 
Queen of Shadows

Published by Bill Etem at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Bill Etem

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Cover art by Dora Gonzales

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Plantagenet Hotel

Chapter 2. Risqué Ladies

Chapter 3. Meeting the Queen Again

Chapter 4. Hadrian's Wall.

Chapter 5. Insertion into Scotland

Chapter 6. Warlike Women

Chapter 7. Moves and Counter-Moves

Queen of Shadows

Chapter 1. The Plantagenet Hotel

It was a queer sort of autumn, quite wildly eccentric and for a few weeks now the north of England has been like Siberia. Never mind that rot about winter beginning at the Solstice. It begins when the snow and ice say it begins, and conditions have been arctic for a fortnight now up in Northumberland. Of course everyone claims to be a great scientist on the issue of carbon dioxide's impact on the environment but you tend to get cynical with people and their lofty assessments of their scientific acumen. Anyway, the glorious warmth and golden glow of a lingering autumn ended abruptly in polar conditions. Something else ended rather abruptly, I dare say. My freedom. I had been called up for active duty – received the order just last week if you must know - told to report to army HQ tomorrow afternoon – so tonight was my final night of being a free man, as it were. After tonight, perhaps years of toil and drudgery, a slave to a militaristic system.

Yes, it's just me, just Sir Hugh Menzies, 47, bachelor, a lone weary traveler, a man who just minutes ago debouched with a crowd of sour-looking slobs from a dreary London train station. The meat-wagon they crammed us into pulled into the city 10 minutes ago. Caught the slow roller from one of my mate's places, a lodge we use for hunting game far away in Northumberland, round about 8: 15 am, I should think, give or take a few microseconds, then on to Newcastle to change to a faster meat-wagon heading south. The big news to report to you is I met these jolly girls on the ride into London, and they invited me to join them for dinner later this evening. And now I'm just outside the hotel where we rendezvous. The girls are just my type. Glamorous, beautiful, not too stuck up, mind you. Just a first impression, that. All the same, I think I know a few things about reading first impressions. I know their ins and outs, their intricacies, their idiosyncrasies, their subtle or conspicuous nuances.

Well now, proceeding with the details of the big romantic reunion, I had some difficulty finding the place, The Plantagenet Hotel, what with all the crowds and the driving rain, but with a little perseverance I found the place and took a room. Tossed my bags on a table, took a shower, had a shave, collapsed on the bed for a quick nap, no more than an hour, needed that refresher sleep rather badly. It was either grab some sleep or pop a couple Benzedrine, so I imagine a nap is the healthier choice for a weary bloke. I wouldn't say I'm a great friend of Benny but we are acquainted. So I made myself presentable and descended to the hotel bar round about 8:00 pm, just the time the girls and I had planned. There was some chitchat with a pretty wench, a young barmaid. Pleasant enough girl, that one. We chatted about nothing in particular, just why she wasn't married and why guys found her so beautiful but also so aloof and both glamorous and yet mysterious. No, no, just kidding you about that. I wasn't asking her any personal questions. I wasn't giving her the 3rd degree about why she was still unmarried, and when she was going to give her old mum some grandchildren, and when she was going to do something with her life, career-wise. I'm not that type. I like to keep the conversation with strangers on a banal level, quite trite, very trite even. You start probing people on sensitive subjects, and then, in my experience anyway, they tend to get touchy or even hostile. Yeah, you don't want to be too glaringly obvious or obnoxious in digging for info on people's private lives. So I'm thinking to myself, now here's a lovely young woman, this here barmaid, but if I go telling her that she's stuck in a dead end job and if I start advising her that she needs to go to night school or day school or she needs to start a self-study program by hitting the books and by applying herself in learning some computer programming or some accounting, or by saying that she needs to get some books at the library which will teach her how to become a bounty hunter, or a private detective, or a film director, or a movie star, to help get herself out of this dead end waitressing job, to get her out of this big huge enormous rut she's stuck in, then she's just going to get chilly with me, or perhaps angry and hostile and nasty with me for trying to run her life for her, when I'm just talking sound sense, just trying to get her out of her dead-end dreary dismal existence, you know? No, trust me on this one, you don't want to see your most well-intentioned intentions go astray. You don't want people to misconstrue you so that you end up hurting their feelings. People are so touchy, so easy to antagonize. Just keep it banal. Trite and Polite. Trite and Polite. Trite and Polite. That's the ticket. Safer that way. Better all round for everyone. I was thinking of telling her that I drink Newcastles when I'm away from Newcastle but not just when I'm away from Newcastle, but that sounded a wee bit too trite, so I asked her about the food at this Plantagenet place and she says the beef stew and the prime rib are first-rate, and then she says the lobster is nothing a connoisseur would touch but if I'm not one of those I might try it.

Well the pretty barmaid then smiles and shoves off to get my beer. If the glamor girls I met on the train don't show up pretty soon I'll have a go at that beef stew, or maybe the prime rib. Yeah that's the plan. Tell you what, chum, let's just say time will tell if it's a sound plan or if it's an unsound plan. This is a cozy place, not too stuffy, no loud obnoxious crowd pushing on me from three sides to make me want to take a swing at some pushy bloke, like the closest pushy bloke. Once I get a few beers in me I'll sound more sociable, don't you fret none about that now, chum. I just sat down not too long after pushing through the snow drifts up north, then had a long slog coming down south from the north country, albeit enlivened of course by the delightful girls. Got some right I dare say to sound a bit agitated and on edge, you can't deny me that now can you? Bloody winter had some nerve in surprising a bloke like that, that ain't right, that ain't kosher. So the barmaid lady brings me my Newcastle Brown Ale and then she moves off to attend to some other fine customers. Oh, say, dear me, look what we got here. Well, well, yes sir, look what we have here. I'm glancing across the barroom toward a table in the main dining room. It's not the glamor girls who I met on the train that I'm spying, but a different collection of glamour girls, and though these new girls look rather a lot like the old set, nevertheless, and here's the good news, these new girls are even more glamorous and even more beautiful than the old ones on the train. Excuse me, for a second, would you? I'll just march over and ask if I can sit with them. They're inviting me over, more or less, casting furtive glances and flirtatious smiles my way. You can't drag your heels here. They're either saying in unspoken language `come on over to our table' or else you're dreaming, your delusional, they ain't sayin that in unspoken language. If they are inviting you over, and if you give them the cold shoulder now, they probably won't smile at you later. If you're delusional, if you think they're just being friendly with their smiles, and are not inviting you over to their table, well, still, they're friendly, so it couldn't hurt to walk over and say Hi. I suppose I should call them women not girls. I mean they might all be 30-year-olds. Still, they have that radiance and youthful glow about them; no enormous wrinkles creasing their faces, mind you, and it's not as if there is a dictator in this here establishment giving us his dictator's rule dictating exactly when an ex-teenage female ceases to be a girl and becomes a woman. `Hi,' I says to them, real cheerful like, `I just got into town and don't know a soul. Perhaps I might sit with you for a minute or two...just a minute or two....at least let me buy you a round of drinks.'

They're OK with me sitting down at their table. Not super warm, but I suppose they got to play the game the way they see fit. I wouldn't have asked to sit with them, as they are, on closer inspection, quite a bit younger than me, quite out of my league, I rather imagine one would have to say, but, they were giving me a few smiles, nothing imaginary about that, and then an adventurous mood came over me. And you gotta go with that sort of mood when it hits you. There were one or two flashy older women in the bar who might be more in my league. No doubt your typical young beautiful glamour girl can be standoffish, a cold fish, if she senses you're a big waste of her time. You got to be so careful with what you say to the princesses. One false move and they give you the silent treatment, and then you have to shove off and try your luck with the older ladies, with females you already gave the cold shoulder to, by choosing so quickly to sit with these here beautiful sweet young things, so a bit of a problem that.

`What are your names?' asks me, getting right to the point.

`I'm Brigit,' says a vivacious one sitting to my right. `And this is Maya, and this is Gail, and that's Lisa, and that's Maria.'

