Shooting off the big guns had been lashing out, not a thing anybody had thought through; and sending those boats full of men through the reef in broad daylight had been just plain stupid.
If the people on those ships had switched on all their searchlights at once they might have wrecked his night vision, instead, like everything else the Dominicans had done thus far, their reactions had been piecemeal, uncoordinated.
Now, true to form it was highly likely, that the idiots were landing men ashore probably without the least idea how to mount, let alone conduct, a night search of totally unfamiliar ground.
Abe grunted, suddenly feeling a lot less worn out. Already he had raised himself to his hands and knees.
“Where are you going, old man?”
“To kill Spaniards.”
“Oh, I see…” Ted Forest realised his friend had discarded the Mauser and was struggling to his feet. “What do you have in mind?”
“Keep your Webley ready,” Abe said, his voice distracted as the hunter in him stepped to the fore, drowning out the voices of his better angels. “These people have no idea what they are doing. They are helpless in the night. They ought to have waited until just before dawn to put men ashore.”
Ted Forest was unable to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. However, the last few days, and hours, had given him ample opportunities to observe exactly how well adapted, and well, dangerous, astonishingly dangerous, in fact, his friend was in extremis.
And besides, he was too tired to pester him further.
He registered that the small fire axe was in his friend’s right hand.
One thought occurred to him: “Oughtn’t we to have some sort of password? You know, to stop me shooting you the next time you emerge out of the bushes?”
“Kate,” Abe murmured.
Then the hunter was gone, swallowed silently by the night.
Chapter 23
Tuesday 11th April
Coolidge Mansion, Shinnecock Hills, Long Island
In the brilliantly illuminated darkness Maude Daventry-Jones parked her Albany Roadster, a soberly liveried, gentrified version of the racer which dare devils had raced – mostly in New Jersey, Baltimore and Boston – around city streets only ten years ago, on the gravelled drive in front of her best friend’s not so humble abode. Getting out, she allowed one of the houseboys to take her keys and to park her pride and joy, and walked up the steps to the cathedral-like front door of the Coolidge castle.
Leonora planned to move to her Manhattan town house when the baby was born; not that she had informed her parents yet. She would leave that to Alex, who had Sir Max and Lady Geraldine wrapped around his little finger. Nobody knew how he managed that.
It was a matter that Maud planned to discuss with Mister Albert Stanton when he returned to New England, hopefully, quite soon now.
Everybody thought Albert was dead, of course.
Notwithstanding, she planned to speak of many things with him when he got back from Europe!
Maude had decided that she knew the man she intended to marry, much better than the others. Albeit only on the strength of a long tete-a-tete at that party at Shinnecock Hills and their subsequent, dreamlike dinner in Manhattan, Albert did not strike her as the sort of man to do anything so silly as to get himself killed. Or rather, at least not until he had had his wicked way with her, a consummation she much desired. Besides, contrary to what so many people told her, ‘hope’ was much less corrosive than grief, which she did not wish to waste on Albert until she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was a lifeless cadaver involved in the transaction.
In any event, when Leonora had called her that afternoon complaining that she was ‘lonely’, Maude had needed no second invitation to throw on some glad rags and motor over to the eastern end of Long Island.
“Alex rang last night,” her friend explained once they had hugged and taken themselves aside into one of Leonora’s private first floor rooms. “His ship is at Norfolk. He went to visit Kate Lincoln. Apparently, she was much more sensible about Abe being missing than he was. I think she ended up comforting him. He said it was the first time that he really felt she was his ‘sister’. Isn’t that peculiar?”
Maude thought about this.
“Alex was always the one who was on Abe’s side over Kate,” she offered.
“True. But he never actually thought Abe marrying a native girl was a good idea before…”
Maude understood why her friend’s voice trailed off.
Even Leonora was beginning to show signs of wear and tear now he pregnancy was so advanced. Maude reckoned that if she was so far gone as her friend, she would be a complete mess but being a ‘complete mess’ was simply not Leonora’s style.
“Until the Empire Day atrocities, you mean?”
“Yes,” Leonora admitted. “We were all different people a couple of years ago, don’t you think?”
Maude nodded vigorously.
“It must be terrible for Kate and all the other wives in Norfolk?”
“I think it just makes all the other Navy people angrier with the Spanish,” Leonora grimaced. “Remember Brave Achilles!”
Maude shivered.
“There’s still no word from Spain?” Her friend checked.
“No.”
Leonora bent over and kissed Maude’s cheek.
She did not say: “Everything will work out, you’ll see.”
That was the sort of thing that stupid people said and she was neither stupid, or weak-minded and nor was Maude.
“The Governor and his wife must be beyond themselves over Lady Henrietta and that other woman…”
“Melody Danson,” Maude supplied. “Nobody knows what happened to them on the night of the coup. At least we know that Albert was travelling to Spain as a war correspondent…”
The stories emerging from Spain gave rise to little optimism that a ‘war correspondent’ was likely to fare any better than any other interloper in the general blood-letting. Goodness, the mob had ransacked the British and other ‘unfriendly’ embassies and consulates of non-Catholic countries, countless diplomats and their families had been butchered in the street or were currently being held in prison on trumped up charges, or basically, blatantly being held for ransom by military and religious groups who were no better – in fact ten times worse – than bandits.
The Governor of New England had been asked by newspaper and TV reporters if he would pay a ransom to obtain his daughter’s freedom. Lord De L’Isle had coolly reminded his interrogators that by law, as an officer, a gentleman and a servant of the Crown that he was specifically forbidden to treat with ‘criminal demands’ of any kind. He had added that it would be ‘fundamentally unjust for a man in my position to employ my theoretical power, and or influence, or my wealth – which, incidentally, is relatively humble by modern day standards – to secure special treatment for my relations when everybody knows that such an option is not available to persons of a lesser position in society or without my family’s substantial private means.’
Lady Diana, the Governor’s wife, had given similar interviews to the press: ‘My husband and I feel deeply for other parents, brothers, sisters and friends who like us, must be worried sick about loved ones trapped in Spain at this time. Henrietta would never forgive us if we were to improperly use our family’s situation to in any way assist her in jumping the queue. That is not, and it never will be the way of the Sidney family!’