New England 07 - The Lines of Laredo, page 12
“Let me guess, he told you he was looking for the right place to counter attack?”
There was a ghost of a smile on the Governor’s oddly pale lips.
“His feeling was that given that he understood our strategy was to draw the enemy’s head into the noose before tightening the noose that time was on our side.”
George Washington shook his head, not for the first, or he suspected, the last time exasperated by the slothfulness and over-confidence of a member of the nobility playing soldiers with other men’s lives.
“Erskine needs to engage Santa Anna’s spearheads and keep engaging them, tie them up, suck them into a battle not escort them on a bloody victory march to the sea!”
“So, what do you advise me to do, General?”
“If we had any assault landing ships left,” Cuthbert Collingwood offered, more than somewhat disenchanted by the tone and the unnecessary callousness of the morning’s meeting to date, put in, “I’d suggest transferring several regiments of Territorials from the upper First Thirteen to beef up the garrisons at Savannah and Charleston, just to make sure we weren’t making a rod for our backs!”
George Washington gave the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet an apologetic look.
“No, that wouldn’t work. We’ve already got troops in Georgia, we control the main road and rail hubs, and there are several airfields we can use to fly in reinforcements and equipment. The only thing we haven’t got, and I hoped we’d have by now, was somebody in command down there with an elementary understanding of his profession.”
“Who do you have in mind?” The Governor inquired urbanely.
George Washington nodded meaningfully at de L’Isle’s Chief of Staff.
“I’m a bit long in the tooth,” Sir Henry protested.
“You are a year older than me,” the Texan rasped at the other old soldier. “Everything I’ve heard tells me you were a real trooper back in the day, Sir Henry. People like you and me don’t forget our business. And you and I both know that idiot Erskine will wait until Hell freezes over before he thinks he’s designed the perfect battle, and by then our womenfolk in Savannah will be in the hands of the goddammed Cubans and Dominicans. If you think what’s going on now, by design I might add, unknown to our people, and those wolves out there on the street is already looking bad, you wait and see what happens if the Spanish take that city! Jesus, if we allow that to happen in the Carolinas we deserve to be lynched, gentlemen!”
Cuthbert Collingwood stirred.
He had been glad to be left out of the unpleasantness. The Navy was as political as any of the other services but at the end of the day a man could always step onto the deck of a ship and within hours, be surrounded by the cleansing solitude of the sea.
“The Queen Elizabeth has recommissioned at St Margaret’s Bay. She’ll be commencing trials in the next few days. She could be standing off Savannah in a fortnight. If the worst comes to the worst, her 15-inchers ought to keep Santa Anna’s finest at bay for a while.”
Again, George Washington shook his head.
“Admiral, we really don’t want to let the enemy get any further north or east than they are now. I’m not sure you fellows understand where I am coming from on this; I mean to end this war fast. Fast and dirty if it comes to it and it won’t look pretty but,” he glanced at the Governor, “you need to know that this war is never going to end until our boys are fighting their way through the corridors of the Palace of the Golden Pines.”
Lord Collingwood frowned.
“I thought the object of the exercise was to trap the Mexicans in Texas to bring them back to the negotiating table?”
Philip de L’Isle shook his head.
He had been a little uncomfortable not confiding his thinking to the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet until OPERATION ROUGH RIDER was well under way. However, once he had recognised that in George Washington, he had discovered a man whose mettle was as steely as his own, and they had laid their plans, a need-to-know circle of two – the Texan and he – had seemed appropriate for the time being.
“Effectively, there is no government in London at present,” he prefaced, preparatory to bringing Cuthbert Collingwood into the innermost circle of the conspiracy. “We are alone; we stand or fall together. One day we may well be held to account for our actions. I am at peace with that. I hope that shortly, you will be also, Cuthbert.”
The C-in-C Atlantic Fleet, and the second most senior officer in the Royal Navy contemplated this. He understood that the Empire was being run by a caretaker administration and that his friend had assumed powers no former Governor of the Commonwealth had claimed. Yes, he understood that they were all, out on a limb and that the incoming government in Westminster, might as easily acclaim or disown them in the coming weeks.
Collingwood nodded, holding his peace.
Philip de L’Isle collected his thoughts.
“Whatever shade of administration emerges from the coming General Election at home, I intend to put an end, once and for all, to the cycle of war in our hemisphere. The days when we could tolerate a climate of undeclared hostilities with our nearest neighbours is over. If the Russian adventure in the North West proves anything, it is that the balance of world power is shifting. Without the Russians counter-balancing the Japanese Empire in the Pacific, we must now, sooner or later, confront Japanese adventurism. I do not have to tell you that, unlike the Tsar’s Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy is equipped with modern vessels and commanded by men trained on the model of the Royal Navy. Moreover, the Japanese have over half-a-million men permanently under arms and have oft-stated territorial ambitions in the Far East and the Western Pacific. I would be astonished if they do not also have designs on our Indochina mandate, and or the Malay states, not to mention the Sandwich Islands and the oil riches of the Dutch East Indies. Facing threats from the Kaiserliche Marine in European waters, and new threats in the Pacific, clearly, the Atlantic Fleet cannot be maintained at its present strength indefinitely. This time next year we will be in no position to mount a repeat of OPERATION ROUGH RIDER. Therefore, our time is now and we must act decisively.”