`Sir Hugh Menzies, c'est moi.' Family name's spelled like M.E.N.Z.I.E.S. but pronounced as Mingis. Odd that.'

`Oh rather!' said Brigit. That's like our Maya. She's Maya Featherstonehaugh, aren't you dear? Spelled like F.E.A.T.H.E.R.S.T.O.N.E.H.A.U.G.H. but pronounced like Fanshaw.'

`Knew a Featherstonehaugh at Cambridge. Capital fellow. Basil was the Christian name. He was chummy with this Brian, no not Brian....Branwell?...Or was it, what? Brewster?... Probably Beelzebub for all I can remember....well I forget, anyway, that one was a bit of a rotter. Pretty damn slow at paying some gambling debts, I dare say.'

`Don't look at me,' exclaimed Maya. `I can't keep track of all the deadbeat friends of all my relatives.'

`Not related to Mickey Featherstone, are you?' asked me of Brigit. `He was a famous gangster back in the day, in New York, Irish mobster.'

`Yeah, I heard a cousin of mine saying we're related to him.'

The waitress comes round with my second Newcastle and then she gets everyone's drink orders. A different waitress leaves us some menus, and a dead silence descends on our party as everyone is trying to decide on the food they want to eat.

`I say,' I pipe up, `why don't you let me buy the next round of booze.'

I don't hear any objections from the girls to that. If they wanted to say they couldn't stay too long because they had plans, well they didn't say that, now did they? No sir, they did not say that. It will be sort of expensive, supplying drinks to these 5 ladies. But what can you do? Romance is blooming between me and the sweet ladies. Now is hardly the time to be a penny pincher. Yes, the girls are eyeing me up and down, up and down, in a secretive sort of way, giggling some and smiling some. I feel lots of sweet romantic magic toward Brigit, and toward Maya, and some toward Lisa and Gail. Don't quiz me yet on just how much magical romantic chemistry I feel exists between Maria and myself. She has very beautiful brown eyes, that Maya. But those very beautiful brown eyes haven't lingered in my direction any too much. A cool little princess, that. Let me give you a brief summary of how things shape up in my assessment of the five lovelies. Let me also give you my analysis of current events. Either this Maria, or that lovely Gail, or perhaps the divine Maya, is the most beautiful of the five. I'm not 100% positive about this judgment though; there's much to be said for both Brigit and Lisa, marvelous females both, truly extraordinary, quite exquisite, both decidedly beautiful to behold in the glow of the fire roaring in the hearth of the Plantagenet's delightful main dining room.

`Sir Hugh,' the fair Gail had spoke up. `You're not the only one here who has been ennobled by the crown.'

`Is that right? Please go on.'

`Maria Casanova is the Countess of Glenmorgan.'

`And a very beautiful countess she is,' I reply in a somewhat witless way. I was startled that she had that rank and station. She looked more working-class than any other sort, I mean, she seemed down-to-earth and not at all snobbish, you know, the way she held her head, her body language, the playful way she rolled her eyes etc.

`And Gail Bennington-Clewes' – and it is Maria - the charming Countess of Glenmorgan who is now addressing me - and I have a chance, really the first time, to gaze deeply into the exquisite eyes of the countess - `is a distinguished person in her own right. She is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.'

Mindful that I was witless the last time I spoke I tried to compensate this time. `Why, I think I have seen her name mentioned in the papers on at least three occasions. Indeed just last week I was reading in The Guardian a summary of her vindication of Wittgenstein's 17th postulate in his much debated and problematical refutation of Blouwer's denial of the law of the excluded middle. And a most exiting vindication it was, I can assure you! But don't let me interrupt. I can see, Countess, I am still much in the dark, for you have not yet finished telling me about the other ladies here.' I suppose talking to a countess threw me some and made sound pompous and rhetorical.

`Let me enlighten you then, Sir Hugh. Maya Manning is an officer in Her Majesty's Navy. She studied under Admirals Owens and Narbonne, taking a First in Battleship Shelling of Land Installations, and a First in Antisubmarine Warfare under the personal tutelage of Admiral Exeter.'

`I say, good show Maya! You are lovely as well as lethal to engage on the high seas. You're not descended from the Duke of Wellington are you? A slight resemblance – you both have a commanding presence of course – but I mean a certain supreme intelligence resides in your features. It hints unmistakably of a possible descent from our great champion at Waterloo.'

`I like that story,' began Maya, `of how a descendant of the Duke of Wellington had to save his girlfriend from prison by repaying the government the money she defrauded from us. `No, Sir Hugh. No sweet monthly income from Arthur Wellesley's estate for me. I have to work to make my money. Lisa knows a lot about bloodlines, well a lot about blood, anyway. She's a physician. Dr. Lisa Montefiori is the doc for you if you want some leeches applied to your head. And Brigit is another pill pusher.'

`Maya likes to tease,' said Maria, Countess of Glenmorgan. `Both Lisa and Brigit studied medicine at the Sorbonne, as well as at the Universities of Berlin and Vienna under the most distinguished professors of surgery.'

`Wow! What strong, brave and intelligent modern women you are. I am surrounded by amazing dignitaries! I see your glasses are empty....Miss....say....Hon....Darling....another round of champagne, whiskey, gin, rum, whatever the ladies want, and another lager for myself, please.'

So the evening is proceeding pleasantly, euphorically to be perfectly honest. I can't recall ever being in such sweet and charming company.

`Oh drat!' exclaimed the Countess of Glenmorgan as she ended a call on her cell phone. `That was my niece and she needs my help in paying her hotel bill. Wouldn't you know it? I left my credit cards back at the castle. Sir Hugh, I wonder if I could impose on you and borrow yours. I'll pay you back tomorrow.'

Well what could I say? She is a Countess after all. I fished round in my wallet for a card which was more or less maxed out. I found one which, if worst came to worst, would only set me back about £500. So I handed it over to the Countess, sort of suspecting I would never be repaid, you get cynical about these sorts of things, but who knows, maybe she would pay me back. So, soon enough, the Countess of Glenmorgan has got her cell phone out again and she's reading my credit card number over the phone. I think very little about any financial risk I might be exposing myself to. But then, all at once, 2 hours later, I suddenly started thinking that I gave her the wrong credit card, and then a sort of horror descended on me as I realize I gave her a card which had little if any balance on it but it had a credit limit of £50,000. But before the horror hit me a sense of euphoria and a sense of peace and sweetness with how the evening was progressing was my predominate mood. As the night wore on, and as I dealt with some anxiety, the ladies were more terribly thirsty than terribly hungry, content merely to devour a modest amount of prime rib and potatoes and asparagus, and cheese and fruit, and freshly baked bread, but they were really most enthusiastic about tequila and gin and rum, and elaborate tropical daiquiris and margaritas. By and by a brigadier general I knew stopped by to say hello. He seemed to be on familiar terms with the ladies. Cheerful bloke. Smiles a good deal. Bit of a pushy old codger though.

`Well, it's about time you got some sleep, hey Sir Hugh,' said the brigadier. `Come, come. Tomorrow we have a momentous day, drilling, practicing maneuvers, shaking the rust off our swordsmanship and our marksmanship. Tah, Tah, ladies. Tallyho, Sir Hugh?'

`He ain't going nowhere, grandpa,' said the Countess of Glenmorgan. `We owe Hugh roughly £50,000. He got himself into some credit card debt, because he was careless, quite negligent and prodigal with his finances. If you must know the truth, the 5 of us women are the cause of all his financial woes! And there is no way we will be able to pay that money back to him without Queen Juanita's help. We'll see her tomorrow. The basic plan is to get a job from her paying us £100,000. Hugh gets his £50,000 back. And then we'll split the remaining £50,000 between us ladies and Hugh, with Hugh getting roughly £10,000 in profit provided he helps us in the job. We've already talked to Queen Juanita about the details. She'll give us the job as long as we have an experienced army officer to lead us. It's a military sort of job. You know espionage, sabotage, seduction, perhaps some counter-intelligence work, but, you know, it involves our infiltration into enemy territory. That's the way it's going to be, Hugh baby, so you might as well smile and be happy about it, Hugh baby. If you don't help us you don't get your £50,000 back, and you don't get no £10,000 in profit.

