Lebensraum…
Oil…
“Unbelievable!” Wilhelm cried out. It was like a roar of pain; signifying the final betrayal. “I come here to try to make things right with people I once thought were my family, my friends and what do I get? Stabbed in the back! That’s what I get for trying to do the right thing! I seek peace and what I discover is that you ‘people’ have been laughing behind my back, behind my father’s back, behind the back of the whole German people!”
If the King, Queen or the immediate object of Wilhelm’s ire had been so naïve as to take comfort from the fact that they were being berated by the King of Prussia, not the Kaiser, they were soon to be disabused of the last scintilla of their complacency.
“Damn you, Bertie! Damn you! I thought you at least were a man I could do business with!”
“Willie, I am a man you can do business with!” The King barked angrily, which was probably the worst thing he could have done.
“Seriously?” The King of Prussia bellowed. “I came here to make things right. To start my reign with a gesture of good will. I was going to offer to scrap Projektende der Tage...”
Project End of days…
“I’d have sent half the bloody Kaiserliche Marine to the breakers if that was the price for a treaty that gave the Empire lebensraum and access to the oil fields that we need to fulfil our rightful racial destiny!”
Nobody tried to gainsay him.
“Why on earth would I make a deal with the bloody Russians if we could sort everything out with our Aryan brothers in England and its White Dominions? But, oh no! You have to trip us up at every bloody turn! I don’t know how you did it,” Wilhelm shouted at Sir George Walpole, “but if you think persuading those dummkopfs to Elect that prissy old fart Ludwig is going to stop me,” his face was red, he was sweating and when he spoke spittle flecked the air, “you’ve got another bloody thing coming!”
With which, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the Charlottenburg Palace.
Chapter 19
Tuesday 2nd May
Gravesend, Long Island
Alex Fielding had been a little – just a little because the events of the last year or so had confirmed him in the opinion that faint hearts never won a damned thing in this world – thoughtful about bringing his wife and baby son back to what had been the Fielding family home of his youth.
On the face of it the Jamaica Bay Road district was not exactly Leonora’s style but he suspected that these days neither the high life, or living in a Shinnecock Hills mansion was her thing, either.
He had taken his gurgling, barely three-week old son Alexander Lincoln Fielding from his wife’s arms to allow her to get out of the car – an old sportster he had borrowed from an old CAF friend for the duration of his brief leave – and was loathe to hand him back.
“I always knew you were just an old softie!” Leonora declared triumphantly.
“Guilty as charged!”
Leonora viewed the old house, boarded up since the time of the Empire Day atrocities, the garden in front of it overgrown, something of an eyesore.
“Weird,” she sighed. “That I’ve never been here until now.”
“It’s the first time I’ve seen the old place in years,” Alex admitted. In other circumstances it might have been a good place to bring up a family.” He hesitated. “This is the sort of size of place the Navy provides for Commanders and their families…”
“Are you trying to say that you want me to move down to Norfolk?”
“No,” Alex chuckled, flashing a smile, rocking his baby son in his arms.
“Oh,” Leonora was stupid about her husband but she was not, per se, dumb about anything in particular and guessed that he had brought her out here because he had something on his mind. “Come on! Out with it, Mister!”
“I will be going back to Norfolk, this time. But in a couple of months, maybe sooner, I’m likely to be headed for the West Coast. Vancouver probably. Then, probably to the Sandwich Islands. The Navy is building a base the size of Norfolk out there.” It all came out with a guilty rush. “The war with the Spanish isn’t going to be over any time soon, or maybe not this year or next. We weren’t ready and it will take a while to get up to speed, re-arm and all that stuff. Besides, looking ahead, it seems that the Government back in England is as worried about the Japanese, and the Russians, I suppose, in the Far East almost as much as they are about the Spaniards right now. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’ve been asked to work up a new air group on the West Coast.”
“And you said ‘yes’,” Leonora decided, not really needing him to spell out any of the reasons why. She had had her eyes wide open marrying Alex Lincoln Fielding. “What about me and your son?”
Alex was feeling anxious; an odd sensation.
“I rather hoped you’d come with me, actually.”
Leonora nodded noncommittally and wandered up the path to the porch of the house, the knee and waist high vegetation brushing her skirt.
“Who owns this place nowadays?” She asked.
Her husband followed in her footsteps.
“My Pa never made a will. I’m the oldest, I guess I own it.”
Ever practical, Leonora asked: “Why haven’t you sold it?”
“Never got around to it. Or even really thought about it…”
“What are the Sandwich Islands like?” Leonora thought they were talking about tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but it paid to check.
“Paradise.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“I reckon I’m in paradise every time I’m with you, my love,” Leonora’s husband declaimed gallantly.
She scoffed at this: “Men!”
Until then she had been thinking more about moving into an apartment in Manhattan, on the West Side within walking distance of Maud’s place. Of course, at the moment Maud was a little preoccupied with her own, personal hero. She guessed her friend would dive head first into domestic bliss, a thing Leonora had never seriously contemplated for herself. And yet now she was being asked to be a ‘proper’ Navy wife.
It was a funny old world.
“Vancouver? You said Vancouver? That’s cold and rainy and winter goes on half the year up there?”
“Well, the base is actually some way to the south. A place called Tacoma, in the northern Oregon Territory.” Alex hoped he was not sounding too vague or evasive, knowing that his wife was not the sort of girl to allow him to get away with fobbing her off with a lot of ‘need to know’ excuses.
With this to the forefront of his mind, even though Admiral Lord Collingwood had, strictly speaking, dismissed him by that stage of their conversation in the huge graving dock at Portsmouth; Alex had stood his ground, taken his courage in his hands and respectfully asked the great man what exactly he had in mind for him.
The C-in-C Atlantic Fleet had thought about it, probably contemplated keeping him on tenterhooks but then, with a mildly amused, harrumphing sigh, gestured for him to walk with him as he continued his inspection of the wounded Ulysses.
‘Yes,’ Admiral Collingwood had grimaced. ‘Fair enough…’
The second most senior flag officer on the Navy List had confided to Alex how he meant to give the Spanish a ‘really sharp kick in the backside at the earliest opportunity’ within the month. Longer-term, with ships drawn from the Pacific Fleet and the Squadron already based at Vancouver, he planned to definitively tip the strategic balance before the end of the year.