George Washington's Ghost

“I planned to have this little chat with you when you returned from Long Island, Commander,” Collingwood confided. “So, this encounter is serendipitous. I want you to accept a permanent commission in the Royal Naval Air Service. It goes without saying that your present rank would be made substantive. I have plenty of sea-going captains with the aggressive, never-say-die spirit we are going to need in the coming months, and possibly years. However, the RNAS is still young, and its esprit de corps a fragile thing threatened by its rapid expansion. I badly need chaps exactly like you to command my carrier-borne air wings.”

“Er, I don’t know what to say, sir,” the younger man admitted.

“When you get back from leave you will be returning to Perseus; but only briefly. Report to me when you get back from leave and I’ll brief you fully on what I have in mind for your future employment.”

Now Alex was blinking like an idiot.

“Our enemies have not rushed into war, Commander,” the older man continued, with the unstoppable certainty of a battleship driving through an Atlantic blow. “It was naïve for anybody to think that once the fighting started, it can be switched off, as if by magic. Personally, I did not think things would go so badly for us so quickly; but I knew we would suffer reverses and that, as now, we would be on the defensive and may well be for some time to come. Contrary to public perceptions, our Government in England, and at the highest levels here in New England, understood well enough the storm that was coming. Unfortunately, the peoples of the Empire are not ready, or receptive to the truths of the modern world. Presently, our foes are sowing the whirlwind that one day, they will come to rue. In the meantime, we must stand firm.”

Alex had taken it as read that as soon as Perseus had re-victualled and re-armed, and that new aircraft were delivered to bring her air group up to full strength, the Atlantic Fleet would put to sea to smite the Triple Alliance a great, war-winning blow.

Lord Collingwood patted his shoulder.

“Go on leave. Get to know your new son, Fielding. The war will still be here, waiting for you when you get back.”

Chapter 17

Monday 1st May

Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Alenteo, Portugal

The first time Melody had met Queen Sophie and the two Infantas, she had had no idea that the small family only occupied a handful of rooms in the western end of the great palace, or that most of the security – troops and armoured vehicles, and the police manning roadblocks on many of the routes into and through the town of Vila Viçosa – were stationed there solely because the King of Portugal, Carlos III of the House of Orléans-Bourbon, was in residence.

Bizarrely, after a revolution which had exiled the House of Braganza at the beginning of the century, twenty years later the Portuguese parliament had gone, cap in hand to little known side-line of two otherwise extinct Franco-Spanish dynasties in a bid to quell sectarian and ideological schisms and restore what had been, for over half-a-century an obedient, compliant and largely unifying monarchy. That this arrangement had ‘worked’ for the Portuguese, halting a slide towards civil war and possibly, strengthened democracy over the years was a thing which had had academic historians performing any number of intellectual and perceptual somersaults ever since.

Queen Sophie, Queen in Exile, made no secret of her admiration for the role her Portuguese counterparts had played in the ‘quiet revolution’ which had seen Portugal transitioning from a failing, bankrupt mother of a sprawling, disintegrating empire forty years ago, to embrace modernity, the arts, and a land whose universities, particularly those of Coimbra and Lisbon, were every bit the equal of their Parisian and British counterparts.

She had nothing but praise for King Carlos II, a quietly-spoken, man who had always led a blameless, fairly anonymous life before he came to the throne; an impeccably constitutional monarch and a rigorously non-partisan head of state, the Portuguese having adopted the ‘British model’ of kingship back in the 1920s. Carlos, a bookish, scholarly man, kept his head down, only appearing to his people, usually accompanied by his wife, the Queen Consort, Elisabetta, a marvellously comforting, matronly woman, in times of state ceremonial, crisis or tragedy and then, discreetly, returning to his ‘quiet’ life in a corner of one or other of the Royal Palaces his unwanted regal role compelled him to inhabit.