SARK - Little Sark Mines - The Lady Marion had slept most of the day. Night had now fallen, she was told, though within the sheltering depth of the mines one depended upon faith and a pocket watch (or their military-issued wristwatches) to tell one so.
Robin had been delayed at the farmhouse longer than had been expected, and though she had missed him - had wanted to miss him, so rarely they inhabited the same island for more than a few hours - she had not been conscious long enough to truly do so.
Using a crudely improvised crystal set, Carter managed to pull in (even at this depth) BBC Radio (something to do with some inspired engineering magic Robin's Communications Officer Reddy had been able to perform), and she was somewhat energized by having listened, and was feeling ready to tackle her own broadcast and repeat of the news, later.
As the day wore on, Johnson had arrived with Wills Reddy, who had grumbled so much to himself that Marion was nearly to believing the mines were a place, simply, where Robin relegated people he could not deal with at the moment. A sort of waiting room for those condemned to see the headmaster.
But of course she knew better. Strategically these shafts were a defensible point, a perfect storage location, and a haven for a unit who could not, altogether, occupy La Salle's small farmhouse for long without bursting its seams and raising even the generally non-prying eyebrows of Stephen's nearest neighbors.
And when Robin did show, it proved a breathless exchange between the two of them at best. He took time to consult with both Johnson, the unit's medic, and Carter, whose unexpected ear Robin even deigned to bend in collecting information about her recovery thus far, and her present condition.
Unsurprisingly, Robin had not cared for the notion of her returning to Guernsey, and he made no show of hiding it, though he had brought Allen Dale with him (presumably to take them to the launch).
"There is much a-foot at present at La Salle's," Robin had confessed, surprising her with his words to follow, "I can say no more now, but rest certain that I shall tell you all tomorrow evening." His eyes worked overtime to register the sincerity of his remarks.
"What?" she found herself uncharacteristically asking (and feeling uncharacteristically put-out by), "you are not coming? You are staying behind?"
"There is a duty - one I've not exercised in sometime - that calls," he gave the arm opposite her injury a squeeze. "I must wait upon a superior, meaning my time at present is not fully my own."
"That is very cryptic," she answered, her voice taking on an edge as she sought the stability of the cavern's rock walls to stay erect as they began the final set of rough-hewn wooden stairs to the surface. The edge had as much to do with her own personal discomfort in the wake of her injury as to do with her frustration in losing out on additional time that could have been spent with Robin that day.
Robin came to a stop on the step just below her, where he had been at spotting her progress, ready to catch her should she stumble or should her at-present short endurance peter out.
He snatched at her swinging hand, bringing her 'round to face him. She was only several inches taller than him, due to the height of the step that separated them.
He kissed her hand. "I send Allen to stay with you during the broadcast, and watch over you before and after. It may include a briefly unpleasant ride in the boot of the Kommandant's auto, and a decided lack of canoodling as your songs play, but he will safeguard you," his eyes shot away, up to the man three steps above her, who had also paused in his ascent.
She sensed her moment, and did not let herself pause to re-evaluate it. Also turning to Allen Dale, she told him - in the tone she might use with an uncooperative or overly-meddlesome servant - "Leave".
The command, and her delivery of it, proved effective enough. He quick-glanced to the side and to Robin, and took the rest of the steps at a bouncy pace, disappearing from view once he'd reached the near top.
"I jest not at all," Robin reminded her before she spoke further. "I have scant hours ahead of me to accomplish much," his mouth formed an apologetic smile. "Will you not be satisfied with a kiss and the promise of meeting as soon as can be?"
She had no idea how, in a sane world, she might have shared such news - certainly announcing the impending births (or conceptions) of her children was not something she had spent any amount of time musing on in her life. She had devoted little enough space to day-dreaming of their possible fathers, after all - much less on how to tell one such news. And here, in such a world of brutality and instability.
