SARK - Farm of Blind La Salle - Oxley and the Lady Marion had arrived at the farmhouse - predictably - in the pre-dawn hour or so following the conclusion of the Nightwatch.
Upon his arrival, it had not taken Oxley long to set Wills Reddy to the task of something (Carter did not know exactly what) off in the countryside, nearby, or within, Hanton Forest - he thought he had overheard the British unit's commanding officer say.
It was odd to see Marion Nighten, voice of the Nightwatch, back at La Salle's farm. She had not attended upon them so since...since the hours immediately following her kidnapping. For which he, of course, was solely responsible. Not that Oxley's eyes ever let him forget it for long, despite the pseudo- peace accord the two men had struck publicly in from of the others that time in the barnyard.
How could he hold such enduring, hard feelings against the man? Doubtless in the same situation, he would handle himself far less well.
Carter had been on watch as the couple arrived, Lady Marion looking bright in the yet-dawnless morning - energized by something within, which did not quite track to anyone knowing the loss she had so recently suffered. Oxley, himself, was a predictable monolith of stone when encountering him. 'To business' and little more, dismissing him from his watch to rouse Reddy.
Which he had gladly done, joined - on his way back into the farmhouse - by the boy Djak. Ever-present, Carter thought, the boy's tenacious vigilance eternally surprising, and yet also pleasing, him.
By the time they had both worked to rouse Reddy (who tended toward sleepy-headedness more than some of the others), Oxley and his girl had La Salle woken as well. (Though in truth very little occurred in the Sarkese rector's home that he was not perceptive enough to witness first-hand.)
It was La Salle who had found Carter - for the moment absent Djak, who had chosen to hike with Wills toward his destination as far as the edge of La Salle's tenement - and informed him there was, as soon as could be managed, to be a wedding. And Carter - and the boy Djak - to stand witness to it.
"I shall leave it to you, Alex," La Salle had said in parting, "to explain it to the boy. There is something I must find before we may begin, and I will take a moment to speak to Robin and Lady Marion - both together and then alone - before your services will be needed."
At that La Salle had departed the kitchen for parts of the house unknown, leaving Carter with his astonishment at having been requested to partner the Lady Marion - the woman he had kidnapped and wounded - upon what he knew was commonly said to be the happiest occasion of any woman's life.
As all tenements on Sark were of modest acreage (and therefore not time-consuming to travel across), it was not long before Djak returned, seeking him in the kitchen rather than staying outside for the final moments of nighttime freedom before she would be confined - due to daylight - to the house.
"There is to be a wedding," Carter told her, as though debriefing a fellow soldier, not knowing how to stall or fancy-up the news.
"Abiav?" she questioned him in the Romany language. "Ceremony of the mingling of the blood?"
"Yes, that's the one," he agreed. "Though hopefully, any blood will mingle only figuratively," he added, thinking of Oxley's eyes, murder ever submerged within them when they looked at him. Knowing that there was no way Carter's selection as witness and partner in the ceremony to Lady Marion could have been at Oxley's consent.
The boy was too perceptive (and had been so for far too long) to have to ask for whom the ceremony was meant to be performed.
"What of the bride price?" Djak asked. "Lady Marion's father is dead. Who will pay it?"
"Ah, bride price," Carter mimed at considering the question, as though it were a head-scratcher. "It would appear that Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer has, in destroying Lady Marion's animal barn, burnt up the agreed-upon bride price of livestock with it. Oxley - your rom baro - has therefore agreed to take her without."
The boy's eyes registered slight shock at this development, followed quickly by blossoming adoration - further adoration - of the unit's commander.
"We are to stand witness; I for the lady, you for Oxley."
The boy did not respond.
"Will you not question me further on the ancient ways of your people?" Carter inquired. "Ask if we will cast an enchantment, here - sprinkle pig's blood, there?" It was rare that he teased the boy.
Djak scoffed, but showed that she knew the remark for affectionate mocking. "I am not so idiot as to expect Gadjo to marry in the way of Rom, am I? I do not expect them to be joined as we are joined. The Rom are a singular people."
"No," Carter agreed, now fully serious. "Not an idiot. Your English is becoming good. Your teacher, Reddy, I think must be proud."
