Bill had sent the rest of his crew away in the last lorry, the other man was one of the farmer militiamen who had turned up at the field, initially demanding to be flown out, and then just to be fed. He had given Bill a black look when he ordered him to sit at the cart but hit the switch when the time came.
Weekend soldiers cost the exchequer a pittance; the trouble was, they could not fight their way out of a paper bag in a war like this. Bill would have felt sorry for the man had he not already seen too many better men die.
The pilot was hanging half out of the cockpit.
He was yelling at Bill.
“Kick the fucking chocks away and get up here pronto, man!”
Bill Fielding blinked, uncomprehendingly.
“Quick, get in behind me before those bastards find the range with those big guns in the town!”
The scout was rumbling, rolling in a cloud of dust towards the runway as the first full salvo of four 75-millimetre rounds screamed overhead and fell among the blast berms where the planes that could not be saved were already burning. Everything which could not be moved had been heaped onto those flames in the last few hours, and a pall of acrid black smoke hung over the ruined airfield.
Bill Fielding swung his leg over the cockpit combing as the Goshawk bumped savagely over the edge of an old half-repaired bomb crater, which even though he was half-in, half-out almost launched him into thin air. A moment later he grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat and poured his lean, hungry frame into the narrow space.
“Hang on, old man!” Greg Torrance bawled before his voice was drowned out. He kicked the brakes, lined up the scout with the end of the runway and pushed the throttle up to and through the gate.
The pilot made no attempt to pull back the cockpit hood.
Bill was deafened, aware only of the thunder of the engine and the hurricane backwash of the Goshawk’s giant three-bladed propeller.
The scout was picking up speed, bounding down the mile-long dirt strip.
Geysers of smoke and dirt erupted in the near distance. Bill shut his eyes. The aircraft shuddered; seemed to stop for a split second.
Then flipped jarringly to the left.
This is it!
Bill had contemplated getting back on better terms with his maker in recent days; but he had been too busy, not yet got around to it. Possibly, he suspected, he ought to have made time to atone. Now, well, it was too late…
He waited for one of the wing tips to dig into the West Texan dirt, and for the Goshawk to cartwheel to its fiery death.
But when he opened his eyes the aircraft was thrumming healthily, climbing hard, he could feel as much in his bones and around him the sky was clean, cold, and for the first time in weeks he started to cough the dust of the desert out of his throat.
Life goes on…
Perhaps, there was a God after?
A merciful God who actually, contrary to the evidence of his previous life, gave a damn about whether Bill Fielding lived or died…
Chapter 11
Friday 28th April
Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Alenteo, Portugal
Now that the time of the audience was nearing, Melody Danson was starting to get nervous, positively anxious. Contrarily, mainly about things she hardly ever usually got het up about; but then she was about to be introduced to the Queen in Exile of the Empire of Spain, Sophie Catherine Magdalena, Princess of Aragon and Navarre.
‘It will be sufficient to address the Queen as Your Majesty, and thereafter, as in the English tradition, Ma’am,” Alonso had explained. ‘Her Majesty speaks English excellently but she will probably take it as a compliment and an earnest of good faith if you initially converse in Castilian.’
Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, formerly the castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas, not to mention several other large estates in Castile and Leon, and Melody had recently learned, still the owner of numerous other estates in Portugal, including commercial properties in Lisbon and land in the Algarve, was a mine of useful information.
If only he stopped trying to fill her head with facts and insights when they were in bed together – and the balance of her mind was somewhat skewed – she would probably learn a great deal from him!
Granted, they had to do something to fill in the gaps between the long, delicious spasms of ecstatic coupling and it seemed such a pity to waste any of the time they were naked together just sleeping; even so, she tended to be distracted in the darkness, flesh against flesh and she usually had to check everything he had told her later when she was in that particular state of… grace.
“Oh, God!” She muttered, looking at herself in her compact, a pretty silvery thing Alonso had bought her in the capital – for the umpteenth time.
She had had her wonderful mane of angry red hair shorn right down to her scalp escaping the Inquisition in the Mountains of Madrid. Time, the intervention of four weeks or so, had repaired her near ‘bald bits’ and a couple of sessions with a stylist who knew exactly what she was doing had made her look half-way human again but even so, she still missed her lost hair…
I look positively boyish, androgynous…
Whereas, Henrietta, even with her hair cut like a boy’s, still looked achingly… womanly.
Sometimes, life was just not fair!
With her flaming hair and pale complexion Melody had tended to avoid the sun as a child. Even though it was still spring, spending so many days outside, trekking across the countryside had left her with an unfamiliar tan, and unlike Henrietta, she had burned a little so now she was constantly dabbing her face and forearms with moisturising cream.
I must look like something the cat dragged backwards through a hedge!
She had no idea what Alonso saw in her.
“I look a mess!”
Alonso had taken her shopping, again, in Lisbon yesterday; that must have been an excruciating experience for the poor man. She kept asking him what this, or that dress looked like and he always just looked at her as if she was a movie star.
“The lipstick is too much…”
It was hard to believe it was a fortnight since she and Henrietta, and Albert Stanton carrying little Pedro, had splashed across that treacherous ford on the River Douro, pursued by bullets kicking up the water, and finally set foot on the soil of Portugal. The two weeks they had been on the run, hunted, harried and forever in mortal fear for their lives already seemed like some kind of strange, formative dream.
It had been a wrench saying goodbye to Albert Stanton a week ago. They had understood he wanted to get back to New England for all sorts of pressing reasons, not least to get re-acquainted with certain Miss Maud Daventry-Jones and the crying need to sell his story, their story to the highest bidder. That was business he would have concluded with one of the big London publishing houses, before he boarded a plane to return to New England.
Henrietta had spoken to her parents several times over the transatlantic telephone link, and Melody, for the first time in twenty years had felt the need to hear her own mother’s and father’s voice. They had been oddly… tearful; it was as if it was the first time, she had really registered how much they still cared about her. She had thought they were distant, somewhat indifferent to her life and career and now, belatedly, she had discovered that she had been wrong, all along.
It was a funny old world…
She and Henrietta had talked about going home, and Pedro. Neither of them could make up their minds if the fact that he was Alonso’s – love-child, bastard – son, these things still mattered in the Iberian Peninsula and certainly would in some quarters in New England, changed anything. It certainly changed nothing about the way they both felt about him – Pedro, that was, because Melody was still struggling to get to the bottom of Henrietta’s feelings vis-à-vis Alonso. The only thing she knew for a certainty, was that her friend-lover-partner’s emotions about the Duke of Medina-Sidonia were, well, complicated and foremost in their decision to remain, pretty much indefinitely, in Portugal was to give the boy a chance to get used to his new surroundings, and to them. Pedro already treated them like his mothers, Henrietta more so, unsurprisingly, since Melody was never going to be any kind of maternal exemplar. The boy still slept with them, or Henrietta when Melody was ‘being wicked’ with Alonso, which was whenever she got the opportunity.