But she took a moment and thought of Carter, of what he had counseled her. And then, though she knew it was probably not right, not the way things ought be, she forced herself to imagine she was at telling Carter again. A man she could face with such news. Rather than Robin - a man (despite his personal stake in the matter, despite his uncontested ownership of her heart) she was not sure she could.
"I think I am pregnant," she said, afraid to look directly at him, that the overlay she had imposed on his face of the impartial Carter would not last. As expected, it did not.
"What-" he asked, his words linking together without the usual breaks. His eyes scoured her person, examining even more closely the ad hoc bandages and arm sling from her wounding which covered what there was of her abdomen. "With a child?"
At the risk of possibly tearing up, or even starting a fight were she to speak, she scoffed and replied tartly, "unless there's something rather macabre about your family lineage to which you've yet to confess." Her own words left her with a feeling somewhere between a good blub and the beginning of a tittering giggle.
Before either sound or action could be brought into the full spectrum of being, Robin reached for the sides of her face, in his instantly incited passion almost pulling her entire, wobbly self down upon him - but certainly bringing her lips to his - and kissing her with great depth and ardor.
"Then you have given me more than I could have possibly wished for - " he told her excitedly, veering into non sequitur as he finally pulled away, "Everything I need to convince him." His smile actually broadened.
Using strength that after such a day he barely had at his disposal, he lifted her into his arms and carried her up the final steps to the shaft's opening, whispering his farewell into her ear before departing again for La Salle's, "Go, then, Little Mother, and 'watch the night." He could not stop himself from quoting Arnold as he disappeared into the landscape. "'Come to me in my dreams'," he invited her, "'and then/By day I shall be well again/For then the night will more than pay/The hopeless longing of the day'."
Marion noticed that even Robin's man, Dale, stood with her to wait and listen as his commanding officer foolishly broke out into ill-advised whistling as he navigated the most covert return path to the farmhouse.
It did not seemly nearly long enough before the sound of his whistle, the rustle of his movements, could no longer be heard.
LONDON - Vauxhall Cross - Office of Clem Nighten - Clem Nighten's secretary walked about the usually tidy space occupied by her direct boss and collected the high-level security clearance memos received over the last several days in order to carry them off to where they would be destroyed.
That was how she thought of herself when at work; not Charlotte, not even Miss Lampmere. 'Nighten's Girl,' the other men here referred to her, only a small handful ever having bothered to learn instead her surname by which to designate her.
So, 'Nighten's Girl' picked up the thirteen April memo, confirming that Allied aircraft had begun a series of attacks on German coast artillery units in Normandy. Moments later she added to the stack the communique stipulating how things would be handled to prevent any word (however random) from leaking about the Allies' upcoming plans for invading France. A sharp restriction on diplomatic privileges. Censoring of all communication, and a cessation of code traffic. All pouches to be inspected. Only American, Russian and the Dominion offices to remain exempt.
She sighed. The still-unspecified day in May would come soon enough, when the boys would embark on the planned invasion, boarding ships to ferry them 'cross the Channel to wait for the appointed day and time. At least until then she could look forward to the need to handle (and collect) far less paperwork.
And perhaps, even (if she let herself quietly hope - forbidden to speak of what she knew at her level of security clearance to anyone else), even a beginning to what might prove the end, the terminus for any need of any further war communication whatsoever. Perhaps.
Tamping down her stack of memos on the edge of the desk blotter, Nighten's Girl moved with her ever-efficient steps toward the office door, and the document destruction room several floors beyond.
Channel Waters between Sark and Guernsey - Allen Dale, no matter that he was the proud owner of such a vessel as the launch found for him by Vaiser, did not like the water. And what's more, he suspected that the Lady Marion, his current passenger, did not much care for him.
Of course his own past actions toward her had not likely gone far to raise him in her estimation. And she was not simple Eleri, whom he might drop a kiss or sweet gesture upon and win her back to his side, no matter how transiently.
He had found that engaging his mind in things other than the dangerous waters churning about them during such a passage did help improve his only-just swallowed back terror. Conversation was generally helpful, especially when German gunships and marine patrols did not appear to offer up their own, dependable distraction.
