by Don Jacobson
Thus composed, Rose sprung her trap.
Time, as it always had been, was relative, and beholden to those entities in command of the fey forces flowing throughout all worlds temporal and otherwise. The Guides granted Eileen several extra frames to do that which she could to bend the paths for those on the cliff that afternoon.
She reached out and stroked the shimmering bands: t’was gentle for she could not do more, being but a fragment of a complete being. Even though Eileen had the assistance of the Guides, as they had promised, their aid was the merest whisper against the raging energies that comprised the sense of sight.
Fearful that what she would do would prove insufficient, but even more fearful of inaction, Eileen dipped her hands into the translucent, rippling streams flowing in front of her. Her intervention slowed their passage from the sky-blue irises exposed to the wind and dust howling on the hillside. Akin to a photo flipbook interrupted in its smooth page-after-page snapping, that wonderfully agile brain, that in earlier times—before—had been her home, paused in its processing, freezing on the last complete image. The lag was momentary, but enough.
In that unseen fraction of a sliver of a moment, Fitzwilliam continued to move across the field of play; not far, but enough.
This fluctuation, this stutter of sight, led Rose to miss the center of her target. Where the steel tipped javelin of her body should have driven itself home directly between Fitzwilliam’s shoulder blades, Eileen’s fiddling with her optic signals changed reality. The delay was not much more than a half a heartbeat, but it caused her to leap at what she thought was the bullseye when it was really the next outer ring.
Rather than burying itself at the base of Fitzwilliam’s skull, her hatpin scoured a furrow in his right trapezius before snagging in the collar of his bridge coat.
As for her target, Richard’s sixth sense alerted him that the moment of greatest danger had been upon him. Perhaps t’was a change in air pressure or the pattern of the wind disturbed as her body sliced through the air toward him. Whatever warned the Preacher, he had the slightest opportunity to flinch, to hunch his shoulders. Even so, his muscles, quick as his war-honed senses were, had only begun their upward movement when a ripping pain on the right side of his neck snapped his senses. Then muscle memory took over.
As Rose’s weight slammed into his back. Fitzwilliam quickly used his six-foot frame to transfer her forward momentum into an over-the-shoulder throw which flipped the slight woman above and around his rotating body. She landed flat on her back; her head closest to his feet. The impact stunned her but did not render her unconscious.
The SOE man above supine figure knew that she would take advantage of the slightest opening. Chivalry and human feelings vanished in the glare of Mars ascendant.
He finished his move with a fierce right-hand jab to her jaw that snapped her head to the side and put both Rose and Eileen to sleep.
Chapter V
The Parsonage, St. Mary’s Parish, Stromness, October 6-7, 1945
Fitzwilliam waited. He waited for those he had summoned to attend him.
He knew that they would be dashing north using whatever means at their immediate disposal. He knew better than to strain his eyes peering out into the darkened mists that shrouded the island. Unlike Mr. Longfellow’s Paul Revere, Richard also knew their choices were circumscribed by time, resources, and geography.
They would arrive when they arrived; be it by air, although Orkney weather frequently made night flights a risk undertaken only in the most extreme circumstances; or by water, the Britons’ favored form of travel for the last 10,000 years since the great land bridge at Dover had been swept away by rising post-glacial seas. They would take over an hour to cover the final ten miles from the great base at Scapa, using well-sprung Jeeps to slowly pick their way along the goat tracks that stood for improved roads in this northern backwater.
Knowing his inclinations as I do, he will probably happily commandeer a U-class destroyer, taking full advantage of its 36-knot speed.[xv] T’will be difficult for their Lordships to deny an Earl who holds the equivalent rank of Vice-Admiral. And, if they made to demur, Alexander[xvi] would set them straight, Richard mused.
