Джеймс Филип - Travels Through the Wind

His wife, Eugenia, a niece of the Emperor was, like that oddly unworldly man in the modern Royal Alcazar of Madrid, pious to a fault and had remained, presumably, blissfully unaware of her husband’s amorous adventures in the Americas. Axiomatically, that lady had not accompanied Alonzo’s party to attend the Festival of the Vine.

Melody Danson had never met the Duke of Medina Sidonia in New England; nor had she ever swallowed the idea that Old Spain’s man in Philadelphia was a congenial, somewhat dim-witted nobleman. So, whereas, Henrietta had been positively speechless, and then a little angry when she encountered the ‘real’ Alonso Pérez de Guzmán in Madrid last autumn, Melody had very nearly allowed the dashing, marvellously well-read and informed nobleman to charm her knickers off the first night they had met. She had not, of course: allowed him to bed her that night although in retrospect, it had been a ‘close run thing’, as one famous admiral of the Great War had observed viewing the carnage all around him after the British Fleet had bloodily forced the Skagerrak.

In Madrid every wall had ears; little went unnoticed, unremarked and the gossip mill was brutal. It was an archaic city in a country which had never emerged from its glorious, lost past, and women were expected to conform to a rigid straightjacket of conventions that no self-respecting woman anywhere in the British Empire would put up with for a single minute.

That said, she had always known that Alonso was the sort of man who treated one rebuff as grist to the mill, and that there would surely be a second attempted seduction, probably sooner rather than later. It was that delicious thought which had, without being crass, done a lot to keep the smile on her face in recent weeks. Obviously, she was a little guilty about that; Henrietta was very precious to her and, she suspected, despite her friend’s brave face, always being under scrutiny, spied upon had been an even greater trial for her. Especially lately, as their time in Spain drew to a conclusion.

Servants materialised out of the shadows and the aromatic red wine of the district was poured into exquisitely fluted crystal glasses.

“This little one is produced with grapes from my family’s own vineyards,” Alonso remarked with no little pride, raising his glass.

Melody Danson sipped and exchanged a glance with Henrietta De L’Isle.

Sir John Tremayne, KCB, the British co-chairman of the Joint Commission of Inquiry, an urbane career diplomat-spy who was something very senior in the Foreign and Colonial Office’s Intelligence Service, had sternly abjured both women to be ‘on their guard every minute of every day’ they were in Chinchón.

He had not been amused when Melody had informed◦– as opposed to reported◦– to him that she and Henrietta had accepted an invitation to stay at the Hacienda de los Conquistadores for ten days immediately before they were scheduled to begin their overland journey to Portugal where, at Lisbon, they were due to catch an Empire Flying Boat back to Southampton on the 23rd March. Hopefully, they would not be detained overlong in London, or wherever they were to be debriefed, and they would be back in New England for the spring, a prospect which hugely bolstered both women’s spirits much to Sir John Tremayne’s irritation.

‘Medina Sidonia is a slippery fish!’ He had observed. “Dammit, by the time you go home the whole Royal Court will assume that either, more likely, both of you, are the bloody man’s mistresses!”

‘Perhaps,’ Melody had suggested, ‘if one, or both of us was Alonso’s mistress, it might not actually be a bad idea? Pillow talk, and all that?”

The old man had been horrified but then for somebody who was supposed to be an arch professional in the dark arts of international intrigue he had seemed, from the outset, to Melody at least, to be rather a ‘choir boy’.

She and Henrietta had been painstakingly discreet about their ‘friendship’ back in England and even more so, here in Spain but Melody guessed that Alonso had seen through their act practically from the beginning in exactly the way she had seen through him the day they met.

Melody looked to their host, smiling thinly as she met his gaze and saw the question quirking in his eyes.

“Did you bring us out here to blackmail us, Alonso?” She inquired in casually accented precise Castilian.

The man raised an eyebrow, thought about it.

“Where would be the profit in that, dear lady?”

Melody waited, some sixth sense telling her that she had read the runes correctly. Thus far, the mission to supposedly unravel the conspiracy◦– allegedly fomented by extremists on the Island of Santo Domingo◦– to murder the King of England and to ‘set the First Thirteen’ colonies ablaze from end to end had got precisely nowhere. The Intelligence Service of New Spain, the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España had obfuscated and basically, offered no meaningful co-operation whatsoever to the Commission’s inquiries, appeals to the Royal Court had been politely deflected and the various organs of the Inquisition based in the Iberian Peninsula had refused point blank to engage with the ‘heretics’, other than to have the ‘British’ members of the Commission of Inquiry followed wherever they went.

But then the mission had not been sent to Spain to find out what was, or might be going on◦– the only people who knew that were probably in Cuba or Santo Domingo◦– but to make it look as if something was being done because both sides were still of the view that tempers in New England needed to be kept in check, and that nobody in their right mind in Europe actually wanted to give those idiots in the Caribbean an excuse to start a new war.

Melody took another sip of her wine.

It was smooth, seductive like the man sitting between her and Henrietta on the veranda above the lights of the picturesque old town hidden away in the hills.

Back in Philadelphia Alonso had tended to make a be-line for the Governor’s daughter whenever he spied her at an official reception. They had become friends of a sort; nowadays, Henrietta mistrusted the man, feeling rightly that he had in some way been using her.

“I don’t know,” Melody confessed, allowing herself a coy smile. “Sooner or later our governments are going to decide that ‘the Commission’ has served its purpose, an anodyne report will get written and promptly buried, and we’ll be back at square one again. So, the next thing might, logically, be for each side to start discrediting the messengers rather than the bad actors who are actually responsible for the mess we’re in?”

The man pursed his lips.

“Just so,” he sighed. “But that is not why I invited you to Chinchón. Yes, I freely admit that seduction is never far from my mind, especially in the company of two such intelligent, beautiful women,” he raised a hand in self-deprecatory acknowledgement, ‘the spirit is one thing, the flesh is weak and as our noble inquisitors remind us temptation is always nearer than we care to imagine. Nevertheless, my motives were, and are, as political as they were personal. Yes, this ‘process’ will soon fail. Yes, we will soon be back at square one, regrettably with daggers drawn again. However, while there is very little that we can do about that at present, there is always hope when one knows that one has friends in the enemy camp.”

Henrietta De L’Isle opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it.

“You see,” the man continued, wryly sad for a moment, “the lesson of history is that wars start because people stop talking to each other. Oh, they talk but not to each other, but at each other. It is only when the shooting starts that people usually start talking to each other again and by then it is usually too late. I fear for my country if there is a war with the British Empire. Mostly, I fear for New England and Nuevo Granada; no matter how imperfect the peace in the border lands of the American south west, it will surely be the crucible of the coming war. If the Emperor could give away Cuba and Santo Domingo now, he would.” He shook his head. “Anguilla, too,” he added laconically, “and all those other stupid little islands that spawn so many infernal plots and coups in the Caribbean and back here in Morocco and on the mainland.”