A/N: A slight edit was performed on the prior chapter 32 in order to clarify that although Geis located Marion at Mr. Thornton's a little over three weeks after the Barnsdale fire (and made her the gift of the horse), five months have now passed since Marion came to live at Thornton's.
It should not be necessary to re-read that chapter, unless of course you would like to do so.

The last few months had proven uncommon good for the Kommandant's Islander driver, Dale Allen. He had benefited from an almost preternatural streak of good luck in both cards and dice (a streak which he must soon allow himself to break, lest the Jerries cease wishing to play with him), and he had benefited from the impatience of his employer, Vaiser. Tired of either having to task soldiers to collect Allen off Sark and bring him to Alderney (or whichever island the Kommandant was bound for that day), or wait for Allen to be fitted into the schedule of whatever attachments and patrols to Alderney were set to sail on transports on a particular day, the Kommandant had confiscated a lovely little launch he had found hidden in dry dock among one of the abandoned homes on Alderney. And gifted it to his driver, and with it, the necessary papers for Allen to move as freely about the bailiwick of islands - nearly - as his employer, providing the seas were not too choppy, as the launch was not a motorboat of great size, rather it had been built for speed and (had they known its long-absent owner) to impress the girls.

Its shiny wooden hull - varnished to a gloss as lovingly as Narcissus' polished mirror glass - turned many a head, even during the Occupation. The Kommandant, feeling his driver somehow represented him even when they were not together, liked it that way. The Kommandant's driver, never one to shy away from attention, and loving the dismissal of restraint where his movements were concerned, found he liked it that way as well.

And if he managed - on occasion - to ferry a workman or two between Sark and Guernsey - for a price - well, certainly the Kommandant could not protest. Not if said workmen had all their necessary papers in order.

Such as today, the chappy he had brought along. Stonemason, as he recalled. Quiet fellow, really - not much for a chat on the trip to St. Peter Port. Allen chuckled to himself as he coiled down the ropes after docking, Robin already smoke in the wind on his way to wherever Marion was staying. Fortunately in his speed to join her he had not gone and left the necessary, corroborating cover of his masonry tools behind.

Those two, Allen thought to himself as he set foot to the Guernsey dock and went to collect the Kommandant's on-island car. Thicker than man and wife anymore, since old Sir Edward's death. They'd be inseparable were but the world more like its old self. He did not doubt Robin'd have Marion at the altar in under two hours' time, were a British victory declared.

As it was, they of course had to settle for stolen interludes of lovemaking (for he did not doubt for a moment this was what they were up to), as though each had a spouse they were cheating on. Robin's: the unit, their resistance work here. Marion's (for Allen knew the German Lieutenant's mind better than did others among the Saintly Six): still, after all that had passed between them, Geis.

He had the car, directing it down the mostly-deserted cobbles of the shopping street, toward Ginny Glasson's, where he was scheduled to collect Eleri Vaiser (at her father's wish) and drive her back to the Barnsdale estate where she remained quartered, though the chaperonage of Lady Marion was no longer available for the Kommandant to exploit (however it was unlikely there was any immediate way for his ex-wife to become apprised of such).

The only visible change to any observer was, that with the disappearance of Marion, Eleri had taken a whim (so the house staff and others believed), and ordered all of her things moved from what had been the former Lady Nighten's opulent suite and bath, and up two flights of stairs into the long-abandoned nursery, not used since Marion herself had been a child.

Occupying the portion of the top floor of the house still considered to be the family's living quarters, it was snugly adjacent to both servants' halls, with easy access to the women's. Little (if anything) would occur in the nursery of which the staff were not aware.

As Allen had been present at the time of her moving, he had been able to take note that the large open room of the nursery (a corner for tiny desks and the hearing of lessons, a corner with a child-sized round table for taking meals, and another corner for the piano) appeared (though of course he had never seen it before - at least not in good lighting) as it would have when the Nighten children were young. As though the master and mistress of the house had left it as is, either in a deep nostalgia for things past, or in a hopeful looking-forward, for things to come...such as the arrival of grandchildren.

