Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3)

by James Philip

  The Colonial Air Force had always been a different kind of animal; funded directly by the colonies themselves. In the beginning the quid pro quo had been that all the CAF’s aircraft would be built under licence in New England, bringing skilled employment and guaranteeing routine technology transfers, mainly to the benefit of the economies of the middle and upper First Thirteen. That had become contentious as the complexity and cost of modern aircraft had rocketed through the roof; currently, London paid for approximately sixty percent of every airframe flown by the CAF.

  The Royal Navy, of course, had always been wholly ‘owned’ and funded by the British Government.

  However, all that was going to have to change if there was another war. If that war turned into a general conflagration the privileged, comparatively wealthy citizens of the First Thirteen would have to be squeezed until the pips started to squeal. As historians quipped: ‘It would be 1857 all over again!’

  Matthew Harrison knew that his friend, Philip De L’Isle and his principals in London shivered at the likely implications of that scenario.

  Personally, Matthew Harrison was agnostic about it while accepting that nobody could deny that the imposition of possibly penal ‘war taxation’ upon the First Thirteen was a thing likely to have long-lasting political implications.

  Isaac Fielding had always maintained that if and when the ‘English’ – for whatever reason – ‘came calling’ for the wealth of the Virginia planters, the New York and Boston money-changers, and looked to claim a meaningful tythe from the industrial robber-barons of the Great Lakes territories, that would be the cause célèbre that finally ignited ‘the spirit of the Boston Tea Party’ and that then, ‘they would really be in trouble’ because ‘old George Washington’s ghost would surely rise again from the cold ground of Long Island!’

  Two Hundred Lost Years had a lot to answer for.

  Personally, the Head of the Colonial Security Service thought that the jury was out on the question of whether even a punitive ‘war tax’ burden might be sufficient, of itself, to begin to unite the fiercely independent East Coast colonies against their Imperial overlords…

  Basically, New Yorkers had little time for Virginians, the two Carolinas would be at war with each other anyway were it not for ‘the English’, Bostonians looked down on the rude country folk of Vermont and Maine, and so on.

  One had to be sceptical that anything would ever change that!

  Matthew Harrison never saw the Morris speedster coupe which suddenly accelerated, mounted the curb and hit him at a speed later calculated to have been in excess of sixty miles per hour.

  He was already dead before his broken body hit the ground.

  Chapter 20

  Good Friday 24th March

  Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

  Melody Danson had begun to lose track of time, of days passing and even though she knew that today was Good Friday if felt as if she had been at the monastery weeks rather than just five long, cold miserable days.

  On the first morning after she and Henrietta De L’Isle had arrived two nuns – ‘sisters’ or whatever – had roused her from her bed, a straw palliasse on the stone floor of her ‘cell’, more a dungeon, that would have had any right thinking-colonist up in arms back home had it been located in say, a New England police station or prison, ordered her to strip naked and then cut her hair. Well ‘cut’ was being a little generous, it had seemed to her that they were ‘shearing’ her with a lot less care and attention than they would have paid had she been a sheep!

  Thereafter she had been dunked in a very cold bath – one of her ‘helpers’ had pushed her head under the water several times while muttering an angry prayer in what she later decided was a demotic, or at least a very rural, Asturian dialect – and left to stand naked and shivering uncontrollably for some minutes before being allowed to dry herself with a towel so coarse it actually scratched her, before being instructed to get dressed. Thereupon, she had been required to don a white linen surplus tailored to fit a woman of twice her breadth, and a faded brown, horribly itchy – it might have been horsehair – habit with a hood that she was specifically commanded to always employ to cover her head when she was ‘outside’.

  With her teeth still chattering, feeling literally like death warmed up she had been frog-marched barefoot to a small, damp chapel and forced to kneel on the floor, just frigid flagstones, for an interminable period while all manner of chanting, praying of the silent and communal kind and various incantations were, it seemed – she was feeling so ill by then she did not care – directed at her.

