The older man nodded again.
“I think we have come to a place of death, gentlemen.”
Rodrigo let this sink in.
“In the coming days we will survey the rest of the plateau. Then we will return to the south.” He straightened to his full height. It would be dusk soon, it had been a long, hard day in the saddle and his people needed to set up camp, heat their rations and sleep if they could in the cold of the desert night. “Let us get about making camp. We will move out one hour before dawn tomorrow morning!”
Rodrigo watched his men going about their work.
Presently, he realised that the student who had spoken lingered at his side.
“Is that what this is, Don Rodrigo?” He asked, grimly. “Our wars with the English, I mean? Some latter-day version of the Punic Wars?”
Rodrigo smiled thinly.
The boy was related to that notorious Imperial playboy, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. His father was that popinjay Pérez de Guzmán’s first cousin. Hopefully, if the rumours about some kind of popular rebellion in the old country were true, people like him had been the first up against the wall and shot! Allegedly, young Carlos, a handsome young man, closely resembled the younger 18th Duke at his age.
“I think you know what this is, Carlos,” he said lowly, waving a hand at the twisted, heat-deformed stump of the tower less than thirty feet away.
The boy was reading Geology and Roman History, the former an obsession and the latter his ‘hobby’, he was an exceptionally bright kid, the sort of student who excelled at everything he touched but might as easily, stumble at the first hurdle when he departed the cloistered, insular world of academia. But that was a problem for the future.
“I don’t want to believe what I think it is, Master,” Carlos de Guzmán confessed, using Rodrigo’s formal University title in his anxiety.
His professor shrugged.
“Isn’t the lesson of history that great powers, like Rome and the English, one day lose their patience and determine to destroy their enemies? Roman history is your subject, not mine,” the older man reminded his protégé, “but didn’t Rome get so fed up with Carthage that one day it decided to destroy it so utterly that not one stone remained above another?”
“Yes,” Carlos said. He looked to his tutor; his eyes troubled. “But not even the English would destroy whole nations? Would they?”
Rodrigo did not know the answer to that question.
All that he knew was that before him, stretching away to the horizon to the north and the east were the abandoned, secret testing grounds of bombs which might, one day soon, sweep the civilisation of New Spain off the face of the Earth.
Chapter 3
Monday 24th April
Leigh Halt, Kent
His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, stepped down, shot his cuffs and turned to offer his wife his arm as she joined him on the platform of the railway station.
Normally, the 10:17 from Charing Cross would have swept on past the picturesque rural station at the village of Leigh to Tonbridge, some three miles to its east; but then normally, it only had one, not two First-Class carriages, the second of which, today, had been commandeered by the Royal Party. In the way of these things, the short journey by car to the King and Queen’s destination that morning, whether setting out from Leigh or Tonbridge, a little farther away, would have been neither here nor there. However, there would inevitably have been a lot more fuss and bother in Tonbridge, whereas, at a little-used halt in the countryside, the fiction that the ‘Royals’ were fulfilling a ‘private family’ engagement was, if not wholly convincing, then at least, plausible.
Predictably, there were a small number of gawping bystanders, eyes agog at the sight of the King and Queen being greeted by the Lord Lieutenant of Kent and the Mayor of Sevenoaks in all their regal and civic finery. Nor had the arrival of a platoon of men in the drab green of the Rifle Brigade, forming an unsmiling, albeit somewhat low-key ring of steel around the halt and hour before the 10:17 from Charing Cross had made its unscheduled stop, gone entirely unnoticed. However, in this part of the Garden of England, none of this really ruffled the tranquility of the locals, let alone impinged upon the customary routines of village life.
For the benefit of the other passengers on the train, the guard had made an announcement respectfully requesting that ‘when this service stops at Leigh Halt, would passengers be so good as to remain in their seats and to refrain from leaning out of open windows!’
By and large, most people had respected this request.
This was, after all, England.
The King, dressed in a pin-striped blue lounge suit, his head bare, and his wife, paused and waved, smiling, to the small crowd as their bodyguards guided them unhurriedly to their car and the Rolls-Royce, accompanied by several black Land Rovers drove away to the south on the road for nearby Penshurst.
In the meantime, the train had resumed its journey to Tonbridge and the Channel ports of Ramsgate and Dover.
“Now that we’re actually almost there,” Queen Eleanor murmured to her husband, for once able to sit in the back of a car without being accompanied by two or three equerries or ladies in waiting, or a government minister or local worthy, and determined to exploit the blissful privacy while she had the chance, “do you really have no idea what the Prime Minister wants to talk to us about, Bertie?”
The King had taken his wife’s hand, as he invariably did when they were, however briefly, alone in public.
He sighed.
In point of fact, his ministers had been unusually tetchy about Eleanor’s presence at this ‘audience’. This was a thing he had found a little odd; it was not as if his views on ‘one monarchy, one partnership of King and Queen’ were in any way strange. It had, after all, been the implacable mantra of his fifteen-year reign.
His wife, still strictly speaking Her Royal Highness Princess Eleanor, the Duchess of Windsor – because his father had never believed she was of sufficiently ‘high birth’ to ever be deemed otherwise – had been ‘Queen’ from the moment of his accession, regardless of whatever all that stupid, arcane protocol mandated. If it was his destiny to have become the accidental King; he was damned if he was going to attempt to bear the burden alone!
His father, the late King had passed away in May 1962 and preparations had been well in hand for the Coronation of his surviving brother Edward; until those blasted Fenians had intervened. He still missed ‘Teddy’, with whom he had always enjoyed, much to the old King’s displeasure, cordial and very amiable brotherly relations: in hindsight, probably because on his part he had never competed with, or been in any sense a threat to his elder sibling.
‘You’re a lucky beggar, Bertie!’ Teddy had said to him wistfully only a fortnight before his death. ‘You’ve got Eleanor, the Navy, and those well-adjusted, sensible boys and girls. All I’m going to end up with is the bloody Crown, which will set off my lumbago every time I put the damned thing on, a wife who can’t stand the sight of me and two siblings who can’t wait for me to shuffle off this mortal coil!’
The King still missed his life in the Royal Navy.
He had spent twenty-three happy, fulfilling years in the Service. While his three elder brothers had led unfulfilled wastrel lives readying themselves to assume, sooner or later or never at all, the full weight of the crown he, as the youngest, practically forgotten issue – his parents had been in their early forties at the time of his birth – of the house of Hanover-Gotha-Stewart, had, almost anonymously, passed through the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1941, and subsequently, been regarded with such negligible filial unction that he had been permitted to marry a woman of only middling aristocratic lineage whom he actually loved. The old King had acted as if he and Eleanor no longer existed, which had allowed them to raise their family out of the public eye leaving him free to pursue what in the end, had been a brilliant career sadly cut short by the combined familial predations of age, alcohol, accidents and eventually, the murderous activities of the Irish Republican Army on Empire Day in 1962.