George Washington's Ghost

Maud had not realised that she had met Admiral Lord Collingwood, C-in-C Atlantic Fleet until some minutes later.

And then Kate Lincoln, her baby son in her arms, accompanied by a slender, attractive woman in her later thirties or early forties, waved to the couple.

The woman with Kate took her son.

“Go on,” she mouthed, a little maternally.

And the next moment Kate had flown into Albert Stanton’s arms.

“Abe’s coming home! Ted’s coming home!”

Maud did not know what to do with herself.

The other woman was about her own age, height, stature, her skin a lot less dark than she had anticipated, her long dark hair a flowing mane down her back.

Before Maud knew it, she was looking into Abe Lincoln’s Mohawk-born wife’s almond brown eyes.

Albert made the introductions. It was the hundredth or more that day yet the first one which Maud knew she would never, ever forget.

“In sorrow and longing we are sisters, Miss Daventry-Jones,” the other woman said solemnly. “Let us be sisters in our happiness also.”

Maud hesitated, stepped close.

The two women embraced briefly, and moved apart.

The older woman, whom Maud now realised was accompanied by three youngsters, her children, presumably, could only be Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, the wife of the former second-in-command of HMS Achilles. Her children, thirteen-year-old Indira, ten-year-old Peter junior, and eight-year-old Maryam, all politely greeted Maud. Indira, having held fourteen-month-old Tom Lincoln, while her mother stepped forward, now rather reluctantly, returned him to Kate with a shy smile.

Maud could tell that the strain was taking its toll on Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, the spokesperson for and acknowledged leader of the families of the Achilles

’s lost and missing men.

“Next time it will be Peter and the others coming home to us, Melanie,” Kate murmured. If her arms had not been full, she would surely have hugged the older woman, and for the moment, oblivious to the churning crowd around them she leaned forward and kissed her friend’s cheek.

Maud blushed, guilty that she was intuitively somewhat jealous of the quiet, supportive intimacy between the other two women. Her closeness with Leonora had just happened, come upon her, them both really, out of the blue. It had seemed, from the outset, something indefinably precious, unique and it often occurred to her that it was unusual to see such ‘oneness’ in others. She was glad that the redoubtable Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, so indomitable in front of the cameras knew she did not have to maintain her pretence in front of her friend…

Things got a little confused when the plane – one of the big new four-engined, high-wing Gloucester TR-4 Manitoba class transports allegedly capable, implausibly, of landing on a strip less than five hundred yards long in an emergency – carrying the returning heroes landed.

Today, there was to be no demonstration of the remarkable aircraft’s short take-off and landing tricks; the Manitoba touched the tarmac a quarter of the way down the one-and-a-half mile main runway, braked in a leisurely fashion, slowed, and eventually joined the perimeter road a hundred yards from the end of the strip.

Albert Stanton tried not to smirk.

The Navy was stage-managing this whole thing as if it was a melodrama, which, of course, that was and why the Manitoba was in effect, taking the long way around to reach the welcoming committee and the now, hundreds, possibly thousands of media people, civilians and service personnel corralled into the relatively small secure area in front of the base’s main hangars.

He thought about explaining the ‘optics’ of the way the Navy was orchestrating events to Maud; stopped himself because he could tell she was loving every minute and he did not want to spoil her fun, or her anticipation of the moment the two returning heroes would be revealed to the crowd, and indeed, the whole Empire.

To return from the dead was no mean feat…

Ted Forest appeared first in the door.

Dressed in a dark blue jump suit that was as near as dammit black with one leg torn to accommodate a bulky splint, he had had to be lifted down to the tarmac. And then the tall, spare figure of Abe Lincoln paused at the top step, waving diffidently before loping down to the ground and in a moment enveloping Kate in his arms as Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, holding young Tom again, with her three children standing protectively around her amidst the gaggle of senior officers and Virginia big wigs, watched on, blinking back her tears.

Remarkably, among the close-packed gang of VIPs, mostly Virginian politicians and planters, Roger E. Lee and his normally sour-faced wife, were today grinning incongruously, eagerly awaiting their turn to be photographed greeting the homecoming heroes.