People had been calling him ‘the appeaser in chief’.
Until lately his detractors had had the courtesy to mutter it behind his back, out of his hearing so as not to upset Emily. Nowadays, there were frequent derogatory editorials in the papers, snide commentaries on the radio and television and Question Time in the Commons had come to resemble a bear pit.
Hector Hamilton had regarded his discomfiture as a small price to pay for the continuation of the European Peace, knowing full well that nobody would remember that it had been his government which had commenced the re-armament programs that were now, belatedly beginning to repair the damage his predecessors’ neglect had wrought on the fighting power of the Empire’s armed forces.
The new aircraft carriers coming into service with the Royal Navy, the high-performance propeller-driven monoplane scouts and bombers being delivered to the RAF in fast-increasing numbers, and soon, the first jet-powered ‘interceptors’ and ‘attack’ aircraft, the new generation of armoured land vehicles, ground cruisers and self-propelled artillery, the superb new infantry weapons, assault rifles, machine guns and a slew of short-range wire-guided munitions, were all the products of his administration’s acknowledgement that until the armed forces had the weapons to do the job, appeasement was the only safe option…
Now, time had run out.
“One day I will apologise to Philip De L’Isle,” the Prime Minister promised. “What he was afraid might happen has come to pass. The lesson of 1866 was that we, that is, the German and Russian Empires and every second and third-rate power left standing, should never fight a second general European war. Logically, therefore, all future wars would be fought elsewhere, imperial trials of strength directed by, and resourced from the old centres of empire.” He grunted, drained his glass. “If I recollect, you wrote a marvellously erudite book about all that twenty years ago. What did you call it?”
The interrogative was gently, and rhetorically posed.
“The Imperial Crisis,” George Walpole groaned.
“Wasn’t it your thesis that once the trouble in ‘faraway places of which the man in the street in London, or Berlin or Philadelphia or Moscow, knows little and cares less’ gains momentum, attaining a ‘critical mass’, that to all intents the ‘contagion’ would be unstoppable?”
“I was playing Devil’s Advocate, Hector,” Walpole retorted urbanely, contemplating his whisky glass.
If their fears materialised, they were going to have to claim that the catastrophe had come upon them unawares; that the pace of extraordinary events had overwhelmed the capacity of rational men, and that they had been the helpless victims of the tide of history: except none of that would be true.
Having known a storm was coming, a storm they could do very little about, they had appeased, compromised in the certain knowledge that the peoples of the Empire did not yet have the stomach for a war. At least, not the sort of war which might have plunged the globe into fiery chaos just to put a ‘few Spanish colonies back in their cages’ in the Americas, or to metaphorically clip the handlebars of the Kaiser’s moustache.
“Thank God,” George Walpole sighed, “we’ve got New England. Even the people around the Kaiser understand that the Empire, with New England at its heart, will always prevail.”
The Prime Minister nodded grimly.
“Yes, nothing changes the ‘facts on the ground’, as they say. Still, it won’t do any harm if we have a quiet word with our respective German ‘friends’ reminding them that if a single Deutsches Heer grenadier steps foot on French soil there will be Hell to pay.”
Walpole hesitated.
“Actually, in the circumstances that ‘reminder’ might be better received in Berlin if the King could be persuaded to put a call through to Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Hector Hamilton nodded.
“I shall speak to the Palace before dinner.” He glanced to the clock on the wall over his desk. “I’ll do it now, Emily will be incandescent if we don’t all sit down at the appointed hour!”
Chapter 31
Tuesday 4th April
Hacienda de Cortés, Navalperal de Tormes, Avila
Albert Stanton tried not to look too worried when the two women were ushered◦– well, half-carried◦– into the long ground floor dining room of the old country house in the foothills of the Gredos Mountains. While he was confident that he still looked something of a ‘sight’, he was visibly on the mend but Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle most closely resembled scarecrows!
They were thin, dirty, exhausted and their hair had been cut short as a boy’s might be, except with the inattention of a drunkard barber using garden shears. Both women were wearing what looked like wet-through British Army battledress, albeit not quite the right size for their privation-reduced frames.
They shivered as they were guided near to the fire burning fiercely in the hearth, where the Cortés family was methodically burning its papers.
Melody blinked acknowledgement to the Manhattan Globe man, while her companion stared at him blankly for some seconds before, in her exhaustion, giving up trying to work out who he was.
Blankets had been thrown around the women’s shoulders.
“This gentleman is Mr Albert Stanton of the Globe,” Melody told Henrietta.
“Oh, of course,” the younger woman apologised and despite the situation and her obvious physical state of near collapse, she held out her right hand to the stranger. “Sorry, I didn’t recognise you. I’m sure we must look a real sight!”
“Not at all,” the man lied valiantly. Thinking it best to change the subject he speculated: “I take it that you did not expect to encounter me here?”
Melody quirked a rueful half-smile.
“No,” the man decided, tight-lipped. “Nash is rather a ‘need to know’ fellow, what? Where is he by the way, Nash, I mean?”
Henrietta swayed and Melody grabbed for her elbow to steady her. The other women in the room took this as their cue to move in and as one to shepherd the Governor of New England’s daughter safely to a chair.
“He said he had a ‘couple of chores’ to do before he came up to the hacienda,” she reported. “I’ve been expecting to hear gunfire for the last couple of hours.”
“Oh, yes. The chap seems to have a somewhat muscular approach to what he does, whatever that is…”
Melody too, had been led to a chair. Almost as the weight came off her aching legs and feet the arms of sleep reached out and attempted, seductively to embrace her.
“We had to abandon our supplies,” she explained, feeling faint, “including what was left of our food and water, blankets and the dry socks Paul made us wear at night…” She must have blinked unconscious. Tried to remember where she had got to, and where she was. “That was a couple of nights ago, I think…”
She accepted a cup of water.
Then some tepid, exquisitely meaty broth which she could only sip at before her empty stomach cramped agonisingly.
Neither she nor Henrietta later remembered being escorted, half-carried upstairs and buried together beneath several layers of blankets, oblivious to the world from the moment their heads touched the pillow.
Contrary to Albert Stanton’s expectation there was no gunfire in the night and to his immense irritation when Paul Nash made his belated appearance around midnight he seemed, mud-spattered fatigues apart, unmarked by the adventures he had been through since they had parted eleven days ago. In fact, the man gave every appearance of being maddeningly fit, fresh, ready for anything.