‘I say, Kelly! How ripping! A medal before you’re even a sub-lieutenant!
Kelly shrugged, trying to look unconcerned. ‘It’s only a tidgy one,’ he said. ‘Nobody in Huguenot seems very impressed.’
If the reaction of his own messmates in the gunroom had varied from the frank incredulity of Kimister to the disgusted cynicism of Verschoyle, however, there was no doubting the genuine enthusiasm of Charlotte Upfold. Her eyes shone and her excitement was intense. Even her elder sister, Mabel, absorbed as she was with parties, hair styles, dresses and the attentions of the young Guards subalterns who were forever on the doorstep, found time to congratulate him.
‘Tell me again!’ Charley said, bouncing up and down on the settee in her eagerness. ‘Tell me what you did!’
Kelly grinned. ‘I knocked the admiral on his backside.’
‘I say!’ Charley’s large blue eyes opened wide. ‘What did they do to you?’
‘Ordered me six of the best, watch and watch about until both the boat and the ladder were repaired, and stopped my shore leave for seven years. But the surgeon persuaded the captain to cut the punishment, and the seven years’ stoppage came to an end because they found I was using it to dodge compulsory cross-country runs ashore.’
Charley drew the deep satisfied breath of an everlasting admirer. ‘It was jolly brave of you,’ she said. ‘I think it’s absolutely spiffing. When will you be able to wear it?’
‘You don’t wear medals. They clank too much and put the admiral off. You wear a bit of ribbon. You ought to know that.’
‘I thought it might be different in the Navy. All our lot are Army. Can I sew it on for you?’
‘I didn’t know you could sew.’
Charley blushed, ‘Well, I can’t. My stitches look as though they were intended for a horse blanket. But I’d be very careful.’ She looked daring, ‘I think we ought to wet its head, don’t you?’
‘What with?’
‘We could have a go at the sherry wine.’
‘What’ll your father say?’
‘He’s with mother at the theatre. But if he knew I think he’d agree.’
Kelly didn’t argue. While the sherry at Balmero House, the home of the Maguires, was always the cheapest possible brand, it was well known that General Upfold kept a good cellar. It was proving profitable being at Greenwich for his examinations, because he was often hungry and had to meet his mess bills and all his expenses out of a mere pittance. Only the occasional postal orders from elderly aunts and the generosity of an Indian prince who was on the same course and could always be openly and unashamedly wangled into providing a dinner ashore made a break in the habit of constant retrenchment, and it was useful to have the Upfolds’ town house at 17, Bessborough Terrace as a pied-à-terre.
Charley poured out two glasses and offered him one. ‘I think it’s absolutely terrific,’ she said. ‘I shall tell all my friends about it.’
‘It’s only a teeny little thing really,’ Kelly insisted. ‘And in any case I got six of the best afterwards. They call me Six-of-the-Best Maguire now. I’m jolly lucky really, ain’t I? If that chap Rumbelo hadn’t decided to use that moment to fall in the sea, all I’d have got would have been a reprimand. As it happened, I didn’t really get a reprimand and I did get a medal.’
Charley gazed at him with shining eyes. From the first day she could remember she had adored Kelly. Notwithstanding his red hair and blunt homely features, to Charley he had always been a Burne-Jones knight in shining armour and she’d never had much difficulty understanding the appeal of people like Sir Galahad and other leftovers from Victorian emotionalism. Yet there was no sentiment about her regard. It was factual, straightforward and no-nonsense. She could think of no better future than to grow into an adult and marry him.
‘Will it make any difference to you?’ she asked.
‘In what way?’
‘Promotion, of course.’
‘Shouldn’t think so. People are always jumping into the sea to pull people out.’
Charley emptied her glass at a gulp and gazed at him with shining eyes. Her cheeks were faintly flushed and there was a strand of dark hair that fell across her nose which she kept having to blow away. Even to Kelly, occupied with the stern business of approaching manhood, it was obvious she was going to be a beauty – and a sight more intelligent than Mabel for all her airs and graces.
