GUERNSEY - St. Peter Port - At Gisbonnhoffer's express instructions, Allen had driven to Ginny Glasson's shop to collect Lady Marion - there being, apparently, no car track by which to collect her from wherever on the island she was presently lodging. (A location which Robin had not shared, even, with him.)
Glasson's shop was separated from the Cabaret's stage door by only an alley, yet Geis had made it clear he expected him to pull into a space near the shop's front, and then, when he and Marion had returned to the car, and Allen had closed the door upon them in the back seat, expected him to round the driveable streets - traveling five blocks instead of them walking far less than one on foot - so that they might present themselves at the front door of Alstroemeria in the auto, and be grandly assisted by the doorman on duty there.
At the sight of Marion approaching the car on Geis' tuxedoed arm, Allen nearly broke into a visible sweat. She was dressed in a muted brass-gold (nearly, he supposed, chartreuse) cocktail number. The narrow skirt was cut below the knee, but above the full calf, giving all the benefit of viewing her legs. The delicate, nearly invisible netting that covered her from shoulder to wrist, and neck to decolletage, allowed the occasional embroidery embellishments stitched into the netting to appear to be resting (or hovering) solely - even magically - upon her skin, and gave the frock the illusion of being held up by nothing, but rather being purely strapless. Her hair, glossy with being styled, was rolled as highly and as tightly (and as fetchingly) as any of the Andrews Sisters'. And the seams on her nylons were impeccably straight. (He sometimes forgot, in the current climate of privation, what a nylon seam could do to a man's mind as it snuggled there, tracking on, up the back of the knee, into regions unseen, like yet-uncharted seas on ancient maps: 'Beyond this, there be dragons'. (Dragons, his rover's mind had always thought, really standing in for the word, 'adventures'.)
Cor-blimey. Allen had never been so glad he had locked up a boot as he was in that instant. He imagined Marion at that moment in Robin's sights: that was the sort of vision that inspired a man to madness - of the Grecian variety, he was certain. He had no doubt that Robin and she had been on bedroom-intimate terms for a good part (if not all) of the day. And he had no doubt such a frustrated connection had inspired Robin's near-idiotic order to be found a night's employment at the Cabaret. Seeing Marion like this - and on Gisbonnhoffer's arm - no good could come of it.
As he held the door for them, and handed her in to Geis, within the auto, he saw that the netting extended to meet the solid fabric of the frock well below the upper back.
He struggled, and won the effort not to throw her even a covert look of concern over the fact she had outfitted herself on par with a fully-dressed stuffed pig on a covered silver charger bound for the plate of an infamous glutton.
Marion Nighten, he reminded himself, was no idiot.
And yet, he could not keep from thinking of a matador, waving a red cape (for all that it was a chartreuse frock in this instance) at a charging bull.
To pass the time in the darkened, air-growing-stale boot, Robin had let his mind drift, briefly, into memory. Well, it had not entirely had his permission.
Due to his plans for the night, he had serving at table on his mind...
How he had stormed that night at everything - at everyone. As though each in the party, in their turn, were the reason he took no enjoyment in anything. Bonchurch was there, of course, seated opposite him at the nightclub's dancefloor-side table, at constantly encouraging him to take repeated turns about the floor with the girls they had brought along on the night's unending bender. But he had grown more than tired of the company offered by the disappointingly prim Renata Sewell-Spitt; Louella Dickon, unable to speak of much else other than her own, perceived inadequacies (such as being of an exceptional height for a woman); and Midge Lowry, whom someone had clearly told that what men liked best was to discuss rugby - in depth.
He had positioned himself (following the last dance) beside the petite-ly voluptuous blonde, Lily Goshawk-Revden, largely because she was the least chatty of the quartet. He was pretending to be fully engaged by the band playing, and the female lead singer, when their server had arrived with the additional champagne they had called for.
The champagne the man spilled on him quickly soaked through his jacket and onto his shirt. He was incensed.
Mumbling a thousand apologies, the man had scurried away to find a clean towel for the (rather expensive, at what they would be charged for a bottle) mess. Robin fumed, catching the eye of another server, and demanding the immediate appearance of the Maitre d'.
It was at this moment he realized that Bonchurch had taken up a position standing behind him.
"You ass," he heard his friend (surprisingly) say, his voice kept low to keep from alarming the girls. It is bad enough you have ruined the night for the rest of us with your sulk. Now you will see this man sacked? And for what? Spilling champagne on your shirt that - in two hours' time you, yourself will have done several times?"
Robin began to turn around and share with Mitch some of the venom he had been saving for the requested Maitre d', but Mitch spoke on, leaving no opening for interruptions without raised voices being necessary.
"You're not mad at him - nor at us. You're in a temper over your bruised shoulder - but more so for losing the Argent Arrow. The Tripp will have another chance next year to win the cup! Tonight should have seen you in a pub, scaring up a fight with some tough who'd give you some real pain in place of your own self-pity. Not spoiling our fun - and punishing some poor waiter for an accident which he could not have helped."
Robin brought his eyes to Mitch's quietly impassioned (and righteous) ones.
But Mitch was not to be scared off. "You do not know what his life is - what turns his day has taken! With your censure, he'll not be hired back by any decent club in all London. Think! What you're about to do!"
Before Robin could reply (or even, in fact, settle on how he might), the Maitre d' (as called for) had arrived.
Robin cleared his throat. He was chastised enough to feel somewhat sheepish, the fire gone out of his bad humor, leaving him with only the same, the constant, ennui. "Here, my good man," he gestured to the Maitre d'. "For the chap who's been serving at our table," it was a larger-than-usual roll of bills. "And," he added as the Maitre d' had turned to go, catching the crook of his arm to hold him back for a second more. "I should strongly suggest giving him the rest of the night off."
