by Don Jacobson
A casual observer would have been mistaken to assume that the woman was nearly dead, beyond hope.
In the first part, her captor would not have been able to realize the deeper objectives of his grand design if she expired after all his dedicated attention. She was meaningless to him as a person: his all-consuming hatred was entirely devoted to another group of tumors that beset his cancerous center. However, he needed a woman, or so he thought, as he believed women to be more malleable than men, to be shaped and then launched like a torpedo into darkened waters. She would be his weapon, to seek out and surprise his target: to kill without mercy.
His aim was simplicity compared to the goal of his captive. His was to re-program. Hers was to survive. Torture was his tool. Something more arcane was hers.
Her masters in the special services had trained her well. She could not necessarily withstand the exigencies of physical and mental torture, but rather she had been schooled to know exactly where her endurance would end and, thus, was aware of the limits to which she could resist before allowing her mission mind to dissociate from her proximate present. At that point, her higher functions—mind and body—would call forth an alter ego who would respond in the direction her physical masters desired, while in a deeply hidden corner of her psyche, her original self would vanish against the time she could safely re-emerge.
How she hated her tormentor’s harsh, Swabian accent, a guttural cant making the brutal parent tongue even more unspeakable. She did not know the face or the mind behind his bestial discourse. She had only “met” him with a cloth bandage separating her eyes from his face.
Yet, his voice was unforgettable, and it was something that helped her focus her remaining energies.
The poison of this place seeped deeply into her bones and began to corrode her very soul. She had long since abandoned any attempts to fight the techniques designed to break her. She accepted that fact as a finality.
That was the life ring to which she clung; the knowledge that the consciousness of her pain would flick off, when necessary, as if someone had opened a switch. No, she would not die, but rather the part of her which cared would sleep while Rose would step forward to acquiesce and become compliant.
Rose would reveal all. Rose would accept the Swabian as her master. Rose would show the dark lord that he had triumphed and would gain that which he sought; a sword with which to smite his enemy.
While Eileen rested.
Eventually she let go of her power, retreating like the tigress she was into a lair carefully prepared to cocoon Eileen from the trials of Rose. The split was accomplished, how she knew not, between one moment and the next. Eileen went to sleep, and Rose awakened.
The cycles of stress and torture, of beatings and starvation continued apace until one of the Master’s brighter acolytes apprehended that the subject seemed more compliant, more willing to reply, more willing to offer up information and other nuggets of her personality. She now loudly cursed the SOE and OSS for abandoning her to the traitors of the Milice who had happily passed her on to the Germans even though the 1,000 Year Reich was shrinking like a wet spot in the July sun on one of Herr Hitler’s vaunted autobahns.[iii] She no longer refused to comply with their demands, but rather responded, if not with alacrity, at least with less hesitancy.
Even then The Swabian was skeptical. How often during the Kampf had he seen those Jews willing to sell their own to gain a crust more and a day longer? Were these decadent, degraded British any different from the Jews they had finally, but begrudgingly, accepted into their nation diluting and weakening their völk?
So, he tested her sincerity, her trustworthiness, in the only manner he could.
They cut the cable holding the handcuffs above her back and hauled Rose to her feet. A large hand grasped the back of her head and pushed her blindfolded face into the striated wall. As she snuffed concrete dust into her lungs, a loud scraping noise filled her cell as something was dragged from the hall and across the space. Muffled cries could be heard from someone who was clearly gagged. A few muffled blows silenced the unfortunate.
As the silence expanded, the bonds constricting her ankles were cut, the cold steel indiscriminately slashing through Rose’s swollen flesh. Warmth dripped down to puddle around her feet, free now for the first time since her betrayal. More rough hands gripped her arms and marched/dragged her to a point in the room where she could sense the waves of fear emanating from another being. She heard the panting breaths taken by a soul as lost as her.
Then came a sound she had heard time and again throughout her captivity as the bully boys would play at mock executions to terrify her. The loud
Her arm hung by her side; so clear was her understanding that to attempt any but what he wished would lead to extinction. In any event, that limb was too weak to lift the less than two pounds the weapon weighed. She waited until yet another hand grabbed her forearm and dragged it upward until the motion ceased with the pistol resting against something quivering.
Stillness was the order for the next several moments as fingers reached over the top of her head and grasped the bottom of her blindfold. In one swift motion the guard—for she assumed t’was a guard and not The Swabian—pulled the cloth up and off her face.
Even though the solo bulb was behind her, casting crazy shadows as if she was not in some terrible prison, but rather Plato’s Cave, her eyes fiercely began to water, so worried by even the watery light from the low-wattage filament. Rose blinked…and blinked again.[v] There, at the other end of her arm, was a hooded man leaning as far away from the gun against his covered head as his bonds holding him in a chair would allow. However, he could not provide more than an inch of separation between burlap and metal.
“Leg ihn um,” The Swabian commanded.
Rose hesitated.
“Scheiss ihn,” The Swabian insisted.
Again, Rose demurred, shaking her head.