Even assuming the battlewagon’s whistling turbines would be strained to their limits, the young priest did not expect his visitors for another ten hours. But, expect them he did, for he had used SOE’s signals’ equivalent of a Force 11 weather warning.[xvii]
He accomplished this specifically by not using his family name which might have drawn notice; but with the entire Matlock clan, reduced as it was, off on holiday, even the moniker Fitzwilliam may not have conveyed enough urgency to warrant action. Any sensible bureaucrat, junior enough to be relegated to weekend duties, would have awaited a higher-ranking individual making his desultory Monday appearance to take the difficult decision of bothering M while he was resting at Deauville.
Rather, Fitzwilliam had exhumed both his and her operational names and buried them deep in an otherwise seemingly innocuous telegram asking for a curate and sent from the village’s GPO. Those two words were still closely held secrets and, when employed in a certain manner, were guaranteed to attract the attention of even the sleepiest post-war communications officer.
He smiled as he imagined the flurry when that fresh-faced lad, perhaps on his first assignment out of the Nursery, discovered that neither code name was available in the regular ledger of working agents or even the grimmer one listing those lost in the line of duty. Then he would have approached the overnight watch commander, probably a jaded fellow who, none-the-less, had not had the requisite cleverness to escape into private industry—or perhaps his talents debarred a lateral move to another ministry, even Agriculture.
That worthy would have reached into his vest pocket for the key passed watch-by-watch from one man to the next. Using that, he would have unlocked a battered grey-green cast iron safe bolted to the floor of the watch commander’s office. The hinges may have objected, so disused they were in these days after Hitler had spread his brains across that dingy bunker’s ceiling…was it only five months ago? Seems an eternity.
Hauling the door back, he would have curtly dismissed the youngster, curious now about the events that would have occasioned some degree of excitement. That was a treasured commodity; and what qualified as thrilling was anything beyond the normal background dreariness of the well-worn Jermyn Street offices; still awaiting their being declared redundant now that the Fascists had been dispatched. Without reprieve, the intelligence services might become like the Roma, wandering from place to place, despised by all, but also sought out for their unique talents. T’would require another threat, perhaps from the equally grey and dangerous men sent out by Dzerzhinsky Square, to impress upon the nice people in Government that some not-so-nice persons were called for.
Fitzwilliam had learned from his father that neither the Admiralty nor the War Office wanted anything to do with those men and women who did their work under the cloak of night and without uniforms declaring their status. Something about no honor among thieves or some other poppycock. The Earl had suggested that either Treasury or the Foreign Office might serve as a suitable home given that both were more comfortable working in the grey areas that exist between the interests of great states, yet those aristocratic gentlemen shuddered at the thought of dealing with those whose antecedents were murky at best and thoroughly plebeian at worst.
Unbeknownst to young Fitzwilliam were the wheels his message set in motion. Oh, he could surmise. He could postulate. However, the reality, as is usually the case, was more significant than any that day…or in the weeks afterwards…could possibly imagine.
First, what the watch commander would discover would impress upon him the importance of the rocket that had been sent up off Scotland’s north coast.
One agent—Preacher—was SOE’s legendary man in France, responsible for wreaking havoc upon the Germans and their French collaborators for over three yea
rs. And, his family name likewise had resonated in Jermyn Street corridors since Waterloo when the Old General, Sir Richard Fitzwilliam himself, had reorganized Britain’s intelligence services into a potent pike that had kept Their Majesties’ enemies at bay.
The other agent—Rose—had been adjudged long dead at the hands of the Gestapo and SS. Her secret war record showed well over a dozen operations that resulted in a drawer-full of citations including an OBE and a DSO as well as the Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur. However, a recent entry, scribed by an unknown hand, indicated that circumstances of her demise were unclear at best.
Now, however, if Preacher was to be believed, and the functionary had no reason to consider that someone used to inhabiting such rarified heights as M’s second son would prevaricate in order to launch a compartmentalized operation, agent Rose had turned up alive and well in the Orkney Islands. How she ended up on his doorstep was beyond the watch officer’s remit. That he would leave to others.
All those factors combined to penetrate the preternaturally hidebound government employee mentality. That led to the second precursor that changed both space and time as the Universe moved from this moment forward.
