The Divine Wind (New England Book 15), page 5
The King absorbed this; his expression sanguine.
“It would not be wise to put all our eggs in a single metaphorical basket,” he remarked, “for example, the Tinian option.”
“No, sir,” Harris agreed.
Parliament was in recess to permit campaigning for the upcoming local elections in May, affecting approximately half of all the county, town and borough councils. The war in the Pacific had hardly figured on the doorstep as candidates tramped the streets shoring up existing mandates, or seeking new votes; to the contrary, the boost in military spending and recruitment seemed to have given the economy a huge shot in the arm, boosting employment opportunities and hourly wage rates. Inevitably, this might not last once the increases in taxation to pay for the quadrupling of the War Office’s budget began to feed through into smaller wage packets. That said, according to Lord Washington, the evidence from New England on the relatively much larger – but still less onerous than in the Old Country – reforms of the tax system, particularly that relating to directly earned income, was surprisingly mixed. New Englanders did not like being more heavily taxed than anybody else but, on the other hand, there was full, well-paid employment across the continent for the first time in living memory and the opening up of the interior, and the express development of the West Coast had caught – positively inflamed –the imagination of many younger citizens.
The King waited for his Prime Minister to get around to what he really wanted to talk about; the Spanish question. Inevitably, the ‘secret’ overtures by representatives of – significantly – the King Emperor, Felipe and his Queen, Sophie Eugenie, had crept into the public domain in recent days. In this respect the revelations of adultery, illegitimate children and the regrettable, frankly despicable drawing of a certain Melody Nash née Danson, and the memory of Henrietta De L’Isle, the daughter of the former Governor of New England had turned into what threated to be a rip-roaring scandal, and had distracted much of the attention from the other, somewhat weightier aspects of the affair.
“I need to establish your views on a sensitive subject, sir,” the Prime Minister apologised.
The King grimaced: “We are here to serve our people; I will of course, be guided by my ministers’ advice.”
“Forgive me, sir. There have been diplomatic matters I would not, nor could I raise with you in good faith, until this time.”
At this the King’s expression softened.
More than one of his prime ministers, and thinking about it, many of his senior ministers down the years had not been up to the job; too many of them the sort of characters he would never have allowed to stand an unsupervised watch on the deck of a skiff in harbour, let alone the bridge of a man of war. However, Sir Stanley Harris had about him the mettle, if not the guile of Sir Hector Hamilton, the leader of an often-divided ruling party, and latterly of several ferociously fractious coalitions for well over half his reign.
Although it remained to be seen if a man, like Harris, who it seemed sometimes had decency leaching out of every pore in his body, could survive overlong as a war leader; the King was quietly optimistic; even if more than one palace insider had expressed their doubts.
Only time would tell…
He remained silent.
The Prime Minister sighed: “I confess I have my reservations about the prospect of a meaningful rapprochement with a country that has so recently fomented war in the Americas, sought to govern domestically and in its handful of remaining colonies by theocratic writ, and has conducted pogroms in the name of the Apostolic Catholic Church against its enemies at home and abroad. Moreover, so far as can be established no Spaniard has yet been held accountable, let alone tried for the unspeakable crimes committed against our diplomats and their families in Madrid, or the sequestration – accompanied by rape, torture and murder in the majority of cases – of the businesses and homes of citizens of the British Empire in the Iberian Peninsula and in the aforementioned overseas dependencies of the Spanish Crown in 1978.”
The King raised an eyebrow.
“If we only treated with people we liked,” he observed, “or only with people who subscribed to our beliefs and values, we’d be very lonely in this world, Sir Stanley,” he added dryly. “For example, if the price for ending the war in the Pacific was inviting the Emperor of Japan and his whole bally court to a Buckingham Palace garden party, I’d set out the tables myself.”
Before his Prime Minister could reply, the King corrected himself.
“Well, the Queen would. She wouldn’t trust me to go anywhere near the table settings or the cutlery!”
Harris hesitated.
“I was brought up to believe that if a thing was too good to be true; it probably isn’t. True, that is…”
The King was beginning to feel a little guilty. One of the advantages of having been on the throne the best part of two decades, and of being married to one of nature’s born peacemakers – Eleanor had honed her skills keeping their brood of princes and princesses from starting a household civil war – was that he had gathered a wide circle of lifelong friends, insofar as a monarch could have such friends, many of whom knew they could confide their worries to him. Thus, it was a rare thing indeed when a Prime Minister came to an audience with new intelligence that was any way surprising to him. Although now that he thought about it, during Horace Walpole’s abbreviated tenure in Downing Street around the time of his accession, the man had been full of surprises; but again, that was very early in his reign. And latterly, he had been reduced to near apoplexy more than once in his dealings with Hector Hamilton’s successor, Sir John Maxwell-Clough, possibly the most self-absorbed and by far the stupidest man ever to stumble into the premiership…
The King knew what was troubling the other man.
“Out with it, Sir Stanley,” he prompted.