She began to refill his glass and he gestured. ‘Steady on with the sherry, old thing. You shouldn’t really gulp it down like that, you know.’
She giggled at him. ‘I know. But today I feel like it. Drink it up and we’ll have another.’
‘No fear. I’ve got to sit my exams tomorrow and I’ll need a clear head.’
‘Another one won’t do us any harm.’
Kelly took the decanter from her and put it firmly back on the sideboard. After a glass and a half she was already looking bright-eyed and not quite under control.
‘Perhaps not me,’ he said importantly. ‘I’m a bit older and more used to the stuff. But you’re still a kid. You’ve got to be careful. Your mother’ll throw me out of the house if she comes home and finds her youngest lying under the table blotto.’
As it happened, Mrs Upfold was none too pleased, anyway. She had long since decided that the impoverished son of an impoverished father was not the best bet in the land for one of her daughters. Even the medal for saving life at sea didn’t change things much. It just showed how impulsive Kelly was, and Mrs Upfold liked steady men like her husband who had advanced from subaltern to brigadier-general without ever really putting his neck at risk, even in the recent vulgar scuffle with the Boers.
Since Kelly was there, however, there was nothing she could do but invite him to stay the night and give him supper, and they were joined by Mabel and her latest admirer, a lieutenant in the Fifth Dragoon Guards whom Kelly considered must look a little like his own horse.
Charley waded in at once. ‘Kelly’s just won a medal,’ she announced. ‘He saved a sailor’s life.’
‘Oh?’ The dragoon seemed to consider winning a medal a little like being involved in a rough-house.
Supper could hardly be called riotous with Mrs Upfold sitting at her end of the table disapproving of the cavalryman for not showing enough attention to her elder daughter and of Kelly for showing too much to her younger.
‘When will you be going to sea again?’ She asked pointedly.
‘As soon as I’m through my examinations Mrs Upfold. When I’ve got them – if I get them – I’ll be a sub-lieutenant and then I’ll be posted to a ship again.’
‘What sort of ship do you want?’ Mabel asked, her shoulder’s gleaming in the candlelight, a tantalising glimpse of her bosom presenting itself as she leaned forward.
‘Dreadnoughts, shouldn’t wonder,’ the dragoon said. ‘Under the admiral’s nose.’
‘Not for me,’ Kelly said. ‘I want destroyers. Perhaps even submarines.’
‘Sneaky things, submarines.’ General Upfold sat up with a jerk. ‘Bit like hitting a man when he’s not looking.’
Kelly thought he was joking. ‘Well, that’s a good way to fight war, isn’t it, sir?’ he said cheerfully. ‘Saves getting hurt.’
General Upfold’s face tightened and Kelly realised to his amazement that he had meant every word he’d said.
‘Didn’t fight that way in South Africa,’ he snorted.
Kelly stared at him. Perhaps the army was as out-of-date in thinking as the Navy, he decided. The little he could recall of the Boer War consisted chiefly of battles lost by mid-Victorian tactics and thousands of men dead of disease caused by indifference and lack of knowledge. He looked quickly at Charley and as she gazed back at him, troubled, her loyalties divided but nevertheless firm, he swallowed and gathered his courage.
‘Perhaps that’s why it took us so long to win,’ he said brusquely. ‘After all, that’s what the Boers did to us, and they seem to have been jolly good at it, too.’
There was a frozen silence. Clearly, in the Upfold household one didn’t recommend wars where men didn’t stand up to each other face to face like gentlemen.
‘After all,’ Kelly went on, aware that he was making things worse but perversely enjoying his defiance, ‘that nonsense they went in for at Fontenoy’s a bit out-dated these days.’
‘What nonsense was that?’ Mrs Upfold asked.
‘The French saying to the English, “You fire first,” and the English saying, “No, thanks, you.” If I’d been the English general I’d have said “Thanks very much” and let go with everything I’d got. That’s how things’ll be when the war comes.’
