1943 - GUERNSEY - two weeks before the Barnsdale engagement party of the Lady Marion Nighten and SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer - "Hush, Allen, hush!" Mitch hissed, as usual, never one to employ harsh language even when it might prove useful. He placed his hand on his brother-in-arms' chest, as if to prevent him from advancing. "I will tell him."
"Well if'n it's easier -" Dale cut in with a familiar shrug, "I don't mind bearin' the bad tidings."
"I'll do it in a heartbeat," Royston offered, "I've no nevermind in the whole mess."
"Yeah," Allen cracked, injecting black humor to the sore subject of Royston's errant wife. "'All but written a book on female betrayal, after all, ain't ye?"
Somewhat bemused by the entire unit's quibbling over who it was to carry Robin the day's bad news, Wills Reddy verbally prodded at Johnson. "What ho, John, will you not offer your services - put your name in for the draw - as well?"
Johnson looked up like a man who had only just discovered he'd sat on a tack, but was too prideful to rise up and admit the pain it was causing him. "I've never been one to understand women," John offered, though he knew himself to be a man who wholly appreciated (yearned for, even) their gentle, domestic ways, "much less men in love with women." He looked sheepishly uncomfortable at this confession. "I'll not stick my own neck out here. Not with so many others willing to volunteer."
"I said, I'll go," Mitch re-asserted, his tone growing sharp. "It's Robin and Marion, after all. Nothing you great muttonheads would know square one about."
"Now, see," Royston piped up, his coarse voice unintentionally ironic, "Bonchurch's gone and set me to thinking about a nice sandwich of cold, thick mutton..."
Present Time - Nightwatch Windmill - "You ought to worry," the man with the pistol on her warned with a slight shake of his head as he spoke. "I won't make it quick."
"This isn't what you want to do," Marion tried to stall him. "To kill a woman - a non-combatant - when your grievance is clearly with the Germans. It isn't what His Majesty would wish."
A bitter laugh, rough and perilous as un-sanded lumber came up from his throat. "No," he agreed. "His Majesty, King George, would just as soon forget these Islands. And His people."
"Perhaps," she acquiesced, herself usually sharing in some of this chap's irritation. "But He would not wish His people to forget one another." But as she said this, she let her eyes for the first time stray down to the pistol, where he held it in a double-grip. It was then she realized she was not speaking to one of His Majesty's soldiers at all. The gloved hands that (attempted) to close around the gun were awkward, and ill-formed for the task. It was, in fact, the left middle finger that gracelessly (and potentially ineffectually) rested upon the trigger.
Her eyes shot back up to re-appraise the uniform, noting now that it was devoid of rank insignia, patches, or ribbons of any kind. It was a blank.
And she had seen its like before, here, since the Occupation. As a costume used in the show of the psychic Joss Tyr.
She did not question that she had not recognized him: she had never encountered him without his stage make-up, the wild, unnatural colors streaked through his flamboyant hair. She took no time to wonder where his facial scars were now - assuming they lay, as always, deeply masked by a layer of (this time) flesh-colored cosmetics.
With a micro-squint of his right eye, she saw that he knew himself to be discovered.
"You are really quite handsome," she told him.
"And you are, patently, not," he told her, almost blithely, walking to circle over toward the running turntable. "Disloyal women rarely are."
She found herself circling also, her back now to the stairs, and (unknown to her) to Robin beyond it, Marion now blocking him from taking his shot.
"It is said," she offered, "- and you, yourself have confirmed it - that you are a Count," she began, "who became an officer, and in a Todt explosion lost much of himself. As well as his position." She let her eyes again take in his uniform. "Who, then, are you at being now?"
"I am what I have been made," he told her, hoping she knew that just because his hands held the gun insecurely, did not mean his aim would prove untrue, "an instrument of revenge." The waterfalls that were his eyes froze over. "I am the Whichman."
