The sound of a huge explosion from somewhere near the Hacienda de Cortés reached the Bentley as it negotiated a sharp turn some minutes into the headlong flight to the west.
Don José turned and looked back at his passengers.
“Do not be alarmed. When I put it to Paul that I wished to leave nothing for the vultures to pick over when we departed, he suggested a use for the blasting powder kept in the village store and for some of the ‘special stores’ that Señor Stanton brought with him.” He smiled grimly. “There will be further explosions,” he warned. “Please do not be alarmed.”
Don José was not a man who believed in ‘alarm’.
When the stray rifle rounds had started fizzing through the air he had stood, unconcerned, in the courtyard marshalling his people into the waiting vehicles, pausing here and there to pat a shoulder or to murmur a reassuring word. More than once he had cracked a wry, one-liner and guffawed, slapping his thigh as if today’s desperate escape was no more than the preparation for a family picnic in the hills.
The ‘further explosions’ were much smaller than the first but there were a lot of them.
Grenades, Melody guessed.
“The country is at its finest in the spring when the waters run strongly in the Tormes. Later in the year the sun beats down and the river becomes a stream,” Don José explained affably. “Some years the river dries up, although not so much of late; the winters have been harsh and the snow on the highest peaks does not melt until this time of the year. As a boy I fished in the Tormes, even this high in the hills. Not of late, though,” he reflected sadly. “Or, perhaps, ever again.”
His wife spoke for the first time since leaving her home.
“We have had forty good years together in this country,” she comforted her husband. “We shall have more to come. Just not in the land of our birth.”
The old woman’s stoicism made Melody a little ashamed of herself. Don José and his family had nothing to look forward to but exile; she and Henrietta might, although at the moment it seemed unlikely, get to go home at the end of this… nightmare.
It was this which made her sit up.
She was at least going to enjoy the view as the Bentley trundled to the west. Henrietta did likewise and gestured to the boy still crouched in the foot well to pop up on her lap.
“My name is Henrietta, what is your name?” She inquired maternally.
“Pedro,” the kid murmured.
Señora Margarita smiled fond indulgence.
“He’s not normally such a quiet one, that boy,” she said with a fond severity. “Sergio’s dear wife,” she nodded at the driver, “died when Pedro was young. We had Polio and Diphtheria in the village that year, our precious monarch and his circle do not care to ‘waste’ their treasure on programs of inoculation of the type common in the rest of the civilised world.” She sighed in disgust. “Worse, they frown upon Alcaldes like my husband infringing upon their ‘prerogatives’ by doing the work they ought to be doing. Pedro was brought into our household as a baby.”
The old lady smiled.
Henrietta had hugged the boy to herself to stop him being thrown about by the unpredictable gyrations of the Bentley.
Melody gave her lover a look, unsurprised that the kid had brought out Henrietta’s mothering side. The younger woman looked back, shrugged imperceptibly, almost defiantly and clung onto the boy.
Behind them a battered Morris estate car◦– possibly less than twenty years old◦– and a slightly more modern, early 1960s battered Leyland lorry rumbled along in the Bentley’s wake. Despite the recent rains the vehicles were kicking up rooster tails of dust and loose stones.
Melody’s thoughts wandered.
Of course, Spain has no real automotive industry. A few factories made spare parts, albeit only for the relatively small number of imported cars and commercial vehicles◦– a business severely constrained by the Spanish government’s Draconian foreign exchange and currency rules◦– and several workshops produced hand-made, very expensive cars for wealthy customers, otherwise the country had no native ‘car industry’ in the sense understood by the citizens of the British Isles, Germany, New England◦– where approximately half the cars and six in every ten large lorries, that is, over five tons deadweight in the Empire were built◦– France, or elsewhere in the ‘first’, industrialised World. Even Russia produced several hundred thousand cars and trucks a year, and both Australia and India had their own thriving automotive industries. But not Old Spain whose industrial economy had scarcely progressed since the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Part of that was the legacy of the Great War, or that was the lie still parroted by the courtiers of the King-Emperor’s court, and by the organs of a Mother Church that was content to see Spain remain a bastion of medieval orthodoxy in all things…
Melody caught occasional glimpses of the Land Rover foraging far ahead of the rest of the convoy. The men riding precariously on its rusty, bucking ribs were armed with rifles, looking for a fight. Problematically, in this sort of valley and mountain terrain, it was patently obvious that a single militiaman with a gun could stop the convoy in its tracks on this road.
Don José was ahead of her.
“In two or three miles we will go to the north, the rest of our journey will be through ‘bandit’ country which the Army and the policía fear to enter.”
He went on to answer Melody’s next, unspoken question.
“We shall drive through the night. At some stage we will have to halt to refuel the vehicles. We have several cans of petrol in the Leyland. With God’s providence, that will be sufficient to carry us to our destination.”
Chapter 36
Wednesday 5th April
Windward Passage, Caribbean
“I’m picking up a broadcast from Kingston!” Ted Forrest yelped. His voice rang with shocked disbelief. “They’re broadcasting in the clear and they say they are under attack. Cassandra has been hit and has gone aground in the harbour. Several ‘heavy units’ are shelling the naval base and the airfield…”
Abe was so insulated in his own intense little bubble of concentration that the words did not register for some seconds.
“Somebody’s shelling Kingston!” His navigator shouted into the intercom.
“I heard you the first time, Ted,” Abe retorted perfunctorily.
When you were in the woods the best hunter always focused on one thing at a time. Distraction was failure, a kill missed. He and Kate had gone off into the forests of the Mohawk country as kids trapping critters, wrangling snakes but that had got old, rattlers were not good eating. Thinking about it they rarely caught anything in those early years, nobody would let him have a gun until he was in his mid-teens. Then Tsiokwaris had loaned him a long Martini-Henry, a gun allegedly brought back by a man of the nation from the Border Wars, Kate had taught him how to be silent in the forests and he had begun to learn the ways of the hunter. Had he known then what he learned later he might have become a crack shot, not merely a journeyman with that gun but at the time the fun had been in the hunt, tracking, plotting, and of course, being alone in the woods with… Tekonwenaharake.
It was the oddest thing: right now, her spirit travelled with him through the wind as strongly as it had in those lost days of their childhood. It was as if a part of her was with him, looking over his shoulder, the angel of his better nature curbing the lust for blood that always lurked, demon-like, beneath his skin when he was like this, hunting his prey.
“It has to be the same people as the one’s down there!” Ted Forrest said, stating what was patently obvious before he knew what he was saying.