Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3)

by James Philip

  I must be getting old…

  Either that or his twenty-one deck landings on and twenty take-offs from the deck of the Perseus to date, had reminded him of his own mortality.

  In the middle distance the armoured flank of HMS Tiger was emerging from the mists, her fighting tops proudly grey, glistening in the damp air above the murk. The rumbling of the ammunition wagons carrying pallets of one-ton, 15-inch main battery rounds from the subterranean bunkers in the surrounding hills to the dockside reverberated across the dark waters.

  Even in port the battleship’s air search ELDAR aerials rotated slowly, ceaselessly and a translucent plume of light grey exhaust fumes rose from her forward, raked funnel.

  Although the Atlantic Fleet was not quite at war yet, every ship not in dockyard hands had at least one boiler lit, a watch closed up and several of her guns manned. On the forward flight deck Perseus had turned out a hundred men to salute the Admiral’s flag flying from Tiger’s main mast halyards.

  A small saluting gun popped.

  The men on deck came to attention.

  Chapter 26

  Friday 31st March

  Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

  Melody guessed Captain Paul Nash, allegedly of the Seaforth Highlanders – she took his stated rank, name and regimental affiliations with a particularly suspicious and very large pinch of salt – was in his early to mid-thirties with a build that might have been designed for trekking across one hundred and seventy miles of mountains, valleys and forests along the spine of the Sierra de Guadarrama, Sierra del Norte and the Sierra de Gredos all the way to the Portuguese border. Unfortunately, Melody had no illusions that her and Henrietta’s bodies were in any way ‘up to it’, and this she had pointed out to their would-be rescuer in no uncertain terms.

  The man had listened respectfully.

  He was stocky, quite obviously without an ounce of extraneous flesh on his teak-hard muscled skeleton, an inch of so taller than Henrietta which made him about five feet ten in height, and moved with an almost cat-like grace and purpose.

  What he had neglected to tell the two women last night prior to advising them to try to get as much sleep as possible, was that when, several days ago, he had thrown himself out of the light plane several thousand feet above the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, he had jumped with a cannister containing weapons, lightweight camping equipment, iron rations, packs of dried ready-cook meals, a first aid kit, several courses of anti-biotics – because you never knew if you might need them – and his ‘personal’ weapons: an automatic assault rifle, a .45-inch calibre semi-automatic pistol, enough ammunition to start a small war and a wicked, hunting knife with a nine-inch blade, razor-sharp on one side and serrated on the other which he carried strapped to his left shin.

  In total he had carried a load of some eighty plus pounds three miles up the mountain from his ‘drop site’ in the valley below the monastery. And somehow, he had dealt with or got past the – presumably heavily armed - men La Superiora had turned away from the doors of the monastery yesterday afternoon.

  Melody had no doubt that ‘Paul Nash’ had secreted other nefarious and very deadly weapons about his person.

  He had also lugged up the mountain camouflaged cold-weather smocks and trousers, several pairs of thick woollen socks and of all things, fur-lined caps for Melody and Henrietta. And wonder of wonders, the kit actually fitted them!

  The women were astonished when they were presented with well-worn but comfortable calf-length walking boots, items Sister Isabella had instructed to be recovered from the monastery’s storeroom of items surrendered, possibly decades ago, by women who had ‘entered our house’, thereby renouncing all property.

  While Melody and Henrietta had been trying to sleep and not really succeeding, ‘Nash’ had been busy investigating what the monastery’s resources had to offer, apparently without demur from La Superiora. Whether this was because Sista Isabella was looking forward to having her step-brother’s ‘whores’ off her hands, or she was relishing the opportunity to thumb her nose at ‘those idiots in Madrid’, watching Melody and Henrietta don the clothes their presumptive rescuer had brought them, the old woman had almost threatened to smile.

  La Superiora’s relatively good humour even survived the news that Nash had decided to delay setting off another day. Ostensibly, this was to give ‘the ladies’ another few hours to take in as many calories as possible and rest up a little longer.

