GUERNSEY - Barnsdale Estate - "Clun!" Kommandant Vaiser shouted as he stormed up the main stair of Barnsdale House before noon, demanding the estate's butler and head-of-staff make an immediate appearance.

"Clun!" he barked, "What is the meaning of this?"

Behind him his driver, known to most as Islander Dale Allen, did a clever sort of dance, making it appear as though he were struggling to keep up with his employer's hell-for-leather gait on the stair, yet all the while managing not to overtake the shorter, decidedly less-fit German.

In one of the larger parlors of the home's ground floor, a queue of Islanders was assembled, and stretched out onto the formal front grounds, wrapping about the circle gravel drive. They waited - one had nervously informed the Kommandant when he had demanded Allen pull the car up to ask - to view the recently deceased Sir Edward Nighten, lying in state at his island home.

Outraged at this answer - assembly of Islanders for any reason still forbidden, illegal, by Occupation diktat - the Kommandant had ordered more speed from the Duesenberg's accelerator, and set his own internal temperature to 'fume'.

Clun was found. Allen listened on as the himself-aged butler explained to Vaiser that the lifeless body of the elderly Sir Edward had been brought home in the early morning hours by Guernsey Constable Dunne, and as the Master (here, naturally, in speaking to Vaiser, Clun referred to Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer) had already departed the estate to return to his post on Alderney, the household staff had endeavored - with Fraulein Vaiser's help - to arrange for things as they thought best.

"You attempt," Vaiser growled dangerously to the very proper old fellow, "to implicate my own daughter in this obvious act of insurrection?"

"My-my lord?" Clun had stammered in the wake of Vaiser's near-apoplexy, erroneously giving the Kommandant a title to which he had no claim.

"Find me the Lady Marion," Vaiser demanded of Clun. "She will answer for this. Fetch Gisbonnhoffer's guards-in-residence. They will find and bring this Island Constable to answer for his role instigating this act of reckless disobedience."

Allen knew better than to protest to the Kommandant that it was only preamble to a decent Christian burial, after all - not an organized act of premeditated Resistance - the funeral of Guernsey's most-celebrated part-time citizen. And for a believed Nazi-collaborator, at that, become so with the published recant of his infamous monograph. A man whose house held at present more German guests than once-free Islander occupants, and a full staff to serve these now-exalted overlords.

Doubtless more than one German stationed on the island would wish to attend and pay their respects upon Lord Nighten's passing, though it was more likely any such Germans in attendance would be more intimately on terms with Nighten's daughter, or future son-in-law.

But Allen knew better than to speak up so. And was to find himself shortly enough dispatched, thankfully dismissed to where such decent, knee-jerk responses no longer were to need swallowing down.

Locating the door to it, Vaiser burst into what had priorly been Lady Nighten's suite of rooms, looking for his daughter, who was not to be found there. The Kommandant removed his great coat, not waiting for staff to appear to take it from him, and arranged himself in the largest, coziest of chairs in the chic sitting room, with the same gusto and mine-by-rights attitude as he might have in setting up an impromptu field office on yet another front.

"You. Driver," he beckoned to Allen, though they two were now alone, Clun off on the tasks to which he had been relegated. "Find Fraulein Vaiser. Bring her to me at once. And Driver," he continued, his voice turning saccharine in its mock-instructiveness, "if you were to...explain to her that...whole-hearted remorse in this instance might go far to rescue her bony-excuse-for-an-arse?" A smile. A crinkle of his nose as he shook his head. "It would not go amiss."

Mr. Thornton's Cottage - Marion sensed someone breathing nearby, the sound louder than her own, still half-sleeping exhales. She felt herself coming into a moment that never was, like alighting from a passing cloud onto a distant mountaintop. The breathing was not Eva's (sounds from the trundle mattress in her Barnsdale bedchamber would not be so distinct, the warmth along Marion's back so immediate).

