GUERNSEY - Cottage of Mr. Thornton - On the cusp of that very action, she thought of waking. Swam in the memories of waking, her pathway through them uncluttered, but winding, indirect. The worst day of waking: she had no idea how she had managed to be brought back to the Otto home following Fred's reading of Clem's world-shattering telegram.
A home. The Otto family at times might refer to it as house, as in, 'ya'll, let's git back up to the house,' but never as 'the House', as her English peers were wont to do with their own manors and grand abbeys. Then again, the Otto house was unnamed, its history trailing back but two generations beyond the present one - and one of them, still living yet. She had often thought, that as opposed to having lost their pretenses, the Ottos perhaps had never (bless them) had any with which to begin.
The knock on the door of her borrowed bedroom was muted, but regular in its appeal. When she had finally ignored it one time too many for the knock-er, the door opened without her consent. Beyond the door, it was somewhere between day and night (or night and day) outside. She could not have said how many hours or days she had passed in the bed of her borrowed room alone, undisturbed, as, she supposed, the Ottos' lives carried on.
"Marion?" she heard Josie Otto's voice call, like that of her older brother's, morphing its pronunciation into more 'Marin'. "Time to dress, now, Honey."
When Marion found her voice it sounded creaky to her, ancient as a little-used crypt door. "I am not coming down for dinner, Joes."
Queerly, without asking permission, Josie pulled Marion's steamer trunk from where it was stowed in the attached dressing room, and began to empty drawers and pack dresser-tops of Marion's things into it. "You'll eat at the station in Lexington," Josie assured her. "Fred's got y'all tickets on the four-fifteen to Washington."
For the first time since she had arrived in the United States and declared her independence from the Mertons, Marion felt she did not have the capacity to accomplish something on her own. "But I don't know - I can't - " she tried to tell Josie, having misunderstood the Southerner's use of 'y'all' - this time in the plural.
"Well don't be silly, Honey," the younger girl assured her. "Tickets. Fred'll go with you. He's worked it all out. The only thing left is for y'all to dress y'self."
Josie's compassionate face came to rest its gaze on Marion's, "and if you need help with that, my two hands are available."
Later, so many miserable, desolate wakings later, having disembarked Lucky George's shady vessel after her surreptitious Crossing, Marion had boarded a public bus at the port, a bus bound for London. She had never traveled so un-chaperoned, so freely, in her own country before.
Upon arriving at the London depot, rather than ring Nighten House to have a car sent, she had asked a helpful porter to engage her a taxi.
"Mayfair," she had told the cabbie. "I will give you the street and house number when we are closer." And she had fallen asleep.
When he woke her (clearly troubled by his having to do so), she looked out the hack's rear window only to see the Nighten residence (coincidentally) directly across the street from where the cabbie, undirected, had parked the car.
The elegant white stone of its edifice, the impressive windows and multiple stories. Even, the impressively reserved cast-iron railing leading down to the servant's entrance, which matched the cast-iron railings ringing the trunk of each tree lining the sedately graceful street.
A late night caller, moonlight on crooked silver sitting amok in the roadway. Only a set of men's pajamas between her skin and buttercream leather.
Her eye found its way to a particular tree, and she changed her mind. "The city of Westminster," she redirected him, "Cleopatra's Needle."
"Wot?" the mostly-patient cabbie barked to her at this odd change of destination. "M'I gonna unload your baggage there?"
"Take me, and then agree to return me here," she pointed to the townhouse, "with my baggage, and you shall be well compensated for your time. And inconvenience."
Money ever music to a cabbie's ears, he drove her as she had asked. She gave him more than enough when they arrived to agree to the park the car and wait for her, out of view of the Needle.
Late Summer 1937 - Upon receipt of the note delivered from the Tripp Club, she had flown from the house like an exultation of larks, her mind and person similarly as scattered. Robin. Home from holidaying. Robin. In London. As was she. Robin!
Though there had been an obvious threat of summer rain when she departed the Mayfair house's front door, she had paid the weather no note, her heart too light to imagine burdening it down with anything at all, even an umbrella on the arm.
