A little later Abe felt and heard the catapult impellor fling one of the ship’s Sea Foxes into the air. Five minutes later the Tannoy blared.
“STANDOWN FROM ADC ONE. THE SHIP WILL RESUME ADC THREE.”
“Panic over, sir,” Abe’s senior sick bay rating murmured.
Abe stood back while his men began to square away the compartment, re-storing and re-packing the equipment they had swiftly, efficiently broken out of lockers and adjoining spaces, and laid out ready to receive casualties. The emergency medical kits which in extremis could be distributed around the ship were meticulously logged back into the sick bay inventory. It took over an hour to restore normality.
Such were the ways of the peacetime Royal Navy.
Everything had its place…
Chapter 29
Sunday 2nd April
Villanueva de Ávila, Castile and León, Spain
Both women had been out on their feet as they followed their infuriatingly tireless guide and protector into the woods in the darkness and waited, faint and swaying as he swiftly, efficiently hung a canvas awning between two trees and spread blankets on the ground.
“Take the weight off your feet,” Captain Paul Nash commanded softly. “Drink some water, I’ll dissolve a couple of ready meals. I’m sorry, we can’t risk a fire but you must eat and drink before you try to sleep. I know your feet must be hurting like blazes. Sorry, I’ll look at them in the morning. We can’t risk a light. The village is only a few hundred yards away.”
Neither Melody Danson nor Henrietta De L’Isle even contemplated a protest. They had walked all of the last two nights and all of that long, gruelling day. They had no idea where they were, and for the moment cared less. For most of the last few hours they had been like sleep-walkers, unconsciously putting one foot in front of the other and for periods, because of the unforgiving nature of the terrain◦– often with sheer drops to one side of rocky, twisting mountain paths, they had been roped together with their inexhaustible guide-protector.
Henrietta and Melody choked down the mush in the billy cans pressed into their hands, and swigged water from the canteen the man held out. Despite their thirst the sour reek of the purification tablets almost made them gag as they drank.
Melody tried to give the canteen back to Nash, guiltily realising she was about to drain it dry.
“You finish it. We passed a stream about half-a-mile back, I’ll re-fill the canteens overnight.”
“Where are we?” She asked.
“The town on the next hill is Villanueva de Ávila.”
“Castile and Leon,” Melody groaned. “I thought we’d be farther west.”
The man chuckled in the darkness.
“We’re about sixty miles from Madrid. Tomorrow we’ll lose ourselves in the Sierra de Gredos. I’d expected there to be more militia and busybodies in the hills,” he added with a suggestion of irritation as if he had been looking forward to the prospect of shooting or knifing somebody.
Henrietta’s head lolled against Melody’s shoulder, instinctively, she put her arm around the younger woman’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head. The women had made no secret of their intimacy, careless of what their soldier knight-errant guardian made of it.
Melody started doing the math◦– how far they had come, how far they had to go to reach the Portuguese border?◦– and she hated the numbers that she was coming up with.
“How far are we from the border?” She prompted wearily. “A hundred-and-ten, maybe one hundred-and-twenty miles?”
“Something like that,” the man conceded, vaguely. “We’ve come over fifteen hundred feet down the mountains. We must be at around three thousand feet hereabouts, the weather’s warmed up and dried up a bit which ought to make it easier…”
“Unless it rains again tomorrow,” Melody objected feebly.
“It won’t,” Paul Nash retorted. “Trust me, it’ll be sunshine and light winds all the way from here.”
Henrietta was fast asleep sitting beside Melody, dead to the world.
“And I’m the Queen of England!” Melody snorted derisively.
The man had rested his assault rifle against the bowl of a nearby tree as he squatted down opposite her. The whites of his eyes fixed on her.
“I need you two ladies to stay strong,” he said. “You stay strong and I’ll do the rest…”
“For all we know there are thousands of people looking for us?”
“I doubt it. There really aren’t that many people who give a damn about us. A lot of locals will have seen us in the last couple of days; most of them will have just shrugged and got on with their lives. The telephone system in the mountains is spotty at the best of times, right now I doubt if it is functioning at all. It’ll take a while for people to work out who is in charge in Madrid and then, it’ll be a whole mess of beans for them to try to work out who is on whose side. No, we could easily just stroll to the border from here in a week or so…”
“Seriously?”
As if to emphasise her scepticism big, cold drops of rain began to filter through the branches over their head. The man ushered the women under the shelter of the awning, pulled a poncho over his shoulders as the rain became heavier, persistent.
Henrietta lay asleep again in moments, her head in Melody’s lap. The older woman ached all over. Nonetheless, she was getting her second wind, possibly the effect of the food and water she had forced down a few minutes earlier.
“I always knew this whole ‘mission’ of ours was a complete nonsense from the outset,” she confessed. “If my head hadn’t been so turned by working for the Governor and Matthew Harrison, I’d never have allowed myself to be talked into it.”
Nash’s eye flicked at Henrietta’s sleeping form.
“Yeah, that complicates things in a,” Melody hesitated, “really nice way and I think Hen needed to spread her wings a little. We both did, I suppose.”
“Life’s complicated sometimes.”
“That’s no lie!”
The man smiled, his teeth flashing briefly in the gloom.
Melody was aware again that there was something profoundly predatory in that smile, and a hunter’s glint in the man’s eyes.
“You seem to know everything there is to know about us. What’s your story?” She asked, not really expecting an answer.
“I suppose I’m one of those guys every Empire needs to oil the wheels. Now and then that involves doing things nobody is ever going to own up to in public. I’m your man for that sort of thing. That’s my story.”
Melody’s eyes narrowed.
Until last year she had been the only female detective inspector in the New York Constabulary, and moreover, at the time of her promotion youngest woman or man, to ever hold that rank. She had not stopped being a detective just because she had been attached to a pointless diplomatic mission to a country where she had lived, blissfully happily, for several years as a child.
Of course, as a young girl she had been blind to the grinding poverty of the peasant population, and to each and every iniquity of the Inquisition, the privileged daughter of two feted and acclaimed classical musicians at the court of the old King-Emperor, Carlos VI. Unlike in the overseas provinces the institution of slavery had been officially abandoned at Royal Command thirty years ago: although it had never been specifically outlawed by statute in the Cortes Generales, the so-called legislature of the Empire of New Spain, essentially a collection of aristocrats, courtiers, old soldiers and place men whose sole purpose was to rubber-stamp royal edicts. Instead of crude slavery the ruling classes had inflicted serfdom on the old Russian model upon the peoples of the agrarian countryside, and a heavily regulated wage slavery upon the inhabitants of the urban landscape.