It was slight, but his eyes caught the corners of the Gypsy boy's mouth point slightly higher than they usually did when at rest.
"I am in need of you, as well," Carter announced, standing from the table to take his empty cup to the washbasin.
"I will do what you want, Flight Commander Thomas Carter." The boy replied, as he often did, with Carter's full military title.
Perhaps he does not realize it's a military designation, Carter had thought more than once. Perhaps he thinks it's bequeathed nobility. A 'my lord', or 'your highness'.
"Find me something in the house - or barn - (though I doubt there is anything suitable in the barn) that will stand for a woman's headcovering. Perhaps the silken scarf you stole from Abby Rufford that saw us exiled from her home."
The boy's nose wrinkled in response to the resurrecting of his faults. "For the lady?" he asked.
Carter nodded. "And hold your bird - " he ordered, the dove in question perched as it often was on Djak's shoulder.
Obediently Djak held the bird as, to Djak's curious eye, Carter disengaged the metal band that assisted in its carrying of messages from about its leg.
Using a butter knife and a bit of elbow grease, with a whisper of artistry, Carter had the pliable metal cuff shaped into something as like a circular ring as might be - only a few millimeters shy of matching up. A reasonable approximation of a woman's delicate wedding band.
Djak gave him an intense look in response to his several moments of work with the metal.
"You are a...knowing man," he said to him, and before Carter could ask for clarification about what, exactly, he had meant, the boy was half out of the room, calling over his shoulder, "I get the other."
And Carter was left to his thoughts.
A knowing man, he considered. Of course, on such things, he was a knowing man. He had barely been into double digits of age when he had come to live in an exclusively female household. His mother's and Babushka's wedding rings more precious to them than any of their previous jewels.
He thought of the last, true wedding he had attended. Not the reduced-circumstances weddings they had from time to time attended in Hoboken, or nearby cities. White Russia without its pomp, its elegance, the ceremonies status quo, contemporarily American - or rife with the borrowed opulence of the local Eastern Orthodox Church - the paste crowns and diadems for the bride and groom used repeatedly in each ceremony. Those being wed having left - having lost - their own such finery, such genuinely jeweled coronets, in Russia. Along with their houses, their dowries, the authority of their titles. The power of their level of rank.
He thought of the Lady Marion today. Knew that were this to be her wedding in England, not the Occupied Islands, she would wear a jeweled symbol of her station upon her head, precious stones at her throat and wrist.
Oxley, possibly, a sword at his side. Braid upon his coat. White gloves.
A grand cathedral set aside to hold those members of the English aristocracy who wished to witness an auspicious joining of their own.
Eighteen or more bridesmaids. Footmen. Choristers. Crowds of commoners thronging for a view.
He could not immediately recall what Reddy had told him Oxley's title and station was, but he did recall that it was a significant one. As was Marion's. So, take what he had imagined, double it.
He was not foolish enough to think either bride or bridegroom would pine for such pageantry today, here in Blind La Salle's homey farmhouse. But he felt as though he knew that a little something - even an only half-complete circle of a ring, a swatch of fabric to cover the bride's head - would not go unappreciated.
It was not so different, perhaps, from what one heard of happening on the homefront. A soldier on a few hours' leave, grabbing his girl, getting their paperwork in order and making a mad dash for any Justice of the Peace to see the job done, the certificate signed, the deal sealed, all before he was due back on base. Before he was again shipped out. Grabbing at happiness - at love? Before the moment evaporated. Before the dreaded telegrams might come, before the chance of being together was lost to war. Lost to what the world had become.
Djak raced back into the kitchen, pride showing on his face over his find. "Okay, yes?"
He held in his hands an exquisite length of broad, hand-sewn lace, the color only a shade lighter than a barely-brown eggshell.
"You have not just found this for the first time today," Carter half-accused, his hand busy at feeling the infinitesimally small knots of the delicate threads.
"No," Djak agreed. "Okay, yes?"
"Only found what for the first time today?" La Salle asked, walking into the kitchen where he was about to let the witnesses know they were ready to begin.
Carter and Djak each took a corner of the fabric length and placed them into the blind rector's hands. The exquisite cloth's weight and bulk amounted to little more than mounded spider webs in his broad, farmer's grip.