He did not know how Mitch always managed to do that. To see further into a personal situation than others, to have such a tender (and open) heart toward the problems of others. Robin truly wondered how one found time for it.
There was a song Marion had played several times on the Nightwatch - a song popular in America, she had said. "Keep on the Sunny Side".
And inevitably, there you would find Mitch the day after, or the next, singing it with all his heart, as though he had co-opted it as his credo: 'Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side/Keep on the sunny side of life/It will help you everyday, it will brighten all the way/If you keep on the sunny side of life.'
Mitch was one to sing with all his heart. Certainly his ear for a tune, and his vocal cords, had little enough to do with the exercise.
The boot of the Kommandant's auto suddenly seemed to grow appreciably smaller and darker than it had been just a moment ago. Robin felt his grief like a blockage within his chest, his two choices, as ever; to swallow it back down, or to cough it up - exorcize it with tears too sincere and rending to be shed silently.
But he found (as he sometimes did) that grief so coupled with other, similar griefs: what he had thought was the forever-loss of Marion (twice), Dunkirk, the war, the larger number of the unit earlier that he had been unable to save, even what had stood at the time as the relationship with the Earl, his father - that instead of agreeing to go back down or come up, it simply sat in his chest, threatening to choke him, rendering him unable to speak - and only half-able to draw breath.
Once they were parked safely near the rear service entrance of the Cabaret, this was how Allen, upon opening the boot, found him. Red-rimmed eyes, sweat on his brow, his voice not yet able to be depended upon.
"Don't recall you being adverse to tight spots before, Boss," Allen scolded him as he offered him a hand out.
"Give us a handkin," was all Robin could bring himself to say, using the offered handkerchief to mop his brow and wipe at his eyes, still at giving orders, still at determined to see the night through. Fifteen pounds heavier, but familiarly so, with his unspent, his unexpendable, grief.
Allen, as predicted, had no trouble getting Robin added to the night's list of workers. Clem Nighten's tuxedo (its ill-fit, and presently unfashionable cut notwithstanding) was far-nicer than those the rest of the night's potential serving staff had managed to scare up.
"What's this about, then?" the floor manager had inquired, curiously. "You've money to bribe me to take him on - because of a debt, you say - yet you cannot settle with him using the same cash?"
"Oh, aye, that," Allen blew it off. "Bribing you, Timothy, 'tis cheaper than what I owe him. He's of a mind to make more tonight than my debt entire."
"Mind you," Timothy cautioned, "they're only promised a go at the leftovers. Some of the customers do tip - but it's certainly not standard. And not all of them tip in standard ways." His eyes gave a 'you know' look.
"Good enough for me," Allen promised him, giving a distant wave to Robin, now within the kitchens and getting a brief tour.
Allen felt relief at seeing that his commanding officer's demeanor had settled considerably since leaving the car. He looked down to where he had just given over to Timothy from his bankroll (never, of course, having withdrawn it entirely from his pocket). It was a bit mussy, as he had taken time neither to count nor to arrange it all day. Here again, he noticed, was the worthless piece of paper that had somehow been shuffled in with what he had won off that young island Constable. Vaguely curious (information, sometimes even of the variety that you are not looking for, is always power), he turned it over in his hands.
It was easy to see that it was the rough draft of something, several attempts at sentences could be made out, but they were also scratched upon and re-written, as though someone were at composing something a bit more important than just the average friendly letter or note.
He walked back to the car, still trying to make it all out. Night had well fallen, and available light was not on his side. He struck a match and lit himself a smoke. Smoking always did clear his head for thinking. He threw his chauffeur's hat onto the driver's seat, inserted the key into the ignition, and powered up the headlamps, walking toward their more-than adequate light.
(Of course he had no business doing so, with a blackout in effect, but, as an undercover British officer, one could hardly fault him for not caring if one of His Majesty's bombers sighted the headlamps and used their light to rain bombs down upon the Jerry officers filling the Cabaret behind him. In this, he did not think of himself, nor Robin, nor Marion.) He stood facing the car (and the headlamps' light), and was finally able to piece together the scrap.
'Herr Kommandant,' it read, with of course a great many changes and corrections, 'You are too powerful to get near, but I have found someone close to you who is not. And I mean to hurt you where it hurts most. If you will visit Striplings' Camera and Films on the shopping street in St. Peter Port, there is a packet of photos waiting there for you. I think you will find your daughter smiling very prettily in each one. I have taken from her what no one can ever give back, and soon the island entire will know her for a strumpet, through the photographs (and first-hand accounts of several witnesses I have invited to oversee - and if they wish, participate in - the deed). You are a killer, and it is very easy - if one looks - to find Islanders willing to help in bringing you pain - as you have brought pain to so many.'
The rough draft of the note was not signed, but he hardly needed such proof to know it for the work of young Rowan.
His mind took a moment to seethe at what fate the young Constable had planned for Eleri, himself now realizing this was the person to whom she had referred when she had asked him about 'pleasing' a man. This event had obviously been, somewhat, in the planning.
He could almost hear a click as a tumbler in his mind fell into place, recalling that Eleri had just this evening informed the Barnsdale staff she was to have an early night.
He tossed his fag to the ground and crushed it out under his foot. What an easily distracted idiot he was - not questioning why she would willingly miss her beloved Joss Tyr's final performance in favor of an 'early' night.
He stuffed the now-quite-valuable note into the double-buttoned placket of his chauffeur's uniform jacket, and threw himself into the driver's seat, intent on Barnsdale, and hoping he would arrive in time.
