by James Philip
The interrogative was gently, and rhetorically posed.
“The Imperial Crisis,” George Walpole groaned.
“Wasn’t it your thesis that once the trouble in ‘faraway places of which the man in the street in London, or Berlin or Philadelphia or Moscow, knows little and cares less’ gains momentum, attaining a ‘critical mass’, that to all intents the ‘contagion’ would be unstoppable?”
“I was playing Devil’s Advocate, Hector,” Walpole retorted urbanely, contemplating his whisky glass.
If their fears materialised, they were going to have to claim that the catastrophe had come upon them unawares; that the pace of extraordinary events had overwhelmed the capacity of rational men, and that they had been the helpless victims of the tide of history: except none of that would be true.
Having known a storm was coming, a storm they could do very little about, they had appeased, compromised in the certain knowledge that the peoples of the Empire did not yet have the stomach for a war. At least, not the sort of war which might have plunged the globe into fiery chaos just to put a ‘few Spanish colonies back in their cages’ in the Americas, or to metaphorically clip the handlebars of the Kaiser’s moustache.
“Thank God,” George Walpole sighed, “we’ve got New England. Even the people around the Kaiser understand that the Empire, with New England at its heart, will always prevail.”
The Prime Minister nodded grimly.
“Yes, nothing changes the ‘facts on the ground’, as they say. Still, it won’t do any harm if we have a quiet word with our respective German ‘friends’ reminding them that if a single Deutsches Heer grenadier steps foot on French soil there will be Hell to pay.”
Walpole hesitated.
“Actually, in the circumstances that ‘reminder’ might be better received in Berlin if the King could be persuaded to put a call through to Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Hector Hamilton nodded.
“I shall speak to the Palace before dinner.” He glanced to the clock on the wall over his desk. “I’ll do it now, Emily will be incandescent if we don’t all sit down at the appointed hour!”
Chapter 31
Tuesday 4th April
Hacienda de Cortés, Navalperal de Tormes, Avila
Albert Stanton tried not to look too worried when the two women were ushered – well, half-carried - into the long ground floor dining room of the old country house in the foothills of the Gredos Mountains. While he was confident that he still looked something of a ‘sight’, he was visibly on the mend but Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle most closely resembled scarecrows!
They were thin, dirty, exhausted and their hair had been cut short as a boy’s might be, except with the inattention of a drunkard barber using garden shears. Both women were wearing what looked like wet-through British Army battledress, albeit not quite the right size for their privation-reduced frames.
They shivered as they were guided near to the fire burning fiercely in the hearth, where the Cortés family was methodically burning its papers.
Melody blinked acknowledgement to the Manhattan Globe man, while her companion stared at him blankly for some seconds before, in her exhaustion, giving up trying to work out who he was.
Blankets had been thrown around the women’s shoulders.
“This gentleman is Mr Albert Stanton of the Globe,” Melody told Henrietta.
“Oh, of course,” the younger woman apologised and despite the situation and her obvious physical state of near collapse, she held out her right hand to the stranger. “Sorry, I didn’t recognise you. I’m sure we must look a real sight!”
“Not at all,” the man lied valiantly. Thinking it best to change the subject he speculated: “I take it that you did not expect to encounter me here?”
Melody quirked a rueful half-smile.
“No,” the man decided, tight-lipped. “Nash is rather a ‘need to know’ fellow, what? Where is he by the way, Nash, I mean?”
Henrietta swayed and Melody grabbed for her elbow to steady her. The other women in the room took this as their cue to move in and as one to shepherd the Governor of New England’s daughter safely to a chair.
“He said he had a ‘couple of chores’ to do before he came up to the hacienda,” she reported. “I’ve been expecting to hear gunfire for the last couple of hours.”
“Oh, yes. The chap seems to have a somewhat muscular approach to what he does, whatever that is…”
Melody too, had been led to a chair. Almost as the weight came off her aching legs and feet the arms of sleep reached out and attempted, seductively to embrace her.