  Several of the dried – desiccated would be a more precise description - ready meals, high protein stews were cooked up, filling Melody’s and Henrietta’s bellies for the first time in a fortnight, inducing an afternoon siesta from which they later awakened marginally refreshed and temporarily, a little less afraid of the ordeal to come.

  It was Henrietta who asked the obvious question: “Why isn’t it safe here anymore?”

  “It was never safe here,” La Superiora informed her in suddenly clipped, very received British Broadcasting Corporation English which had both younger women blinking at her. “My brother has worked very hard to remain unaligned, a so-called honest broker between the King-Emperor’s El Escorial conservative faction and the Queen’s Aranjuez modernisers. Unfortunately, gossip ties him to Sophia’s,” she shrugged, “petty coats. I have no idea if the rumours are true but our families – that of the Queen when she was one of several young girls mooted for marriage into the Royal Family – were very close and Alonso even as a very young man, was a very hard boy to not fall in love with.” A flicker of unlikely fond remembrance was instantly extinguished. “The Mother Church will afford this house some small protection but only at a cost, namely, its expropriation from the family’s hands. It depends how confident the Holy See in Rome is in its agents in Madrid as to whether I find myself the object of a bull of anathema. This is a matter of no importance to me. I am too old to accompany you on your journey to freedom; and in any case, I refuse to flee from the cowards of the false Inquisitions that plague the Empire. I shall stay and fight.”

  Outside the rain was sleeting down driven nearly to the horizontal by the wind which howled through the mountains.

  “We shall depart when the gale abates,” Paul Nash declared. “At whatever hour that may be.”

  Both Melody and Henrietta would be carrying old canvas knapsacks, taking the edge – but little more - off the load their muscular guardian angel planned to hump across the Mountains of Madrid. Each woman would heft extra blankets, and between them much of the food including hard tack biscuits from the monastery’s stores. The man would be transporting a lightweight tent, ground sheets, a stove and two small gas bottles, all the medical supplies bar the anti-biotics which he had donated to Sister Elvira, the order’s carer for the sick. It went without saying that he planned to – very personally - carry all the weaponry he had brought with him from…

  “Where exactly did you come from, Paul?” Melody asked waspishly.

  “From the sky, dear lady.”

  Okay, military types tended to be paranoid about secrecy. She got that. Not that it was going to stop her asking questions.

  “Alonso sent you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “That’s no answer at all!” She complained.

  “True,” he retorted blandly. “For all you know I could be working for the Spanish Government. I might be about to kidnap you for ransom or to deliver you into the hands of the Inquisition.”

  Henrietta had quirked askance at Melody.

  Whose impatience was almost tangible: “If that was your game you’d have turned up with a small army and you’d already have whisked us away to your lair in the mountains!”

  “I might not have?”

  Melody had frowned even harder.

  “Okay, but that’s what I’d probably have done.”

  The man had started cleaning his Martini Henry assault rifle, a wickedly compact weapon capable of a rate of fire of nearly six hundred rounds per minute in full-automatic
mode. Three spare thirty-round magazines were packed into his body webbing. The clips for his pistol, which he had laid on the floor beside him as he worked, each contained eight soft-nosed .45 BSA – Birmingham Small Arms – factory patent bullets. From the slickly choreographed, precisely executed way he disassembled and re-assembled both weapons, Melody guessed he could do it blindfold, or in the dark of the night, or under fire faultlessly, nervelessly.

  “According to your New York Constabulary file you refused to undergo fire arms training or to carry a gun on duty, Ms Danson?” The man inquired, idly.

  “I was terrified I’d shoot my foot off.”

  “That’s why you do the training, to stop that sort of thing happening.”

  “I don’t think I could ever shoot anybody.”

  The man thought about this.

  “No? You’d be surprised,” he sighed. “Maybe, you just haven’t met enough people who’d be better off dead yet.”