1943 - GUERNSEY - two weeks before the Barnsdale engagement party of the Lady Marion Nighten and SS Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer - "What news, then, Mitch?" Robin had given his usual greeting to his longtime friend and fellow officer. They were bivouacked within view of the coast, though far enough from inlet or beach to avoid immediate detection. The camp, of direst necessity, had been slap-dash in the making, and remained nothing they could not easily tear-down and reassemble in a flash - as would likely be necessary, as since their seeking refuge from their hulled ship on the island of Guernsey they had been the perpetual, prospective quarry of what seemed like every Jerry occupying this Channel Island region.
"She is here," was all that he had said to Mitch's declaration that the Lady Marion Nighten was at present a known resident of Guernsey, Mitch's voice dry, his throat as though half-choked on sand or grit.
"Her father had a house here," Robin recalled aloud, unimportantly, his mind stuttering through its paces at the news. Marion, Marion who had gone to America, somehow here. Marion, probably the sole person he would wish to speak with before he died (both legally and actually). Marion, whose face hung in the sky above him at night, occluding the North Star. Over-mapping any constellations one was meant to steer by. Marion, whose smallest gesture haunted him, whose bloody pigheadedness had, in its circuitous way, brought him here.
"Yeees," Mitch agreed with his declaration. "Sir Edward is here as well. Oh," for a moment he brightened. "Dale got work. Which is how the news came to us."
"Us?"
"Well," he put his hand out in a 'so-so' motion, "the unit. They are not at all pleased with it, I might tell you."
"Pleased with what?" Robin asked, his brows clashing together like two Spitfires in a dogfight. "What is another abandoned Briton to them," he shrugged, "another caught under the thumb of the Reich, here?"
"Well that's just it, isn't it?" Mitch went on, "Allen reports that she and her father are entertaining Jerries at their estate, most every week-end. And that Marion -" he caught himself here, knowing he had coarsely backed into saying what he had started out to say more fluidly. He swallowed uncomfortably. "Marion is...entangled...with one of their Alderney officers."
Robin's eyes shot up to Mitch's, his face blanched. But his voice betrayed none of his shock. "And so the lads take issue with this."
"With their very forthcoming-about-his-love-life superior now being the well-known paramour of a Nazi collaborator?" Mitch had not known how much he would now wish Robin had been able to keep his mouth shut all those dark nights 'round a fire, spinning tales of Marion Nighten's perfection to his mates and men. His pre-Island behavior certainly made their present situation a rather more complicated one. "Well, they are hardly in the mood to stand you a round of drinks upon consideration of the notion."
Robin heard his friend listing the obstacles his previous openness about Marion was causing them. He thought of it himself. Had he spun her into a fantasy? Something faery-like that vanished with the dawn? It had been nearly five years since they had spoken, much less laid eyes on one another. What if, in that time, she had made him into a villain - or worse yet, written him off as simply a mistake she had easily gotten over?
"And what if they are right?" Robin asked aloud. "Times change us, Mitch. Would you have ever imagined a world where you would have agreed to let your own dear mother think you dead - no matter what was at stake?"
"Or in which I would count Dale among my bosom friends?" Mitch added quietly to himself and then scoffed. "'Perhaps they are right?'" he quoted Robin loudly, wagging his head in an exaggerated motion. "'Perhaps they are right?' What know they of you - of, of Robin Oxley as was? What know they of Marion? Your Marion? You will let them dictate whether you go and see her - whether you any longer will trust her?" Mitch could hardly figure out what to do with his hands, such was his state of agitation. "This is insanity."
Robin's reply was quiet, reasoned, and resolute. "She left me, Mitch. You were there - she chose the horse. After that, how could I ever claim to know her well again?" His demeanor began to spiral back into that of the black cloud that had persisted around him in the days following Marion's sailing on the oceanliner to America.
Mitch marched with noisy-in-the-undergrowth steps closer toward Robin. "You know her. I know her," Mitch fought against Robin's mounting disillusionment. "For the Lady Marion Nighten to entertain the advances of a Jerry officer - to even tolerate one attending the same soiree as her...why, she would have to have had some large part of her brain - her conscience - her social principles surgically removed."
Robin considered this. "They say Geordie Wellington's name was found on the roll list of a German Nationalist sympathizer's society."
This brought Mitch to a sudden halt. "Geord - who?"
Again, in off-the-cuff tones. "Some chap that had been paying calls to her just before we..."
