The unmarked Blenheim twin-engine transport aircraft had been waiting for them outside Perpignan, its very military, RAF-looking crew, clearly feeling somewhat out of sorts in their grubby civilian flying kit.
‘The container with all the stuff we’re going to need once I get the ladies to Navalperal de Tormes will follow you out of the door,’ Paul Nash had explained airily to Stanton, who, in retrospect had taken in very little of the advice or the pseudo-information he was given before or during the long, very bumpy ‘terrain-hugging’ flight south. ‘The static line will automatically spring your chute a couple of hundred feet after you jump’, actually he had frozen in the open hatch and had to be pushed, ‘so, all you have to do is find and secure the supplies in the container before you make contact…’
None of which took account of him bashing his head when he landed, or his being so badly concussed that by the time he had stopped throwing up and his eyes were starting to focus it was pitch black inside the olive grove he had come down in.
This is insane…
And now there were people in the grove nearby.
He could hear his parachute, somehow detached from him rustling and cracking in the branches. He knew he was never going to find the container and its precious supplies. The whole thing was hare-brained; how the Devil was Nash going to find ‘the ladies’ in the bloody mountains in the first place? Let alone get from there to here◦– God only knew how many miles separated their jump positions◦– and find him again?
No, this is beyond insane…
Nash claimed to know where Melody Danson and the Governor of New England’s daughter had been ‘parked’ for quote: ‘safe keeping’.
Not that Stanton needed to know this, or really, anything about anything in particular.
‘We can’t have you blabbing the first time they snip off one of your fingers, old man,” Nash had guffawed cheerfully.
There had been a bright light in Stanton’s face.
That must have been when the man from the Manhattan Globe passed out…
Now, he blinked into muzzy-headed consciousness.
Somebody was swinging a hammer against the inside of his skull as if he had the worst hangover in human history and he was half-afraid to open his eyes in case he bled to death.
A cool, damp cloth was placed on his brow.
He did not understand what was being said to him, registering only that the woman’s voice was soothing, unthreatening.
He groaned, attempted to sit up.
Bad mistake; he collapsed back into the warm, soft pillows.
Okay, the Inquisition have not got me yet…
“Rest easy, Señor,” the woman said in awkward, heavily accented English. “The Alcalde has been called…”
Albert Stanton squinted myopically at the woman, a large lady with a heavily tanned complexion and dark eyes, who was smiling stoically.
“Where am I?” The man croaked. He had no Spanish, other than pigeon.
“You are among friends and my husband’s men have buried your,” she hesitated, “goods in the hills. Even if they look the militia will find nothing. But they will not look…”
The woman pressed a cup to his lips and cool liquid slipped like nectar across his parched palate and down his throat.
“Little at a time,” he was cautioned. Then: “You do a very brave thing. These are bad times…”
Stanton slept after that and when he awakened the nausea and the worst of his pain was gone. He reached around for his glasses, found them on a table by the bed, crammed them on his face. His head remained sore, his thoughts muzzy but he felt stronger, strong enough to swing his feet over the side of the bed and scan the room for a suitable pot or bowl in which to relieve his bursting bladder.
Hearing movement a man entered the room.
“Bathroom?” Stanton muttered.
“Of course. This way.”
Presently, the New Englander looked at himself in the mirror.
Not a pretty sight!
His left cheek, which seemed about twice its normal size, was stitched◦– it was hard to tell if that was one or two gashes◦– and he was going to have the mother and father of all black eyes. His nose felt… wrong, and his spectacles would not quite sit normally atop it. His ribs hurt and his right knee was swollen, hardly mobile.
What was it they said: ‘Worse things happen at sea?’
The Alcalde, Don Jose de Cortés, was a broad, magnificently moustachioed man in his sixties who insisted that Stanton “lie down again before you fall over” in heavily accented English, and drew up a chair by his bedside before sobering, albeit only by a degree before offering to fill him in on one or two little things that “my good friend el Escorpion will have neglected to share with you!”
“The Scorpion?”
Don Jose grimaced and slapped his right thigh.
“My Duke’s name for Señor Nash. But,” he chortled and shook his head, “but it is apt.”
Don Jose’s ‘lord’ was Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, whom Albert Stanton had never met but heard a lot of conflicting things about during the two years that the man was his country’s Consul General in Philadelphia. The consensus had been that he was a charming, somewhat dim-witted buffoon, an aristocratic place man a little out of his depth in New England who was most famous for his legendary philandering.
Stanton got confused at this point. Well, if he was being honest, even more confused, and because he was so beaten up, he must have allowed his bewilderment to show.
He compounded this when he admitted: “Nash told me to hide the ‘equipment’◦– I haven’t a clue what was in that big box◦– I dropped with and that he would rendevouz with me here, and then…”
Actually, he realised he had no idea what was supposed to, or likely, to happen then.
“Are you a soldier?”
“I did my militia service several years ago. I know which end of a rifle to hold, but…”
Don Jose smiled sympathetically.
“What?” Stanton blurted.
“Perhaps, your pen will be mightier in our cause than any sword we might put in your hands, Señor Stanton.”
The reporter did not care to contemplate the thought that Paul Nash◦– or whoever the man he had met on the Express train to Lyon was◦– had played him like a fish on the end of a very short line, flattering and bamboozling him into jumping out of a bloody aeroplane, for goodness sake!
The older man had turned deadly serious.
“If all goes well, we shall be reunited with his excellency, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and our Catholic Monarch Sophia Louise in Portugal. In the meantime, we await the arrival of the Scorpion and his charges, then, if necessary, we shall fight our way to the border.”
Chapter 23
Wednesday 29th March
Government House, Philadelphia
The Chairman of the Virginia Colonial Legislative Council, Roger Emerson Lee III, who liked to tell anybody so foolish as to hang on his words that he was distantly related to Light Horse Lee, an obscure minor figure in the revolt of 1776, whom, in their wisdom the English had ‘graciously rehabilitated’, thus founding his most ‘loyal’ of ‘loyal families’. Basically, he was a man so full of his own importance that it never occurred to him that even his political allies regarded him as a self-serving buffoon. Nevertheless, owing to his innate ruthlessness and absolute belief in his own right to speak for ‘his people’ he had inexorably risen up the greasy pole of colonial politics to not only lead the majority faction in his own Colony’s legislature but had recently been appointed Director of the Organisation of Chairmen of the Fifteen, the mouthpiece of the East Coast crown colonies.