Fortunately, Eleri's slender size did not over-tax the youth-sized mattresses on the beds in the adjoining bedroom, the nurse's Spartan adult bed long ago removed for use elsewhere in the house.

Stubbornly, she had refused, despite his several attempts, to tell him the root reason for her moving.

"Driver," she called to him today from the rear, passenger's seat of the car, their relationship constantly in flux, vacillating from all-too-familiar to distant, appropriate detachment.

Her hair had been done in marcelled waves by Ginny, smoothly and fetchingly along her face, as tide stroking along the sand, the length of it then pulled into knots and loops in the back - enough to drive a man wild trying to understand the complex system of plaiting. Yes, Ginny Glasson certainly knew her trade.

"Wot's that, Fraulein Vaiser?" Allen matched her in aloofness.

In the rear-view, he could see her bent over, studying a magazine of some kind, not even at trying to hide her keen interest in it.

It appeared to him to be an out-of-date fashion journal.

"What would you say is...the best way to please a man?" she asked.

Had he been eating something, he might have choked. Coughed at least, surely. Elerinne Vaiser asking how to please someone? Stop the presses. Drop the anchor. He made to answer her, finding it near impossible to keep his eyes to the road. (Fortunately, with so few permitted to drive on the island, he faced no other traffic with which to contend.) "I suppose...to be kind," he told her, thinking of some fantasy of a wifey at the ready with slippers, and bangers and mash kept warm and ready on the hotplate. "To be gentle, and sweet."

He saw her roll her eyes in exasperation at his answer and slap the pages of the magazine shut.

"No. Not like that!" she corrected him. "I mean...in a - a - a physical way." Her voice became steadier. "As a lover."

"Come now, wot have you got, there?" he asked her, his suspicion piqued, throwing one hand back to try and catch hold of the fashion glossy.

She tried to snatch it back from him, her face scowled in the effort, but even while driving he had managed to get a good hold of it, and brought it up to the front seat where he could see it, slowing the car's speed as a matter of caution.

"You give that back Mr. Allen," she demanded. "It's not yours!"

"And I daresay it's not yours either, Ellie," he reminded her.

With one hand, he opened the out-of-date fashion journal only to discover another booklet within - this one about half-size compared to the other, easily hidden among it. Upon seeing what it was, he pulled the car to the side of the road and engaged the brake, though he let the engine idle. Petrol, after all, was never in short supply for the Kommandant's man.

"How do you satisfy a man, 'Mister' Driver, she asks," he said. "Blimey, Ellie. Where'd you find this bit o' sin? Surely not up in your nursery digs at Barnsdale?"

She sulked, looking as though she would make another grab for it back. But she told him. "No. It was at Ginny Glasson's. Just there, among the other magazines in the waiting area."

Allen whistled. "Some soldier must've wanted to spice-up his barbering trip's all I can say." He shook his head lightly. "My, but that'd catch a pretty penny from the right bloke," he referenced his immediate, gut-reaction: selling this somewhat dog-eared (and who knew what else done to - and with - it) pamphlet of black and white French erotica Eleri had managed to discover among the other out-of-date mags at Ginny Glasson's salon.

"It's not yours to sell!" Eleri replied rather righteously for someone at defending their rightful possession of a pictorial series of nude and near-nude men and women engaging in various forms of unacceptable public (and in some pictures, even private) behavior.

"Well it's hardly suitable reading for a girl such as yourself, now is it, Poppet?"

"I am not a girl," she snipped at him defiantly, her just-groomed eyebrows coming together like a sharp pair of scissors. "Most men with a set of eyes in their head would know me for what I am: twenty years old, and by all standards a proper woman."

He could not hold back a snigger (though a muted one she did not likely mark, as he was facing the road and sitting with his back to her) at her use of 'proper'.

"Mark my words, Miss Eleri," he let her have her way in the matter of her maturity (if not in the matter of surrendering the pamphlet to her), "this here's not something you'd find in the possession of a 'proper' lady."