"Got a girl in trouble once," he announced without preamble from his place at the wheel, knowing that though Marion was trying to appear asleep even the smallest acts of resettling herself gave the ruse away.
"That is certainly not a very pleasant euphemism," he heard her answer, though she had not turned 'round toward him, but remained facing the stern of the boat.
He tried to repair his use of the common expression. "Not that I meant to infer that you...had found yourself in trouble, so to speak..."
Here there was a familiar arch-ness to her voice as it carried through the night air to his ears. "You are the type, of course, to eavesdrop."
"Oh, that," he spun it, attempting to downplay his listening-in to her and Robin's final exchange before they exited the mines. He shrugged it off. "Perhaps your little pow-wow was not as quietly rendered as you might like to think."
"And perhaps the skills you valiantly employ for King and Country are not so easily disengaged - even when among your fellows?"
It seemed they were headed for a row straightaway if they kept talking, but after a lengthy pause she asked, in a kinder tone, "so you are a father, then?"
"Naw," he replied, recalling Lizzie's chestnut hair, glossy as molasses, the way the evening's lights at the shilling-a-dance club she worked for sparked in her eyes like Guy Fawkes' Day. "Found myself in a spot of bother shortly after she told me - "
Again, that archness. "With the constabulary, we are to assume?"
"Fortnight on a petty charge, my brother, his mates and me. When I got out I went to find her, but...'no more babe', she says, mysterious-like. 'Over so quick 'doubt the chap she worked for at the hall even knew she'd met with trouble."
"And you were left..?"
He shrugged into the dark night. "'Brother thinks she disappeared it. I were always...afraid to ask." He took a breath in the telling. "But I were left, still me-self. Out of the lock-up, ready for the next challenge. Weren't long after I decided to go straight, and from there, into the Army Service."
Marion spoke to finish the story, her tone low, wistful, all its high-and-mighty vanished. "And you never saw the girl again."
Allen Dale nodded into the night. For good or for ill, he could not dispute that all-in-all, Lady Marion did often have just his number.
"And I never saw her again," he agreed, thinking for a moment that as far distant as Guernsey yet was from them now, Lizzie and whatever possibility the child she had been carrying had held for him, whatever potential future there, was yet farther still, and no longer, really, a place to which he would ever now sail.
LONDON - Tuxfarne House - David Nigel Tuxfarne VI, the Duke of Loughborough, sat in his study and thought he had never quite found himself so mired in a slip-of-the-tongue nightmare as he had that day. And unfortunate, really, that he had no one to whom he could relate the dismaying tale of his own, too-loose (it would seem) lips. Certainly not the Duchess of Loughborough, who could not stomach (even after thirty-one years of marriage) the smoke of his cigar (necessary, really, for any such confessions - integral to his survival of them).
He did not think he could bring himself to lay himself bare to the other chaps at the War Rooms. Time, he felt certain, would more than do that for him.
He sighed. Resign his post? He would hate to do so. It had been an innocent slip, after all, in the presence of an old acquaintance. Or so he protested to himself.
Well, perhaps not just any old acquaintance. She had once been the young woman he had been nicknamed "Lover Boy-o" over. But that had been decades ago. Surely he was the only one left to recall that time, now.
They had been at tea. Awaiting the arrival of the Duchess. Lady Nighten - that is, Lady Miranda (then again, he had never truly stopped thinking of her as Lady Miranda, though she had become Edward's both legally and - easily enough to see - in her heart, long ago) - had been prompt to a fault in her appearance, during which he believed (according to his social secretary) they were set to discuss some charity or Red Cross plan of her orchestration. As they waited for his wife, and the establishment's staff held their tea, he embarked on small talk to pass the time.
In truth, he was not even sure the wording that he had used, or to what he had been referring at the time in the broader picture of their conversation. Only that he had casually referenced the fact that Edward, Lord Nighten - Lady Miranda's until-recently husband - was dead.