Booted feet quickly skritched across the floor from where the Master had stood. Pulling the gun from his factotum’s hand, he elbowed the man away. Standing behind her he grabbed the back of her neck and squeezed, pressing her carotid arteries until her vision, such as it was, began to tunnel. Then he swiftly pulled his firearm away from her neck and fired a shot into the floor by her feet.
The flat crack of the 7.62 mm cartridge was deafening in the confined space. The whine of the ricochet was brief, but another furrow was burned into Rose’s abused leg.
Then he coldly repeated, “Scheiss ihn.”
Eileen awoke for an instant.
you must. t’will be outside my ken. when I return, you will sleep and forget.
Rose pulled the trigger. The gun bucked against her hand, and the chair-bound man was thrown away from her, the red mist contained by his hood.
Another sack was thrown over her head.
After that, her treatment became, if not gentler, at least less sadistic. Rose could feel herself being shaped to a purpose. Conversations became longer as her psychology was probed and bent to the greater will. Eventually she understood—and accepted—that her only goal was to become The Swabian’s switchblade, a subtle weapon, ready to slice into the soft flesh beneath her victim’s chin. She had killed for him once. Another body would not increase her account.
She still was not privileged to see The Swabian’s countenance. She was allowed to sit facing a new wall, but a cell wall none-the-less, in that same chair as the poor soul who became her bona fides; still bloodstained, one leg loosened by his death throes, a reminder of her acceptance of the Master’s will. She had been a killer before in the service of her country, but never a murderer in violation of her mores. There was no inner solace for her. Although Rose remained u
naware of Eileen presence, Eileen’s existence inside her mind prevented Rose from splitting off another fragment of her soul like a horcrux, the fact of which had been bruited about by scholars for generations.[vi] Rose now lived for His approbation in the realization that He yet controlled her life what little there was of it remaining.
His other men, however, seemed less concerned that she would see their features. This did not worry her for, as she reasoned, she could have been killed any of a hundred times before this. That was not to be her destiny. Rather she would be allowed to become the instrument of his vengeance. However, she was not yet permitted to see the final details of his grand design.
She waited.
Then came the day when a stack of peasant clothing was thrown at her feet as she stood with her nose against the concrete. A pistol dug into her ribs, and one of her guards demanded that she wait 30 minutes before clothing herself.
Again, she waited.
In the meantime, she heard footsteps in the hallway on the other side of the doorway. Then she heard nothing.
Her internal clock marked 45 minutes since the last rude commands. Only after that did she turn away from the wall and approach the stack of shapeless, but clean, grey homespun clothes. Amidst the pile she discovered a sheet of paper and several hundred occupation Marks.
On the paper was typed a brief message:
Guardian, September 23, 1945
See Personal for Miss N for instructions
With that, Rose began her lengthy trek back to England.
Chapter II
The Rectory of St. Mary’s, Stromness, Orkney Islands, October 6, 1945
Richard Edward Fitzwilliam, the rector at St. Mary’s, Stromness’ High Church Parish, looked down at the rough white envelope he had just discovered near the kitchen door of his current dwelling: a low, whitewashed cottage huddled in a hollow out of the incessant gale that shook the Orkneys presaging another frozen season. The modest abode—surely a donated two-room, thatched hut qualifies for the appellation—served as his home while the Council scoured the countryside for the slates necessary to seal up the gaping, wind-blown, holes in the roof of his regularly-ordained residence. However, postwar Scotland was no place to scrounge building materials that were otherwise sorely required to rebuild the population centers further south.
Fitzwilliam had found the packet upon his return from a lengthy tramp across the moors during which he had called upon two elderly widows, each scraping out their existence in barrows burrowed into the craggy, bluff-dominated, landscape. Having left a half-bushel sack of oats and a paper of barley sugar sweets with each woman, he had turned his face back toward Stromness, moving even more quickly without the two stone of parched grain in his ruck.
That lightness did not carry over to his emotional being. As his long strides eroded the miles back to town, his unconscious mind wrapped its figurative arms around his sense of the present; mercilessly carrying him back over the past few years when his buff-colored canvas packs carried diabolical devices intended to end life rather than nurture it. These images were darker and more desperate; utterly dissimilar from those bucolic portraits he recalled as he read his Grandfather’s diaries from the sepia-toned days of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
The missive he now held had been written on supplies anyone could have purchased for just a few bob for ten at a candy and tobacco shop. He distractedly flipped it front to back a few times, and then snapped it against stiffened fingers as if the blows would cause the sparse direction to fly off, relieving his responsibility to attend to it.
He realized that he could neither change nor ignore its implications. This letter called up painful memories, but also screamed out a warning.
The name that was scribed on the front…a code name, nothing more…was known only to three persons: himself being one. The use of his unique moniker ensured that he would read the letter contained therein, if only to determine if t’was his father who had sent it…
…or the woman he had assumed to be dead; having been betrayed to the Gestapo by one of their own.