She was an emotional wreck, but far too happy to let it worry her. She was elated, she was a ball of nerves. She felt a piercing fear that she could no longer recall what Robin looked like. Perhaps she had best turn around and return to study his portrait one last time before setting off.
Nonsense! Such was her hurry she could not wait for the car to be brought 'round for her use, and got herself down the street, to the corner as quickly as possible, and managed (quite shockingly, even to herself) to hail a cab.
She saw the ancient obelisk's point - jutting over sixty feet into the London sky, even in the overcast weather - before she saw him, waiting, pacing at the base of it.
Her heart quickened with recognition. No longer any fear, there.
Only minutes before her arrival on scene, the heavens had opened, and poured down a rare, warm summer shower, so committedly that his coat and clothing were past being soaked. He had no umbrella on his person, but certain that his roadster was nearby, and unwilling to merely watch him from over a distance a single second longer, she burst from the cab, without even the driver's assistance in stepping onto and down from the running board, and dashed to Robin so quickly she was confident the pelting raindrops could not even have found purchase upon her.
Once he saw her coming, Robin waited for her to come to him, letting her rocket herself into him, into his arms, as he relished the nearly-empty streets - courtesy the downpour - and the unabashed public display of affection it won him on Marion's (usually reserved) part.
Instantly, he buried his soaked face and hair into her neck, the splash of scent she had applied there before departing not wasted on his senses.
"Why here?" she asked - his head still to her shoulder - dying to know. "Why would you not come at once to the house?"
"Let me look at you first," he said, pulling away from their embrace, holding her at arm's-length, his eyes having to squint slightly to see in the continuing onslaught of rain.
Instinctively she brought her hand up to try at smoothing her hair. As it had done shortly for him, no observer could now accurately tell how long she had herself stood in the warm downpour, so soaked-through she was already, the starch in her blouse a mere memory, the fresh flower on her collar both wilted by the rain and falling apart from their embrace, her impeccable nylons splashed over with the street's dirt and grime. The rolls of her stylish hairdo dripping rain onto her forehead.
"You are a picture," he told her, utterly captivated by the look, the arrival of her. "Were Wren here, I would commission your portrait."
Even in her joy at seeing him, a small crease graced her brow, and she reminded him hesitantly, "but he was an architect."
"And it is building I have on my mind," he offered in rejoinder. "Why here, you ask? Why meet here after these weeks separated by the Channel? Because I found I wished to erect a monument to the happiest day of my life."
Through the rain he winced up, trying to sight the obelisk's point.
"The happiest...day of your life?" she asked him, her heart flipping at what such a declaration might forebode.
"But I did not long for the woodlands, or countryside, which despite their beauties are too far away. And certainly, there is little enough room for wild, untethered happiness in a drawing room. I need my monument, my touchstone, to be nearby me at all times. Here, in London. Where it might be frequently visited, even sighted over a great distance. It had, of course, to be pleasing to the eye, large, and as close to eternal as anything in all Britain might be."
"And so we are here."
The rain slackened a bit.
"I could not have found a more perfect memorial for this moment had I designed and carved this stone pillar myself, Marion, and yet, I find myself shaking - having nothing to do with the damp and the rain. Only, I find (mostly shockingly to myself) I am afraid. Frightened by happiness. Frightened by acknowledging a happiness so intense that even in this moment I fear what might come were it ever taken away from me."
It was hard to say how it had come about. She had hardly noticed as her head had to bend to keep him in her sights as he moved onto but a single knee placed to the pavement.
"My dearest; I have no desire to spend even the length of a dance in the arms and company of any other woman." He popped up and took his hand to smooth back a stray hair of hers, always taunted into frizz and curls in humidity. "Curly locks," he began, and surely, as any schoolchild, she knew the rest by heart. "Wilt thou be mine?" He left off his quotation before getting to dishes or swine, or the promise of a lifetime of idle embroidery.
"Yes," she told him in English, nodding her head, continuing on by verbalizing her mental list of the seventeen other languages she had researched in his time away, giving vehement 'yes'es in every one.
By the time she got to Swahili, and began again in the dead Gothic tongue, he had had enough, and stopped her mouth, and its verbosity of affirmation, satisfyingly, with his own.
She did not squirm, nor did she try to cut his kiss short, despite its being publicly administered.