"Well she didn't fall in love with Geordie Welling...zinger, did she? She didn't promise to marry him. She didn't love him more than earth or sky or air to breathe -"
It was Robin's turn to be suddenly halted. "You think Marion loved me more than earth or breath?"
This was not a topic they two had ever directly addressed. When Robin and Marion had been together, certainly it had not needed to be said. And when she left...it was hardly the right way to console a friend.
Mitch inhaled. "I think she loved you no less than you loved her." Mitch let his declaration sit. "Than you do love her, even now."
"And so I should trust that there's more afoot than what gossip Allen might collect for us?"
So obvious it seemed to him, Mitch did not vocally agree, but rather added to what ought occur next. "And so we should altogether go and see, and learn if she is to be a friendly (of which I am certain she is), or if we have both gravely overestimated her moral fortitude and her overall character (which I wholeheartedly doubt)."
"Even so," Robin reminded the empty space directly in front of him, where he looked out at the sea, "traitor or true, Marion has never been an easy woman. She will not take kindly to being questioned."
"Well," Mitch spoke the word with an inconclusive shrug, "the lads are ready to write her off. And so shall I be, once we part here."
"How is that?" Robin's head snapped back to catch his friend's face. "After such impassioned pleading on her part?"
"It will not do for both of us to stand in her support and defense. It will seem like, like ganging up on them. You know how we've always tried to avoid situations like that."
Robin found himself falling into a smile. "And so you will revert to being dour and doomsday about the prospect that the Lady Marion can be trusted?"
Pushing out his chest like a man trying to imitate pride, Mitch announced, "I shall pattern my feelings on the subject after Wills', which are certain to be no harsher than John's, less cynical than Allen's, and a sight less drastic than Royston's."
"And so I go to battle against my own men over a well-acknowledged-by-them lost cause." It was a summation, not a question.
"Well, yes, but you do outrank us all. Surely there's some comfort in that."
"Damn little, my friend," Robin told him, certain he felt a bruising swell on his heart from where it had leapt at the news of Marion's close proximity, and then fallen, thud-like when Mitch had added the prospect of possible collaboration - possible emotional attachment - with, of all people, the occupying enemy.
Present time - Nightwatch Windmill - "Quick," Joss Tyr, Count Werner von Himmel, the self-christened Whichman laughed without feeling. "That would hardly be fair, would it? As I mean you to suffer. Not likely anyone would find you here, in this out of the way - what would you call it?" He had dropped his well-done British accent, and spoke like himself (at least what she knew of him to be himself).
"Of whose murder do I stand accused?"
"The murder of the only friend I have. You wear her bauble on your finger, there."
Marion's eyes narrowed, as her mind tried to understand what he could mean. "And you have followed me here, all the way from Mr. Thornton's?"
"Curious, that," his tone became like that he used in his shows, part sing-song, part teasing. "Is it still proper to call it 'Mr. Thornton's'? When he no longer inhabits this earthly realm?"
"You have...killed him?" Her mind looked back down to the pistol, an errant thought of whether the barrel might still be warm shot out to the forefront of her mind.
"Enough talking," and he wagged the gun at her, "the Whichman killed Mr. Thornton so that Islanders learn. Heﾒs aided you. You, a known collaborator. He died, if only for his faithful tending of you." He smiled without teeth, his eyebrows raised as if to ask, 'whaddya think of that'?
"Are you cert -" and she meant to ask if he were sure Thornton was dead, not merely injured, and in asking it, she made an instinctive initial turn toward the stairs as if to run to her friend and his cottage.
She had meant to explain that the Whichman and she were not so very different. That she played with the Jerries in the day, but lived to spite them in the night, and that he, known by all as the OberAdmiral's special pet, clearly performed some similar Resistance, but the mention of Thornton killed threw her own need for preservation out of her mind.
In the instance of her turning, Robin seized his moment, managing to get off a shot at her captor. His aim proved true, and his bullet hit Tyr firmly in one of the hands that held the pistol, shearing off two fingers, both of which remained in the psychic's glove and flipped back to kiss his knuckles. They had been wood.