“We had to abandon our supplies,” she explained, feeling faint, “including what was left of our food and water, blankets and the dry socks Paul made us wear at night…” She must have blinked unconscious. Tried to remember where she had got to, and where she was. “That was a couple of nights ago, I think…”
She accepted a cup of water.
Then some tepid, exquisitely meaty broth which she could only sip at before her empty stomach cramped agonisingly.
Neither she nor Henrietta later remembered being escorted, half-carried upstairs and buried together beneath several layers of blankets, oblivious to the world from the moment their heads touched the pillow.
Contrary to Albert Stanton’s expectation there was no gunfire in the night and to his immense irritation when Paul Nash made his belated appearance around midnight he seemed, mud-spattered fatigues apart, unmarked by the adventures he had been through since they had parted eleven days ago. In fact, the man gave every appearance of being maddeningly fit, fresh, ready for anything.
“What did I tell you about bending your knees and rolling when you hit the ground, Stanton?” He chortled, grinning crookedly.
“The ground ‘hit’ me first!”
“Never mind. So, it goes!”
“The ladies were in a state of near collapse,” the New Englander said accusingly.
“Yes. I had no idea that they would be so plucky. I think they’d worked out that I wasn’t going to let them fall into the Army or the Inquisition’s hands. Not under any circumstances. As I say, they are plucky ones. I think Ms Danson must have marked Lady Henrietta’s card.”
“What are you talking about, man?” Stanton demanded suspiciously.
“Ah, the man from the Manhattan Globe needs his card marked also,” Nash whistled, his gaze suddenly hard. “There’s no diplomatic way of saying this, I’m afraid. Trust me, you really, really do not want to fall into the hands of those people…”
“What are you talking about…”
The penny dropped.
Nonetheless, Paul Nash spelled it out.
Presumably, just so that Albert Stanton wrote it down accurately.
“There are people looking for us who would torture, torment more accurately, rape, I daresay, generally make the ladies’ lives a living Hell, invent ludicrous confessions and have Ms Danson, and particularly, Lady Henrietta read those confessions out in court, in a show trial, you understand, before they – the bad guys, and there are a lot of them out there – eventually put them to death. The ladies would be very lucky if they were only hanged until dead by the neck in a public square in front of a baying mob. The way things are going it is more likely that they would be burned alive for witchcraft or heresy.”
Albert Stanton felt as if all the blood in his body had drained into his feet.
“Seriously?” He asked. He switched on his brain the next second. “No, forget I said that…”
“You,” the other man continued, “would certainly be almost as big a catch for them as Ms Danson, and no doubt treated similarly. I promised the ladies that if it came to it, I guaranteed them my best endeavours to ensure that they experienced as little pain and knowledge aforethought as I could manage, in what might be very trying circumstances. A man’s word is his bond, what? Obviously, I don’t want to get myself captured either. In that sense, we’re all in exactly the same boat together.”
“Nearer eighty than ninety, old man,” Nash commiserated, grinning mischievously.
Don José entered the room and patted his back.
“You must have had many troubles along the way, old friend,” the Spaniard said wearily, showing his years now he no longer had to maintain the mask of assurance he had radiated to his family and retainers over the last week while they waited for news of Nash’s mission, preparing for flight at a moment’s notice.
“A few,” Nash conceded. “But nothing the ladies need to know about.” He glanced meaningfully at Stanton. “I’m not a great believer in inflicting the more sordid ephemera of my profession upon the womenfolk,” he said tersely.
The New Englander had no idea how to interpret this.
“I made sure that all the throat-cutting happened while the ladies were safely stashed away, out of sight, out of mind, what?”
“Oh, right, I see. That was very, er… Thoughtful of you…”
“No, it was professional of me. The ladies are in my care and it’s damned bad form to unnecessarily alarm a lady.”