There were times when Elerinne Vaiser did not care for the way her father's driver spoke to her. When he chose to lord his 'worldly wisdom' over her - unfairly so. This, she felt, was just one of those times. Very well. She would not tell him that there was a person who thought her both proper and a woman. She would let him sniff it out for himself, if he were so very very clever as he thought he was. She would not tell him her secret.

Though of course, it would have been helpful, really, had he agreed to answer her about the whole 'pleasuring' bit. Certainly he had evidenced no such particular prudery in regard to such matters with her before.

Now she had no idea where to go to get such an answer.

SARK - La Salle's farm - When Iain Johnson arrived to answer the cry for 'Medic' that had originated within La Salle's second upstairs bedroom, what he found would have been a tremendously confounding sight, had he not diagnosed the Gypsy 'boy' Djak with a case of impetigo some months ago. (At the same time also diagnosing the 'boy's' complete lack of male genitalia.)

The gallowglass Carter was leaning far over the bed, which Djak still occupied a place upon, attempting to rouse him. Djak, at best, was responding sluggishly to his efforts, and when Carter stood away and the shadows brought on by his leaning diminished, it became easier to see the blood (though not in great amount, and in fact smear-dried) upon his palms, as well as that staining the bedding.

Johnson caught something in Carter's demeanor that was not that of the man's usually (almost) icy placidity, but he had no time to consider it before he was in the other man's sights.

Carter looked at the arrived medic, his bag for doctoring in tow, and at John's taking-in of his surroundings quickly surmised something of what was going on. "I must assume, Johnson, that due to the utter lack of surprise upon your hairy face, that this scene comes as no particular shock."

"How's that?" Johnson made the attempt to continue the sham, but he was never much good for playacting of any kind. "What's caused this, here? Wounded in his own bed? Djak!" he called, adding his urgency to Carter's previous attempts, "Djak!"

But the effort was hollow.

Carter stared him down.

"Right," John gave up the pretense. "Doesn't appear to be a quantity of blood that ought to be troubling. Not that we could very much have Battley in to examine our stowaway Gypsy...girl."

Djak's eyes came into focus, and she sat up in the bed her mind working slowly, as though something more than mere sleep, mere tiredness were holding her back. She felt achy and warm and...lethargic. As though she'd much rather curl up and fall back to sleep, than confront whatever else the world had to offer her today. It was a feeling quite counter to how she usually began her waking life.

"She'd best go wash herself, and the sheeting," Carter said (though not directly to her), though she could not immediately place why. She wondered at his face, he did not look at all of himself. "And hang the sheets to dry within the house - no good for them to be seen on the line." He spoke the words somewhat clipped - as though he had a chill, his eyes half-haunted, similar (but not quite so wholly as then) to the days in which she had first known him at the Treeton camp.

"Has it come before, Lass?"

Oh, Johnson was there too. How odd. The room was not made, really, for three - much less when one of them took up as much space as did the unit's oversized medic.

She nearly asked 'what' aloud, before she spied the color of dried blood upon Carter's hands, and looked to the sheet below her, the blood upon her boy's trousers. In response to the sight of it, her own eyes grew large. Not at the possible gruesomeness of it, but rather at the shock that it had happened to her at all. She had long assumed her lack of womanly bleeding was the result of some of the bodily violence that had been visited upon her in the camps - or possibly a Godly judgment against things she had done, compromises she had been forced to make in her life, her path having diverged from the way of the Rom.

"No," she answered Johnson, shaking her head in the negative. "And I am," she paused to recall the numeral in English, "twenty-two in years."

Johnson's face reacted to this. He and the lads had not thought their 'boy' Djak a day over seventeen. So, yet another preconceived notion smashed. Not a girl at all. A woman.

"I do not doubt 'twas the camps what kept you from it," he explained. "Poor nutrition, inhuman workload. Now that you've been with us a bit - this good Sark air, vittles on Stephen's table...it has made all the difference, and your body's comin' in to its own." He spoke the last part before he thought about it too closely. As his lips formed the words, though, up came a violent blush within and above his beard at the realization he was addressing a woman about her body. To cover, he rushed on, "I shall ask Stephen for some rags we might tear for your -" he nearly stalled out, "bandagings."

