It was unlikely she could have shot straight in that moment, unlikely that she had the pistol grabbed in time, had the source of that giveaway noise truly wished her harm.

In German she asked the intruder to identify himself.

"You are not very welcoming," came the response in broad, undeniably English tones, "to this, your-playhouse? Secret club? What-" he obviously could see the supplies stacked haphazardly about her, "your cave of pirate treasure? For I know enough German, Fraulein, to know those were not at all kind words of greeting you just threw at me."

Robin Oxley stepped out of the shadow and into the circle of light, near to where she sat at the microphone. He looked, on balance, much as he had earlier that night. Of course he did. Why should the separation of but a few hours markedly alter his appearance to her?

She had been wrong about his hair. Although short on the sides, it was quite long on top, only combed back, off his face. She should have known: vanity, for him, had always won out over practicality. At least in matters of grooming, and, as she recalled, apparel. His barber's tab had often been a fright, not to mention his haberdasher's. How his father, the Earl, had frequently blown his top upon receiving his son's outrageous bills in the late afternoon post.

She found herself distractedly wondering if her own clothes did not appear quite grubby-unsightly, even-from her time down here.

"I have had quite a jog of it, Marion, trying to keep up with you," he told her. "I came to the house, only to see you rigging yourself for an expedition. So, of course I had to follow." He smiled. "Reconnaissance now like second nature to me."

She did not reply, never taking her eyes from him, but again depressed the transmitting button on the mike, the original song, and another one after it now done playing. "News and more news, and a full recap of BBC broadcasted news from earlier today coming up," she said, before returning the broadcast to the record.

Robin pulled in his chin, as though what he heard was entirely unexpected. "So you are not listening at all. You are...transmitting..." His head remained slightly tilted to one side, his eyes, ever on hers.

Again, she gave no answer where he had left space for one. Her hand for some reason still lay in plain view on the pistol, though she was not sure why. "Spying and following people is now, you say, in your nature?" she asked him. "Is it also in your nature to crash parties of powerful and dangerous men, your sworn enemies?"

"What, that?" he actually smiled, that crack smile that told you he was pleased with himself, and oughtn't you to be also? "We could hardly pass up the opportunity to spy on all those Jerries in one place."

She did not smile in return; her reply was smooth and delivered as instructive. "You are new to the islands, you do not realize: we are not so populous here than an odd accent, an unfamiliar face, will not arouse suspicion."

"Unfamiliar face?" His tongue came out toward his lips before he bit down on the lower one, still smiling. "Is that what I am to you, then? Unfamiliar?" Something of the grin fell out of his smile, and was replaced by what she remembered: a perilous (to her, to her heart) intensity. "Odd. For I know your face. Tracing its outline in my mind is the first order of my Catechism. Creating words to relate to my fellows the exact blue of your eyes? My second."

She did not want to be, but she was the first one to look away, turning her eyes to her stack of record albums, it suddenly feeling quite important that she knew which one she would be playing next.

"Did you think," he asked, referencing his unannounced appearance here, "I was your fiance-just there? That is, your other fiance? Is that why the German salutation?" He leaned over from where he stood, his face searching to see hers from where she had turned it away from him. "Did you fear he had come to catch you out?" He looked significantly at the pistol her hand still rested upon. "To see why you left his bed in the middle of the night?"

Her hand pulled back from off the gun as though she had been slapped. "No," she said, low and harsh, meaning to answer all his erroneous assumptions, even the one that so stung. Her jaw was tight as she spoke. "Geis is a gentleman."

"Ah," Robin remained maddeningly casual. "You have not seen him, then, enjoying his work at the camps."

Her jaw tightened further, her teeth ground against each other. She raised her eyes to him, to show him that at such a remark she seethed.

"But," he continued on blithely, "'twas more than simple curiosity that brought me after you. I bring an engagement gift: your newly beloved's orders. To your ears before they even reach his. Courtesy the Kommandant's driver, my man, Allen Dale." He gave a little bow, as though she might applaud his accomplishment.

"Why should you care what Geis' orders are? He is not so high and important a cog in the grand scheme of the Occupation, of the Reich."

"He is called to serve a nearly continuous round of duty on Alderney, at the camps, until further notice." Robin allowed his demeanor to alter as he studied her reaction to this news. "Beginning later this very morning, when the written orders will be delivered to him, at, I believe, your home. It would seem, Fraulein, he is to become-or already has become-quite indispensable to Herr Vaiser."

