by James Philip
“I was working in the kitchen garden when the panic started a few days ago,” Melody offered.
“I was in the chapel,” Henrietta returned. “The only time they don’t have me working is when I’m on my knees praying!”
The older woman smiled and the Governor of New England’s youngest daughter giggled involuntarily.
‘The panic’ had quickly evaporated only to recur again, and again, with the women being ushered hurriedly to their cells at regular intervals over the last few days. Today, ‘the panic’ was of a self-evidently different intensity, not just the appearance of a stranger or a passing pilgrim at the gate of the monastery.
“I never really paid much attention to my Latin classes at school,” Melody confessed, “but I seem to be getting a crash course here!”
Her grasp of Latin had been well-honed during her training for the Bar; however, she too was out of practice and in any event, had never really taken to the language as a tool of spoken communication. It did not help that many of the nuns casually employed positively archaic forms of Biblical and other liturgical texts. What had impressed her was that practically all the nuns she had come into contact with, many of whom seemed to be from peasant or labouring classes where traditionally, girls in Spain had not been taught to read and write, were significantly more fluent in Latin than either she, or she suspected, Henrietta were.
“They’ve been keeping us away from the East Cloister,” Henrietta speculated, that’s where the monastery school is. I’ve heard children’s voices several times in the mornings. The younger woman spoke in a whisper. “Do you have any idea where this place is?”
“Somewhere north of Madrid. At least twenty, twenty-five miles to the north judging by the country we trekked through with Don Rafael.” Melody sighed. “That already seems like an age ago…” She had collected her wits again now. “I thought I heard an aeroplane before they called me inside that first time?”
“I heard a commotion in the gatehouse later that day.”
Melody was tight-lipped.
“It didn’t take them very long to find us, did it?” Henrietta went on, chewing her lower lip.
“No, it might not be that,” Melody said tartly, relenting immediately. “The whole country is in turmoil, so far as we know. At a time like this, old scores get settled. Old debts called in. Places like this might look like easy meat for deserters, chancers, local bigwigs who think the Mother Church or the Medina Sidonia family have lost their grip on things. Besides, up here in the mountains we’re an awfully long way from anything you or I would recognise as civilisation, or the rule of law.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Henrietta admitted sheepishly, badly wanting to be reassured.
“This place might be a closed book to the local Inquisition, for example,” Melody explained, deciding the best thing to quell her own fears was to carry on talking. “As for that aeroplane, well, there’s nowhere for it to land around here.”
“Bandits could just take over,” Henrietta posited. “What’s to stop them?”
“God,” Melody replied, with greater confidence than she felt. “The Mother Church is the one constant and we both know that the Catholic hierarchy tends to revert to an eye for an eye interpretation of Holy Scripture when somebody treads on its turf.”
“That’s true…”
“We’ve forgotten something,” Melody grinned.
“Oh, what?”
“This,” Melody breathed, kissing her lover open-mouthed as the women renewed their embrace.
Later they lay together, entwined for mutual warmth and mental solace, listening to the faint, distant sounds of the great citadel-like religious house.
No hue and cry came to their ears.
There were no heavy – or in fact, any – footsteps in the corridor on the other side of the impregnably locked door to their cell. Presently, evening drew on: they rose to nibble bread and pick at the cheese, which tasted bitter and stank unpleasantly as they broke through its crust, slaked their thirst with caution not knowing when the water jug might be re-charged and hurriedly crept back beneath the blankets to keep out the chill which quickly radiated from the thick walls of the castle keep when night fell.
Eventually, they slept.
Much later Henrietta blinked awake.
Candles burned nearby on the floor and on the table below the window, and a dark form loomed over the women, seated unmoving in a chair.
“Do not be alarmed,” the man said in a gently amused, unthreatening low baritone. He had spoken in English with a vaguely Canadian twang which might have originated anywhere in the Maritime Provinces or the upper colonies – Maine, Vermont or New Hampshire as easily - as in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.
