by James Philip
Melody was aware again that there was something profoundly predatory in that smile, and a hunter’s glint in the man’s eyes.
“You seem to know everything there is to know about us. What’s your story?” She asked, not really expecting an answer.
“I suppose I’m one of those guys every Empire needs to oil the wheels. Now and then that involves doing things nobody is ever going to own up to in public. I’m your man for that sort of thing. That’s my story.”
Melody’s eyes narrowed.
Until last year she had been the only female detective inspector in the New York Constabulary, and moreover, at the time of her promotion youngest woman or man, to ever hold that rank. She had not stopped being a detective just because she had been attached to a pointless diplomatic mission to a country where she had lived, blissfully happily, for several years as a child.
Of course, as a young girl she had been blind to the grinding poverty of the peasant population, and to each and every iniquity of the Inquisition, the privileged daughter of two feted and acclaimed classical musicians at the court of the old King-Emperor, Carlos VI. Unlike in the overseas provinces the institution of slavery had been officially abandoned at Royal Command thirty years ago: although it had never been specifically outlawed by statute in the Cortes Generales, the so-called legislature of the Empire of New Spain, essentially a collection of aristocrats, courtiers, old soldiers and place men whose sole purpose was to rubber-stamp royal edicts. Instead of crude slavery the ruling classes had inflicted serfdom on the old Russian model upon the peoples of the agrarian countryside, and a heavily regulated wage slavery upon the inhabitants of the urban landscape.
Nowhere in Europe had feudalism survived so robustly, and nowhere in the post-renaissance ‘West’ had so many factors combined to limit, in many cases suffocate and actively snuff out, the spark of innovation and ambition vital to any nation seeking to maximise the opportunities of industrialisation. Old Spain had been left behind by the rest of the World, become an impoverished backwater in which six or seven out of every ten of its citizens might as well have still been living in the middle of the nineteenth century for all the good ‘modernisation’ had done them. There was no national electrical grid or even a proper road system in the mountains north of Madrid, in winter starvation often stalked the villagers on the hillsides who still lived in semi-fortress communities largely ignorant of the marvels taken for granted in some of the big towns and cities, forever the voiceless vassals of the princes who lived in golden splendour in their great palaces.
All this had disgusted her on her return as an adult to Spain but right now it leant persuasive credence to what Paul Nash had said to her. She was stuck in a mindset alien to the majority of the peoples of the country around them. She was thinking like a latter-twentieth century, very independently-minded woman; she might speak Spanish like a native but there was no way she could put herself in the place of somebody who had only ever lived in these mountains, and if they were lucky, attended a church school for half-a-dozen years during their childhood. To most people they encountered she and Henrietta and their guardian would be strangers, no threat, of no interest once they had moved on by and passed out of sight. An armed man accompanied by two women was just a man guarding his chattels in these hills where the writ of princes and absentee landlords was a tenuous, infrequently exercised prerogative.
“I don’t think you work for the CSS,” Melody decided, thinking aloud.
“Does it matter who I work for?” This the man posed, amused.
She shrugged, suddenly weary beyond measure again.
“Who do you really work for?”
“Ah… I think you’ve worked that out already.”
The rain was falling so hard that the branches and leaf cover above their heads made little or no difference.
“Stay dry,” the man sighed, rising to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Like I said, to re-fill the canteens and to reconnoitre ahead. I’ll leave my backpack here with you in the dry under the awning. Try to sleep, we’re as safe up here as anywhere. Especially, if the weather sets in for the next few hours. It rains a lot in the night at this time of year, hopefully we’ll have another dry day tomorrow. The going gets a lot better until we climb into the Gredos Mountains so we ought to make good progress. But right now, just try to sleep.”
With that he was gone, ghosting into the night.
Melody tried to track him, it was useless.
He disappeared into the darkness like a wraith.
