Unspoken, was another conundrum.
Many times in recent years the Kaiserliche Marine had demanded ‘proof’, if such a thing was not an oxymoron, that the British Empire had not been – somewhere in its vast lands, well over a quarter of the non-oceanic surface of the planet – itself in breach of the Submarine Treaty banning the further manufacture of nuclear devices or reactors, and ‘vessels propelled above or below the water by such contrivances’.
Philip De L’Isle did not know – or need to know, let alone want to know – if his country was rigorously abiding with each and every one of the nuclear protocols of the Submarine Treaty. He had never asked anybody who might be in the know about such things: why would he, they might actually give him an honest answer?
However, like many men at or close to the summit of Imperial power he had his suspicions, albeit ones never voiced, or even alluded to in private, or heaven forfend, in public. Pragmatist that he was, it had always seemed, to say the least, improbable, that somewhere remote, cut off from the rest of the world – there were countless such places in the Empire – somebody was not carrying out forbidden research, development, or perhaps, even producing exactly the weapons and systems unilaterally banned under the terms of the Submarine Treaty.
In fact, it was inconceivable to him that the Germans would have so openly supported their allies in the West Indies and the Central Americas, in building vessels such as the one which had crippled the Indomitable had Berlin not strongly suspected that their British co-signatories had their own dirty little secrets. The sort of dirty little secrets which had always prevented British Governments, regardless of political hue, from ‘calling out’ Berlin on its own transgressions. Such, after all, was the normal give and take of diplomacy, the thing which usually maintained the peace.
Personally, the Governor of New England had been one of those who had believed that it would have been better to have stood up to the German Empire back in the mid-1960s, to have bitten the bullet and accepted the reality of the new technologies and their implications rather than attempt to put the nuclear genie back into its bottle.
Over a decade later he was far too worldly a man to know, in his heart of hearts, that his Government would never have actually given away, or accepted such Draconian constraints, as it seemed to have done when it signed the Submarine Treaty, unless it had other, contingency plans in its locker.
Moreover, in the same spirit Berlin would have – and had obviously done in the West Indies – done everything it could to circumvent those inherently odious restrictions on its right to develop nuclear technologies and its undersea warfare capability; it seemed axiomatic to Philip De L’Isle that his own government would have behaved likewise.
Philip De L’Isle had taken it as read that Cuthbert Collingwood was one of the few men who might know, for sure, all of the Empire’s dirty little secrets.
“Oh, well, I suppose we should not be that surprised that our enemies will, from time to time, spring surprises on us,” he observed dryly.
“That is to be expected,” the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet concurred.
The Governor of New England had the distinct impression that the other man was, briefly, smiling like a Cheshire cat as he spoke.
“I’ll let you get about your work, Cuthbert. You have a war to fight; meanwhile, I shall do my best to circumvent an insurrection in the First Thirteen!”
Both men chuckled.
Both men wondering exactly what the other had to be so rueful about…
Chapter 27
Tuesday 12th April
Shinnecock Hills, Long Island
“Our chaps have finally got their act together,” Sir Maxwell Coolidge announced portentously, for reasons best known to himself convinced that the three women and his new born grandson needed, or for some reason, wanted to hear an unscrupulous New York banker’s take on the two-day old war.
Leonora’s mother, Lady Geraldine gave him a censorious look. The new mother and her best friend, Maud Daventry-Jones had not even noticed that the great man had deigned to find time in his financial wheeling and dealing diary, to set eyes upon the latest addition to his clan.
War was not just good for business; it was Manna from Heaven to the bankers who confidently expected that it would be to them that the East Coast colonies would turn to finance their contribution to the coming battles. It was an article of faith in the First Thirteen, and therefore in the Johnny-cum-lately fourteenth and fifteenth colonies of Vermont and New Hampshire, that their taxpayers should be, insofar as it was possible, insulated from the real costs of hostilities. Particularly those skirmishes hundreds, or in the case of the South West, thousands of miles away which when all was said and done, were really the affair of the wider Empire, not exclusively the citizenry of New England. Therefore, it was confidently expected that what relatively small charge was levied upon the Crown Colonies, territories and unincorporated lands of North America could be covered, under existing Imperial credit guarantees, and therefore at no risk to the exchequers of the individual colonies, by the banks; preferably, by the banks of the First Thirteen, just so all the profit stayed in New England. Or rather, in the already deep pockets of men like Sir Max Coolidge.
Thus, despite having been up all night making the final arrangements to create the cartel via which, he and a select band of brothers planned to rob the British taxpayer blind, Leonora’s father was in a very sunny mood that morning.
That his formerly errant, somewhat wild child embarrassing daughter had become something of a reformed character in recent months and now produced a robustly healthy six-pound, thirteen-ounce baby son, was just the icing on the cake.
This was indeed a fine day to be alive.
And to a Manhattan banker.
And to be a grandfather again…
Dammit, he ought to have insisted that Alex accept an appointment on the board of one or other of his companies!
How on earth was the man going to afford to keep his daughter in the style to which she was accustomed on an Air Force salary?
Never mind; that could be revisited when the boy got home…
Leonora had been dozing; her labour had been uncomplicated, just overlong and she was, understandably, exhausted and just wished everybody would go away and leave her alone.
Except for Maude, obviously, who was presently cradling little Alex Lincoln Fielding wearing an expression of very nearly beatific joy. Leonora’s mother had held the baby briefly but motherliness had always come a very poor second to her duties as a hostess, and Long Island’s queen bee socialite.
“What on earth are you talking about Max?” Lady Geraldine demanded irritably.
Like her husband she had also been up all night, although in a better cause than gratuitously conspiring to make huge piles of money out of the death, and the misery of the First Thirteen’s young men.
“Our chaps gave the Spanish a bloody nose in the Bahamas. Sank a cruiser and shot up a couple more. All our boys got back, too! That ought to show the blighters what’s what!”
Maude Daventry-Jones had never seen Leonora’s mother so… disappointed with her husband. She had seen her get testy, even turn a little sneering. Apparently, her friend’s parents’ marriage had never been a love match; more an alliance between two very rich families whose elder statesmen, and women, had determined that it was high time the two tribes made peace and pooled their immense resources. At the time, both Leonora’s parents were the only children already too old to imagine they would be blessed with further offspring, so, there had been no ‘competing’ inheritance ‘issues’; in the event, people said they had knocked along fairly well in the beginning, just not so well from around the time Leonora and her two older brothers, Leo and Max junior had come along and secured the Coolidge line of succession. Lady Geraldine, having performed her maternal duty as a brood mare, had thereafter been a little surplus to requirements in the marriage. Leonora’s father had been a notorious womaniser until he had his first heart attack, five or six years ago.