“Melody,” Henrietta hissed.
“I’m awake,” the older woman muttered, trying to prop herself on an unsteady elbow as she peered into the gloom. She did not ask the man who he was.
She already knew that.
As to what he was doing here in the Mountains of Madrid…
Well, that was the mother and father of all conundrums!
The last time she had spoken to Captain Paul Nash, an aide-de-camp to the Military Attaché of the United Kingdom Embassy in Madrid, he had struck her as a typical upper-class dimwit. The man had made a clumsy pass at her at that Embassy reception soon after she got to Madrid, and she had rebuffed him with barely veiled contempt. Which, she had assumed, was why they had not had a lot to do with each other since. During that first encounter and the others when their paths had crossed, he had affected a positively effete hoity-toity upper-class accent which was so over the top it would have embarrassed a member of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace!
She had naturally concluded that he was a spook.
Now, in the darkness his voice rang with confident authority.
“If I asked you who you really are would you tell me?” She asked, stifling a shivering yawn.
“Melody?” Henrietta asked, not yet recognising the stranger but cognisant that nothing about the mysterious interloper had panicked her partner.
“Brigadier Harrison and Lady Henrietta’s father wasn’t prepared to allow you, either of you, to go out and about without,” the man paused, chuckled lowly, “a safety net. Besides, in the beginning we didn’t trust Alonso.” He grunted ruefully at this juncture. “That was another mistake. If it wasn’t for him you two would almost certainly be enjoying the hospitality of the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España, or,” he reconsidered, “one or other of the various flavours of the Inquisition vying for position in Madrid.”
This was a classic case of too much disjointed information all in one mouthful for the women to quickly assimilate.
“Is Alonso all right?” Melody asked.
“Yes. The last time I heard. But that was a few days ago, now.”
Both women, still clutching the blankets close had sat up.
The man leaned forward, viewing them by the faint illumination of the candles.
He chuckled ruefully.
“Well, I don’t think there is anything I can suggest to improve your disguises, ladies!”
“Very funny!” Melody retorted.
“Sorry, but your own Mums wouldn’t recognise you and in the circumstances that’s all to the good. It’s pretty chaotic out there and we need to take advantage of that. Sooner or later the Generals,” he shrugged, “or it may be the Colonels, who tend to be better at insurrection than the old guard, will get themselves organised, wheel out the King-Emperor, or the most senior surviving member of the Royal Family, kiss the ring of the Cardinal of Madrid and turn a blind eye to the excesses of the Inquisition, then it will only be a matter of time – not long, I’d guess – before the towns and the cities, and the borders, I daresay, get locked down tighter than a duck’s arse.”
“The Army mounted the coup?” Melody demanded.
“Maybe. Maybe, they just stepped in when the Court factions kicked off, or when the
Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España and the Guardia Nacional tried to move against the Cardinal of Madrid’s personal inquisitors. All that stuff’s way beyond my pay grade. Nobody on our side has the vaguest idea who organised the mass protests outside the Royal Alcazar that seem to have been the trigger, or the starting gun, for the craziness. Coups always work better in a climate of chaos when nobody has a clue what’s really going on.”
It was a lot to digest.
Neither woman spoke.
“Anyway, once Alonso had got word to us that he’d locked you two ladies away in a monastery,” the man guffawed laconically, “that was a nice touch coming from a chap like the Duke,” another chortle, “then it was the work of another couple of days to find somebody to fly the aeroplane and voila, here I am!”
Melody frowned.
“There’s nowhere within ten or fifteen miles of here that a plane could land?”
“Well, not in one piece,” the man whom she knew as Paul Nash agreed affably.
“That’s why I had to parachute into the valley. It took me bloody hours to retrieve all my kit and then to climb all the way back up to the monastery!” He sniffed. “I’d hoped to be with you a couple of days ago. Sorry about that. I’d have been here a lot earlier if I hadn’t bumped into those scoundrels La Superiora has been keeping at bay the last few days.”
