London's West End, December 1938 - Mayfair - Edward, Lord Nighten's Georgian town house - A look of puzzled wonderment played upon Robin's face, but only for a moment. "Well," he asked, "where has this saucy lass been these long months of our courtship, I ask you?" his eyes cannily taking in the room's out-of-the-way surroundings as if for the first time.

"Don't worry about that," Marion attempted to assure him. "She's here now."

She reached for one of his hands, but losing her courage at the last minute, settled it benignly over her now-galloping heart, rather than upon the outer curve of her breast, which had been her original intention.

"Free of all other underpinnings as well," she added, by way of encouragement. She tried to think of the slender sheer quality of her frock's fabric, of how little lay between him and her.

But she was finding it very hard to meet his gaze. Not because she in any way feared what was to come next, what she had set herself upon a pathway toward. Rather, because within his once lit-and-animated eyes she could see (even when she wasn't looking) that there was a determination growing, a sense in him that he had just been presented with a puzzle to solve, a paradox to unmuddle. That though his hand may tremble without his direct consent, his mind was not truly yet led along, distracted and entranced as she needed it to be.

She leaned into him, at least partly to continue to avoid his eyes until they would settle into unsuspicious acceptance of what was about to take place. In doing so, her hand still upon his wrist, his hand naturally slid away from her heart and to the side in order to accommodate her sudden closeness.

She kissed him, feeling the peculiar sensation of her undressed thighs, her own skin upon her own skin, somehow signaling decadence to her.

His hand (she could not tell if it still needed her hand upon its wrist to hold it there) nearly floated across the soft, pliable ruchs falling from the neckline in the upper bodice of her frock, both touching and yet not touching her.

There was a brief flare in the fervor of his kissing her back, and sensing it she seized the moment to secure Robin's continued participation.

She took his other hand and moved it further up her leg - her thigh - along the equally sleek, frictionless skirt of her frock until his fingers were necessarily halted by encountering her torso and hip, his thumb having dipped in its journey toward her inner thigh.

Still she kissed him, hoping to kiss away the look nevertheless lingering in his eyes (no matter that they closed every now and again). Hoping that he would not make her attempt every action necessary to consummate the night without at some point also fully joining in.

He broke away from the kiss, and she felt his hands withdraw from where she had placed them. She expected those spots to turn quickly cold. Instead, they continued to give off an unexpected heat.

From his position still on a single knee, he smoothly lifted the long hem of her gown, enough to get his hand underneath it, and began to run it up the back of her (as promised) bare leg. He stopped for a moment and caressed her calf, brought his hand back down so that he might cup her ankle. As she felt his fingers arrive at the lower back of her knee, she realized (with far more understanding and finality than she had before) that there was now, truly nothing - not even so much as fabric - between he and her. Not even the nothing-to-navigate garter belt that she had removed and cast off into a trunk in her bath, worried lest even her maid see it and she be compelled to produce a reason why she did not have it on.

The length of her skirt draped over her legs, over his arms and hands within it, hiding them from view, only as it arched, the tip of her foot and toes occasionally coming into focus from underneath it.

The thought of such freedom, such unencumberedness, coupled with his elevating her leg to the height of his shoulder and kissing at its ankle brought a sound from within her she had not quite expected.

"Stop," Robin said, and she was surprised to hear a command within the sharpness of it.

What could it mean? Was this how he liked to experience such moments? It did not seem like him.

"Stop, I say," and the sharpness remained as he unceremoniously let her leg fall to the carpet, heel first.

"What can you mean?"

She managed, finally, to find her speaking voice. "How can you want that?" She was now a knot of incompletion on both physical and intellectual fronts.

The teeth of his lower jaw began to push against his lower lip. A sign she had long ago deciphered as frustration. "Because I am beginning to feel decidedly manipulated," he told her as he rose, his eyes suspiciously sliding to the side to contemplate her. "...rather than merely seduced."

"Merely seduced?" She remained sitting, her hands now within her lap, but allowed her tone to rise and meet his. "I finally throw myself at you - what you've always been at asking for - what it seems you've always wanted - and you find it 'merely' seductive?" She scoffed. "That is quite enough insult for one night." She cocked her head, waiting for him to withdrawal his accusation.

He did not.

Were Marion anyone else, he would have put one hand to the high-back davenport and leaned in as he spoke, more than slightly threateningly, but something about her - about their exchange - left his back stiff, unwilling to accommodate any inclination that might be interpreted as 'bowing' to her will - even if merely physically. "And may I, then, find it insulting that, rather than your replying promptly to my offer of immediate marriage, you choose instead - with no impetus, nor invitation by myself - to hide, yes, I think hide - what I can only assume will be your refusal by attempting to distract me with sex?" His eyes searched hers wildly, intent on truth - and explanation.

