New England 05 - George Washington's Ghost, page 12
Melody did not remember walking back into the Orangery, or sitting down, or a footman materialising to pop the Champagne cork, or to half-fill the fluted glasses with the bubbling, fizzing issue from the chilled bottle.
The Infantas had run in, breathless.
They had been allowed a sip of Champagne each and dismissed, indulgently, so that they could continue their chasing game outside.
“To what are we drinking?” Alonso, who had drifted into the Orangery, materialising by Melody’s side, asked of his Queen.
“Miss Danson and I have had a very interesting conversation,” he was informed in a gently teasing voice.
“I am intrigued.”
“I am sure that Melody will tell you all about it, in due course. In the meantime, I want to hear all about her adventures in the Mountains of Madrid with the Lady De L’Isle!”
Chapter 12
Friday 28th April
Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin
Eleanor, Queen Consort and Duchess of Windsor, never really felt relaxed in Berlin. Partly, this was because her command of the German language was ‘schoolgirlish’, and unlike her husband, she was not actually closely related to anybody of any importance in the city. There was also the fact that in Berlin most German men of a certain class – the ruling class – treated women with barely veiled condescension or as ignorant, pretty faces to be ‘talked at’. Whereas at home, or practically anywhere in the Empire no invitation to her husband would have specifically excluded her; here in Germany, other than in respect of wholly social events, or designated political ceremonies, she was automatically excluded, ignored as if she did not exist.
Bertie simply would not put up with it anywhere else.
Even here, he still got a lot hotter under the collar than she did, bless him.
“None of the bloody Electors trust any of the others!” The King seethed, coming into the drawing room where Eleanor was writing a letter to Elizabeth De L’Isle, in response to her old friend’s latest fascinating missive on the subject of her daughter’s adventures, and miraculous escape from Spain.
Eleanor looked up.
“Apparently,” she reported brightly, “Henrietta and her companion, Ms Danson, rescued a young boy, just four years old, during their adventures,” she explained brightly. “An orphan, by all accounts. It seems their escape was masterminded by several of the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s arms men. I can’t wait to sit Hen down and hear all about it from her own lips!”
This completely took the wind out of her husband’s sails.
As she had known it would.
“If you were the Prince of Bavaria or the Princess of Lower Thuringia,” she posed, smiling, “or the Bishop Protector of the Palatinate,” she went on, “would you trust any of the other Electors, Bertie?”
“No, I suppose not,” the King agreed with a sulky ill-grace that he regretted a moment later. “I’m sorry, my dear. It’s just that here we are three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century kicking our heels in a country with a governmental system stuck in the bloody middle ages!”
“What do Sir Hector and Sir George think of all this?” Eleanor inquired.
The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were as frustrated as their monarch; except, because they were intrinsically political animals, they were more adroit at concealing their angst. Had it not been for the war in the Americas and the dreadful catalogue of secrets the royal couple had carried with them to Berlin; the last few days might have been a prime jamboree of diplomacy, a melting pot of the nations. As it was, the paralysis at the heart of the German Empire suddenly seemed horribly dangerous, and the electoral system first designed to settle the question of the succession upon the death of a Holy Roman Emperor in times immemorial, had endless potential to be a disastrous global banana skin!