Each tasted the rain on the other's lips.
"Oh, yes," Robin said, remembering, fumbling in his pocket, his searching of it complicated by the wet fabric not wishing to comply and part, but rather to adhere to itself. "I had forgotten."
As he searched, he look at Marion's face. "'A Robin and a Robin's son," he recited, meaning his father and himself. "Once went to town to buy a ring/They could not decide on clear or blue/And so the Robins brought both back home to you'." His fingertips located the unboxed ring and managed to pull it forth, bringing the inside-out pocket lining with it. "I daresay Father did not approve, and the House of Cartier only just, but I chose blue for your eyes, and a quadrumvirate of diamonds. One for each of our children," he prophesied, intently holding her gaze.
He squinted up into the clouds still very present overhead. "My car is still at Kirk Leaves, in the North Country," he apologized with a shrug and chuckle. "A ceremonial dousing was not meant to be an integral part of the day's celebrations."
"I do not care," she told him, shaking her head to make the drops fly out of her now-dissembling hair. "Fair weather or foul," she slipped into quoting MacBeth, "when shall we two meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
"An ill omen, surely, my love," he cautioned her, but with a bold smile at his lips, "to speak words of such a bloody play on this day of all days. But, I will, as you shall have it. No matter what may come, this shall be our forever rally point, our memorial to happiness: Marion's Needle. Like you it?" he asked, attempting to show it off to her with an outthrust arm, his other firmly about her waist.
She laughed at his theatrics. "It is the way you sell it," she agreed. "But I far prefer, 'Robin's Needle'."
"Hieroglyphics and antiquarians be damned," he declared, "had I my trusty penknife I'd have our initials cut into it within the hour."
"Shhh - " she giggled, wary that someone (though the pavement traffic was nearly non-existent) might overhear his threat to deface the ancient Egyptian obelisk that, in point of fact, significantly pre-dated even Cleopatra's storied reign.
November 1939 - Marion walked away from where she had bought the cabbie's present idleness on her behalf. There was not so much as a hint of rain over all London, and in specific the City of Westminster was uncharacteristically positively blazing with sunlight.
The stone obelisk cut a sharp path into the cloudless sky above it. For all that it was impressive, it was so terribly - stone. So cold and without emotion; unlike Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, St. Margaret's in Lothbury's statues of blissfully frolicking cupids - A.G. Walker's reverential monument to Emmeline Pankhurst, even.
Why had he chosen this? Yes, of course she recalled his reasons. Recalled, she thought, far too much of that happiest day of his - of her - life. But when she gazed on the monument he had chosen to their happiness, it now seemed more like a dagger to her, a crude, early Roman short sword, edged to maim, if not kill, all who approached it. Cutting, even, into Heaven itself.
Or perhaps it was not so enduring as once-thought. Perhaps it was nearly set to crumble. Stone into dust. Dust into ashes. The taste now day-and-night within her mouth.
She turned her back on it, in her haste to put it behind her nearly stumbling in her shoes.
Back to the taxi, and the waiting cabbie. Back to Mayfair, a failure, aged and empty before her time.
The cab pulled up in front of the Nighten residence, stopping appropriately at the curb, her baggage and trunk unloaded from it before she had a chance to repent her arrival.
The cabbie accepted his fare from her and left.
She stood, abandoned on the pavement, knowing how it would dismay her mother to see that her daughter's bags were stacked unceremoniously curb-side, as opposed to having been brought in through the servant's entrance by Nighten-employed footmen before the bags' leather had ever had a chance to touch the ground.
But of course the cabbie hadn't known, hadn't usually accepted fares to tony Mayfair. Hadn't known to wait until Nighten staff attended upon their arrival, until the Housekeeper settled the fare and any tip with him directly.
Marion ascended the twenty-or-so stone steps and rang the bell.
The massive door swung open, revealing their town butler.
"Ettlestone," she greeted him with a nod.
"Lady Marion," he responded, his jaw gone quite slack, his eyes showing an emotion she had never before encountered in him. Unlike his usual, highly-efficient self, he did not immediately move to one side to allow her entree.