She could not believe what she was hearing. All her planning, all her hopes. Her hopes to show him she did care for him, to persuade him that she would marry him - in time. Her plan to convince him beyond shadow-of-a-doubt that what she had to tell him this night would alter their arrangement not at all. That she would give him this thing. No, that they would share this thing, make this memory, strengthen this bond. This, that would carry him through. That, (she did not particularly care to think of it this way) would placate him, until the wedding. Her own ire flared. "How dare you insinuate that this - THIS - would not be something meaningful for me. That it is not with great consideration and, and emotion that I have decided upon this."

Robin moved aside, putting the long, low table, the lone flute of champagne he had brought with him, between him and her. His body was as tense as though he had endured a spell of being tied on the rack. His hands were beyond even the calming power of juggling either lone cigarette or engraved silver case.

"Well, see, my love," he told her, though the tenderness conveyed by the intonation of 'my love' was somewhat dubious at the moment, "that is where your scheme has fallen short. After two years of saying, very firmly (and even, very fairly) 'no', it makes little sense to change your mind so utterly one Christmas night when I have not even been at play-chasing you." He paused as though she might wish to speak.

She did not.

"I did not work you up into such a state of arousal. Rather, I honorably offered to marry you within the week - if not sooner - at which time your long-held goal of, as I recall, 'not lying down until I never have to get up again' could be accomplished. And at which time we might have aroused one another, quite legally, 'til our dying days. Here," he indicated the room they occupied, "you attempt to befuddle my mind, hoping, I can only assume (and it is not a very pretty assumption) that I will not notice your failure to reply to my matrimonial suggestion."

With his speech, some of the tension had leeched out of him. But not all.

"Very well," Marion said, now rather cold all over, save the top of her head which threatened to reach the boiling point at his outraged lecture aimed at her. "I cannot marry you straightaway. There is no time." Out of the corner of her eye she caught an unwelcome glimpse of a small portrait sitting upon the mantel, of her mother as a young woman.

"But I have just said," Robin reiterated. "We shall cast off all such chaff as planning and balls, soirees and teas. The Earl's tenants do it every day, and I am assured it is quite official."

Would he not stop speaking of hurrying along their wedding? Would he not stop queering her pitch (however ignorantly), making it ten-to-the-twentieth times harder to say what she had resolved to say this night? She made her first attempt.

This was meant to have followed a very passionate, sincere, and satisfying bout of lovemaking. If possible, while still lying in one another's arms. As was, there was no way to cushion the blow, and the news she had meant to relate cheerily, with a by-the-by breeziness, (news over which she had hoped - thought - they possibly might even further celebrate) abruptly turned sour on her, naked and unpleasant as the wizened Emperor in his 'new clothes'. "No, I," having lost her preferred method of delivery, she dropped her head, unable to meet his gaze. She set to picking at a thread on the mustard upholstery of the seat. "There is no time. I am to..." she lifted her chin, resolving to be ashamed no longer, but rather than seeing him she could only meet the unblinking eyes of the young woman, her mother, in the mantel's small portrait. "I am committed to doing something that will make me more at home in my marriage."

She did not have to look at him to know that his face fell.

"I am leaving at the year's start for the American Equestrian Circuit."

If the certain frequency of high notes (as sung by an opera singer) shattered glass, the silence that followed her confession/announcement must have knit the glass in the bottles that surrounded them more tightly than any forge fire, bonded the crystal in the stemware to a strength beyond breakability. While enacting the opposite upon them. Marion and Robin: coming apart.

"With the horse," he added flatly to her declaration, his voice that of air deflating from a zeppelin, his eyes closing in comprehension of the past three-quarters of an hour.

"Yes," she tried to inject her response with excitement and anticipation, this trip something to look forward to - to be proud of, "with Beau. It is a chance - a chance for both of us," she continued passionately, indicating the horse, "to experience something. You, you cannot understand." She looked at him, dressed as sharply as any dandy, yet never exuding such sycophantish idiocy. She began to speak without censoring herself, never having planned to lay the many jealousies, the many irritations and fears she had of him at his doorstep - much less to do so tonight. "You have been to school, earned your place at university. You have the option every day to occupy a desk at a respected soliciting firm in the City (an option which you rarely exercise, save between two and four of the clock on the odd day of the month when you are not suffering a hangover). You vacation on the Continent, travel without the Earl how and when it pleases you. You have access to learning," here her voice threatened to break. "To people of note and significance. You have the world, Robin - you need but only ask and if you cannot go to it, it will be brought to you." She wondered if the tears assembling in her eyes spoke to him more of outrage or sadness. "Even my own post is first shuffled and screened through my mother or her maid before being handed to me. That they may know who is writing, even if they have not stooped to breaking the seals on such letters in several years."

