Beneath Gray Skies

by Hugh Ashton

  “Well, it was really my niece, Kitty,” she explained. “She taught him the basics and taught him a few pieces of classical music. But after a while, I came to realize that he had a natural talent for making his own music that I could never begin to come close to understanding. I didn’t like it at all at first, I have to tell you now, Christopher. But then I realized what you were up to. Wonderful complicated rhythms, harmonies I’d never heard before, but worked so well with what you were doing, developments of the theme. And none of it written down.” She shook her head sadly.

  “If you’ll permit me to offer my poor opinion,” offered Virginia, “it should never be written down. The music that Christopher is producing is so new and fresh it would suffer if it was to be imprisoned on a printed page.”

  Henry lifted his eyebrows. “What do you think, Christopher? We’re talking about what you produce, after all.”

  “My view,” said Christopher solemnly, “is that we should change the subject and move on to something else, like who is going to sit where at the wedding. I know that a lot of Wasserstein relatives and friends are coming to the wedding. My side is going to look rather empty, I suppose, with only a few people from the British Embassy, apart from you and Miss Justin. But I was wondering… It’s a great favor to ask of you, but Miss Justin, would you please take the place of my mother at the wedding?”

  “With pleasure, dear boy,” she replied. “That’s the nicest possible thing you could have asked me to do.”

  “Then I’m happy, too,” exclaimed Christopher.

  There was a contented happy silence between the four of them which lasted for a few minutes until it was broken by Henry Dowling who looked at his watch.

  “Is that really the time? Miss Justin, I fear we have trespassed on your hospitality long enough.” He got up to go.

  “Miss Justin,” suggested Virginia. “Since you are a stranger in this town, and since you may need to do some shopping, may I call on you tomorrow and we will go to the stores together?”

  “What a charming idea. Yes, please.”

  They fixed a time and place for the meeting, and Miss Justin’s three visitors left the room. The door closed, and Miss Justin sank back into her chair, content with the way that things had turned out. She liked the look of Christopher’s wife-to-be. No nonsense about her, she thought, and she certainly seemed to have a way of getting what she wanted.

  -o-

  There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” she answered, expecting one of the hotel servants to clear away the tea things. Instead, Henry Dowling entered.

  “Terribly sorry and all that. Did I leave a handkerchief here? Maybe it slipped out of my pocket when I was sitting down?” He closed the door behind him.

  “I don’t believe you did,” she answered.

  “Actually,” he continued, “this is all a good deal more important than a handkerchief. Please sit down and listen carefully to what I have to say to you. I didn’t want to say any of this in front of Christopher. I am worried about your safety if you return to Cordele. As I am sure you realize by now, the man Brian, Lewis, or however you know him, is an agent working against the Confederacy. I tell you this with the utmost confidence that you will repeat this to no-one.”

  Miss Justin nodded, tight-lipped, in response.

  “However,” Dowling continued, “I know that you are already under suspicion. You will continue to be under even more suspicion as time goes on, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that you could easily be arrested and imprisoned in the near future if you return to Cordele.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” The near euphoria she had felt at Christopher’s good fortune had vanished, replaced by a small cold ball of fear inside her.

  “I—we,” he corrected himself, “feel that it would be in your best interests not to go back to Cordele after the wedding. We can easily persuade the Confederate authorities that you are seriously ill and are in no condition to leave Washington. If necessary, we can even arrange for your death to be reported to them.”

  “I don’t think that I’d want that,” she replied, a little shocked by the idea.

  “I don’t blame you. ‘Mourir, c’est partir un peu’”, he misquoted with a wry smile. “But it might be a good idea to keep out of the Confederacy for a very long time. You can write a letter to Lewis Levoisin allowing him to live in your house, and so on. Even give him power of attorney to pay your bills, and so on. In fact, I think you’re probably going to be writing to him quite regularly and we’d like to have your letters and the envelopes before you send them to him, so that we can add our own messages to them. Just make sure that the last page of your letters always has only a few lines on it. Don’t worry about money, by the way. We’ll make sure that you have enough to be as comfortable as you need while you’re living here.”

  “What about Horace and Betsy, my slaves? Oh, doesn’t it sound awful when I say that word here?”

  “Leave Horace and Betsy to us, Miss Justin. I think you may be seeing them here before too long,” replied Dowling with a confidence that he didn’t altogether feel.

  “Really?” she smiled up at him. “In which case, as long as those I love and care for will be safe, I don’t think there’s any argument about this, is there?” Dowling nodded in agreement.

  “Now the first thing we have to do is to determine the nature of your disposition. Forgive my being so personal, but do you suffer from any existing illness or infirmity we could use in this regard?”

  “Well,” she smiled, “my physician in Cordele has been treating me for angina pectoris for some time now. It’s not serious, but any bad news regarding my heart would come as no surprise to him.”