Stephen's calloused fingertips danced over the lace as though its knots were the very language of Braille itself. "Djak," he spoke. "This is good. A good thing to have found. It is Madame La Salle's." He smiled, unable, even in the moment of memory, to allow any sadness to show in his demeanor. "She sewed it herself to wear on our wedding day." He brought it to his face to smell, its age (and time packed away) requiring that he imagine any long-disappeared scent of his absent wife. "Yes," he said, encouraging the young boy, "off to Lady Marion with it. And you deserve all thanks she affords you."
"It has been long years since I have seen such fine handiwork," Carter told the proud husband, its affect upon him genuine.
"I look forward to the day you may shake the graceful hand by which it was made," La Salle told him. "Though when Louise has come home, Alex, I doubt I shall let those hands long out of mine own." Remembering himself, he cleared his throat. "Come," he encouraged Carter, "we've two hands to join - before Wills and the others return."
Marion had been surprised by the boy Djak's - check that, the secret girl Djak's - appearance moments before she was to join Stephen in the downstairs parlor. Djak held in her arms a length of handmade lace, and even before Marion could think to mourn the lack of hairpins to secure it, Djak craftily produced them as well.
"From Flight Commander Thomas Carter," she told Marion, her Gypsy-trained beauty-hungry eye impressed by the magnificence of the lace mantilla as it covered Marion's dark hair, the finished edge sitting just above her dark brows, its length falling over her shoulders and down her back to her calves, nearly negating the fact Lady Marion (of necessity) needs must wear trousers to her own wedding.
"Thank you," Marion told Djak, able to see some reflection of herself in the very modestly-sized looking glass upon the bedroom's bureau.
"Is he waiting, downstairs?" Marion asked the girl. "I confess, I am not sure how to carry on. Before this," she indicated the added formality of the headcovering, "I assumed we'd all just walk in, as we might any other day. Now - things somehow feel...monumental."
Djak did not fully understand the words Marion spoke, nor the myriad broken English wedding customs to which she alluded, but she recognized uncertainty in Marion's eyes, and could recall enough of her past life before the war to know that brides often had a way of becoming shy or reticently modest just before the ceremony, no matter their day-to-day personalities.
"Come," she beckoned Marion, extending her hand to be held, and walking with her down the steps and to the home's front sitting room.
Upon entering the room they stood upon no particular ceremony. It looked, generally, like it did every other day. Stephen and Robin occupied a portion of it, Robin's back to them, Carter standing slightly apart from the two men, his shirt buttoned to the neck, his worn and misused RAF uniform coat brought out from its hiding place and also buttoned to within an inch of its life.
The past weeks had proven good to him, and the weight he had once shed so abruptly during his harsh captivity was finding its way back to his bones, into muscle, filling out the tailoring of his uniform, despite the fabric's becoming tatty, and he looked appreciably less of a scarecrow than he had. The dyed ginger hair and (meant-to-disguise-him) florid side-whiskers proved an attractive color counterpoint to his RAF blue.
At the sound of their arrival, Robin turned toward them. Djak dropped her hand to join Carter, and Marion gasped in shock.
How he had found the time to do it, she did not know. Perhaps securing and settling Madame La Salle's veil to her satisfaction had taken her longer than she knew. But there was Robin. Her Robin. Shaved, barefaced, like as when he was born. Like as when she had last seen him on a pier - herself a great distance away on an oceanliner bound for America.
"What have you done?" she cried, forgetting the others in the room.
Robin shrugged, the newly bared skin on his face strange in its uncovering. "Simply tried to uncover the man for you, today of all days." He smiled.
Marion felt as though she hardly knew how to speak to him, this man she had not seen since 1939. This man, that had died not a year later.
She took a step toward him and extended her hand to his now-downy cheek, the tint of his skin above his beard-line darkened from sun and island chores. The newly exposed skin light as any up-all-night, sleep-all-day playboy layabout's might be.
"Oh, but I liked it," she told him, with regret for the beard's loss, bringing the back of her knuckles along his sleek jawline. "I truly did."
At this he chuckled. Of course, there was no knowing how best to please her. But it angered him not a bit. Taking her hand from his face and holding it in his own, he promised, "then consider it growing back in as of this minute."
She returned his smile.