Okay, if I blab to Melody Danson, I’ll be the next one to get his throat cut! It was always good to know exactly where one stood…
Stanton raised his hand.
“I understand.”
“Good. If the bad guys carry on being as inept as they’ve been so far,” Nash explained, pragmatically moving on past his warning to the reporter without a backward look – which Stanton guessed was the way he lived his life – and letting him in on the next part of the plan, “we shall be fine. We’ll rest up here until tomorrow night. If it comes on to rain, we’ll move out then, otherwise first thing the following morning. All of us, everybody.”
Stanton had already worked out that there was no future for the Cortés family or the members of its household in the new Spain rising from the ashes of the conflagrations in Madrid and the other big cities.
“You won’t see me tomorrow. Don José’s in charge now. In the event that anything untoward happens in my absence, he will decide if we run or fight.”
“Where will you be?” Stanton shook his head, raised his hand again, this time in apology. “Sorry, dumb question.”
“Not at all, old man. We’re in the middle of a particularly vicious, fast-spreading civil war and as in all such situations there is opportunity for those who know how to exploit them, and inevitably, an unusually large number of people who urgently need to be dead,” he smiled wolfishly, “rather than alive and kicking.”
“A lot of people,” Don José growled like a bear with an itch that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot reach to scratch.
Chapter 32
Wednesday 5th April
HMS Achilles, Windward Passage, Caribbean
The ship had been piped to Air Defence Stations One an hour before dawn as the cruiser serenely glided south through the waters of the fifty-mile-wide channel between eastern Cuba and the island of Hispaniola – where Columbus had first set foot in the New World – which since the turn of the century had been known as, and latterly officially become the Spanish Crown Province of Santo Domingo. The strait itself had been formed in unimaginably remote geological times by movements along a major active fault line between the two islands. The same fault ran east through Santo Domingo all the way to the Mona Passage and the islands of the smallest and poorest of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, the archipelago of the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico – the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico – which, largely neglected by Old Spain, had been loosely allied with its nearest neighbour for much of the last century until in modern times, the German Empire had acquired its now prosperous concession and wealthy watering hole around the port of San Juan.
The waters beneath the Achilles’s keel were over five thousand feet deep and between the cruiser and its destination, still over two hundred miles to the south-south-west, Kingston, lay the abysmal deep of the eastern end of the Cayman Trench.
Piping the ship to ADS One was just the Old Man’s way of letting everybody know that now they were heading south he wanted everybody to be on his toes.
‘This is the Captain. We’ll soon be clear of the northern reaches of the Windward Passage. We’ll be letting the old girl,’ the ship, ‘have her head as soon as it is fully light. We’ll make the breakwater at Kingston this evening and enter port tomorrow morning. At which point Achilles will assume command of the West Indies Squadron.’
The Old Man had been at his most fatherly.
‘Whatever you have heard about the situation vis-à-vis Cuba and Santo Domingo and the rest of New Spain you will have noticed that nobody is actually shooting at each other at the moment. Ideally, we’d like to keep things that way. We are sailing south to show the flag and to spread goodwill among the people of the islands blessed to live beneath the Union Jack…’
Shortly after the Old Man concluded his brief Tannoy address to the ship, word was passed for Surgeon-Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln and Sub-Lieutenant Edward Forrest to report to the Captain’s stateroom.
‘We’ve got at least one too many aircraft on board, gentlemen,’ Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson proclaimed cheerfully. ‘We can’t even risk exercising the starboard three-inch auto-cannons without blowing away one of the bally things!’
Neither of the airmen attempted to gainsay this.
‘I’m sending off the ‘wheeled’ Sea Fox at first light. I have a few despatches and the boffins have an attaché case full of papers they want sent back to Florida post-haste. I’m told the Sea Foxes have plenty of range for that sort of thing, especially the ‘land’ variant we’ve got sitting on the catapult right now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Abe agreed respectfully. ‘It’s several hundred pounds lighter than the float planes and less robustly constructed so it can fly for at least another hour, say one hundred and thirty or forty miles, on the same tank of fuel.’
