by James Philip
“Follow me,” Don Rafael commanded. “Whatever happens, stay close to me!”
The women trotted after him, down to the ground floor of the hacienda and thence to the wine cellars. There were other Arms Men, all brandishing cutlass-like swords or old-fashioned six-shooter revolvers.
Breathing heavily the party burst out into a narrow alleyway behind the Ducal residence.
Henrietta could already feel her feet rubbing, blistering in the ill-fitting, painful boots but right then none of that mattered. She was running – she knew not why or to where – for her life and the only thing that stopped her completely going to pieces was Melody’s hand in hers and the broad back of the old, sword-wielding man leading them through the warren of the ancient town’s medieval streets in the now pre-dawn greyness.
Behind them the rattle of gunfire seemed unbroken.
Fires had been lit, buildings were burning, their flickering glow periodically lighting their way along cobbled, twisting alleys. More than once Henrietta felt herself falling, tumbling to her knees, and being picked up as if she was a rag doll and impelled forward. Even in the cool of the morning she was sweating heavily, her hair plastered to her face and every breath came in ragged, lung-hurting gasps.
They halted, leaning against a low wall on the edge of the town. At their back the whole of Chinchón was an angry hornet nest, a battlefield.
“What?” Melody demanded breathlessly. “What is going on, Don Rafael?”
The old man motioned for the women to get down below the level of the top of the wall, lowered himself onto his haunches and viewed them with rheumy, oddly untroubled eyes.
“The world has gone mad,” he said sadly. “As my master, the Duke, warned me it might when he was summoned to Aranjuez.” He coughed, took unhurried looks to his left and his right, like the old soldier he was, making absolutely sure that his men were in the right place. “It is too dangerous to take you back to Madrid, or to any place where the rebels might respect diplomatic soil. So, I must take you to sanctuary until plans can be laid to smuggle you safely out of Spain.”
Melody detected the shame accenting every word the proud Castilian knight said.
“You must trust me, My Ladies,” the man concluded. “You are under the protection of my Duke. You have my word as a gentleman and an Arms Man of the House of Medina Sidonia that no man will lay his hand upon you while I and my men live.”
Chapter 10
Saturday 18th March
Île de la Cité, Paris
Albert Stanton had felt a little creased and travel-weary last night when he had finally arrived in the ‘City of Peace’. When he was a boy the text books had called the French capital the ‘City of Peace and Reconciliation’ but that latter appellation had been quietly dropped over the last twenty years. It was as if the politicians and diplomats had known all along a thing the rest of civilisation had not. The flight across the Atlantic had seemed to last an eternity despite the normal following winds, with interminable delays at each stop for fuel in Nova Scotia and Belfast Loch and then, when the CEREBUS – one of the oldest flying boats in the Imperial Airways fleet – had finally touched down on Southampton Water he had had to wait six hours for the next ferry to Le Havre.
That said, it would have been churlish to have complained overmuch about his first-class, luxurious no expenses spared journey paid for out of the fat wallet of the Versailles Studio Collective. His hosts and ardent suitors for the film rights of Abe and Kate’s story, planned to send him back to New England in a week or so on the flagship of the Blue Star Line, the year-old sixty thousand ton, thousand feet long leviathan Titanic.
In an upper deck penthouse with his own team of stewards, would you believe? Mr and Mrs Stanton’s little boy had, it seemed, made the big time!
That he had arrived in Paris a little bit emotionally conflicted had not been anticipated; that was not at all like him. Having built his career upon his ability to keep his eye unerringly on the ball he had to admit that the last few months had been more than a tad…distracting. And as for his brilliant career, well, that had really only taken off after the acquittal of the Fielding brothers last August. And then only because he had happened to have flown with Alex on the morning of that fateful day in July two years ago. In retrospect, everything had flowed from that – at the time – middlingly unremarkable flight.