Cabaret Alstroemeria - Marion did not have to make a true effort at studying Geis' shirt's fancy studs as she danced with him. Certainly there was nothing any longer of interest to her about his face or person otherwise.
He was one of a certain number of officers present who had managed to secure proper tuxedos for the night. The rest - the majority - simply wore their very best dress uniforms, their hats removed as they were indoors. Being in civilian formal wear should have taken some of the edge, surely, off her feelings for the Nazi Lieutenant, but, today it assuredly did not.
The night's main entertainment of Prinzer's pet psychic, the notorious Joss Tyr, was not scheduled to take the stage for some time. At present a band played, and various singers took turns at the microphone while those so inclined, danced. Dinner was to be served just prior to the show.
Mostly, Marion had to discipline her mind not to think of Robin, to try and insert him into such an evening, or fall prey to nostalgia for the many times past they had danced in nightclubs far superior to this tissue paper and paste representation of one.
She would not let herself delve into memory or a present desire to be near him. She would not give Geis the satisfaction of looking at her, and seeing that happiness, that delight within her eyes and having any reason to think that he might have been responsible for putting it there.
She had no idea how the evening might play out - how Gisbonnhoffer expected it to play out. But she did think that this night - their first back within each others' company - she might quite reasonably avoid any physical advances without angering him.
Preventing him from holding her within his embrace while they were dancing? Another impediment entirely. And one she had chosen to endure, rather than scheme to overcome.
The song ended, and he returned her (still on his arm) to their very intimately small table. A waiter's arm came from her right and offered her the night's menu, which she took somewhat absentmindedly, having been momentarily distracted by his cufflinks, which bore no small resemblance to a pair her brother had worn with some frequency during their island holidays.
Her eyes, as it was before her, went to the menu, exquisitely hand-calligraphed in German. In the low lighting she lowered the parchment-heavy paper in order to see it better by the light of their table's ruby glass-enclosed candle. She noticed the date at the top. So late in the month? her mind asked her. Already? She hardly knew the number of the days anymore. The day of the week she was generally more solid on. Life had become so changed with Mr. Thornton.
She worried to herself over how long Geis would see fit to keep her out - her only true concern of the night being that she had a single appointment she must not miss: the Nightwatch. As it was, here in the dark, at a time (due to the ridiculously early curfew and lack of candles or lamp oil) she and Mr. Thornton would have been asleep for hours, she struggled somewhat to keep awake, her mind working, her guard up.
But the date. That was a troubling thing to have lost track of. She let her mind muse on that and its implications further.
Geis had ordered them drinks. She hated the way he spoke to wait staff. She always had. There was never anything impolite in his address (especially if they were doing an acceptable job), but even with Barnsdale's household staff she always sensed something, some undertone as he ordered them about that to her ear rang of a self-satisfaction, a delight in having someone to direct that had no choice but to obey.
Her drink was placed appropriately, removed from a tray again by an arm bearing those very familiar cufflinks. She followed the white-gloved waiter's hand up beyond the cuff and along the arm of the suit coat he wore. She got as far as the bowtie before her heart fell. A dimple, an imperfect crease in an otherwise impeccably practiced bowknot.
Like a person witnessing a railway accident, she found herself unable to look away. He already had her eyes. (And of course, as she had trothed in front of La Salle and the others, her heart...) Had she not turned so cold with dread at his recklessly being here (and not only here, but at present standing betwixt her and Gisbonnhoffer), she would have blazed molten hot outrage at him.
Seeing all of that within her eyes, Robin immediately took the lead. "Lady Marion," he said, as though formally greeting her, with a deferential nod of his head. "Please accept my condolences - and those of my family - on the death of Sir Edward." His eyes held hers, now expectantly, waiting to see how she would respond.
She knew he had only said it, only mentioned it aloud, to see if speaking her father's name would niggle at Gisbonhoffer. This knowledge did nothing to lessen her own coming-on emotional reaction to his (if he had been anyone else, pretty) speech.
As he had known it would, the mention of Sir Edward re-focused Marion's mind away from her immediate desire to see him drawn and quartered, and became the opening salvo in his undercover working of their table.
"You knew Sir Edward?" Geis asked him (as Robin had suspected he would). The Lieutenant's eyebrows raised in vague, polite curiosity.
"Aye," Robin answered him, this man at present appearing to be his better, "but only indirectly. As a boy, through a woman my family knew working at the estate, he granted my brother and I free reign over his lakes and ponds."
Geis gave a benign nod appropriate to such small talk, moving on to what he saw as the central question in any such exchange. "And so you will also have a familiarity with her ladyship?" His eyes flicked over toward Marion, surprised to note that even a passing mention of her deceased father could still affect her composure.
"No," Robin backtracked, hitting the perfect pitch of a man who had, perhaps, over-bragged. "We two were only ever on the grounds when the family was absent."
Marion noted the sorry fit of his (rather, Clem's) old suit. He had always been slender in comparison to most men, but especially to Clem, who was ever at having to have his shirts let out in the chest, to make way for his brawny frame.
She wondered if Robin noticed, as he would have in the old days. If it pinched at him - even in the far reaches of his mind - to be so ill fit. Certainly she had noticed that at present she could have benefited from several taking-ins of her frock's waist. When she had shown up at Ginny's, Ginny had done her best on short notice with her needle, but it was hardly a proper fitting session.
For the sake of Gisbonnhoffer (and the other officers' eyes) Marion had not very much cared. But now, well, even in her anger with Robin, even with everything else going on, she would have liked to rest in the knowledge that she looked her best.