The twenty-four Electors: princes, a couple of princesses, one Duchess and various ‘Protectors’, could vote for whomsoever they pleased at the forthcoming ‘Imperial Conclave’, due to commence early next week. Although, from the outside it seemed odds-on that the Kronprinz, presently the uncrowned Kaiser Wilhelm VI of Prussia, the mercurial forty-four-year-old son of the old Emperor, ought to be a shoe-in at the Sanssouci Palace – Germany’s rival to the magnificence which had been Versailles before it was destroyed in the Great War – the traditional seat of the Kings of Prussia and in more recent times, of the German Emperor. However, nothing was quite so disruptive or corrosive as an Imperial election; and as was traditional, the most bizarre rumours were freely circulating in the city. Laughable as it might seem, many in the Crown Prince’s retinue constantly obsessed about suspicions that several of the more Catholic Electors favoured a Hapsburg, or even a revanchist Bourbon candidate. Of course, this was patently absurd because not even an Elector could seriously expect the people of the Grosse Reich to stomach a dispossessed French princeling on the throne, and the only available substantive Hapsburg contender would be the embattled King of Spain or one of his teenage sons, all of whom in terms of bloodlines were more Bourbon-Medici-Aragonese than Hapsburg other than in name. Nonetheless, that such improbable possibilities could be discussed at all, was illustrative of the unusually febrile atmosphere in the capital and the reason why so many of the great men of affairs presently resident in the city, literally, dared not go home until a generally acceptable new Emperor was actually crowned.
Infuriatingly, in accordance with twentieth century tradition – supposedly to avoid intimidation or bribery – Kronprinz Wilhelm was effectively, in purdah, inaccessible to the Electors and they to him, for the duration, other than in the course of holy worship, or in the joint fulfilment of ceremonial state obligations. Practically, and ludicrously, this meant that several of the Electors, members of the old Kaiser’s inner circle were not allowed to talk to other members of the interim Reich Administration.
The right and the left hand of the government literally did not know, and where not permitted to communicate, what was going on with each other.
And people honestly believed that the Germans were the most rational, organised nation on the planet!
“Hector and George dined with cousin Albert last night,” the King sighed. His distant relative, the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, was one of the two Thuringian Electors, very much a man staunchly in the Crown Prince’s camp.
Eleanor knew that cousin Albert – goodness knows how many times removed – had the rare knack of making her husband dyspeptic. It was ever thus if families. She had always found Albert harmless enough, albeit a little over-bearing, and a little too fond of the sound of his own voice. Not to mention, for a man with such a colourful past – in rotund middle age he remained an incurable philanderer – rather too self-righteous. He was also an inveterate schemer. Wealthy, having never had to seek, let alone pursued a profession other than opinionated lordliness, Albert had made a career of scheming for no better reason than, he could. At times such as these when it seemed to many that ‘everything was up for grabs,’ the only certainty in an uncertain world was that cousin Albert was probably having the time of his life.
Meanwhile, the over-large gang of visiting monarchs, politicians and diplomats in Berlin to attend the funeral of the old Kaiser and the anointment of his successor, had been farmed out around the numerous summer and winter palaces of the capital and its surrounding royal estates; the Charlottenburg had been reserved for the British and, as they dribbled in from all over the world, the representatives of the Dominions. By tradition only the Dominions, not colonies, not even the larger ones sent representatives to the great set-piece pageants of foreign states. Therefore, while Chief Ministers and Governor-Generals from Dominions, such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the nefarious Maharajas of a clutch of self-governing states within the Indian Raj, and representatives of the largely self-governing sparsely populated Canadian dominions planned to attend the State Funeral of the old Kaiser, the King alone represented New England, Labrador and Newfoundland and the majority of all those other places stubbornly painted imperial pink on maps of the globe.
Dominion status had been mooted for the First Fifteen New England colonies as long ago as the 1880s, mainly in recognition of the role New Englanders had played in the victory of 1866. Had there been more enthusiasm – in the event there had been virtually no interest in the idea whatsoever then, or since baring that from a few eccentrics, like Isaac Fielding and his republican-leaning adherents - on the other side of the Atlantic, it might have happened without a great deal of fuss and bother, and more or less passed on the nod.
The trouble was the world, and New England had changed out of all recognition in the last hundred years. The process of settlement had exploded west from the historic colonies in parallel with the westward march of northern, Canadian expansion until now, the imperial writ ran from coast to coast, the bothersome South Western corner excepted. And with that unfettered expansion had come unstoppable economic growth that was now the well-spring of the whole Empire. The ‘final canalisation’ of the St Lawrence and the linking of the Great Lakes, completed only in 1955, financed almost wholly from grain and ore revenues mainly from Canada, to whom Dominion status had been granted as long ago as 1951, had literally, opened up the New England west to industry and agriculture, promoting a boom that had run out of control for the last twenty years.
