“Ah, you’ve got a girl back home! Good for you!”
Stanton was rarely speechless.
He opened his mouth to snap a retort, thought better of it.
“She must be quite something if you’ve voluntarily foregone the pleasures of the City of Peace?”
“Yes,” the New England muttered.
“Especially,” the other man chuckled, “when the movie people you’ve been hob-knobbing with would have been picking up the tab every inch of the way!”
Albert Stanton just stared at Paul Nash.
“They won’t let you cross the border,” his very well-informed companion went on, cheerfully. “Our people, I mean. The French gendarmerie won’t either. The Spanish might shoot you, just for the Hell of it. But you’ve probably worked all that out for yourself. Presumably, you can afford to bribe somebody to drop you upon Catalonia’s middlingly rocky shores?”
“What’s your game?” Albert Stanton demanded angrily.
“No game,” the man who called himself Paul Nash growled, suddenly dropping the forced bonhomie. “I’m going to Spain looking for two women whose lives are probably, at this moment, in the sort of mortal peril I seriously doubt that you, cynical old scribbler that you are, can even imagine.”
The New Englander opened his mouth; no sound emerged.
He had never been so flummoxed in his whole life. Well, other than when Maud Daventry-Jones had gone out of her way the other night to make damned sure he kissed her flush on the mouth…
Paul Nash was silent.
Watchful, waiting, waiting…
“Two women,” Stanton said eventually in a low, confidential murmur.
“Yes.”
Now Albert Stanton waited. The train was rattling and rocking along, picking up speed almost like a runaway. The first time New Englanders travelled on a French Express they always thought they were on board a runaway…
“You are well-acquainted with one of the women, and know of the other,” Nash declared. “The file I was given indicated you might have met her in passing. But that’s by the way.”
The Manhattan Globe’s star investigative reporter had regained his composure. He was thinking straight again. The impatience playing in his green-grey eyes prompted a nod from the other man.
“For reasons beyond my ken,” Paul Nash groaned, a scowl twisting at the corners of his mouth above a square jaw that jutted momentarily, “the powers that be elected to allow the two ladies to be put at risk. To wit, they ought to have been called home a month ago, but the idiots in London vetoed my recommendation. In fact, I had only just got back to Paris from Whitehall◦– where I’d received something of a telling off for carping on about the danger of what seems to have just happened in Spain, happening◦– when the news arrived that the balloon had gone up in Madrid.”
Albert Stanton could only think of two women of his acquaintance, the one he had spoken to on a couple of occasions, the other, not really at all who so far as he knew might be in Spain at the moment.
“Are you talking about Melody Danson?” He inquired tentatively. “And perhaps, Lady Henrietta de L’Isle.”
“I knew you’d get there in the end, old man! Obviously, the Official Secrets Act stops me naming names but as you’ve already mentioned them there’s no reason we can’t get down to business!”
“Business?”
“Yes, I need you to tell me absolutely everything you know about the two ladies. Absolutely everything. About them, their careers, education, antecedents, the colour of their eyes, their mannerisms, anything they are afraid of, everything.”
“I hardly know them…”
“You’re the Manhattan Globe’s man on the case! Nobody’s closer than you to several of the leading actors in the Empire Day affair. If you’re anywhere near as good at your job as people say you are, you’ll have had your ear so close to the ground for the last couple of years you know the dramatis personae better than their own mothers do!”
Stanton raised an eyebrow.
“What if I don’t want to tell you a damned thing?”
“Well, I suppose I could threaten to throw you out of the carriage somewhere between here and Lyon. But,” he held up a hand, “that’s normally the sort of thing I reserve for people who try to do me physical harm and I’ve not got you down as a homicidal maniac. So, if you were, hypothetically, to try to give me the hear no evil see no evil, think no evil blind monkey number, I’d probably just mark your card with the local gendarmerie in Lyon. Nothing malicious, you understand but I can guarantee that you’ll spend the next couple of months in a cell with a latrine bucket for company. The choice is yours but if you want to fly to Portugal with me to see what we can do to rescue our two damsels in distress, I’d suggest you start spilling the beans like your life depends upon it!”
Albert Stanton swallowed hard: “Presumably, because one day soon my life might depend on it?”
“Man-to-man,” Nash murmured, leaning closer, “yes, that’s about the size of it, my friend.”
Chapter 15
Sunday 19th March
Royal Navy Norfolk, Virginia
The thing that had really struck Kate Lincoln the first time she had stepped aboard HMS Achilles to, not without immense trepidation, attend a ‘family open day’ a month or so ago shortly after Abe had joined the cruiser, was that the great ship had seemed ‘alive’. Abe had explained away the illusion by saying that there was always machinery running, and at least one of the ship’s six boilers ‘lit’ which was why there was the constant low background rushing of the ‘blowers’ ventilating the bowels of the leviathan. It had never occurred to Kate that the Achilles was actually quite a small ship until she had seen two huge walls of steel, floating castles bigger than any man-made structure she had ever seen or imagined slowly cruise into Hampton Roads while she was aboard Achilles that magical afternoon in February.
‘The white man’s magic is powerful strong,’ Abe had whispered in her ear as the couple had stood on the rear end◦– the ‘quarterdeck’◦– of his ship watching the battleship HMS Princess Royal and the brand-new fleet aircraft carrier HMS Ulysses stately progress to their moorings out in the roads. A group of husbands and wives, friends and family members including any number of scampering, noisy children had surrounded the couple witnessing the leviathans anchor.
‘Captain Jackson likes to throw these parties every month,’ Abe had confided to his wife. ‘Achilles is a family ship. Besides, keeping everybody in touch with their families is good for morale and discipline, it keeps everybody’s feet firmly on the ground.’
Kate did not know about that!
For a month or so after her husband had donned his Navy blues she had very nearly swooned every time she laid eyes on him. He was so handsome…
The Captain had particularly asked to be introduced to Kate that afternoon last month. In fact, she had learned that he particularly asked to be ‘properly introduced’ to each and every one of his men’s wives upon their initial introduction to the ship’s ‘family’.
‘I am honoured to present my wife, Tekonwenaharake, daughter of Tsiokwaris, sir.’
Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson had smiled indulgently, very much in the fashion of a proudly indulgent uncle, a question in his grey eyes.
‘Kate, sir,’ she had blurted, a bundle of nerves as the great man extended his hand in greeting, his smile◦– of the patriarchally kindly variety◦– slowly broadening all the while. ‘In my birth language my Mohawk name means,’ she had struggled with the words, scrunched up her face in momentary concentration, ‘travels through the wind…’