“The Spanish King and Queen take the view that it is beneath their dignity to deal with anybody other than their equals in rank and prestige…”
The King raised a hand.
“In all seriousness, Sir Stanley, the Queen and I would invite the Devil incarnate to lunch if that is what it will take to stop the Spanish meddling in the Americas and toadying up to the German Empire!”
Privately, he also thought this was a priceless opportunity to get in first, and to discover what the Spanish were up to before his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm got his foot in the door!
“You’d be willing to receive a royal plenipotentiary from Madrid, sir?”
“Yes,” the King confirmed. “I think we ought at least to find out what they want. Don’t you?”
Chapter 5
Wednesday 29th April 1982
Aldershot Road
William Howe Estate
Bronxwood
Crown Colony of New York
Melody Nash had carefully arranged the papers across the kitchen table as she waited for the others to ring in and connect to the transatlantic conference call.
It was good to have something to take her mind off the furore which had enveloped her and her family’s life, in the last few days. As if having to tell her six-and-a-half year-old monster – sorry, son – that he was Pedro Alfonse Pérez de Guzmán, the heir to the Dukedom of Medina Sidonia and that he was very nearly, denied only by an accident of filial legitimacy, a prince of the House of Bourbon and might at some stage find himself in the line of succession to the Spanish throne, was not bad enough, there were still three pantechnicon-sized broadcast lorries – belonging to the EBC, ITV and the infant New York News Company (NYNC) – parked in the road outside her house. If it had not been for a 24-hour police presence, alternating shifts of eight officers periodically supported by two or three mounted colleagues, and a squad of four brawny Royal Marines rotating every twelve hours, aggressively patrolling the garden brandishing automatic weapons, not to mention the withering look her husband gave every half-way innocent caller, it would have been a nightmare.
Well, an even worse nightmare than it had been thus far!
As she had anticipated, it had taken precisely no time at all for the contents of Alonso - the complete utter unspeakable bastard - Duke of Medina Sidonia’s ‘confidential letter’ to her to circulate, incredibly fast and very, very widely, in the public domain. Thus, the house had been under siege for the last three days.
Needless to say, Pedro was loving every minute of it; not least the part about being a prince, which he interpreted as prima facie authority to behave badly and to treat everybody around him as a serf. Typically, her husband – he was a trained killer for goodness sake – had no idea how to deal with this; luckily, she was made of much sterner stuff but then in her years as a jobbing detective inspector in the New York-Long Island Constabulary she had had a lot of experience dealing with the way the criminal mind worked. Oh, and she could stare the little monster down and drink tea at the same time!
Lizzie, their middle daughter, nearly two-and-a-half now, who reminded Melody more and more of her mother, Henrietta, seemingly with every passing day, was oblivious to the rise and fall of the noise in the street, not so Hen, their youngest, fifteen months old and clearly aware, although Melody could not work out how, that the family’s life had changed forever.
Paul had resigned his commission at the same time the ‘Prince of Bronxwood’ story had broken, coincidentally only hours before Roger Lee had gone on television claiming he had been ‘tortured’ by the ISS at Camp 020. After which, seemingly every politician and captain of industry with a Germanic-sounding name in the First Thirteen had demanded Paul’s head. On a platter, silver or otherwise. Clearly, concluding his days as an undercover operative were over; the only honourable thing to do was resign before the show trial…sorry, court martial.
Actually, the resignation issue was another problem.
Melody was sitting in a rented Army house in the middle of a military accommodation estate…
But they would worry about that another time.
Amelia Henry, speaking to her from Virginia, had been commiserating with her while they waited for the London end of the connection to be established. It transpired that Melody’s friend, and client insofar as she was still involved in the case of Lee versus Henry over potentially lucrative landing rights along the bank of the Rappahannock River – basically as a part-time legal clerk, fixer and facilitator between the parties on the Henry side of the affair – was expecting her second child.
Melody had known her friends were trying for another baby. ‘Really hard and very often,’ Amelia had confessed, and her now confirmed pregnancy had given the two women plenty to discuss while the minutes ticked past.
Amelia’s older brother, not a very nice man, in league with a shady gang of developers seeking to drain, reclaim and build on a swamp between the Rappahannock and the Anacostia Rivers on the Maryland side of the colonial, riverine demarcation line with Virginia. All well and good, they had purchased the land for literally, pennies, and had a perfect right to build on it, not that it would do them any good because Amelia and her husband, Sam, who really was a prince among men, had previously purchased the Lee family’s former, now derelict Bangor Estate, on the south bank of the Rappahannock from her bankrupt brother, Roger, and with it acquired incidental landing rights on both sides of that river for a mile downstream and some five miles upstream. Therefore, if the Grantville Corporation wanted to exploit their swamp on the north bank of the Rappahannock, they could neither conduct drainage work on the northern bank nor build anywhere within one hundred yards of the ‘natural course of the river in a typical high summer’, without the express permission of the owners of the said Bangor Estate. In other words, they could not drain the swamp, or economically exploit their land without first paying Amelia and Sam a fair rent or royalty, or negotiate a separate licence under which they waived or abrogated their customary rights.
