by James Philip
‘Kate, sir,’ she had blurted, a bundle of nerves as the great man extended his hand in greeting, his smile – of the patriarchally kindly variety – slowly broadening all the while. ‘In my birth language my Mohawk name means,’ she had struggled with the words, scrunched up her face in momentary concentration, ‘travels through the wind…’
Captain Jackson had chortled.
‘Which is exactly what your husband does all the time, dear lady!’
Kate had not thought about it that way until then, now she thought about it often. Life was full of circles within circles, experiences lived again and again in infinite variations.
‘What goes around comes around,’ was a saying she had heard several of her new Navy wife friends murmur. The society of the married quarters tended to be phlegmatic, practical, its optimism tempered by the knowledge that both good and sometimes bad, things happened at sea.
That day she and her son, Tom, and the other ‘Wardroom’ wives and their offspring had been bussed in for the ‘family day’ party. Now the ship was crowded with ‘civilians making the deck untidy’ but nobody minded about that because this time tomorrow Achilles would be gone.
Abe had bought an old atlas from a second-hand bookshop in the old town of Norfolk opposite the sprawling Portsmouth Naval Dockyards so that he could show Kate where he was headed.
It was a beautiful book with colourful relief maps of all the continents and a marvellous two-page spread of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean. Measuring the distance between Norfolk and Kingston, Jamaica she had discovered that it was around one thousand three hundred miles.
Abe had teased her about that.
‘Unfortunately, we can’t go straight there, we’d run aground half-a-dozen times!’
Other officers had greeted Kate with tiny nods of the head, shaken her hand as if she was made of glass, tried far too hard to make her feel welcome and that had deeply touched her. Two men had actually apologised that she had had to pass by those ‘good for nothing GW idiots at the gates…’
Becoming a Navy wife had been an education, one she was still absorbing. Stepping on board the Achilles had been a rough and ready finishing class of sorts.
Those Getrennte Entwicklung ‘idiots’ at the gate pasted billboards around Norfolk protesting about the ‘polyglot’ scandal of the Royal Navy’s historic – well, near century-old explicitly mixed-race crewing practices – and yet standing in the crowd on the quarterdeck of HMS Achilles she was surrounded by many coloured faces and everybody seemed to be getting along just fine!
Basically, very few people in the Navy had a lot of time for the GW idiots, the majority of whom claimed ‘religious exemption’ from military service the moment colonial enrolment – ‘Draft Notices’ – landed on their doormats.
Abe had taken their son in his arms as soon as she stepped aboard the ship, transparently eager not to waste a single second with him before he sailed away.
He had taken her forward to show her the aircraft he flew.
There were two flying machines atop the cruiser’s amidships catapult, both with bulbous floats like the Bristol seaplanes Abe had flown in Ontario. Below the boom of the heavy-duty crane which recovered returning aircraft and lowered the ship’s larger ‘small boats’ into the water, there was a third aircraft, almost but not quite identical to the seaplanes stowed high on the catapult rails.
Kate had stared at this flying machine not immediately knowing what was ‘wrong’ with it. Her husband had followed her gaze. He had laughed gently as their son gurgled with pleasure at being raised to his father’s shoulders.
The third Sea Fox had its wings folded inward along the length of its all-metal monocoque fuselage and seemed to have lost its floats…
Abe stepped closer and kicked at the nearest fixed undercarriage wheel.
“I only get to fly this one off the ship,” he grinned. “Well, me or one of the other fellows.”
He elected not to tell his wife that the ‘wheeled’ Sea Fox had had its single defensive machine gun removed, likewise its bomb racks and heavy cameras and once the ship was at sea two technicians from the Headquarters Electronic Warfare Division would go to work filling the rear cockpit with top secret equipment.
“We’ll fly her ashore as soon as we are in Jamaican waters,” Abe said, leaving it at that.