Now, grain from the prairies west of the Mississippi had rendered the famines of Bengal, Rajasthan and the Punjab things of a past, dark era. And huge, sprawling frontier cities had sprung up along the shores of the Great Lakes, their never-ending hunger for labour drawing people from every corner of the Empire. It was hardly surprising that Philip De L’Isle sometimes grew so exasperated with the insularity and the westward ‘blindness’ of the ‘great men’ of the East Coast who were still so wedded to the old country, that they refused to glance over their shoulders at the ‘new’ New England conquering the fastnesses of their unimaginably bountiful continent...
“Um,” Eleanor declared philosophically, giving her husband a wry gaze, “you’ve got that faraway look in your eye, again, mein Liebe.”
The King grimaced sheepishly.
“Forgive me, my love, I was thinking about everything we saw when we were in New England a couple of years ago,” he confessed. “I don’t mean our time in the East. I was thinking more about those great factories, the steel mills, the row upon row of huge grain silos at Buffalo, and all those big ships plying their trade on the Great Lakes. And,” he shrugged, “travelling on that train across the prairies, sometimes rattling through endless fields of ripening wheat and corn from morning to dusk. And thinking, as inevitably one must, how little the people at home, or in the wider Empire, or in the First Thirteen, truth be known, and certainly not here, in the heart of Europe, understand that in New England there lies a sleeping giant…”
“I’ve invited Ranji to join us for luncheon,” Eleanor said, changing the subject in an attempt to raise her husband’s spirits. “Hopefully, you two can cheer each other up talking about cricket!”
The news instantly broke her husband’s preoccupation.
Major General His Highness Jam Saheb Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji III Jadeja of Nawanagar, was the flamboyant, raconteur grandson of the most remarkable cricketer ever to come out of the sub-continent.
‘Ranji’, like her husband – strangely, given that he had been a gunnery specialist, a thing requiring the finest imaginable exactitude – notwithstanding his unquenchable love of the summer game was a man almost completely lacking in hand-eye co-ordination when it came to holding a cricket bat or attempting to take a catch in the field.
Nevertheless, the Chairman of the All India Cricket Board of Control and the Honorary Life President of the Marylebone Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club, the arbiter of the laws and standards of both sports at Thomas Lord’s Field next to Regent’s Park, and the King were old friends from their school days at Harrow. Regardless of whatever else was happening in the Empire, they always fell straight into an animated debate about the state of their national summer games (Cricket and Tennis) and the perennial problem of what on earth their respective Cricketing elevens were going to do about the blasted all-conquering Philadelphians!
On that particularly sore topic, while now and then the Australians or the South Africans put up a gallant but doomed fight against the terrifying New Englanders – whose bowlers bowled like the wind and whose batsmen seemed to be wielding mighty tree trunks, not the matchstick forty to forty-five ounce bats of their foes – who time and again mercilessly reduced their foes to dispirited, often gibbering shells of the men they had once been…
Eleanor giggled.
Her husband had already brightened, shaken off his broodiness.
“And after luncheon I plan to take a stroll in the grounds…” Her voice trailed off because she very nearly had to bite her tongue to stop herself saying: “Because we probably won’t be welcomed back again when we make our shameful confession about the Submarine Treaty to whoever turns out to be the new German Emperor!”
She was relieved her husband was not reading her mind, or if he was, he hid it well.
“Yes, Ranji and I do tend to jabber on a bit about bat and ball, and the politics of the International Cricket Council,” the King conceded apologetically.
