George Washington's Ghost

Albert Stanton still had no idea what to make of the arrival in Viano do Castelo, in Northern Portugal of Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas, sometime diplomat and cavalryman, now seemingly an agent of the Spanish Government in Exile in Lisbon, headed by the estranged wife of the King Emperor Ferdinand, Queen Sophia, by reputation a woman capable of extraordinary mendacity. Even more baffling, were the man’s relations with the two women who had shared his roller-coaster life and death flight across the wilds of a country disintegrating into civil war.

Melody Danson was clearly the Spaniard’s mistress, and not remotely coy about it; and as for Henrietta, goodness, well, she was scarcely less familiar with de Guzmán, whom, incidentally, seemed to be a decent enough fellow, than her friend. Disconcertingly, the two women had never, at any time, bothered to hide their own, presumably, intimate relations, leastways, not in front of him or from what he had seen, from the disinherited, apparently, now Catholically ex-communicated nobleman.

Albert Stanton had always thought he was a broad-minded sort of man. He had heard the rumours about Melody Danson, not given them a second thought; the woman was clearly at ease with herself without ever going out of her way to flaunt her predilections. In Spain, far away from the stupid, old-fashioned orthodoxy of the religiously inclined in the First Thirteen, both Melody and Henrietta had made no secret of their mutual affection, one for the other.

Unfortunately, sooner or later that was going to be a problem for her father, the Governor of New England…

“You went all dreamy back there in the car?” Maud asked him as they spilled out onto the forecourt of the hotel in the Hamptons, where her parents had organised a modest – by the standards of well to do Long Island families – homecoming ceremony.

“Sorry, I was back in Spain,” he grinned uncomfortably, “and Portugal. I’m afraid I’ll probably have moments, now and then, when some of those things come back to me, for a while yet.”

Maud clamped herself on his left arm.

“I shall distract you!” She promised. “Daddy will want a long engagement, by the way. But that simply won’t do! We need the bands to be read toot sweet so we can get down the aisle as soon as possible.”

“That sounds like just the ticket,” he agreed.

Leonora Coolidge button-holed the hero a little while later.

“I’ve been out of it for most of the last forty-eight hours,” he confessed. “What’s the latest news about Alex?”

“His ship is at Norfolk. The Perseus ‘tore up a turbine’ or something in the battle to save the Ulysses. So, Perseus was in dry dock for a few days; she may already be mended by now. Alex is hoping to fly up here for a day or two, maybe at the weekend. I’m not holding my breath.”

“I heard he was in the thick of things?”

Leonora pulled a face and shook her head.

“The stupid man,” she said with a severity mocked by the fond pride in her eyes, “spent so much time flying around making sure all the pilots coming back to the Ulysses, which was on fire from one end to the other by then, flew on to try to land on the Perseus that he ran out of fuel. He was in the water nearly a day before he was picked up!”

That was more or less what Albert Stanton had heard; it was always good to get corroborative information, especially when the man concerned was a friend.

“No news about Abe, I suppose.”

Leonora shook her head.

“Poor Kate…” The man made an effort to put on a brave face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a wet blanket.”

Leonora laughed, patted his chest playfully.

“My best friend just got her knight in shining armour back. That’s good enough to be going on with for the moment!”

It had come on to rain which meant everybody had come inside, where it was stuffy and noisy in the ground floor rooms Maud’s father had rented for the occasion.

“Oh, I wish we could just be alone,” Maud complained.

This was the way the man felt about it too.

“We’ll say good bye to your people and go back to Manhattan,” Albert Stanton said with rare impetuosity, his courage rapidly diminishing.

“Yes!”

While Maud’s parents had obviously planned to bask in the reflected glory of the new hero in the family a while longer, they had the good sense to know that the young people badly needed a little time together.

Leonora had already departed.

“I have a baby to feed and your mother and father’s friends are incredibly boring,” she had said on the way out, pausing to briefly drape herself around Albert and to hug Maud in a long sisterly embrace.

Most of the press corps had taken Leonora’s exit as their cue to race back to their offices on the other side of the East River, to file their copy and get their photographs developed.