Since moving into married quarters Kate had made a point of dressing as her neighbours dressed, albeit she had soon become aware that she was, in comparison with many of her new friends, something of a make and mend obsessive. In the house she still wore a pair of comfortable moccasins, a gift from one of her aunts, otherwise she was a very ‘modern’ woman. That said she found the ‘lingerie’ her friends talked about fiddly and uncomfortable, and as for stockings and suspenders, that was just ridiculous and other than on the coldest of days – when she wore leggings or slacks under her calf-length frock or skirts – she preferred to go bare-legged. One day she hoped her feet would get used to the impractical half-heeled lightweight leather shoes that were all the rage in New England; but nobody minded her sticking to flat heels even though it emphasised that she was not the tallest of women.
Although spots of moisture still pattered on the deck the rain of the morning had passed over as the farewells began.
“Be safe, husband,” Kate asked. She had heard about his ‘close shave’ from one of the other wives. Everybody thought she was married to a daredevil! She patted his chest, bowed her head to rest her brow against him, hiding her face.
“That’s what I plan to do,” he promised, the words catching in his throat.
They hugged, kissed and then the family day was over with the women and children reluctantly disembarking as the cruiser’s five-man Royal Marine Band serenaded the departing guests.
Abe walked back to the ship, distractedly saluting the officer at the head of the gangway.
“Permission to come on board, sir?”
Sub-Lieutenant Ted Forest, unmarried and presently romantically un-entangled, as he bemoaned cheerfully to anybody who would listen, grinned broadly.
“Permission granted, sir!” Forest had had the deck watch that afternoon. “Tom seems to have grown every time I lay eyes on him, Abe,” he remarked as the two friends turned to watch the last of the busses drive off.
“He’ll be taller than you the next time I see him,” Abe complained ruefully.
Chapter 16
Sunday 19th March
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
La Superiora Isabella had been rudely disturbed from her prayers by the arrival of her half-brother’s Arms Man, Don Rafael and his two whores. She was not a happy woman.
That her much younger sibling – he was twenty-six years her junior, the only male issue of her father’s second marriage to an Aragonese gold-digger young enough to be his daughter – should impose upon her, yet again, at a time like this was very nearly beyond belief…
However, when her initial ire subsided, she allowed herself a few minutes for reflection. If Don Rafael, that most honourable of her father’s swords should have allowed himself to be embroiled in this farrago was a strange, dissonant thing which gave her pause for thought. Although, why he or her brother should imagine that she was remotely interested in the goings on in Madrid or the other cities – each and every one Babylon-reincarnated and deserving of the cleansing fire of God – still defeated her comprehension.
Up here, hidden away at an elevation of some five thousand feet in the Sierra Guadarrama Mountains, her community made no effort to keep abreast of, and rarely inquired, into the affairs of the world beyond the adjacent peaks and valleys of the harsh, unforgiving land upon which their great monastery had sat, like God’s last citadel since the time of Ferdinand and Isabelle, a monument in living stone to the glory of la Reconquista, the re-conquest of the whole of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in 1492.
From what she could gather from Don Rafael, that most discreet of Arms Men, it seemed tha
t her brother – presumably in a fit of Quixotic idealism, a dangerous thing that he had always been prone to - had placed his sword at the disposal of Queen Sophia, another Aragonese usurper, at Aranjuez because ‘the Christian soul of Spain’ was imperilled by traitors to the best interests of the Mother Church and the State.
Even her third-party conversations with Alonso tended to be conflicted, unsatisfactory affairs; as had this most recent encounter with Don Rafael, conducted at the main gates to the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción by the flickering light of shielded candles in the rising wind and spitting rain of the coming storm. Up here in what foreigners lazily – incorrectly if one was being pedantic - called ‘the Mountains of Madrid’ in their verse and songs, winter was still upon them and often, it delivered one last frigid blast before it surrendered, coldly to the inevitable spring.
Alonso knew that she could not refuse sanctuary.
