodderick lives."
In a rare moment of speaking the tongue of the Fatherland in front of her, Tyr swore. "So it is another failure."
Ginny neither agreed nor disagreed with his pronouncement. "The civic archive is said to be a shambles, the job of putting them to rights unlikely, if not all but impossible, under the Occupation. Documents lost forever. History now ash."
He chose to take issue with her summation. "We cannot worry ourselves over history, Gin," he declared. "Not when it is the future we seek to reclaim, to shape."
"No," she agreed with him, "we cannot. But the Bailiff's attache, Matthew, he will have no future now. He is dead."
Momentarily Tyr re-took the measure of his Occupation paramour, a woman he had (satisfyingly) yet to see flinch in her dedication to overthrow the Occupation. A woman long-proven in her commitment to liberation, a Guernsey partisan among the upper echelon of the islands' organized Resistance network. "Your reaction to the death of a clear collaborator seems uncharacteristic to me."
She did not know how to explain to him - a man no longer with a country, a man stripped of any compassionate understanding he might once have had the capacity for - the connections of home and state, and neighbor. That those Islanders scorned as collaborators (and certainly she scorned them) were her people, her Islands' soul. Her cousin, her milkman, her dead husband's best friend. And that while despising the way they fearfully capitulated to the enemy, she at the same time (as might a mother) greatly pitied and, even, loved them for their weakness. "We knew him," she said of Matthew. "He and my eldest son were quite close friends as boys. He was a sweet child."
Tyr made no response to this emotional connection she had with the deceased, nor had she expected him to. The device, of course, had been meant for Jodderick. But in the scheming (and he in the constructing) of it, both knew there was a likelihood it would not reach its true target. Though in his planning, Tyr expected even a mis-fire to accomplish the large part of his purpose: to alert Islanders there was an immediate and very final price to be paid for consorting with the enemy. That standing by for something such as the Nightwatch killings would neither be tolerated, nor forgiven.
Though she did not expect a sympathetic response from him, she added, "Lady Marion has lost her father and part of her home."
There may have been something of a school master in his tone when he reminded her, "...An even clearer collaborator, Gin."
"As anyone asked would say of me, Count," she reminded him, using his noble title. "I wonder, have you read Dumas-pere? Le Comte de Monte Cristo?"
She knew she was out-of-sorts today. Matthew's death had put her so. Doubtless she was distressing her lover with this momentary bubbling up of scruples, coming from the woman he knew better as a determined partisan and skilled Pimpernel, than an Islander siding with her people. "With your appetite for retribution you ought to do," she encouraged him toward the book. "But be mindful. At the novel's end he loses the princess, and the woman he once loved, and finds his exquisite revenge a cold comfort."
Had they been a different sort of a couple, in a different sort of a time, he might have taken that moment to draw her down on the bed to him, assure her he would do all in his power not to lose either any past love they had shared, nor any to come in future. He might have forsworn revenge. She might have cradled his head to her breast lovingly, and spoken to him of a life they might make together. But they were not that couple, and these were not those times.
Instead he told her what she already knew. "I do not intend to live long enough to experience any such regret. Or anticipate a future filled with love, rejection, or comfort - cold or otherwise. I intend to fulfill the Whichman's prophecy, which as you know, I wrote myself. I will live only as long as it takes to see the enemy defeated, destroyed - purged from these islands, this planet. Then I will be done. Then I will sleep. Without dreams."
"I have not such luxury, Count," she told him. "Because I love too much things in this present world. My sons tether me here, the hope of one day again seeing them no longer as soldiers, seeing them go on to happy lives, in a world liberated of this present evil. That keeps me here. It motivates my participation in The Work, but also robs me of the single-mindedness of your zeal. For you love nothing."
Speaking baldly, as they always did between themselves, he contested her pronouncement of him. "I loved Avia, I think," he told her, referencing his prized dove, and presently missing Resistance courier. "But I think we must believe her lost, possibly to a falcon I am told Sark's ReichKaptain has acquired, with whom he enjoys hunting. I do not know that I shall ever see her again."
"And she loved you, that much was clear," Ginny agreed with him, thinking of how the animal had doted on her master.
"If I had any sorry left, Gin," he took her hand in one of his, presently absent its first-finger prosthetic. "I would be sorry for not being able to tell you truthfully that I love you." He kissed its back elegantly, as he might have during the height of his days among the German aristocracy.
"I do not know if there is room left in this present world for such a love," she agreed, returning to her usually less-morose self. "I think we have found - or made - room for what we have. Moments of pushing back the darkness. Acceptance of one another..."
"The occasional gift of peeling off our masks?" He half-smiled at her reaction to his having noticed that she, also, wore one. "Of physically reconnecting with whatever humanity they have left us with?"
She lightly pushed against his bared shoulder, skin on skin reminding them both of the relieving sensual connection they unabashedly shared without illusions within these four walls.
She increased the pressure on his shoulder to encourage him to lie back down in the bed. "Best get back to sleep, Count," she told him, the sunlight in the room having shifted to alert her of the passing of time, and that the hour was soon to arrive when she must open her shop below to customers. When she must open her ears to further learn what she could of the night before.
"I will endeavor to be as quiet as they say is a church mouse," he promised her, ensuring their months-long tryst continued to go unnoticed.
"As ever you are," she agreed with him, finding the smallest chip in the lacquer on one of her nails, and seeing yet another task to add to her always briskly busy day.
...TBC...