Chapter 30
Monday 3rd April
Cliveden House, Buckinghamshire
Sir George Walpole had requested one, last meeting with Lothar von Bismarck, the Russian Minister and the Papal Legate, Cardinal Manzini before returning to England. The Royal Air Force had sent a Marlborough twin-engine transport aircraft to hasten his journey, landing him and his small entourage at Northolt where cars had been waiting to whisk him the fifteen or so miles out into the country to the Prime Minister’s country retreat in the heart of the Home Counties.
Normally, the Foreign and Colonial Secretary relaxed when he walked through the portals of the magnificent old Italianate mansion in the Chiltern Hills. Today, his customary public insouciance, what people who ought to have known better persisted in describing as ‘grace under pressure’ was a somewhat porous mask which might slip without warning at any time.
“Oh, dear, George,” Lady Emily Hamilton smiled sympathetically as she appeared from a side room to intercept her visitor as he divested himself of his hat and coat, “surely, things can’t be that bad,” she remarked cheerfully as she studied her old friend. “It is bad enough that misery-guts old Primus inter pares is walking around with a permanently long face without you joining him in a double act!”
“Forgive me, Emily,” Walpole brightened, “things aren’t that bad.”
The Prime Minister’s wife had never really forgiven her husband for allowing himself to be bullied into taking up residence at No 10, Downing Street, her least favourite address in Central London. Three decades ago her circle at Oxford, where she had been one of the brightest of all the footlights throughout her time at St John’s College reading Modern Literature, Greek and French, had been astounded when she married the Honourable Hector Hamilton, the second son of Lord, then 4th Earl Maidenhead and Taplow. Opinion had been divided between those who were worried she might have suffered a psychotic episode of some kind or that she had been momentarily dazzled, blinded in fact, by the supposedly fabulous wealth of the son of the ringmaster of the ‘Cliveden Set’.
Actually, her real friends soon realised that she had simply fallen head over heels in love with the quietly spoken, and in those days still relatively anonymous backbench Member of Parliament for Epping Forest. For most of their marriage it had been Emily, a published poet and erudite, acerbic columnist and sometimes features editor for a succession of daily national newspapers, and a popular ‘talking head’ on television current affairs and quiz programs, who had enjoyed by far the higher public profile – by a country mile – of the pair. That had all come to an end with Hector’s surprise promotion to the Cabinet in the post-assassination crisis which had brought King George V to the throne.
Nobody had been more surprised than Hector when it transpired that cometh the moment cometh the man!
Presently, Hector Hamilton was three-years and seven months into his second ‘sentence’ – as Emily put it succinctly – ‘in the jug at Downing Street with no hope of remission for good behaviour.’
Emily was the human face of the ‘family firm’ and everybody around her would forgive her anything. She was, after all, a national – nay – imperial treasure.
She took the Foreign and Colonial Secretary’s arm and led him into her husband’s ground floor office at the back of the great house. The Prime Minister’s personal Royal Marine bodyguard knocked lightly on the door, opened it and stepped, respectfully aside. Not the
least of Emily’s, mainly whimsical complaints, was that she and Hector had to live in a goldfish bowl surrounded by heavily armed men!
However, after the carnage half-a-dozen dissident Fenians had wrought on the imperial establishment in the early 1960s the decision had been taken that that was never going to happen again. Cabinet ministers and the senior members of the Royal family never went anywhere without their police or armed services protection details; on balance, most ministers and, so far as George Walpole could tell, the consensus within the royal household was that being alive was a lot better than being dead or maimed, so the security and the constraints it placed on individuals just had to be tolerated.
“I don’t care how bad things are,” Emily Hamilton declared. “I don’t want you boys drinking all the whisky before dinner. I hate it when I’m the only voice of sobriety at the table!”
“Your word is our command, my dear,” her husband assured her, taking off his reading glasses as he rose to welcome Walpole. “I’ve called the inner circle over this evening,” he said to his visitor when they were alone. “For obvious reasons, I wanted to hear your take on the latest developments first.”