“Scoundrels?” Henrietta murmured.
“Their officer confided to me that his superiors wanted to get their hands on ‘the Duke’s whores’ but that Sister Isabella had sent him away with a flea in his ear and a threat of ex-communication ringing in his ears…”
“There are people looking for us even up here in the mountains?” Melody checked, trying to figure out what the man had meant when he said ‘bumped into’.
The man smiled, barring his teeth in the gloom.
“No, not anymore,” he said blankly.
Chapter 25
Friday 31st March
HMS Perseus, off St Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia
Alex Fielding did not know how he felt about having been peremptorily transferred – temporarily, he hoped – from the Colonial Air Force to the Royal Naval Air Service.
Technically, this was a thing his home colony – New York – could have vetoed but given that by transferring Alex, and his whole squadron, to the Royal Navy, the ever-parsimonious bean counters back in the Defence Department in Albany got to defray the entire cost of operating 7NY Squadron to the British Exchequer, the people in the colonial capital had probably bitten off the Navy’s hand when the transfer was first mooted.
Not that Alex had that much to complain about. He had been bounced to the rank of substantive Commander, with that rank’s pay and prestige, while actually serving as only a Lieutenant-Commander aboard HMS Perseus. Basically, the three navy-rings on his sleeve seriously trumped his major’s pips in the world of short-term CAF commissions. Heck, it almost made him ‘respectable’!
Whoever would have seen that coming?
Not that any of that guff pre-occupied him that morning.
He had lost two of his guys already: one dead and another banged up so badly he was not going to be in uniform again, if ever, any time soon. That was in addition to the three men who had not cut it as naval aviators and a fourth who had decided that this new game – operating the Squadron’s Goshawk Mark IVs off the deck of an aircraft carrier – was not for him. That was fair enough, none of them had signed up for the Navy lark!
The yardstick by which a man was certified ‘deck qualified’ was six successful landings on a carrier at sea. There was no time limit within which this had to be achieved, not officially. Unofficially, the Navy had wanted it done in a screaming hurry.
Land, take-off a minute later, climb back into the circuit, take your turn and come in to land again, and so on until a man had the magic six ‘survived’ deck landings.
Alex and sixteen of his nineteen remaining pilots – including a couple he had offered to transfer back to land-based operations because he had mistakenly thought they would get themselves killed on ‘this lark’ – had already qualified over two fraught days.
The last week had been brutal, not least because the Navy believed it was only a matter of time before it was right in the middle of a shooting war. Back on land the politicians, generals, legislators and media people could complacently pussy-foot around reality; out at sea the Navy had already activated War Plan Alpha-1978.
In the absence of specific guidance from the mandarins in London the Senior Service was doing what it always did in times of crisis, it prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. Which was why the huge aircraft carrier was gliding through the slowly lifting fog in the wake of two pilot boats to dock alongside Gun Wharf – a complex of quays linked to the magazines on the northern shore of the Naval Base which these days, virtually encircled St Margaret’s Bay. Perseus was at best half-worked-up, in no condition to punch even a proportion of her substantial weight but even a half-strength Combat Air Wing of some thirty-five aircraft, with a flight room filled with still raw, green ‘carrier airmen’ she was, to quote her CAW Commander: ‘One Hell of a beast!’
Alex had climbed up to the flight deck from his cabin in the bowels of the leviathan to get a bit of fresh air and untypically, to clear his head of some of the jangling contradictions he had rarely experienced down on the Border as a singleton ‘hot-shot scout jockey’. Much to his surprise the responsibilities of squadron command had washed off his shoulders like water off a proverbial duck’s back; right up to the moment they had told him about Perseus.
To have only had three bad crashes was near miraculous…
‘A testament to how well you’ve brought your chaps on,” the CAW had declared.
