by James Philip
‘What the bloody Hell were you playing at?’ He had demanded of Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln, RNASR, whom rightly, he considered to be the primary malefactor. ‘You came within a whisker of getting yourselves, and God only knows how many of your crewmates killed and badly damaging the bloody ship!’
By then Abe seriously doubted he could possibly feel any more wretched.
He had been convinced the diving Sea Fox was going to pile into the deck somewhere aft of the funnel, probably on top of the ship’s second sea plane, stowed at the time on the midships catapult. Hauling back on the stick and closing his eyes had been the only thing he could do. Nobody had been more surprised than him – Ted Forest apart, that is – when at the last second the aircraft had, with a gut-wrenching protest that very nearly tore off the wings somehow…missed the ship.
In fact, technically the Sea Fox had not actually ‘missed’ Achilles; the small rudder of her port float had struck the top of the funnel and the aircraft had carved through two thin radio cables before, on the verge of a stall it had…missed.
Instantly, Abe had pushed the stick forward before the machine plummeted into the grey North Atlantic like a stone. Clipping the crest of a wave the Sea Fox had struggled into the air and miraculously…survived.
Understandably, the Achilles’s Executive Officer had been in a mood to have the two ‘maniac flyers’ keel-hauled.
Abe knew exactly what he had done wrong.
‘It is my fault entirely, sir. Ted, I mean, Sub-Lieutenant Forest was literally just a passenger,’ he had said blankly, staring to his front not daring to meet Peter Cowdrey-Singh’s blazing stare. ‘They warned us about ‘target fixation’ at Virginia Beach but the training regime on shore was never as intense as that moment…half-an-hour ago. I got so wrapped up holding the deck in my sights that I forgot everything else I had been taught, sir!’
Now, Abe was standing in front of Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson. Unnervingly, the magnificently piratical, greying man in his late fifties, the younger man concluded, ought to have been an awful lot angrier than he seemed to be that morning.
“Who told you to attack the ship the way you did that second time, young man?” The senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet inquired, deciding he had allowed the young man before him to ‘stew’ long enough.
“Sir?” Abe blurted, not sure if he had heard his captain correctly.
“You made a minor, very understandable hash of your first attack but then you altered your tactics and – had we been in a real battle – you might very well have dropped a clutch of bombs down my bloody funnel,” Jackson complained laconically.
Abe scrambled to recollect his thought processes on the day he had almost got himself killed.
“In the first attack I misjudged the aircraft’s manoeuvrability in the dive – they never allow us to ‘go in that deep’ in training – and I suppose, the speed of the Achilles’s turn. Again, I’d never flown anywhere near a ship operating at flank, or top speed, sir.”
Captain Jackson was listening indulgently.
The two men were alone in Jackson’s big stateroom near the cruiser’s stern. Achilles had been built as a ‘flagship’ but only rarely employed in that role and ‘officer country’ was unusually spacious as a result even though part of it had been modified to accommodate the Petty Officers’ Mess some years ago.
It was Abe’s understanding that when a man stood before a Captain’s Table to be disciplined for his egregious offences there were numerous other interested parties in the room. Like, for example, the Executive Officer, his own Divisional Commander, and customarily, the Captain’s Secretary minuting proceedings.
However, that morning he was alone with the great man.
“But you got it right the second time?” The older man ruminated. “Granted, by very nearly crashing into MY ship!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry about that, sir.”
Captain Jackson grunted softly, shook his head.
“You commenced your dive before the ship began to turn. Was that a lucky guess?”
“Yes and no, sir. I don’t have much, any real experience of these things but I guessed the ship’s first ‘jink’ was probably just the rudder going over a few degrees, then I saw the port screws going astern. After that it was just a matter of following the ship deep enough into the dive to be sure of a hit…before pulling up, obviously, sir.”
