Captain Jackson had chortled.
‘Which is exactly what your husband does all the time, dear lady!’
Kate had not thought about it that way until then, now she thought about it often. Life was full of circles within circles, experiences lived again and again in infinite variations.
‘What goes around comes around,’ was a saying she had heard several of her new Navy wife friends murmur. The society of the married quarters tended to be phlegmatic, practical, its optimism tempered by the knowledge that both good and sometimes bad, things happened at sea.
That day she and her son, Tom, and the other ‘Wardroom’ wives and their offspring had been bussed in for the ‘family day’ party. Now the ship was crowded with ‘civilians making the deck untidy’ but nobody minded about that because this time tomorrow Achilles would be gone.
Abe had bought an old atlas from a second-hand bookshop in the old town of Norfolk opposite the sprawling Portsmouth Naval Dockyards so that he could show Kate where he was headed.
It was a beautiful book with colourful relief maps of all the continents and a marvellous two-page spread of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean. Measuring the distance between Norfolk and Kingston, Jamaica she had discovered that it was around one thousand three hundred miles.
Abe had teased her about that.
‘Unfortunately, we can’t go straight there, we’d run aground half-a-dozen times!’
Other officers had greeted Kate with tiny nods of the head, shaken her hand as if she was made of glass, tried far too hard to make her feel welcome and that had deeply touched her. Two men had actually apologised that she had had to pass by those ‘good for nothing GW idiots at the gates…’
Becoming a Navy wife had been an education, one she was still absorbing. Stepping on board the Achilles had been a rough and ready finishing class of sorts.
Those Getrennte Entwicklung ‘idiots’ at the gate pasted billboards around Norfolk protesting about the ‘polyglot’ scandal of the Royal Navy’s historic◦– well, near century-old explicitly mixed-race crewing practices◦– and yet standing in the crowd on the quarterdeck of HMS Achilles she was surrounded by many coloured faces and everybody seemed to be getting along just fine!
Basically, very few people in the Navy had a lot of time for the GW idiots, the majority of whom claimed ‘religious exemption’ from military service the moment colonial enrolment◦– ‘Draft Notices’◦– landed on their doormats.
Abe had taken their son in his arms as soon as she stepped aboard the ship, transparently eager not to waste a single second with him before he sailed away.
He had taken her forward to show her the aircraft he flew.
There were two flying machines atop the cruiser’s amidships catapult, both with bulbous floats like the Bristol seaplanes Abe had flown in Ontario. Below the boom of the heavy-duty crane which recovered returning aircraft and lowered the ship’s larger ‘small boats’ into the water, there was a third aircraft, almost but not quite identical to the seaplanes stowed high on the catapult rails.
Kate had stared at this flying machine not immediately knowing what was ‘wrong’ with it. Her husband had followed her gaze. He had laughed gently as their son gurgled with pleasure at being raised to his father’s shoulders.
The third Sea Fox had its wings folded inward along the length of its all-metal monocoque fuselage and seemed to have lost its floats…
Abe stepped closer and kicked at the nearest fixed undercarriage wheel.
“I only get to fly this one off the ship,” he grinned. “Well, me or one of the other fellows.”
He elected not to tell his wife that the ‘wheeled’ Sea Fox had had its single defensive machine gun removed, likewise its bomb racks and heavy cameras and once the ship was at sea two technicians from the Headquarters Electronic Warfare Division would go to work filling the rear cockpit with top secret equipment.
“We’ll fly her ashore as soon as we are in Jamaican waters,” Abe said, leaving it at that.
Since moving into married quarters Kate had made a point of dressing as her neighbours dressed, albeit she had soon become aware that she was, in comparison with many of her new friends, something of a make and mend obsessive. In the house she still wore a pair of comfortable moccasins, a gift from one of her aunts, otherwise she was a very ‘modern’ woman. That said she found the ‘lingerie’ her friends talked about fiddly and uncomfortable, and as for stockings and suspenders, that was just ridiculous and other than on the coldest of days◦– when she wore leggings or slacks under her calf-length frock or skirts◦– she preferred to go bare-legged. One day she hoped her feet would get used to the impractical half-heeled lightweight leather shoes that were all the rage in New England; but nobody minded her sticking to flat heels even though it emphasised that she was not the tallest of women.
Although spots of moisture still pattered on the deck the rain of the morning had passed over as the farewells began.
“Be safe, husband,” Kate asked. She had heard about his ‘close shave’ from one of the other wives. Everybody thought she was married to a daredevil! She patted his chest, bowed her head to rest her brow against him, hiding her face.
“That’s what I plan to do,” he promised, the words catching in his throat.
They hugged, kissed and then the family day was over with the women and children reluctantly disembarking as the cruiser’s five-man Royal Marine Band serenaded the departing guests.
Abe walked back to the ship, distractedly saluting the officer at the head of the gangway.
“Permission to come on board, sir?”
Sub-Lieutenant Ted Forest, unmarried and presently romantically un-entangled, as he bemoaned cheerfully to anybody who would listen, grinned broadly.
“Permission granted, sir!” Forest had had the deck watch that afternoon. “Tom seems to have grown every time I lay eyes on him, Abe,” he remarked as the two friends turned to watch the last of the busses drive off.
“He’ll be taller than you the next time I see him,” Abe complained ruefully.
Chapter 16
Sunday 19th March
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
La Superiora Isabella had been rudely disturbed from her prayers by the arrival of her half-brother’s Arms Man, Don Rafael and his two whores. She was not a happy woman.
That her much younger sibling◦– he was twenty-six years her junior, the only male issue of her father’s second marriage to an Aragonese gold-digger young enough to be his daughter◦– should impose upon her, yet again, at a time like this was very nearly beyond belief…
However, when her initial ire subsided, she allowed herself a few minutes for reflection. If Don Rafael, that most honourable of her father’s swords should have allowed himself to be embroiled in this farrago was a strange, dissonant thing which gave her pause for thought. Although, why he or her brother should imagine that she was remotely interested in the goings on in Madrid or the other cities◦– each and every one Babylon-reincarnated and deserving of the cleansing fire of God◦– still defeated her comprehension.
Up here, hidden away at an elevation of some five thousand feet in the Sierra Guadarrama Mountains, her community made no effort to keep abreast of, and rarely inquired, into the affairs of the world beyond the adjacent peaks and valleys of the harsh, unforgiving land upon which their great monastery had sat, like God’s last citadel since the time of Ferdinand and Isabelle, a monument in living stone to the glory of la Reconquista, the re-conquest of the whole of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in 1492.