Of course this was not generally (outside SIS and the War Rooms) known, and certainly not a published fact. British Intelligence, after all, was not publicly known to be equipped to know or verify anything about the occupied Channel Islands. But their son, Clem Nighten ,had been told (though some many, many weeks after intelligence had discovered the fact), and Tuxfarne had assumed, naturally, that young Nighten had quietly informed his mother.
However, it had quite suddenly and disturbingly become apparent that he had not.
With her taking in the knowledge of her husband's passing, a haze of sorts came over Lady Miranda. Gone was her usual, delightful mode of expression, her charming animation, her perfect posture and presentation. And when, a moment later, that haze had passed, nothing that he could immediately recognize as Miranda seemed to remain. It was as though she had woken from a fitful, restless sleep that had lasted a decade. Her eyes blinked slowly, unreliably. Her mouth seemed to work, but emitted no audible sounds, and the beauty that even at her age still seemed such an essential part of her person deserted her.
He had a terrible a moment of thinking to himself that he had agreed, somehow, to the taking of tea with Dickens' Miss Havisham on the day she discovered her fiance was not coming.
Miranda seemed, instantly, as old as a wizened Covent Garden beggar woman standing in the rain, heedless of the weather. A woman treated harshly by life, whose face showed every path sorrow and misery might tread upon it.
It was certainly not the face one chose to wear to tea. When she abruptly stood to go he felt no compulsion to stop her, rather, wondered if he ought to offer himself as someone for her to lean upon to get to her waiting car.
But he felt, horrifyingly, no connection to the woman beside him. She was no longer the captivating, Aphrodite-of-a-girl he had - even at twenty-seven - so desperately tried for a chance with. No longer the pleasant acquaintance to which she had receded in later years.
This was an utter stranger to him, someone he had made so by his own blunder. The things for which he had so long admired her stripped away by his own, mis-placed words.
As the car door shut upon her and drove away, he wondered if he would ever see her again. And if he did, whether it would be a meeting with the Miranda of old, or with this new, ancient creature to which he had no bond (social or nostalgic), and with which he shared no past. And yet which he had somehow, bunglingly, fathered.
ITALY - at the foot of Monte Cassino and its Benedictine Monastery - Allied Command Hut - U.S. Fifth Army - "G'won, now," urged the Limey.
"See if he won't put up his kid sister's address!" came as a boisterous shout from the Canada Corps' leader.
"Stupid Canuck," barked Fred Otto's American counterpart, not bothering to bring his Queens' attitude down even a notch - particularly during such a heated moment in a poker game. "He'll never do it!"
"Care to make wager on that?" asked the Pole in his halting, but easily understandable, English.
Of course, his own American counterpart in command was a Polack himself - not that far removed from the old country - which made distinguishing one from another a bit more complicated, since U.S. 5th Army Lieutenant Colonel Fred Otto had not bothered with learning any of their names, and as they sat around playing cards on a old crate the light was such he could not read from off their uniforms had he wanted to do so.
The Kiwi commander, always with a strict concentration for the game, cleared his throat and adjusted his sizeable wrestler's shoulders, gaining the immediate attention of every man not yet 'out' of the hand.
Fred Otto pretended to bite at his lip in consideration. "Tell y'all what I'm-a gonna do..." He slipped his hand in his shirt pocket, ignoring the rest of its contents and settling on a particular, by-now well-worn letter. "Got me this here letter," he held it up to the light, hoping to make it more desirable in his hands (he was, after all, in the midst of a losing streak, and he needed them to let him use whatever he had as stakes to raise).
"But not yer wee sis'," assumed the Limey.
"Oh, it's ole Bessie again, is it Freddy-boy?" his counterpart asked.
"And this Bessie, she is pretty girl?" the Pole asked.
"She's just about as fine a jumper as I've ever seen," Fred answered.
"A fine jumper?" the Limey scoffed with a slick grin. "You talk about women as though they were horseflesh, Otto, and you a dealer in it."
