In total he had carried a load of some eighty plus pounds three miles up the mountain from his ‘drop site’ in the valley below the monastery. And somehow, he had dealt with or got past the◦– presumably heavily armed◦– men La Superiora had turned away from the doors of the monastery yesterday afternoon.
Melody had no doubt that ‘Paul Nash’ had secreted other nefarious and very deadly weapons about his person.
He had also lugged up the mountain camouflaged cold-weather smocks and trousers, several pairs of thick woollen socks and of all things, fur-lined caps for Melody and Henrietta. And wonder of wonders, the kit actually fitted them!
The women were astonished when they were presented with well-worn but comfortable calf-length walking boots, items Sister Isabella had instructed to be recovered from the monastery’s storeroom of items surrendered, possibly decades ago, by women who had ‘entered our house’, thereby renouncing all property.
While Melody and Henrietta had been trying to sleep and not really succeeding, ‘Nash’ had been busy investigating what the monastery’s resources had to offer, apparently without demur from La Superiora. Whether this was because Sista Isabella was looking forward to having her step-brother’s ‘whores’ off her hands, or she was relishing the opportunity to thumb her nose at ‘those idiots in Madrid’, watching Melody and Henrietta don the clothes their presumptive rescuer had brought them, the old woman had almost threatened to smile.
La Superiora’s relatively good humour even survived the news that Nash had decided to delay setting off another day. Ostensibly, this was to give ‘the ladies’ another few hours to take in as many calories as possible and rest up a little longer.
Several of the dried◦– desiccated would be a more precise description◦– ready meals, high protein stews were cooked up, filling Melody’s and Henrietta’s bellies for the first time in a fortnight, inducing an afternoon siesta from which they later awakened marginally refreshed and temporarily, a little less afraid of the ordeal to come.
It was Henrietta who asked the obvious question: “Why isn’t it safe here anymore?”
“It was never safe here,” La Superiora informed her in suddenly clipped, very received British Broadcasting Corporation English which had both younger women blinking at her. “My brother has worked very hard to remain unaligned, a so-called honest broker between the King-Emperor’s El Escorial conservative faction and the Queen’s Aranjuez modernisers. Unfortunately, gossip ties him to Sophia’s,” she shrugged, “petty coats. I have no idea if the rumours are true but our families◦– that of the Queen when she was one of several young girls mooted for marriage into the Royal Family◦– were very close and Alonso even as a very young man, was a very hard boy to not fall in love with.” A flicker of unlikely fond remembrance was instantly extinguished. “The Mother Church will afford this house some small protection but only at a cost, namely, its expropriation from the family’s hands. It depends how confident the Holy See in Rome is in its agents in Madrid as to whether I find myself the object of a bull of anathema. This is a matter of no importance to me. I am too old to accompany you on your journey to freedom; and in any case, I refuse to flee from the cowards of the false Inquisitions that plague the Empire. I shall stay and fight.”
Outside the rain was sleeting down driven nearly to the horizontal by the wind which howled through the mountains.
“We shall depart when the gale abates,” Paul Nash declared. “At whatever hour that may be.”
Both Melody and Henrietta would be carrying old canvas knapsacks, taking the edge◦– but little more◦– off the load their muscular guardian angel planned to hump across the Mountains of Madrid. Each woman would heft extra blankets, and between them much of the food including hard tack biscuits from the monastery’s stores. The man would be transporting a lightweight tent, ground sheets, a stove and two small gas bottles, all the medical supplies bar the anti-biotics which he had donated to Sister Elvira, the order’s carer for the sick. It went without saying that he planned to◦– very personally◦– carry all the weaponry he had brought with him from…
“Where exactly did you come from, Paul?” Melody asked waspishly.
“From the sky, dear lady.”
Okay, military types tended to be paranoid about secrecy. She got that. Not that it was going to stop her asking questions.
“Alonso sent you?”
“Yes and no.”
“That’s no answer at all!” She complained.
“True,” he retorted blandly. “For all you know I could be working for the Spanish Government. I might be about to kidnap you for ransom or to deliver you into the hands of the Inquisition.”
Henrietta had quirked askance at Melody.
Whose impatience was almost tangible: “If that was your game you’d have turned up with a small army and you’d already have whisked us away to your lair in the mountains!”
“I might not have?”
Melody had frowned even harder.
“Okay, but that’s what I’d probably have done.”
The man had started cleaning his Martini Henry assault rifle, a wickedly compact weapon capable of a rate of fire of nearly six hundred rounds per minute in full-automatic mode. Three spare thirty-round magazines were packed into his body webbing. The clips for his pistol, which he had laid on the floor beside him as he worked, each contained eight soft-nosed .45 BSA◦– Birmingham Small Arms◦– factory patent bullets. From the slickly choreographed, precisely executed way he disassembled and re-assembled both weapons, Melody guessed he could do it blindfold, or in the dark of the night, or under fire faultlessly, nervelessly.
“According to your New York Constabulary file you refused to undergo fire arms training or to carry a gun on duty, Ms Danson?” The man inquired, idly.
“I was terrified I’d shoot my foot off.”
“That’s why you do the training, to stop that sort of thing happening.”
“I don’t think I could ever shoot anybody.”
The man thought about this.
“No? You’d be surprised,” he sighed. “Maybe, you just haven’t met enough people who’d be better off dead yet.”
Melody recoiled with a horror which was unfeigned.
“Seriously,” the man smiled wanly. “Trust me on this one. Some people you can’t argue with, the only thing you can do is kill them before they kill you.”
Melody and Henrietta were alone in the room with the man.
“Who sent you?”
“Brigadier Harrison,” she was informed wryly. “The day after he and Alonso proposed your name for the Joint Commission in Madrid.”
“Alonso?” Henrietta De L’Isle queried in disbelief.
“He was the one who proposed the Commission to ‘take the sting’ out of the revelations about the Empire Day outrages that you,” he looked to Melody, “so adroitly brought into the public domain last year that the Governor was, against all expectations, able to exert some small influence over the excesses of what I believe in New England is called the ‘news cycle’. We’d known for some time, years in fact, that there were a large number of bad actors here in Old Spain and out in the islands of the Caribbean, not to mention within that nest of vipers in New Granada. Needless, we didn’t want the blighters stirring up war-fever in Madrid or the Gulf of Spain, or anywhere else until we were in some kind of position to defuse it. So, Alonso fell on his sword in Philadelphia, and returned home to try to talk a little sanity into the Royal Court, or rather, ‘courts’, plural. As ever, diplomacy is the art of the possible and sometimes things don’t turn out the way we hoped. This is one such occasion.”