George Washington's Ghost

The lovers had got a taxi to the nearest rail station, Bridgehampton, waited over an hour for the stopping service to go on down the line to the last halt, Amagansett, and then return west along the single-track. The line only became two-way at Good Ground, which serviced the Hampton Bays area. There was a lot of talk about the line being closed to the east, the days when two daily trains carried fresh fish to the markets of Brooklyn and Manhattan were long gone since Colonial Highway 107 had been extended all the way to Montauk. Notwithstanding, there was always such a hullabaloo from the wealthy locals on this part of Long Island that the New York Railway Company had, to date, carried on running the whole line at a small, albeit worsening loss for most of the last twenty years. Elsewhere along the East Coast commuter services had been electrified in the fifties and sixties; all except the ‘marginal lines’ which one day would inevitably, be abandoned.

Maud cuddled up against Albert Stanton, he contentedly put his arm around her shoulders as the train, just a two-carriage service pulled by an old diesel locomotive clattered and jolted back towards the city they both called home.

Knowing that it would be chaos at the landing pier, Albert had taken the precaution of asking Imperial Airways to deliver his luggage – only a couple of small cases, mostly filled with clothes and shoes purchased in London, a dozen second hand books discovered trawling the capital’s second hand and antiquarian bookshops, and a few miscellaneous toiletries – to his East Side apartment.

The carriage had filled by the time the train rattled over the King Edward VI Manhattan Bridge and squealed to a stop at the Broad Street elevated terminus.

“Where shall we go?” Maud asked shyly. A little of the euphoria of earlier in the day had evaporated, otherwise, her yearnings were unabated.

“I think,” Albert Stanton grinned, “the returning hero deserves dinner with his lady fair?”

“Yes,” Maud nodded enthusiastically. “And then I’d like very much to be seduced, please!”

Chapter 8

Wednesday 26th April

Edificio del Ministerio de Defensa, Churubusco, Mexico City

General of the Army of New Spain Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón rose to his feet to shake the hand of the German Ambassador, Walther von Hagen, and his Military Adjutant, the monocled Colonel Dieter von Seydlitz-Hesse.

Both of Santa Anna’s visitors towered over him, the Ambassador a broad, hearty Bavarian from an old Wilhelmstrasse dynasty, Seydlitz-Hesse a sixty-three-year-old, angular, hawk-browed Prussian career soldier and one-time mentor of the Kaiser presumptive, Kronprinz Wilhelm.

The Mexican Defence Minister and Chief of Staff of the Army was a man of approximately average height, physically unprepossessing, almost anonymous until one met his gaze and then the quiet, dazzling clarity in his grey brown eyes seized an interlocutor’s whole attention. And when he spoke it was always with soft, reasonable authority which left nobody in the room in any doubt that he, and he alone knew the way forward.

He waved his guests towards comfortable chairs in his sparsely furnished, very nearly bare-walled office overlooking the sprawl of the modern city. Like other newly-built military installations in the capital the Defence Ministry Building was brutally functional, totally lacking in ornamentation; gone were the days when precious treasure was wasted on pandering to the egos of the men in uniform who had ruled Mexico, as if it was their personal fiefdom, for much of the last century.

Santa Anna studied the two Germans.

The great men of the Wilhelmstrasse in faraway Berlin had not imagined, for a minute, that Mexico would actually – true to its sacred national promise to its allies – actually invade the New England South West. This war, the men around Count Lothar von Bismarck, the Foreign Minister of the Reich had reasoned, would be like all those of the last fifty years; border skirmishes, small land grabs to deter the English from interfering with the mines of Alta California and Sonora, designed to make it impossible for the British Empire to exploit the oil reserves known to lie beneath Texas and the continental shelf in the northern reaches of the Gulf of Spain.