  “Excellent,” Dowling smiled back, making a note in his pocket notebook. “I’ll make sure we get this underway as soon as possible. A little over-excitement during the wedding, maybe that could cause a heart problem? And while I’m on that subject of the wedding, may I congratulate you on Christopher? You seem to have taken the place of his real mother, and I am delighted to meet you at last. Quite frankly, I can say now that when I was working in London and told that Christopher would be working with me, I was somewhat dismayed.”

  “Because of his color, you mean?” She sounded slightly shocked.

  Dowling chuckled. “Oh no, because he is American. I’m afraid we British are not always so keen on our American cousins as you would like us to be, and our prejudice is quite often color-blind. But Christopher turned out to be not only a fine mind and a quick learner, but a real gentleman, and a true pleasure to work with. I shall miss his company when he changes jobs.” He briefly explained how Christopher was to take over Virginia’s position.

  “I’m so pleased for him. I more than once very nearly told him he was the son I never had.”

  “He certainly thinks the world of you, Miss Justin.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Dowling.”

  As Dowling closed the hotel door behind her, Miss Justin felt she was living in a dream. She wondered how many other ladies of her age could say they were experiencing such excitement at that time of life.

  Chapter 27: Cordele, Georgia, Confederate States of America

  “Don’t you recognize an old friend?”

  Whatever else anyone said about Georgia, it sure got hot, David Slater thought to himself. Not even the dry heat of the Kansas plains, but a sticky kind of heat, like Florida, where your ribs stuck to your skin, and you sweated from the inside as well as the outside. But as he told himself, the work he was doing was interesting and he was having fun learning about it.

  After the first incident with Lieutenant Spitz, he’d learned to respect Major Weisstal a little more, and eventually to like him. As Weisstal himself had predicted, David had discovered for himself he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Major LeHay had been pleased about this, since it made life a quite a lot easier for him. David discovered that Major Weisstal was a chess player. He wasn’t as good as Brian, which meant that Dav
id beat him almost every time, but he was tricky enough to put up a good fight.

  They played together a lot, talking about the work they were doing, and Major Weisstal took the opportunity to teach David some German. David noticed that the few times that he lost his chess games against Weisstal, he was usually being instructed in some particularly thorny point of German grammar, and suspected that this was Weisstal’s way of trying to level the playing field, but he continued with both the chess games and the German.

  The massive airship shed was taking shape near the new lake produced by damming the Flint River. “Like a cathedral,” said Major Weisstal to David one day as they walked beneath the enormous steel arches, and then had to explain to the Baptist David what a cathedral was and how it felt to be in one. The whole shed was built on an enormous rotating turntable. About fifty slaves would turn the turntable and the shed to align the doors with the prevailing wind, making it easier to move the airship in and out of the shed.

  When an airship arrived or departed, a tall steel latticework tower on wheels would be placed outside the shed, with a complex structure on its top around which the airship would swing as the wind changed. This tower was the mooring mast, to which the airship would be attached when she was outside the shed (David had quickly learned that airships, like their marine counterparts, were often female). Major Weisstal explained that this tower had to be extremely strong, and did some sums on a piece of paper to show to David just how much pressure the wind could exert on a large airship. David couldn’t follow all the math, but he was impressed enough with the result.

  A little less than a mile away from all of this, nearer the new lake, a large collection of tanks and pipes was taking some kind of shape. The Airship Support Regiment hardly ever went near there, and it was being built by a mixture of civilians and a construction regiment together with their slaves, who were camped near their work, and hardly ever went into the town. The German army officers and men rarely visited this place, but their civilian scientists were often there, conferring with their Confederate counterparts. Major LeHay had told David that this was nothing to do with them, and that David’s new task, now that the Support Regiment was up to strength, was to turn over the paperwork to the new NCOs in the regiment, and start training the ground crews.

  From the two Majors, LeHay and Weisstal, David had learned a lot about airships. The idea that something larger than the ship on which he had crossed the Atlantic could float in the air was still fascinating to him, and he was longing for the day when he could actually see one.

  He learned that once an airship was properly balanced, it would float, neither going up nor down. When the airship was in that condition, it was possible to “walk the ship”, with about fifty men guiding the airship by means of ropes attached to the side, rather like a group of children sharing one enormous balloon on fifty strings.

  They would have to be careful not to pull too hard on the ropes, or the airship would be pulled down onto the ground. If that happened and the engines were turning over, which would almost certainly be the case when the ship was about to be launched, and the propeller hit the ground, said Major Weisstal, who’d served in the German Navy’s Airship Squadron in the Great European War before transferring to the post-war Army, the result would be chaos, with fragments of propeller blade flying like high-speed javelins in all directions.

