by James Philip
In Madrid every wall had ears; little went unnoticed, unremarked and the gossip mill was brutal. It was an archaic city in a country which had never emerged from its glorious, lost past, and women were expected to conform to a rigid straightjacket of conventions that no self-respecting woman anywhere in the British Empire would put up with for a single minute.
That said, she had always known that Alonso was the sort of man who treated one rebuff as grist to the mill, and that there would surely be a second attempted seduction, probably sooner rather than later. It was that delicious thought which had, without being crass, done a lot to keep the smile on her face in recent weeks. Obviously, she was a little guilty about that; Henrietta was very precious to her and, she suspected, despite her friend’s brave face, always being under scrutiny, spied upon had been an even greater trial for her. Especially lately, as their time in Spain drew to a conclusion.
Servants materialised out of the shadows and the aromatic red wine of the district was poured into exquisitely fluted crystal glasses.
“This little one is produced with grapes from my family’s own vineyards,” Alonso remarked with no little pride, raising his glass.
Melody Danson sipped and exchanged a glance with Henrietta De L’Isle.
Sir John Tremayne, KCB, the British co-chairman of the Joint Commission of Inquiry, an urbane career diplomat-spy who was something very senior in the Foreign and Colonial Office’s Intelligence Service, had sternly abjured both women to be ‘on their guard every minute of every day’ they were in Chinchón.
He had not been amused when Melody had informed – as opposed to reported - to him that she and Henrietta had accepted an invitation to stay at the Hacienda de los Conquistadores for ten days immediately before they were scheduled to begin their overland journey to Portugal where, at Lisbon, they were due to catch an Empire Flying Boat back to Southampton on the 23rd March. Hopefully, they would not be detained overlong in London, or wherever they were to be debriefed, and they would be back in New England for the spring, a prospect which hugely bolstered both women’s spirits much to Sir John Tremayne’s irritation.
‘Medina Sidonia is a slippery fish!’ He had observed. “Dammit, by the time you go home the whole Royal Court will assume that either, more likely, both of you, are the bloody man’s mistresses!”
‘Perhaps,’ Melody had suggested, ‘if one, or both of us was Alonso’s mistress, it might not actually be a bad idea? Pillow talk, and all that?”
The old man had been horrified but then for somebody who was supposed to be an arch professional in the dark arts of international intrigue he had seemed, from the outset, to Melody at least, to be rather a ‘choir boy’.
She and Henrietta had been painstakingly discreet about their ‘friendship’ back in England and even more so, here in Spain but Melody guessed that Alonso had seen through their act practically from the beginning in exactly the way she had seen through him the day they met.
Melody looked to their host, smiling thinly as she met his gaze and saw the question quirking in his eyes.
“Did you bring us out here to blackmail us, Alonso?” She inquired in casually accented precise Castilian.
The man raised an eyebrow, thought about it.
“Where would be the profit in that, dear lady?”
Melody waited, some sixth sense telling her that she had read the runes correctly. Thus far, the mission to supposedly unravel the conspiracy – allegedly fomented by extremists on the Island of Santo Domingo – to murder the King of England and to ‘set the First Thirteen’ colonies ablaze from end to end had got precisely nowhere. The Intelligence Service of New Spain, the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España had obfuscated and basically, offered no meaningful co-operation whatsoever to the Commission’s inquiries, appeals to the Royal Court had been politely deflected and the various organs of the Inquisition based in the Iberian Peninsula had refused point blank to engage with the ‘heretics’, other than to have the ‘British’ members of the Commission of Inquiry followed wherever they went.
But then the mission had not been sent to Spain to find out what was, or might be going on – the only people who knew that were probably in Cuba or Santo Domingo – but to make it look as if something was being done because both sides were still of the view that tempers in New England needed to be kept in check, and that nobody in their right mind in Europe actually wanted to give those idiots in the Caribbean an excuse to start a new war.
Melody took another sip of her wine.
It was smooth, seductive like the man sitting between her and Henrietta on the veranda above the lights of the picturesque old town hidden away in the hills.
Back in Philadelphia Alonso had tended to make a be-line for the Governor’s daughter whenever he spied her at an official reception. They had become friends of a sort; nowadays, Henrietta mistrusted the man, feeling rightly that he had in some way been using her.
“I don’t know,” Melody confessed, allowing herself a coy smile. “Sooner or later our governments are going to decide that ‘the Commission’ has served its purpose, an anodyne report will get written and promptly buried, and we’ll be back at square one again. So, the next thing might, logically, be for each side to start discrediting the messengers rather than the bad actors who are actually responsible for the mess we’re in?”
The man pursed his lips.
“Just so,” he sighed. “But that is not why I invited you to Chinchón. Yes, I freely admit that seduction is never far from my mind, especially in the company of two such intelligent, beautiful women,” he raised a hand in self-deprecatory acknowledgement, ‘the spirit is one thing, the flesh is weak and as our noble inquisitors remind us temptation is always nearer than we care to imagine. Nevertheless, my motives were, and are, as political as they were personal. Yes, this ‘process’ will soon fail. Yes, we will soon be back at square one, regrettably with daggers drawn again. However, while there is very little that we can do about that at present, there is always hope when one knows that one has friends in the enemy camp.”
