The door clunked shut.
Melody listened but heard no key turn in the lock.
She opened her arms and Henrietta fell into them.
They clung together until Sister Isabella returned.
“You will be separated. Together you will be too conspicuous. You may not associate again while you are under the protection of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.”
The women stared at her.
“Is that clear?”
Melody and Henrietta nodded dazedly.
“Good. Come with me.”
Chapter 17
Monday 20th March
Government House, Philadelphia
The Governor of New England had not returned to Philadelphia until the early hours of that morning. Going straight to his wife’s chambers he had found her heavily sedated and sleeping, mercifully, peacefully. Sitting by her bed in the gloom protectively, tenderly holding her left, slightly less twisted, hand he had attempted and failed to parse, to draw any hard and fast conclusions from the meetings, inspections and abbreviated public engagements which had filled the last seventy-two hours in Norfolk and the surrounding military bases.
London had decided that if the worse came to the worse◦– a general war with the Spanish◦– then New England and the Atlantic Fleet would ‘ride out the first blow’. There would be no ‘provocation offered’; the view being that nothing mattered more than that ‘the Empire stands astride and commands the moral high ground.’
Personally, De L’Isle thought this was a strategy of despair, tantamount to an admission that the Empire’s policy in the America’s was holed below the waterline.
But… And it was a big but; nobody had fired the first shot yet and peace, albeit of the uneasy, fragile kind was a lot better than a real shooting war. Moreover, putting to one side the pronouncements of leading colonial politicians and opinion-makers in the more bellicose middle and upper colonies◦– the one’s farthest away from where any fighting might actually happen◦– nobody in Government House honestly believed a wholesale military mobilisation was a thing likely to find widespread support throughout the rest of New England.
Problematically, he suspected the majority of the men and women in the street, if they thought about it at all were quite happy to convince themselves that the Border Wars were things of the past and that the South West was an ‘old issue’, and anyway, if anything went awry in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean that the Royal Navy would sort it out in five minutes flat!
Of course, the man in the street was blissfully unaware of the troubling undercurrents in international affairs, or that since the middle of the last decade the two great European Empires◦– those of Britain and Germany◦– had been vying for ascendancy and advantage around the margins of their respective imperial spheres and increasingly, trespassing on each other’s prerogatives through the agency of proxies. Diplomacy was, indeed, war by other means and Whitehall’s perspective was that the Kaiser’s men had taken far too many ‘liberties’ of late. There were many places in the World where there was if not a lot, then at least some ‘wiggle room’, scope for accommodations and negotiations: unfortunately, there was no such scope in New England, or for the Governor of that Commonwealth.
If Philip De L’Isle ordered a general mobilisation before the war actually began, he would be pilloried for scaremongering; whereas, if he waited until Spanish boots were on New England soil before hitting the button, he would be pilloried for vacillation.
Heads he lost, tails the other fellow won…
Sooner or later most Governors of the Commonwealth of New England came to understand that nothing was black and white and there were often, especially in great matters of state, no ‘good options.’
You have only got yourself to blame, old man…
Nobody had held a gun to his temple and ordered him to pick up the poisoned chalice. Thus far, his time in Government House had coincided with one of the longest periods of peace for several decades, the people had got used to the absence of war and welcomed the gradual run-down of both the colonial militias and the CAF. The complacent mantra that whatever the Spanish do we have the Royal Navy had taken root. Under his administration everybody’s number one priority had been to do nothing to slow down or to impede the runaway economic boom which was making New Englander’s more prosperous and supposedly, happier with every passing year. Even the Empire Day outrages of July 1976 had just been a blip on the horizon; nobody could have predicted that the ‘blow back’, or knock on effect of last year’s revelations about the disaster would have their most malign, world-shaking consequences not in New England but hundreds and thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Mexico and back in old Spain.
There was still no news of Henrietta...
The latest cables from London reported that communications with the British Embassy in Madrid were ‘up and down’ and that fighting in the city had intensified in the last twenty-four hours with the Army shelling several neighbourhoods and possibly the grounds of one, or all of the Royal Palaces.
Troublingly, the provinces of New Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo had yet to publicly, formally pledge their allegiance to the King-Emperor. In fact, hardly anybody had said anything about events in Spain other than the Pope in Rome, who had demanded the warring parties lay down their weapons and accept the intercession of the Papal Legate to the Spanish Church, Cardinal Vincente Coretta, formerly Bishop of Milan and latterly hardly ever absent from the side of Pius IX, the doddery, eighty-seven-year-old near blind incumbent sitting◦– stupefied most of the time, some claimed◦– on the throne of the Vatican.
Unlike the Pope◦– premature rumours of whose death had leaked out of Rome twice in the last six months◦– Coretta was an arch conservative who preached ‘God’s will that we roll back the territorial and theological adjustments of recent times.’ Specifically, this was usually interpreted as advocating a stronger hand on the helm in Madrid, a resumption of the Church’s historic missionary role in Spain’s overseas provinces and a global renewal of the battle against the march of heresy and apostasy.
De L’Isle had snatched three hours sleep, risen, completed his toilet, breakfasted and was at his desk at nine o’clock, diligently working through his papers and dictating letters to his secretary.
He broke for a cup of tea at eleven o’clock, chatting briefly with his Chief of Staff, Sir Henry Rawlinson about the meetings he had scheduled for that afternoon with the Governors of the Carolinas, Georgia and the Governor-designate of Florida, which was about to be incorporated into the Commonwealth of New England as its newest Crown Colony.
The race was now on to incorporate all possible viable protectorates, concessions and as much as possible of the ‘wild west’ beyond the Mississippi as full colonies. This was always a thing the First Thirteen and their two ‘Johnny-come-lately’ allies◦– Maine and Vermont◦– had resisted for over, in several cases, a hundred years before, more recently, grudgingly caving in to the reality of the global marketplace. That none of the ‘unincorporated’ or so-called ‘un-organised’ territories had yet gained full Crown Colony status simply reflected the determination of the First Thirteen’s rear-guard action. Ironically, as the crisis worsened in the south, practically every delaying tactic had run its natural course and in the coming years De L’Isle confidently expected the map of his immense bailiwick to start changing in a big way.