Had the crooks and thieves hiding behind the Grantville Development Corporation been honest men, they would have hired a lawyer to contact the Amelia and Sam, and negotiations might have begun. Offers might have been made, considered, haggled over and in the fullness of time, because the aforesaid Amelia and Sam were reasonable, business-savvy people who understood the way things worked, a deal would almost certainly have been cut to the mutual advantage of both sides.
However, ‘tortured’ Roger Lee’s friends had not wanted to bother with any of that; so, they had immediately resorted to law, relying on an arcane Virginia statute dating to the seventeenth century, presumably written by and for the benefit of, puritans, miscellaneous religious and racist bigots, slave traders, pirates and unscrupulous plantation owners within a generation of the first settlement of Jamestown, which stipulated that no claim to land was valid if it was ‘held’ by a person of ‘negro or indigenous descent’.
The legal opinion that Melody had heard was that this was as about as relevant, or as enforceable as the apocryphal dormant English statute which demanded the hanging of any Welshman found abroad in the old medieval borough of Chester after dark.
She and the eminent King’s Council, Sir James Patterson, who would be defending Roger Lee’s petition in the Court of Appeal in Whitehall sometime in June; to whence the case had been ‘expedited’ by the request of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of New England, who had literally ‘jumped’ on it the moment it was laid before the First Appeal Circuit of the Philadelphia Division of the Colonial Claims Court, since it presented obvious ‘constitutional issues’, and other ‘merits’ justifying ‘urgency’ in the ‘interests of good governance and the sanctity of colonial jurisprudence’, namely the avoidance of the whole judicial system of the First Thirteen being ‘polluted’ by the decisions of a ‘lower, colonial bench’, and last but not least, because there was a reputational risk to the Commonwealth of New England’s reputation throughout the Empire if Virginian bigotry went unchallenged.
To cut a long story short; the Attorney General in Philadelphia had recognised that if, by some hideous mischance, the case went in Roger Lee’s favour then all non-European, demonstrably non-Caucasian persons in the Commonwealth would overnight become second-class citizens with, in theory, no right to hold property, or by extension, no right to petition any court in the land.
Which was patently ridiculous.
To everybody except the members of the board of the Grantville Development Corporation…
“Hello over there!” Boomed Sir James Patterson, KC, the man who would be presenting Amelia and Sam’s rebuttal of Roger Lee’s attempt to recover the negligently run down, bankrupt estate he had been so eager to sell to keep his legion of creditors off his back only three years ago.
Sir James had a fruity, plummy voice which boasted that it hardly required a transatlantic communication cable to be heard three thousand miles away in New England.
“Amelia and I have been taking about babies, Jim,” Melody retorted cheerfully.
“Hello!” Amelia called brightly.
“Oh, yes! Sam told me the good news. Congratulations, dear lady. Many congratulations!”
Melody waited a moment for the boisterous King’s Counsel to get down to business.
“Solomon and Vera are with me, we’ve borrowed a room in my old friend Derek Fortesque’s Gray’s Inn Road chambers for this little tete-a-tete,” Sir James explained, sobering only by a degree.
Solomon Wilberforce’s father had been the Lee family solicitor for nearly half-a-century before passing the torch to him for over thirty years before his own retirement in 1976. Melody got the distinct impression that coming out of retirement to help to deliver a comprehensive coup de grâce to Roger had been no sacrifice whatsoever for the old man, who had, if necessary, decades of damning inside knowledge about the Lee family’s nefarious goings on with which to confound whatever subterfuge Roger or the Grantville Development Corporation’s regiment of handsomely-paid lawyers threw at them in London.
Just in case, Vera Anderson, the former detective whom Melody had recruited to delve into the business affairs and relationships of Amelia’s brother, and the dubious personnel and the provenance of his Grantville associates, had accompanied Solomon to England in case any of the relevant documentations she had uncovered in Alexandria and elsewhere in the Colonial Archives needed to be formally attested during the appeal hearings.
The truth of the matter was that neither Roger, nor his friends, had imagined this case would even go before a magistrate in Virginia. They had assumed – correctly until Melody intervened and funding, mainly from Maud Stanton’s parents, and their anti-planter rich friends on Long Island had underwritten their costs – that Amelia and Sam lacked the resources to challenge the petition to hand over the Bangor Estate, lock, stock and barrel, and they had gone straight for the jugular.
The GDC had had no Plan B, and instead of behaving like normal businessmen, failed to come to the table before the courts took the suit out of the hands of the parties as was their wont, when a potentially important point of law was involved.
“The hearing is set for Tuesday 27th June,” Sir James said. “I am given to understand that the Attorney General of the Crown Colony of Virginia wishes to be heard by the court. If the blasted man had made up his mind sooner all this could have been sorted out a fortnight ago. But every dog deserves his day in court, and all that!”
Melody was confused.
“What’s he got to do with any of this, Jim?”