Marion knew she had to break eye contact with him again, every time she did so seeming like giving up ground in a skirmish, but it was imperative she broadcast the news at the appropriate time. She bent to consult her wristwatch.

As distracting as these new orders of Geis' were to her, she could hardly concentrate on them now.

She turned the record's volume down and returned herself to the microphone, in her practiced drawl delivering what she could recall (which was actually quite a lot, and quite detailed) of the BBC's earlier news broadcasts, as well as any news that she had overheard, large or small, war- or occupation-related or not about the islands. When she was through, she promised another segment (a repetition of the same items) in thirty minutes, and continuous music until then.

She could feel Robin's eyes keenly on her throughout.

"Oh, I get it," he said, when she lifted her fingers off the transmit button. "'Nighten' watch? And this accent, you believe it will protect you somehow, disguise who is speaking from them?" Derision crept into his tone. "So, what, you watch Mrs. Miniver a couple of times and now you believe you can best Hitler?"

"Mrs. who?"

He frowned at her question. He had forgotten, there would be no new motion pictures on the islands, much less thinly veiled British propaganda films made to inspired the civilian public. "Marion, if, on a lark, I can clumsily follow you out here and catch you red-handed, what makes you think Gisbonnhoffer-or anyone else-could not? And what; you think they will fail to notice the antenna you have inexpertly affixed to the rottening vane? One gust of wind just so and it will not matter, the whole shaft and the rigging will come down, and your fancy dress game here will be through." The longer he spoke, the more in a temper he became.

"And perhaps me, too? 'Through' as well, you are thinking?" she asked, glad that he now displayed an emotion she could match. "Hoping? To lose an unpleasant reality of a past-whatever? Someone that spooks your men? Makes them fear for your loyalties as you fear for mine?"

"No!" he responded quite roughly, as though he had overstepped some line he had not meant to cross, said something he had hoped to keep to himself. "It is for your safety I-"

She interrupted him, cool and detached as a psychologist, and addressed his conflicted self. "Is it hard to feel something for someone you fear has gone to the other side? Is it hard for you to reconcile me to the past? To that Marion?"

Robin took a deep breath, his voice pleading with her, yet frightened by her tone of disconnection. "It is only, you must help me understand what has happened here. Why you are here?" He threw his arms wide to indicate the island of Guernsey, "and not home in England, where you belong, or even, as I had long believed you, still in America, an ocean away from-this?" Then, in almost a whisper, a tremble to his voice, "Marion, what has gone so very wrong?"

It was quite possible he was asking for an answer that would necessitate going back five years to that day she had told him she was going to America.

But she did not, in all honesty, feel up to having that discussion tonight. It had already been quite a long day. And the answers to, much less the explanations of their problems of five years ago seemed all but unrecollectable to her now.

She began to recount the particulars of her current enforced sojourn on the island. "Quite early in the spring of '40-you had only just been buried-we received word that my father, who had been staying at our vacation home here, had been thrown from Gypsum, and that he was not recovering as well as one might expect. He was...absentminded, scattered, and at times incoherent. And his physical injury was proving long-term. My mother had already divorced him. I came to see after him. By June all his time abed had led to a persistent pneumonia." She closed her eyes for a moment as she shook her head. "He would not have lived through an evacuation. By late July," she shrugged, "Gisbonnhoffer had taken a liking to the house-to me, to the estate, and had quartered himself in it."

"And Sir Edward?"

"His body is largely recovered. He is...rarely cogent. He spends his days in his study, or in his sunroom, in the library listening to the gramophone, looking at pictures of mother and Clem. Both of whom in his broken mind he usually believes are dead."

Robin's eyes scrunched about the edges, hearing of such circumstances.

"He knows me," Marion continued, wishing Robin would not react to the story so, making it harder to tell. "But he retains no understanding of our present situation."

Robin's response was quick, and avidly curious. "What of his writings? Why have the Germans not taken him to persecute? To publicly pillory? It is usually their way."

Marion looked at her wristwatch to hide her eyes momentarily (more ground lost in their skirmish), though she did not yet need to be concerned about the time. "They scripted a recanting of his monograph. He signed it willingly, unsuspectingly. It was printed to great fanfare in more than several of their propaganda pamphlets. As his home is host to Nazis, to their parties, as his daughter will marry one, seemingly at his consent, Edward, Lord Nighten is of greater use to them as a propaganda tool than a martyr."