The Old Man nodded sagely.
‘You and Forrest,’ he went on, ‘have the least time on the standard float plane Sea Fox. So,’ he added apologetically, ‘I have accepted your divisional commander’s recommendation that you deliver despatches to Kingston, re-fuel and fly up to Florida via a fuelling stop on Grand Turk Island, with the initial reports and some of the raw data the electronic warfare chaps compiled while we were cruising off Santo Domingo. Rest assured, you’ll be returned to the ship on the first vessel heading south in due course. Do you have any questions?’
Now, Abe and Ted Forrest were being shaken to bits as the engine ran up to maximum power with their Sea Fox firmly locked onto the catapult sledge.
To Abe’s surprise the armourers had loaded a hundred pound, and two twenty-five pound high-explosive bombs into the racks under both wings of the aircraft. This weight had more than compensated for the seaplane’s lack of big, heavy, dragging floats. Moreover, having expected the flight crew to remove the observer’s ring-mounted 0.303-inch calibre drum-fed machine gun, Ted had been pleasantly surprised to discover it still in place and two spare drums clipped into their rack near to hand. Likewise, the deck crew had re-mounted the aircraft’s 0.5-inch forward-firing gun and filled its ammunition box.
Sitting in the wheeled Sea Fox’s cockpit for the first time there were other, minor surprises. The controls were familiar, obviously, although waiting on the catapult they felt oddly strange; perhaps because the machine seemed to be brand new, everything spick and span. There was a small fire axe clipped to the inner fuselage by his right knee – in case there was a crash and he had to chop his way out of the wreckage, not normally a consideration at sea apparently, where it was presumed a trapped pilot would simply drown – and the first aid kit was in a larger, aluminium box stowed by his left ankle. There also seemed to be a thin metal bulkhead – in the float planes there was just a void - separating him from the navigator-gunner’s position.
However, these were things he only g
ave fleeting consideration.
Not so the uncomfortable weight of the holstered service revolver, an old-fashioned Webley six-shooter on the belt around his waist. He and Ted Forest had stared at the gun and belt presented to each of them by the armourers as they waited to mount up.
‘Captain’s Day Orders, sirs,’ they had been informed. ‘All officers going ashore are to carry firearms at all times until further notice, sirs.’
There was no space in the aircraft for personal belongings; just as well because then it would really have felt as if they were deserting the ship at the precise moment the commission began in earnest. As it was, they could still convince themselves they would be back in a few days.
However bad the news, nobody believed the balloon was going to go up anytime soon. If the ‘high ups’ were really worried about the situation in the Caribbean, Achilles would be steaming south in the wake of a battleship, several much bigger cruisers and one of the giant new aircraft carriers. And as for the rumours about the German ‘Vera Cruz’ Squadron well, with the Indomitable already guarding the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Spain, the Germans – even if they were flying the flag of Nuevo Granada – were hardly in any position to cause mischief. If the Vera Cruz Squadron was intent on showing its new flag it was likely to cruise down to the Antilles and all those territories like Aruba in the south which Germany had leased, or rather appropriated pretty much in perpetuity from their former Dutch owners, or to visit the Cayman Islands, another of the supposedly legitimate concessions granted to the Kaiser in the underbelly of the thirteen-year-old Submarine Treaty.
Both Abe and Ted Forrest’s emotions had therefore, been mixed as they said their abbreviated farewells and mounted up in the pre-dawn darkness that morning, especially for the Sea Fox’s pilot who had discovered the only way not to feel homesick was to bury himself in his duties to the threshold of exhaustion every day. If he allowed himself time to mope over Kate, of missing witnessing their son growing up day by day, his mood dipped and he became preoccupied, no use to man or beast on a fighting warship.