He could not be unmoved by the zeal with which she spoke, letting that emotion cover over her less-than-ringing endorsement of him and his ways. "Yes, then, we shall go together," to him it solved everything. His voice quickened to match her earlier enthusiasm. "We can marry now and easily have our trunks ready for shipping - or go and buy what we best need when we arrive." He was about to smile.

"I have said," she interrupted that smile, sticking to her key points, refusing to be distracted from them. "There is no time for a wedding. There will be time when I return."

He cocked his head at this. Again at further sussing what she was up to - this grand idea (and any preparation it required) hardly springing into existence overnight, much less the execution of it. And yet he, the fiance, unaware of it - even as a distant pipe dream, much less as a coming-on fact. "I had no idea you so enjoyed such planning," he said, sarcasm growing behind his words. His eyes narrowed. "You never cared for society before."

"Society," she huffed with disgust. "As a wife," she willed herself not to look again to her mother's portrait, "what else might ever be my domain?"

He studied her for a moment, assuring himself she knew what she was saying - what she had implied before throwing it back in her face. "And is my heart, then, not enough?" he asked, his words staccato with emphasis, his eyes ablaze.

How could she do this to him? Say such a thing. The other things: his perceived sloth, his uselessness to the greater scheme of the world, his free-wheeling, spendthrift ways, his inability to stop before exceeding the line drawn at excess with drink and dame - the ridiculousness of his person. These he was more than acquainted with from any discussion with his father, from (at times) Mitch, and any number of headmasters and even other women he had taken out.

But to hear Marion, the woman who had changed his world (if not his habits), Marion say that his heart was not enough for her...that she must also pursue some personal goal - some personal glory - in a distant place, without him. Well, in that moment he knew for the first time that he must be truly worthless. Must be what people said of him and worse.

He was surprised Mephistopheles himself did not rise from under the very carpets of Nighten house and carry him down to Hades.

Marion, the only thing he had wanted in a decade, the only thing to which he had allowed himself to aspire, declaring him not enough, his heart lacking - when his heart was all he had ever had of his own to give anyone. When he was entirely committed to using it to its very utmost for her. When she had made him so happy, simply by existing. Made him invest himself into the next day, when he might see her again. Gave him a reason to wake, to think of a future.

Crumbling, now, the bricks of his foundation compromised and he had never noticed. She loved him not. Not enough. Not as he did her.

His demeanor fell, his voice grasping for explanation. "Is this what you planned to tell me as we embraced in the afterglow of your carnal designs upon my person tonight? That you are leaving me. That my heart is not enough domain for you to rule over? That you would far rather plan a wedding than begin to live a new life together?" He looked at her where she was seated nearly with hate. With a disgust borne of a man who has put his whole self upon the table only to see it rejected, and the embarrassment and hurt of such tempers his original tender feelings into something harder, uglier, and even violent. "It is small wonder you thought to dose me first with a spoonful of sugar."

She opened her mouth, but found she could not yet speak, the change in him so jarring to her.

"God, Marion," he chid her. "Do you know how much I would have hated you for it?"

"No!" she decried what she saw happening in front of her eyes, even without understanding it. "I love you Robin, I truly do." Could he not see? "More than anything!"

Spite was on his tongue. "And yet you find yourself needing a plan to do something to 'make you more at home in your marriage'?" He scoffed hard. "To me? Perhaps it is best you go, Marion. I do not doubt I shall be far from proper company in the upcoming New Year," he hinted, threatening a likely return to his prior dissolute lifestyle of excess and ennui.

Feeling that she had lost entirely her grasp on their conversation, reacting as one gasping for air might, she went with the first thing that came to her mind: outrage that he would blame any backsliding in his life upon her, upon her perfectly rational decision to take this trip. "How can you not do something with your life!" she shouted, thinking, for not the first time, of his obvious prospects where a seat in government was concerned. She felt so envious of him, of his opportunities, those already wasted, and those potentially yet to waste in future. Her head hurt from the force of it.

As he stormed out of the room to locate his hostess (her mother) from the party beyond and beg her pardon for departing early, Marion's final thoughts - through her searing headache - careered around the fact she had not had a chance to tell him - to discuss with anyone - how grave things seemed to be becoming between her parents in the wake of her father's monograph being published. That despite several politicians throughout Europe championing the ideals and clarion call it had set forth, the reception (particularly among her mother's Society here in London) was far cooler. To the point that Lady Nighten feared nothing short of shunning in her future. The low attendance at tonight's party certainly suggested it.