"That is true," Marion agreed, backing up his story. "When father and Clem were on holiday, they made use of those waters for themselves. They would have expected solitude in those times."
Gisbonnhoffer smiled. "You are all but an old friend, then. Come," Geis generously offered, "sit with us for a moment and reminisce." He threw his hand out toward a chair, though adding a third at their small table would prove something of a crowd. An excess of knees, alone, would prove difficult to navigate.
"Do you smoke?" Gisbonnhoffer asked, extending a cigarette toward him, not waiting for Robin's answer before also extending a lit match. Without protest (though Marion knew he had given it up), Robin accepted both, removing his glove in the taking of it.
"I am sorry," Marion tried to fill what she thought was likely bordering-on precarious silence. "I," she shook her head as though lightly dismayed, "I do not recall your name."
Robin nodded at her, as any of the locals might, accepting her apology for not being able to remember them each distinctly. "Earl Oxnard," he said, confidence in every syllable. "My father was Laird, Laird Oxnard."
Coolly, as though he was already beginning to grow bored with their guest, Geis asked, "And do you have family on the island, Mr. Oxnard?"
"Yes, yes I do. As a matter of fact...I am newly married."
"Is that so?" Geis looked to Marion to gauge her response at this news, his coming-on boredom evaporated.
"Let us then wish you all happiness," she said, her tone not entirely committed to lauding such tidings, but rather distant (as it might be, a Lady wishing such to a mere, unknown-to-her peasant).
"Thank you, thank you both," Robin began, before Geis interrupted and called for another server to bring them a third glass, that they might toast this Oxnard's marital future with it.
"She is but a local girl," Robin continued, determined, Marion thought, to somehow in all this get her own goat as well as Gisbonnhoffer's. "But good at her chores, and true to a fault."
"And is she fair of face?" Geis asked, with renewed interest.
"My eyes have never seen her equal," Robin responded, all the while not taking his eyes off Marion's. "Present company, of course," he added, nodding to her, "excepted."
It was all she could do to incline her head as one might when accepting such a compliment for real.
"And what do you think of our 'model' occupation of your islands?" Geis asked him, not liking the way this man was looking at Marion. "Do you kiss our hands in the light and plot to overthrow us in the night?"
At this, Robin displayed a very good show of balking at the sudden turn taken in Gisbonnhoffer's questioning. He even turned vaguely white at the gills from the sinister undertone of it.
"Me, Sir?" he used a formal address for the Lieutenant. "I only hope to make enough tonight so that when I return home I'll have some little left for the Mrs."
A moment passed, and Marion decided to step in. "Of course you do, Mr. Oxnard," she spoke as though to comfort him, as if he were one of the many islanders who knew her on sight, but with whom she had no personal relation.
"Then you had best get back to your present business," Geis directed him abruptly, the pitch of his voice dropping to the floor, now barren of all amity, dismissing Robin from his comfortable spot at their table. "As we are not yet served, and the show meant to start straightaway."
Robin performed a reasonable facsimile of a chastened garcon, and disappeared toward the kitchen in search of their portion of the banquet.
"Marion," Geis commented, reaching to place his hand atop hers. "Was it wrong of me to invite him to sit with us a moment?" His right eye narrowed. "You look positively flush from the encounter."
"No," she worked to assure him, "No. It is only, I suppose, that," she let herself take a breath, "meeting him too keenly reminds me of the happy past."
Barnsdale - Carriage House - Seeing the unexpected return of the Kommandant's driver (a position of some small power, as when a soldier was expected to be working he certainly did not wish to be caught out by a man who potentially had Vaiser's - or Gisbonnhoffer's - ear), the quartet of Geis' guard that had been milling about, waiting for the nights entertainments to begin, cleared off without requiring so much as a 'boo' from Allen.
For once, since the unit had become stranded on these islands, Allen Dale had no reason to cage his anger - and to the situation he brought more than it (and Rowan's black plans), solely, inspired within him. It was a rare chance to be fully true to himself, no playacting.
Seeing which of the bedchamber doors was at present closed, he half-stomped toward it, murder on his brow, and soundly kicked it in without even feeling the unpleasant friction the action birthed in his knee and hip.
There was the young Constable Rowan, there was Eleri, upon the bed. And there, there was the weapon - rather, the camera. So at least the deed was not yet done. The young constable was stripped to the waist, his braces dangling about his hips.
Eleri must have packed herself a bag and smuggled it from the main house here, as there was no way Allen could imagine her (even her) attempting to walk about on the grounds in only the lacey afterthought of a negligee she wore.
"Frau-lein Eleriiii," he let his voice mimic what he could recall of the relentless, unable to be ignored voices of men who had overseen the unit's strenuous training regimen.
Her eyes registered his entry and presence there with something not unlike inveterate hatred. At the very least, one might say in that moment she would have, like a viper, spat poison, were she so equipped.
"Clear off," Allen told her, danger bleeding into his already authoritarian tone. "Schnell," he added, never having taken his eyes off Rowan.
This was a mistake. Eleri shot up from the bed with a banshee shriek and threw herself at Allen, half at scratching for his eyes, the other half at trying to find something to kick. To Rowan, it looked like the Kommandant's driver was caught in a whirlwind of fru-fru and a whirligig of appendages.
But Allen proved as quick as she proved impassioned. In one moment he had her by the shank of her let-down hair. But smart enough to know that grasping the entire clump was sure to hurt less than twisting only a small, but more tender amount, he employed the latter technique, finding himself able to reasonably control her movements by jerks and tugs.
Without another word to her, as one does with a cat in heat, he put her outside, literally stranding her on the upper balcony of the carriage house, which overlooked the garage space where the estate's cars would have once been housed, outside the two chauffeur's flats, but still (for whatever of modesty's sake was left) within doors.
