Nowhere in Europe had feudalism survived so robustly, and nowhere in the post-renaissance ‘West’ had so many factors combined to limit, in many cases suffocate and actively snuff out, the spark of innovation and ambition vital to any nation seeking to maximise the opportunities of industrialisation. Old Spain had been left behind by the rest of the World, become an impoverished backwater in which six or seven out of every ten of its citizens might as well have still been living in the middle of the nineteenth century for all the good ‘modernisation’ had done them. There was no national electrical grid or even a proper road system in the mountains north of Madrid, in winter starvation often stalked the villagers on the hillsides who still lived in semi-fortress communities largely ignorant of the marvels taken for granted in some of the big towns and cities, forever the voiceless vassals of the princes who lived in golden splendour in their great palaces.
All this had disgusted her on her return as an adult to Spain but right now it leant persuasive credence to what Paul Nash had said to her. She was stuck in a mindset alien to the majority of the peoples of the country around them. She was thinking like a latter-twentieth century, very independently-minded woman; she might speak Spanish like a native but there was no way she could put herself in the place of somebody who had only ever lived in these mountains, and if they were lucky, attended a church school for half-a-dozen years during their childhood. To most people they encountered she and Henrietta and their guardian would be strangers, no threat, of no interest once they had moved on by and passed out of sight. An armed man accompanied by two women was just a man guarding his chattels in these hills where the writ of princes and absentee landlords was a tenuous, infrequently exercised prerogative.
“I don’t think you work for the CSS,” Melody decided, thinking aloud.
“Does it matter who I work for?” This the man posed, amused.
She shrugged, suddenly weary beyond measure again.
“Who do you really work for?”
“Ah… I think you’ve worked that out already.”
The rain was falling so hard that the branches and leaf cover above their heads made little or no difference.
“Stay dry,” the man sighed, rising to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Like I said, to re-fill the canteens and to reconnoitre ahead. I’ll leave my backpack here with you in the dry under the awning. Try to sleep, we’re as safe up here as anywhere. Especially, if the weather sets in for the next few hours. It rains a lot in the night at this time of year, hopefully we’ll have another dry day tomorrow. The going gets a lot better until we climb into the Gredos Mountains so we ought to make good progress. But right now, just try to sleep.”
With that he was gone, ghosting into the night.
Melody tried to track him, it was useless.
He disappeared into the darkness like a wraith.
Chapter 30
Monday 3rd April
Cliveden House, Buckinghamshire
Sir George Walpole had requested one, last meeting with Lothar von Bismarck, the Russian Minister and the Papal Legate, Cardinal Manzini before returning to England. The Royal Air Force had sent a Marlborough twin-engine transport aircraft to hasten his journey, landing him and his small entourage at Northolt where cars had been waiting to whisk him the fifteen or so miles out into the country to the Prime Minister’s country retreat in the heart of the Home Counties.
Normally, the Foreign and Colonial Secretary relaxed when he walked through the portals of the magnificent old Italianate mansion in the Chiltern Hills. Today, his customary public insouciance, what people who ought to have known better persisted in describing as ‘grace under pressure’ was a somewhat porous mask which might slip without warning at any time.
“Oh, dear, George,” Lady Emily Hamilton smiled sympathetically as she appeared from a side room to intercept her visitor as he divested himself of his hat and coat, “surely, things can’t be that bad,” she remarked cheerfully as she studied her old friend. “It is bad enough that misery-guts old Primus inter pares is walking around with a permanently long face without you joining him in a double act!”
“Forgive me, Emily,” Walpole brightened, “things aren’t that bad.”
The Prime Minister’s wife had never really forgiven her husband for allowing himself to be bullied into taking up residence at No 10, Downing Street, her least favourite address in Central London. Three decades ago her circle at Oxford, where she had been one of the brightest of all the footlights throughout her time at St John’s College reading Modern Literature, Greek and French, had been astounded when she married the Honourable Hector Hamilton, the second son of Lord, then 4th Earl Maidenhead and Taplow. Opinion had been divided between those who were worried she might have suffered a psychotic episode of some kind or that she had been momentarily dazzled, blinded in fact, by the supposedly fabulous wealth of the son of the ringmaster of the ‘Cliveden Set’.
Actually, her real friends soon realised that she had simply fallen head over heels in love with the quietly spoken, and in those days still relatively anonymous backbench Member of Parliament for Epping Forest. For most of their marriage it had been Emily, a published poet and erudite, acerbic columnist and sometimes features editor for a succession of daily national newspapers, and a popular ‘talking head’ on television current affairs and quiz programs, who had enjoyed by far the higher public profile◦– by a country mile◦– of the pair. That had all come to an end with Hector’s surprise promotion to the Cabinet in the post-assassination crisis which had brought King George V to the throne.
Nobody had been more surprised than Hector when it transpired that cometh the moment cometh the man!
Presently, Hector Hamilton was three-years and seven months into his second ‘sentence’◦– as Emily put it succinctly◦– ‘in the jug at Downing Street with no hope of remission for good behaviour.’
Emily was the human face of the ‘family firm’ and everybody around her would forgive her anything. She was, after all, a national◦– nay◦– imperial treasure.
She took the Foreign and Colonial Secretary’s arm and led him into her husband’s ground floor office at the back of the great house. The Prime Minister’s personal Royal Marine bodyguard knocked lightly on the door, opened it and stepped, respectfully aside. Not the least of Emily’s, mainly whimsical complaints, was that she and Hector had to live in a goldfish bowl surrounded by heavily armed men!
However, after the carnage half-a-dozen dissident Fenians had wrought on the imperial establishment in the early 1960s the decision had been taken that that was never going to happen again. Cabinet ministers and the senior members of the Royal family never went anywhere without their police or armed services protection details; on balance, most ministers and, so far as George Walpole could tell, the consensus within the royal household was that being alive was a lot better than being dead or maimed, so the security and the constraints it placed on individuals just had to be tolerated.
“I don’t care how bad things are,” Emily Hamilton declared. “I don’t want you boys drinking all the whisky before dinner. I hate it when I’m the only voice of sobriety at the table!”