"She is the Nightwatch, you lunatic simpleton," Robin shouted at Tyr, blazing down the stair, no thought to its half-rotten steps, his gun trained now on far more sensitive parts of the man. "Look around you! Hold you fire!"
Tyr had managed - before Robin's shot caused him to drop his weapon - to get off a single round. Robin had not realized it, the sound falling just so with his own shot that one could not have been distinguished from the other. It was only the vivid color (even in the low lamplight) blooming on the shoulder of the shirt Marion wore that told the tale.
Tyr stood looking about him, (for the first time, it seemed) taking in the cellar's surroundings, the microphone and turntable.
"I had planned to kill you, NightWatchwoman," he said aloud, as if someone in a dream.
"Then you would have done your countrymen's jobs for them," Robin sneered out, trying for a better look at Marion's wound.
She brought her now pale, but steady hand up to his probing one, "it's clean-through, I think," she informed him from where she had half-fallen to the packed-earth floor.
She tried, with his help, to lever herself up using a vertical support beam, but Robin saw the color drain from her face, and her eyes begin to go blank as before a faint, and set her back down again, if somewhat roughly.
"Will it stretch?" he asked her (even while attempting the crudest of triage to her wound) of the microphone cord, knowing she had yet to sign-off from the broadcast.
"Not this distance," she ruefully smiled, her eyelids half-closed. "It is a poorly-constructed location from which to broadcast, or so I've been told," even in her pain and physical stress, she could not help but tease him.
The record was moments from its conclusion.
"Can you make it the distance?" Robin asked, suspecting she could not, yet. "For I've not such a pretty voice as yours."
While they were saying this, they failed to notice - until it was too late to prevent him - that Tyr had stepped toward the microphone, and making use of yet another of his peculiar talents, pitched his voice - not as it had been when he first entered to threaten her, in the round tones of BBC English - (but rather) in a more than reasonable approximation of one Josie Otto, a girl he had never met, in a country he had never visited, and spoke the usual conclusion of the programme: "as long as 'night' has fallen, until oppression ends, the Nightwatch will broadcast freedom to these, our own dear Islands."
It was, perhaps, an imperfect imitation on his part. And yet, accounting for radio static and other interference...shortcomings of homemade crystal receiver sets, the difference between the real Nightwatch and this man, this Whichman, was one only Marion herself was likely ever to perceive.
There was no real time for either Robin or Marion to register their thoughts about Tyr's last-second substitution aloud. Robin had set to stripping back Marion's blouse in an effort to get a better look at her wound.
Marion had room for only one thing in her crowded mind besides the pain. "He has killed Thornton," she recalled.
Robin threw a half-horrified glance over his shoulder at Tyr, taking in his phony (but convincing) uniform. "And so the last thing a loyal Islander sees is one of His Majesty's own men taking his life?"
Before Tyr could (or had even chosen to) counter Robin's accusation, Marion issued an order of her own. Her voice was controlled and deliberate. "Send. For Allen."
"What? No," Robin disagreed, trying to ignore her harsh intakes of air at his further probing the wound with his fingers. "The fewer that know their way to this place -"
"Send him for Allen," she repeated, indicating Tyr, her sentence choppy with effort. "Have him bring me Eleri. And then go to Thornton's and bury his body," she issued a task for the three men. "See to it he helps bury his body." One of her eyes rolled around and rested on Tyr.
"I am of little use with a spade," Tyr replied, wary enough in their joint presence, as his pistol had been knocked far distant from him, and this newcomer (Robin) was still easily armed and clearly had the upper hand - even as he attempted to suss out Lady Marion's injury. "And you have cost me two of my best fingers." He held up the wilted looking glove to show where Robin had sheared off the two digits of his wooden prosthetic.
"Be glad you are yet alive, Whichman," Marion warned him, her eyes translating the grief she was only beginning to feel over Thornton into deep, scorching scorn. "No one present will mind, much less pity you, to see you on your knees, digging with what God has left you of your hands."
Barnsdale Estate - What a night! He could hardly get his breath.
Certainly the surprises did not stop coming. Him, back at the carriage house to be surprised by a man he eventually puzzled out as Joss Tyr in an inside-out Royal Army jacket, giving him Oxley's codeword, 'Pennsylvania six, five-thousand', and demanding he gather up Eleri and head out into the Jerry-patrolled, off-limits darkness.