  When this had happened to a German naval airship, he said, the airship had been grounded for almost a month while the engine pod and three gasbags were replaced. And, Major Weisstal added almost as an afterthought, five ground crew as well as three of the airship’s crew had been killed.

  Once out of the shed, the task was to stop the airship from blowing away in the wind, but since the whole of the enormous shed was mounted on a giant turntable, the shed could be turned so that the wind would always be at the airship’s back, or “stern”. On the command “up ship”, the airship would drop a large quantity of water, which would then make the airship lighter than the air in which it was floating, and the ground crew would drop the ropes, which would then later be hauled inside the airship by the airship’s crew. “And don’t forget to let go of the ropes,” Major Weisstal reminded them. He told another story of a ground crew rigger who had wound the rope around his wrist and had been lifted a thousand feet into the air when the airship took off. Happily, the airship crew had been able to haul on the rope and drag him into the cabin, but it had not been easy.

  “How does the airship land?” David had asked.

  When the airship came in to land, Major Weisstal explained, the first thing to do was to drop a metal wire to the ground. This, he went on, was to ground the airship, as it might have built up an electrical charge during its flight, and a spark might fly between the airship and the metal mooring mast, which could set off the hydrogen. Major Weisstal explained this to David, and to Major LeHay, who seemed not to have heard of this technique, and showed how even a small amount of static electricity could produce relatively large sparks, using a bakelite comb rubbed on his woolen uniform.

  “Of course, the danger’s really only there when the ship is filled with hydrogen,” he explained. “With helium-filled ships, there’s no gas to explode, but it’s probably a good idea to discharge the static electricity, anyway.”

  Once the spark had jumped between the ground and the end of the wire, he went on, the airship would drop another, stronger rope from the nose. At the end of this rope was a clip, which was attached to the clip at the end of a similar rope dropped from the top of the mooring mast. Once that had been done, the winch in the mooring mast started to reel in the airship, drawing the nose to the rotating head of the mast. And once docked, a gangway allowed the passengers and crew to step comfortably off the airship onto the ground. In the case of the Cordele mast, a gangway would lead from the airship’s hull into the mast itself, making it easier for the passengers to step on and off the airship.

  Once the airship had been moored and emptied of passengers, the ground crew could walk it into the shed.

  “So, it’s all very simple in theory,” explained Weisstal, “but quite complicated when you actually try to do it. One of the most difficult things to manage is to get everyone to do everything instantly they receive the order. Even one or two seconds can make a big difference to whether the airship launches safely or not. And the other difficult thing you must do is to make sure that everyone hears the orders. That’s not so easy, with an airship’s engines running.”

  “How did you manage in Germany, Major?” asked Colonel Vickers, who was also a part of the conversation.

  “Bugles,” was the surprising answer. “We found that the noise of a bugle was about the only thing that would cut through the noise of the engines. You use bugles in your army, don’t you? I can teach you and some of your buglers the calls we used for our work.”

  David discovered that he wasn’t really musical, or at any rate had no memory for bugle calls, and despaired of being able to control the ground crew.

  “No, David,” explained Weisstal (David had long ago ceased to be ‘Sergeant’ to his chess partner). “The ‘Stand fast’ call is ‘ta-taaa-ta-ta’. The ‘Up ship’ call goes ‘ta-ta-ta-taaa’, like Beethoven’s Fifth.”

  “Beethoven, sir? Who’s that?”

  “Oh dear,” sighed Weisstal, and muttered something in German that was probably a comment on the lack of general artistic culture in the Confederacy.

  David felt dumb, and said so.

  “No, I don’t think you’re dumb,” replied Weisstal. “If you were dumb, you wouldn’t be as good at your German as you are, and you wouldn’t be able to play chess, let alone win all the time. Let me hear you sing something.”

  David sang a few lines of “The Old Rugged Cross”, and Major Weisstal winced.

  “I’m afraid, David, that you’re going to have to accept the fact that you have no voice for singing or ear for music. But that doesn’t stop you from having many other fine gifts, so cheer up.” />
  The airship handling crew continued drilling, feeling particularly ridiculous as they marched around with a large wooden frame on wheels to the top of which ropes were attached, listening to bugle calls, and trying to work in unison.

  Major Weisstal occasionally dropped by and offered constructive criticism. “You’re all doing very well,” he told David one day. “Since none of you has ever seen an airship, it’s extremely impressive to see you all so well-trained. I really don’t have any worries about your team’s ability to look over the Bismarck when she comes over.”

  “The Bismarck, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s what the airship’s just been named. Know anything about Bismarck?” David shook his head, so Major Weisstal told him about the way in which a number of small German countries had been joined together to become a great world power.

  “Kind of the opposite way round to America, then, sir?”