"Before we begin," Stephen spoke, " - and I have already been over this with Robin and Lady Marion - I will tell you," he looked to Carter and Djak, "because you are not fully versed in our customs and laws, that there is no divorce on Sark. Here, it is not granted, and divorce decreed elsewhere is not recognized. What we seek to do here today binds to the grave."
Djak's brow crinkled at the word 'divorce', and Carter attempted to render explanation of it in Russian. It took a long moment, but the boy eventually nodded his understanding.
And Stephen began.
Robin had her hands. Without a bouquet, she had given him both. As her hands threatened to tremble, she thought of how his hands and fingers never fiddled about as they had in the past. No longer danced with impatience, fluttered with inner unrest.
She had given him an engraved cigarette case once as a gift. An engagement gift, in fact. It had fast become his favorite plaything, ever slipping and sliding acrobatically through his constantly moving fingers. He was never without it, and rarely dropped it, his fingers too agile, too practiced in their perpetual restlessness.
Strange, she had thought - for them to find their peace now, here, during a war, an Occupation, a stranding of his men far from contact with their command. She had not directly asked him about their once-constant motion. She had asked after the case.
"In a lock-up, I do not doubt," he told her, "at headquarters. Once we were listed dead they required anything personalized of ours. Photographs, monogrammed handkerchiefs, even, things of personal significance. I managed to keep it held back for several weeks, but they got it off me one day in hospital when I fell asleep." His eyes had hardened. "Which was damnably unfair."
"And what did you find to toy with, then?" she asked, not showing how much it had touched her that he was so loathe to be separated from it.
"Kept my fists full of fags, I reckon," he answered, surprising her.
"But now...I never see you smoke."
"Nor do I smoke," he confessed. "Oh, I always have some on me - helpful in the Black Market here, and one never wants to have to deny his mate bumming a smoke. But I'm through. Had my last three days after landing on the islands. Realized one more smoker meant less smokes for the unit entire. And a small joy is still a small joy. Especially in such times lean on pleasure. So I try and help out - keeping my lips off their small joys."
"And do they know?" she asked. "Why you quit?"
He had merely shrugged.
They were about to give their vows and consent when Carter broke in by clearing his throat. Marion felt Robin's right hand tense slightly in her left.
"Sir," Carter addressed Stephen, "we do have a ring."
Stephen put out an open hand to receive the small, incomplete band Carter deposited in it.
With his other hand, Stephen felt of the pigeon band's imperfect circular construction, and began to speak on the symbol of eternity as illustrated by a wedding band.
"To be joined in marriage, to become one, and to covenant with each other lasts until the end of what we, as individuals, understand as time. Until the moment we breathe no longer upon this Earth. And though this ring is truncated to the eye - even, to the touch - the bonds created by such a union exist yet in the ether, traveling - as even I can tell you - far beyond the borders of this small island, beyond the passage of time or the changes age and separate experience may bring about. If you will let them. If you will each humble yourself, and dedicate yourself to what promises you have entered into today. And if today you are sincere in your pledge. Robert Oxley," they had chosen to forego using their longer, more formal names and titles, "if you so wish to proceed, repeat after me..."
With this ring, I thee wed.
Marion thought to herself that, oddly, this moment seemed like an echo of something that had already taken place at sometime in the past. Not new, not...original.
They two had stood here together before, surely, these words had passed between them. This bond long ago forged.
Time became blurry. They were always wed, always meant for one another.
This gold and silver, I thee give.
She saw, for the first time up close, the ring Carter had managed to scrounge from somewhere. She seriously doubted it contained either gold, or silver. And yet. And yet she knew she would cherish it as though it were crafted of Heaven's very dust.
With my body, I thee worship.
She felt, more than heard, Robin's voice shake ever so slightly on 'body'.
And with all my worldly goods I thee endow.
Their worldly goods, now so insignificant. Three-quarters of a ring. Borrowed clothing. Nowhere between the two of them to call home. Barred from their bank accounts. Robin, unable to redeem whatever cheques the Army might issue to him across the Channel, her, without a paying profession. Destitute, but together.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Robin took the fragile ring and placed it momentarily over each finger, starting with her thumb, over each it hovered, like a child's game, as he named off the Trinity. Lastly, at the closing word, settling it upon her ring finger.
Amen.