`I say, that's a bit of a shocker!'

That was all I could manage on such short notice, so thunderstruck was I, Sir Hugh Menzies, at the startling turn of events.

`Just do your part and don't blow things when we talk to Queen Juanita tomorrow,' said Professor Gail Bennington-Clewes, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.

Chapter 2. Risqué Ladies

I was back in the dining room of the Plantagenet Hotel ten hours later. My associates in some sort of military operation slept upstairs. I waited for them as long as I could endure before the pangs of hunger drove me to the dining room. A serving woman was filling my cup with hot coffee.

`Congratulations on your business dealings, Sir Hugh,' said the young woman. She was smiling that sly sort of smile you get from women when they know they got you cornered, when they know they got you trapped in an embarrassing situation.

`Yes, thank you, my dear,' I replied, wondering if the whole hotel knew about the espionage job.

`I expect it comes as quite a jolt, quite an abrupt shock to the senses,' said the waitress. I mean, to be a gentleman with few financial cares one day and then to wake up the next day entrapped in all sorts of financial and military and romantic entanglements the next day, why I imagine it must be quite a severe jolt to an older, sedentary sort of fellow like yourself.'

`It's just one of those things, which, in life, like death, or like war, or pestilence, or famine, it is just one of those things which we must meet head on, and we must do our duty, and not shirk from our duty.'

`But to have 5 women, 5 strangers – though they are all quite lovely strangers – to have them turn your life upside down the way they did, in sort of a confidence swindle – I mean, it must leave you doubting your own sanity some, huh? It must leave you wondering if you shouldn't march straight off to a psychiatrist to have your head examined. I mean to just hand over your credit card to complete strangers...'

`Yes, yes. I dare say I should seek professional help right after I finish my breakfast.'

`You will have to eat quite a lot, to keep your strength up, I mean. You don't want to get run down. You don't want to feel like you're at your wit's end, always struggling, always running and running and running, always sprinting at full speed trying to earn that £100,000 that the Queen will give you if you accomplish the military operation to her high standards.'

`I supposed there's good sense in that. Might as well have an extra spoonful of sugar. Might as well have more toast. And more orange, and lemon, and apricot marmalade.'

'And more bacon? And more steak? And more kidney pie?

'Might as well revel in gluttonous excess,' I reply.

`I don't mean to pry, but these 5 females you find yourself mixed up with, you know, are they straight? Are they normal female heterosexuals?' asks the serving girl.

`Normal enough, I imagine. I wouldn't classify myself as a great great expert on female normalcy. What I might think is normal in a female might not be all that normal. Still, all things considered, I suppose I would have to say, all 5 of my comrades in espionage strike me as marvelously healthy high-spirited uninhibited.....'

`Do tell! You got 5 wild insatiable hussies on your plate, do ya?

After delivering that comment the serving wench ran off, giggling uncontrollably, giggling like a hyena as she dashed off to the kitchen, no doubt to gossip there with the other serving girls about my 5 insatiable hussies who were relying on me to keep them living in luxury.

Countess. Professor. Doctor. Another Doctor. Naval Officer. What a laugh all that was. If any one of them had picked up a serious book of scholarship once in her life it would be news to me. There was one benefit however. I had a nice savings. It wasn't like losing £50,000 was anything that would drive me to destitution. I can lose that sum and still be worth 10 fold as much. But I would need to hire myself out as a mercenary sooner or later to make enough money to live in the style I am accustomed to living. I contemplated my reflection in a piece of silverware. Good heavens, Sir Hugh, what ails you, man? Your wits have deserted you! Plunging headlong into desperate ventures are we? On the slippery slope to a firing squad, has it come to that, man? I continued to contemplate my confounded visage in the silverware. Good heavens, Sir Hugh. Most assuredly your wits have deserted you!

`Ahoy there, Menzies,' a voice from across the voluminous dining room was addressing me. I looked up from my perusal of my silverware to spy a member of my club. It was Atherton Drake accompanied by his wife. `Atherton and Lucinda! What I pleasure to find you here,' I exclaim as I rise from my chair and await them as they stroll across the room. Atherton Drake was an old rascal. I could defeat him at chess once in a while. Once upon a time we would play incessantly in the evenings at our club.

`Well I never!' exclaimed Lucinda. `The nerve of the strumpets you see nowadays!' I followed Lucinda's eyes to the bottom of the stairway. As I suspected, my 5 female comrades-in-arms had descended on the dining room. Now I had to pretend that I hadn't heard Lucinda's denunciation of them.

`Darlings!' I exclaim, `Maria, Lisa...I'm over here.'

My plan was to not introduce my con artist girlfriends / military associates to Atherton and Lucinda. The plan, hastily devised indeed, was this: I would look and sound enthusiastic to see my 5 girlfriends / debtors / fellow espionage agents, and then I would resume eating my breakfast. Lucinda and Atherton would shove off soon enough, I reasoned, they would probably shove off as soon as the barely clothed girls arrived at my table. No need to stress over any introductions.

`You know those half-dressed whores, Menzies?' demanded Atherton Drake. He didn't have to whisper those words because the girls were pretty far away when he said them. But they were getting closer and closer.

`I know them. Yes, I do.' I said.

It was quite shocking, though rather exciting all at the same time, to witness the arrival of my friends. To observe just how scantily clad these brazen young ladies were dressed made my head swim. The line between lingerie, between a flimsy little nighty, one of those translucent jobs which usually reveals a lot more than it conceals, and an outfit which a daring but more or less respectable young woman might wear to an informal breakfast in a hotel dining room, is one of those gray areas not easily navigated. I hadn't noticed before because she was hidden behind Maria, but now Lisa's deshabille, or whatever that word is, was sort of jumping out at people, getting all up in their grills, and shouting in a metaphorical way - Look At Me! Look at My Voluptuous Curves! You will either Acknowledge My Femininity or else You Can Go To Hell! I was pretty much in awe of her daring. Damn she's got guts to dress like that. Talk about a tramp! Talk about decadent risqué outrageous behavior. Lisa is wearing only a bra on top and some thin little nylons down below there. I'm also trying hard to find out what Brigit is wearing, but I can't see much more by way of clothes on Brigit either. Lucinda is about to keel over with shock at the sight of these women. She is rocking from side to side, shaking with old-lady rage, trembling with the old-lady trembles, beside herself with apoplexy as she stands wobbling on her spindly old-lady legs.

`I guess one would have to concede that they're very informal girls,' I announce.

`Menzies! Are you daft, man? You associate yourself with these sleazy tarts?' demanded Atherton Drake.

`I ought to bust you one in the mouth for that, numb-nuts,' said Gail.

When Lisa, in just her bra and nylons, threw her arms round my neck, well, the sight of this brazen female exhibitionism was simply intolerable, simply too much for poor Lucinda to endure any longer. The scandalized grandmother made straight for the exit with Atherton chasing after her.

My friends and I pulled a few more chairs from neighboring tables and we sat ourselves down to breakfast. I felt quite stodgy and old-fashioned, terribly over-dressed and far too formal in my blue jeans and a t-shirt and my black and silver tennis shoes.

`Goin' ape-shit on abs and cardio today,' said Gail.

I'm thinking to myself: `What the hell did Gail just say?'

`She goin' balls to the wall. She gonna make her gut pay big-time in the gym. No pain no gain, Hugh baby,' said Lisa, speaking up after sensing I didn't understand what Gail was saying.

`Ape-shit? Balls to the wall? Isn't that American slang from decades ago?' I inquire.

`How'd you catch on so fast?' asks Brigit.

`What do you thinks abs is?' asks Maria.

`I haven't the faintest.'

`Abs is your abdominal muscles,' replied Brigit. `What you want with your abs is to see your six-pack. A gut that's in shape looks like a six pack of beer viewed from the top. A gut that is out of shape looks like your gut, Hugh baby. Cardio is your cardiovascular system: your heart and your veins and your arteries. Your lungs, though the main part of your pulmonary system, is customarily included as part and parcel of your cardiovascular system.'