Carter stepped toward the door, causing John to have to shift where he stood in the small amount of free space in the room.

"No need for that," he assured Johnson, still not addressing Djak face to face. (Indeed, still not looking at her.) "She will have long ago discovered where Madame La Salle kept hers." Despite the helpful vein of his comment (and the truth in it) it escaped him like a ghostly murmur more than that of a man simply speaking instructions.

As he descended the stairs and stalked into the kitchen on his way to the washhouse, he encountered Wills at the window, on watch. Before the younger man could ask after the earlier commotion, Carter leveled a near-killing gaze at him.

Ignorant of anything that had come to pass (beyond the earlier yelling that he had been able to hear), Wills felt his blood freeze in place, and found a half-second to wonder if Flight Commander Thomas Carter might've done more good on the front lines - the ability to render such a chilling stare surely wasted across the distances involved in aerial dogfights.

"I do not know what you've been playing at," Carter told him, forbiddingly. "I am not fool enough to think, after months of your confusing the feminine and masculine pronouns, that you did not know. If this has all been to take advantage of the girl..." He glowered. "Either way, you and Johnson are about to have your bollocks," he made use of the British term to drive his point home, "handed to you on a platter when your man Oxley finds out."

At that, he left in a thick cloud of unacted-upon menace.

Wills knew he could not hazard taking his eyes for long away from the road coming in to the farm. But he had never yet so dreaded the thought of sighting Robin coming down the lane.

GUERNSEY - Heindl Cottage - Mitch was on his way back the short distance from the cow shed (a sort of half-lean-to alongside the chicken coop) to the cottage, from where he had finished the early-morning milking of the Heindl cow.

He stopped short before entering the cottage, seeing the shadow of a tall man, dark along the opposite wall of the window, next to the familiar shadow of Eva's.

For a moment he had convinced himself it was the occasional Jerry that showed up to check on him. Always unannounced, always swift and to-business, but always, dependably, they came. Came to make sure he had not run-off or attempted escape.

And so, with such a visit, Eva was required to present him for their inspection. He had seen, as they left, that (what he supposed were) Reichmarks were handed to her in a small wallet. For the keeping of him, he knew - this farm not enough to support the family already attached to it, much less the addition of the needs of a full-grown man. Between what it appeared Eva earned in the town (she helped keep the town pub, Hilda had told him) and this Jerry dole on account of Eva keeping him as a prisoner, the Heindl family only just got by.

Any excess monies, of necessity, went toward Eva. (Though she never let the others suffer in the doing of it.) For the outfitting and grooming of her - it being (naturally) harder to make money serving at the bar for ugly, or slovenly girls.

Mitch exhaled. Upon closer inspection, the shadow was Daniel's, Eva's younger brother's. Relief flooded him. Though the soldiers sent to check on his out-of-prison billet had never enacted violence of any kind upon him, he could not contain the skittishness that innately gripped him when he found himself in their company unarmed.

His discovery gave him a moment to muse on how Daniel had grown in the past few months. He was no longer quite the knobby-kneed still-a-lad of sixteen he had been when Mitch had first been remanded here. He was seventeen now, broader of chest, taller of frame, with something of whiskers threatening to sprout along his jaw.

In thinking of the boy's recent growth-spurt, he found himself unable to do so without a personal feeling of pride. Satisfaction in this boy who had become his friend.

He stooped to re-pick up the milk pail and proceed into the cottage, just as Daniel was ducking out of it, giving Mitch the particular wave the deaf boy reserved for the most special of his few compatriots.

"I want to thank you, Monsieur Miller," Eva began as Mitch passed through the low doorframe.