Half of his heart hopefully believed that his pater familias, the 12th Earl, was using a bit of tradecraft to get his attention; perhaps seeking to entice him into a late autumn reunion with his family rather than remaining holed up in his Northern fastness. His war wounds, invisible to all but himself and others of his ilk, usually made him poor company at best, he had assured his family, and, at the worst, a disruptive force if the mood became too powerful to subdue.
Yet, his calling to serve the Lord was of such strength that he could not become a hermit. However, he recognized that he could never voluntarily avail himself of his connections to immerse himself in one of the preferred parishes where aristocratic rectors most often were installed. He had no patience for diocesan politics. The Rt. Rev. Richard Fitzwilliam could only stomach so many teas at fusty bishopric palaces where smarmy clerics sought to curry favor and gain patronage. St. Mary’s here in the blustery Orkneys was the best living for him…and was the only such refuge open, the rectory in Bude, Cornwall, long unavailable, having been filled by a twenty-five-year man: himself a refugee from the 1914 cataclysm.
Richard’s family, though, would not let him crawl into a hole in the heather and pull the shrubs in after him.
His SOE agent’s brain, that central clearing house tempered by both realism and fantasy, overruled that irrational part of his soul which hoped that t’was his father behind the communication. Fitzwilliam ultimately reasoned that British Intelligence’s vaunted “M” had more efficient ways of reaching out to his second son than secreting a coarse message under the lid of a milk box. And, he also understood that the Earl needn’t seek to entreat his prodigal. That worthy well knew that his Countess, a fount of Reynolds’ strength, was more than capable of bending her children to her will.
Lady Anne, in her latest letter, offered that she had accepted Richard’s excuse that his parish duties had made it impossible to attend the traditional Five Families’ grandes vacances at the reopened Deauville Beach House. Then she slyly had set her piton in the tiny logical crack his summertime demurral had provided. “Perhaps my son,” she gently wheedled, …
Richard smiled as he imagined the irresistible gaze of those caramel eyes, wide in feigned innocence, rising from her supremely laid, cream-colored notepaper, focused on him.
…who is a minister of the Lord, would find it in himself to attend the October dedication of his Grandmother’s marker in the tiny burial ground behind the Dune and deliver a eulogy to the great lady.”
Not so subtly, Máman also suggested that he could join his brother, the Viscount, and his young family aboard the Persephone, to travel from Southampton to Deauville as they had done so many times when his grandparents both lived.[vii]
However, his heart’s remaining portion, which, along with its mate, had never beat quite the same since the day his father had commanded his presence at the Trust’s offices in Lincoln’s Inn to deliver the darkest of news, prayed that another woman had survived to come back to him as she had promised.
Although he knew her real name, he could only recall that brave and resolute female, the one who terrorized the Nazis and their collaborators, by her nom de guerre!
And, remembering the gambits that he—as the Preacher—and she—as England’s Rose—had undertaken in the Great Cause, each offering slim odds for survival much less success, he understood that if anyone could have discovered a way to pass through the veil without perishing, t’would have been her.
Rose had flattened herself amongst the heather that covered the slopes above Stromness. She had found a pair of bushes below the ridgeline that created a natural den into which she had crawled. From there, nearly invisible unless a seeker stepped on her, using her Barr and Stroud CF41 naval binoculars, she had kept a watcher’s eye on the milk box in its lonely position adjacent to the small hut’s kitchen door.[viii] Hours after she had placed the note, she had
observed nothing.
Then she had been alerted by a heavy tread of a man descending from the heath behind her, clearly heading toward the waterfront community. She buried her face in the crook of her elbow to hide its unremitting whiteness, still ghostly even after several weeks above ground. Her instructors at Drumintoul Lodge[ix] had drilled into her—and every other SOE recruit’s head—that an unblacked face was a dead giveaway to someone awake enough to be watching his six.
As the footsteps receded down the trail Rose cautiously peeked over her arm to see him! More than enough of Eileen had crossed over into her alter to cause a twinge of reminder between ribs and hips. However, the feeling had betrayed Eileen’s attempts to assert herself, and Rose had pushed her back into a dark corner of their common mind. Rose could not sleep until she had completed her mission.
Slightly more than a week ago, she had climbed down from the milk-run pulling into the carcass of Manchester’s London Road train station. Not one shred of glass remained to relieve the blackened naked steel skeleton, standing as mute testimony to the Blitz of five years past. Yet, the teeming masses moved about their business along clean, almost pristine platforms. Not a soul paid more than passing notice to the tattered and thin young woman clambering down from the worn second-class coach. Perhaps t’was because she fit in so well; the bulk of Manchester’s, no Britain’s, population was living in the make and mend world of continuing rationing. Few, if any, consumer goods had begun emerging from war-worn factories.
Rose casually had strolled over to a young boy crying the Guardian’s latest headlines about the awful discoveries being made as Allied forces liberated the POW camps in Burma in the wake of the Glorious First of September Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Tossing thruppence in his bowl, she accepted the proffered newspaper. She folded the gazette once and pushed it down into her carryall bag, not wishing to draw any attention to her eagerness to peruse the agony columns. Then she walked out onto the Piccadilly and moved along until she turned in at a curbside tea stand.
