God's Crusade

Part Three

"So...really...his major qualification for the post is that he is still shagging the Republican Presidential candidate?" Alistair Forbes chuckled as he tossed the rather thick file back onto his already cluttered desk, amused by the details. "I should meet him...he may be able to give me some tips!"

"Sir James Middleton is a talented ambassador, and by sending him to Washington we may be making Sharon Rosen a very happy woman, which could be no bad thing if her star continues to rise." Quentin Robinson-Smythe replied, not at all offended that his decisions were being questioned by the Director of Communications, even in jest. He well knew that Forbes was Buckingham's personal minder, the big beast who dispensed discipline and even the occasional little reward to oil the ever-turning wheels of government. He had been deftly sniffing around everything and everyone for thirteen long years and the Foreign Secretary was quite accustomed to his style. "It is a relationship that has already shed some light on a few little problems...it makes sense to exploit it whilst we can, Alistair?"

"Oh fuck, yes, of course, I am not doubting that...but there are two potential embarrassments here. One, he gets caught with his pin-striped trousers down inside the White House, which involves breaking several laws for a British citizen, as I know you know...and two, his fucking daughter turns into the student from hell...have you told him to sort that? I don't want to see pictures of her partying across Europe in our papers?"

"Yes, I have raised the issue...he assures me it will not be a problem...and Rosen is actually extremely...oh let's just say I don't think we have to worry on that score."

۩

July 2033

Mena stood in the queue for the Swissair check-in desk feeling slightly surprised. She had thought that she would stand out in the busy, crowded airport terminal like some sort of freak as she still wore her school uniform, although thankfully minus the armoured linen of her tablier. Ankle length skirt, black woollen stockings, thigh length tunic with its high neck and cuffed sleeves, and all parts covered by the drapery of her heavy cloak had to be the perfect recipe for everyone to stare at her. Or so she had thought. But standing directly in front of her was an elegant lady swathed in dark brown velvet, a matching coal-scuttle bonnet hiding her head, her mantle drawn across her face so that only her downcast eyes were visible through a thin covering of lace. Her floor length cape was buttoned about her, preventing Mena from seeing if she wore mittens. But she knew that the odds were that she definitely did and that she was also wearing a muzzle behind her mantle. The poor woman did not look like she was acting the part of a pious Reformist lady so Mena had to assume she had gone the whole hog for other reasons. The man standing by her side, presumably her husband or father, had just adjusted the mantle as it had been lowered for identity purposes at the first security check to be compared with her passport.

Nearer the desk were two girls, not veiled but wearing heavy dresses whose voluminous skirts swept the floor around and about them. They wore matching bonnets, and gloves with their wrists tucked away inside their buttoned cuffs. Their open capes were slightly shorter than that of the women standing directly in front of Mena. When they turned to look up at the Departures Board above them, Mena saw their pale white faces for the first time. Clearly twins, they could not have been more than fourteen years old or thereabouts, yet apart from wearing no mantles, they were as heavily and comprehensively covered as the adult lady in dark brown. Not maidens yet, Mena told herself, reminding herself that the normal age was sixteen, although the technical end of childhood was the onset of puberty.

Two more veiled and bonneted women joined the queue behind Mena and, by pretending to be looking for her father, she soon realised that they must be a seriously pious Reformist lady and her guardian, essentially her servant but rather more like a nanny as far as Mena could work out from the internet. For one woman, the taller of the two, was dressed in a smart full length dress and cape but they and her bonnet and mantle were not of velvet. Wearing gloves and holding tickets and passports in one hand, it was obvious that she had to be the guardian and the shorter figure was equally obviously her charge, as she was weighed down with dark green velvet from the top of her forward projecting bonnet to the hem of her impossibly wide skirts.