  Next, she had found herself back in her cell.

  ‘Found herself’ because she must have fainted or passed out at some stage because a different nun with none of the righteous hutzpah of her former ‘escorts’ had sat her up and was trying to get her to eat what looked like lumpy vomit dripping from a rudimentary wooden spoon.

  Actually, to be fair, ‘the food’ turned out to be some kind of watery gruel made from crushed maize which only tasted like vomit.

  ‘Our ways will be strange to start with,’ the other woman, who might have been Melody’s age but it was hard to tell when she could only see a part of her face in the gloom of the cell, assured her without malice.

  Melody had been so hungry she did her best to keep her ‘breakfast’ down, notwithstanding how just the smell of it made her gag. Thinking about that morning she realised now that at one point she must have been borderline hypothermic, so cold that her body was starting to shut down and the gruel, in addition to the blankets her gentle saviour had wrapped about her shoulders had probably been all that kept her going.

  For all she remembered they could have locked her away for the rest of that first day. She had slept fitfully as if in the throes of a fever, awakened only with the sharp pain of her bladder protesting. There was a large terracotta-type bowl by the door which she used to relieve herself before collapsing back onto the lumpy palliasse again, not waking again until it was dark.

  Her cell door was wedged open the next morning.

  Cold gruel was placed on the floor, an earthenware jug with brackish water next to it and a chunk of bread so black and hard she initially thought it was a rock of some kind. She had had to soak the bread in the gruel to soften it sufficiently to attempt to eat it.

  “Wash!” Yet another nun had demanded, standing in the door.

  Melody had followed her down two corridors afraid she was going to be subjected to another ice bath treatment and was pleasantly surprised, not to say, relieved, to be ushered into what was obviously a communal washroom with two real latrines in open brick cubicles at one end. There was tepid water in a bowl, and some kind of carbolic soap.

  It was all she could do not to yelp: “Hallelujah!”

  It seemed that cleanliness was definitely adjacent to godliness and it was the custom of the sisters to discard most or all of their garments so as to ensure this much to be desired state was achieved on a whole-body basis at least once a day.

  Running her fingers through her raggedly massacred now very short hair was an experience, as was eying the bumps and bruises on her legs and knees acquired hiking over the mountains. The bruises were coming out nicely…

  She felt positively scrawny, beaten up and was glad that there were no mirrors to hand.

  She had asked her companion about that in halting Catalan.

  ‘Pride goeth before a fall,’ the other woman had replied stoically.

  Sometime later that morning she was handed a broom.

  ‘Sweep the corridors and the courtyard. A sister will bring you food later.’

  So, she had swept the floors and ventured out into a claustrophobic yard, got a little distracted by the faded, cracked possibly formerly magically coloured tiles underfoot. She wearied very quickly, tried to carry on, eventually slumped in a corner and started to cry.

  That was the low point.

  Not that the days since had been exactly a barrel of laughs
.

  She hated feeling like a victim, being helpless and after a while, as she had always done in the past she began to fight back. However bad things get a woman can always get angry!

  Fighting back, even in small ways was not tolerated.

  They had marched her off to see the Mother Superior that evening.

  “You must work,” Sister Isabella informed her tersely, waving for her to be taken away again. Then the old woman had had a second thought. “No, take her to Sister Elvira. She looks feverish.”

  Sister Elvira was even older than La Superiora.

  Mercifully, it transpired that she was cut from a different cloth.

  She had put her hand to Melody’s forehead.

  Looked placidly into her eyes.

  Taken her left hand between her hands.

  “We are an order that welcomes any who will contribute to the common good under the sight of Our Lord,” Sister Elvira decided, her voice maternal. “We will keep you, and your friend, another day from fully joining our community. That is our way. You are both exhausted still. You both have much to get used to.”

  Since the old woman had made no attempt to communicate in any language other than Castilian, Melody assumed that she too had been let into the secret about the monastery’s two new guests.