Alex thanked the fates that he had been lucky enough to have inherited half-a-dozen real fighter pilots, men who had served on the Border, survived enough scrapes to know that blinking twice was never going to cut it. Those experienced men had carried the ‘newbies’ and the ‘sprogs’ along in their wake, and to the credit of the CAF’s peacetime flight training programs – which old hands tended to regard as overlong and fussy – once they had got over their terrors many of the junior men had soon got the hang of ‘catching a wire’.
Not that landing on the Perseus was ever going to be routine. If take-off and landing were the two most dangerous times on land then at sea, the perils were positively extreme. It was with good reason that the most hazardous place on any ship in the Royal Navy was the flight deck of an operational carrier.
Worse, the Navy was still only just beginning to get used to operating high-performance low-wing monoplanes like the Goshawk off the decks of the big new carriers. Previous experience flying string-bag, hundred-mile-an-hour machines too fragile to ‘catch a trap’ off the much smaller decks of the first carriers – often converted merchantmen or cruisers from the Reserve Fleet – significantly less than half the size of the Ulysses class ships, had proven useless and many of the attempts to transfer the ‘lessons’ learned in that previous era had ended up killing too many brave men.
Perseus was scheduled to be at St Margaret’s Bay for seventy-two hours. Insofar as the giant base was practically in the middle of nowhere and literally miles from what New Englanders – particularly from Alex’s neck of the wood – tended to call ‘civilisation’, its main attractions were a couple of big cinemas, and some of the most notorious bars in the Empire.
The gentrified civilian settlements where the wives and families of Navy personnel and the permanent civilian employees of the dockyards lived - regimented streets of detached and semi-detached married quarters up and down the coast and around Halifax to the north – were a world apart from Royal Navy St Margaret’s Bay.
The fleshpots of St Margaret’s Bay, wet and chilly, arctic for two to three seasons of each year were the exclusive preserve of the crews of visiting ships. Alex planned to take his boys on a monumental pub crawl they would remember the rest of their lives before Perse
us sailed again. There was nothing like a party to blow away the cobwebs and besides, the Squadron’s fallen deserved a bloody good wake!
The carrier’s fog horn blared deafeningly.
Cynics claimed that the Empire had invested so heavily in the St Margaret’s Bay-Halifax shipbuilding, maintenance, stores and base infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century, primarily in furtherance of a concerted attempt to shrug off the dead hand of organised labour back in the Old Country. However, if that had been the case the Crown would hardly have developed Norfolk into the largest naval base in the World outside of Europe, nor would it have continually modernised and kept busy, the Admiralty yards at Brooklyn, given that the civilian workers employed in any Empire facility in either New England or Canada had – by statute - enjoyed the same workers’ rights as their ‘British’ counterparts since as long ago as 1916.
People said the days of St Margaret’s Bay were numbered. However, while it was true that none of the contracts for the new fleet carriers had been allocated to its yards, it was also true that the era in which the Navy mandated that its big ships be constructed in secret, far from the prying eyes of potential enemy agents, were long gone. The Ulysses class was being built as visibly as possible just so that everybody knew that the Royal Navy was acquiring and enthusiastically embracing, a new and formidable technological edge on its rivals.
Leonora had looked at Alex as if he was pulling her leg when he told her he was ‘joining the Navy’; at the time he had rather been hoping that somebody was indeed pulling his leg! It had been a lot harder to leave her that last time, especially as he had no idea – nor did anybody else – when he would be back. Everybody assumed Perseus’s home port was going to be Norfolk but in reality, that was no more than scuttlebutt. Other rumoured home ports had been Gibraltar, or Alexandria in Egypt, although it was said that Malta was unlikely because the dry docks there were too small.
The notion that he might be hundreds or thousands of miles away when his first – so far as he knew, he had been drunk a lot in the latter half of the 1960s and the first half-decade of the 1970s - son or daughter emerged squalling into the world, preyed on Alex’s mind.