‘Wasn’t aware war was coming,’ the dragoon said, and Kelly decided he not only looked like a horse but probably also thought like one because there’d been a smell of war in the air ever since the Agadir crisis just after the Coronation Review, when the Germans had faced the French with their teeth snapping and their sabres rattling in their scabbards. If the noise hadn’t reached the Horse Guards, it had certainly reached the Admiralty and had passed through every ship in the fleet. Every midshipman and snot-nosed ship’s boy knew that the Kaiser resented the size of the Royal Navy and wanted one equally large.
‘It’s bound to come sooner or later,’ he said. ‘The Germans are getting far too big for their boots, and the Kaiser’s half-wit enough to go off at half-cock. I’ll bet Jacky Fisher thinks it’s coming. That’s why he’s been building bigger ships than everybody else.’
He looked about him, sure of support this time. After all everybody quoted Fisher – even the most junior midshipman who considered it made him sound modern, up-to-date and go-ahead. But Fisher’s pronouncement that the Navy was a drowsy, inefficient, moth-eaten organisation filled with splendid seamen but not many men of vision had split the fleet into two camps – the ‘Fishpond’ versus the Rest – and so it seemed, the whole of London, so that Kelly’s enthusiasm wasn’t reflected in the faces of the others.
‘Man’s a menace,’ General Upfold said. ‘Looks like a Chinee. Perhaps even got a touch of the tarbrush in him. Don’t know how he got the Admiralty.’
‘I heard,’ Mrs Upfold said firmly, ‘that there’s something very odd about him. Mad on dancing, they say.’
‘Well–’ Kelly grinned ‘–they do say the midshipmen of the Mediterranean Fleet used to get a bit annoyed when he pinched their girls – and even more when they found the girls actually enjoyed dancing with him.’
‘Sounds like some rather unpleasant parvenu,’ Mrs Upfold decided.
‘It’ll be a land war anyway,’ General Upfold said. ‘The Germans would never accept battle at sea. Never risk it. Not with our navy.’
Mrs Upfold sniffed. ‘I don’t think there’ll be a war at all,’ she said. ‘War’s grown far too serious these days for anyone to take the risk.’
‘What if some bright spark starts something in the Balkans, Mrs Upfold?’ Kelly leaned forward eagerly. ‘Between Austria and Serbia, say. Russia would have to go to the help of the Serbs because she has an agreement to look after Slav interests, and then Germany would come in because she’s got a treaty with Austria. Then France would have to come in because she’s got a treaty with Russia, then England–’
Mrs Upfold stared at him. Clearly she considered him a troublemaker. ‘You seem to know a great deal about European politics, Mr Maguire.’
Kelly shrugged. A few days before, with the joyous indifference of youth, he hadn’t known a damn thing about them, but with the possibility of war looming on the horizon, the instructor at Greenwich had seen fit to include in the curriculum a short discourse on international affairs and he’d suddenly become aware of what was going on in the world around him.
Mrs Upfold had clearly decided that the discussion had been going on too long, and she put down her napkin and brought it to an end like a conductor bringing his baton down for the last firm beat. ‘I don’t think England would come in,’ she said and began to rise, as if certain that no government would ever dare defy her.
They all trailed weakly after her and, over coffee, Kelly sat on one side with Charley, conscious that he’d probably put his foot in it and done himself a lot of no good in the matter of free meals. Charley squeezed his hand. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘Truly it doesn’t. I’m sure you’re right.’
It seemed a good idea to go to bed early and Charley went too. Outside his bedroom door, she stopped, close to him, her face raised to his.
‘Don’t worry about them, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I shan’t take any notice of them when we get married.’
‘Marry a sailor, marry trouble,’ Kelly said.
She looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Mother thinks you’re not good enough.’
Kelly grinned. ‘She’s probably right.’
Charley’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, no, Kelly! Not for a minute.’
‘Did you tell them we were going to get married?’
