George Washington's Ghost

Henrietta had spoken to her parents several times over the transatlantic telephone link, and Melody, for the first time in twenty years had felt the need to hear her own mother’s and father’s voice. They had been oddly… tearful; it was as if it was the first time, she had really registered how much they still cared about her. She had thought they were distant, somewhat indifferent to her life and career and now, belatedly, she had discovered that she had been wrong, all along.

It was a funny old world…

She and Henrietta had talked about going home, and Pedro. Neither of them could make up their minds if the fact that he was Alonso’s – love-child, bastard – son, these things still mattered in the Iberian Peninsula and certainly would in some quarters in New England, changed anything. It certainly changed nothing about the way they both felt about him – Pedro, that was, because Melody was still struggling to get to the bottom of Henrietta’s feelings vis-à-vis Alonso. The only thing she knew for a certainty, was that her friend-lover-partner’s emotions about the Duke of Medina-Sidonia were, well, complicated and foremost in their decision to remain, pretty much indefinitely, in Portugal was to give the boy a chance to get used to his new surroundings, and to them. Pedro already treated them like his mothers, Henrietta more so, unsurprisingly, since Melody was never going to be any kind of maternal exemplar. The boy still slept with them, or Henrietta when Melody was ‘being wicked’ with Alonso, which was whenever she got the opportunity.

I have been completely wanton with Alonso…

I ought to be ashamed of myself…

But I am not.

I wonder what that means?

Melody decided not to re-do her lipstick.

The mood she was in she was likely to paint her whole face!

“Oh, God,” she groaned anew.

She fixed her lover in her almond-eyed gaze.

“This isn’t real, Alonso. No matter how I, you, either of us would like to go on like this forever, we can’t. It just won’t work.”

The man smiled a rueful smile and leaned over to kiss her forehead and rest, for a moment, his right hand on her nether regions.

God in Heaven, I love it when he does that!

“Oh, fuck… What if I inadvertently swear or blaspheme in front of the Queen?”

“You won’t.”

“But I might!”

It was too ridiculous: this whole ‘audience thing’ was freaking her out in the way that being on the run for her life from the Inquisition and being shot at, had not!

Perhaps, she rationalised, it was just getting out of the car after the ninety-mile drive from Lisbon to be confronted by the magnificence of the Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa?

“Why is the Queen of Spain living so close to the border, Alonso?” The question popped up in her head, like interrogatives often used to in her previous life as a detective.

“Two reasons,” the man shrugged. “To be close to the children she has lost, and,” a sad pursing of the lips, “to send a message to her enemies in Madrid that she has no fear of them.”

Melody knew very little of the real story of Queen Sophie’s escape from the mob besieging Aranjuez Palace outside Madrid, as it happened, on the same night that she and Henrietta had been spirited out of Chinchón, minutes ahead of the Inquisition.

Alonso had confided to her that Don Rafael, the faithful family arms man who had saved the women’s lives that night, had been killed in the course of a second, failed attempt to rescue other members of the Queen’s court from Toledo, where they had sought sanctuary and been, in the way of things in a civil war, betrayed by countrymen they had mistaken for friends.

Melody had known Alonso must have wept many, many tears for his father’s old retainer, and down the years, his own good and true friend and mentor. It was but one more cruel cut to bear. One way and another they had all passed through a dreadful vale of tears in recent weeks…

Melody had expected a regiment of footmen in full ceremonial livery, terrifyingly elegant, and a gaggle of intimidating ladies in waiting.

Instead, a small middle-aged woman with bird-like eyes and pecking mannerisms as she spoke, materialised before the couple and addressed Alonso as if Melody was not there.

“You may present your lady to Her Majesty, Don Alonso.” The trio walked several steps, their feet ringing dully on the marble floor. “You will be received in the Orangery.”

Much to Melody’s surprise the woman she had come to see rose to her feet and smoothed down her stylish, grey calf-length dress as her visitors entered her presence in what seemed like a very plush greenhouse attached to the side of the palace.

Queen Sophie was about Melody’s own height, and age. Her hair was raven black to her shoulders, she was slim, poised and her blue-grey eyes seemed oddly, amused.

She was not alone.

Both the royal princesses were present.