  Melody recoiled with a horror which was unfeigned.

  “Seriously,” the man smiled wanly. “Trust me on this one. Some people you can’t argue with, the only thing you can do is kill them before they kill you.”

  Melody and Henrietta were alone in the room with the man.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Brigadier Harrison,” she was informed wryly. “The day after he and Alonso proposed your name for the Joint Commission in Madrid.”

  “Alonso?” Henrietta De L’Isle queried in disbelief.

  “He was the one who proposed the Commission to ‘take the sting’ out of the revelations about the Empire Day outrages that you,” he looked to Melody, “so adroitly brought into the public domain last year that the Governor was, against all expectations, able to exert some small influence over the excesses of what I believe in New England is called the ‘news cycle’. We’d known for some time, years in fact, that there were a large number of bad actors here in Old Spain and out in the islands of the Caribbean, not to mention within that nest of vipers in New Granada. Needless, we didn’t want the blighters stirring up war-fever in Madrid or the Gulf of Spain, or anywhere else until we were in some kind of position to defuse it. So, Alonso fell on his sword in Philadelphia, and returned home to try to talk a little sanity into the Royal Court, or rather, ‘courts’, plural. As ever, diplomacy is the art of the possible and sometimes things don’t turn out the way we hoped. This is one such occasion.”

  He contemplated this, snapping together three separate components of his assault rifle before continuing.

  “We don’t usually cock things up quite this badly but then when you a dealing with a bunch of religious maniacs, and with a hereditary monarchy that belongs more to the sixteenth than the latter twentieth century, I suppose we ought not to have been anywhere near as surprised by the way things have gone,” he sighed, “as they have.”

  Melody said nothing.

  The man grimaced apologetically.

  “Alonso was confident that he could protect you two ladies but obviously, events rather overtook us all. Anyway, I’m here because I was ‘it’, HMG’s last ‘standing’ asset in-country with half-a-chance of extricating you two.”

  “What about all the other people at the Embassy?” Henrietta asked, her curiosity aflame.

  “As you see, I’m the only one here with you on top of this mountain.” He decided he had talked enough about himself. “Is it true that you’re Alonso’s mistress?” He put to Melody, genuinely and in no way salaciously curious.

  Henrietta giggled at her friend’s unease.

  “Yes, and no!” Melody replied, recovering fast. “It’s complicated…”

  “Ah, that explains it. He gave me the distinct impression that if I didn’t escort you – and of course, Lady Henrietta – safely to the border that I would regret it. Which is odd, because Alonso has always been such a level-headed fellow about members of the fair sex before.”

  Melody refused to be distracted again.

  “Okay, you’re telling us that you’re CSS?”

  “Sorry, I thought I’d made that clear. I work for Matthew Harrison, and I suppose, for Lady Henrietta’s father.” Nash completed re-assembling his Martini Henry, he snapped back the breech.

  A round clicked into the chamber.

  Locked and loaded.

  “I really do suggest you ladies try to get a little bit of shut eye before we set off. Don’t mind me.”

  The women hesitated.

  “I’ll be just outside the door,” he promised, rising to his feet, holstering his pistol at his waist and hefting the matt black assault rifle in his arms.

  “You’re guarding us even in this place?” Henrietta blurted.

  “We live in strange times, My Lady,” Paul Nash grinned. “Better safe than sorry, what!”

  ACT III – THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE

  Chapter 27

  Saturday 1st April

  Palace of the Nations, Place de la Concorde, Paris

  Sir George Walpole, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Colonial Affairs, smiled sternly for the massed cameras of the press and at the last moment, remembered to nod – several times, with appropriate gravitas - in acknowledgement of the live TV coverage of his arrival in the Place de la Concorde. Not that he was in any mood to smile overmuch at anything in particular as he walked stiffly into the regal, cathedral-like reception hall of the Palace of the Nations, the great neo-classical complex built upon the ruins between the Seine to the south, the Champs-Elysées to its west and the gardens of the ruined, never re-built Tuileries to the east.