‘But of course!’ That possibility to Charley was as natural as breathing. Getting married to Kelly was as inevitable to her as the sun coming up the following day.
Kelly pulled a face. ‘No wonder they weren’t very friendly. I expect they think I’m getting you in dark corners. At your age, no mother’s going to welcome that.’
There was an awkward pause. Charley was standing very close to him and he could smell the perfume she’d been allowed to put on for the occasion. She’d also been permitted to put her hair up and looked surprisingly grown-up with the white column of her neck rising from the ruched frill round the top of her dress. He knew she was itching to fling her arms round him. It was something she’d never done before, though they’d often exchanged friendly kisses of greeting or goodbye, and he felt that perhaps the perfume had gone to her head.
As her hands fluttered and she gazed at him, her face close to his, he thought of all the free meals he was jeopardising.
Her body sagged with disappointment as he didn’t clutch her to him. There seemed a faint odour of treachery about his indifference. Their previous kisses at parties had always been with someone else looking on and, with her hair carefully arranged by Mabel and the perfume she had lathered on until its scent seemed overpowering, she had hoped he might be overwhelmed.
‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded unhappily.
‘Nothing,’ he said briskly as he opened his door. ‘It’s just that it’s getting late.’
The examinations were taken in sub-zero temperatures and Kelly was so cold he sat them wearing a greatcoat in the pockets of which he secreted ginger beer bottles full of hot water. Despite what he’d said at the Upfolds, he had no real fear of failing. He’d had his head crammed with mathematics, applied mechanics, physics, chemistry, nautical astronomy and navigation, surveying, meteorology, naval architecture and foreign languages, and behind all that was the stolid and steady work of years, watch keeping and the hard facts he’d learned about gunnery and torpedoes. Even the boatwork with cutters and picket boats with seamen twice his age who’d nursed him from the day he’d first appeared, sometimes even finding cocoa for him, or fried bread and eggs when he was at his hungriest, their faces always bland and uninformative. ‘Well, you know that canteen stuff we took aboard, sir. One of the crates was a bit damaged so we got an egg or two for nothing.’
While he waited for the results, he wrote to Their Lordships of the Admiralty, suggesting that he might be considered for the submarine service. As a sub-lieutenant on five shillings a day it was going to be hard to make ends meet and the extra few shillings he would get as a submariner were a big inducement. The only thing he didn’t want was a battle cruiser, and a request for submarines, even if it didn’t bring a posting, might at least convince Their Lordships that he had a preference for small craft.
He had no sooner been confirmed as a sub-lieutenant, however, than he was informed that there was no lack of volunteers for the submarine service and he had, therefore, been posted instead to HMS Clarendon, part of the Second Cruiser Squadron. Since some sort of celebration seemed to be called for, he borrowed a couple of pounds and took Charley out to lunch at the cheapest place he could find. She turned up wearing half of Mabel’s finery and looking such a sight in high-heeled shoes, large hat, make-up and too many beads he felt vaguely ashamed of her.
It wasn’t the happiest of meals, with Charley trying not very successfully to be grown-up and Kelly trying not to be big brotherly. Afterwards, outside the restaurant, he put her into a taxi and was startled to see her begin to take off her make-up, hat and beads, miserably aware that her ploy to overcome Kelly with the charm and sophistication of an older woman had somehow not come off. She had wanted with all her heart for him to be enraptured at the sight of her and she was very conscious that not only was he not very impressed, he probably even actively disapproved.
‘Mother will kill me if she sees me in this lot,’ she said gloomily. ‘She doesn’t like me trying to look older than I am.’
Aware that she was hurt, he tried to put things right. ‘I don’t know that I do either,’ he said. ‘You’re much nicer as Charley than as Charlotte.’
She gave him a grateful look but, realising he was being charged waiting time for the taxi and that the driver was looking at his watch, Kelly kissed her hurriedly. She tried to cling to him, her mouth following his eagerly as he backed away and turned to the driver. ‘Bessborough Terrace,’ he said. ‘I’d like to pay now. How much?’