“And ruthlessly,” George Washington added, demonstrating an unsuspected talent for understated irony.
None of the men had touched their teas.
The Governor got to his feet and went to his personal drinks’ cabinet, returning with tumblers and a bottle of twenty-year-old Speyside single malt whiskey.
“The sun is almost over the yard arm,” he observed for Cuthbert Collingwood’s benefit. “It has been a trying morning.”
Chapter 12
Monday 7th November
Kensington, Philadelphia
Henrietta’s face, still tanned from the Iberian summer, was pale as Melody recounted the events of the day. Well, mostly of the morning, she and Alonso had spent most of the afternoon making up (and in hiding) in one of those hotel rooms couples often rented by the hour in the Harrow Gate District of the city.
Neither of them had been in the mood to talk overmuch.
What was there to talk about?
Both women had half an ear for the sound of the TV in the next room, where little Pedro was watching a kids’ program recorded over the weekend. Trying to shield the little mite from the shit storm his family was not so much navigating, as leaning into, was very nearly impossible. Fortunately, he was a robust little character and thus far, hopefully, he had not really understood what was going on around him.
After she and Alonso had escaped from Government House that morning, Melody had been at a loss to know how to stop the man she loved marching around the colonial capital challenging people he hardly knew to duels. Poor Alonso was outraged, humiliated and unusually for him, his world was spinning faster and faster, out of control. Melody had decided that all she could do was be there for him until he refound his equilibrium. She was feeling as guilty as Henrietta about the dark suspicions she had not only harboured but at one stage thrown in the poor man’s face.
Okay, thinking about it he had made more than one bad call lately, albeit for the best possible reasons. Or so he had believed at the time. Melody liked to think that she could have helped more but then he was the one who had sold his soul, without ever asking the two women – well, all things considered, two of the women - in his life to buy into those, painful accommodations.
Melody and when she got around to worrying about stuff like that, Henrietta, might decide that they had cause to be unhappier about this than either of them, probably, would be.
Both women had wanted to resume their lives in New England and Alonso had done everything he could to make it happen; it was not as if he was the first, or would be the last Spaniard to make the mistake of giving a British pro-consul the benefit of the doubt…
Greeks bearing gifts had nothing on colonial civil servants!
“I was so horrible to him,” Henrietta blurted.
Coming home to Philadelphia had turned into a bad, waking dream and understandably, things were getting on top of her. Not least, because she was feeling very ‘big’ and unattractive, which was never a good thing for a young wife expecting her first baby.
“Your father or Alonso?” Melody asked, trying to tease her with a smile in her brown eyes.
“Daddy, but he had it coming to him!” The younger woman seemed to sag. “And Alonso, which was inexcusable. I mean, we both knew his first loyalty was always going to be to the Queen…”
“Alonso was also telling us a whole lot of fibs,” Melody sympathised. “Even if he thought he was trying to protect us.”
“I wish he’d just told us both the truth to start with then we’d never have come back to this two-faced country in the first place!”
Melody hugged her and let her cry.
There was a knock at the open door to the bedroom.
Alonso peered in.
“Mike Llewelyn is here,” he explained apologetically, stepping into the room.
Melody groaned.
She had meant to give her would-be bagman a call to tell him the bad news; that he was unemployed but then he had probably worked that out for himself, anyway. She had got him released from his two-year commission in the Pennsylvania Territorial Regiment, that meant he was free to go back to his day job – as a legal junior working through his articles for the Colonial bar – free of any further military obligation. That said, he had seemed enthusiastic about being a freelance Government House investigator.
He had been far too good to be true and given the turn of events, she ought to have figured that out before now.
The handsome young man was waiting in the lobby, shifting unhappily on his feet and looking a little furtive.
“You know I was supposed to be spying on you, and his Grace, and Lady Henrietta…” He began, shrugging apologetically.
Melody thought about it.
She was all out of anger for today.
“So, you’re ISS?”
“Yes, I used to work for Matthew Harrison,” the man confessed. “He was a good man; he didn’t deserve to die that way. I didn’t know he was dying of a cancer, anyway. He was never the same after Major Arnold was killed. She was like the daughter he never had…”
Melody beckoned him through the house to the kitchen, rifled through the cupboards. The three household staff – a butler-caretaker, a maid and a cook - had been sent home that afternoon because she and Alonso could not make up their minds which one was a Government House mole and they wanted a little privacy for however long their little ménage a trois remained in the city. She found a couple of glasses, a half-full bottle of Rum. Glancing at the label she decided even though it was cooking grade that it would not make her, or anybody else go blind, and poured two fingers of the dark nectar into each glass.
“Don’t try to make me feel better by telling me you felt bad about making me look stupid,” she warned him, handing him his drink and settling at the table.
