Now and then the stench of death, a vilely putrid corruption wafted through the open windows of the strangely unscarred bastion overlooking the brilliant azure blue Mediterranean on the eastern shore of the main island of Malta.
In their first floor state room Marija fussily helped her husband into his brand new, freshly pressed uniform.
Peter Christopher was edgy, anxious to be reunited with the members of his crew who should by now already be on their way to the Verdala Palace. The initial plan to meet the VIPs from England at Luqa air base had been abandoned earlier that morning; nobody had explained why; presumably because the whole ‘shindig’ had been switched to the Verdala Palace.
“Stop fidgeting, husband,” Marija demanded with her face pinched with fond vexation. She and Peter had been transported across the island while it was still dark, and in the privacy of one of the state room she had ordered her ‘hero’ to lie down on the big bed so that she could properly examine his injuries. As she had suspected his torso was a mass of deep, horribly discoloured bruises. Sending for a first aid kit she had excised two small pieces of shrapnel from below his left shoulder blade; it had troubled her that her husband had hardly flinched because she understood it could only mean that he hurt practically everywhere. Studying his chest she concluded that at least one, or perhaps two of his ribs on the middle of his right torso, were cracked. She had begun to relax a little when she determined that his messy head wounds were all of the superficial variety. She had painstakingly, lovingly tidied him up.
“You look like you’ve been in a street brawl in Valletta,” she had assured her husband when he eventually claimed that ‘I’m all right, really’. Her look had silenced his complaint. “People will be taking our pictures,” she reminded him. “It is important that we look our best.”
Her husband’s right ankle and right knee were swollen and his whole leg had stiffened overnight. No amount of liniment application or bandaging was going to remedy the twisted knee and sprained ankle; time alone would heal those sorely tried joints.
“You will have to walk with a stick and for once,” she had smiled, “lean on me,” Marija decided feeding him aspirins for his numerous aches and pains.
Even though the Verdala Palace had been largely unoccupied during Sir Julian Christopher’s tenure in command on Malta, the domestic and administrative staff of the palace had been retained to ensure the building was immediately available for use as an emergency hospital or a command centre.
“Your father’s uniforms very nearly fit you perfectly, husband,” Marija observed, pausing to admire the tailoring of the dark cloth as she brushed a speck of dust off one shoulder. Sir Julian had kept several spare uniforms in store at the Verdala Palace, each bereft of gold braid, cuff rings of rank or medal ribbons, for such fripperies were to be sewn on at need. A resident seamstress on the palace’s staff had already sewn a commander’s three rings onto the brand new uniform jacket.
Peter Christopher swallowed hard, tried to blink back his tears.
Marija rested her head on his chest and ever so carefully, wrapped her arms around the man she loved.
He kissed the top of her head.
“Now that I look the part,” he said with mock bravura to hide his distress, “you must try on those dresses.”
The women who had brought in the uniforms had also laid three very expensive-looking dresses on the big double bed at the heart of the state room. The ‘fancy frocks’ as Margo Seiffert would have described them had belonged to Lady Marian Staveley-Pope, the wife of Sir Julian Christopher’s predecessor on Malta. Hugh Staveley Pope had been second-in-command of the Mediterranean Fleet at the time of the October War and had been advanced to Vice-Admiral and to overall Theatre Command after his own chief’s assassination. His wife, Lady Marian, had been holidaying with friends on the French Riviera on the night of the war and never been seen or heard of again. Lady Marian had been Admiral Staveley-Pope’s second wife, some quarter of a century his junior and by coincidence possessed of a similarly trim figure as Marija.
“These are far too grand,” Marija objected. The dresses bore Parisienne labels and were made of a fabric that felt so fine beneath her fingers that she was half-afraid to handle, let alone wear, creations so opulent.
“My love,” her husband grinned, his bruises making the expression oddly lopsided, “to me you would be the most beautiful woman in the world if you were dressed in a potato sack,” he shrugged, painfully because the gesture tweaked something that did not want to be tweaked deep in his rib cage, “but in these weeds,” he chuckled softly, “you will be Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren all rolled into one!”
Marija instantly stared at her feet, afraid that she was blushing so violently in her pleasure and embarrassment that the top of her head would explode. In her disorientation she inadvertently slapped her husband’s shoulder just above his right clavicle with the flat of her very, very distracted left hand.
“Ouch…”
This sobered her in a moment.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
But the man was laughing and the next thing she knew, so was she.
Chapter 56
Walter Brenckmann had anticipated an entirely different reaction to the news he had just delivered to the Foreign Secretary. The Ambassador of the United States of America to the Court of Blenheim Palace had hurried over from the temporary Embassy compound at Trinity College with the telegram straight off the Cipher Room teleprinter.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson shook his head, grimaced in apology.
“I’m sorry, Walter,” he grunted, waving at the papers on his desk in the former don’s study on the first floor of the medieval pile which now accommodated the Foreign Secretary’s private office. “We had a few setbacks on Cyprus overnight and the casualty toll from Malta just seems to go up and up.” He hesitated. “And I can’t shake this nagging feeling that something else is going on.” Again, he shook his head and forced a smile.
“Sometimes it is only when things are darkest that you discover who your real friends are, Tom,” the dapper former United States Navy destroyer captain replied wryly.
“Yes, quite. It is marvellous news that the President is coming to England,” the Foreign Secretary declared — and it was marvellous news — but in the light of the other news that MI5’s apparently comprehensive ‘swoop’ on ‘Irish and other insurgent elements’ had conspicuously failed to ‘sweep up’ any of the Redeye surface-to air missiles that Chiefs of Staff and everybody else who ‘needed to know’ in Oxford was presently so exercised about, the President’s timing was not wholly propitious. And then there was the news of the similarly spontaneous intention of the Irish Government to send ‘cabinet level plenipotentiaries to England to defuse’ the ‘tensions’ between ‘our countries’. Nobody in the UAUK thought it was a remotely good idea for senior members of the avowedly anti-partition Fianna Fáil Dublin Government to be on British soil, let alone to meet and confer — possibly — with the Irish-American President of the United States of America while he was in Oxford. Emotions were running high about the ‘Irish problem’, feelings could hardly be more tender and the bloody IRA had smuggled state of the art American anti-aircraft missiles into the country! “However, the visit of the ‘Irish delegation’ might create difficulties.”