‘With the waiting time, sir, that’ll be two bob.’
‘Two bob?’ Kelly’s jaw dropped. He had to join his ship at Chatham and he had a long way to go on the three shillings he had left. Despite the fact that he’d chosen the cheapest wine and eaten the cheapest dish on the menu, his calculations had not been careful enough.
The driver grinned. ‘That too much, sir?’
‘No.’ Kelly’s pride was touched. ‘No, that’s all right.’
‘Make it one and nine, sir. I’ll see the young lady home safe.’
Blurting his thanks, Kelly handed over the money and closed the door, and the cab drew away with Charley gazing at him with lost eyes through the rear window. Staring after her for a second, Kelly drew a deep breath and headed for the station where he’d left his luggage, aware that he had barely enough for a tip to the porter.
Within two days, he found himself heading with the squadron for Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a cruise to show the flag in Canadian and American ports. The crossing of the Atlantic was made in a full gale, with the ship battened down and everything below deck swimming in water. Clothing hung at odd angles from the bulkheads as it swung in jerky arcs to the corkscrewing of the ship, and the atmosphere was so damp the deckheads ran with moisture and the seamen’s messes were awash with grey suds that sluiced wet clothing and mess traps about the decks.
The greater moments included a dash up the Hudson in close line ahead at seventeen knots which, while it was a fine sight, was a little unnerving to the ferries and small craft that scuttled for their lives from the sharp steel bows. There was also the ruination of a dance they gave in New York when fifteen degrees of frost so froze the hearts of the American heiresses they’d hoped to attract, they remained quite impervious to the charms of Clarendon’s impecunious officers.
New York was kind to them, however; almost too kind, because when the New Yorkers took them to their homes, Kelly found himself adopted by the over-eager daughter of a well-heeled businesswoman who, twice divorced, left them alone in her apartment while she went about her own affairs. Finding himself fighting off the girl across a vast bed in the early hours of the morning, he decided it wasn’t worth trying to remain a virgin.
As he woke the next morning, dazzled and a little startled by what had happened, and unable to avoid a feeling that was arrogant, bold and self-satisfied all at the same time, the girl appeared in the doorway, holding his shoes and a bottle of beer. ‘Only trouble with this, I guess,’ she said with a grin, ‘it gives you such a thirst. Better push off now because if Mother finds out she’ll start the War of Independence all over again.’
Back in England, feeling himself weather-beaten – if not as a seaman, at least as a lover – he realised that his Irish accent had almost gone and that in its place the indefinable but undeniable signs of a seafaring life that were common to all sailors were already beginning to show. For three weeks, he had written almost daily to the girl in New York, but love affairs for sub-lieutenants were pretty deathless affairs, full of adoration, broken hearts and sudden partings, with a new girl and a new broken heart in every port. At the end of it he had found he couldn’t even remember what she looked like and he began now to make plans to use his leave to visit Ireland. He was looking forward, if not to seeing his parents, at least to seeing Charley. She had never failed to write to him even when his own family had found other business more pressing, and he was feeling a strange sort of elation at the thought that she would be sixteen now, a mature young lady and, surely to God, too old to be watched day and night by her mother. Kimister, who had always known of his affection for her and had been in love with her himself since he’d met her as a cadet at Dartmouth, called it romantic. Verschoyle called it cradle-snatching. But Kimister was somewhere in the north of England now, with Verschoyle, in destroyers, something that had become a sore point with Kelly since Verschoyle had wanted a battleship and Kimister had never been sure what he wanted.
As he was brooding on it, a head appeared round the wardroom door. It was the navigator, a breezy young man called Fanshawe who was built like a house-side and had once played rugby for England. ‘Hope you’ve not made any plans, Maguire,’ he said.
Kelly turned. ‘Why not?’