  Melody had obediently drunk the potion – some kind of cold herbal tea, she guessed – from the cup that Sister Elvira had pressed into her hands. Later she had slept a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Okay, so they drugged me…

  A few of the other nuns had given her curious looks when she was escorted through the building to the refectory the next morning, others had watched her as she choked down more of the foul gruel and slaked her thirst. Apparently, all the other sisters had completed their toilet hours ago and she had missed her turn. Breakfast concluded, it had been straight to a larger chapel than before where she glimpsed Henrietta, like her, with her hood drawn half over her face several rock-hard cold pews away. Both women had minders, or perhaps, ‘watchers’ would be a better word, assigned to them for the first couple of days they were allowed out of their cells. In between periods of kneeling supplication wherever one was at a given hour, or attendances at, initially, meaningless religious observances in the chapel, Melody’s days rotated between the kitchen, sweeping floors and working in the walled garden on the southern side of the castle-like complex.

  She began to yearn to look over and beyond the walls, to chaff at commandments restricting ‘noviciates’ such as her to the ground floor and the ‘under croft’ spaces of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.

  The morning gruel and hard bread was a thing to be endured; in the evening the bread was fresher and some nights the warm, steaming broth, tasted like manna from heaven to stomachs cramped with hunger.

  Everybody was hungry practically all the time; in that the communion was united and despite herself, Melody quickly started to find common cause with other sisters, many of whom began to quirk smiles, or occasionally giggled at her deliberately butchered Catalan. Several of the nuns spoke passable French, although it took a while to get used to the fact that nobody was remotely interested in her life prior to the day she had ‘entered’ the monastery.

  That had confused Melody.

  It was as if when a woman arrived in this other little world within a world locked away in the seclusion of the high Mountains of Madrid that the slate was wiped clean, that one began anew.

  Melody worried about Henrietta.

  If the adjustment to life here was hard for her then what must it be like for her younger friend, lover…

  Three times they had exchanged inscrutable, unreadable brief looks in the gloom of the chapel, or across tables at opposite ends of the refectory, once they had passed each other in a corridor almost without knowing it.

  Melody would have given anything just to know that Henrietta was…okay.

  There was rain in the air that morning as Melody hoed and weeded the ‘sunny corner’ of the kitchen garden. The sisters grew root vegetables elsewhere because this bright spot was reserved for bean stalks which climbed wooden frames and chives, and mint and rosemary struggled to gain a foothold in the tilled dun-coloured earth. She was a total ignoramus when it came to gardening, horticulture or agriculture. Back home she would have rued her broken finger nails, the soreness of her pale, previously soft hands and the stink of the manure in the earth beneath her feet. Such things had swiftly ceased to matter as she went about her work with a mind oddly emptied of clutter and distractions.

  I had had no idea how one behaved in a place like this…

  Already, she had picked up the basic do’s and don’ts of the sisterhood, accepted that she was an inconsequential junior member of the community whom the others viewed as a clumsy child in their midst.

  Today was Good Friday but the chores still had to be done.

  There were dishes to be scrubbed and washed, the laundry pummelled in the kitchen’s big tubs and the garden tended, God’s work to be accomplished in the intervals between abasement and worship, and devotions to be lived and to be celebrated.

  In a funny sort of way, she half-suspected that she could be happy here…

  “Come inside!”

  That was when Melody became aware of the distant drone of an approaching aircraft.

  Chapter 21

  Easter Saturday Friday 24th March

  HMS Achilles, approaching Bermuda

  Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln of the Royal Naval Air Service had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that the ship would cruise straight down to the Gulf of Spain before transiting the Windward Passage to make port at Kingston, Jamaica within the week. However, it transpired that this had never been the plan.

  ‘This is the Captain!’ The Old Man had announced over the Tannoy about an hour or so out of Norfolk. ‘In the morning we shall be rendezvousing with units of the Atlantic Fleet to conduct gunnery, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine evolutions. Thereafter, we will steam directly for Bermuda where we will top-off our bunkers, and take on fresh produce before steaming for the Caribbean. Divisional Commanders will be authorised to issue six-hour shore passes to their people while we are at Bermuda. That is all!’

