“Forgive me, My Ladies,” a man apologised with urgent, perfunctory gruffness.
The women recognised the voice of Don Rafael, the senior Arm’s Man that Alonso, Duke of Medina Sidonia had left behind in Chinchón to chaperone and to safeguard his guests.
The Spaniard was a man in his late fifties, a life-long family retainer with whom Alonso invariably conversed with quiet, patrician respect. The man had served Alonso’s father for half his life and although Henrietta had not been introduced to him, or had the occasion to speak with him in Philadelphia, he had never been far from Alonso’s side, bodyguard and she had since learned, now and then, his wise counsellor.
The Hacienda’s middle-aged housekeeper had accompanied the man into the bed chamber.
“Time is short,” Don Rafael declared in a tone which brooked no dissent.
“Put on these clothes!” His companion ordered. “Forget about your toilet and your hair. Just get dressed. Now!”
Don Rafael may or may not have turned his back as the woman threw back the blankets revealing Melody and Henrietta’s shocked pale nakedness. However, because he was a gentleman, he had turned the torch away.
Henrietta began to protest.
“What is happening?” She demanded.
“Do what they say, sweetheart,” Melody snapped, pushing her out of the bed ahead of her.
That was when Henrietta belatedly realised that there was a sharp tang of immediate peril in the air and that both Don Rafael and the housekeeper were on the tightest of tight reins.
The women began to pull on the shifts and dresses pressed into their arms; plain linen, ungainly, heavy, coarse woollen ankle-length robes◦– that stank of the earth◦– like those worn by peasant women out in the country.
Boots clunked onto the floor.
“They won’t fit you but put them on anyway,” the housekeeper pleaded desperately as if time had already run out. “Quickly! Quickly!”
Henrietta dumped herself down on the side of the bed next to Melody as they frantically did as they were ordered to do, pulling on the horrible, stiff boots, and glimpsing the flash of steel in the reflected light of the torch.
Don Rafael had unsheathed the Castilian steel of his old-fashioned ceremonial sword.
“What is going on, Don Rafael?” Melody asked calmly, her voice barely a whisper.
Henrietta, who was so rattled, so caught up in the moment, that she had not thought to utter a word since her previous panicky complaint, froze. The ‘fireworks’ had got a lot louder in the last minute or so and seemed to be much closer. Belatedly, she worked out that what she was actually hearing was gunfire interspersed with the crack of grenades.
“We must leave,” the man replied abruptly.
“What about our…” Henrietta began, the words dying in her throat as the house seemed to flinch beneath her feet.
There was the faint stench of smoke.
A clamour in the street below.
And a long, magazine-emptying burst of automatic gunfire.
“Forget your jewellery and trinkets, girl!” The housekeeper spat, grabbing Henrietta’s arm and dragging her to the door.
“Follow me,” Don Rafael commanded. “Whatever happens, stay close to me!”
The women trotted after him, down to the ground floor of the hacienda and thence to the wine cellars. There were other Arms Men, all brandishing cutlass-like swords or old-fashioned six-shooter revolvers.
Breathing heavily the party burst out into a narrow alleyway behind the Ducal residence.
Henrietta could already feel her feet rubbing, blistering in the ill-fitting, painful boots but right then none of that mattered. She was running◦– she knew not why or to where◦– for her life and the only thing that stopped her completely going to pieces was Melody’s hand in hers and the broad back of the old, sword-wielding man leading them through the warren of the ancient town’s medieval streets in the now pre-dawn greyness.
Behind them the rattle of gunfire seemed unbroken.
Fires had been lit, buildings were burning, their flickering glow periodically lighting their way along cobbled, twisting alleys. More than once Henrietta felt herself falling, tumbling to her knees, and being picked up as if she was a rag doll and impelled forward. Even in the cool of the morning she was sweating heavily, her hair plastered to her face and every breath came in ragged, lung-hurting gasps.
They halted, leaning against a low wall on the edge of the town. At their back the whole of Chinchón was an angry hornet nest, a battlefield.
“What?” Melody demanded breathlessly. “What is going on, Don Rafael?”
The old man motioned for the women to get down below the level of the top of the wall, lowered himself onto his haunches and viewed them with rheumy, oddly untroubled eyes.
“The world has gone mad,” he said sadly. “As my master, the Duke, warned me it might when he was summoned to Aranjuez.” He coughed, took unhurried looks to his left and his right, like the old soldier he was, making absolutely sure that his men were in the right place. “It is too dangerous to take you back to Madrid, or to any place where the rebels might respect diplomatic soil. So, I must take you to sanctuary until plans can be laid to smuggle you safely out of Spain.”
Melody detected the shame accenting every word the proud Castilian knight said.
“You must trust me, My Ladies,” the man concluded. “You are under the protection of my Duke. You have my word as a gentleman and an Arms Man of the House of Medina Sidonia that no man will lay his hand upon you while I and my men live.”
Chapter 10
Saturday 18th March
Île de la Cité, Paris
Albert Stanton had felt a little creased and travel-weary last night when he had finally arrived in the ‘City of Peace’. When he was a boy the text books had called the French capital the ‘City of Peace and Reconciliation’ but that latter appellation had been quietly dropped over the last twenty years. It was as if the politicians and diplomats had known all along a thing the rest of civilisation had not. The flight across the Atlantic had seemed to last an eternity despite the normal following winds, with interminable delays at each stop for fuel in Nova Scotia and Belfast Loch and then, when the CEREBUS◦– one of the oldest flying boats in the Imperial Airways fleet◦– had finally touched down on Southampton Water he had had to wait six hours for the next ferry to Le Havre.
That said, it would have been churlish to have complained overmuch about his first-class, luxurious no expenses spared journey paid for out of the fat wallet of the Versailles Studio Collective. His hosts and ardent suitors for the film rights of Abe and Kate’s story, planned to send him back to New England in a week or so on the flagship of the Blue Star Line, the year-old sixty thousand ton, thousand feet long leviathan Titanic.
In an upper deck penthouse with his own team of stewards, would you believe? Mr and Mrs Stanton’s little boy had, it seemed, made the big time!
That he had arrived in Paris a little bit emotionally conflicted had not been anticipated; that was not at all like him. Having built his career upon his ability to keep his eye unerringly on the ball he had to admit that the last few months had been more than a tad… distracting. And as for his brilliant career, well, that had really only taken off after the acquittal of the Fielding brothers last August. And then only because he had happened to have flown with Alex on the morning of that fateful day in July two years ago. In retrospect, everything had flowed from that◦– at the time◦– middlingly unremarkable flight.
Leonora Coolidge had courted him, journalistically, after he wrote a sympathetic article about the unjust fate of women like her who had been swept up in the New York Constabulary dragnet in the weeks following the atrocities in Brooklyn and the Upper Bay. Later, he and Alex had hit it off, just a random thing, the first time they met after his release from prison; and the connection with Abe and Kate had flowed from that because Abe trusted and basically, liked his older half-brother.