Nevertheless, something told Jackson that sooner or later, Surgeon Lieutenant Lincoln was going to outgrow this ‘little’ ship.
“May I speak my mind, sir?” Abe asked on an impulse, his thoughts roiling. Two days ago, the hunter in his soul, demons in the very blood coursing through his veins, had caught him unawares.
“Yes.”
“I learned two things the other day. One, that I was nowhere near as good a pilot as I believed I was…”
“And the other thing?”
“That if, even in a slow old Sea Fox if I had wanted to dive straight into the deck of the Achilles, I don’t think there was a single thing anybody on board could have done to stop me, sir.”
“My, my,” Captain Jackson guffawed ruefully. “Well, watching from the bridge I was convinced that you were going to do exactly that,” he confessed, “right up to the moment you… didn’t!”
“Sorry, sir.”
The older man nodded and briefly his expression turned severe.
“Well, Mr Cowdrey-Singh has given you a piece of his mind. As has your Divisional Commander. To your credit you have taken full responsibility for your reckless conduct. This will be noted on your papers but otherwise I am content to consider the matter closed. That is all Lieutenant, you may resume your normal duties.”
Abe had been reconciled to being disciplined, and feared being denied shore leave when Achilles returned to Norfolk to complete her final preparations for her forthcoming Caribbean cruise. He had taken it as read that he would be grounded, at least for a token period and taken solace from the fact this would allow him to become more involved in the routine work of the ship’s Medical Department.
Ted Forest was loitering with intent in the passageway outside the Captain’s Cabin.
“Well, what’s the bad news, Abe?” He demanded anxiously.
“Er, there isn’t any.”
“Seriously?”
Abe nodded, still in a daze.
His friend slapped him on the back.
“If you weren’t a blasted teetotaller, I’d stand you a pink Gin!”
“I’m not a teetotaller,” Abe protested feebly, allowing the shorter man to take his arm and guide him up the steps to the quarter deck. He drank the occasional beer, it was simply that he did not like the taste, or the effect alcoholic drink had on him and he never had. He suspected part of it might be to do with the toll he had seen drink take on his brothers and sisters of the Mohawk Nation. Nonetheless, he had never been one of those inflexible, pedantic abstainers. He began to collect his wits. “Another time, perhaps,” he suggested.
The two men stood at the rail.
Achilles was slicing through the coastal chop at a sedate nine knots streaming minesweeping paravanes to starboard and port in her wake. The idea was to cut the cables of bottom anchored mines and for sharpshooters to detonate them when the bombs bobbed to the surface.
Realistically, nobody could imagine anybody in this day and age would actually order a cruiser to clear a minefield, that sort of stuff had gone out of the porthole with the development of sophisticated magnetic and electronic activated ‘field sensor’ mines in the 1950s which exploded only when a ship steamed over, or within killing range of one of the infernal devices. Nevertheless, since the Royal Navy had seen fit not to remove the offending ‘minesweeping’ equipment Achilles was duty-bound to employ it, like all her other weaponry, with the utmost unction and this required regular drills.
“I almost got you killed the other day,” Abe said dully.
“But you didn’t, old man.”
“I’m sorry, that’s all.”
Ted Forest chuckled: “Worse things happen at sea, isn’t that what they say.” Another chuckle. “The next time I’ll know to give you a jolly good kick up the backside!”
Unaccountably, Abe’s mal-de-mere began to lift.
In the middle distance the watch bell tolled.
“I need to report to the sick bay,” Abe decided, straightening. He smiled tight-lipped at his friend. “Thanks, Ted.”
“For what?”
Abe did not know what to say to this.
“Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”
The Son of the Hunter patted Ted Forest’s arm and headed forward to report the outcome of his interview with the Old Man to Achilles’s Surgeon, forty-seven-year-old Bostonian, Commander Michael Powell Flynn.
Flynn outranked Abe’s other Divisional Commander, who was just a lieutenant like the much younger man, only with several years more seniority, and was therefore his ‘boss’ on board the cruiser.
Achilles’s Wardroom very nearly reflected the multi-national mix of the rest of the cruiser’s crew, albeit with a slightly lower representation of the coloured faces below decks. On a ship with an Indian Executive Officer, a half-Red Indian assistant surgeon-cum-seaplane flyer gave rise to precisely no comment whatsoever.
Michael Flynn was an Irish New Englander, other officers were from Australasia, the Caribbean, Africa, the ship’s Navigator was a second-generation Nigerian emigrant to the British Isles, the Engineering Officer the grandson of a lascar steward on one of the last sailing clippers carrying tea and cotton from the Indies back to the Old World. Truly, if England had become the melting pot of the Empire then the Royal Navy had become one of its primary global ‘mixing’ pots.
Which of course, was why so many Navy men found the aberration of the Getrennte Entwicklung movement in the First Thirteen, and increasingly in Maine and Vermont◦– two colonies who had considered themselves to be members of the ‘First Fifteen’ for the last century-and-a-half, although even now they were still looked down upon by the ‘originals’◦– so incomprehensibly bizarre.
Especially, since it was exactly that special sense of family, of belonging to something that was so profoundly greater than the mere sum of its parts which was the real, unquenchable strength of the Senior Service.
Michael Flynn heard out Abe in wry silence.
“Dammit,” he complained when Abe finished, “I was hoping you’d at least be confined to the blasted ship, so I could hand off the next two weeks’ sick parades to you!”
Chapter 7
Thursday 16th March
Plaza Mayor, Chinchón, Comarca de Las Vegas
The two women had stayed on in Chinchón when their host, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, had been unexpectedly called back to Madrid on Monday evening. Escorted by a pair of Ducal arms men and with their every need assiduously catered for by the devoted household of the Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle had, after tearfully making their peace, determined to make the very best of their little ‘holiday’ away from the stifling tedium of the last few months.
‘My Queen demands my presence at Aranjuez,’ Alonso had apologised, giving every appearance of being utterly mortified to leave them.
He had assured his guests that as the Royal Palace of Aranjuez was no more than a dozen miles as the crow flies◦– although twice that distance by road through the mountains◦– he hoped to return soon, or at intervals during the ‘balance of your stay in my humble house’.
Queen Sophia kept her court some thirty miles from where her husband, the King-Emperor ruled, either from the fortress-like many times rebuilt Alcazar, or as it was more commonly known, the Royal Palace of Madrid, or from his Monasterio y Sitio de El Escorial en Madrid, the El Escorial Palace near the town of San Lorenzo another thirty miles north west of the capital.