Allen Dale knew allies sometimes wore the strangest of faces, but surely Tyr's must be the strangest yet. A man born into the camp of the enemy, who had served his masters well as an officer, and since his accident and disfigurement had served them in other, exotic ways (assuming anything of the rumors one heard at the Dixcart was to be believed). Yet here was Tyr, carrying Robin's code, knowing where the Nightwatch windmill was. Bringing news that Lady Marion had been shot.
There was nothing to do in response but obey 'Pennsylvania six, five-thousand', and move quickly; collect Eleri, and in the doing of it not for one moment turn his back on this curious convert to the Resistance.
Before ascending all the way to the nursery, Allen had stopped in Marion's former room to stealthily gather up a piece or two of what she had there of sturdy, comfortable clothing, and a fistful of towels that might work as impromptu bandages, if needed.
Eleri had not stirred when he entered the nursery, nor the bedroom within it. Laid out in sleep upon the child's bed he certainly had no trouble seeing her, too, as yet something of a child, for all her put-on airs and attempts at grabbing the world by its throat and bending it to her will. For all that her father was a sick monster with an insatiable appetite for perverse brutality.
Who was he to lay judgment upon her as she searched this harsh world of Occupation and war for love? Certainly whatever religious version of it she had known in the convent had not been the right kind, the best kind (as if he, himself, might even know what that was). Clearly it had not satisfied, not fulfilled her.
"Come, my girl," he whispered to her, not wishing to startle her awake. "You are needed to help..." and, as it was still the best dis-arming mechanism he knew to enact upon the mercurial Eleri Vaiser, he bent to plant a kiss on her lips.
Her eyes opened at his lips' touch, and when he pulled slightly away, she said, still sleepily, "I am angry at you. Why am I angry at you?"
He moved his mouth to salute her forehead like a good brother or uncle, and chose to explain what was to come, rather than to dredge up what had already, earlier that night, occurred.
"Lady Marion is hurt, and she is asking for you. So on with your duds, Ellie." He kissed the white, center parting in her dark hair this time, noting that at Marion's name a more full degree of wakefulness had come over her. "Something hardy, though, a good pair of boots - 'can't say as how far we have to go."
Like a good child she rose and walked over to the florally upholstered changing screen that shielded half of the room's clothes cupboard, and set to doing as she was told.
Nightwatch Windmill - Tyr had left. Realizing the information he was most keen to learn, Robin had promised to tell him the tale of Marion's ring's previous owner upon his faithful return with Allen and Eleri. His and Marion's joint expectation that Tyr would return was furthered by the notion that, had they a mind to, they could expose him and his activities as the Whichman to his countrymen, leave his disciplining up to them.
She almost asked Robin why he was letting Tyr live. Why he had not, like that time on Sark with Thomas Carter, simply gone into a blood-frenzy and torn out the man's throat with his bare hands. But even in the haze of her injury she saw two things. The first, that they needed Tyr alive to go for help, the second, that at the time Carter had taken her Robin had had no security of her, no confidence that came from the two of them being the whole they were always meant to be. When he had found them he had seen so much more than simply her shorn hair and bruised face, her disintegrating frock. He had seen someone shortly to end any hope he would ever have at a reconciliation between them. Someone far less capable of rising to her own defense as she had tonight. So many things had been working on him in that moment those months ago. And he was less removed from the inhumanity of battle than in these intervening months he had become.
Of course, she felt not quite so confident that when Tyr returned Robin mightn't give in to anger and still put a bullet in his head, dropping him in to share the grave they were to dig for Thornton. She must remember to specify for him not to act so. Must remember to tell Allen that Tyr must live, though she herself felt murderously enough toward him for two. Would feel relief, no doubt, at seeing him punished for what he had done to Mr. Thornton.
Robin asked her where he might find what she had left of her spirit stash.
Marion half-groaned. "It will take more than you would like to know to get me properly pickled."
He looked down at her, at her grim face of confession, recalling an armoire packed with various levels of liquid in glass decanters and bottles. Of the condition in which the now late Mr. Thornton had related finding her following Sir Edward's death.