Isabella de Guzman, born the daughter of the House of Medina Sidonia, had renounced her titles, wealth and earthly privileges of her birth in mid-life. She had not come to Christ as a virgin supplicant but originally to make sense of the grief and despair of losing her husband, Miguel, to a stupid hunting accident and her son, Carlos, to a dreadful, inherited wasting illness. She had loved Miguel, they had abjured the customary civil restraints upon marriage between first cousins, turning to the Mother Church to bless their union. And in the end God had sundered them, as if to mock the happiness of their time on earth together. Her life had become a penance, an atonement to ensure her husband’s and her dear son’s souls rested easy in the arms of their Lord. That she had eventually become Sister Isabella, La Superiora of the sublime house consecrated in the time of la Reconquista, had followed with the inevitability of night following day.
That evening the two bedraggled, dirty, footsore, near-exhausted, hungry, thirsty New Englanders swaying unsteadily on the cold stone floor of Sister Isabella’s bare-walled, dungeon-like unwelcoming ‘day room’ found themselves under the relentless, hard-eyed scrutiny of a woman who customarily had no patience whatsoever for human frailty.
“You,” the old woman said eventually after a long, horrible silence as she appraised the newcomers, “are self-evidently not what Don Rafael or my well-meaning but feckless brother claim that you are?”
Melody had hissed at Henrietta: ‘Leave the talking to me,’ as they had stood, shivering outside the monastery while La Superiora berated Don Rafael in clipped, mightily vexed Castilian before that dignified, but harshly chastened gentleman was finally dismissed.
Don Rafael had departed without a sidelong glance at them.
“I beg your pardon,” Melody had begun in French. Smiled apologetically, re-started in halting Catalan, “my Spanish is,” she shrugged and held out her arms in what she hoped might pass for Gallic confusion. ‘Not good, I…”
“SILENCIO!”
Melody swallowed hard.
Okay, that did not go as well as I had hoped…
“You,” the old woman spat at her, “you, I can see could be one of my brother’s mistresses. You’re his type.”
Melody recoiled, opened her mouth to defend the accusation that she was anybody’s ‘type’, but thought better of it the next moment.
The other woman had already turned her piercing, hawk-like stare onto Henrietta who was doing her best, and failing, not to wilt under its merciless glare.
“Whereas, you, are not Alonso’s type. Whatever else, he is no ravisher of virgins!”
Henrietta took offense to this.
“I’m not a…”
“Silencio!” Sister Isabella moved around the ancient, less than flat and much knotted table at the centre of the room and stood directly before the women. “My brother rarely asks me for anything. Now he sends me you two. Marija,” she looked to Henrietta, “and Carmen,” this to Melody. “So, although you cannot possibly be what you seem to be, yet my brother has assumed a debt of honour to you both.”
The silence deepened.
“What do you expect us to say, La Superiora?” Melody inquired, too tired to hide her irritation. She had spoken in Spanish, deliberately mimicking the accent and subtle dialect of the peoples of the mountains separating the Community of Madrid from neighbouring La Mancha. “We are strangers in this land who must trust our lives to the kindness of,” she shrugged, “other strangers.”
The old woman appeared not to have heard her then relented, shaking her head.
“Yes,” she sighed, letting down her guard momentarily, “are definitely my brother’s type.”
Melody quirked a grimace of acknowledgement.
Alonso’s sister probably had a point but this was hardly the time to be discussing the complicated – actually, messy – ins and outs of her sexuality.
Sister Isabella was stone-faced again.
“Has Alonso’s infatuation with that harlot in the Royal Palace of Aranjuez caused,” she gestured with an angry hand, “all this?”
Melody hesitated.
“I don’t think so. Or rather, I’d be very surprised if it had anything to do with…well, whatever is going on… I know nothing of Alonso’s influence in Queen Sophia’s Court but whatever seems to be going on in Madrid, or elsewhere, is much bigger than just court gossip or intrigue. Men came to Chinchón to capture or kill us, I don’t know which. Alonso went away, we think to Aranjuez several days ago. Otherwise, like you, we know only what Don Rafael was able to tell us, La Superiora.”
“So, who are you?”
“I’m nobody. Not in the big picture of things,” Melody replied.
“Nobody but my brother’s favoured mistress?”
