A teenage girl in the uniform of the Coolidge family – blues and greys – served the women afternoon tea; cream tea, in fact. Scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam.
Maude patted her tummy.
“If you go on spoiling me like this I’ll be as fat as a barrel when Albert gets home,” she complained half-heartedly.
“I think he’ll like you even more that way, dear!”
The friends giggled.
“Sometimes,” Maude confessed, unbidden, “I wonder if I am just being silly. I mean, I hardly know Albert.”
“Alex almost got me killed on our first date,” Leonora reminded her. “And as for our second date, well, I spent most of that on my back!”
Maude coloured.
She had always been terrified of boys, men really, before she became friendly with Leonora and belatedly realised the error of her ways. For all that she was still a virgin; at least in the sense that she had never gone ‘all the way’ with a man. Which was not to say that she had not explored a lot of the other ways short of ‘all’, just that she had never actually slept with a man…
She determined not to dwell on that today.
“Daddy says the Spanish attacked all along the Border this morning,” Leonora announced suddenly. “The markets are already in free fall.”
Maude had heard something similar on the radio as she motored across Long Island.
“I thought that war was always good news for great magnets like Sir Max?” She countered, trying to sound bright.
“Only in the end,” Leonora retorted. “That’s after all the magnets have got together, double-crossed each other a few times and the law of the jungle has made some of them obscenely rich and all the others just wealthier.”
“That’s dreadfully cynical, dear.”
“Yes, isn’t it. Daddy and all his friends knew the war was coming. All the Long Island magnets, I mean. That’s why they had their brokers piling into shipyards, aeroplane works and the factories that manufacture the latest armoured land cruisers. When the government comes to them to build the new machines our boys at the front are going to need, they’ll all get together to inflate and fix the prices…”
“Is that what Alex thinks?”
Leonora shook her head, smiled wanly.
“No, he doesn’t care a hoot about any of that. I think it is all just a great big game to him. Even this crazy nonsense about joining the Navy!”
“You knew he was a hero when you married him?”
“This is true. But…”
Maude rose from her chair, concern etching lines on her face.
“Are you all right?”
Leonora had staggered momentarily to her feet, now she steadied and sat down.
“I’m quite fine, really.”
Maude was unconvinced.
“Should I call…”
“No, no, I wish people wouldn’t fuss over me all the time.”
“Sorry…”
“I don’t mean you, darling. Goodness, if I didn’t have you to keep me sane, I don’t know what I’d do!”
Maude’s vision went a little blurry.
She thought she was going to cry.
“I feel pretty much the same way about you, you know.”
“We’re a pair, aren’t we?”
There was no denying this.
“Oh dear,” Leonora murmured, groaning.
“What?”
Maude was surprised to discover that having jumped to her feet she found herself looking down into Leonora’s rueful half-smile.
“I think we ought to call the doctors now,” the other woman suggested, grimacing with sudden discomfort.
“Why, are you…”
“Yes. I think my waters have just broken.”
Chapter 24
Tuesday 11th April
Salamanca, Spain
The lights of the city twinkled ever-brighter as the boat drifted on the spring flood beneath an ancient stone bridge. The River Tormes was unpassable east of Salamanca at most seasons of the year, a wide, slow-moving, shallow stream which meandered through wooded muddy sand banks, partially tamed here and there by low weirs which created lethal mini rapids. However, the snow from the mountains was melting, the recent storms had swollen the channel and now flooded many of the lower-lying banks.
Paul Nash and Albert Stanton sweated and strained on their oars, Melody Danson held another, shorter oar over the stern of the twelve-foot, leaky boat as Henrietta – and to less effect, little Pedro – desperately baled water over the side.
“Right, right, right!” Paul Nash growled at Melody, who did what she was told, instantly feeling the iron-heavy weight of the river resisting her makeshift rudder.
The boat grounded momentarily before it was swept along.
It began to rain as they all heard the river tumbling over the approaching flooded weir. A hundred years ago the Tormes had been partially dammed east of the city but that structure had – like many of the boons of Spain’s long-lost golden age – fallen into disrepair and collapsed decades ago, leaving several perilous threats to navigation. The weir was breached in three places, most badly in the mid-stream, where the current had sculpted a plethora of deep, fast-flowing channels, small whirlpools and nearer the banks, dead, unmoving pools which were only disturbed when, as now, the Tormes was in semi-flood.
“Don’t try to fight the current!” Paul Nash commanded.
The soldier, adventurer, spy was imperturbable, inexhaustible, and relentlessly cheerful. Inevitably, it was this latter which most irritated the others.
Although they had eaten well in the morning before they had set out from Alba de Tormes, the parting gift from the wives of the men for whose derelict boat they had exchanged the Inquisition’s Blohm and Mertz limousine, they were all hungry again and not so much at the end of their tethers, as well beyond, yet Paul Nash remained unwearied, unworried and infuriatingly optimistic.
And always, enigmatic.
Melody never quite felt she understood who or what he was. It had dawned on her that she might not even be right about the real nature of the mission the man had been sent on. True, he had hinted that rescuing Henrietta was the main, if not the big thing, and that subsidiary to this he was not going to let either her or Hen fall into Spanish hands.
But what was real?
And what was smoke and mirrors?
Most of all it made her aware that for all her worldliness – certainly by New England standards – she had not really appreciated, until it was far too late, that by returning to Europe and then Spain, she would be so profoundly out of her depth.
Accepting the mission to Madrid had been a mistake on so many levels that looking back, she was appalled that she had been so easily gulled into playing along. Obviously, the coup cum civil war which had turned her and Henrietta into fugitives, presumably with huge prices on their heads, trumped all other considerations for the moment but even had their time in Spain ended uneventfully, coming back to Europe on a commission to be a part of a Colonial Office fig leaf, feminine window dressing to mitigate the worst implications of Spanish involvement in the Empire Day atrocities, had been just plain… dumb.
“Oars out of the water now!” Paul Nash yelled.
Melody struggled to lift her rudder oar, lost her balance and fell into the boat. The oar gave her a painful thwack as she was briefly spread-eagled across it. Feeling very stupid she tried to regain her feet; to no avail because that was when the boat flew through the torrent pouring through the big breach in the old weir.