Henrietta De L’Isle opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it.
“You see,” the man continued, wryly sad for a moment, “the lesson of history is that wars start because people stop talking to each other. Oh, they talk but not to each other, but at each other. It is only when the shooting starts that people usually start talking to each other again and by then it is usually too late. I fear for my country if there is a war with the British Empire. Mostly, I fear for New England and Nuevo Granada; no matter how imperfect the peace in the border lands of the American south west, it will surely be the crucible of the coming war. If the Emperor could give away Cuba and Santo Domingo now, he would.” He shook his head. “Anguilla, too,” he added laconically, “and all those other stupid little islands that spawn so many infernal plots and coups in the Caribbean and back here in Morocco and on the mainland.”
“You speak as if war was inevitable, Alonso?” Henrietta interjected.
“Likely, not inevitable,” he replied gently.
“Melody and I are just two women. Window dressing here in Spain,” the Governor of New England’s youngest daughter objected. “How can we possibly influence things?”
The Spaniard drained his glass and waved for it to be refilled.
Presently, he answered Henrietta’s question.
“When you are recalled to England, or to wherever your fates take you, you,” he declared softly, fixing Henrietta in his grey-brown stare, “will still be the remarkably accomplished daughter of a very powerful man.” He turned his gaze towards Melody: “And you, dear lady, one day soon, will probably be the Head of the Colonial Security Service…”
“Rubbish!” Melody retorted in English.
“Is it? Lady De L’Isle’s father, an implacably honourable man has stood by Brigadier Harrison thus far – in my country he would have thrown him in prison by now – but sooner or later the branch upon which Señor Harrison sits will bend
so far it must break…”
Melody shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“There will be a call for a replacement acceptable to a majority of the First Thirteen’s Governors,” her host continued, a note of subtle apology underlying his words, “the appointment of a woman would reassure all the colonies that the CSS’s wings have been sufficiently clipped. Honestly and truly,” Alonso said, with no little sympathy, “if you did not already exist, Lady De L’Isle’s father would have to invent you, Señora Danson.”
A servant tried to top up Melody’s glass; but needing more than ever to keep her wits about her, she signalled for it to be left half-empty.
“You make a lot of assumptions, Don Alonso,” she observed tartly.
The Spaniard shrugged.
“Yes, but think of the possibilities if you were Head of the CSS and I was, say, the master of the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España…”
Henrietta was shifting uncomfortably in her chair.
“Should I really be listening to this?”
“Oh, yes,” the man chuckled. “We are, after all, just three friends, private citizens passing the time of day together before we dine. There is nothing sinister going on here.” He hesitated. “Well, I suppose if this conversation became generally known to certain officers of the Inquisition, I could end up a slave in the Indies, or worse but I don’t think that is likely. Our small talk becoming generally known, I mean.”
Melody said nothing because she understood that the man had just placed his life in her hands.
Chapter 3
Friday 10th March
Anson Road, Royal Navy Norfolk, Virginia
Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln, RNASR – Royal Naval Air Service (Reserve) - had kissed his one-year old son’s head and hugged, and smooched like the world was going to end with his wife before, with aching reluctance, he had torn himself away and jumped into the waiting car outside the neat married quarters on Anson Road.
He and Kate had talked about how they would cope with separation, reassured each other, coupled last night as if it was for the last time. Since they had ‘properly’ begun their married life together on Leppe Island some twenty months ago, they had never, ever been completely apart and it scared them both.
This parting was bad enough, scheduled to last a week or perhaps up to ten days at most. Then they would be reunited, for a few days or so, before Abe’s ship steamed away for a four to six-month attachment to the West Indies Squadron.
Abe tried not to mope about things; Kate was stoic in the way of her people. Stoicism was written into the soul of the native peoples of the Americas, a thing unlearned by most Europeans long before they colonised the New World all those centuries ago. The fact that Kate was approximately two months pregnant with their second child made parting even harder; that summer he was likely to be away while his wife’s belly swelled and if fate so conspired, he might not even be back in Virginia in time to welcome his new offspring into the world.
Their son, Kariwase – a new way of doing things in Kanien'keháka – had been delivered into life by the Iroquois mothers of the Kempton community in Ontario while he watched on, his white man’s medical learning treated as an unnecessary encumbrance. Although he would have stepped in if the need had arisen it had not and that was a mercy, for Kate had wanted their son born the way nature had decreed for unknown thousands of generations before her.
There was the normal desultory Getrennte Entwicklung separate development crowd hanging around the main gates to Royal Navy Norfolk, protesting about the one wholly multi-racial, and horror of horror, ‘integrated’ exemplar, in New England.
Namely, the Royal Navy.
Abe’s driver, Sub-Lieutenant Robert Edward ‘Ted’ Forest, a blond, stocky man a year or so his junior who was still relatively new to the First Thirteen invariably shook his head and whistled a little sadly whenever he encountered ‘religious nuts’. But then ‘newbies’ from the Old Country, these days a veritable mixing pot of humanity inter-mingled from all over the Empire, tended to be colour blind if not always very good at veiling their innate sense of moral superiority.
