God's Crusade

Part Nine

Hugh Blackstone made his rounds late. He had been up half the night operating on a series of patients and his patience was wearing thin, as always. He was not a patient man, but he was damned good at his job, which earned him the respect of his peers. He barked at several nuns, scattering them before him and making everyone nervous, but he did not care. He only cared about patient welfare, and perhaps his own family. Grabbing the notes from his new assistant, he approached the female ward, searching for a woman he wanted to fit a stent to in a few hours. She had been a patient of his wife's, when she could still practise, recommended to him by a mutual friend.

"Oh for goodness sake...what is going on here?"

"Sir?" His assistant sounded flustered. Running around after Blackstone was a hard job, but worthwhile in terms of experience. He was an excellent surgeon, the best in the area, maybe in the south of England, but he did not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.

"How can I examine a woman who is covered from head to toe?" Blackstone demanded as he indicated the covered body in the bed. "And how the hell can I ask her how she is if she is muzzled?"

Not that his opinions made any difference. Blackstone was not naive. The National Health Service had been the Reformists first target back in 2020 and thirteen years later the tendrils of influence had reached into every orifice, as far as he could see. Every nurse in his hospital was a nun, some of whom were barely trained, and the latest edicts affecting patients were driving him insane. His wife, a perfectly competent doctor, was stuck at home, unable to work because of her sex. She would have been a nun if he had not married her. He shook his head in dismay and shouted at his assistant some more.

۩

When, twenty minutes later, her father left the room, Mena had been taken straight back to the room Miss Freeman used as a schoolroom for her and told to go and kneel in the corner like a naughty toddler. She knew what was about to happen, but, regardless of her dread of the next hour or more, Mena obeyed silently, adopting an upright kneeling posture, her body held in a perfect straight vertical line from her knees to the top of her head.

'At least something to thank the bloody nuns for,' she thought bitterly to herself as she settled into a kneeling posture which most maidens would find crippling after a while but she found relatively simple. Mena, with almost six years experience of adopting that pose in her convent school's chapel, started to look carefully back over her short and unpleasant meeting with her father, barely even noticing Miss Freeman draping an over-size blinding veil over her like a thick shroud.

In a way she had been expecting Forbes' proposal, or at least something surprising from him. She had seen the hard light of lust in his eyes as he looked at her whenever they met after Downing Street, a lust that seemed to her to be mixed with something else. Maybe something more sinister. Mena could not tell exactly what it was, but she always knew that she did not really like what she read in the suave bastards eyes at times.

Balancing the desire she saw in his eyes, she was also aware of how he was unceasingly polite and charming as he could be, most unnaturally so. After their first meeting she had been expecting him to ignore her at best, and to be hostile at worst. But he had managed to throw her off balance with his apparently spontaneous smiles, with his funny little jokes, with his conspiratorial whispers, and just by the way he charmed her much against her own will or inclinations. Basically he flirted with her. With her, he always appeared to be at ease and to be really enjoying her company.

She had not been totally truthful when she told her father that she barely knew him. For at a reception in the Foreign Office, given to celebrate her father's appointment, he had spent perhaps an hour in her company, as well as that alarming first meeting in the waiting room in Downing Street, of course. Looking back, he must have planned the reception meeting in advance, because, as soon she and Miss Freeman were announced and had been introduced to the Foreign Secretary, she found Forbes right by her side, looking at her with surprising intensity.