“Er, I don’t know what to say, sir,” the younger man admitted.
“When you get back from leave you will be returning to Perseus; but only briefly. Report to me when you get back from leave and I’ll brief you fully on what I have in mind for your future employment.”
Now Alex was blinking like an idiot.
“Our enemies have not rushed into war, Commander,” the older man continued, with the unstoppable certainty of a battleship driving through an Atlantic blow. “It was naïve for anybody to think that once the fighting started, it can be switched off, as if by magic. Personally, I did not think things would go so badly for us so quickly; but I knew we would suffer reverses and that, as now, we would be on the defensive and may well be for some time to come. Contrary to public perceptions, our Government in England, and at the highest levels here in New England, understood well enough the storm that was coming. Unfortunately, the peoples of the Empire are not ready, or receptive to the truths of the modern world. Presently, our foes are sowing the whirlwind that one day, they will come to rue. In the meantime, we must stand firm.”
Alex had taken it as read that as soon as Perseus had re-victualled and re-armed, and that new aircraft were delivered to bring her air group up to full strength, the Atlantic Fleet would put to sea to smite the Triple Alliance a great, war-winning blow.
Lord Collingwood patted his shoulder.
“Go on leave. Get to know your new son, Fielding. The war will still be here, waiting for you when you get back.”
Chapter 17
Monday 1st May
Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Alenteo, Portugal
The first time Melody had met Queen Sophie and the two Infantas, she had had no idea that the small family only occupied a handful of rooms in the western end of the great palace, or that most of the security – troops and armoured vehicles, and the police manning roadblocks on many of the routes into and through the town of Vila Viçosa – were stationed there solely because the King of Portugal, Carlos III of the House of Orléans-Bourbon, was in residence.
Bizarrely, after a revolution which had exiled the House of Braganza at the beginning of the century, twenty years later the Portuguese parliament had gone, cap in hand to little known side-line of two otherwise extinct Franco-Spanish dynasties in a bid to quell sectarian and ideological schisms and restore what had been, for over half-a-century an obedient, compliant and largely unifying monarchy. That this arrangement had ‘worked’ for the Portuguese, halting a slide towards civil war and possibly, strengthened democracy over the years was a thing which had had academic historians performing any number of intellectual and perceptual somersaults ever since.
Queen Sophie, Queen in Exile, made no secret of her admiration for the role her Portuguese counterparts had played in the ‘quiet revolution’ which had seen Portugal transitioning from a failing, bankrupt mother of a sprawling, disintegrating empire forty years ago, to embrace modernity, the arts, and a land whose universities, particularly those of Coimbra and Lisbon, were every bit the equal of their Parisian and British counterparts.
She had nothing but praise for King Carlos II, a quietly-spoken, man who had always led a blameless, fairly anonymous life before he came to the throne; an impeccably constitutional monarch and a rigorously non-partisan head of state, the Portuguese having adopted the ‘British model’ of kingship back in the 1920s. Carlos, a bookish, scholarly man, kept his head down, only appearing to his people, usually accompanied by his wife, the Queen Consort, Elisabetta, a marvellously comforting, matronly woman, in times of state ceremonial, crisis or tragedy and then, discreetly, returning to his ‘quiet’ life in a corner of one or other of the Royal Palaces his unwanted regal role compelled him to inhabit.
The most conspicuous member of the Portuguese Royal Family was Carlos’s eldest son, the Prince Royal, now in his mid-thirties who often stood in for his father on overseas forays, and actually, seemed to enjoy the public notoriety he enthusiastically cultivated as ‘the People’s Prince’, attending sporting events and generally living the celebrity lifestyle the King, plainly, despised. It was said that the Prince Royal’s French wife, Princess Antoinette Johanna, a willowy blond Austrian-born apparition, who might have stepped straight off a Parisian catwalk, had a knack of invoking mild apoplexy in her regal in-laws; in any event, the couple never stayed at Vila Viçosa.
Melody had imagined her first audience with Queen Sophie would be her last one. Which only went to show that she had been wrong about a lot of things lately.
On her second visit to the Palace, Queen Sophie had introduced Melody to sixty-three year-old Queen Elisabetta, who turned out to be as bubbly and energetic as her public persona, and to Melody’s discomfort had instantly started asking her astonishingly perceptive and well-informed questions about the cases she had solved working as a detective in the Crown Colony of New York!
It transpired that the Queen Consort of the Portuguese, an avid reader of detective non-fiction, and fiction and, a fluent English-speaker, liked nothing better than to sit down in front of the television set and watch taped recordings of British and new England crime dramas and whodunnits!
It was all a little bit overwhelming…
Yesterday, Melody had marshalled the courage to press Queen Sophie further about what she had said to her during their first bewildering encounter. In retrospect, everything had seemed unreal that day, and Melody badly needed a little clarity.
Today, Alonso had had to go to Lisbon.
Apparently, the Spanish Government – if such a thing meaningfully existed at present, which was a moot point – had started legal proceedings to sequester the Medina Sidonia estates in Portugal. Or rather the authorities in Madrid had commenced actions to pass the administration of those estates to the Mother Church in Portugal, disregarding the fact that under Portuguese Law a Papal Bill of Anathema – ex-communication and disinheritance, etcetera – had no foundation in Civil Law within the borders of Portugal or its overseas dominions, territories and protectorates.
Nevertheless, the futile cases still had to be disputed in the courts.
Thus, Alonso had had to stop pleasuring her at the crack of dawn that morning, to set off for the capital, over ninety miles away, a think Melody resented more than somewhat.
“I’m not ordering you,” the exiled monarch laughed, “to marry Alonso. Either you, or your friend, Lady de L’Isle. I’m just saying that it would be the best outcome for Alonso, and whomsoever took him on in matrimony.”
Recently, there had been times when Melody suspected her life was turning into a series of scenes from a Restoration comedy of errors.
“Look,” she tried to explain, “I’m Alonso’s mistress. We’re fairly discreet about it but it is not exactly a state secret,” she had reminded the Queen, whom, even though she was never anything less than regal, had demonstrated a wickedly dry sense of humour and self-evidently, intuitively seemed to treat Melody like a kindred spirit. “So, obviously, I’m middlingly stupid about him. But Henrietta…”
“Ah,” the other woman sighed. She thought for a few seconds, and seemed to come to a decision. “Throughout our lives, and especially when Alonso was on his travels in the Philippine lands and in New England, he wrote to me, and I to him. The farther away he was the more often he wrote. Almost daily, these last few years, after he was banished to New England…”