Robin's ire was apparent. "And yet you stood by, letting him so unknowingly betray and perjure himself?"

"Yes!" Marion shouted with an outsized ferocity, Robin the first person she had ever had to defend these actions to. She was gripped by a far stronger emotion as she spoke than she had been in a very long time. "I not only stood by, I saw to it he signed the retraction! I played editor of what had been written by Goebbels himself so that the syntax more closely resembled Father's own!"

"I do not see," Robin's eyes rolled heavenward, to the dark night sky visible through gaps in the windmill's roof. His breathing was ragged, this news of her father, hero to many, example and champion of Right-of Sir Edward's downfall-paining him as much as had she cut him for real.

"I do not see," Robin said again, in a tone that would be furious if it were not so beseeching for enlightenment. "In doing so, you helped dismantle all that he stood for, all that he fought to bring into the light. To allow them to coerce him into repudiating all that he knew to be right and good and worth sacrificing everything for.

Marion only watched him, she did not respond. She knew what he was going to do next, before, perhaps, even he had decided on it. He was going to make her listen to it, going to speak those words, here, in the midst of this Occupation, in the voice of a man she had loved. This dead man, now living-those words originally written by her father: a man once living, now all but dead.

Robin quoted from memory her father's celebrated monograph, his voice and delivery eloquent, as only he knew how to be. "'For it is in just such teaching that we must ask ourselves as individuals, as a nation, as a world: if we do nothing to assist our fellow man in such times, be he lesser in status, or even, as so erroneously suggested by Herr Hitler's propaganda machine, lesser in intellect-are we, ourselves, not less civilized, less the champions of justice, and made lesser men by such deliberate oversight and inaction? For to my recall, was penned long ago in a Book far better than Mein Kampf; 'greater love hath no man than this: than that he would lay down his life for his brother.' Let us then, as a nation, prepare ourselves for just such a sacrifice to come, and even, hurry it along in our eagerness to right the grave and multiplying wrongs we can no longer ignore as they are enacted upon our brethren across Europe.'"

Robin paused for a long moment, the words of her father heavy with integrity, with truth and, even, with heroism. "He weathered the isolationist backlash when first that was printed, did he not? He stood by his work. He did not renege on his beliefs, his convictions. Not even when-not even-"

Marion could hardly breathe. "Why did I do it?" she asked Robin rhetorically, roughly, angrily, even. "Because in the end you hope the truth will out. You hope the good guys will win. And because assassinating a reputation is better far than assassinating-watching a person..." she felt unshed tears clogging her throat, "knowing a person will be..." damn him for being alive to even ask this of her, she sucked in breath, "than being party to losing the life of someone you love; to abuse, to torture, to unwarranted cruelty. He is a man, Robin. He is my father. I chose his life-our life-over a reputation. Over an articulated ideal."

Robin hung his head, knowing the deed already long ago done. His tone was low, bald with defeat. "I do not know that I would have chosen the same."

Neither pointed out, though it hung in the air between them, that due to Marion's choices her own reputation (and her life) would also be irreparably damaged, were being so even at this moment, even on this day.

Time passed as the half-muted record played on. Neither spoke for a space, as if to let the dust of harsh realities and disputed choices settle.

Finally, she broke the conversational silence. "Then I truly hope you shall never love a person enough to have to make that kind of choice." She looked up at him, his head still half hanging. "Or have to live with a person you love having had to make that hard, hard choice for themselves."

Robin did not respond, but brought his eyes back up to hers, their edges wincing. Whether over her choices or Sir Edward's resultant downfall she could not be sure. Her gaze had returned to its familiar steadiness. It was now his turn to retreat by looking away.

"I brought this," he said, as he produced her earring from earlier that night. "It must have fallen from your hand as you crossed the park. It seemed best that you have it, lest it be found-or not be found-and raise suspicion."

She stood to take it from him, walked the one and a half steps to his side.

He saw the tearing now, in her earlobe, the color of the blood the blindfold's removal and snagging had cost her. It birthed a momentary tenderness in him.

"Kiss it better?" he offered.

She ignored the come-on of a suggestion. "You have chastised me for my engagement to Geis, Robin. You have then chastised me for my work here. I fear you must reconcile your divided mind about me. Am I to be punished for a collaborator, or taken to task as a daredevil, an unnecessary risk-taker in the Resistance?"