`Cardio means treadmill and stair climber, elliptical and bike and jogging,' said Lisa. `Gonna hit it hard today, Hugh baby. Can you dig it? Gonna hit it real hard in an aerobic way. Gonna go ape-shit on abs and cardio. Goin' balls to the wall on incline sit-ups and the stair climber. Gonna make it hurt till I hurl.'

`Why?' I asked. `You're already in shape. You're perfect as you are right now.'

`I can get even perfecter.'

In another quarter hour our breakfast was concluded and we retired to Lisa's suite. Later that morning, while Lisa and Gail were goin' ape-shit on abs and cardio, Brigit, Maria and Maya wanted to shop and spend, shop and spend. And as I was the man with all the cash I was conscripted into the army of shoppers. The sale of my Suffolk estate closed a month ago. I had wanted to be free of its burden for some years. And when I received the letter announcing my call-up from the reserves to the regular army, a tour of duty which I expected to last 5 years, I had my solicitor expedite matters to get the place sold as soon as possible. Glad to be free of it. Made a tidy sum too. Now I was flush with cash but that didn't mean I was incapable of squandering every last penny in my pile.

Chapter 3. Meeting the Queen Again

We caught a train out of London. Just a short ride. Then a coach driven by four powerful horses drove my 5 friends and myself to Her Majesty's Castle. This wasn't Buckingham Palace, mind you, as Queen Juanita was not a fan of that preposterous monstrosity. One is always a little nervous at these sorts of meetings. Certainly a Queen has to fear retribution from the rabble if she orders a henchman to chop someone's head off without due process of law. Still, she might chop your head off first, and then deal with the consequences from the rabble of denying you due process of law later. The Castle was something of a joke, in how far it went to avoid the charge of being heartlessly posh and ostentatious, a joke that damn well descended into vulgarity. The humble abode sat a couple miles east of Royal Tunbridge Wells. The parkland which surrounded Her Majesty's Castle was a 4 acre expanse of grasslands and woodlands, with the woods concealing the Castle from the scrutiny of passing commoners. The Castle itself was a 4 bedroom, 3½ bath home built in the `rambler style' popular in the USA in the 1970s. The craze for grandiose Neo-Classical, monumental Georgian, and heroic Italianesque architecture went by the wayside when the rich and powerful in the UK became enamoured with the rambler style. The tacky neon green and burnt orange wallpaper had certainly not been removed, as hadn't the crazy navy blue shag carpet which the original owners had installed, and so, not surprisingly, it was an amazingly down-to-earth dwelling, indeed it was the last word and the ultimate statement of what an unpretentious English home ought to look like. It was a sound, honest, unpretentious modern dwelling perfectly suited for a sound, honest, unpretentious modern monarch trying to appear to the rabble, to unruly parliamentarian mobs, as a monarch who is not a pretentious and snobbish monarch, but, rather, as terribly likeable and wonderfully human Head of State of a large and modern nation, of a nation so supremely rich it didn't have to put on a big show to announce that it was supremely rich. At least that is the essence of the unofficial version of the statement made by her Majesty's Castle in Royal Tunbridge Wells.

Queen Juanita, and her consort, Prince Zach, met the 6 of us us at the front door. I couldn't help noticing the screen door immediately in front of the front door had a broken hinge, and so the screen door wobbled a good deal as Prince Zach held it open to allow us to make our entrance into the `Castle' Of course I had been knighted by Her Majesty a few years back, and she was good enough to remember me and the ceremony, so this helped to smooth over any awkwardness which usually hits me whenever I meet people like Kings and Queens who see themselves as angelic beings who soar far above the rabble.

`You can toss your coats over any of the beds in any of the bedrooms,' said Her Majesty, Queen Juanita. `Feel free to leave your shoes on. The Zach man and I like to walk in our stocking feet, but that's not a command performance for guests.'

`I like what you've done with the new drapes,' I remarked. I know it was a feminine sort of comment, but it's the best I could do at the moment.

`Yes,' replied Queen Juanita, now speaking to my girlfriends. `When I knighted Sir Hugh three years ago the place had dark green but quite glitzy curtains with lots of silver and gold sequins. By going with a drab, washed-out cream-colored drape, Prince Zachy dacky, Mr. Zach man, old Zach bones and I both agree that it gives the place a wonderful down-to-earth sense of great trustworthiness and supreme honesty, while at the same time, the drabness of the new drapes keeps everything not glitzy and not pretentious.'

`Oh I quite agree,' said Maria. `I think that...'

`Let's get down to business,' interrupted Her Majesty with brutally inexcusable rudeness. Queen Juanita had interrupted Maria as if Maria was a hound, as if Maria was a dog that dared to let out a bark in the Queen's Castle.

`Now, Sir Hugh,' began Queen Juanita. `As you no doubt know, - And don't tell me any of the particulars about how you were recruited into this conspiracy! – I don't want to know those details! – As I say, as you no doubt know, the finances of these 5 women you've fallen in with have deteriorated so terribly that they are reduced to desperate ventures. To dangerous and highly questionable ventures which might well lead all of you to the hangman. I mean there's a best case scenario and a worst case scenario. I don't want to dwell on what might happen, but we're all adults here. If everything goes well you make £100,000. If things don't go so well you get your heads chopped off.'

`No chance of languishing in a Scottish prison for decades?'

`Let's not be naïve please, Sir Hugh. I am not one of those tawdry sort of divine-right monarchs who takes no interest in the welfare and happiness of her subjects. Fact number 1. You received a letter recalling you from the reserves into active army duty. 2. You met some charming young women on a train who wanted to meet you later that day at the Plantagenet Hotel. 3. You did not meet those young women, but, instead, you met a different collection of young women at the Plantagenet. Correct so far, Sir Hugh?'

`Immaculately, majestically, impeccably correct, your Majesty.'

`4. I have my ways of knowing that your 5 girlfriends paid a sum of £20 to the young women you met on the train, paid in full, for services rendered. The young women on the train put the young women who would soon become your girlfriends in touch with a man of means, with you, Sir Hugh, and then you went into debt, and then an offer was made to you which you couldn't refuse. Ah, I don't want to know any more! Now see here, Sir Hugh, I have a great deal of expertise in military matters. Like Elizabth 1., like Mary 1, I know warfare and strategy. I know what the Kingdom requires and I am willing to pay mercenaries to accomplish my ends. A few centuries ago the Germanic philosopher Nietzsche said that nothing consumes a man like resentment. We don't want you consumed with resentment, Sir Hugh. And we don't want your girlfriends to feel as if they are being eaten, eaten alive I say, devoured by the overpowering emotion of resentment. So, essentially, I am in the business of managing the sanity of my subjects. The first lesson we must learn is to not overreact. Henry VIII. overreacted when he beheaded some of his wives. Parliament overreacted when it removed the head of Charles I. Lee Harvey Oswald overreacted. James Earl Ray overreacted. O. J. overreacted. Robert Blake overreacted. Phil Specter overreacted. Claudine Longet overreacted with that skier. Ray Rice overreacted. We're still not exactly sure if Natalie Wood was murdered or if she died by accident. I mean, speculation abounds but what do we really know, you know? Getting back to the science of anger management, now we know that wives and girlfriends will nag some – that is what wives and girlfriends are hardwired to do - but if you slug them when they nag you then you might kill them, the wife / girlfriend might never get up off the floor of the elevator where you slugged her, and then you might go to prison, perhaps forever, especially if you are powerfully built like Ray Rice, and certainly the law takes a dim view of men who K.O. their girlfriends with one punch. Now see here, if you feel a certain amount of rage welling up inside of you, and I'm speaking to all of you in general and no one in particular, well, don't murder anyone for heaven's sake! So, pour ice cold water over someone's head if you must, or tear up all the clothes in her closet if you have to, or slash the tires on his horse-drawn carriage, but don't pummel or maim or murder anyone please, dear ladies and Sir Hugh. Say, for instance, Sir Hugh, is really getting on your nerves, and is just driving you crazy, driving you right up the wall. Well, just `hi, Bub, how's it going?' Bub means B.U.B., Butt-Ugly Bimbo. Or you might call him, D.E.A.R. – which means Dirty, Evil, Asswipe, Ratface. He will think you're being sweet when you call him bub, or dear, but you're really saying nasty shit about him. This will blow off some of the resentment which you feel towards him. Of course you'll have to make up your own offensive terms which sound friendly. Or say someone who has been real bitchy to you asks you something like, where did you go for lunch, honey? You can reply with something like, `I went to this new place called MYOFUBBs. It's quite wonderful.' And then he or she will then say, `Oh, MYOFUBB's, hmmm, never heard of that place.' MYOFUBB's is code for: Mind Your Own F*cking Business Butt-face. Of course, of course, it is best to be polite. But if you are being driven crazy with resentment, then you have to blow off some resentment-steam, you have to give the release value to the resentment that has been building up inside of you because of the obnoxious spouse.