Of how for him, liquor had once been an escape from a life without the potential for effect, a way to feel something - if only a false happiness. Of how for her it had clearly become a retreat from true despair, a way to feel less - an insulator that had helped her pass the days, soften the never-ending blows and horrors of the Occupation.
"That, I think, my love," he told her, his voice flooded with greatest tenderness, "is a conversation for another time."
"Then you agree that we will yet have some time...together?" she handily turned their discussion to the potential severity of her wound.
"I have seen men march an hundred miles after such a piercing," he bragged, though something about his eyes did not fully support the sentiment. "We must but staunch the bleeding, keep you here in the doing of it, quiet and resting, and your only worry will be how to travel far enough West to accept what the Yanks call a 'Purple Heart' from their Mr. Roosevelt."
She directed him to the location of the last of the bottles, and he brought over the one he thought would act quickest, and taste best.
She drank from it, and soon enough found herself still in Robin's arms where he had re-seated himself on the floor, supporting her at an angle. Still in his arms, though not quite. Rather, somewhere floating slightly above them, and also found her mind (once it had been distanced from the pain in her shoulder by the alcohol taking full-effect) choosing to ponder the matter of Joss Tyr, Marion Nighten, and Miranda, the former Lady Nighten.
1939 - London's West End - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house - One of her mother's oldest friends, Lady Lytton, had come to tea. A friend of such long-standing intimacy even Marion's father, Sir Edward, called her by her first name, simply, 'Livonia'.
A friend that until Marion's more recent years of attempting to be more grown up (and then actually becoming so), Marion herself was allowed to call, merely, 'Livvy'.
Her mother had not yet arrived to the tea, instead asking Marion to sit and entertain Lady Lytton momentarily as she finished her toilet before coming down.
Marion sighed. "You should have seen her at the stationer's," Marion groaned only half-mockingly at her mother's behavior in the selecting of engagement party invitations. "She may as well have been Nelson, overseeing the traffic in Trafalgar. Or Mr. Disraeli ordering about his staff before the opening of Parliament."
"Yes," Lady Lytton commiserated with good-naturedness, "Kate does manage to assay Society with a grit and gusto usually found only in politics."
"Why do you do that?" Marion asked, wondering why she had never questioned it before. "Call her 'Kate'? It is no part of her name."
For a moment, seemingly in consideration of the question, Lady Lytton studied the raisin in her teacake. "They have never told you, even after all this time?"
Marion's face clearly displayed a puzzlement that would not be distracted by the dainty finger foods piled on the multi-tiered silver stand placed on the low table between them.
"Well, I daresay, Darling, that it is time you heard. For had you been schooled outside of the home you would have heard it and learnt of it long ago since." Before beginning, she set down the small china plate, consigning its teacake to later, and drank no more, no less, than an entirely ladylike sip of tea. "It is an alias, of a kind. A name by which Miranda could never easily be connected with her family, or, later, your father."
"Why should she need an...alias?" Marion half-wondered if her mother were to be outed as some sort of clandestine lady novelist.
"At the age of seventeen - young, really - but there I was alongside her (of course I would have followed her into the Fiery Furnace, had she but stepped in that direction), we chose to become Suffragettes."
Marion's eyes half-bugged. Was Lady Lytton simply mis-using the term? Confusing the 'suffragists' committed to peaceful, socially acceptable change with 'suffragettes', unswerving in their belief violent protests would help them win the field?
"Of course, being from affluent families, being members of the nobility, made this quite...awkward. Your grandfather, Miranda's father (it is a pity he died before you could have known him), permitted her to be involved, so long as she kept the family well out of it. And so she created 'Kate Bridges', and pledged herself to the Women's Social and Political Union."
"I was not instructed much on suffrage -" Marion began.
"I do not doubt it."
"- but were they not a rather...militant organization?"
"My, yes. We were an outraged cabal, determined to change the world. Window-smashing, hunger-strikes, arson, even. Why, Mary Richardson took an axe to the Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery to protest Emmeline's force feeding."
"Force feeding?"
Lady Lytton nodded. "In prison."