However, Abe was a practical man; one out of two was a good start.
The Englishman had doffed his cap, half-bowed and treated Kate like an exotic princess the first time he had called at the Lincoln household. Ted Forest had reduced Kate to tears of mirth attempting to correctly pronounce her Mohawk name, Tekonwenaharake, and been absolutely fascinated by his hosts’ stories of life in the wilds of the Mohawk Valley.
That had been shortly after the Registrar of the Commonwealth of Virginia had granted the deed excising the name ‘Fielding’ from all official documentation.
Just so as to tidy up any possible loose ends, Abe and Kate had since had their marriage blessed anew – as Mr and Mrs Abraham Lincoln – in the Anglican Chapel at the base.
Ted Forest had been posted to HMS Achilles as the senior of the three Navigator-Observer-Air Gunners – the other two men were rated as Petty Officers - attached to the light cruiser’s twelve-man Flight Division, responsible for operating the ship’s two Southampton Flying Boat Corporation Sea Fox seaplanes. At the same time Abe had begun his familiarisation with the ‘type’ – with Ted in the ‘back seat’ - at the nearby Virginia Beach Royal Naval Air Station.
The two men had hit it off from the start.
‘How come a bally doctor is flying kites in the RNAS?’ Ted had asked within minutes of their first meeting.
‘It’s a long story.’
He had told that story over a beer in the Mess at Virginia Beach.
‘I was inducted straight into the Royal Naval Medical Service as soon as I got here. I assumed I’d be a junior houseman, or the Navy equivalent, for my time on shore. Anyway, as I understand it, somebody in the Personnel Section here at Norfolk saw that I was a qualified pilot with several hundred hours under my belt and the next thing I knew, I was hauled in front of a selection panel at twenty-four hours’ notice. The next day I discovered I was in the RNAS!’
Coincidentally, given that by then it had been determined that he would be posted to the Achilles, an older ship whose crew spaces had been progressively shrunk over the years by the need to incorporate more and more space-consuming modern weaponry and equipment, combining the posts of assistant surgeon and second-in-command of the ship’s Flight Division saved ‘a scarce berth’, and was therefore, an ad hoc accommodation entirely acceptable to the cruiser’s captain.
‘Apparently, that was also a major consideration,’ Abe had joked, having discovered that Achilles’s commanding officer was none other than the senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet, the Honourable Francis Stanley Jackson. Jackson’s father had been Achilles first captain back in 1949; now the son was ending his career on the valiant old ship. The Royal Navy liked to square circles, to arrange things to be as balanced and ship-shape as possible.
During her forthcoming commission in the Caribbean the Achilles would be the senior ship on station, the flagship of the Jamaican, Windward and Leeward Flotillas. Flying his Commodore’s Pennant would be a fitting way for a distinguished officer like Francis Jackson to bookend his career. From the outset, Abe had realised that the Navy like to do things ‘the right way’.
It took about an hour to sign off all the paperwork required to fly Serial RN937-3 – a Mark IV all-metal monocoque fuselage construction with stressed-aluminium surfaced wings SFBC Sea Fox seaplane – out of the charge of No 823 Royal Naval Air (Operational Training) Squadron.
This achieved, the two officers quickly mounted up, fired up the seaplane’s Preston Rapier seven-hundred horsepower liquid-cooled V-8 engine and after a cautiously overlong run across the water took to the air for the forty-mile flight north-east to rendevouz with the Achilles.
Despite the season it was a clear, almost windless day.
The Sea Fox was typical of the seaplane types in the RNAS’s inventory. It was a good, sturdy, reliable machine but aging, b
orderline obsolete, relatively slow with a maximum level-flight speed of around one-hundred and fifty knots and capable of carrying only a clutch of three or four two-hundred-pound bombs. There was a wheeled and a float plane version of the aircraft; the former had a forward-firing 0.5-inch belt-fed machine gun, the model Abe was flying today only had a single 0.303-inch calibre Mark IV Enfield Small Arms Factory patent drum-fed machine gun operated by the occupant of the second, rear cockpit, otherwise the Sea Fox was defenceless.
The aircraft was a throwback to before the age when big ships had all-seeing electronic marvels like ELDAR; before in fact, the original small experimental aircraft carriers – the forerunners of the giants now coming into service - were even twinkles in naval architects’ eyes.
Tellingly, no ship built in the last fifteen years incorporated hangars, catapults, or any provision for carrying on board aerial reconnaissance aircraft. It was only the old ships in the Fleet, like the last surviving 1950s trade route protection cruisers and several of the more venerable big gun capital ships of the battle line that carried any kind of air arm. Once upon a time even the heftier fleet destroyers would have carried a flimsy float plane, an early death trap version of the Sea Fox or the Bristol VIIs Abe had flown in Canada.
Abe heard his navigator’s voice in his ear.
The intercom on a Sea Fox was a rudimentary bundle of brittle cables still operated by crude switches inconveniently placed by the crew members’ knees low in the cockpits.