“Um…”
Abe swallowed, his mouth aridly dry.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“I know hanging back that way would have got Ted and me shot down in a real battle but if it was ‘for real’, I’d have hung back farther away or farther astern where the medium AA cannons and the three-inch auto-cannons are blocked by the aft deckhouse. Obviously, anybody who tried to attack the ship in an old Sea Fox would be on a hiding to nothing…”
Abe realised he was getting carried away.
“In any case, I reckon that in a real fight there would be several aircraft attacking at once, splitting the ship’s fire, sir.”
The older man was a little…amused.
“Do you apply this same grasp of logical complexity to your work as a healer, Lieutenant Lincoln?”
Even though he was still standing rigidly to attention Abe involuntarily shrugged.
“I like to think that I am always working to be the best physician, the best flyer, and,” he hesitated, “the best husband and father that I can be, sir.”
Francis Jackson studied the tall, handsome dark-haired young man before him. He had had his doubts about having such a ‘celebrity’ aboard his ship, wondering whether a man with such a colourful recent history could ever really fit into the closely-knit, generally happy crew he had nurtured in his eighteen months in command of the old trade route cruiser. The jury was still out on that one; in the meantime, the young man had contrived to make himself something of a ship’s talisman and he was not about to take him to task for obeying his mantra of ‘train for war to fight a war’ to heart.
Nevertheless, something told Jackson that sooner or later, Surgeon Lieutenant Lincoln was going to outgrow this ‘little’ ship.
“May I speak my mind, sir?” Abe asked on an impulse, his thoughts roiling. Two days ago, the hunter in his soul, demons in the very blood coursing through his veins, had caught him unawares.
“Yes.”
“I learned two things the other day. One, that I was nowhere near as good a pilot as I believed I was…”
“And the other thing?”
“That if, even in a slow old Sea Fox if I had wanted to dive straight into the deck of the Achilles, I don’t think there was a single thing anybody on board could have done to stop me, sir.”
“My, my,” Captain Jackson guffawed ruefully. “Well, watching from the bridge I was convinced that you were going to do exactly that,” he confessed, “right up to the moment you…didn’t!”
“Sorry, sir.”
The older man nodded and briefly his expression turned severe.
“Well, Mr Cowdrey-Singh has given you a piece of his mind. As has your Divisional Commander. To your credit you have taken full responsibility for your reckless conduct. This will be noted on your papers but otherwise I am content to consider the matter closed. That is all Lieutenant, you may resume your normal duties.”
Abe had been reconciled to being disciplined, and feared being denied shore leave when Achilles returned to Norfolk to complete her final preparations for her forthcoming Caribbean cruise. He had taken it as read that he would be grounded, at least for a token period and taken solace from the fact this would allow him to become more involved in the routine work of the ship’s Medical Department.
Ted Forest was loitering with intent in the passageway outside the Captain’s Cabin.
“Well, what’s the bad news, Abe?” He demanded anxiously.
“Er, there isn’t any.”
“Seriously?”
Abe nodded, still in a daze.
His friend s
lapped him on the back.
“If you weren’t a blasted teetotaller, I’d stand you a pink Gin!”
“I’m not a teetotaller,” Abe protested feebly, allowing the shorter man to take his arm and guide him up the steps to the quarter deck. He drank the occasional beer, it was simply that he did not like the taste, or the effect alcoholic drink had on him and he never had. He suspected part of it might be to do with the toll he had seen drink take on his brothers and sisters of the Mohawk Nation. Nonetheless, he had never been one of those inflexible, pedantic abstainers. He began to collect his wits. “Another time, perhaps,” he suggested.
The two men stood at the rail.
Achilles was slicing through the coastal chop at a sedate nine knots streaming minesweeping paravanes to starboard and port in her wake. The idea was to cut the cables of bottom anchored mines and for sharpshooters to detonate them when the bombs bobbed to the surface.
Realistically, nobody could imagine anybody in this day and age would actually order a cruiser to clear a minefield, that sort of stuff had gone out of the porthole with the development of sophisticated magnetic and electronic activated ‘field sensor’ mines in the 1950s which exploded only when a ship steamed over, or within killing range of one of the infernal devices. Nevertheless, since the Royal Navy had seen fit not to remove the offending ‘minesweeping’ equipment Achilles was duty-bound to employ it, like all her other weaponry, with the utmost unction and this required regular drills.