"Slender ankles, graceful as a willa branch in spring. Legs clear into next week." He could tell they could almost see her figure emerge from the swirls and twists of smoke their individual cigarettes were merging into above the crate.
"And the rump?" grunted the Kiwi.
"Oh, she's a fine seat on her," Fred assured him. "Just the right amount of give." And he knew he had them. They'd let him buy his way into raising and calling, for the chance at Bessie's letter and her address so that they might write in hopes of getting a letter of their own. And he may just have turned his luck, to win this hand.
"'Temporary failure'," the Canuck attempted to joke, referring to what headquarters had chosen to name the Allies' ongoing inability to take the hill that seemed to overshadow every moment of their lengthy (and increasingly bloody) encampment here. "We'll have to pauper him next time if we want to get our hands on that address for his sister."
"'Temporary failure'?" Fred repeated, choosing to answer the reference in regard to the siege, rather than in regard to his protecting his own sister from unsolicited mail penned by hardened soldiers. "I'll wager any man among you right now: we'll own that hill before May twentieth."
"This May?" his counterpart quipped, his mouth ever as loose as if he had been at drinking. "Or next? Am I to make odds on May '44? Or '45?"
The other men laughed, though they knew the joke was on them, on the troops under their commanded, and the thousands of others they had ordered to their deaths in this unbreakable siege.
Still, every man present agreed to partner him in his wager.
His prospects, it seemed, were indeed looking up.
"Good girl," he sent thanks out in his mind to Bessie Queenland, making a mental note to write the next morning to inform her of whomever would win her letter (assuming he, himself, did not win it back), and that she might soon need expect a second correspondent based here, (at least for the time being) in Italy.
London's West End - Mayfair - Nighten Family Georgian town house - Even the staff had little call to realize the master's rooms - his bedchamber and adjoining study - still from time-to-time entertained guests over the course of Edward, Lord Nighten's nearly five year absence. Rather, a single guest.
It was, in truth, only the butler Ettlestone who had any notion that, were she unable to be found elsewhere, it was Lady Miranda who stole away to the now closed-up set of rooms. Lady Miranda who with regularity removed the white sheeting from atop the small, cherrywood secretary (compared to the larger, more ornate desk of his Lordship's below in the library) and borrowed its pen and pot to write. What, he did not know. But he kept her secret, without her having ever asked him to do so, without her having issued any orders or spoken any confessions on the subject at all.
When the young master's wife, Claire, had inquired about her mother-in-law's whereabouts that afternoon, he had smoothly allowed her to think, simply, that Lady Miranda was indisposed in her private suite of rooms, and would not be seeing visitors - even family - or taking her meals in the dining room, for the day's duration. He said nothing at all about the fact he knew she was presently sitting at Sir Edward's secretary, doing or managing whatever it was she clearly felt those rooms continued to require of her.
She sat, unable to see anything before her: not the exquisite decoration, pitch-perfect for this male-centric room. Not the box of letters she had taken out from a drawer. Nothing but Tuxfarne's lips, over and over repeating the words she had not expected to hear. That Edward had died. Without her. Away from home. Away from her. That any moment of contrition, of explanation by her to him had been robbed from her forever.
That the letters in the box she had taken out were never to be read by him. The first chronologically, still bearing the Royal Mail's seal stating that it was undeliverable as of late June 1940. A consequence of the Occupation. No mail, no phone, no telegraph. No communication.
Still she had written - but no longer posted - the letters. Letters to her husband, to the man she loved. They would read them together, someday, she had supposed. Upon his return (or her ability to journey to Barnsdale, to him). They were letters of no great consequence, she knew. They spoke of London, of life here, asked questions about life there, on his island. They had become her way to continue their chats, once held intimately in his bed after the rest of the house had gone to sleep, their Marion a floor below, poring over her books, continuing her father's work even as he rested from it.
