“Why, thank you for coming out to see us,” Eleanor beamed at the sea of faces.
The King doffed his cap to the crowd.
Henrietta De L’Isle had scurried across the pier, heedless of her own dignity, and virtually on hands and knees planted a single microphone on a stand before the King and Queen.
Goodness, Eleanor thought, that girl thinks of everything!
“The Queen and I,” the King declared, “have had the honour of visiting a number of the men, women and children so grievously injured in yesterday’s outrage in Brooklyn, and sadly, the opportunity to give what little comfort we might to those whose loved ones have perished, or for whom there must be little hope of recovery. As always, we were humbled by the fortitude, courage and pluck of everybody we encountered.”
At a squeeze of his hand he surrendered the microphone to his wife.
“We cannot praise the tireless work of the dedicated doctors and nurses at the Flatbush Royal Military Hospital enough. Tragically, it is only at the worst of times that one becomes aware of the very best in us all. I could not help but weep, neither of us could, meeting so many good people laid low through no fault of their own, and yet so bravely confronting things…”
Eleanor’s voice failed her. She lowered her head for a moment, sniffed back a flood of tears. Overhead two aircraft circled like distracting, angrily buzzing bees as she re-composed herself.
“It is at times like this, on days like this that I and my husband are reminded that we are honoured and privileged to be your King and Queen, and we are reminded that the only reason that we are here today is to serve you!”
The King drew his wife’s hand to his side and she moved close.
Spontaneously, he planted a pecking kiss on her cheek, and in a similar moment of abandon she kissed him back.
“God save you all!” King George declared.
The Royal Standard broke from the port halyard of the destroyer’s old-fashioned mainmast.
Onboard HMS Cassandra as the warship cast off and began to back away from the pier the King and Queen waved to the masses on the pier.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get so emotional,” Eleanor said, smiling despite her roiling angst.
“You are their Queen, my love,” he husband reassured her. “You are their Queen and the Mother of the Empire. The world is changing and there are no rules in the King and Queen game anymore.”
She leaned against him as they smiled their fixedly regal smiles.
Henrietta De L’Isle and her two personal bodyguards had literally jumped onto the destroyer as she departed. Now the young woman approached her Sovereign.
She was a little breathless.
“I’m sorry, I should have had that microphone in place before your car arrived, sir.”
The King laughed.
“My dear, you are a marvel!”
“Oh,” Henrietta blushed and momentarily stared at her feet. “I, well… Thank you, sir…”
The King waved one last time and turned away from the pier, now some fifty to sixty yards away.
“We shall repair to the wardroom,” he commanded. “My wife and I need a stiff drink before we show our faces again!”
The original schedule for this day, Empire Day, had ordained that the King and Queen should attend morning service on the quarterdeck of the Lion, and partake of sherry and sweetmeats in the flagship’s wardroom preparatory to boarding the Cassandra shortly before eleven o’clock.
Thereupon, the Fleet Review would commence with the destroyer steaming slowly up and down the columns of ships anchored in the Lower and Upper Bays for well over two hours amidst the constant firing or royal salutes, the flying of thousands of flags, and the cheers of every ship’s company as it lined the rail.
These things almost always over ran; for one, both bays would be full of sailing craft and motor boats impeding Cassandra’s stately progress; and for two, it was a huge party and nobody worried overmuch if a party went on a little longer than the timespan mentioned on the original invitation!
Henrietta De L’Isle and the Queen disappeared briefly while the King chatted with the destroyer’s second-in-command – the Captain was making sure Cassandra did not run down any of the yachts cluttering Gravesend Bay – and Eleanor re-emerged with her face ‘restored’.
Word came from the bridge that ‘Cassandra will be on station in ten minutes’, and the Royal Party dutifully trekked up to the destroyer’s open compass platform.
Cassandra’s modern successors had enclosed bridges; marvellous for conning the ship in a North Atlantic blow but not so good for viewing and being viewed during the course of a Fleet Review.
The destroyer was making fifteen knots through the slight chop in the Lower Bay, hurrying to her start position abreast the starboard flank of HMS Lion by the appointed hour. The ship cleft through the sea with effortless ease, the roar of her engine room blowers like the purring of a mighty beast of prey.
Eleanor put a hand to her head, wondering if perhaps she ought to put her hat back on before her hair became totally windswept.
Soon Cassandra would sweep through the narrows – Hell’s Gate – into the Upper Bay, still rushing until she came abreast of the Tiger, the fourth ship in the 5th Battle Squadron ‘line’.
Each of the Lions had supposedly been built to the same ‘class pattern’ but a professional eye could pick out a myriad of minor distinguishing differences between the great ships; service refits, retrofits and upgrades to their upper works, masts, ELDAR aerials and arrays, and communications antenna which readily identified each as being unique.
For example, third in the line was the Queen Elizabeth, the least modified of the four ships still operating with her original ELDAR rig and twenty-year-old main battery gun directors. Of course, to a casual observer, or at a distance all of the Lions seemed identical, virtually indistinguishable from the smaller heavy cruisers Ajax and Naiad flanking the flagship.
All the visiting Navies had been allocated anchorages in the Lower Bay either side of the ships of the 3rd and 5th Cruiser Squadrons, the nucleus of the Americas-stationed East Coast Fleet. Presently, the flagship of the ECF, the massive battlecruiser Indomitable, was dry-docked at Norfolk having been in collision with a merchantman in Chesapeake Bay a month ago. Nevertheless, her two sisters, the thirty-year old Invincible and Indefatigable swung around their chains in the middle of the Lower Bay dwarfing practically every other ship other bar the visitors from Kiel.
The German Empire had sent the 2nd Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet across the Atlantic with a bevy of escorting destroyers. Just to remind the Royal Navy that if it neglected the Home Fleet the North Sea and the Atlantic sea lanes might not be forever the British ‘ponds’ they had been for most of the last two hundred years.
The Imperial German Navy, numerically and technically second only to the Royal Navy – upon which it modelled its organisation, training, operational practices and traditions – had sent three of its most formidable capital ships to New England.
The Kaiser Wilhelm, and her sisters the Grosser Kurfurst and Friedrich der Grosse were fifty-thousand-ton leviathans with main batteries and systems of armoured protection mirroring that of the Lion and the subsequent Victory class battleships currently serving with the Home Fleet. Many naval architects regarded the Kaiser Wilhelm class as improved ‘copies’ of the Lions, and possibly superior and more robust gun platforms, given that the first of them had only been laid down some years after the Lion had been commissioned. The Germans had always refuted any suggestion that they had ‘copied’ the design of the Lions, rightly pointing out that the Kaiser Wilhelms had adopted a significantly different hull form.