Her mind was enveloped in the fantasy that she was lady mistress of Kirk Leaves, surrounded by Robin's - her and Robin's - rooms, there. Rooms she had always demurred away from visiting (despite frequent invitations varying in their levels of sincerety and randiness), rooms unknown to her, but much-dreamed about, much-speculated upon at the time. Like finally seeing behind a curtain which for so long had opaguely obscured what was beyond, behind the veil.

Her nightgown the softest lilac satin, the covers over them - yes, them - the plumpest to be found. She looked to Robin, the parts of him she could see. The hands and forearms of a man, the nude shoulder of same. Her lover. The man in her bed. Or rather, the man in whose bed she was in. The bed which they obviously shared. The pleasures within it which they also in the dream, quite obviously, shared.

The war far away, or even, never-had-been. A Sunday morning, before she had to be up, to meet with Wadlowe and the housekeeper and arrange for the day to come. A Sunday morning to simply lie abed and marvel. That the world could feel so perfect, so simple, fitted into Robin's arms. Fitted into this perfection of privacy. A jigsaw puzzle so long thought to be forever missing a piece, now found. Now complete. Puzzle done, time for rest. To enjoy the scene assembled. All that was required of her: to lay, safe within his arms.

She recalled nothing of how she came to be here, nothing of weddings or honeymoon trips, trousseaus or vows. She should have been alarmed about her lack of curiosity over where her wedding ring might be found - she felt none on her finger. Yet, she did not. In that far-longer-than-it-truly-was moment as her mind set into waking, there was nothing to worry for, nothing over which to fret. The world was again in its right mind, idyllicly so. To question such harmony the idiot prerogrative of none but a fool.

Turning her head back toward him Marion announced with some surprise (but without irritation), "you're drunk," upon encountering the pungent smell of liquor seeping from breath and pores.

Robin's eyes opened at this, and widened at her accusation, recalling her to herself. The crinkles about their edges held none of his usual gaiety.

"No," she recanted with dismay, "I am drunk." Her hand went to her temple, "Quite so, and of a morning." There was a small degree of wonder in her tone. She was only beginning to grasp that she was not, in point of fact, ensconced at Kirk Leaves.

His brow furrowed at her obviously scattered perception. "I came before the broadcast had finished," he told her.

Her cloudy mind offered her small pieces of the night before. "...and I passed out, likewise."

"So Mr. Thornton has said," Robin agreed. "He found you there, a record repeating in a scratched groove some thirty minutes beyond your usual sign-off time."

"So very long? That cannot be good," she said half-heartedly, taking in Mr. Thornton's very modest cottage interior around them. She sat herself gingerly up, and Robin followed her lead. The crude, low bed creaked beneath this re-distribution of weight, but there was little else to sit upon in the cottage, save a single chair by the fire, and Mr. Thornton's own plain bed.

"I have left Barnsdale," she told him, intending the announcement in a more permanent way than the obvious fact she was not there at present. She tried to drag a hand through her hair, but its tangles were too great. Her hand would not agree to move through it.

Robin took his hand and ran it from her shoulder down her arm where he took her hand in his and clenched it. "And where is Sir Edward?" Robin asked, with tender hesitance, inquiring after the body.

"Mitch is dead," she answered him, her tongue and teeth nipping at her lips in her uncertainty of delivering the news. "Geis had him killed, or killed him - " she shook her head and looked down, "to spite me. Shall we talk about that?" she asked, with faux brightness.

Her head snapped around, almost defiantly. "About my punishment for precipitating it? About how I think it feels to have good, dear, steady Mitch's blood on my very hands?"

Robin let himself have a moment to breathe through that deeply upsetting piece of news and re-focussed. "Last night," he prompted her. "Will you tell me?"

Her chin shot up in a gesture of semi-defiance he was not unfamiliar with. The half-coming-on, half held-back tears as she spoke, less familiar. "Sir Edward, Lord Nighten lies dead on the ground at his holiday estate. A rather ignominious end, wouldn't you say?"