"Lady Marion," he said again. And had she not spent time so recently among the emotionally demonstrative Ottos, she would not have realized that he was (as the reserved, respectable head-of-staff) at fighting back the urge to embrace her.
His training kicked in, and he extended a hand with which to take her hat. Instead of surrendering it to him, she (the new Marion, no longer the Marion that had departed this house) extended her hand and placed it momentarily within his. Ettlestone's eyes looked over to hers, and took on a momentary cast of both comfort and empathy at her brief gesture.
"You are...in America," he told her, his trembling voice struggling to reconcile with his refined demeanor. "We had not expected you, Ladyship."
"No, I daresay," she agreed absently, stepping inside toward the foyer's impressive, round pedestal table. The same familiar vase sat upon it, at present overflowing with fresh, brilliantly violet sweet flags.
"I will go and tell Lady Miranda of your arrival," he offered, and she found it queer to hear her mother referred to by her birth title, rather than that of 'Lady Nighten', the designation she had had to relinquish in the finalized divorce (though Marion knew that many of her friends still addressed her by it).
"Would you not, please, rather call down Master Clem?" she asked, preferring that meeting to a maternal one.
"Oh," Ettlestone, as ever, hated to disappoint. "Master Clem is not in this afternoon. He is was called to King Charles Street with his work. We are told to ring him there should the need arise."
"And Father?" she asked.
"Still at the Island," the butler confirmed, with a nod. "There has been talk that he may attempt compiling his papers to assay his memoirs."
She had allowed Ettlestone to lead her upstairs to her mother's private drawing room, reserved only for callers on the most intimate of terms.
In heading there they passed the turning she would usually take to arrive at her own bedchamber, and her mind strayed for a moment thinking of her bed, there. Of sleep, and privacy.
Oh, once asleep, how was she to ever wake again?
It was only Freddy's talent for forward motion that had kept her going, kept her so reliably on her feet in the weeks since the telegram. Even on Lucky George's ship she had felt him across the waters, holding her up, buoying her so that she might travel through the coming days until landfall.
But in his way Freddy was lost to her now, nearly as finally as was Robin. Her own successful Crossing was unlikely enough. It was utterly implausible that in the current climate of war he would (or could) dare to risk his own.
She heard the familiar, muted knock Ettlestone gave once at her mother's door.
"Enter," Lady Nighten - Lady Miranda - called in reply to it.
And so they did, Marion without noticing any strength in her own legs in the movement. What was she doing here? Why on earth had it seemed right that she return here?
"Lady Miranda - " Ettlestone began to announce her, but Marion rounded the doorway more quickly than he could speak.
"Damnation," Marion heard her mother say, never having heard her utter a swear word in her entire life prior. Her mother had spoken it crisply, daintily, even, as though it were a perfectly acceptable way for a Lady to express herself.
Lady Miranda smoothly, but with all speed, replaced her Limoges teacup and its saucer soundlessly on the silver tray from which they had been taken. She took a quickly-assessing look at her daughter and, without rising from where she sat, instructed the butler. "Lord Nighten's liquor cart at once, Ettlestone."
Lady Miranda never touched liquor of any kind. Often even turning down liquer-based desserts when they were offered to her.
Marion felt like her eyes could not blink quickly enough to take it all in, her mother's efficient, dependable taking-charge of the moment.
The short walk up the stairs to the drawing room seemed to have sapped whatever strength Marion had left. "My steamer trunk and baggage," she confessed. "The taxi has left them all on the pavement."
She had expected her mother to decry the horror of this, the outrage and unacceptability of a Nighten engaging a cab, rather than ringing for the car. She did neither.
"By all means, Ettlestone," her mother commanded, sounding more of an army general than a society matron, "clear the pavement of them, lest Gypsies wander in and traipse off with Lady Marion's best colliers. Call my maid to draw a bath - steaming! Ring Master Clem that he is to return home at once, as his sister has arrived from America."
In short order, the room seemed to be teeming with staff; a new girl to be appointed Marion's ladiesmaid for the present time, until her usual girl could be called into town from where she had been sent to serve at Lincoln Greene, the Nighten country home. The bed to be aired, seating for dinner to be re-ordered, the menu re-drawn, Lady Miranda (with her regrets - though they did not sound very genuine) to be home to no further visitors for remainder of the day.