But Sir Edward stood firm, staunchly refusing to renege on what he so fully believed in. Their arguing the point could at times now be heard throughout the house (a sound never heard prior), and Marion had more than once caught two servants in deep discussion bandying about the word 'divorce', their voices silenced only by making her presence known.

The public face and interaction of her parents (even at the family breakfast table), once so pleasant, could now be described as 'frigid' at best.

She could hardly bear to share a room with both of them. She had begun to retreat further and further into her night owl routine, starting later and retiring later, to the point she rarely saw her family, save occasional conversations with her father alone. They two had been so hopeful for the reception of his monograph - containing not a word both did not wholeheartedly embrace and agree with. They had spoken of its being the first crack in dismantling what Germany was trying to build. They had no idea it would signal, rather, the seemingly imminent collapse of their own family.

How could she have explained to Robin that his heart - she thought his heart - was enough, but there was an 'and yet' attached to that statement?

She had been nothing short of horrified to hear her own lips question (though the notion must have been flitting about in her nightmares for some time) that once married, 'what would her life be about other than Society?' It sounded so terrible. A death knell of a type. It sounded so of something she might expect her mother to believe - if not to say.

Her mother, once a brave crusader for right, a respected political mind - who gave it up, turned her back on right and challenging the wrong. Who let a setback - several setbacks - steer her course away from risk, from her own convictions. Who came to settle for presiding over some of the silliest women in London. Society: her only dominion. A woman's bailiwick, its borders entirely domestic, appointed chatelaine to nothing beyond that to which her husband endowed her.

A woman who now risked (perhaps even looked forward to) losing her own husband, the man who loved her best, over a monograph whose set-forth ideals she fully believed. But that she could not acknowledge publicly lest she lose her ever-shaky hold upon her variable kingdom and its shallow-headed (and hearted) minions.

Lady Nighten's position was all she had. And she seemed now set to sacrifice both her own ethics, and her marriage to it.

Marion's mind returned to Robin. The taste in her mouth remained bad to her still, minutes creeping on from when he had walked out of the room, from when she had voiced her 'and yet'.

Knowing she was not likely able to uncork one of the room's many bottles of champagne on her own (certainly she had never done so before), and wishing to see no one else, she grabbed for the still-filled flute Robin had brought in with him, grabbing it off the low table in front of her. Steeling herself for the action, she drank, stopping short only from swallowing the butt-end of the fag he had cast off within it.

Ashes.

Yes, she thought, feeling here and there within her mouth the flecks of grit among the familiar bubbles. That seemed about right.

Nightwatch Windmill - present time - "I will have nowhere to go," Marion told him in further protest. "An unmarried woman without a father she might name for her coming child?" She shook her head, "I cannot ruin the Nighten family with this news, surely."

Robin attempted a blithe response. "Although I daresay the Earl was gently relieved when I perished quite admirably in His Majesty's service, rather than was found, indecorously passed away in the back of my Roadster from too much drink, go to him, Marion. Stoke swears he has been at taking in and boarding refugees at Kirk Leaves. And is being assisted by Mitch's mum, Lady Sophie. Her heart has always been soft where the Earl's has been somewhat inanimate in the past." He gave her arms a squeeze, trying not to dwell on the fact this might be one of the final plans they two would be able to make for many months. If ever again. "The estate is far enough from London to avoid most gossip. We can have Stoke and his lads dream you up a temporary new name, if you like." His brow furrowed. "Take some time, should you need it, before reconciling with your family."

Marion leaped to counter his diminishing the Earl's feeling for him. "Oh, you are so very wrong, my love, my dearest love," she told him, dragging her fingers through his hair to where they hugged at the back of his neck. "The Earl would fall on you and kiss you as the Prodigal Son's father were he to see you alive. And slaughter a baker's dozen of fatted calves." She traced his browline with one of her thumbs. "He has always had such a heart for you - even when you could not see it, and his enduring grief kept him from expressing it."

"But not your mother?" Robin asked, trying to lead her into confessing that her own family still greatly cared for her. "Nor Clem, you think?"

She pursed her lips. "You said your Stoker knew of my engagement to Geis?"

"Yes," he nodded. "He said that's what the gossip was at MI-6. Don't know if it's gone much further than that."