‘Leave’s cancelled. Everything’s changed. We’re going to Kiel as part of a banzai party for the German naval review. You’d better survey your uniform, and if you can afford it buy full dress and a ball gown. I’ve got the order here – “Whilst in German waters, uniform will be worn ashore; for the purposes of sport, flannels will be permitted, but it is hoped that officers will see that the latter are of an immaculate nature.”’
They sailed for Kiel in a dense fog. Off the Jutland coast they had a harmless and entertaining dodging match with a group of German fishing smacks and that afternoon rehearsed cheering ship for when the Kaiser appeared. Rounding the Skaw, at the northern tip of Denmark, they made passage for the Belt and arrived at the northern limit of Kiel Bay at dusk two days later.
Kelly was on watch as they anchored and Fanshawe indicated the sky. ‘Believe in omens?’ he asked.
Above their heads was a cloud – shaped like a snake, its head erect and about to strike.
‘Looking directly towards England,’ Fanshawe pointed out, and as he spoke the sun set, tingeing the cloud with red.
‘And that,’ he added portentously, ‘is probably blood.’
The stay in Kiel was a round of official receptions, banquets and dances, with visits from German officers stiff as ramrods who could not understand that in the British Navy men off duty did not behave to each other in the wardroom as they did on the quarter deck. For the official functions, Clarendon’s officers had almost to live in full dress, a costume not designed for modern life, especially in summer, and while the talk was all the time of peace, always in the background there was the knowledge that war might be near.
The whole of German society seemed to be in Kiel in a kaleidoscope of ships and yachts, and eventually the Kaiser himself appeared through the canal, the bows of his yacht, Hohenzollern, breaking the silk ribbons across the entrance to the new locks.
‘Well,’ Fanshawe said thoughtfully as they watched, ‘with the new locks and the bends in the canal widened, their largest dreadnoughts can now pass directly into the North Sea. If that doesn’t make the Kaiser more cocky than he is now, nothing will.’
As the assembled ships’ companies cheered mechanically, the Kaiser stood at the salute in admiral’s uniform on a stage built over the yacht’s upper bridge, his withered arm carefully hidden. Fanshawe’s nose wrinkled.
‘Bloody poseur,’ he commented.
The imperial yacht was followed by every kind of craft possible, from racing-eights to pleasure steamers, and one boat was swamped and a few loyal Germans drowned before Hohenzollern came to anchor, to be surrounded immediately by police boats to keep the enthusiasm at bay.
‘We do it much better at Spithead,’ Fanshawe said with lofty disapproval.
There were night clubs ashore and willing girls of Russian and Austrian nationality who caused Kelly’s loyalty to Charley to slip a little and the increasingly fragile memory of the girl in New York to disappear like a puff of smoke. Sports were also held for the sailors and it was noticeable that the British were defeated at almost everything, much to the disgust of the lower deck.
‘The bastards had preliminary contests before we arrived,’ the Master-at-Arms told Kelly. ‘Their teams are the pick of thirty thousand men.’
German orchestras played for them and they learned German patriotic songs like ‘Was Blasen die Trompeten?’ and ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and were told that there couldn’t possibly be any war between their nations, because ethnically they were almost brothers and it was only the dirty French who were the troublemakers. To seal the friendship, the German submarine depot gave a dance, a very private dance, it was explained, where everyone would be in mess undress, and the Kaiser’s severe displeasure was being risked because they were going to dance ragtime and be allowed to sit out, without chaperones, in the rose garden of a café chantant which had been taken over for the evening.
By this time, with a dinner and a ball ashore almost every evening, Kelly’s eyes were hanging out on his cheeks and he had been looking forward to sleep. But this seemed to be a chance worth taking and those German girls who wore French-cut clothes were very attractive. Among them was a willowy countess from Mainz who went by the nickname of the Ice Maiden, because of her striking beauty, pale skin, blue eyes and white-blonde hair. She had a reputation for frigidness, it seemed, and with the experience of New York behind him and a few sparkling Moselles inside to work up a mood of over-confidence, Kelly set out to destroy it. The result startled him. Within an hour, he had left the café chantant and was alone with her at a night club where they consumed enormous quantities of caviar and champagne cup called bola, Kelly nagged all the time by a guilty feeling that he wasn’t playing fair with Charley.