"And Gisbonnhoffer killed him? Also to spite you?"

She shook her head, though she would ever lay the sin of her father's dead at Geis' over-filled doorstep. Even so, such was not the full truth of it. "He died trying to save me from the blazing barn." She shrugged as if to explain. "He thought me to be inside. Gisbonnhoffer set torches to the animal barn because he has come to believe that I have kept a - a marriage - from him. I do not know why, but he believes himself both betrayed and greviously ill-used by me."

Robin's concern turned to simliar confusion. "The Lieutenant thinks you married?"

She nodded. "He threatened to interrogate Father on the matter, but I could not let him - what if he had spoken of you, here on the islands? So I entered a full confession: I am married, my indignation and outrage over his own attempt at bigamy merely a sham to conceal my own, black plans to falsely wed him."

Robin returned to his original question. "And Sir Edward?"

She half-attempted a smile. "Beyond where they may touch him. Asleep. Happy."

"Happy?"

"He came back to me," she told him, taking his other hand in hers as she related what now seemed miraculous. "He knew. He was - more lucid than I had seen him since just before the Occupation. He spoke of Mother, of Clem, of our lives here...of you."

"Me?" He squeezed her hand.

"That he was glad that I would still have you, here."

She let him pull her into an embrace, his arms circled about her.

He placed a fervent kiss into the crown of her hair. No spoken condolences, no apologies or trite attempts at wisdom. "Marry me," he said, without elaborating.

She immediately withdrew from the intimacy of his arms (no matter how good it had felt) and turned to stare at his mouth, as though she had only imagined it spoke.

Admittedly, he felt a shade less confidant in his suggestion with her removed from his near proximity. "Marion," he appealed to her. "We are ever and always going in different directions. I no longer have the patience to assume that we will meet again on the other side of the world. These last years have taught me - as I ought to have known all along - that I must snatch at happiness when I can. And you - have long been my happiness."

As was so often her way, she stormed in response to his proposal, to the hopefulness it held. "The world is on fire all around us, Robin." She, of course, knew she had no need to tell him that. "Tomorrow is far from a promise - if even an expectation. And you ask me to troth with you 'forever'?" She scoffed. "It is too absurd!" She knew she cried against it so because of how very tempting an offer it was this day, this moment. "We may neither of us live to see luncheon."

"No," Robin came at it in an unusually (for him) reasoned way. "I ask only what the minister, what God, will - till death do us part. Is that so unreasonable?" His hand reached out for her face. "If death comes tomorrow, or this afternoon, or thirty years hence, I am yours." And then he capped it off with her own, long ago desire. "Lay down with me, Marion, and never get up."

What a vapor that would have sent her into those years ago. Lay, with Robin, never having to get up. Never having to think of leaving, of parting. An offer of always. What tingles, what unknown, hidden raptures, what only-ever half-imagined marital delights might just such a request have conjured to her?

She found that silly, untested young girl, with her incomplete understanding of what the world held for her made her angry. Just as did that girl's inexperienced thoughts of lovemaking, of considering the possibility that a woman might actually contract with a man 'forever', and truly mean (and hope in) it.

"You do not understand, Robin." She scoffed with bitter laughter. "How can you NOT understand? Have you not seen suffering? Are you simply blind to what takes place all about us? Every day? I know you are not, and yet - to ask this?" She felt herself bristling. "What have I to offer you, to offer anyone?"

Could he, he of all people, know her so very little now?

"My mind cannot even see tomorrows. My insides are half-burnt, singed and grey. What sort of bride would that make? I would be no gift for you. I could make no home for you. What do we even have, here? No home, no land, no...true professions. I would say we live in a fantasy, but it is more a night terror, with night never set to end. Nothing here is real - or perhaps it IS real, it is the only true permanence anymore."