Taking himself back to the bedroom, he found Rowan quickly attempting to rewind the films within his camera and (apparently) salvage whatever he could of their cut-short lovemaking session.
It had been more than a little while since Allen had had the occasion to employ a proper shakedown (or, indeed, receive one), but once learned, such things are never forgotten.
He knocked the camera out of the man's hand with a solid and dependable closed fist of his own. The apparatus came apart upon colliding into the floor. Using that same fist, he cuffed Rowan into the nearest spot of open wall.
"Empty your pockets," he demanded, his voice no longer rough, as his actions were instead - grabbing the younger man by the Adam's apple (between thumb and knuckle of his first finger) to insure he kept his place up against the wall.
Out came the pockets' contents onto the nearest chair seat. Two additional canisters of film (likely still unexposed), a druggist's phial which Allen grabbed (along with the films) and popped open to smell, pulling it away from his nose with a jerk when he recognized it as ether in nature. It was a conservative amount, what a person might use to smother unwanted kittens (or render insensible unsuspecting young women). He tossed the phial toward the room's pedestal sink, where its glass tinkled against the porcelain as the liquid ran down the drain. The canisters, and what small amount of monies the Constable had left to his name from his losses earlier in the day, he pocketed.
"Who am I?" he asked the young man, rhetorically, relaxing his hold on the Adam's apple enough that Rowan might speak - though belaboredly.
He could not quite manage the 'th' sound of 'the'. "'Kommandant's man."
"That's right," Allen agreed with a head nod. "And as I am the Kommandant's man, I am also Miss Eleri's man. Out to protect his interest - and hers."
Rowan coughed. "And I am Rowan," he tried unsuccessfully to announce with disdain, Allen's grip on his throat impeding artful vocal expression of any kind. "Son of Dunne. Orphaned by your Kommandant. My father killed for naught but his kindness." He tried to straighten his shoulders, to telegraph defiance. His eyes bugged. "And I am at my revenge."
"'Well I know it," Allen leaned in and half-whispered along his cheek, into Rowan's ear. "But hear me. I have your note, I have the evidence I see here with my eyes. We both of us know whom the Kommandant will believe. Consider that your revenge is spent." He could see the terror that his aggression inspired in this man's eyes, along with this Rowan's oppositional desire to overcome it in favor of nursing his hatred. An hatred so great he would destroy a non-combatant in the twisted illustration of it.
Naturally, Allen could more than match the constable's abhorrence of the Kommandant. Certainly he knew of deed upon deed upon deed for which justice demanded the sadist answer. But for all the daughters Vaiser had ordered tortured, or raped, or killed - assaulting Eleri was no way to affect that justice. And not solely because Vaiser felt next to nothing for her.
So though he agreed with this Rowan's root motivator (though he could even, perhaps, respect it), he knew he would have to emerge from this moment bloodier than he would have liked. He reached for the knife that was among the things emptied from the man's pockets. Unsnapping it from the small leather sheath that it wore, he sliced its blade horizontally across one of Rowan's palms. Deep enough to rend skin and fat, and certain to scar (if not in future impede the use of some of his fingers).
"That is so you remember," he warned him. "If you approach Fraulein Eleri ever again - even for a moment's chat - I will go to the Kommandant with my evidence, and you, and whatever may be left of your family will pay dearly for your failed revenge." He gave Rowan a heavier push, grinding his shoulders back into the wall, and took several steps backward and away from him.
"You're not much of an Islander, Collaborator," the young constable spat at him, cradling his bleeding palm as he added several choice slurs onto the accusation.
"You can say that again, Mate," Allen vocally (though subduedly) agreed, as he brought his legs to step over the felled bedroom door, and he walked toward the flat's door that opened into the interior of the carriage house to collect troublesome and sure-to-be-truculent Eleri, and shuttle her back through the night's dark to the estate's main house.
Cabaret Alstroemeria - She had ceased counting the number of dances and tallying the songs they had heard played by the time the psychic's act was about to - finally - begin. It was after midnight, the final courses of the banquet only now being served to tables.
To her relief they had seen little enough of Robin, other than him filling their glasses and serving and removing their plates, since Geis had dismissed him back to his job. Even so, she felt like a veritably struck lightning rod every time he came anywhere near her.
And of course he seemed to relish it, bringing his arm, extended to give or take a plate or glass, closer to her shoulder or back than it needed be. He was fortunate in the dim lighting of the venue (and in the black of Clem's tuxedo) that Geis (and anyone else looking) would have a hard time noting these inappropriate overtures if she did not herself point them out.
A sparkle of confetti and a burst of aromatic scent announced the arrival of Joss Tyr. As was his usual way, he began the show with a series of jokes, usually at the expense of the suffering Islanders. Weeks after (for he rarely told the same joke twice) one could still hear them circulating, now having made their way down into the Jerry ranks.
She was so exhausted, and so over-stimulated by Robin's ill-planned crashing of the occasion, as the night wore on she found it increasingly difficult to curb what was already the large degree of personal disgust she had decided to no longer disguise from Geis.
"Film star W.C. Fields," Tyr was going on, "is noted for saying that one should never work with children or dogs. How convenient then - ought we to draft him an invitation tonight - to join us here on these islands?"
Approving and spluttering laughter filled the room.
Marion felt a withering glance take over her face as she heard Geis' laughter join with the others. Geis, who rarely laughed at anything, who was generally so sober-faced in any instance as to strike one, nearly, as sole owner of a funeral parlor.