Marion exhaled. It was as she had always suspected: her present (unavoidable) choices forever altering her future world. "Well, so at least Clem - if not mother - thinks I am engaged to a Jerry (if not already wed)." She shrugged, finding comfort in the weight of his hands upon her arms, the encompass of his embrace. "What have I to offer them as proof otherwise? The Nightwatch is unknown at home, I've no doubt - and no doubt SIS will wish to keep it that way. So here I am, single refugee daughter, arriving home after nearly five years without her respected father to defend her character or her choices, unable to explain myself or name the father of my child. Whom all involved will assume...as would you or I...is said Jerry."

That part, at least, would be different on the islands, so very many, if not nearly all of the children born to Islander women during the Occupation the uncontested offspring of German soldiers. So common anymore women no longer even sought to conceal it.

"Go to the Earl," Robin said again, attempting to sound confident. "I shall write a letter for you to take. Date it around the time of my enlistment, saying that I have given it to you in case you should need help of any kind - no matter your situation - that you should seek indefinite sanctuary with the Earl. That he ought consider you as much my wife as were the banns read and fulfilled. And that he ought also, should you need, settle any monies upon you - and any child you might have - that he may have once considered mine." He raised his eyebrows as if to ask her assent to this new wrinkle in their plan, but did not wait for her response. "No matter your protestations I have never considered him a sentimental man, but he is honourable and would take such a vow of mine with all seriousness."

She found her mind wishing to skip ahead of his outlay of the immediate future. If Stoker's sub did come this night - less than seventeen hours from now - she could see England, see Kirk Leaves, even, in less than 72. It was dizzying to contemplate. "And you will come to me there?"

He nodded his head and then placed the side of his temple against hers. "When my work here is done, I shall fly to you both, rather - all three of you - " he included the Earl, "without so much as allowing myself to be debriefed, to say nothing of changing my clothes or accepting refreshments of any kind."

She smiled at this vow, though not without sadness pulling about the corners of her eyes. "It will be hard not to tell the Earl to keep your rooms at the ready."

"No, Wife," he disputed, placing a kiss near her ear. "Make my bed one of straw - in the stall where your Beau was birthed. I find I am destined for the farm life wherever I go. And our child shall no doubt learn to walk, dodging horse manure among your many four-footed friends."

She pushed aside his equine reference. At the back of her mind lay the question she knew would nag at her in the coming hours: the question of whether she were not making the same choice her mother had those years ago, in the wake of the Epsom Derby and the death of Emily Davison. (The choice for which she had always held her in such low regard.) Choosing a child - a family - over her calling, over her war yet to be waged. Would it not be possible to have both? Or had the Jerries here, in this instance, made it impossible to pursue each in tandem?

"Robin," she asked him aloud, saving the question of her mother for her own, single-sided musings later, "if not for me, would you go? Or rather, if you were in my position - truly, no using this merely as your bully pulpit - would you go? Would you leave things here, abandon the islands, and their people?"

He let the air hang silent as he agreed to genuinely consider his answer.

"There is something one is taught in training," he began, "even if one already knows how to sense such a time. And that is the notion of when it is time to pull out, to retreat. Even if I mightn't always be able to see it for myself, I have always been keenly aware of it where my men - my mates - are concerned. Were I, like you," he brushed part of her hair to the side, "the object of such intense interest to a Jerry officer - his potential target at every possible turning - to discover that I was with child, yes, I would get out. My choices - my comfort level with risk - would no longer be solely my own. I would be living on a clock counting down, a potato masher once the pin was pulled. It is only a matter of time before the defences we have laid in place fall, and you will find it too late for retreat, and yourself too depleted for attack."

She listened to what he said, heard that he spoke of Geis rationally, with none of his usual vitriol. His argument could not be more sound, more compelling. She was to be only a retreating soldier, then - not a failure, not a coward or deserter. She was to live to fight another day. These terms she thought she could accept.

"Very well, I will go," she told him, agreeing at last. She would have him instruct Allen to enlist the psychic, Joss Tyr, to repeat his impersonation of the Nightwatch nightly, taking over her present duties.

She did not tell Robin what a weeping cavern he had already opened up within her as he spoke of their parted future, referencing his own arrival in England as not only after his child was born, but after it had also learnt to walk.

It was an impossible agreement she had made with him. Perhaps every bit as impossible as the alternative.

For the next moments she worked to clear her mind of it as she let him lower her (with himself) to the windmill's floor, where he'd tossed down a quilt behind several blocking barrels, concealing them from any uninvited guests.

His handling of her - of the still gunshot-wounded her - was gentle to a fault. She kissed him, and brought her hands to all parts of him knowing she was soon to say goodbye to such important luxuries, but also clinging to the fact that they were to meet tomorrow on Sark, well before Stoker's night rendezvous, to enact whatever there might be of the more final goodbye to which she had just reluctantly agreed.

...TBC...