"Thank me?" Mitch asked, seeing that she was already at the task of getting ready so that she might go out this day. She had worn a scarf to sleep in over her newly-set (done in the town) hair. She was now at heating an iron to press one of her prettiest frocks: a pattern of pert yellow lemons still hanging from their branches covering its cloth, from shoulder to hem.

"Certainly, thank you. Daniel is a different boy since you came to us. More open, less brooding. It is hard for a young man, I think," she offered, "without a father."

Mitch caught her darting her eyes over to 'the baby', now awake in the far corner of the cottage. Though the entire family was given to calling the lad such, he was actually a strong little boy of four, whose Christian name (though it was not much used) was Seth.

"And harder still," she continued, not realizing that he had seen her concern for Seth also in that moment - concern for his future. "...with his lack of good hearing. You have almost outpaced me, Daniel says," she smiled, "with your quick learning of his sign language."

Mitch smiled. Though Daniel used no established method of signs (or at least none that Mitch knew of) and sometimes even grunts to communicate, he had managed - especially with the lack of other interaction available to him here, no books, no newspapers, no playing cards, even - certainly no wireless - to pick up the young man's personal code quite effortlessly.

But here came Seth, ready for breakfast - and always ready to disrupt a conversation by attempting to have one of his own.

"Mere," he called to Eva, "mere! Please, I want to eat?" Eva flashed a look up at Mitch, as if to ask forgiveness for the interruption, and moved to the cookstove to portion out Seth his morning's porridge.

Momentarily she returned, as always a smile on her lips for him, and kindness in her eye.

"You are going to town today," Mitch said, though it was neither a question nor a statement that required an answer.

"Do you miss your family?" she asked him, trying to deflect his mind from the town, from escape or sneaking about beyond the boundaries of their patch. Asking about his family was perhaps not the cleverest attempt at distraction.

"My family?" Mitch asked, thoughts of his mother so (necessarily) submerged at this point that her face did not even pop into his head. Rather, he saw Robin's face. And that certain look in Allen's eye right before he was going to take the game and rubber from you. He saw the brine-hardened hands of Roy, those hard-won, protective calluses from his years sailing. Immediately he knew he had to steer them onto another tack.

"Seth is a lovely boy," he told her.

"Yes," Eva agreed, though perhaps hesitantly. "He, he sometimes confuses me with Mother." She tried to explain the child's having just called her, 'mere'. Hurriedly she added, "he does so with my sisters sometimes as well. I've heard it."

Rather suddenly, Mitch found his mind becoming quite insightful where the boy Seth was concerned.

"No," he shook his head slowly in disagreement with her. "I do not think that he does. In fact," and here he dared to hold Eva's gaze as steadily as ever he had, "I do not think he is confused at all."

If the interior of a hovel, all of its three windows open to the outside, could grow quiet (the birds and other countryside noises do the same), so did the Heindl cottage grow in that long, long moment.

Eva looked at Mitch, smart enough to lift the heavy iron off her frock lest it burn.

Mitch looked at Eva, at the way her neck seemed to perfectly meet with her head just behind her ear. At the way that Eva, whom it was often said took after her father - and Hilda (of whom it was said among the family that Eva resembled very little) neither one seemed to have contributed one iota to young Seth's physical appearance. The boy's hair was dark, and nearly curly. His skin tended toward pale, with not a freckle on it, and his eyes (especially when he was about to cry in an attempt to get his way) were so large and blue as to be almost (as at such times) disconcerting.

He looked nothing of the Heindls Eva was said to resemble. And nothing (so it would seem) of the family that gave the world mad, batty Hilda.

"Perhaps he is not," Eva confessed, letting her head slightly bow with the admission that Seth, in fact her son, was not at all confused about his proper parentage.

Before Mitch could answer (he had no answer for this unexpected news, actually), she jerked her chin back up. "Does it matter?" she asked him, almost beseechingly, "does it matter if he is not?"

Her hands were each half-clenched atop her ironing. Without lifting either off the ironing, Mitch cupped his hand atop one of hers.

"No," he told her, his smile slowly reassuring, and entirely genuine. "Certainly it does not. Not to me."

...TBC...