  The next day Achilles had joined a second, albeit modern – only half-a-dozen years in commission – light cruiser, HMS Culloden, a couple of miles astern of the battleship Tiger, which in company with the heavy cruiser Naiad had conducted a ‘full-bore shoot’.

  Even at that distance the battleship’s broadsides had torn the air asunder like thunderclaps. Each time she unleashed a salvo the great ship had disappeared behind billowing clouds of smoke. It had been the most remarkable and the most sobering thing Abe had ever seen in his whole life.

  Later that day Achilles had ranged up alongside the behemoth and delivered despatches from Norfolk via breeches buoy. A passive observer from the unobscured elevation of the catapult rails, Abe had stared in mute wonder at the castle of steel surging effortlessly through the rising Atlantic swell at fourteen knots, asking himself, not for the first time, what on earth those lunatics had thought was going to happen when they crashed speed boats and flimsy old aircraft into a thing like that!

  Achilles and Culloden had had their own ‘shooting match’, engaging each other at a range of nearly thirteen thousand yards at speeds of up to twenty-eight knots, their respective gun directors configured to shoot with a six-degree targeting offset.

  There had been a frissance of excitement through the ship when one of the Culloden’s broadsides fell only two hundred yards astern of the Achilles half-way through the exercise, otherwise both ships had fired with ‘commendable accuracy and near optimal rates of fire’ throughout the eighteen-minute-long exercise. According to the ‘umpires’, who subsequently analysed the ‘gun plots’ adjusting for the mandatory offsets, Achilles would have been bracketed seven times and hit at least three; Culloden bracketed nine times and, because she was a bigger ship, probably hit five or six
times.

  Needless to say, Captain Jackson authorised a second tot of Grog for the entire crew that evening!

  This was also a Navy tradition: when one division or department excelled their triumph belonged to the whole ship. Culloden was not just the bigger ship – by at least three-and-a-half thousand tons – with twelve to Achilles’s eight main battery rifles but her turrets were much more highly automated, and therefore, theoretically able to put approximately twice the weight of metal in the air at any one time. To have performed so well against a newer, larger vessel which also had a marginally superior ‘ELDAR suite’ was the highest possible compliment to Achilles’s combat readiness.

  But then, allegedly, every captain in the Atlantic Fleet blanched at going up against – one on one – a ship under the command of Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson, RN.

  On the third day out from Virginia the weather had been too stormy for safe flying operations and Abe had spent the day conducting the morning sick parade, and later signing off the ship’s registry of medical supplies.

  Yesterday, the ship had turned south and worked up to twenty-three knots to be in position to make Bermuda in the middle of the calm spell forecast for the following day.

  Twenty minutes ago, Abe’s CO’s Sea Fox had launched off Achilles’s catapult. Now, after much ‘messing about’ to hoist his own aircraft onto the launching rails and a short delay loading the firing charge to the aging, somewhat temperamental assembly, his charabanc was ready to launch.

  Abe had never actually launched off a moving ship. In fact, this was his first catapult launch and he was not entirely sure what to expect.

  Both Sea Fox seaplanes were being ‘jettisoned’ before the cruiser began to pick her way through the reefs and shoals protecting the superb natural anchorage within the elongated half-circle of the one hundred and eighty or so islands – the remnants of ancient volcanoes – of Bermuda. Apparently, the wheeled, land-plane Sea Fox was going to be stored on the catapult while the ship was in harbour and more equipment – depending on who one asked – was going to be installed therein, or removed, meaning that one of the float planes was going to have to be part-mothballed, its wings folded back, fuel tanks and lubricant reservoirs drained, its gun unloaded for safety before they could be re-hoisted onto Achilles as ‘deck cargo’ for the journey south.