"I do not know," he replied, his eyes still studying her, particularly now that she stood before him. "It is as if I do not quite know you. This you." One of his eyes narrowed, but his expression was not entirely sour.

Looking at him, at his always-next-door-to-a-lark face, Marion felt ancient. She felt an hundred years old, heavy with unwanted wisdom, unwanted insight. "We are different people now, Robin. Strangers. And if you say we are not, I say: beware. For I am. I have played too long at faking love. I fear I shall no longer know the difference between the stage and front-of-house."

A frown came to his brow. "You say you have grown feelings for this German?"

She smirked, but bitterly. "None that are tender."

Lest her remark encourage him, she continued on as before. "Do not pursue me here, Robin. I am a lost cause. Abandon me to the invader, as Britain did these islands. Make your tactical retreat," she brought her lips together in a tight, thin smile. "Go on with your work here as though we had never reunited, for I must surely go on with my role as though I never encountered you. I must forget tonight. Perhaps tonight's champagne," and gin, and... "perhaps tomorrow's headache will help me do so."

He inclined his head to one side. "So you believe a freedom fighter cannot, also, have a love, a love life, secret and separate from his work?"

"I don't know," she told him truthfully, certainly never having thought on the notion before. She shrugged. "I have never met a partisan."

He laughed. "But look around you, Marion!" He indicated the cache of things she had hidden her, her radio transmitting equipment. "You are a partisan! Mrs. Miniver be damned. You are the stuff legends are made of."

She stood watching, amazed as always at how his emotions could turn on a dime.

At his proclamation, he suggested a peace offering. "I shall send Wills to the Nighten-gale of this Nightwatch, if you will allow me to show him this place. He will repair your antenna. Perhaps be able to conceal it better."

"Thank you," she said, with genuine feeling. Her voice dropped so low as to almost be an undertone. "I have...missed your ways, Robin."

He stopped and cocked his head to show slight suspicion of her statement. "I do not think you could be too regretful over our parting."

"What do you mean?"

"Marion," he said, as if it were necessary to remind her, "you left me for a horse."

She scoffed at his simplification of their separation. "Beau was not just any horse..."

Robin's lips mimicked what she was about to say perfectly; he had heard it many, many, many times before.

"Saracen's Beau, by Swallow Den out of Cordelia Anne, was not just any horse."

"Was?" he asked, curiously concerned.

She didn't answer that question, instead her mind turned to the emerald ring still on her left hand. "You know," she began, his eyes following hers to the jewel. "I would gladly return it to her, and the finger it adorns, as well, should she wish it." She thought of the times she imagined her finger black with rot and death from the wearing of this ring. Adorning the finger that supposedly trailed most-directly to her heart.

"Its return would do Mrs. Stein little good now," he told her, his outrage at her having it not so intense as earlier in the night, "and cause you grave trouble, I should think, should you lose it."

He did not ask where his ring was.

"So we are to be strangers, then?" he looked to her for confirmation of their set plan of action.

She nodded her reply. "Two people newly introduced, perhaps. But blank slates to one another."

"Very well, then," he agreed to her terms. "But let us dance," he looked to the rotating turntable, repeating his request from earlier in the night, "for what could be more normal among two new acquaintances, or even two old-perhaps estranged-friends?"

She did not move beyond his reach quickly enough, and he had her caught into his embrace, dancing to "I'll Be Seeing You" in the negligible open space there in the windmill's half-cellar.

He did not mention that she danced very similarly to a girl he used to know quite intimately before the war. He did not say that he did not recall the last time he had danced with a woman in pants, or that Mrs. Stein's stolen ring with its heavy emerald, the gift of his enemy, of his rival, was chafing at his shoulder where it rested on her hand. Robin did not speak. He only danced. He only held her to him.

"I'll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places/That this heart of mine embraces, all day through."

It was only for a moment, Marion told herself, promised herself, only for a moment that she would close her eyes, remember-imagine the parquet dance floor at the Ritz in London, the sound and feel of other couples dancing around them. The look of Robin in his tuxedo that last night they had danced there together, the color and scent of the orchid he had brought her to wear, her favorite. The new clutch purse she had brought out with her for the evening, which she had lost, and how he had gone from table to table without shame on his knees searching for it on her behalf. And how, after closing, the management and the band, so charmed by his exploits (and the clutch found-back in Robin's roadster, never having even been brought inside-her compact and lipstick yet in it) that they agreed to play one more set. Just for them, just for that couple, alone on the dance floor: that Robin and Marion.