Oh, she was so angry. And she was so hurt, and so - grieving. And so, so very exhausted. She should not have to explain these things to him. She should not have to - Not have to - Re-convince herself of them.

"And you speak of snatching at happiness? Grabbing for brass bloody rings when the carousel no longer dependably travels, even, in a circle? What can a wife be - a husband be - in such a place, such a time?"

For some reason, at the last moment she attempted to soften her tirade, alter the tenor of their conversation. "'Tis a bad attempt at gallows humor, I do not doubt."

Robin had taken in everything she said. He watched, also, what the saying of it had brought onto her physically. "Were you going to go through with it?" he asked, his tone soft, non-confrontational, "to marry him?"

Her mind bogged down with the unexpected question for a moment. Her eyes scrambled. "Yes," she answered truthfully, her voice dying away in the admitting of it. "As I have said."

He let himself give an incremental smile at her answer, let his hand slide from where it had come to rest on her shoulder up the side of her neck, cupping the side of her face. He let his opposite shoulder shrug. "Then how can you not better accept me?" His eyes beseeched. "Do you not love me, Marion? Did you not once? And now, again?"

All breath exhaled her body. Her shoulders dropped. She would not lie, nor prevaricate. "May God watch over you, Robin, I love you. Once, far more than I knew. And now," it was barely a whisper, "with as much as I have left to do so." She pushed her jaw against his palm.

"And Gisbonnhoffer already believes you married," he went on. "You can fear nothing from him, then, on that account."

"Oh, I can fear a great many things of him," she began in what she hoped would continue on as a sensible tone. "He burnt the barn," her words began, already, to become shaky, "killed Dovecote while I was made to watch," there was nothing now but to get through it, "and incinerated Gypsum and the others without batting an eye." Her tears now wet his hand. "I can only assume this is but the beginning of his cruelty."

Her voice caught as she found herself asking, like a child in fear of a bogeyman, "please, Robin," her eyes closed with the effort. "Don't let him touch me - don't let those hands that - Don't!" For a moment she found it very difficult to leave off shaking her head.

"'Don't let him' - " Robin stalled out, and half-asked the question in wonderment, "do you mean to say..."

The implication momentarily snapped her back into herself. "No!" she protested his assumption, "I have never let him, that is, we have never...shared a bed."

They sat for a moment looking at one another. She saw the way his eyes regarded her, so much more deeply, with such greater comprehension and empathy than had those of the prankster's, the merry half-man half-boy's of her first proposal. How she had loved that half-boy. But how, how very much she had tried not to, but yet nonetheless had grown to need that man.

"Robin," she asked.

"Yes?" Always, ever with a ready answer for her.

"Marry me." She tried to not shudder, tried not to bodily react to making such a wild, impossible suggestion. "Share my bed. Take back our lost yesterday. Convince me of tomorrow."

He did not say yes, in any spoken language.

She offered him no nursery rhyme or grand romantic gesture. There was no giving and receiving of a ring. (The ring once - and always - symbolizing their joining an ocean away.) The exceptionally modest fire on Mr. Thornton's hearth was nearly going out. Within the un-electrified cottage, the day's light barely illuminating their surroundings, it could just as likely have been 1200 AD as 1943 AD. And Robin answered her in a similar, timeless way.

His second hand came up to bookend the other cheek of her face, the tips of his fingers teasing into her hair, and he brought her mouth toward his and kissed her until, if not for the imminent possibility of Mr. Thornton's return to his own cottage, doubtless his acceptance of her proposal would have gone much further. And in that moment, doubtless, she would have let it.

"I can see the society page clipping even now," he took a moment to brag. "'Lady NoOne to wed the Viscount of Nothing in a bare-bones ceremony held at an unknown locale. No family to attend'." At this realization, he stopped joking, and his eyes flicked away.

