George Washington's Ghost

When their son had broken the news to them neither the King nor the Queen had, literally, known what to say, or which way to look. Philip and Elizabeth De L’Isle were among their oldest, closest friends. It had been awful until first Henrietta, and then Elizabeth, had written to them to put their fears to rest.

Dear Uncle Bertie and Aunt Eleanor

, Henrietta had written, I know you will be angry with Jamie. Please don’t be. He and I will always be the best of friends, like always, very much like brother and sister; perhaps, we ought to have said more at the time but we agreed a little while ago that marriage was not for us. Well, not to each other although obviously, I would have been honoured to be connected so intimately to the Royal ‘firm’. Jamie was as relieved to be released from our teenage ‘arrangement’ as I was! I dashed off a letter congratulating Jamie the moment I heard the news. I wish him all the happiness in the world…

Thinking about Henrietta’s letter suddenly dragged the King’s thoughts back to the trials and tribulations her father, the Governor of New England, was presently enduring.

The whole Gulf of Spain, the Caribbean and thousands of square miles of the southern and south western Borderlands of New England with New Spain seemed to be on fire. News of one setback – no, call a thing by its real name ‘defeat’ – after another had rained upon the heads of his Government in London and his Administration in Philadelphia.

The more sensationalist of the newspapers spoke of New Orleans and the Mississippi being threatened; of Royal Naval forces badly mauled and thrown back in disarray; and of open revolt in several of the First Thirteen colonies, of panic buying emptying the shelves of shops, demonstrations on the streets and of sporadic outbreaks of ‘low-intensity’ rioting.

Fortunately, the Empire Broadcasting Corporation took a more level-headed, balanced approach to these things mitigating against the need for heavy-handed censorship – a thing the King deplored, mainly because it seemed to him to be nearly always counter-productive – at home, or throughout the Empire. Censorship was, however, a thing under constant review and when the news of the latest ‘setback’ – well, disaster if one was being frank about it – became widely known, everybody in the Royal Party accepted that the Government might have no alternative but to clamp down hard.

There had been a great battle in the waters south of, and within Mobile Bay, east of the Mississippi Delta, where the damaged battlecruiser HMS Indomitable

and several of her escorting destroyers had sought shelter awaiting the arrival of the cruiser Devonshire and her consorts, before making joint passage to the east and hopefully, finding sanctuary in Atlantic waters.

Reports were confused as to specifics; not so unclear about the essentials of the action which had subsequently occurred. A large number of enemy vessels – from the navies of New Spain (Nuevo Granada), Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo – had gathered in the waters off Mobile Bay, and although gallantly attacked with torpedoes by the Indomitable’s destroyers, approached ever closer inshore and engaged the valiant old battlecruiser in a three to four-hour gunnery duel.

Notwithstanding the arrival of the Devonshire’s squadron in the middle of the battle, and that the Indomitable’s eight 15-inch main battery rifles and modern fire control systems were, it was assumed, greatly superior to the weapons and gun-laying capabilities of her foes, eventually, she had been battered into a burning, sinking hulk as her magazines were emptied, and the Devonshire – badly handled with her own magazines running low – forced to break off the action and withdraw out to sea with three surviving destroyers.

Presently, the wreck of the forty-five thousand-ton battlecruiser Indomitable lay partially capsized in some forty feet of water off Galliard Island. It was feared that at least two-thirds of her fourteen hundred-man crew had perished in the great battle. Of her escorting squadron, only two, badly damaged destroyers survived, having been forced to take shelter beneath the guns of Mobile and Spanish Fort at the head of the Bay.