Leonora Coolidge had courted him, journalistically, after he wrote a sympathetic article about the unjust fate of women like her who had been swept up in the New York Constabulary dragnet in the weeks following the atrocities in Brooklyn and the Upper Bay. Later, he and Alex had hit it off, just a random thing, the first time they met after his release from prison; and the connection with Abe and Kate had flowed from that because Abe trusted and basically, liked his older half-brother.
Looking back, it had been Kate who had really given him the theme for the feature he had published in the Manhattan Globe that had so caught the public imagination, and swiftly attracted an unstoppable avalanche of interest in New England, and, it now seemed, practically everywhere that the map was painted Imperial Pink!
People ran away with the idea that Kate was some kind of latter-day Pocahontas. She was nothing of the sort yet in her down to earth practicality, stoicism and devotion to her husband and son she had somehow ceased to be ‘a squaw’ – he loathed that term – adrift in the ‘white’ world of the First Thirteen and become a kind of ‘every-woman’ with whom few New England housewives could fail to identify. Kate herself, did not think she was in any way remarkable, or any different from other women. She had spoken of her love for her husband – they had been childhood sweethearts and teenage lovers, married under tribal law before they were twenty, a secret Abe had kept from his family for nearly four years – their life together and their hopes for the future with a simple frankness which spoke straight from the page of the first draft of ‘Abe and Kate’, the working title for what was promising to be the English language publishing sensation of 1978.
Abe and Kate – Stanton did not think for a moment that would be the actual title by the time the interminable haggling with publishers was concluded – was already well on the way to burying the now fading notoriety of that other bestseller, Two Hundred Lost Years.
And it might not even be published for another six months!
Perversely, now that he was finally in Paris – a city he had always wanted to visit – a part of him wanted to be on the boat home as soon as possible.
Maud Daventry-Jones had been hanging, literally hanging, on his arm by the end of that soiree at Castle Dore, the great bastion of the Coolidge dynasty in the Shinnecock Hills of Long Island.
She had been hanging on his arm and he had felt like he was eight feet tall!
A dinner at the Ritz in Manhattan the evening before he boarded the CEREBUS for the journey across ‘the pond’ had flown by in a blur and in retrospect he could not make up his mind who had been more fascinated, utterly infatuated with whom. With any other girl that meal might have concluded with a steamy night in an impetuously booked hotel room, or perhaps, in his cramped Brooklyn apartment.
That was a thought which had not even occurred to him until much later, lying awake in the dark trying to make sense of his feelings, having kissed his date goodnight on the steps of the Ritz before putting her in a taxi back to her West Side studio overlooking the Hudson River.
He had bent his face to hers, intending to respectfully peck her cheek. She had shyly raised her mouth to meet his. Just for a fleeting second and then…bizarrely he was recollecting, he knew not why, a meeting with Melody Danson – heck, she was a one off! – when they had both agreed that they were not each other’s ‘type’. There was absolutely nothing about Maud that was not ‘his type’ and it was pretty clear that she felt the same way about him. The serendipity of it all left him stunned. And right now, he was a little home sick, out of sorts in a strange city a long way from the only woman in the world he had ever loved…
/> Yet it had not even occurred to him to ‘take liberties’ with Maud the other night because she was just so much better than that. She deserved more, only the best and he could not help but wonder if he was, in his heart of hearts, worthy of her.
Albert Stanton had first encountered Maud in prison.
She had been locked up in the Massapequa Prison for Women after one of her protest stunts with Leonora Coolidge had gone wrong, or right, depending upon one’s viewpoint. Maud had been sitting beside her friend; both women’s hair still streaked purple-pink – the after-effect of a botched attempt to deluge the Chief Magistrate of New York with purple dye and butter acid bombs outside his office on Clinton Street – and they were both in a mood to pick a fight with any man who crossed their bows.
