“What did I tell you about bending your knees and rolling when you hit the ground, Stanton?” He chortled, grinning crookedly.
“The ground ‘hit’ me first!”
“Never mind. So, it goes!”
“The ladies were in a state of near collapse,” the New Englander said accusingly.
“Yes. I had no idea that they would be so plucky. I think they’d worked out that I wasn’t going to let them fall into the Army or the Inquisition’s hands. Not under any circumstances. As I say, they are plucky ones. I think Ms Danson must have marked Lady Henrietta’s card.”
“What are you talking about, man?” Stanton demanded suspiciously.
“Ah, the man from the Manhattan Globe needs his card marked also,” Nash whistled, his gaze suddenly hard. “There’s no diplomatic way of saying this, I’m afraid. Trust me, you really, really do not want to fall into the hands of those people…”
“What are you talking about…”
The penny dropped.
Nonetheless, Paul Nash spelled it out.
Presumably, just so that Albert Stanton wrote it down accurately.
“There are people looking for us who would torture, torment more accurately, rape, I daresay, generally make the ladies’ lives a living Hell, invent ludicrous confessions and have Ms Danson, and particularly, Lady Henrietta read those confessions out in court, in a show trial, you understand, before they◦– the bad guys, and there are a lot of them out there◦– eventually put them to death. The ladies would be very lucky if they were only hanged until dead by the neck in a public square in front of a baying mob. The way things are going it is more likely that they would be burned alive for witchcraft or heresy.”
Albert Stanton felt as if all the blood in his body had drained into his feet.
“Seriously?” He asked. He switched on his brain the next second. “No, forget I said that…”
“You,” the other man continued, “would certainly be almost as big a catch for them as Ms Danson, and no doubt treated similarly. I promised the ladies that if it came to it, I guaranteed them my best endeavours to ensure that they experienced as little pain and knowledge aforethought as I could manage, in what might be very trying circumstances. A man’s word is his bond, what? Obviously, I don’t want to get myself captured either. In that sense, we’re all in exactly the same boat together.”
“And eighty or ninety miles from the Portuguese border,” Albert Stanton groaned.
“Nearer eighty than ninety, old man,” Nash commiserated, grinning mischievously.
Don José entered the room and patted his back.
“You must have had many troubles along the way, old friend,” the Spaniard said wearily, showing his years now he no longer had to maintain the mask of assurance he had radiated to his family and retainers over the last week while they waited for news of Nash’s mission, preparing for flight at a moment’s notice.
“A few,” Nash conceded. “But nothing the ladies need to know about.” He glanced meaningfully at Stanton. “I’m not a great believer in inflicting the more sordid ephemera of my profession upon the womenfolk,” he said tersely.
The New Englander had no idea how to interpret this.
“I made sure that all the throat-cutting happened while the ladies were safely stashed away, out of sight, out of mind, what?”
“Oh, right, I see. That was very, er… Thoughtful of you…”
“No, it was professional of me. The ladies are in my care and it’s damned bad form to unnecessarily alarm a lady.”
Okay, if I blab to Melody Danson, I’ll be the next one to get his throat cut! It was always good to know exactly where one stood…
Stanton raised his hand.
“I understand.”
“Good. If the bad guys carry on being as inept as they’ve been so far,” Nash explained, pragmatically moving on past his warning to the reporter without a backward look◦– which Stanton guessed was the way he lived his life◦– and letting him in on the next part of the plan, “we shall be fine. We’ll rest up here until tomorrow night. If it comes on to rain, we’ll move out then, otherwise first thing the following morning. All of us, everybody.”
Stanton had already worked out that there was no future for the Cortés family or the members of its household in the new Spain rising from the ashes of the conflagrations in Madrid and the other big cities.
“You won’t see me tomorrow. Don José’s in charge now. In the event that anything untoward happens in my absence, he will decide if we run or fight.”
“Where will you be?” Stanton shook his head, raised his hand again, this time in apology. “Sorry, dumb question.”
“Not at all, old man. We’re in the middle of a particularly vicious, fast-spreading civil war and as in all such situations there is opportunity for those who know how to exploit them, and inevitably, an unusually large number of people who urgently need to be dead,” he smiled wolfishly, “rather than alive and kicking.”
“A lot of people,” Don José growled like a bear with an itch that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot reach to scratch.
Chapter 32
Wednesday 5th April
HMS Achilles, Windward Passage, Caribbean
The ship had been piped to Air Defence Stations One an hour before dawn as the cruiser serenely glided south through the waters of the fifty-mile-wide channel between eastern Cuba and the island of Hispaniola◦– where Columbus had first set foot in the New World◦– which since the turn of the century had been known as, and latterly officially become the Spanish Crown Province of Santo Domingo. The strait itself had been formed in unimaginably remote geological times by movements along a major active fault line between the two islands. The same fault ran east through Santo Domingo all the way to the Mona Passage and the islands of the smallest and poorest of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, the archipelago of the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico◦– the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico◦– which, largely neglected by Old Spain, had been loosely allied with its nearest neighbour for much of the last century until in modern times, the German Empire had acquired its now prosperous concession and wealthy watering hole around the port of San Juan.
The waters beneath the Achilles’s keel were over five thousand feet deep and between the cruiser and its destination, still over two hundred miles to the south-south-west, Kingston, lay the abysmal deep of the eastern end of the Cayman Trench.
Piping the ship to ADS One was just the Old Man’s way of letting everybody know that now they were heading south he wanted everybody to be on his toes.
‘This is the Captain. We’ll soon be clear of the northern reaches of the Windward Passage. We’ll be letting the old girl,’ the ship, ‘have her head as soon as it is fully light. We’ll make the breakwater at Kingston this evening and enter port tomorrow morning. At which point Achilles will assume command of the West Indies Squadron.’
The Old Man had been at his most fatherly.
‘Whatever you have heard about the situation vis-à-vis Cuba and Santo Domingo and the rest of New Spain you will have noticed that nobody is actually shooting at each other at the moment. Ideally, we’d like to keep things that way. We are sailing south to show the flag and to spread goodwill among the people of the islands blessed to live beneath the Union Jack…’
Shortly after the Old Man concluded his brief Tannoy address to the ship, word was passed for Surgeon-Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln and Sub-Lieutenant Edward Forrest to report to the Captain’s stateroom.