Cricket and Association Football – respectively the national summer and winter national games - were alike to Eleanor; once, early in her marriage she had suggested, in all earnestness, to Bertie that both games would be much improved as a spectacle if each side had their own balls…
Their marriage had, fortuitously, survived that first crisis and flourished; which only went to show what could be achieved if there was a little bit of good will and plenty of give and take on both sides.
When they were first married, they had holidayed and travelled in the German Empire, a thing impossible since the late 1950s although visitors from Germany often quietly called on the family in London or at one or other of its country retreats. But discreetly, for discretion had been the key word in all ‘higher-level’ Anglo-German contacts in recent times.
However, the next visitor to the royal couple’s rooms was not the cheery Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, it was a very grim-faced Sir Hector Hamilton, who thus far in Berlin had cut a sorry, somewhat diminished figure. He had kept the ‘great secret’ from his King for what he had determined were the best possible of reasons, his motives had been good, patriotic but he had wilted under the white heat of his monarch’s anger, and hardened political operator that he was, he was not about to recover his equilibrium any time soon.
“Hector, what is it?” Eleanor asked anxiously. “You look as white as a sheet?”
The Prime Minister bowed.
“George Walpole stayed behind at the Embassy,” the newcomer explained. “Telegrams are coming in all the time. We have received reports that the redoubt defence lines around San Antonio in Texas have been breached, and that our reserve forces of last resort, are in full retreat.”
The King’s face darkened, his scowl deepened.
“I regret that I must report that there are no substantial forces between the invaders and the Mississippi River, sir,” Sir Hector Hamilton went on. “But,” he added, holding up a hand. “That is not the worst of it, forces of the Triple Alliance supported by many warships are reported to have seized the port of Pensacola. If this is true, then it is likely that the Delta and the city of New Orleans may soon be cut off and in due course, besieged; or worse, the enemy may strike east and isolate Florida from the rest of New England.”
The King compelled himself to take several long breaths.
It did not help.
“And?” He asked tersely, knowing that there must be more very bad news.
“And an enemy squadron is reported to be bombarding English Harbour on Antigua, our main garrison in the Leeward Islands…”
Eleanor was bewildered.
She looked to her husband.
“I don’t understand,” she confessed. “What on earth is the Navy doing about all this, Bertie?”
Chapter 13
Friday 28th April
HMS Surprise, 35 nautical miles SW of Bermuda
Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln, RNAS, had adjusted to the sameness and clockwork routine of life on board HMS Surprise faster and with a lot less angst, than his friend. Ted Forest, notwithstanding he was still recovering, rather than rehabilitating from what had been life-threatening wounds, freely confessed he was getting ‘cabin fever’, shut up in their claustrophobic new world.
‘I joined the Air Service because I hate confined spaces and I actually like the wind in my face!’
For Abe, this surreal entrapment below the waves, was a priceless opportunity to regain his mental and physical equilibrium, and to allow his battered body and perturbed psyche to heal itself. Of course, he worried about Kate, and what she must be going through, probably thinking in her heart that he was dead but there was nothing he could do about that and, hopefully, all his wife’s grief and hurt would, in time, be repairable, if and when he eventually got home. If he had died on the Achilles, or on Little Inagua, Kate would never have known where his bones lay. As it was, although his and Ted’s sojourn on the Surprise seemed interminable – this was actually only their fifteenth day aboard – it would surely end one day. In the meantime, he had been devouring the submarine’s medical library like a starving man suddenly presented with a banquet fit for a king!
And the quietness was pure bliss…
However, he was not quite so sure about the tiny electric shock; well, more of a persistent tingling of the band around his left wrist which warned him that there was about to be a boat-wide announcement which he was required to listen to, over the ether via the earpiece permanently in his right ear.
Apparently, unlike on surface ships, blaring alarms and exhortations over the boat’s speaker system were an ‘absolute no-no’ when the Surprise was creeping around several hundred feet beneath the surface trying very hard to be as stealthy as possible.