What was this tale? She could easily see her mother falling in - for the sake of what may have been fashionable at the time - with women committed to change. Certainly Lady Nighten had chaired enough commissions and committees on everything from poverty to unemployment to immigrants in Marion's lifetime. But the unglamorous notion of prison sentences, of women so steadfast in their cause they would not eat - upon pain of having food forced on them? No. This she could not see.
Knowing how to read the shifting tides in Marion's eyes well-enough by this time, Lady Lytton nodded in disagreement with her friend's disbelieving daughter. "Miranda was imprisoned from time to time as well. But there was such a light about her, Marion. Such a passion within her, it spilled out. It called to others. It swelled the movement."
"And her family - what of them?"
"Well they weren't pleased, to be sure. But her father had never been able to deny her anything she wished. And the newspapers never decoded her alias, never printed her true identity."
Marion's mouth felt unusually dry. "And what, what of my father?"
"Edward? Darling, Edward didn't have a chance. The year Miranda was presented at Court, Edward was - what, forty-two? - taken by all for a lifetime bachelor. But here's Miranda, nineteen, on fire with her commitment to changing politics (and then the very world) as we knew it, and the most eye-catching thing he had ever seen. And though your father was never caddish in his single life, rest assured, no man gets to that age without knowing something of women.
"She sparkled like diamonds in a sea of unpolished cut glass. Her Court gowns were exquisite, her hairstyles the envy of every town party. And her rhetoric, and the logic and ardor behind it were both genuine and rationally sound. If you had your eye on Edward when she would arrive at a party (and I often had the opportunity to do just this), her entrance would nearly knock him off his feet.
"People assumed, of course, he was simply making a fool of himself, pursuing a woman twenty-four years his junior, with suitors enough to stretch 'round the block. Assumed the Season would end, Miranda's engagement to some suitably wealthy and stable young lord would be announced, and Lord Nighten would return to his seat (and his sanity) in the House of Lords."
"But she married Father."
Lady Lytton's face took on the slyest of smiles. "She not only married him, she loved him as passionately as she loved the Cause. He seemed to represent to her some...masculine political ideal. An equally-committed lover. And he was, and had been committed to women's suffrage even before they were introduced. In his reserved and well-reasoned way, of course. He threw no rocks, had no need to employ hunger strikes or take on a separate identity. Always, he chose to work within the system. Which of course, being both a man and holding a seat in the House of Lords, was an option open to him."
"And when Mother was - imprisoned?" Marion's mind and nearly her mouth stuttered over the foreign notion.
"To his great credit, he let her be. And to maintain 'Kate Bridges'. At her express wish he did not even visit her. And when the harsh feedings were employed, he was in his seat at Parliament, fighting in his way for the same thing she was, in hers." Here she sighed. "Nineteen-ten was expected to be, by them, the happiest of their new marriage, as they watched the Conciliation Bill make its way through the political system."
Here, Marion's keen mind for historical recall snagged. "But that bill never enfranchised women."
"No. Not as it ultimately stood. By November of that year, Mr. Asquith had changed the bill, instead, to extend voting rights to more men, perverting its original intent. Miranda was distraught. Edward felt betrayed by the other MPs who had stood with him in original support of changing the law. The WSPU intensified their actions beyond mere civil disobedience and destruction of public property." And here her voice grew quiet. "We made our first foray into arson, and bombings. It was after the Great War. Perhaps we fancied ourselves inured to such destructive violence.
"February of 'thirteen, we burned down Mr. Lloyd George's house, for failing to support equal suffrage for all women. By April, the government had grown tired of our behavior while imprisoned (and by the way our hunger strikes outraged the general public against their cruelty toward us). They passed the Cat and Mouse Act, which would release us from prison when our health was threatened by refusing to eat, and then allow them to re-arrest us when we had recovered. Our original tactics had become a vicious merry-go-round. Then, the Epsom Derby."
Marion nodded. "Yes, a woman spectator was killed there. I recall reading of it."
"She was no mere woman, nor mere spectator, Marion. It was Emily Davison. She walked in front of the King's Horse, intent on martyring herself for the Cause. It was after that your mother no longer came out with us as 'Kate Bridges', or, in fact, at all."