`I don't know if I agree with any of this retaliation shit,' said Brigit.

`Look here,' began Queen Juanita. `Trust me on this. Your association to Sir Hugh didn't start off on the right foot. You 5 ladies are swindlers, con artists, extortionists etc. I can well understand why you women did what you did. You need a military man to make the £100,000. You need to exert leverage over a man to bend his will to your will, to make him your pawn. So we have to take active and decisive steps to ensure that Sir hugh doesn't get resentful, doesn't get violent. I don't want my military operation ending in tragedy, in vicious shouting, in bloodshed, in broken bones, broken skulls, bashed in faces, shattered lives etc. And we don't want any of you ladies to let resentment build up until you grab a gun and blow his head off. Facts are facts though. You ensnared him. You trapped him. You got him in your clutches. He, quite naturally, might feel some resentment over this. Even if he doesn't feel any resentment over it - I mean you 5 ladies are pretty hot, pretty much smokin' hot in the female allure department – I mean if you had some genuine affection for him he might overlook the fact that you trapped him, still, there are a million ways which he might inspire resentment in you, and there are a million ways which you might inspire resentment in him. Now, I know, tearing up clothes, or pouring ice water over someone's head, or saying nasty little shit like phony-ass terms of endearment which are actually nasty-ass code words, I know, I know, all this sounds dirty, cheap, low-down, juvenile and nasty-ass, but I'm telling you, the human heart is like a pressure cooker. When the pressure in the pressure cooker builds up and up and up, and up and up and up, and up and up and up, then murder and bloodshed, bashed in faces and broken lives can result, so you want to limit the blow-up: you want to limit the size of the explosion when the explosion comes.'

`I can see the wisdom in her Majesty's words,' said Brigit.

`That's right!' said Queen Juanita. `Look at that Daphne du Maurier novel and Hitchcock film of the same title, Rebecca. If Mr. de Winter murdered Rebecca because he was burning up with rage because she taunted him with her love affairs then you could say he overreacted terribly, but he killed her because she had cancer and both Rebecca and de Winter didn't want Rebecca to suffer a lingering painful death from the cancer. And Mrs. Danvers was such a witch to the 2nd Mrs. de Winter because she was so terribly devoted to the 1st Mrs. de Winter: she was a twisted witch but at least it was out of devotion to another person; Danvers was messed up in the head most assuredly, sick and twisted, but she was still a million times better than the evil Countess of Báthory, and while Mrs. Danvers was blowing off some resentment steam when she set Manderley ablaze, and this looks like a terrible overreaction, still, if it was either murdering the 2nd Mrs. de Winter or putting a match to a house, if she was driven by such over-powering emotions of resentment to do one of those two things, then she did the lesser of two evils, so that's a big success for Mrs. Danvers. Good job bitchy old sicko, Mrs. Danvers!'

`But don't you think our faith, Christianity, forbids doing evil even if it's the lesser of two evils?' asked Brigit.

`Absolutely. Nevertheless I'm saying if a person is absolutely going to do something evil and anti-Christian, because he is being eaten up by resentment, then I would be telling him don't do anything evil and anti-Christian! But if he or she is bound and determined to satisfy his or her lust for revenge by doing something evil and anti-Christian, then you would rather they, you know, say something nasty and mean-spirited, rather than pick up a gun and blow someone's head off,' replied Queen Juanita.

`Did you arrive at all this by contemplating the tragedy which engulfed your father, the late King James III?' asked Gail.

A dead silence pervaded the room. No one spoke for at least 10 seconds.

Gail had broached a topic which was a big taboo to broach in the presence of Her Majesty, Queen Juanita. Her father, the late King James III., had taken a shotgun and had nearly murdered his wife, the Queen Consort Consuela Juanita Conchita Jimenez de Lopez-Villanueva of the Asturias-Andalusia-Extramadura-Segovia, because she had served him Green Tea instead of his favorite Earl Gray Tea. This not only precipitated the arrest and conviction of James III. for attempted murder but it also precipitated his abdication, and weeks later, most likely, his fatal heart-attack. Following the abdication young Juanita ascended the throne of England because King James III. and his Queen Consort Consuela Juanita Conchita Jimenez de Lopez-Villanueva of the Asturias-Andalusia-Extramadura-Segovia had no male issue. Her coronation was accompanied by the explosions of bombs hurled by Parliamentarian mobs howling for the overthrow of the British monarchy, by the rabble - hordes of British commoners - resorting to the means of brutal hooliganism to gain their ends of a true Republic, a Republic modeled after the most enlightened Republics found in Congo, Chad, Costa Rica, Canada, China, Chile, Cambodia etc. It was only by throwing herself at the feet of the Christian-Communist Party in Britain that Queen Juanita was able to win over the majority of the people in Britain, and persuade them to not abolish the British monarchy in favor of a Republic. Like so many English monarchs before her she had turned to spiritual authorities to strengthen her temporal authority. Critics were quick to liken her to William the Conqueror, who received the Pope's blessing to invade England and slay Harold and Harold's English armies. They were quick to insist she was not completely unlike King John, who, when defeated by the barons of England and forced to sign Magna Carta, begged the Pope to prop up his feeble hold on the throne of England, on the condition that he, John, make England a fief of the Papacy. Her adversaries were not slow to liken Queen Juanita to the scheming Henry VIII., who threw himself into the camp of the enemies of Rome in order to make himself the supreme spiritual and temporal authority in England. And look how long Henry II. had to grovel at the feet of the Pontifical authority after the murder of Becket. No tons of groveling at our feet, then no throne for you, Henry II. And now Queen Juanita had thrown herself at the feet of the Christian-Communists in Britain, had received their blessing and support, on condition of course that she conform to the dictates of the Christian-Communists in Britain, and thereby she defeated the Parliamentarian mobs howling for her overthrow, and secured her hold on the throne of England. The Christian-Communists in Britain, a pejorative term given to them by their enemies, but one they didn't mind too much, saw themselves as modern day Lollards, as Neo-Lollards. All of this info about the Christian-Communists in Britain was old news in Britain, but Hugh's American girlfriends were confused about a few issues. 10 seconds of silence elapsed and then Gail thought that, as she was the one who caused the awkward silence in the first place, she ought to mend things.

`I must say,' began Gail, `I just love how you, your Majesty, so magnanimously forgave your late father for nearly killing your mother. You know how old guys get when they are on lots of medications. They just lose their marbles completely! And these European kings are so damnably in-bred. They come from families where first cousins are always marrying each other. Gives them these weirdly massive jaws and crooked elongated noses. Plus being in-bred doesn't help you think clearly and act responsibly when you are under a lot of stress, such as when your wife serves you the wrong sort of tea! By the way, how is your mom doing?'

