Leonora had already departed.
“I have a baby to feed and your mother and father’s friends are incredibly boring,” she had said on the way out, pausing to briefly drape herself around Albert and to hug Maud in a long sisterly embrace.
Most of the press corps had taken Leonora’s exit as their cue to race back to their offices on the other side of the East River, to file their copy and get their photographs developed.
The lovers had got a taxi to the nearest rail station, Bridgehampton, waited over an hour for the stopping service to go on down the line to the last halt, Amagansett, and then return west along the single-track. The line only became two-way at Good Ground, which serviced the Hampton Bays area. There was a lot of talk about the line being closed to the east, the days when two daily trains carried fresh fish to the markets of Brooklyn and Manhattan were long gone since Colonial Highway 107 had been extended all the way to Montauk. Notwithstanding, there was always such a hullabaloo from the wealthy locals on this part of Long Island that the New York Railway Company had, to date, carried on running the whole line at a small, albeit worsening loss for most of the last twenty years. Elsewhere along the East Coast commuter services had been electrified in the fifties and sixties; all except the ‘marginal lines’ which one day would inevitably, be abandoned.
Maud cuddled up against Albert Stanton, he contentedly put his arm around her shoulders as the train, just a two-carriage service pulled by an old diesel locomotive clattered and jolted back towards the city they both called home.
Knowing that it would be chaos at the landing pier, Albert had taken the precaution of asking Imperial Airways to deliver his luggage – only a couple of small cases, mostly filled with clothes and shoes purchased in London, a dozen second hand books discovered trawling the capital’s second hand and antiquarian bookshops, and a few miscellaneous toiletries – to his East Side apartment.
The carriage had filled by the time the train rattled over the King Edward VI Manhattan Bridge and squealed to a stop at the Broad Street elevated terminus.
“Where shall we go?” Maud asked shyly. A little of the euphoria of earlier in the day had evaporated, otherwise, her yearnings were unabated.
“I think,” Albert Stanton grinned, “the returning hero deserves dinner with his lady fair?”
“Yes,” Maud nodded enthusiastically. “And then I’d like very much to be seduced, please!”
Chapter 8
Wednesday 26th April
Edificio del Ministerio de Defensa, Churubusco, Mexico City
General of the Army of New Spain Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón rose to his feet to shake the hand of the German Ambassador, Walther von Hagen, and his Military Adjutant, the monocled Colonel Dieter von Seydlitz-Hesse.
Both of Santa Anna’s visitors towered over him, the Ambassador a broad, hearty Bavarian from an old Wilhelmstrasse dynasty, Seydlitz-Hesse a sixty-three-year-old, angular, hawk-browed Prussian career soldier and one-time mentor of the Kaiser presumptive, Kronprinz Wilhelm.
The Mexican Defence Minister and Chief of Staff of the Army was a man of approximately average height, physically unprepossessing, almost anonymous until one met his gaze and then the quiet, dazzling clarity in his grey brown eyes seized an interlocutor’s whole attention. And when he spoke it was always with soft, reasonable authority which left nobody in the room in any doubt that he, and he alone knew the way forward.
He waved his guests towards comfortable chairs in his sparsely furnished, very nearly bare-walled office overlooking the sprawl of the modern city. Like other newly-built military installations in the capital the Defence Ministry Building was brutally functional, totally lacking in ornamentation; gone were the days when precious treasure was wasted on pandering to the egos of the men in uniform who had ruled Mexico, as if it was their personal fiefdom, for much of the last century.
Santa Anna studied the two Germans.
The great men of the Wilhelmstrasse in faraway Berlin had not imagined, for a minute, that Mexico would actually – true to its sacred national promise to its allies – actually invade the New England South West. This war, the men around Count Lothar von Bismarck, the Foreign Minister of the Reich had reasoned, would be like all those of the last fifty years; border skirmishes, small land grabs to deter the English from interfering with the mines of Alta California and Sonora, designed to make it impossible for the British Empire to exploit the oil reserves known to lie beneath Texas and the continental shelf in the northern reaches of the Gulf of Spain.
The ‘long peace’, and the coming of democracy to the Mexican Republic a dozen years ago, had redirected the wealth of the country’s mines into the public purse. Previously, the war lords and their minions had siphoned off the fruits of the land; now there were modern hospitals in all the big cities, public servants got paid regularly, the sick no longer starved on the streets, new roads and railways were under construction and industry, previously hamstrung by corruption and the country’s medieval, chronically under-invested infrastructure, had leapt ahead. The economy had grown at over ten percent for each of the last eight years, and fuelled by the runaway growth of the mining sector, foreign currency had poured into the country.
“I think you know why we are here today, Minister,” Walther von Hagen suggested.
Santa Anna nodded.
The German Empire had been perfectly happy to collude in the Triple Alliance’s re-armament programs, and by implication, connive in its preparations for war. What the wise men of the Wilhelmstrasse had not banked on, was the war breaking out this year, nor next year and consequently, no steps had been taken to stockpile essential raw materials sourced from the region by the Reich. And now it was too late to do anything about it.
Problematically, while the islands of the greater Antilles – Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo – only exported cotton, tobacco, sugar, exotic fruits, spices, hard woods and trinkets to the Fatherland, Mexico had, in recent years become a key supplier of key strategic minerals and this trade had, thanks to the British blockage of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain, and anticipation sooner or later, of the long Pacific west coast of Mexico, cased overnight.
“It is my government’s view that things,” Von Hagen hesitated, “need to be placed back on a more even playing field.” He was one of those profoundly undiplomatic diplomats the Wilhelmstrasse often despatched to friendly, and client states. Always something of a bull in a china shop, many of Santa Anna’s colleagues in the Cabinet of Il Presidente Hernando de Soto, regarded the German Ambassador as an uncultured oaf, frequently joking among themselves at the expense of the man’s often pigeon-Spanish. “There is a feeling in Berlin that things have rather got out of hand…”
Santa Anna smiled a saturnine smile.
“To the contrary, things are going very much to plan, Herr Ambassador.”
“Dammit, Felipe,” the German protested, “we’re bloody lucky Gravina’s adventures haven’t landed us all in a general war with the British!”
Santa Anna raised an eyebrow.
The President of the Republic, family members and a small number of old friends might casually employ his Christian name but he had always resented it when a man used it without his leave.
He carried on smiling, as if in sympathy.
Simply stated, because the Germans had not expected war this year; neither had the English.
The British Lion had been caught half-asleep and as yet, he had not fully awakened. Axiomatically, had the Wilhelmstrasse known that war was imminent it would have instructed all its citizens to return home, including the technicians who kept the Californian gold mines open and elsewhere, who had overseen a doubling in the production of silver in the last five years. Such an exodus would have shouted ‘war’ to the whole world; as it was there were still at least a hundred thousand German nationals ‘trapped’ in the ‘war zone’, and the great traffic in copper (of which, globally, Mexico was the third largest producer), and in sodium-sulphide, fluorite, celestite, and calcium inosilicate (of which it annually supplied upwards of one-third of all European demand) had come to a grinding halt. At the same time, the flow of oil from Curacao and the refineries at Aruba, and from the newly opened fields in the Venezuelan jungle territories had dried up.