Mike Llewelyn pulled up a chair and joined her.
He had looked over his shoulder several times now.
“Alonso isn’t going to come in here and slap you across the face with a riding glove, or anything.”
“Ah, that’s good to know.” He studied his drink. “I did come here to apologise to you, though.”
“That’s okay, I was feeling bad about having to sack you.”
The man chuckled involuntarily.
“It was fun. Meeting you. Being around you for a few days. The trip to Texas was a thing, wasn’t it…”
“I should have known I was being set up for a fall,” Melody admitted, draining her Rum in one go, getting straight up to bring the bottle to the table, and pouring a refill. “Actually, I knew I was. Being set up for a fall, just not one off the edge of a cliff.”
The man sipped his drink.
“What will you do? If you don’t mind me asking, that is?”
“Is the Governor really that interested?”
Melody’s companion pulled a face, shrugged.
“I think Lady Henrietta’s mother may be.”
Melody shook her head, stared into her tumbler. The first shot of Rum had left her cold, usually the initial alcoholic kick started making her lightheaded within seconds; it was a psychological thing, nothing to do with the ethanol starting to pump around her body. Tonight, she was just…numb.
The man jumped up when he heard movement behind him.
Henrietta and Alonso entered the kitchen.
“Mike, if that’s his name,” Melody explained, “was a plant. He says he used to work for Matthew Harrison.”
“Mike is my name,” the increasingly uncomfortable visitor claimed. “Mike Llewelyn-Phelps, actually…”
Alonso had escorted his wife to another chair, he stood back, his back to the drainer, watching over the women and the clearly, somewhat conflicted ISS man.
“I should go,” the other man said.
“You asked Melody what we will do?” Alonso reminded him. “I’m sure your principals will want to know her answer.” He put a gentle hand on Melody’s shoulder.
“Well,” she sighed, “it seems to me that we don’t have much of a future in this town. Tell me I’m wrong?”
Against his instincts, the man drained his glass.
He waited for the fire in his throat to abate.
“You need to go as soon as possible. They’re going to put out a story that you kidnapped Lady Henrietta but you need to go. Government House, the ISS, everybody who is anything in the First Thirteen needs a scapegoat for what’s gone wrong in this war and conspiracy theories about spies, and Spanish infiltrators fits the bill. The Governor will do anything, and I mean anything, he has to do to make sure OPERATION ROUGH RIDER stays secret. There is a long list of people he could have thrown to the wolves but none of them were the Melody Danson, his own daughter or a gentleman with as high an international profile as his grace,” he concluded, glancing anxiously at Alonso.
Henrietta had moved close to her husband who had extended his free arm about her shoulders.
“I will never forgive him,” she whispered, tears trickling down her face. “Tell my father that!”
“You should leave now,” Alonso advised, a silky threat wrapped in an apparently emollient tone.
He disentangled himself from the women to briefly escort the ISS man out of the house. Returning, he put a finger to his lips, looking meaningfully around the kitchen.
“Let me pour you a drink of water, my love,” he said to Henrietta, stepping to the sink and turning on both the hot and the cold taps. Instinctively, the three of them leaned close. “We go now,” he whispered. “We leave everything.”
Earlier, Alonso had asked Melody to comfort Henrietta, disappearing for about forty minutes. He must have got back to the house just before ‘Mike’ arrived. Presumably, the ISS man had been awaiting his return…
Melody thought this was all getting twisted…
Most of the big houses in Kensington had hidden service roads, paths, entrances where tradesmen and deliveries could access the domestic quarters unseen by the gentry in the rest of the building, out of sight and mind.
Now the threesome, with Melody carrying a bemused Pedro, walked out into the last of the dusk.
The women did not ask what was happening, or where they were going. Even Pedro knew to keep quiet, to just go with the flow as he clung to his Mama Melody, with only the top of his head peeping out of the big shawl she had wrapped around him.
“Do we know for sure that the house was bugged?” Melody asked breathlessly, clinging to Henrietta’s hand.
“No, but after today, nothing would surprise me,” Alonso retorted tersely.
“Where are we going?” Henrietta demanded, her voice shocked, in a daze.
“Portugal, eventually,” her husband said. “We will be safe there. But first we must disappear. Your father’s people will be searching for us. We must be fugitives until arrangements can be made for our safe passage to Lisbon.”
Dark shadows blocked their way.
Melody almost screeched in alarm.
Then one of the men nodded respectfully, and spoke to Alonso who patted his arm and threw a tight-lipped smile at the women. The second stranger offered to carry Pedro; Melody, shook her head vehemently.
Nobody was going to prise the boy from her arms.
Soon they were in the back of a rattling ten-year-old Pittsburgh Motor Corporation van of the type used to deliver groceries and newspapers all over the city. This one had hard benches inside the cargo space.
It was fully dark when the van halted and the rear doors swung open. Strong hands helped the women down to the ground. They were by the river; Melody guessed some miles south of the city, the lights of which cast a distant loom over the northern horizon.
Alonso spoke to another man.
Melody froze, instantly recognising the voice of the stranger.