This actually didn't do a whole lot to end the awkward silence pervading the room, but Queen Juanita acknowledged Gail enough to say her mum was doing OK, living in a condo on the Isle of Wight, seeing friends, watching La Liga, Serie A and Premier League matches on the telly, strolling the strand in contemplative solitude, reminiscing on what might have been if only she hadn't so foolishly served King James III. the wrong kind of tea. But you could tell Queen Juanita was still miffed at having to relive the whole scandal: the shooting, the terror that hit her over the head when she first realized that her mother had almost been murdered by her father; the police hauling her father away to gaol, the emotional turmoil of the trial, of the abdication, all the endless emotional upheaval she experienced at having of the weight of the crown thrust on to her head so suddenly, when she had been so certain that she was years away from that responsibility; the riots and the bombings at her coronation, the mad scramble to find factions and to build coalitions which would support her amidst a violent and bloody revolution etc., etc. And she had to relive all sorts of tawdry details which were published in the British tabloids. It became public knowledge that James III. confessed to the police that he was infuriated with his Queen-Consort because she was always badgering him, always nagging and nagging and nagging him to read Thomas Paine's Common Sense. So at last he made a bargain with his Queen Consort Consuela Juanita Conchita Jimenez de Lopez-Villanueva of the Asturias-Andalusia-Extramadura-Segovia, he made a bargain with her saying he would read Common Sense if she promised to dance for him, in their bedroom – a bedroom just down the hallway from where they were all presently sitting – dance for him wearing one of those skimpy little two-piece outfits which American cheerleaders wear, you know, the ones they wear when they kick their bare legs high in the air, when they twirl around in their highly feminine and seductive or innocent way. So a deal was made and James III. read Common Sense, and therefore he upheld his end of the deal, but the Queen Consort didn't live up to her end of the deal: she steadfastly refused to dance for King James III. while wearing the skimpy little cheerleader's get-up. And this breach of contract infuriated his Majesty no end – the injustice of her action was something which the King could neither forgive nor forget - and the fact that the Queen-Consort served him the wrong sort of tea one morning, a slip-up which would have ordinarily been just a minor irritant, one meriting only a mild admonition, became the straw which finally broke the camel's back, so to speak, becoming the spark which set off the near homicidal explosion in King James III. So, naturally, having to relive all these tawdry details and having to relieve the emotional tumult which assailed Queen Juanita's psyche for month after month, having to relive all the anguish which arrived with every huge headline in big bold print in the World's newspapers didn't put Queen Juanita in the best of moods at the moment, to put it mildly.

`I could use a couple shots of Canadian Club Whiskey right about now,' said Queen Juanita at last, stifling her discomfiture. `Hey Zach man, the eminent Prince Consort, would you fetch me that bottle over there along with a glass? Get a glass for yourself while you're at it....OK then, you guys, you disturbers of my peace of mind, I'll manage your finances. Yeah, your welcome, no problem. I'll do that for you guys. That's just about all I wanted to say, at the moment anyway. I'll manage your finances and I'll manage your sanity, and I'll see that you don't go broke and don't go crazy from being broke. You'll get a letter from me tomorrow. It will contain a contract for a business opportunity between us, a way for you to make a handsome pile of money. You're under no pressure to accept my offer. Take it or leave it. No problem either way. No pressure to sign. No need to feel any obligation. But read the Letter of Agreement and think it over. And thanks for dropping in. The Zach man, Prince Zachy boy, my sweet Prince Charming, el Zacho Supremo, the Zach master, el Zachio, the right respectable Prince Consort, will show you out.'

`Well that was rather an abrupt transition to our exit,' I say to my girlfriends when we are all standing outside Her Majesty's 4 bedroom 3½ bath rambler / Castle.

Queen Juanita doesn't stand on much ceremony when Queen Juanita wants you out of her place,' replied Gail.

`Ain't that the truth,' said Maya.

`I wanted so badly,' began Maria, `to interrupt her and call her B.U.B.B.Y., or D.E.A.R., or B.U.B.B.Y.L.I.C.I.O.U.S. after she was such a rude bitch to me when she interrupted me. But I just bit my tongue and let the resentment boil up and up and up and up inside of me until I was about to scream, and then the resentment sort of went down, down, down, down until it disappeared altogether when I saw that she was going to take care of us.'

We took the horse-driven coach to the train station in Royal Tunbridge Wells and then grabbed a train to London and Waterloo Station, and then we returned to our suite at the Plantagenet Hotel in a coach drawn by more horses.

Chapter 4. Hadrian's Wall

The contract from Queen Juanita arrived the following day. It disclosed terms which were not quite what we expected - £1,500,000 split between the 6 of us for 7 years of Secret Service work, plus future consideration for unforeseen expenses, medical care, legal fees etc. Queen Juanita offered us jobs as irregulars, mercenaries, henchmen, call it what you will. Goodness knows the wars against the northern barbarians were still raging white-hot. Under Queen Juanita's terms my girlfriends and I could remain together as a fighting unit, the six of us, with myself of course as the big boss man, or at least primus inter pares, if we agreed to her offer and her offer called for our immediate insertion into enemy territory. We would have to travel 200 miles into enemy territory, and we would have to return with military information to earn our money. Queen Juanita wanted military intelligence on enemy troop movements, info on any huge barbarian armies advancing upon England, info on anything less momentous but still important, anything which we could discover while marching 400 miles, 200 miles out and 200 back. We would be supplied a map which gave us the location of caches, hidden deposits of food and medical and ammunition supplies. These caches were spaced roughly at 40 mile intervals. The six of us signed the contract, posted it, and then in three days we got our orders to move out.

The train up to Hadrian's Wall was uneventful save for the time we spent in Manchester hunting for some shotguns. I was partial to these `Made in China' jobs. These are cheap but reliable 12 gauge pump action shotguns. Plenty of stopping power with these China babies, that I can assure you. Say, for instance, a charging screaming Highlander was coming straight at one of my girlfriends, with broadsword drawn, looking to slice her head off. With one of these inexpensive China jobs she merely had to point and shoot to lay the bloodthirsty Caledonian low. He won't be blowin' no bagpipes in his cute little skirt no more, not that one. We were well stocked with wool cloaks and wool blankets. We had a waterproofed canvas tent to keep the wind and rain and snow at bay. Well, I won't monopolize the narrative. Let's hear from the lovely and enterprising girlfriends....

Gail: I wanted to get me a big-ass American gun to blast any damned Scotlander barbarian asshole that dared show his treasonous face to me. But Hugh Baby didn't want to spend any money, and this had nothing to do with his wallet being tied to the apron strings of Queen Juanita, because she was buying the inexpensive Made in China guns for us and Hugh Baby was just being stingy and wouldn't kick in any extra cash to let me buy a Made in USA gun. And then, like me and Lisa wanted to buy lots of decent whiskey and gin and rum, but Hugh Baby was only buying us the cheapest whiskey he could find. So we got to Hadrian's place. Saw the big wall. We just walked on top of that damn thing day after day, kept a lookout for invading barbarian armies, for murderous hordes of Picts and Caledonians descending on the southland, but there weren't none of those so we ended up getting drunk every night. But then, one night, maybe a week after we got there, the commander on the wall got sick of us being around so he orders us to pack up our shit and start marching north. So that was exciting, entering the land of the vicious Picts, bloody savages painted in their blue war paint. Later on we would find the damned Caledonians. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Chapter 5. Insertion into Scotland

Lisa – Our insertion into Scotland was sort of odd in how it came about. Discipline is slack among the troops up on Hadrian's Wall. Queen Juanita tells her commanders to go easy on the soldiers because she needs lots of soldiers, but she can't pay them much, so to entice people to join the military ranks she has to sweeten the deal for them, which means discipline is slack, so if the soldiers want to take turns, so that some of them walk the wall and keep watch for advancing barbarian armies, while the other soldiers get drunk, or frolic, or get drunk and frolic, then Queen Juanita wants her commanders to allow that sort of thing. So life is pretty soft for a soldier, especially if he or she is accustomed to hard labor. You get free meals, you get to sleep in a soft bed, you have to exercise and harden your muscles and you have to walk the top of Hadrian's Wall for long stretches of time, and you have to be vigilant in watching for barbarians and armies of barbarians, but when you are off duty you get to drink liquor – you can't get drunk of course but, you know, you can drink enough to feel pretty good and relaxed - and you can lounge in pools filled with hot water atop the wall, and you can flirt with soldiers of the opposite sex, and you can do quite a few things as long as you can get ready for battle fast, within a minute or two, they don't want you acting lazy as shit when you hear the trumpets blaring and calling you to battle. So the six of us are sitting in this one pool of hot water they have atop the wall – they got these pools of hot water every few miles atop the wall – and they got lots of fake palm trees on top of the wall too - and of course we're enjoying a few beers while we sit in the hot water in this cool little pool painted aquamarine beneath the fake little palm trees, and it's fun because the cold wintry north wind is howling over our heads but we're warm and comfortable in the hot water, drinking beer, kicking back, looking up at the starry sky, having fun. Gail was either too lazy or too intoxicated to go to the ladies room so she gets out of the pool and finds a buttress on top of Hadrian's Big Old Wall, and, Gail, thinking no one can see her, drops her bikini bottom and unleashes a torrent of warm liquid atop the great defensive wall from Roman antiquity.