His inertia overcome, Hogg (this man ought to be recognized for his role, however brief, in our tableau) picked up the handset of a blank-faced telephone and, gulping twice to control himself, spoke the three numbers which were guaranteed to track down M in whatever lair he had chosen for himself that night.
As it turned out, the Earl had yet to depart for Southampton to join his eldest son, his son’s wife, and his two small grandchildren aboard the Persephone to journey to the House at Deauville. His time in the arms of his family would have to wait. They could proceed without him.
Within an hour, M and his acolytes—two trusted young men…the white-blonde Alois Schiller and the red-headed Denis Robard—were bundled into the unheated cabin of a tired old Lancaster bomber for the three-hour flight to the RAF base serving Faslane on the Clyde in Scotland. From there, aboard the HMS Ulysses—as predicted by his son—M sped north to meet a dead woman.
Chapter VI
Throughout the long Northern night, Fitzwilliam had time to reflect on many sundry matters both deep in his past as well as much closer to the present. None of these disturbed him more, though, than the presence of the slight woman now strapped to his cot. Her short-cut blond hair spread across the pillow as the purpling bruise gradually darkened her jaw.
He was surprised that she had not awakened for he had measured his blow to incapacitate not injure. Perhaps there was more behind her unconsciousness. He had heard from the psych boys that the brain, when forced to deal with significant trauma, often would simply shut down to allow time for the mind to process all that had transpired. Fitzwilliam had no doubt that Miss Nearne, Eileen, had endured brutal treatment at the hands of her captors who had somehow succeeded in turning her into a weapon.
Well Eileen in her guise as Rose, had always been a weapon. However, she had made the informed choice to dispatch our enemies. Now someone has turned her back upon us.
As pre-dawn began to pink the walls of Stromness’ East-facing cottages, Fitzwilliam felt, rather than heard, his father’s approach. Their bond, maybe t’was their shared Bennet blood, had always been close. Lord Thomas, his father, labeled himself thoroughly perplexed that he could never surprise his two sons at mischief. At some point shortly before the war, while both were still in their teens, Michael, the eldest, had revealed that he and his brother could feel their father’s approach. From then on, the Earl would dispatch the Countess to catch out the boys.
Some Bennets could manipulate emotions—never in the negative, but rather to soothe. His grandmother, Lady Kate, had spoken often of how an Aunt Jane could calm a room by placidly sitting stock still until the hubbub had receded. As a young boy, Fitzwilliam suspected that the Countess was referring to her eldest sister, although Richard could never be sure as there had been so many Janes...and Elizabeths…and Marys…and Kittys...peppering the rolls of the Five Families.
His grandmother also suggested that her beloved husband, the 11th Earl, was a monumentally successful diplomat because he, too, had the same abilities as Jane. He could bridge the gap between nations and bring peace out of war. While the Bingley branch tended to enjoy this preferment, Grandmother Kate asserted that she felt that her nursery-mate Lydia may have also passed this trait along to her descendants. She noted that Lydia, usually referred to in the Five Families as the Dowager Countess, had a knack for getting her own way; something for which the diplomat Henry Fitzwilliam had also been known.
Other Bennets had infallible senses of direction, although it tended to be fickle, usually pointing the beneficiary toward Meryton, Hertfordshire as well as true North. This tendency seemed to run strongest in the Darcy line. Richard’s slightly distant cousin, Lizzy Darcy, the Countess Georgiana’s daughter, recently affianced to a German, of all persons, had exhibited this unusual compass-like ability.
Now, in his mind’s eye, Fitzwilliam could see his father, chin deeply huddled within the navy-blue bridge coat, occupying the right front seat of the jouncing Jeep. Likely the two captains, Schiller, soon to be married to his cousin, and his true cousin, Robard, would be holding on for dear life as the American import joined forces with Scottish ruts to avenge 18th Century English insults to both their noble nations.
Of course, Fitzwilliam had become acquainted with the German shortly after European peace had broken out in May. This was before he retreated to his Stromness refuge. While their association had been short, Richard had been able to take the measure of the eerily quiet man. Certainly, though, many of the war’s young participants held their counsel, so Schiller’s taciturn nature was not unusual.