"Let us take today," his thumb brushed along her cheek under her eye, though no further tears were shed there, "for your Father. Allen is with me. I shall get myself shortly to Barnsdale to see what is afoot there. Eat what Mr. Thornton provides, rest and heal. I shall see you at the Nightwatch. And ferry you, then, to meet my 'family'. As for the service to come, I have just the man for it." He smiled at her, but not without a certain sadness, uncharacteristic for him to let show through.

She faced it head-on. "And yet you have no Mitch to stand up with you."

He could not afford to let himself descend into full-on despair for his lost friend. As always, with the unit and with his work, there was too much at risk to lose focus for long. "And so I shall take the day," he promised her, "the month, the year ahead, to mourn Mitch."

"But your love of, and grief for him - it does not diminish your wish to...have this wedding?"

He allowed himself a deep sigh. "Sadness," he thought of his own mother's death, "does not preclude the possibility of joy. Your father. Mitch. We two shall be sad together. But we shall be - "

She finished it for him. "Together."

"Aye. But a few hours more, and then, my love, 'High diddle doubt, my candle's out/My little maid is not at home/Saddle my hog, and bridle my dog/And I shall fetch my little maid home.'"

And his little maid kissed him farewell until then.

Barnsdale Estate - Allen made quick work of getting down to the main floor level of the house via the now-familiar servants' stair. He knew if he found he needed to he could rely on someone in the lower-level kitchens knowing where Eleri might be, but thought to try his own instincts first.

When he came to the large parlor's servants' entrance, he pushed on the immaculately oiled door and it slit open silently, and just far enough that he was able to survey the room within without himself being seen.

The Kommandant's unexpected arrival had not yet dampened the attendance of mourners, it would seem. There was little enough to fear at present, until the Kommandant could assemble an attachment of troops to force (or threaten) them into dispersing, which would take time, as the house's telephone - despite its being located in what was now largely accepted as Nazi Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's home - was no longer in service, its line severed, as were most on the island, in the first days of Occupation.

Sir Edward was indeed laid out in full pomp, his body dressed by the staff in his best (or near-best, to Allen's eye) clothing, laid out on sturdy planks (Blimey, how valuable that wood was to Islanders burning anything at present for fuel!) across two high-backed chairs.

Candles, long wax tapers the likes of which Islanders had not seen in a year and six months or more, burned (needlessly - it was full daylight) in beautiful, ornate candle stands, and fall flowers (of which the island, still, somehow, managed to be right swollen) adorned the room with the proper amount of tasteful decoration.

And Elerinne Vaiser stood at the head of the corpse - neither family, nor truly acquainted with the man - graciously accepting condolences from any and all comers in a sedate navy blue frock that had clearly been located within Marion's closet.

He took a quiet step into the room, not wishing to disturb its reverent atmosphere, and positioned himself behind Eleri's shoulder.

He extended his hand toward her shoulder, and in response to weight upon it, she turned to him, her thin eyebrows coming together in an unspoken question at his appearance. Clearly, she had neither noticed, nor been informed of, her father's arrival.

"Best come with me, straightaway," he told her, keeping his voice low. Sliding his hand from her shoulder down to the small of her back, he used it to steer her toward and then through the servants' stair door.

"First things first," he asked, once the door swung silently shut. "Where's Lady Marion?"

"Well, I don't know that."

"Your father means to find out - and not nicely."

"If he can, he's a far better detective than any of us here."

"You don't see, Ellie," he attempted to counsel her. "He doesn't have to be a better - or even a good - detective. Get enough soldiers out here and he finds her by sheer force of numbers. And it's best if we find her first. He's keen to see heads roll over this," he cocked his head to indicate the other side of the door, "assemblage."

"I am not lying," she told him. "I do not know where she is. I can only hope - " and then he watched in surprise as she began to softly half-cry, her slender shoulders shaking with unheard sobs before him.

"There, there. Wot's this, then? Closer to old Edward than I had thought you were, Love?" He managed to stop himself short of asking if she had, perhaps ever gone in search of a fictional missing scarf in Lord Nighten's chambers.