What she did not know was that he was feeling the lift of more than several glasses of good wine, and basking in what he saw as his accomplishment of successfully enticing her to join him.
She was the finest-dressed and most finely bred woman in the room. That the other women in the room were in general husbandless housewives- or inexperienced teenaged-girls-turned-Jerrybags only with the advent of the Occupation (and every one of them from simple, unsophisticated island stock) was lost on him. He was the man present in possession of the diamond, the treasure that was Marion. He could hardly help but be chuffed at such a truth.
And so he laughed.
"How can you express amusement at such cruelty?" Marion asked him - one of her few questions of the night, as she had generally avoided any speech that might lead into further conversation.
"Well," he reminded her, not immediately marking her irritation with him, "there are no dogs - and very few children - here. His is a keen observation."
"There are no dogs," her voice threatened to ring out beyond the space their table occupied, "because pets were ordered euthanized in the days before your landing. The fear then (which I might well add has more than come to pass) was that due to wartime privation there mightn't be enough food for humans - much less animals." Her eyes stopped in their fluttering, impassioned movement, for a moment settling on his to announce the guilt of it. "People here were expected to consent to the killing of animals they treasured most - because of you."
His face, as she might have expected, remained placid, the smile from his earlier laugh not fully wiped from it.
"And as for children," he ought to be thankful she did not rise to pound her fist on the table in her decrying of his behavior. "Have you not seen the eyes of an Islander when they do clap onto one of the rare children left - or born - since the Occupation? There is nearly a greed within them. Young or old, we here are a dying people! We have sacrificed our beloved pets in the wake of your soulless gods, and we have lost our children as sure as Hamelin Town, sent them far away so that they no longer know us. What legacy will we then have? Those of us aged on the outside - those of us aging at pace within?"
"Marion," Geis attempted to recall her to herself, hoping that she might re-gather her composure before anyone noticed. "You forget yourself." There was the hint of intimacy to his whisper. "You speak as though you were one of these Islanders. As though their cares were your own." His face had lost its placidity, a wrinkle introduced to his brow. He wondered if the evening's excitement (and wine) were perhaps proving too much for her after her near-monastic life of late.
"Yes," she stonily agreed with him, letting her voice drop back to within her chest as she saw that her outburst had done no good, produced no effect. "I am but holidaying here these last four years, carefree and unattached to the problems of the locals."
But her near-diatribe had caught the psychic's attention, no performer wishing to be potentially upstaged by one within the audience not in on the act.
"Predictions!" Tyr announced with an odd-sounding clap of his half-hands, "The Voices call for the sharing of predictions! Whom present shall Their energies center upon?"
Marion was momentarily distracted by the feeling of someone taking up the position of standing directly behind her chair. She half-glanced down, without moving her head, and saw to her right one of Clem's cufflinks glint in the darkness.
When she brought her eyes back toward the stage, she realized Tyr was standing, in mock impatience, at their table.
"The ex-quisite Lady Marion," he announced to the audience, which applauded her. "Having grown more mysterious and enigmatic in her time away from us, no doubt. The Spirits," he declared, leaning in to the very small round table, his voice falling into a queer range that mimicked the sharing of a confidence, but was clearly audible to all present, "choose you." 'You' was like a voiceless whisper, as he moved to grasp her left hand from where it had sat upon the table.
"A great mis-placer of rings, the Lady Marion." He held up two fingers high above his head: one real, the other his permanently curved wooden thumb. "Two lost, the Spirits know. Yet one on its way back to her. Across an ocean as blue as sapphire." He threw his arm out as though imitating the ocean's waves. "But what is this? She has not waited for its return - she wears another, a jewel-less band - "
Tyr never quite took hold of her hand. She did not voluntarily lift it toward him. What were left of his natural fingers had extended to take her hand in his (always gloved), the prosthetic wooden ones holding to their permanent, petrified arches and bends, producing an unsettling effect.
His second hand came to join his first in the practiced (and effective) illusion that he would receive further information from the Spirits beyond about the future of Marion Nighten. But instead of his gloved appendages contacting her skin - the true conduit (he had always asserted) between his Gifts and another's essence - the tip of one of his still-live fingers extended to caress the very plain, very unusual band upon her finger that even more unusually, underneath, did not fully encircle the base of her digit.
Joss Tyr took in his breath, but in this action, there was no stagecraft. His eyes tried to convince him the dark light of the cabaret (the light into which he sometimes felt he had been born, like a mole, or other below-ground dwelling creature) that he was mistaken. But he could not mistake the familiar aura emanating from that particular piece of brass. It was Avia's. Beyond question, beyond doubt.
What it was doing bent from its true shape and affixed to the hand of the Lady Marion Nighten who occupied the table (and affections, and likely, bed) of SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer, he had no immediate way of knowing - his second sight was quite silent on this matter.
It had been his plan all along to use the evening's farewell performance to pull the greatest stunt of his show business career. For he was in no particular hurry (unlike his benefactor - and ignorant-of-it enemy) to yet abandon the island Guernsey. His own, terrifying, shocking collapse before show's end, he had planned for the better part of two weeks. What was to be the inciting cause he had never quite fully settled upon.
Here, at Gisbonnhoffer's table, his finger extended toward touching the lost item of the single thing in the world that he (if he loved anything at all) loved best, he had hardly needed to rely on the earlier practice, as he clutched his heart and brought his hands toward his temples as though he could no longer bear the weight of his Gift. He was no longer even certain that he was faking in that moment. It was all he could do not to shout his beloved dove's name, along with publicly declaring the Lady Marion her obvious killer. (Would not anyone else think so of a person going about wearing their vanished lover's jewelry?)
He swooned, he half-choked, his head thrown back as one about to enter a convulsion.