A knot closed around Marion's throat, but she had to ask. "Did Father refuse to let her?"
Lady Lytton's smile turned soft as she looked over the young lady before her. "It was not as simple as that, Marion. Your mother was twenty-two years old, Clem was about two. When Emily died so violently - so unexpectedly, her injury occurring fully in the public eye - it was earth-shattering for those of us within the Cause. We had heard 'no' so many times, even, as with the Conciliation Bill, when we wholeheartedly expected to triumph. Miranda was a wife and mother. With Emily's death the stakes had become so much higher. Two weeks before the Derby, Miranda had just been released from jail due to her health. She was tremendously weak, her body battered by the various means and tools employed in 'feedings'. She had never wished to die for the Cause. She had wanted to live for it. And she loved your father, and baby Clem. And though you were four years off, I know she was also thinking of you - of the future. And so it was decided she would no longer actively pursue being 'Kate Bridges'. Though she never withdrew that name from the WSPU rolls, and regularly donated monies to support them."
Marion found she wanted the story to go on. The heroine in it to triumph, not falter. "And so she rested for a while, perhaps grew depressed. And when she came back to herself -"
Again, the kind smile. "Found another arena in which to express her talents."
"Society." It may as well have been a swear word.
"It was '28, of course, when we finally were recognized on equal voting terms with men. Surely you were old enough to remember that?"
"Yes," Marion agreed, finding that with this story she was able to see much of her younger life cast in a very different light. An unsettling one. "They had been invited to a small party in celebration at Lord Heatherly's. Father attended. Mother stayed in her room, alone." Her voice grew wistful. "She had a headache all that day."
"She was a goddess, Marion, the way she served the Cause. A burning fire of righteousness at which others warmed themselves. There are times even now when I meet an old friend from those days who recalls a public speech she had given, or a, a pamphlet written by her that provided strength during the hardest times when it seemed we would never be heard."
Marion's face gave a forced, line of a smile. "And now she has...Society."
"And you, Marion. She has you," Lady Lytton reached over to squeeze her hand. "And you have the very dashing young Oxley I am told, more than ready to 'set the date'."
Marion had continued her smile, but inside she had felt nothing but the swirl of bile.
Present time - Nightwatch Windmill - Duality. Two identities caught up within the same person. Her mother, Miranda, and Kate Bridges. Werner von Himmel and Joss Tyr. Marion Nighten and the Nightwatch.
How to not let them overcome your true self. How to puzzle out which one actually was your true self. Her mother had killed Kate Bridges, abandoned her, leaving only some version (it would seem, according to Lady Lytton) of a shell known as Lady Nighten, hardly a whole. Certainly not a whole in public. In public Lady Nighten was rarely thought to have an idea in her head beyond those best addressed by the upper echelon of household staff, or a Parisian atelier. And that was seen to be entirely appropriate.
Joss Tyr had so overcome the man Count Werner von Himmel he shunned the very use of the name, was going about the countryside killing entirely innocent Islanders without any clear remorse. Of course, she hadn't known him before - perhaps it was the same sort of thing he would have done under his Jerry commanders. Only, in this instance he would have given Thornton a medal, and her, (thinking her a collaborator) a new pair of nylons.
And Lady Marion.
How she had been losing the strength to tread water before her engagement party. The actual Lady Marion threatening to capsize, going down three times, only coming up twice, in the wake of the mask she had to wear for Geis and his kind. She was not entirely sure she would re-surface, even, as the Nightwatch, or if she would only have fractured herself somehow, permanently damaged what it was that defined - that had once defined - her.
But for Robin she was sure she would have shortly found out. But for Robin.
The pain was coming back, like the persistent sizzle of a burn that carries on long after the skin is removed from the cooktop, her surroundings growing clearer. She gave a ragged breath and felt Robin tense, and his hand go for the spirits.
"No," she told him, having had enough for the moment of dulling herself, of distancing herself from this present. "Not just now. Kiss me," she said. "Kiss me, instead. We are alone."
"You're going to be fine," he told her, resisting the urge to tighten his embrace of her.
"I know," she replied, with contentment. "I'm here, with you."
...TBC...