The brief exchange of their intentions, the reciting of their vows, could not have encompassed more than ten minutes. At the conclusion, Stephen directed his unseeing gaze to them and asked of Robin, "will you kiss the bride?"
And she was a wife.
"Now, to the particulars," Stephen encouraged them toward the kitchen table, where a large and seemingly antique volume was laid out upon the trestle table.
Marion had forgotten. Of course, they must sign the register.
"We three witnesses," the rector nodded to Carter and Djak, "have been well-chosen. Although no one is either asked or encouraged to lie about what took place today, discretion, Robin and I both agree, is preferable. We already have plenty to conceal - the two of you not the least of which is yourselves. And so we shall tender this moment to that same vault." His hand reached for, and found, Djak's shoulder. "In an effort to frustrate anyone with ill intent researching today's happening, I have retrieved the oldest church register with which I have been entrusted. Sark's Parish Church of St. Mary, its last entry made in the year of our Lord 1230. Alex has agreed to write out the citation for us to sign and make formal and official by Sarkese law, as the register is primarily in Norman French, and his written French is very finely rendered I am told." La Salle gestured to one of several blank, ancient pages of yellowed paper in the back of the leather-bound book, and a pot of ink and accompanying pen.
Carter set to the task while Robin and Marion watched over his shoulder as his writing flowed in great, artistic flourishes, in the way his Frenchman tutor had long and strictly instructed him as a boy. And in the way that even after all this time, his once oft-drilled fingers had never forgotten.
When he had completed the day's assertion (mimicking the format of prior entries), Robin read it aloud for Stephen's benefit. And they each took their turn signing in the proper places. Robin and Marion now made use, in their signatures, of their full names and titles. Stephen was helped to know where to write his own name, and the two witnesses found themselves in the interesting - but uncommon - position of signing their actual names.
Carter looked about him, and recalled that Stephen already had most of his personal story, and would be unable to see anyway, and as the bride and groom were far too taken with each other at present to notice, signed himself double: both as RAF Flight Cmdr. Thomas Carter, and then, in Cyrillic so unused it ought to have caused his knuckles to creak as though rusty when he penned it, Alexsei Igorovich, Prince Komonoff.
So pre-occupied with risking himself in such a public and final way, he nearly did not notice when the Gypsy boy Djak wrote his name. Carter could not read the Romany language, but still, his mind tugged at him, the letters written down seemed unlikely to coalesce into a name sounding of 'Djak'.
He gave the boy a mildly questioning look, which the boy coolly deflected.
As the Lady Marion was removing Madame La Salle's veil, La Salle lifted the volume from the table, confident the ink had had time to set and dry, and wrapped it in a nearby, waiting piece of strong oilcloth.
"To the side of the house, Alex," he directed. "Near the wild bluebells, I should think. Bury it deep enough that it might not be noticed, but not so very deeply that we may not find it again."
Marion had not known what she thought, what she expected might happen next. A humble toast, perhaps? Of La Salle's mythical (she had heard so much about it) cider? The offer of a bed, or bedroom in which to sleep - she and Robin well-spent after a night of the Nightwatch and travel to Sark, and it now nearly seven-thirty in the morning?
But she had certainly not expected to be whisked off into the forest. Not that on Sark, generally, there was much in the landscape to designate with that geographical label.
"In the 1500s, I am told," Robin had said to her, as they came in sight of a small, forested area, "the Sarkese people built single-story two room houses in clusters at the heads of valleys, nearby fresh water sources. But in later days they were abandoned. Most are fallen in, but one day Wills and I managed to find one or two that were repairable. And so we have done," he beamed at her proudly. They were within the tree cover now, and shortly did come upon Wills himself, bending in his height to exit a small stone house, its insides lit by a fire on its hearth, the smoke of it coming from the chimney concealed among the height of the tightly-growing trees.
"Will you stand us a watch, my friend?" Robin asked Wills.
Reddy nodded, having expected something of this nature when he had first been tasked with coming to tidy the house.
"Good man," Robin told him, slapping him on the back.
He offered him no news. Neither of Mitch, nor the ceremony so recently passed.
And so here she was. She could not say how much later. The bedding in Robin's 'house' was not elevated, but on the swept-dirt floor. There were plenty of blankets, though, and the room's interior could not have been tidier, though it was entirely without ornament or furniture of any kind. A netting bag hung from a hook near the fireplace, well off the floor, filled, she assumed, with some things for them to eat by and by.