He inclined his head slightly to the side, as if to better examine her weeping face, trying to puzzle out if this emotion, was, indeed, genuine.

"Well," she sniffled, "he was a kind man - even if he was...dotty. And Lady Marion loved him, didn't she? Oh, I pray to God, Mr. Allen, that she is alive."

"Dale," he, as ever, prompted her toward the familiar version of his alias. "Alive?"

"That he has not killed her as well."

"'He' who? 'As well'?" Allen could not become too fraught at present over the immediate status of Marion, having, with Robin, heard that she made it to the Nightwatch broadcast.

"Herr Geis," she said, and a shiver took her. "He came, in the night. I saw him with Sir Edward. He - I was wrong. Wrong. He has no kindness in his heart. No 'qualities'. They had barricaded me in my rooms, but from my window I saw Sir Edward had gotten free, had rushed off toward the animal barn, which was burning - where the Lieutenant had taken Lady Marion, and several of his men. When Sir Edward met with Herr Geis - entreating him for his help, I do not doubt - Herr Geis simply...thrust Sir Edward from him and walked away, never looking back. Constable Dunne returned a short time later with Sir Edward's body. He told us that Sir Edward believed Lady Marion was in the burning barn, and rushed in to help her, to get her out. And in doing this, he met his end."

As she had given her story, Allen had watched her intently, at once trying to process both the facts as she presented them, and her own reaction to them.

As she was still somewhat crying, he reached out his arms toward her, and she agreed to step into them. "Here," he said, attempting to comfort the girl, "here."

But he could not let the need for comfort in that moment overshadow his need to know where Marion was, and the tricky task of producing a contrite Eleri for her father upstairs.

"And no one here has seen Lady Marion since then?"

"Constable Dunne says she has run off. Some of the staff expect her to return, others - a minority - believe she may have...done herself a mortal harm."

Well, that was a grim thought to consider.

"Your father will order the viewing disbanded, you know."

"And why should he?" she half-cried out, her ire raised. "For all I - or anyone - cares, he may sit in and oversee it if he likes."

"Look, Hen," Allen attempted to explain to her, "Your dad's an important guy 'round here. Mind yourself of that. Important men don't like to show up and find unexpected, bordering-on-illegal things going on. Apologize to him. Tell him you were wrong. Maybe request that he oversee the viewing. Let him know you were only doing it to keep the staff and nearby village folk from mutiny. Trying to be the lady of the house when the lady - and her future lord - are missing. It was a mistake. That's all. Sorry, Dad. Kiss kiss."

"But I'm not sorry." She actually stamped her foot in defiance. "And I'm not wrong. It is he who is wrong, and ought to be sorry." She cocked one ear as though she had heard him wrongly. "Are you suggesting that I live my life counter to what I know to be truth?" She gave an exasperated exhale. "What sort of a person would do that?"

"What sort of a person, indeed," he mumbled to himself, following her brief diatribe against his advice.

"In conclusion," he added, hoping something of what he said would perhaps manage to help her bridle her tongue in her impending interview with her father, "we must let the Kommandant decide in what way it is best to lay Sir Edward to rest - unless, not bein' funny, we wish to join 'im."

"I think you must be the single, least-courageous man I've ever met," she told him in wonder as he followed close behind her up the servants' stair.

"Yeah," he half-scoffed, recalling to himself not to fall too far below her on the steep stair, lest he be tempted to sight (it would prove so easy) up her frock's skirt, "but in ten-year's time let's see, Miss Ellie. Let's see who of us 's still among the livin'."

...TBC...

A/N: Sorry updates have been coming less reliably often. I stepped out on a brief fic-cation with BBC RH series Allan. I'm sure you'll be seeing some of that 'trip' posted here in days to come...but try not to throw rotten fruit because he took me (briefly) away from the Channel Islands, and back to Sherwood...