Notwithstanding, Leonora was the willowy beauty she could not help being, a woman like Helen of yore, whose face might inadvertently launch a thousand ships and turn countless strong men’s souls to mush. Maud had seemed round-shouldered, a little dumpy and vaguely tomboyish, except even that day her brown eyes had twinkled when she spoke…
I must have been blind the last year!
Of course, Maud was the equivalent of Long Island aristocracy and he was a guy from the back of nowhere who, at that time, was still working hard to make something of himself. Women like Leonora and Maud had seemed like exotic creatures from another world, unattainable, untouchable.
Maud was over-conscious that she was no statuesque Venus de Milo exemplar of womankind like her friend.
‘I’m short, curvy, buxom and liable to plumpness if my mother is anything to go by…’
Stanton had observed: ‘It takes all sorts. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were all the same?’
That had come out all wrong.
What he had meant to say was: ‘I adore you exactly the way you are!’
However, from the smile on Maud’s face he got the general impression that regardless of what he had actually said, that was what she had heard spill from his lips.
He sighed.
He tried to read the papers while he waited for his hosts to make an appearance. He had arrived early at the plush boulevard café almost but not quite in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral - the great Gothic monument flattened by German artillery in the 1860s and still, in places, undergoing restoration to its former glory over a century later - taking an inside table due to the cool breeze threatening rain sweeping up the Seine.
Like all newspaper men he was an avid consumer of newsprint. Practically every major daily newspaper printed in the World had a Paris edition produced in an English, German or French translation, and he had worked his way through half-a-dozen papers that morning.
He had not realised that the Germans and the Russians, traditional enemies, had been so hugger-mugger of late. Apparently, Crown Prince Frederick had just got back to Berlin from a State Visit to Moscow. The son of the German Emperor was reputedly a huge fan of Wagner, Tchaikovsky and the Opera – and of loud music in general, and the Tsar had taken Frederick and his wife, Kristina, a placid Danish princess with a smile fit to melt an ogre’s heart, to the ballet before he and his new friend ‘Freddy’ – a second cousin, all the royal families of Europe were variously inbred – off to play toy soldiers.
It seemed the Russians were going to buy over a thousand warplanes from the concern of Messers BMK – the Berlin, Munich and Kassel Aircraft Works – in the next couple of years. Payment was to be made in oil, rather than specie, shipped directly from the Caucasus.
There had been fleet manoeuvres between the Kaiserliche Marine and the Russian Fleet in the Baltic and the Far East…
Okay, that sort of thing never got reported back in New York!
The Paris Stock Market was down again…
Breaking news in the Times of Paris: ‘Disturbances in the streets of Madrid for the second day running. Troops fired warning shots over the heads of the mob outside the Royal Palace of Aranjuez…’
Um…
It was a big ask expecting a New Englander to entertain so much as a scintilla of sympathy for the House of Hapsburg!
But even so…
The journalist sighed, put down his paper.
There was a jovial commotion at the door to the café signifying that Albert Stanton’s suitors had arrived!
Chapter 11
Saturday 18th March
Sierra de Guadarrama, North of Madrid
The two old cars had rumbled and jolted over narrow twisting mountain roads and then tracks before finding still more precipitous, barely maintained, ribbons of crumbling, ice-ruptured tarmac still deeper into the high country most of the day before finally giving up the unequal struggle and discharging Don Rafael, a pair of young toughs hefting hunting rifles and the two women in a narrow canyon leading still higher between grey, sun-dappled looming peaks.
They watched the vehicles coughing and wheezing away and then, at Don Rafael’s signal began to march, wearily – well, Henrietta and Melody, at least – into the rubble-field of fallen rocks and alpine-type shrubs – which almost immediately hid them from the dusty track the cars had, with no little difficulty, just traversed.
After perhaps, thirty minutes - although it seemed like hours to the exhausted women - the group halted to rest beneath an outcrop of granite. The three men were all carrying heavy packs, from which canteens of brackish water, biscuits and dried fruit were forthcoming.