All of this was accomplished in two heartbeats. Just as quickly, the room cleared, a second tray of tea, and Sir Edward's liquor cart produced on the low table.
Finally, Lady Miranda rose from her place, almost as if her having stood in front of the staff might have given them the mistaken impression that she thought the shocking happenings of her daughter unexpectedly returned home from an ocean (a world, a war-less world) away was something to be treated as though it might be hard to manage.
She walked to where Marion still stood, half-swaying in her emotional exhaustion, and steered her youngest child into a comfy chair, the one most often frequented in memory by Marion's father.
Miranda unbuttoned Marion's jacket, without immediately removing it, and, in an action so unusual in its familiarity it was almost distressing, took a seat on the petite footstool that matched the armchair, and set at quietly removing her daughter's shoes.
Watching this unexpected ministration, Marion looked down, and thought how strange, how odd that after all these years it would prove to be her mother - a woman with whom she so rarely saw eye-to-eye - that would assist in the waking of her, in the keeping of her going and upright during what she knew would be the enduring grief of Robin's death still yet to come.
Present - GUERNSEY - Robin had come as quickly as he had ever done anything in his life, with only Allen along to temper his inclination toward risk (greatly increased at this present crisis) and retain any mindfulness of dangerous Nazis, and stealth, and possible capture.
Were it not still half-night, Guernsey would indeed smoke: twin pillars from its two transforming (to him) fires. The island's civic archives a shambles, they were told - the island was lousy with illicit news of it. The Barnsdale estate: the animal barn smouldering as though it had been paid a visit by Nero. The singular smell of animal death and unslaughtered - yet cooked flesh - heavily in the air.
Soon enough the wind off the sea would carry all such reminders away.
And Edward, Lord Nighten, dead.
Marion had said so - they all, everyone had heard it in her broadcast. Even the boy Djak, whose English was only aspiring toward proficient. The moment Marion's disguised voice had spoken the news, Robin had begun to make ready to leave. For how long he did not know.
He had gone first, naturally, to Barnsdale House, only to find her rooms (and any other rooms he and Allen could think of) bare of her presence.
Then, leaving a disappointed Allen behind, he had dashed to the Nightwatch windmill. Unpopulated, yet even in the relative darkness he could not miss the emptied bottles and used glasses sitting about.
He knew not where to look next. Purely out of now long-formed habit, he began to slowly circle (ever widening) outward from the windmill, not at all confident he would find anything, but needing a clue, and knowing it to be her last-known location.
He had found, of all people, Thornton, the man Eva Heindl had once assured him was a friend 'with a closed mouth', who had also (again, according to Eva) endowed Marion with his contraband radio transmission equipment that had become the basis of the Nightwatch.
They two had not exchanged much information that day, long weeks ago, when Thornton had helped Robin put Clem Nighten's un-christened boat out to sea in the shallow estuary. But the older man at least knew Robin was on friendly terms with Eva, had a vested interest in Marion, and being out at present ignoring curfew, likely had a Resistance bent of mind.
Thornton had been at attempting to gather any sort of possible fuel to start a fire. Recognizing Robin, he hurried him back to his cottage, where Marion lay.
Looking down at her, her hair, though short, still a-tumble, Robin thought of how he had dealt with the pain of her leaving him in favor of a horse, in favor of a trip across the Atlantic. How he had ignored the pain of his heart, burying it, not truly finding it again until the overpowering physical pain of his injury appeared following the crash. How that bodily anguish seemed to call forth the wounding of his heart, making ignoring it any longer an impossibility.
He did not know how Marion might handle what had occurred. If it would prove to be a final straw, or further rallying cry.
He looked over to Thornton, as if asking permission for what he was about to do, and, seeing acceptance in the older man's eyes, without removing his jacket in the cottage's un-firelit coolness, he laid down on the low, crudely-hewn bed beside Marion, and waited for her to wake, and for him to see.
...TBC...
A/N: Did I get your needle right, GClio? I did try. ;)
If any reader has interest in re-reading the events leading up to Robin's 1937 proposal, you may locate them in Chapter 6 of Story 2; "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane".