Connie took off her hat, sat forward on her mount, a handsome black gelding her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. They had all been in the saddle for several hours and her face was a little grimy as she turned to look up as an antique biplane wobbled towards them, and then turned over the arroyo to head almost due south.
“A Fleabag,” she declared. “Those things look so frail you half-expect them to fall out of the sky at any time!”
Connie spoke Spanish in an oddly French-accented way. Spanish and English, and for reasons nobody had ever explained to her, one of the dialects of the Wichita, had always been spoken, virtually interchangeably on the Rancho Mendoza since time immemorial. From habit, she and Pablo tended to converse in Spanish; particularly when they were in the company of ‘Easterners’, most of whom only spoke English. In any event, given that their respective fathers were talking in the first language of the Commonwealth today, they were being awkward, sticking to Spanish.
That again, was another of their ‘little ways’, foibles remarked upon all the time by their mothers but unremarked by their respective fathers.
Connie and Pablo turned their horses to watch the Fleabag crab across the sky as it slowly followed the line of the arroyo down to where it met the fork of the Trinity River. Lately, they had seen higher-flying, much more modern silvery-winged warplanes and transport aircraft flying to the south west.
They assumed the aircraft must have navigated from Caddoport on the Red River, tracking along the railways lines to the west before using the upper reaches of the Trinity River as way points signalling the way down to the transit aerodromes around San Antonio some two hundred and fifty miles to the south-south-west. Those aircraft probably used Waco and Round Rock, there were supposed to be navigation beacons at both, as further way markers on their flights to the south.
“Pa says the Mexicans won’t come this far north,” Connie said quietly.
Pablo shrugged.
A hundred years ago, Trinity Crossing had been the site of a border fort of the Empire of New Spain, and the whole South West had been half-a-dozen provinces of the great sprawling dominion ruled from México City all the way from the Pacific to the Red River.
In school all Texan children were taught that once upon a time that ‘dreadful empire’ had stretched from the northern shores of the Latin Americas to the Texas Territory and the banks of the great Mississippi. In both Pablo’s and Connie’s great-grandfathers’ lives the Inquisition had ruled the ground upon which they now stood. And now, it was said, that the Catholic Triple Alliance had embarked upon a new crusade to reclaim the lost lands from the heretic usurpers of New England…
“What are you two plotting?” Connie’s father called, fondly gruff.
It was Julio who replied, turning in the saddle.
“Do you think the Mexicans will come this far north, Don Jorge?” He asked, suddenly serious.
“Maybe,” the older man said. “But swallowing San Antonio will choke them awhile first. That’s what towns and cities do to invading armies. They suck in troops and when they fall it is hard to get an army moving again afterwards.”
Connie’s gelding stamped his hooves as she guided its proud head around.
“What do we do if that happens, Pa? I mean, if they come this way>”
Her father pondered this a moment.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that a lot,” he confessed.
“The Army will probably requisition the whole herd, anyway,” Julio’s father said disgustedly. “Like they did in Don Jorge’s father’s time.”
That was before Connie and Julio had been born. It was an era lost in family history, folklore and legend. Even at the time of the last war the young people had barely been toddlers, recollected little and knew only what their elder siblings had told them; snatches of more myths, fragmented gossip. The old folk never talked about their time away at the wars.
Connie knew her father had been some kind of hero in that last war. Girlishly, she had always assumed he must have been a hero each time he had gone away; how could he be anything else. As a child she had wondered why so many visitors to the ranch called him ‘Colonel’, and the way everybody in Trinity Crossing very nearly bowed and scraped when he came into a room; but in the way of such childhood things, not really thought much of it.
Julio’s father had gone off to war with him, too.
They said he had been wounded, very nearly died in one battle and lately, after a day in the saddle he was noticeably stiff, and often had to be helped down to the ground, a thing he clearly hated. Other, that was, when the helping hand was that of Connie’s father. For they were old soldiers both.
“Will you go away again, Pa?” She asked.
Her father shook his head, quirked a rueful half-smile.
There was something faraway in his grey eyes for a moment as he glanced to Pablo and his old friend grimaced as they shared an old, unspoken joke.
“No,” Connie’s father sighed, “I hope not, sweetheart.”
Chapter 6
Monday 24th April
Penshurst Place, Kent
The Royal couple had been welcomed to the old house by the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England’s thirty-five-year-old eldest son, Viscount Frederick Philip Anscombe De L’Isle and his vivacious Indian wife Usha, known within the family as ‘Pippa’. ‘Freddie’ De L’Isle had followed his father into the Guards and was presently attached to the Household Cavalry, a duty he had temporarily been relieved from to perform the honours at Penshurst Place.
“Freddie you look marvellously recovered from that fall you had at Windsor last autumn!” Queen Eleanor beamed the moment the bowing, scraping and curtsying was over and done with.
The dashing cavalry officer’s wife was heavily pregnant with their third child and Eleanor began, gently, to berate her husband, whom, like all the De L’Isle offspring had grown up regarding the ‘accidental’ King and Queen as forbearing and attentive godparents and as quasi Uncles and Aunts.
That was the thing the King and his consort missed the most; the easy informality of those days when they were both ‘minor’ royals; as ordinary a family as it was possible to be.
“Oh, Pippa,” Eleanor scolded fondly.
Usha’s father had been the Minister for Bengal in London for many years, a wise, professorial, witty man who had brought up his four daughters in the ‘English way’, ignoring criticism from nationalist quarters – principally, gangs of religious zealots, Hindus and Islamists – back home in Calcutta. “I feel terrible that we’ve forced you to stand outside in the cold!”
“The rest of the party is gathered in the old Banqueting Hall, sir,” the younger De L’Isle respectfully informed the King as the two couples went inside. For the time of year there was a persistent, bitter wind gusting across the Kentish Weald, a thing the King and Queen tried not to interpret as an ill omen for their coming journey to Germany.
Normally, there would have been a full reception line in the drive and on the steps to the mansion; however, that had been deemed ‘too public’ and the King had not troubled to delve deeper into the matter. His father would have demanded a band, fanfares and that every notable from twenty or thirty miles around attended him on his arrival ‘in the county’; but that was not the sort of monarchy that the firm of Bertie and Ellie ran!
The King and Queen had visited Penshurst Place many times over the years. Situated just thirty or so miles from the sprawl of London, it offered a welcome haven of tranquility. Their own children had played and occasionally, fought with Philip and Elizabeth De Lisle’s large brood and it had been fascinating to observe the often, parallel development of the De L’Isle youngsters and their own ‘brats’. Of the De L’Isle brood, Freddie, the oldest and Henrietta, the youngest, had always been the real stars. Freddie had assiduously cultivated the persona of the devil may care, polo-playing horseman soldier: and it was only a matter of time before he abandoned his military career and followed his father into the Diplomatic Corps. And as for Henrietta, after her recent adventures in Spain, she probably had the world at her feet!