  On another day the most respected – by friends, allies and enemies alike – historian-politician manipulator of World affairs of his generation, a man one Russian minister had once, in perplexed exasperation called ‘Machiavelli in a frock coat’, might have paused to enjoy and to marvel at the great buildings ringing the octagonal Place de la Concorde, of which the Palace of the Nations was the magnificent jewel. Today, he was pre-occupied, having spent the whole of the five-hour journey from London to Paris via the Channel Tunnel, deep in conference with his bevvy of aides and advisors, afraid of what new disasters might be presaged by the telegrams he knew would surely have accumulated awaiting his arrival at the Gare du Nord Terminus.

  He was still struggling to absorb the alarming implications of the latest updates from Spain and the bellicose pronouncements – not unexpected but unwelcome nevertheless - of the Governor of the Spanish Royal Province of Cuba.

  It was hardly surprising that the Foreign Ministers of ‘the powers’ were rapidly coalescing in Paris that afternoon several days in advance of their scheduled monthly ‘get together’ customarily attended only by junior representatives briefed to discuss predominantly ‘technical’ matters relating to the routine ‘fine tuning’ of international relations.

  Sir George Walpole’s mood was not improved when he was kept waiting in the British Rooms of the western wing of the Palace by his counterpart, and co-chair of the Council of the Nations, Count Lothar von Bismarck of Hesse-Kassel.

  The German Legation had apologised profusely for its principal’s ‘unavoidable delay’ but Walpole suspected it boded ill for the conversation he was about to have with his old friend.

  He and Lothar were of an age, nearer sixty years old than fifty and had sparred, in academia in their younger days and – off and on - in the less amenable, dangerous sphere of realpolitik for the last, ever-more troubling decade. On Walpole’s part, their political encounters had been interrupted now and then by the vagaries of the workings of democracy in the United Kingdom, not a cross that von Bismarck, whose family had been - as near as dammit, Walpole had written many years ago – under the Germanic Imperial system, ‘the hereditary custodians of the Empire’s foreign affairs for the last century.’

  In preparation for his life-long role, first as a junior secretary in the Kaiser’s Colonial Office ahead of a succession of increasingly senior posts until eventually, he had succeeded his father at the Wilhelmstrass
e, the German Foreign Office on the Unter den Linden in Berlin, Lothar had spent two years at Harrow, and studied Classics and Medieval History at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had met many of the men with whom, it was anticipated, he would work with, and sometimes against, in pursuance of his Kaiser’s policies in later life.

  In comparison with the large, fierce, somewhat over-bearing persona of his illustrious forebear – at least, in his depictions in portraits of the period and those early still photographs of him in old age, who was the acknowledged guiding hand behind the Treaty of Paris, the man German children were taught was the ‘saviour of the First Reich’ – Lothar was a man constructed on slighter, dapper lines belying the fact he was the ‘Iron Man’s’ great-great grandson.

  His mother was the sister of Her Majesty the Duchess of Windsor, the Queen Consort of the King, George V of England, which made the King and Queen his aunt and uncle. Nobody had designed that particular match, royalty having been bestowed upon it by assassination and fate rather than by any reach of imperial match-making. Nevertheless, by a strange accident of history Lothar von Bismarck presently found himself nineteenth in line of succession to the English throne.

  At one stage back in the late 1950s he had actually been seventh in line but since then – much to his relief - the present King of England’s offspring had been loyally, dutifully and with no little gusto producing new royal princes and princesses at a rate which far outstripped the rate older members of the Royal Family were passing away.

  Back in Germany the left-leaning papers sometimes teased Lothar about his ‘British antecedents’. Cartoons of him hob-knobbing with the Royal Family referring to the King as ‘Bertie’ and the Queen calling him ‘Bissi’, appeared in the press every time he was accused of being ‘soft on the Brits’.