Under the covers she - and he - were totally bared. In this small but dense patch of trees about the two still-standing houses, very little light shone through, this small fire the only source of seeing, though closer to midday she expected that might change for several hours.
But they were not cold. Queer, she thought. How chilling lone nudity can be, and yet, joined nudity, here, under a single cover, on the ground, in a strange place and with only the slightest of fires, how cozy warm. How unexpectedly snug.
She re-positioned herself and felt his sleeping hand and arm respond by stroking along her undressed side. Unconsciously, perhaps, for him, but the gesture, the caress, still full-bodied and arousing for her.
When they had arrived within the house, Wills a good distance off, ensuring their safety, Robin had announced this place, his 'camp' in this wooded valley, was known as Hanton Forest to the locals, though he agreed with her, that only on Sark would a healthy-sized coppice of trees earn the title 'forest'.
It was after they had physically sealed their joining as man and wife, after they had first assayed becoming one and she lay in his arms that he spun her a story of this place. It was a sleepy sort of tale. They were both quite sleepy, and it had many stops and starts, and long moments for silent consideration.
"There is a tale," he told her, his voice similar in its timbre to a deep sigh, or a beating heart, "'says Hanton Forest is the home to something quite special. Quite unique the world over: the last unicorn. It is here he lives, after all this time, the last of his kind. Lonely, without a mate." Here he gave her a squeeze. "Perhaps we might sight him," he challenged her.
Moments passed while neither spoke, before he began again. "Do you know why it is that he has come to be here, my darling? Why, of all places, Sark? This thicket of trees? This sixteenth-century ruin? Because Sark is one of the last places on earth where true magic can hide. Where true magic can live, even in present times."
Silently they lay, each considering this new myth.
"Well, if we have brought any little magic with us this day," Marion after awhile answered him. "Then I suggest we attempt some conjuring, and find him a wife."
Robin bent to kiss her between her shoulder blades. "I shall be with you directly, Mrs. Oxley," he told her, his voice awash in drowsiness. "To return to 'conjuring'. But do not hurry me along just now. There will be more time shortly. Your honeymoon is not yet spent."
He had not managed to hang on to consciousness long after that, and neither, truly, had she.
Yet, she was certain, not long after, here she was, awake. Herself quite alert. She tried not to feel the pressure of passing time, yet she knew that by the early morning she must return to Guernsey for the Nightwatch.
When she had shared that with Robin on the boat ride here, he had only quoted to her from the old rhyme, "The deer he loves the high wood/The hare she loves the hill/The knight he loves his bright sword/The lady - loves her will."
He had not argued with her or attempted to change her mind.
And later she had not told him - nor would she - that as they had stood in La Salle's kitchen this morning, signing their names to the marriage they had entered into, she had had the briefest flash - a horrid one - wherein she saw them all dead, as though a massacre had occurred in that very room. Carter's blood mixed in with Djak's. La Salle crumpled to the floor, and herself floating above it all like a ghost. And Robin - Robin rushing in the barnyard door, to find them all so.
She had made a great effort to swallow the unexpected thought, to disallow its hijacking of her day, her present happiness.
Indeed, the lady had done what she willed. Marion Nighten was not going to let potential regrets (let alone future, unknowable regrets) cloud her present.
Anymore than she would let primitive accommodations dampen her honeymoon.
She had what she had wanted: Robin. In a burst of connection, she realized that he was now her family. He was now, as their lying here together illustrated, her flesh.
She felt of a Guernsey Gache, the popular island fruitcake with currants; its recipe calling for a depression to be made in its dough. To make it; mix, knead...let rise.
For so long that depression had been there, deflated, central to her being. But now, now she felt herself on the rise. Felt herself becoming what she had originally been crafted to be.
"How dare you remove yourself even an inch away from me, Woman," she heard a now-wakeful Robin threaten from over her shoulder.
She felt the sensation and pressure as his hand slid a thumb down the side of her unexpectedly passion-swollen breasts, and brought its welcome fingers to bear on the bone and indent of her naked hip.
There was no longer any beard to tickle when he warned her, "I am not even the half finished with you."
...TBC...