Remnants of confetti shook down unbidden, as if from out of thin air. A smoke bomb misfired, engulfing a distant corner of the room in heavy fog. At a nearby table the centerpiece burst, injudiciously, into flame.
The electric house and stage lights flickered as if the space had transformed into an impromptu haunted house, then went out entirely. Only the muted candle lights at each table remained glowing.
As he fell to the floor, Joss Tyr let out a sound untranslatable by any language known or unknown upon the earth, and chaos erupted.
Barnsdale - Carriage House - Allen Dale had been more than surprised to see, upon exiting the carriage house flat, that Eleri Vaiser was nowhere to be found.
Swiftly (never over-certain of the erratic girl's motivations), he lengthened his stride to bring himself to the house proper, and then up the numerous steps toward her now-preferred lodging of the family nursery.
His mind was, for once, he thought, pristinely clear. The opportunity for the release of the long bottled-up emotion inside of him in his confrontation with the constable, Rowan, had afforded him a wakeful lucidity he had not had the opportunity to experience very often since beginning his double-agent's work as Kommandant's driver, his days more often filled with swallowing his own truth, overlooking (or having to intentionally treat lightly) the horrors which the Alderney camps perpetually held, the wicked depravity of the Kommandant's never-ending schemes and orders. In this unaccustomed moment of clarity, Allen fully expected to be greeted as a returning hero when he swung wide Barnsdale's double nursery doors.
That proved a mistake. He saw in an instant that Eleri had been crying, most vigorously. And also that she was holding a gun - on him.
"I hate you," she said, from her spot sitting among the mussed sheets in her child's bed, heels driven into the mattress, the ancient pistol so heavy she had to prop up her hands' holding of it between her two, elevated knees. "Is it you he has sent? You come to teach me my lesson?"
"Who?" Allen asked, not following, not certain a pistol of such great age would fire reliably (assuming she knew how to pack and load such an antique), but not interested in taking the chance.
"My father!" she sobbed out, her usually sharp and hawkish eyes now like runny watercolors, wet and red and blurry to look at. "He swore if I did not behave he would send one of his men - like Gisbonnhoffer's Thered to - to - to - "
"To hurt you?"
Vigorously she shook her head in the negative. Even through her tears he could see past, to her eyes, that 'to chaperone you' was not the correct answer. He calculated in her recent move from her more-accessible, less-nearby-the-ever-present-staff rooms.
"To...rape you?" he asked, his tone bordering on incredulous. "His own daughter?" It was a leap, after all, from not caring for your own child, to actively seeking to plan their own violent sexual assault.
"What do you care?" she challenged him, and for a moment he thought she might put down the pistol and fly at him all nails and kicking feet again. "You don't want me to be happy! You think only of your position!" And then she did throw the gun aside, onto the matching bed. "Tonight was meant to be the most special of my life. And I'd finally found someone on these cursed islands to share it with and - "
In the absence of the firearm, Allen felt confident enough to reach into his chauffeur's coat and pull out the revenge note Rowan had been crafting. He held it out toward the weeping Eleri, and waited for her to read it for herself.
"'Found it on him earlier today," he told the top of her bent head. "Took me a minute when I read it an hour or so ago to put it together with your new interest in French erotica..."
In her hands, the paper shortly wilted much like her own, no-longer-defiant posture. "But we were in love. He loved me," with that she raised her head. "We were going to be together. We shared something! Something special," in wake of the note, her denial was losing steam. "I was going to - "
"No, Ellie," Allen spoke to her with a shake of his head, his tone neither soft nor understanding, only, truthful. "'at's not love."
"Well, then what is?" she questioned him, some of her old sting creeping back into her voice, expecting him to know the correct answer, if he could call hers out as false.
At the nature of the question, the impracticality of her asking it to him, he responded (not without a level of derision to match her sting), "I'm no anthropologist, no Miss Lonely Hearts. Whyever would you look to me to show you summat like that?"
They froze there for a moment, her face half-looking of someone desperate for a comprehensible answer to her question, his of disbelief at her asking it, until his mind snapped to, and he broke the moment (and the conversation) by walking over to collect the pistol, partway between feeling foolish and feeling relieved to discover that it was only a child's play toy (doubtless, a young Clem Nighten's) after all.
Cabaret Alstroemeria - The Cabaret exploded into chaos, with their table at the very enter of it. Somewhere in that moment Robin had slipped away, left his post at her back. Marion did not even see exactly when, nor how, but when she looked to him he was not there.
Geis and a multitude of other officers had sprung forward, each eager to assist the OberAdmiral's particular pet in his deep, possibly mystical swoon.
"No!" they heard Prinzer, their commander, himself in the fray, cry with powerful force against their offered help. "Do not touch him! Not with your flesh! Gloves, gloves, I say, on every one of you. As you see, his mind - his Gift - is overly susceptible to human contact. You will all overpower him!"
And so, in the general rush of every officer applying their (always tucked into their uniform belts') gloves, Marion herself managed to get free of the further impending chaos, and make her way to the somewhat more open air of the (now empty, as everyone present was consumed with the drama of Tyr) ladies washroom.
"I say, Sir," she overheard Geis at trying to advise the near-distraught OberAdmiral - to impress him, "the closest bed is surely through commandeering Ginny Glasson's second-floor flat for his care, for as long as he needs it. It is only a few steps across the stage-door alley to her shop's rear door, I am told. And if I recall from her file, Glasson herself has some background in the nursing arts." Geis paused in faux-consideration for the still lightly moaning Tyr, "if you think he might be up to such a move, however brief."