That the Ice Maiden wasn’t as frigid as her reputation was proved beyond doubt when he found himself outside her apartment as dawn was breaking. Without a word, she pulled him inside, and was throwing her clothes across the room and reaching with her lips for his mouth and with long cool fingers for his shirt even before he’d managed to slam the door behind them. All his life, Kelly had worked on the principle that you could touch anything anywhere on a girl that was not covered with clothing but that the rest was verboten; but since New York all the rules had gone by the board, and shedding clothes right and left, he grabbed her hand and ran for the bedroom.
Two hours later, shakily aware how little he knew about sex, he was anxiously wondering what the next erotic item in the programme would be, when she started up with a yelp, clutching the sheet to her ample bosom.
‘My husband,’ she shrieked. ‘He returns this morning from Brussels!’
Kelly had just made his escape to the end of the street when he saw a cab appear at the other end and draw up at the apartment block, and he returned thankfully to the ship ready to foreswear all official functions for the rest of the visit.
‘Good time?’ Fanshawe asked blandly as they sipped coffee in the mess.
‘Too good.’
‘Wonder what it is about you.’ Fanshawe eyed Kelly curiously. ‘Only got to blink those long red lashes of yours and they fall in droves at your feet. What’s the technique?’
‘No technique,’ Kelly said. ‘Just enthusiasm. Seafaring’s no profession for a man who believes in personal chastity.’
Fanshawe pulled a face. ‘Well, it’s true one’s away from women so long at times one feels like a wolf howling at the moon. But be careful, young Maguire. Seamen are notoriously sentimental. Every ship has its quota of three-badge men and elderly officers who ought to know better, who’ve been caught by some cheap little tart for no other reason than that they’ve been too long nourishing sentimental dreams at sea in the long nights and fallen for the first woman who crossed their bows.
Feigning a stomach disorder, Kelly remained on board for the next twenty-four hours, but when a note appeared for him from the Ice Maiden to say that her husband had gone on to Berlin and that she planned to appear at a tea dance the following afternoon, he threw caution to the winds, and set off full of excitement, wondering what the evening might hold.
As it happened, it held nothing. He had barely got his arms round her when a German dressed in some sort of official uniform appeared and a moment later the manager climbed on to the rostrum, stopped the band and made an announcement in German. His face was grave and immediately the Germans started whispering among themselves.
‘What’s he say?’
Fanshawe translated. ‘The Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s been assassinated in Sarajevo,’ he announced.
‘Who’s the Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he’s at home? where the hell’s Sarajevo?’
‘The Archduke was the heir to the Austrian throne and Sarajevo’s in Serbia.’
‘What does that mean?’
Fanshawe shrugged. ‘It means war, old boy. I was talking to the navigator of Hohenzollern last night – chap called Erich Raeder – and he said the Germans were scared stiff of an unexpected incident like this setting off a war between us. This time it’s not like Agadir.’
Kelly frowned. At the time of Agadir, he’d been concerned only with keeping his nose clean to avoid the attentions of the sub-lieutenant of the gunroom, but even so he’d been well aware of the intensity of the crisis. The Germans had sent a gunboat to protect their interests in French North Africa and all the alarm bells in Europe had started to quiver. The crisis, had been defused in the end but it had been a clear pointer to German attitudes and the deep and violent passions of resentment coursing beneath the glittering uniforms that thronged the Kaiser’s palaces.
The dancing had stopped and people were reaching for their coats.
‘You will have to return to your ship,’ the Ice Maiden said, and he saw that her face looked bleak and worried.
‘Surely there isn’t that much hurry?’
She sighed. ‘I think you will find there is,’ she said. ‘This is a black day for Germany. The Archduke represented German influence in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Emperor had even promised him recognition for his morganatic wife. All the work of fifteen years is gone.’