The former Hamburg resident who had won the heart of Lady Elizabeth apparently preferred to allow his actions to serve as proof of his mettle. He usually refused to use any of his family’s titles because he was disgusted at the malevolence of extreme German nationalism that had brought about his father’s death. Ignoring his protestatations, though, the defunct Hohenzollern court still based in Holland adamantly styled Hauptmann Alois Schiller as Graf von Schiller, an Earl. In earlier days, that alone would have made him suitable to have carried the daughter of a British Countess back to his Schloss. Titles, though, were utterly meaningless to this young generation shaped by the awful fires of 1939 to 1945. However, neither Schiller nor Lizzy Darcy cared one whit for position. Each had vowed to find a singular mate who plucked the chords of that most fickle of organs, the human heart; both had resolved to marry for love.
Schiller had no special traits except that of uncommon bravery; something clearly passed to him from his father, the much beloved Oberst Schiller. That man had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Grandmother Kate fourteen months ago against the naked stone of Deauville’s town hall. The younger man’s distinguished war record (Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub)[xviii] and virulent anti-Nazism along with his father’s heroism positioned him in the front ranks of the first wave of German POWs to be released from their labors in the English countryside. That the Earl of Matlock had taken a special interest in the young man assisted in cutting many of the silken red strings so often used by harried clerks to control their workload.
However, even an Earl could only do so much. The weeks dragged on. Ultimately, the intervention of M was required to separate the Captain from the transport taking him to a troopship in Plymouth and, instead, install him in the back seat of one of SOE’s Lysanders. From RAF Biggin Hill in Kent, t’was but a short hop for the doughty aircraft to deliver Schiller to the wide strand facing the Channel in front of the Beach House.[xix]
Fitzwilliam served as Schiller’s escort, squeezing into the cramped rear cockpit beside him. What Fitzwilliam knew of Schiller was passed to him by the Earl who wished to remove any residual prejudices his son may have held against those who had worn feldgrau during the recently conclud
ed proceedings. M need not have worried as Richard had already completed his transition from Leftenant-Colonel Fitzwilliam—his nominal rank—to that of Father Richard, Church of England priest.
There was no opportunity to talk over the roar of the Bristol Mercury’s nine cylinders. The two passengers spent the journey looking out over the English Channel whose waters until recently had been a churning mass of ships dragging men and materiel in both directions. Now, however, little disturbed the light chop as if an order had gone out to suspend operations out of sheer weariness.
Once the Lysander’s engine had been silenced and the deadly propeller had ceased its invisible spinning, the ad hoc ground crewman—Richard quickly recognized Denis Robard’s uncontrollable red mop rippling in the ever-present on shore breeze—raced forward and scrambled up the permanently-attached ladder to unsnap the canopy’s dog latches. Flipping back the glass, he smiled briefly at his old playmate before schooling his features in recognition of the solemn work ahead. Robard slid down the ladder, and Fitzwilliam gestured that Schiller should depart first.
Alois was greeted on the sand by a somber Feldwebel (ret) Manfred Liebermann, Oberst Johannes Schiller’s subaltern and der Graf von Schiller’s Flugbegleiter.[xx] The bareheaded older man was clad in his uniform, stripped now of insignia, but parade-ground crisp with creases that were as sharp and precise as if the edge of the sheathed sword carried by Liebermann had been used to gauge them. His devices of hereditary office were suspended around his neck, the great seal of the House of Schiller weighing down the silver links glistening in the late morning sun.
Throughout his years at the Oberst’s side, the great chain had been safely hidden deep in his ruck. On the day of martyrdom nearly one year ago, Liebermann had shouldered his packed kit and walked away from the Wehrmacht; trekking down the macadam to the Beach House. Not one townsperson or macquard harassed the older German as he trudged, tears streaming down his face, into the cemetery where he reverently draped his master’s coffin with the Imperial standard and laid the great blade, unsheathed indicative of a glorious death, atop the Schwarz-Weiß-Rot ensign.