“We ought to be carrying our share of the load,” Melody remarked, pointing at the over-burdened rucksacks.
The younger men thought this was hugely amusing.
Don Rafael, who seemed the freshest of them all despite his years, shook his head and grimaced whimsically.
“My Lord would never allow of that,” he retorted gently, proudly, in that marvellous intonation of pure old-fashioned Castilian which Melody had decided as a teenage girl had the capacity to make the best love poetry of that ancient language so exquisitely…erotic. “I am honoured in my duty to you both,” Don Rafael continued. “It is the greatest tribute that My Lord could bestow upon me, and,” he eyed the two younger men, “my sons.”
Melody felt very silly, and not a little unworthy.
“Besides,” the man guffawed softly, “if the worst happens you Ladies must run like the very wind. That is not a thing to be done with a soldier’s baggage upon your fair backs!”
Don Rafael’s sons chuckled, the women smiled and blushed.
“Where are you taking us, Don Rafael?” Henrietta asked quietly.
“A place that has been in the debt of the House of Medina Sidonia for a hundred years…”
Melody raised an eyebrow.
“Won’t the authorities, or whoever is looking for us,” she had worked out a lot of things as the journey had progressed. She was, after all, a professional detective and therefore, deductive reasoning was what she had been doing for a living for many years now. “Head straight for Ducal houses and lands?”
“Yes. And no. Remember, Señora Danson, that this is Spain,” Don Rafael re-joined. “There are places that are barred even to the Inquisition.”
Melody absorbed this.
“Okay, so you’re not going to tell us where we are going?”
“Regretfully, no,” the man apologised. “However, from the moment we arrive you must cease to be Lady Henrietta De L’Isle and Special Emissary Melody Danson. I respectfully suggest you become Señorita Marija,” he put to Henrietta, “and perhaps, Señorita Carmen.”
“Okay…”
“Actually, the names do not matter it is just that you cannot be who you are while you are en santuario.”
In sanctuary…
Melody threw a glance at Henrietta which in other circumstances might have been mischievous.
“I might have been wrong about what I said about being a nun,” she observed ruefully.
“A nun?” Don Rafael echoed, shaking his head. “No, that is not our intention although much will be at the discretion of the Mother Superior, a most
redoubtable woman…”
The man thought his thoughts for several seconds.
“Please, I mean nothing that I say now with malice. I am an old man who has had my day, I have seen many things and witnessed things better not witnessed, but I must speak without dissembling to you both, My Ladies.”
Henrietta did not think that sounded like good news but then she and Melody were, apparently, fugitives on the run for their very lives so it was hard to tell what exactly constituted good news on a day like this.
She opened her mouth to speak only to think better of it when Melody shook her head. That was spooky the way Melody could read her…
“Your names en santuario mean little because those into whose hands I shall be entrusting you think you to be,” Don Rafael hesitated, distaste twisting at the corners of his mouth, ‘women of the lowest kind. Harlots, or rather, courtesans fleeing from the troubles in Madrid, Segovia and Toledo. The majority of your custodians will assume that you are favourites of my master…”
“I suppose being a mistress is better than being a whore,” Melody decided dryly.
“Inevitably, it may be that your custodians will treat you with little dignity. They will almost certainly require you to serve penance. I apologise in advance but…”
Melody shrugged.
“If we’re going to do this thing it has to be done properly.”
Okay, Don Rafael planned to hide them in more or less plain sight and if that was going to work it was going to have to look as good as they could make it look.
“I believe you speak French, My Ladies?” Don Rafael checked.
“Yes,” Henrietta confirmed. “And other languages…”
“French will suffice. I advise you to affect to be hard of hearing or unfamiliar with any Spanish tongue, except perhaps, Catalan because French ‘ladies’ who find their way into the Royal Courts of Madrid often previously frequented the, er, fleshpots of Barcelona and the towns close to the border…”