`Hey, Gail! We can see your drunken white ass!' shouts Lisa, who is fairly drunk herself.

Then we can hear Gail a-cursin' and a-cussin'. And then Gail shouts out, `You perverts better turn your sicko heads or I'll slap you so frickin hard.'

`All right, all right, settle down,' says Lisa.

`I mean it damn you,' screams Gail.

`Time to cut Gail off, no more beer and no more whiskey for poor Gail,' says Brigit, and everyone's laughing and enjoying the show Gail is providing us with.

Then a general or colonel or some such big-shot who we barely recognize from down the wall screams out, `I too can see your white butt, madam, so please be quick about your business there, and then get the hell off of my wall and start marching north!' So most of us was laughing at Gail and this big-shot in the regular army, and watching to see if her white butt blushed crimson in the moonlight. But it just stayed her usual white butt without any change toward becoming a blushing butt. Hugh Baby was sort of drunk and he wanted to fight the officer for being rude to one of his girlfriends, but we talked him out of it, and not because of the reason which runs that if Hugh Baby got himself fired from his mercenary job for fighting with a regular army officer, he might forfeit all his money to the crown, and then his girlfriends would be penniless, and then we would be as piss poor as we were before we met Hugh, well, partly for that reason, but mostly because it was stupid to fight over Gail's white butt, and what would you call such a battle I wonder? I suppose, probably: The Battle over Gail's White Butt - and even Gail was telling Hugh to let it go, just let it go, but Hugh wouldn't let it go, he just refused to let it go, at least not for a while there. Anyway, yes sir, once Hugh baby calmed down, we recalled that we got the order from the big-shot general to clear out, to get the hell off the wall and start marching north. First we had to gather up our gear and garments, and guns and ammo, and whiskey, and we couldn't forget to grab the map which told us where our first cache of supplies, of food and more ammo, was located...

Maria – After the embarrassing ruckus with the officer getting nasty at Gail for urinating all over his precious wall, and after we got the order to move out, we had to wait until the moon hid itself behind a wall of thick clouds, had to wait cause we had to conceal our movements from anyone spying on us from the northern side. Of course it's English territory on the northern side of the wall for quite a few miles, but, still, it seemed like barbarian territory because we wouldn't have any English armies protecting us once we lost sight of the wall. So after we got our gear assembled, got the big canvas packs on our backs, got our guns and ammo and whiskey, we had to wait around for half an hour, waiting for the moon to get itself hidden behind a thick cloud, and we had to hold back Hugh Baby, all 5 of us, to stop him from picking a fight with the guy who had been yelling at Gail and laughing at her. Anyway, eventually, the moonlight disappeared behind a cloudbank and we got our gear and garments and guns and gin and rum and scotch whiskey and rye whiskey and ourselves lowered to the far side of the island, hidden to some degree in the shadowy darkness afforded by a buttress on the northern side of the wall. So we're walking north, walking further and further away from the protective comfort the old wall gives a person, and at first we're all petrified, we're all terrified and afraid some bloodthirsty horde of enraged Scottish barbarians will try to murder us by stabbing us with their knives and swords. Every time the full moon comes out from behind the clouds we throw ourselves to the turf and try to remain as motionless as possible. But the minutes pass, and then the hours pass, and we ain't been murdered yet, and we ain't seen no enraged Scotsmans nowheres, and eventually we stop to rest atop a hill and we can see for miles in all directions when the moonlight is uneclipsed by any clouds. If there's anyone following us we can't see him, and he can't be very close even if he is following us. We zig and we zag a meandering course until morning light, at which time we find a depression in the turf, there are no tress or groves of trees anywhere in sight to hide in, but the depression in the turf serves us well enough, and we take turns napping and keeping watch for advancing Scotlandish armies during the day. It gets pretty boring just sitting under our blankets watching the same old bit of dreary treeless lakeless mountainless oceanless landscape, so we drink lots of whiskey, and some rum and gin, and Hugh is always on our case about keeping low and concealed when we have to run off to another depression in the turf to piss the whiskey out of us. For a while there, I swear, I had to piss like every 15 minutes.

Chapter 6. Warlike Women

Maya – I know some other have filled you in on what happened our first 24 hours away from the wall. We dashed northwards in the night and then we slept and kept watch and relieved the boredom by drinking lots of whiskey, waiting for night to fall so we could travel north unseen by any Scottish patrols. Once we got far enough north we could try to blend in with the barbarians, but this close to the wall we would be executed pretty fast if captured. So our second night over the wall arrives along with a snow storm. And this is excellent news because the nasty weather will conceal us from patrols. We have plenty of wool cloaks and wool pants, spandex T-Shirts, spandex halter tops, yoga pants, wool socks, silk lingerie, polyester bras, silk and polyester underwear, wool blankets. Our whiskey supply however is nearly depleted. Still got a couple liters of gin and the same of rum. So we'll have to stock up on whiskey once we hit a fairly large town in the Scottish lowlands, some city where we can blend in with the locals and hopefully not be too conspicuous as spies from England. We found a forest to pitch our tent when morning came after the second night on the run north. The tent's concealed well enough. It's snowing pretty hard but everyone is keen on hygiene, keen on staying clean. Got lots of soap to use while washing in a nearby stream. It's frigid of course but a couple shots of rum deadens the pain. We got rubbing alcohol and deodorant and perfume and cologne, so we smell really sweet and intend to stay that way, and we might not get a proper bath until we get to a city like Glasgow or Edinburgh. So it's the six of us in the tent while the wind is howling outside. Everything is perfectly cozy. You can't sleep naked as that would be a shivering ordeal. That would be pretty damn cold! But if you bundle up some with blankets it's cozy and comfortable. We probably should be more conscientious in rotating the watch every hour. Some people sleep too long and then the person on watch has to pull extra duty. No one seems too aggravated but as Nietzsche says, men are always getting consumed with resentment, so I'll have to keep a watch on Hugh to make sure he doesn't drive himself nuts by fretting over minor irritations and petty jealousies and perceived injustices done to him. I did two hours of watchman duty during the day, and that was fine, if I did only one hour I wouldn't have been carrying my fair share of the burden. I had plenty of sleep so I don't mind. A dog came poking his nose round our camp and of course he starts howling and betraying our position to the local folks, assuming any local folks were round to hear his howls. We enticed him to come closer with strips of steak. Hugh was thinking of bashing his head in if we could entice him to come close enough for what Hugh was calling his gangland hit on a dog, that would shut him up forever, stop him from howling and betraying our location, but the girls and I gave him steak and petted him and he quieted down, so in the end Hugh didn't have to bash the nice doggy's head in. In the last hour of daylight we got the map out and tried to locate the nearest cache. For landmarks we had our forest plus a stream and a rock wall. We stumbled around some after sighting a large oak, which is mentioned on our map, and then we found the cache, which was just a wooden chest bound with iron bars hidden in a clump of evergreens. We were 100 yards inside a small but trackless forest thick with brambles so even though the chest was not buried underground it might have remained concealed from the locals for who knows how long. We had strict orders to not take more than we needed, but we were low on whiskey, and there were, aside other items, 5 bottles of whiskey in the chest, so we helped ourselves to the 5 bottles of whiskey, and we left the sacks of porridge and the sacks of potatoes untouched. We each carried a couple pounds of bread, and a couple pounds of cheese, and some salami. Plus we each carried a ten pound sack of porridge and a five pound sack of sugar. So there was no chance of starvation, assuming we didn't soon find a large city to lose ourselves in.