The men took chairs by the cold hearth where a tea pot, a jug of milk and a pair of cups and saucers awaited them on a low table. They looked at each other.
“What the Devil are the Germans playing at, George?” The Prime Minister asked quietly.
“It’s not just the Germans,” his Foreign Secretary countered. “If it was, things might be explicable. In some sense, at least. Frankly, I’m not entirely convinced that the German Minister really knows what his Navy is up to in the Caribbean. It’s the old problem of the Army, the Navy and the Foreign Ministry each pursuing their own agendas. It does not help that the Kaiser seems to be a little do-lally some weeks… Goodness knows what the Crown Prince and the Tsar said to each other the other week; everybody knows they hate each other’s guts and have done since they were cadets…”
“Perhaps, they’ve finally agreed that they dislike us more than they loathe each other?”
Sir George Walpole shook his head, forced a grimace because they both knew that was not what this was all about. The German Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, modelled itself on the Royal Navy, its officers were expected to be fluent English speakers and writers, and close, life-long and life-defining friendships between officers in the two navies were common. The relations between the Deutsches Heer and the British Army were less cordial, as was to be expected from the men of armies watching each other across the broad expanses of the upper Rhine.
But that was not the problem, the problem was that something unquantifiable had suddenly altered and the whole calculus of Anglo-German relations had somehow shifted, like continental tectonic plates grinding against each other, suddenly shifting without warning; and he had not seen it coming, so, perhaps it was not really that inexplicable that for the first time in his political career he was at a complete loss as to know what to do next.
The academic and the historian in him wanted to offer analysis, to dissect the runes uncovered by the not so subtly moving pieces on the geopolitical chessboard but the time for that had come and gone, possibly years ago.
He began to list the new, and old – unresolved - issues separating London and Berlin.
“While I am convinced that there would be no consensus within the circle around the Kaiser, or within his government, which would support any direct threat of armed aggression against our fundamental interests in Europe,” Walpole prefaced, cursing how ponderously his mind was turning of late, “German policies challenging our traditional hegemony around the world and encouraging allies and proxies to oppose our influence, essentially although not exclusively non-violently have led to conditions in some regions which have generated a momentum of their own. I do not know, nor can I claim to know, if this was the hope or the plan of my counterparts at the Wilhelmstrasse, or simply a concatenation of unseen or unforeseeable consequences.”
The Prime Minister’s eyes narrowed.
“An accident, you mean?”
“Perhaps, more likely an object lesson in the workings of the law of unintended consequences…”
“You do know that you start speaking like a professor of the old school when you are worried, George?”
Walpole forced a smile.
“Yes, sorry.”
Hector Hamilton rubbed his chin with his free hand before picking up his tea cup with the other. He raised the cup to his lips, thought better of it and replaced it on the table top.
“The Crown Prince has been talking about pulling out of the Submarine Treaty ever since the ink dried on it,” he reminded his friend. “The Germans have been complaining about our alleged interference in the development of their Caribbean oil refineries on Aruba, without cause, obviously, for almost as long. As for their army of so-called technical advisors on Cuba and in New Spain, well, we decided to turn a blind eye to that as part of the quid pro quo, or rather, the diplomatic scaffolding supporting the Submarine Treaty and its related sub clauses…”
“Lothar warned me that the Kaiser is on the verge of posting notice to quit from the Treaty,” Walpole informed Hamilton. “It is blatantly clear to me that the coup in Spain must have been instigated by a middle-ranking cadre of Army and Navy officers trained in Germany.”
The Foreign Secretary’s tone was suddenly harsh.