Why were nuns always so obsessed with sex?
“That is none of your business, My Lady,” Melody retorted, baring her claws Minx-like, replying as if she was speaking to the woman as an aristocrat not a maid of God.
“So, are you nothing?” The old woman snapped at Henrietta.
“Hen,” Melody pleaded.
Too late.
“I am Lady Henrietta De L’Isle, the daughter of the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England…”
She might have added ‘oh, bother’ or something more descriptive of her sudden foolishness in allowing herself to be so easily provoked. However, by then Henrietta had worked out that she should not have risen to the bait and it was already far too late to take anything back.
“We are both fully accredited members of the British Diplomatic Mission. Unfortunately, that does not seem to count for anything in this country anymore.”
Sister Isabella’s eyes had widened a fraction.
She folded her arms across her chest.
She sighed.
“Listen to me very carefully,” she declared quietly, “you are the harlot Marija, and your friend is your partner in shame, Carmen. As such you will be treated accordingly by this House. You will live like my lowliest noviciates, you will eat, work, dress and deport yourselves in atonement without complaint and obey every instruction you are given without protest.”
Melody had no idea if this was good or bad news.
Luckily, she was beyond caring.
“I will leave you for a few minutes. There are things I must arrange if you are to be inducted into our community. You will not be with us very long but it is important that you do nothing to betray your true identities. When I return you will speak only in French or Catalan, the latter badly, I think…”
The door clunked shut.
Melody listened but heard no key turn in the lock.
She opened her arms and Henrietta fell into them.
They clung together until Sister Isabella returned.
“You will be separated. Together you will be too conspicuous. You may not associate again while you are under the protection of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.”
The women stared at her.
“Is that clear?”
Melody and Henrietta nodded dazedly.
“Good. Come with me.�
�
Chapter 17
Monday 20th March
Government House, Philadelphia
The Governor of New England had not returned to Philadelphia until the early hours of that morning. Going straight to his wife’s chambers he had found her heavily sedated and sleeping, mercifully, peacefully. Sitting by her bed in the gloom protectively, tenderly holding her left, slightly less twisted, hand he had attempted and failed to parse, to draw any hard and fast conclusions from the meetings, inspections and abbreviated public engagements which had filled the last seventy-two hours in Norfolk and the surrounding military bases.
London had decided that if the worse came to the worse - a general war with the Spanish - then New England and the Atlantic Fleet would ‘ride out the first blow’. There would be no ‘provocation offered’; the view being that nothing mattered more than that ‘the Empire stands astride and commands the moral high ground.’
Personally, De L’Isle thought this was a strategy of despair, tantamount to an admission that the Empire’s policy in the America’s was holed below the waterline.
But… And it was a big but; nobody had fired the first shot yet and peace, albeit of the uneasy, fragile kind was a lot better than a real shooting war. Moreover, putting to one side the pronouncements of leading colonial politicians and opinion-makers in the more bellicose middle and upper colonies - the one’s farthest away from where any fighting might actually happen – nobody in Government House honestly believed a wholesale military mobilisation was a thing likely to find widespread support throughout the rest of New England.
Problematically, he suspected the majority of the men and women in the street, if they thought about it at all were quite happy to convince themselves that the Border Wars were things of the past and that the South West was an ‘old issue’, and anyway, if anything went awry in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean that the Royal Navy would sort it out in five minutes flat!
Of course, the man in the street was blissfully unaware of the troubling undercurrents in international affairs, or that since the middle of the last decade the two great European Empires – those of Britain and Germany – had been vying for ascendancy and advantage around the margins of their respective imperial spheres and increasingly, trespassing on each other’s prerogatives through the agency of proxies. Diplomacy was, indeed, war by other means and Whitehall’s perspective was that the Kaiser’s men had taken far too many ‘liberties’ of late. There were many places in the World where there was if not a lot, then at least some ‘wiggle room’, scope for accommodations and negotiations: unfortunately, there was no such scope in New England, or for the Governor of that Commonwealth.