He need not have panicked.
Maud decelerated at the last moment and then the lovers were locked in a blissful embrace, perfectly oblivious to the frantic clicking and clattering of camera shutters. It was a clinch broken, very reluctantly, only when the participants began to turn blue from lack of oxygen.
“I missed you,” the man gasped.
“I missed you even more!” Maud claimed breathlessly.
Albert Stanton slowly become aware of the huge welcoming committee for the first time, and the deafening storm of… applause. Although sorely tempted to kiss Maud anew he determined to be strong, mostly on the grounds that a pleasure delayed was likely to be a pleasure multiplied later, and tried to stand tall for the cameras.
He clutched Maud’s left hand in his larger, right mit.
She was quivering with excitement.
“This is what it must be like to be movie stars,” he whispered, looking to her.
Maud giggled.
The Manhattan Globe man had been introduced to Maud’s parents last year, when he was covering Maud and Leonora’s running battle with the Colonial authorities over the wrongful imprisonment of members of the Fielding-Lincoln family. However, this was a little different, very much an encounter with the mother and father of the bride to be.
Dazedly, he shook Maud’s father’s hand.
Maud claimed that despite the impression the old man made on strangers that her father was a ‘good sport’ underneath; Albert Stanton asked himself how far down one had to drill to get to the ‘good stuff’. Her mother was a rotund, cheerful lady with her daughter’s mischievous, twinkling eyes. She kissed her daughter’s beau on the cheek with no little enthusiasm.
Albert Stanton ignored the clamour all around.
“Sir,” he said in an approximation of what he hoped was his most serious, decisive tone, “forgive my temerity but I won’t beat about the bush; I would like to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage.” He weakened. “if that’s all right with you, sir?”
Had the man not retained a firm grip on Maud’s hand she would have been jumping up and down and clapping her hands together in a jig of joy.
Leonora Fielding rolled her eyes.
Men!
If that’s all right with you…
Leonora had no idea what exactly her own husband had said to her father, who, by any standards was a much scarier and harder case than Maud’s sweet, somewhat fuddy-duddy old man.
Alex had probably said something along the lines of: ‘Look, I’ve already knocked up the girl; so, you had jolly well better let me take her off your hands before people start to notice the bump, what, old man!’
“I’ve already volunteered to be maid of honour!” She announced loudly.
“Well,” the father of the would-be bride decided, ruefully, “that settles it. Don’t you think, Mother?” This latter, he inquired looking to his wife who was already moving to hug her daughter.
Albert Stanton had tried to sleep on the flight from England.
Failed, dismally.
In the event, leaving Melody and Henrietta, and little Pedro, had been a much bigger wrench than he had expected. This was hardly surprising, thinking about it, they had gone through a lot together. Both women had hugged him very nearly to death.
Albert Stanton still had no idea what to make of the arrival in Viano do Castelo, in Northern Portugal of Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas, sometime diplomat and cavalryman, now seemingly an agent of the Spanish Government in Exile in Lisbon, headed by the estranged wife of the King Emperor Ferdinand, Queen Sophia, by reputation a woman capable of extraordinary mendacity. Even more baffling, were the man’s relations with the two women who had shared his roller-coaster life and death flight across the wilds of a country disintegrating into civil war.
Melody Danson was clearly the Spaniard’s mistress, and not remotely coy about it; and as for Henrietta, goodness, well, she was scarcely less familiar with de Guzmán, whom, incidentally, seemed to be a decent enough fellow, than her friend. Disconcertingly, the two women had never, at any time, bothered to hide their own, presumably, intimate relations, leastways, not in front of him or from what he had seen, from the disinherited, apparently, now Catholically ex-communicated nobleman.
Albert Stanton had always thought he was a broad-minded sort of man. He had heard the rumours about Melody Danson, not given them a second thought; the woman was clearly at ease with herself without ever going out of her way to flaunt her predilections. In Spain, far away from the stupid, old-fashioned orthodoxy of the religiously inclined in the First Thirteen, both Melody and Henrietta had made no secret of their mutual affection, one for the other.
Unfortunately, sooner or later that was going to be a problem for her father, the Governor of New England…
“You went all dreamy back there in the car?” Maud asked him as they spilled out onto the forecourt of the hotel in the Hamptons, where her parents had organised a modest – by the standards of well to do Long Island families – homecoming ceremony.
“Sorry, I was back in Spain,” he grinned uncomfortably, “and Portugal. I’m afraid I’ll probably have moments, now and then, when some of those things come back to me, for a while yet.”
Maud clamped herself on his left arm.
“I shall distract you!” She promised. “Daddy will want a long engagement, by the way. But that simply won’t do! We need the bands to be read toot sweet so we can get down the aisle as soon as possible.”
“That sounds like just the ticket,” he agreed.
Leonora Coolidge button-holed the hero a little while later.
“I’ve been out of it for most of the last forty-eight hours,” he confessed. “What’s the latest news about Alex?”
“His ship is at Norfolk. The Perseus ‘tore up a turbine’ or something in the battle to save the Ulysses. So, Perseus was in dry dock for a few days; she may already be mended by now. Alex is hoping to fly up here for a day or two, maybe at the weekend. I’m not holding my breath.”
“I heard he was in the thick of things?”
Leonora pulled a face and shook her head.
“The stupid man,” she said with a severity mocked by the fond pride in her eyes, “spent so much time flying around making sure all the pilots coming back to the Ulysses, which was on fire from one end to the other by then, flew on to try to land on the Perseus that he ran out of fuel. He was in the water nearly a day before he was picked up!”
That was more or less what Albert Stanton had heard; it was always good to get corroborative information, especially when the man concerned was a friend.
“No news about Abe, I suppose.”
Leonora shook her head.
“Poor Kate…” The man made an effort to put on a brave face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a wet blanket.”
Leonora laughed, patted his chest playfully.
“My best friend just got her knight in shining armour back. That’s good enough to be going on with for the moment!”
It had come on to rain which meant everybody had come inside, where it was stuffy and noisy in the ground floor rooms Maud’s father had rented for the occasion.
“Oh, I wish we could just be alone,” Maud complained.
This was the way the man felt about it too.
“We’ll say good bye to your people and go back to Manhattan,” Albert Stanton said with rare impetuosity, his courage rapidly diminishing.
“Yes!”
While Maud’s parents had obviously planned to bask in the reflected glory of the new hero in the family a while longer, they had the good sense to know that the young people badly needed a little time together.