She thought of burning them to ash in a passion. She thought of pressing them into the folded hands of his corpse, only to realize there would be no body, no funeral. No memorial. That even in death, something as simple as having his inanimate self here, nearby, was to be denied her.
She thought on this a moment further and pulled open a second drawer, withdrawing a leather-bound copybook, the first half of it heavy with Edward's familiar handwriting. She ran her fingers across the old script.
Taking up a pen, she wrote the day's date.
"My darling husband, lord of my heart," she began, "I have lost for myself, even, it would seem, the honour of being your widow." As she continued on, writing about her day, her disastrous encounter with the Duke of Loughborough, she paid no heed to the tears that fell, puddling upon the page and blurring the peacock blue ink that was always her husband's particular request whenever she ordered from the stationer's.
It would not be the last time she would have need of subjecting this particular copybook thus.
SARK - La Salle's Farmhouse - Stephen La Salle shared the closed parlor with Iain Johnson, returned for the moment from the mines. Neither knew how long John might be able to stay, and with the arrival of Roger Stoker (now in the kitchen with Robin), all of the unit felt the peculiar pressure of time more acutely, as their imminent rescue from this place seemed more assured than ever.
Certainly that was the very topic Robin and Stoker even now planned out across the farmhouse's trestle table.
The work of taking Stephen's dictation was not laborious, nor was his letter (which Stoker had agreed to carry) lengthy.
"Write it for me, John," Stephen had asked. "And I shall sign as I can."
"But is it safe, Stephen," John had begged the former rector, "is it safe to give yourself away so? When Stoke himself asked that you keep Louise's name from the salutation, and refrain from addressing it to her - at risk of exposing you to suspicion and harm, were he to be caught?"
"Understand, John," Stephen said, his voice slowed with deep emotion, "I cannot write the words she will see, I can only dictate them. Across such a distance, everything between her and I must needs use a proxy. My signature, my mark, if you will - it's all I can gift her with. The solid knowledge that I have touched this paper, as surely as her hand wrote the diary entries you and Djak read faithfully to me each day. The thought of giving her that assurance warms my heart more than I could easily express."
"'Tis a rare union ye two possess," John remarked, as ever startled by the depth and endurance of their relationship - though he had never met Stephen's wife, other than through her writings, her possessions that still haunted her once-(and hopefully future) home.
"And will you ever marry, John?"
"I lived alone before the war, once me mam passed. Long days into nights working the mines. I doubt I've ever been seen as much of a catch, and myself, not given to fishin' - in that respect."
"And the others?"
"Dunno. Robin's least suited for it, but most likely to have a go at it, seems. Royston's wed, for what it's worth, and Wills is hardly in a position at present to imagine such. But now, Allen has always claimed with deep conviction to be saving himself for a Rockette."
"A Rockette?" Stephen asked at the unfamiliar term. "Whatever is it?"
John shrugged. "From what I can best make out, a dance hall girl in New York City. Seems he's an Auntie Annie in nearby Scarborough who stitches costumes for them. 'Claims a Rockette is an endless pair of legs knit to the face of an angel."
Stephen laughed at the description that sounded so of Allen. "That seems a rather gruesome depiction."
Johnson gave a gruff chuckle. "Does make one wonder where the finger is to wear the wedding ring."
Stephen fell silent at the joking, not because he did not approve, but because he mind returned again to the task at hand, seemingly insurmountable. To condense the content of nearly five years into a brief note. He pulled out the bowl of his clay pipe from his workshirt's dress pocket and rubbed at it as thought shining it between his fingers.
"Write this, John. Begin: God bring this to you, God find you well. I remain, 'Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed...(for we walk by faith, not by sight).' New paragraph: You fade not from my memory, nor from my future hopes. Let it dry a moment, now, but only just." Stephen rose from his chair, "Now hand me the unfamiliar pen, and we shall see what nonsense I might commit to paper and yet call it my name."