She had reached the short hallway toward the loos, and turned down it to make the familiar turning into the ladies', when she felt the presence of someone following her. Someone far too near for her comfort. The candlelit sconces in the short hallway were dim, as was the Cabaret's lightning on the whole left low in order to create a certain mood, a reminder of the darkish, below street-level nightlife of Berlin.
She thought of a handbag - of how she had not been given one for the night, and so could not depend upon its weight (nor its potential contents) to aid her in that moment. Bereft that, she began to bend down and remove a shoe, certain the sturdy heel would do her some good when wielded in her hand.
Too late. He had her swung about, back to the wall, a mere single step away from the washroom door.
There was no moment available for repartee, for him to tell her that he had noticed the scent of their day together had been washed away and replaced by artificial perfumes and oils paid for by her Jerry lieutenant. And that he didn't like it. That he missed the lack of it. Missed the scent they two somehow created together.
Time only to press his mouth onto her, hungry as a man made to only look at his dinner for hours without being allowed to touch it, much less taste it.
She answered him back, the moment's shock at her pursuer being him causing her to respond to his own intensity two-fold.
"I shall come later this night," he whispered into her mouth, referring to his visiting the Nightwatch, as he, of necessity, had to pull shortly away.
"Yes," she agreed, her own mouth speaking back into his, her heart wild with the jeopardy inherent in that moment. "You will," she relished the creation of a double entendre. "Several times."
He stepped back from her, and though she sighted no one in their immediate vicinity, she brought her hand back and slapped him with force across the face.
He accepted the slap, his eyes widening and contracting at the conclusion of it, as though it truly had stunned him.
"You ass!" she declared, loud enough that anyone might hear her reprimand.
Which perfectly expressed both her opinion of any presumptuous garcon who might think he could take such physical liberties with a Cabaret guest (much less a Lady) - and of the man she had married, that night playing it so dangerously - and for what, really? - so perilously close to the edge.
SARK - nearby La Salle's tenement - Stoker was, again, abundantly thankful for the dark, for all that it made his compass-reading troublesome. He had in his possession the rough coordinates (as given in several coded Nightwatch broadcasts) of the unit's makeshift HQ on this island.
He was tired - and somewhat wet - from his sea-to-shore journey. More like, sea-to-cliff, or sea-to-cave. He had found (less easily than he had expected) the one chosen out for him by Legg's learned consulting of the various maps, and made happy use of its unlikely hidden space within for stowing the boat and several key items, that he could not reasonably be carrying with him at the moment. He was a stranger here, after all - an entirely unknown face on a small island sure to be quite suspicious of unknown faces at any time, but much more so at the present. The hour was between nine and ten o'clock. Well into the Jerry-imposed curfew after which all residents were required to be (and stay) within doors until morning.
He marveled that in all the distance he had walked, he could still hear the sea, making it hard for him to focus, to not compare the night and this place to any evening when on a jolly seaside holiday.
Early on, nearer to the seaside cliffs, he had passed three houses and several barns on his way, but he had stopped at none. He was interested only in the house meant to be at (if not just close - he doubted these coordinates were spot-on) the location he held numerically in his head. He prayed that he would know how best to approach it, as well as prayed that it would be the exact one sheltering members of the unit.
In the distance he saw a dark shape (blackouts ongoing even here, on Sark), which he took for a house. He quickened his pace, stopping once to consult his compass and do some figuring in his head. This was it. He felt certain.
As he walked toward the front door (so certain he was that he had arrived), he reminded himself of how long the unit had been out of the game. How any SIS-given passwords or secret codes in their possession would now have long been defunct. Of that fact being the very reason he had been sent - that they would each know and trust him on sight - rather than some random British commando bursting in they had never met and could not be sure was not simply a ploy of the enemy to blow whatever covers they had taken for themselves, here.
Like any other reasonable visitor (and because he could think of no other way to go about it), he knocked politely on the front door.
There was some time in an answer coming, during which he had the brief presence of mind to wonder why they did not seem to have a watch posted that would have sighted him. There was nothing else in sight of the farm, no other house or distant outbuilding. There was no way, surely, that the Jerries would have known him to be coming just now, just here. The Nightwatch had run, as usual, the night before - no indication given that anything with the unit had gone awry.
Slowly the door pulled open, strong light shining from behind the person standing there. A woman. Stoker took a moment to count the collection of children behind her. She stood, without speaking, taking in his attire and unfamiliar face from head to toe.
His mind told him he had erred. The coordinates (or his own figuring) had been off. And here he was, standing in this unwitting, Sarkese woman's doorway. Surely if a man were present she would have sent him to answer the door. It was important that she not take him as a threat, which might send her, even now, to the Jerries for aid. It was important that he be allowed into the house. The longer he stayed out in the open the more likely he would be caught. In the brief space of a quarter-second he studied on what to do.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
Her face told him nothing.
As best he could remember from his time in school day pantos, he let himself list a bit, placed one leg behind the other, and dropped into a rather reasonable facsimile of a dead faint.
Abby Rufford stood at her home's doorway and for a moment surveyed the unknown man who had knocked upon her door after curfew and then shortly, without speaking, swooned and fainted dead away.
Making up her mind, she turned to her eldest son, knowing he could best make the trip, and sent him off to La Salle's as fast as his feet - and discretion - could carry him.
Then she, and two of the girls, grabbed the stranger by his boots (their soles showing surprisingly little wear) and unceremoniously dragged him into the front hall of their home before they re-shut the door behind him.
She had no idea what was going on, but like any mother, she could smell trouble. And this new 'trouble' had the scent of Robin, that handsome, naughty scamp of a man from La Salle's, all over it.
...TBC...