George Washington's Ghost

But when he opened his eyes the aircraft was thrumming healthily, climbing hard, he could feel as much in his bones and around him the sky was clean, cold, and for the first time in weeks he started to cough the dust of the desert out of his throat.

Life goes on…

Perhaps, there was a God after?

A merciful God who actually, contrary to the evidence of his previous life, gave a damn about whether Bill Fielding lived or died…

Chapter 11

Friday 28th April

Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Alenteo, Portugal

Now that the time of the audience was nearing, Melody Danson was starting to get nervous, positively anxious. Contrarily, mainly about things she hardly ever usually got het up about; but then she was about to be introduced to the Queen in Exile of the Empire of Spain, Sophie Catherine Magdalena, Princess of Aragon and Navarre.

‘It will be sufficient to address the Queen as Your Majesty, and thereafter, as in the English tradition, Ma’am

,” Alonso had explained. ‘Her Majesty speaks English excellently but she will probably take it as a compliment and an earnest of good faith if you initially converse in Castilian.’

Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, formerly the castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas, not to mention several other large estates in Castile and Leon, and Melody had recently learned, still the owner of numerous other estates in Portugal, including commercial properties in Lisbon and land in the Algarve, was a mine of useful information.

If only he stopped trying to fill her head with facts and insights when they were in bed together – and the balance of her mind was somewhat skewed – she would probably learn a great deal from him!

Granted, they had to do something to fill in the gaps between the long, delicious spasms of ecstatic coupling and it seemed such a pity to waste any of the time they were naked together just sleeping; even so, she tended to be distracted in the darkness, flesh against flesh and she usually had to check everything he had told her later when she was in that particular state of… grace.

“Oh, God!” She muttered, looking at herself in her compact, a pretty silvery thing Alonso had bought her in the capital – for the umpteenth time.

She had had her wonderful mane of angry red hair shorn right down to her scalp escaping the Inquisition in the Mountains of Madrid. Time, the intervention of four weeks or so, had repaired her near ‘bald bits’ and a couple of sessions with a stylist who knew exactly what she was doing had made her look half-way human again but even so, she still missed her lost hair…

I look positively boyish, androgynous…

Whereas, Henrietta, even with her hair cut like a boy’s, still looked achingly… womanly.

Sometimes, life was just not fair!

With her flaming hair and pale complexion Melody had tended to avoid the sun as a child. Even though it was still spring, spending so many days outside, trekking across the countryside had left her with an unfamiliar tan, and unlike Henrietta, she had burned a little so now she was constantly dabbing her face and forearms with moisturising cream.

I must look like something the cat dragged backwards through a hedge!

She had no idea what Alonso saw in her.

“I look a mess!”

Alonso had taken her shopping, again, in Lisbon yesterday; that must have been an excruciating experience for the poor man. She kept asking him what this, or that dress looked like and he always just looked at her as if she was a movie star.

“The lipstick is too much…”

It was hard to believe it was a fortnight since she and Henrietta, and Albert Stanton carrying little Pedro, had splashed across that treacherous ford on the River Douro, pursued by bullets kicking up the water, and finally set foot on the soil of Portugal. The two weeks they had been on the run, hunted, harried and forever in mortal fear for their lives already seemed like some kind of strange, formative dream.

It had been a wrench saying goodbye to Albert Stanton a week ago. They had understood he wanted to get back to New England for all sorts of pressing reasons, not least to get re-acquainted with certain Miss Maud Daventry-Jones and the crying need to sell his story, their story to the highest bidder. That was business he would have concluded with one of the big London publishing houses, before he boarded a plane to return to New England.