Off in the kitchen, Roger Stoker was again sharing with Robin Oxley his orders per the mission. "I will stay tonight, but tomorrow night is my rendezvous. Where I have hidden the launch among the caves there are also supplies - generous supplies; stores and provisions - medicine, even - equaling the weight of two grown men, for those that will be left behind."
Suspicion was thick in Robin's response. "Left behind?"
"Orders are you are to return with me, and one other - of your choosing. The boat will hold no more." Stoker's eyes strayed to the spot so recently inhabited by the Gypsy La Salle sheltered here. "Military personnel only." He waited for what he knew would be Robin's (rightly earned) protest. Knowing he would support it, though be unable to capitulate to it.
"So my lads are to be scuppered here, with only a Boxing Day token from home, left without a leader - again stranded?" He scoffed. "You see how penned in we are here, Stoke. We will shortly all be dead men for real, ere we are not careful. And lucky."
It was not the first time Stoker had had to think over Robin's very natural and right response to MI-6's harsh-but-necessary directive. But it was the first time he had had to feel the hopelessness of it. "If I could, I would happily stay and let you take two with," he pleaded. "Yet, I know too much. Should I be captured, 'twould be far more damage I could do in breaking than every man-Jack of you here."
Ever sidetrackable by his curiosity, Robin queried, one eye narrowed, examining Stoker, "And so there is big news afoot?"
"Old Bean, I can't tell you much while we're yet in-country. But I can say this much: the day is sooner than you can likely imagine that there will no longer be any boats - enemy or friend - arriving or departing these islands."
"A blockade?" Robin caught his breath. That could only mean one thing: ensuring the safety of an invasion force. "And we are meant to be shut out? Trapped beside our tormentors?"
Stoker said no more, but did not deny Oxley's quick-follow logic.
"We've six and a half good codebooks to send home with you," Robin spoke to break the impending silence, to prevent himself from tempting Stoker toward an indiscretion where things Top Secret were concerned.
"You've dated them with when you acquired them?"
Robin nodded, knowing that though they were not the most-current in use, SIS could still use them to check against transmissions made around those dates, and come steps closer to breaking codes still in use by the Jerries.
"They are kept at the mines," he shared.
His mind tugged at him, but only momentarily, that he was about to make a wrong choice, motivated by interpersonal dislike rather than clear-headed strategic thinking. "Royston will go," he added to their plans, his mouth almost rebelling and saying the more-correct choice of 'Carter' in Royston's place.
The man had survived a pitiless ordeal as a prisoner. His time in the Alderney camps may well have provided him with intel they had none of them yet heard. He was, if it were to be believed, a crack pilot recovered enough now to return to flying. And if an invasion were truly coming, fighter pilots would be valuable as gold.
He was wanted by the enemy, who knew his face. His presence here endangered them all, even Stephen - despite Carter's current disguise. But still Robin could not bring himself to say the name, to ship the man home.
"He's the best memory of our lot," Robin spoke to recommended his choice of the unit's career sailor, though Stoker had not acted as though he needed convincing. "Once we're done here, I'll instruct the others to share with him again anything of use they might recall; a full-debrief. We'll have his head so swimming with reconnaissance about these islands, he'll likely capsize your launch before you meet up with your sub."
Stoker laughed. "It's settled, then," he agreed. "Roys for brains, and you for...?" he deliberately cut off his sentence, expecting Oxley to wittily finish it for him. Instead, the other man grew quiet. Had he been smoking one, his mouth moved in such a way that it reminded one of a man chewing on an unlit cigarette, rolling it back and forth across his teeth and tongue.
"No, Stoke," Robin Oxley said with a faint shake of his head. "Four years in, and I have found my war." He raised his eyes to his friend. "And it is here." He took a breath. "Orders or no orders I'll not make sail from this place 'til the Jerries do first."
The two men examined one another with all the tension of two cowboys just before a shoot-out.
Bollocks, thought Stoker, caving to Oxley's determined (challenging, even) stare, making no effort to conceal the heavy frown line growing upon his temple. This, in all of his planning, he had not foreseen.
...TBC...