“I almost got you killed the other day,” Abe said dully.
“But you didn’t, old man.”
“I’m sorry, that’s all.”
Ted Forest chuckled: “Worse things happen at sea, isn’t that what they say.” Another chuckle. “The next time I’ll know to give you a jolly good kick up the backside!”
Unaccountably, Abe’s mal-de-mere began to lift.
In the middle distance the watch bell tolled.
“I need to report to the sick bay,” Abe decided, straightening. He smiled tight-lipped at his friend. “Thanks, Ted.”
“For what?”
Abe did not know what to say to this.
“Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”
The Son of the Hunter patted Ted Forest’s arm and headed forward to report the outcome of his interview with the Old Man to Achilles’s Surgeon, forty-seven-year-old Bostonian, Commander Michael Powell Flynn.
Flynn outranked Abe’s other Divisional Commander, who was just a lieutenant like the much younger man, only with several years more seniority, and was therefore his ‘boss’ on board the cruiser.
Achilles’s Wardroom very nearly reflected the multi-national mix of the rest of the cruiser’s crew, albeit with a slightly lower representation of the coloured faces below decks. On a ship with an Indian Executive Officer, a half-Red Indian assistant surgeon-cum-seaplane flyer gave rise to precisely no comment whatsoever.
Michael Flynn was an Irish New Englander, other officers were from Australasia, the Caribbean, Africa, the ship’s Navigator was a second-generation Nigerian emigrant to the British Isles, the Engineering Officer the grandson of a lascar steward on one of the last sailing clippers carrying tea and cotton from the Indies back to the Old World. Truly, if England had become the melting pot of the Empire then the Royal Navy had become one of its primary global ‘mixing’ pots.
Which of course, was why so many Navy men found the aberration of the Getrennte Entwicklung movement in the First Thirteen, and increasingly in Maine and Vermont - two colonies who had considered themselves to be members of the ‘First Fifteen’ for the last century-and-a-half, although even now they were still looked down upon by the ‘originals’ - so incomprehensibly bizarre.
Especially, since it was exactly that special sense of family, of belonging to something that was so profoundly greater than the mere sum of its parts which was the real, unquenchable strength of the Senior Service.
Michael Flynn heard out Abe in wry silence.
“Dammit,” he complained when Abe finished, “I was hoping you’d at least be confined to the blasted ship, so I could hand off the next two weeks’ sick parades to you!”
Chapter 7
Thursday 16th March
Plaza Mayor, Chinchón, Comarca de Las Vegas
The two women had stayed on in Chinchón when their host, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, had been unexpectedly called back to Madrid on Monday evening. Escorted by a pair of Ducal arms men and with their every need assiduously catered for by the devoted household of the Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle had, after tearfully making their peace, determined to make the very best of their little ‘holiday’ away from the stifling tedium of the last few months.
‘My Queen demands my presence at Aranjuez,’ Alonso had apologised, giving every appearance of being utterly mortified to leave them.
He had assured his guests that as the Royal Palace of Aranjuez was no more than a dozen miles as the crow flies – although twice that distance by road through the mountains – he hoped to return soon, or at intervals during the ‘balance of your stay in my humble house’.
Queen Sophia kept her court some thirty miles from where her husband, the King-Emperor ruled, either from the fortress-like many times rebuilt Alcazar, or as it was more commonly known, the Royal Palace of Madrid, or from his Monasterio y Sitio de El Escorial en Madrid, the El Escorial Palace near the town of San Lorenzo another thirty miles north west of the capital.