She kept her eyes shut too long. She felt the warmth of his breath, the texture of his beard, unfamiliar, as he brought his face to hers, his lips to hers-not aggressively, not passionately, even, but slowly, timidly, almost, as a first kiss might be. A soft, gentle knock on the front door. Was anyone home? Might I come in for a cuppa?

She thought to expect that he would taste of other women, of strange places he had traveled without her, of exotic tobaccos and lessons learned she had no knowledge of. He didn't.

He tasted of contrition, of comfort. Of warm firesides and safety and...a wish, perhaps, for reconciliation.

Was anyone home to that knock? she wondered. She let another kiss happen. Allowed a tightening of his arms about her. Three small tears rolled down, one quickly after the other, out of her right, still-closed eye.

Robin alive. Robin, here.

Her life had suddenly become tremendously more complicated.

She opened her eyes. They were only dancing now, the kiss not quite answered, yet not quite ignored. He held her. She had not the words to tell him his arms were the only substantial things on earth supporting her now, in this moment. But for them, but for them...

"I'll see you in the morning sun, and when the night is new/I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you."

The Nightwatch's broadcast was nearly over. Marion Nighten was still somewhat tipsy. That is how she would explain this lapse to herself tomorrow; letting him dance with her. Letting herself believe, really believe that this truth before her was possible: he was alive. Tonight was a lost cause. A monument to bad judgment, spurred on by too much alcohol. Tomorrow it would be as she had told him: they were strangers, and she must forget she had seen him, must forget his resurrection. Must carry on playing her part.

But for the length of this song, for this moment, What sort of night was it? Well, don't be cheeky. It was the happiest night of her life, of course.

}}-> The End

...TBC in "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane"...

Our Cast
Robert "Robin" Oxley, Viscount Huntingdon...Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, aka the outlaw Robin Hood
The Lady Marion Nighten...Lady Marian of Knighton
Lieutenant, Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer...Sir Guy of Gisborne
Island Kommandant Vaiser...Vaisey, Sheriff of Nottingham
Sir Edward Nighten, former Parliamentarian...Sir Edward of Knighton, former Sheriff of Nottingham

The rest of the "Saintly Six" -
Mitch Bonchurch, Navigation Officer...Much
William "Wills" Reddy, Communications Officer...Will Scarlet
Allen Dale, Reconnaissance and Acquisitions...Allan-A-Dale
Richard Royston, Explosives...Royston "Roy" White
Iain "John" Johnson, Medic...Little John Little

Eva Heindl...Eve of Bonchurch, of S1 "A Thing or Two About Loyalty"
Fred Otto...the Booby; Count Friedrich Bertrand Otto von Wittelsbach, of the German duchy of Bavaria, of S2 "Booby and the Beast"
Clem Nighten...Sir Clem of Knighton, an OC, Marian's older brother, as invented for my "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With"

Our Locations
The Channel Island of Guernsey, and in particular the Barnsdale estate...Knighton
The Channel Island of Alderney...Nottingham
The Bertrand-Otto Stables and Farm of Nicholasville, Kentucky, USA...the German Duchy of Bavaria

Author's Ending Note: Please know, this is not an in-depth work of great research and time spent. It is meant to convey a feeling for the times, and the places mentioned, but certainly not believed by the author to be a fully-accurate and historically impeccable rendering thereof. [would that I had the free time to pursue such!]

To wit: for any inaccuracies of geography, historical timeline, politics, government or culture, please accept my apologies in advance.

If I have referenced a song that would not have been in the sphere of these two people, or mistook something about the British Channel Islands, or have proven faulty (though vague, I assure, on purpose) over how Marion is able to broadcast the Nightwatch, or even have electricity available to do so at a remote windmill, or how, at the arrival of a telegram to the US about Robin's death she is yet still able to return home, crossing the Atlantic during a dicey time to do so and still manage to attend his funeral-it is all done in good faith, in the hopes of writing a good story - as is the use of any inflammatory terms toward any groups or nations that were in use at the time, such as 'Jerries'.

Additionally, please note; in any future postings of this AT/Uberfic, Channel Islands' geography is set to be bent to my will like space in Dune.

So if you must write or post to say how wrong I've gotten it all, do so, but know that the above is my official mea culpa on such matters.

We shall not speak on them again.