“The thing that worries me, scares me, if I’m being honest about it, Hector,” George Walpole continued glumly, “is the news that the Wilhelmstrasse, albeit apparently at the Kaiser’s command, has allowed the re-flagging of Admiral von Reuter’s squadron. It is unclear when exactly this occurred, probably sometime in the last fortnight but those ships are now under the operational control of the Armada de las Americas. Which means that this blasted ‘Triple Alliance’ that the Spanish colonies in the region have been talking about for years, now has the nucleus of a modern navy…”
“Surely, our German friends must realise that this risks temporarily altering the balance of naval power in the Caribbean,” Hector Hamilton remarked, cool as a cucumber. “Presumably, you explained this to Count Bismarck?”
“Yes,” his friend confirmed abruptly.
The Prime Minister remained relatively sanguine.
“With the Indomitable and her squadron at New Orleans and the Princess Royal and Task Force 5.1 of the Atlantic Fleet presently exercising within seven days’ steaming time of anywhere in the Gulf of Spain or the rest of the Caribbean, any advantage the Spanish, or their German mentors, might hope to gain from this ‘exercise’ would be short-lived, George.”
“Would it, Hector?” His old friend objected. “All we have down there right now is a single light cruiser, the Cassandra at Kingston Jamaica, and another, the Achilles on her way to join her in a few days’ time. We have negligible air forces on Jamaica, or for that matter on any of our other island territories in the eastern Caribbean. Goodness knows what potential havoc Admiral von Reuter’s ships could wreak down there before our capital ships caught up with them. If they ever caught up with them, that is. And what if we eventually capture or destroy those German-Spanish ships? There are already nascent independence movements on many of the islands under our control. There have been sporadic campaigns of civil disobedience on both Jamaica and Barbados, goodness, we had to send in the Marines to restore order in Trinidad two or three years back. What message will it send to the peoples of those far-flung islands if we cannot even defend them from a handful of bloody ‘Spanish’ cruisers?”
The Prime Minister digested this in silence, then, forsaking his tea went to the drinks cabinet and returned with a decanter of whisky and two crystal tumblers. He poured generous measures into each of the glasses.
The two men sipped, then as if by common consent, imbibed deep draughts of the restorative amber liquid as they mulled cause and effect, and ultimately, their failure.
Walpole knew that the King had talked his friend out of resigning in
the aftermath of the Empire Day atrocities of two years ago, that personally, Hector had felt then, and ever since that he ought to have departed Downing Street back in July 1976, standing aside in favour of a younger, and perhaps, angrier and more decisive man to face the music.
People had been calling him ‘the appeaser in chief’.
Until lately his detractors had had the courtesy to mutter it behind his back, out of his hearing so as not to upset Emily. Nowadays, there were frequent derogatory editorials in the papers, snide commentaries on the radio and television and Question Time in the Commons had come to resemble a bear pit.
Hector Hamilton had regarded his discomfiture as a small price to pay for the continuation of the European Peace, knowing full well that nobody would remember that it had been his government which had commenced the re-armament programs that were now, belatedly beginning to repair the damage his predecessors’ neglect had wrought on the fighting power of the Empire’s armed forces.
The new aircraft carriers coming into service with the Royal Navy, the high-performance propeller-driven monoplane scouts and bombers being delivered to the RAF in fast-increasing numbers, and soon, the first jet-powered ‘interceptors’ and ‘attack’ aircraft, the new generation of armoured land vehicles, ground cruisers and self-propelled artillery, the superb new infantry weapons, assault rifles, machine guns and a slew of short-range wire-guided munitions, were all the products of his administration’s acknowledgement that until the armed forces had the weapons to do the job, appeasement was the only safe option…
Now, time had run out.
“One day I will apologise to Philip De L’Isle,” the Prime Minister promised. “What he was afraid might happen has come to pass. The lesson of 1866 was that we, that is, the German and Russian Empires and every second and third-rate power left standing, should never fight a second general European war. Logically, therefore, all future wars would be fought elsewhere, imperial trials of strength directed by, and resourced from the old centres of empire.” He grunted, drained his glass. “If I recollect, you wrote a marvellously erudite book about all that twenty years ago. What did you call it?”