One thing Melody had learned since she had returned to Spain the previous year was that the two Royal Courts were rarely in step, the one often frustrating the will of the other in a ludicrous, Ruritanian farce that many foreign diplomats had condemned as ‘an accident waiting to happen’ for much of the last decade. The miracle was that the Queen somehow contrived to regularly produce additional princes and princesses – five to date - all of whom Ferdinand had acknowledged, and apparently, for they were seen in public very rarely, tended to actually look a little like him – long of jaw and wide-eyed – despite the fact he and his wife seemed to be constantly at odds over, well, practically everything.
Melody had questioned Alonso on this more than once, including on the day after their coupling.
He had been maddeningly vague.
‘In your country, New England and in the British Isles there is a certain constructive tension between opposing political parties and organs of your governmental institutions – for example, between the Houses of Commons and of the Lords in Whitehall, and between the Office of the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England and the various colonial administrations and their internal legislative councils – which you elect to call a system of checks and balances. Here in Spain and throughout the Empire there is no similar separation of the judiciary from the executive branches of the Imperial Government. That would be impossible given the existence and nature of the various organs of the Inquisition, and the fact of infallible sovereign rule by the King-Emperor. However, that does not mean that the Monarchy, the Church or anybody else is actually in control of all things. Regional governors have great power and factions within both Royal Courts are supreme in some things, weak in others. Of course, a cynic might say that the checks and balances in the Spanish system are, like those in the British Empire, in reality closely related to who holds the real power rather than they are to any fig leaf of democracy, the fiction of a supposedly independent judiciary, or the primacy of Parliament.’
Melody had not been ready to concede that the democratic principles which had, and were continually trickling down through the fabric of the British Empire, bore any comparison with the dictatorial, theocratic chaos of its Spanish counterpart.
In fact, this was a point she had made at length and with no little indignation. Her host, and lover, had clearly found the entire debate…immensely stimulating.
‘In any event, our system,’ the man had concluded, smiling one of those smiles that had very nearly charmed her knick
ers off, again, ‘requires that the wheels of governance be oiled, lubricated in a different fashion. Which is where neutral go-betweens, emissaries, legates, call us what you will, who are respected by all the parties, come in. Presently, I serve Her Majesty, one day I might serve the King-Emperor, or even the colleges of Cardinals in Seville and Toledo. We live in strange and interesting times, do we not?’
Discreetly overseen by their ever-present minders – large men dressed in the green and grey of the Medina Sidonia family – Melody and Henrietta had explored the fascinating old-world charms of Chinchón, visited vineyards and wineries on the Plain of Tajuña, and shamelessly gorged themselves on the fresh breads, cheeses, olives and cold, preserved meats of the district.
They had been a little surprised to discover that they were by no means the only ‘outsiders’ in the town. There were visitors from France and Germany, several people from England, adventurous travellers brought to the wilds of the Mountains of Madrid in search of a traditional world that was fast disappearing elsewhere in Western Europe. Unlike Melody and Henrietta, the ‘foreigners’ they encountered were careless of the alleged watchfulness of the Inquisition, and thoroughly disinterested in the medieval, positively Byzantine politics of the Spanish Empire. Instead, they were bewitched by the atmosphere and tranquility of the rural landscapes through which they moved, far removed from the hustle, bustle, noise and complexity of their lives ‘back home’.
The two women were happy to pass themselves off as fellow travellers, tourists subtly absorbing the endless contradictions of the country around them.
Most Englishmen and women, and New Englanders – if they thought about it at all – assumed that the average Spaniard lived in constant fear of the Inquisition in a society under the unrelenting merciless heel of the Catholic Church. Which, of course, was a nonsense. The majority of Spaniards were in any case religiously – Catholically, obviously – unquestioningly devout and far from viewing the Church as a burden on their backs, took immense succour and no little joy in their faith. Given that Spanish society was still over fifty percent agrarian, in most places the Church was invariably as much a welfare as a spiritual overseer; local priests, the monks and the nuns of a plethora of ancient religious orders and houses ran the hospitals, organised the soup kitchens when crops failed and lobbied local, district and national civil authorities to relieve hardships and to fearlessly appeal against injustices both large and small.