Gail – Maya has filled you in in quite admirably in some ways, quite deficiently in others. She can be lucid now and then when drunk, so this accounts for her successes. Long story short she completely neglected in her drunken stupor to explain why we had to hold up in our first camp for over 48 hours. Yes we were still in England but this was really just a technicality, as patrols of Scottish barbarians roamed over the land with impunity. I suppose we might have challenged them but that would have been counter-productive or even foolhardy as we are secret agents seeking to gather intelligence, not a patrol designed to bloody Scottish barbarians in skirmishes. We wanted to shove off some dark night but we seemed to be surrounded by these patrols. We took catnaps and bided our time, and drank and descended inexorably into boredom. Maria was reading Lisa's copy of Kristian Lavransdatter. I'd been all through that saga as well as Jenny and The Master of Hestviken at The University of Honolulu. I found the cold gloominess of medieval Norway in Undsett's novels an intoxicating elixir, just the antidote I needed from the tediously boring and endless Kona, the warm southwest wind which blows over Hawaiian Islands. You get so sick of flowers and palm trees and tropical sunsets glowing over the warm Pacific waters. Give me the fog and cold of the icy Nordic regions any time! Let me feel the blast of a hurricane over the cold North Sea hit me straight in the face....Hugh tried a few pages of Kristian Lavransdatter but tossed it aside and then began stuffing his face with cheese curds and saltine crackers, washing it all down with 4 or 5 Bud Lites he had concealed from the rest of us. Eventually he let us finish off his private stock. I doubt he was actually going to try to hide 24 bottles of beer from his girlfriends. `That sort of explicit pornography you find in modernist Scandanavian literature,' Hugh was saying, `is a corrupting influence on people. It's a corrupting influence, I tell you. It breeds degeneracy and dissolution, derangement and dissipation. It can't help but encourage immorality. Glorifying adultery leads to adultery, and adultery leads to inflamed, riotous, tempestuous passions, things which lead straight to murder and bloodshed. So, no, I am not a fan of that sort of literature' said Hugh, becoming rather voluble and sententious now with a few beers in him, as he reclined on a snow bank, wrapped up in 2 or 3 thick wool blankets. I told him that he needed to put his knee-jerk reactions and his damning initial judgments aside, and told him he needed to try to appreciate a work of art by first reading it carefully rather than by judging it after a few glances. `No, I can judge these things quickly,' replied Hugh. `Look at Mann's The Magic Mountain. I could tell very quickly the infatuation the protagonist had with Claudia would be deeper and more meaningful because Mann was never explicit with any sexualized or pornographic writing, whereas Lawrence in Lady Chatterley strikes you as a dirty old man, or dirty young man, not some great artist. Contrast that with his genius in Women in Love. I know you took a First in Modern Literature at the University of the Mango Trees within the Coconut Grove. I know you...'

`It was the University of Honolulu and it was a Master's Degree. I know you've been drinking some but please don't forget that now, dear, dearest fubby bubby.'

`Alright then, I stand corrected, dearest darling dear one, I know, I mean everyone here knows, you are a great and accomplished expert on modern literature, but that doesn't mean you're the great goddess of infallibility when it comes to judging novels and romans-a-clefs and novellas, and comic books, and steamy romances, and hard-boiled crime fiction, and books in the true crime genre, and in the genre of erotica, and in the genres of fantasy and science fiction...'

`Keep your voice down!' exclaimed Maria. `There's a Scottish patrol come straight this way.'

Gail – The Scottish patrol was not exactly heading straight towards us. Maria is such an exaggerator. It's like she always has to over dramatize everything. The Scottish patrol missed us by at least 100 yards. Yes we had to duck down low below the snow banks and listen carefully to detect if their tramping and their talk was getting any closer than 100 yards. But we were never in any real danger. It never go to the point where we would either have to fight for our lives, or die fighting for our lives, by fighting a band of bloodthirsty Scottish barbarians. We got our shotguns ready to shoot, of course, but how difficult is it to remain unseen from a noise troop of soldiers who are at least a 100 yards away? I was interrupted from my reverie while listening to Hugh darling babble. How crazy it is to be huddled in my blankets and sitting in a pile of snow when just a few weeks ago I was working the night shift at a Wal-Mart in Appleton, Wisconsin. Lisa got me an application one day when I was strung out on meth and contemplating suicide. It did me a lot of good to get out of the house and meet new people. I soon met Maria and Maya and Lisa who also worked at our Wal-Mart in Appleton. Maya and me would use a pallet-jack to move pallets off of trucks and then we would put the merchandise where it needed to go. Maya was a big meth-head too. She was always talking about studying some medical pamphlets for a few minutes every day for a year or two, and then going to college, and then going to medical school, and becoming a doctor, but she could never focus her mind and her willpower to devoting herself, not even for 5 little minutes each and every day, to reading up on diabetes or colonoscopies or gallbladders...like me, she would listen to music or watch TV while she got high, or we would go drinking with some other chicks or with these dudes we knew, go drinking that is when we weren't working at Wal-Mart. We could get hammered at parties and these dudes we knew would protect us from other dudes who wanted to take advantage of us. But then this one dude we trusted took advantage of Maya when she was high on crack, and then we decided we couldn't trust those dudes no more. I suppose Maya might have spent a grand total of 45 minutes every year reading these little medical pamphlets her mom gave her. They had titles like Hypertension and Wart Removal and Bone Cancer and Dementia. There were over a thousand pamphlets in the series so you would know a lot of medicine if you read one of those pamphlets every day for a year or two. I was thinking of going to school to get a two-year degree in Crime Scene Analysis, but I could never make up my mind to do that or go to this school where they would teach you how to make these fake corpses with fake blood and fake gore on them that were needed in horror films. We, Maya and me, and Lisa and Maria, met Brigit at Wal-Mart after she got out of prison for selling heroin to a cop. She had her kid taken away from her while she was in prison and so she was paying a lawyer to try to get her kid back, but then the foster family her kid was living with moved out of Wisconsin and into Oklahoma and Brigit knew she would eventually have to prove to some judge in Oklahoma that she was financially stable in order to get her kid back, and not coincidentally it was Brigit who did some research and learned how easy it was for young attractive enterprising women to snare a rich husband in England, and so we knew this chick who had a meth lab, and we were helping her distribute the magic crystals for a few months until we scraped together enough cash to buy plane tickets to London and enough cash to cover hotel and restaurant expenses for a few weeks. So, yeah, it was a pretty big relief for all of us chicks in finding Hugh and finally becoming financially responsible adults, finally getting some economic stability into our lives. Of course risking our necks here in Scotland was not something we planned on, but it's sort of exciting work, it sort of gets your adrenaline pumping. It's better than stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. I got so sick of being at a party and then having to shove off to do my 8 hour shift from midnight to 8:00 am at the Wal-Mart in Appleton. The meth helped me stay awake but one day I was cursing out my boss, and I can't even remember why I was cursing him out, so after cursing him out I go outside for a break and then my badge doesn't work when I try to get back inside. So, yeah, I know I had to give up the crystal methamphetamine after Wal-Mart canned me. That shit is really bad for your teeth too, but my pearly whites still look pretty good cause I wasn't doin meth for months and months, just for a few months.'

Brigit – Let me start in where Gail ended. I won't bore you or sicken you with the details of my using the latrine. Giving those sorts of grungy details is the bohemian fashion with modern trekkers and modern explorers, people who seem so often to be ancient hippies left over from the famous 60s of two centuries ago, you know how they talk when giving a slide show lecture at some local library: I took numerous dumps, here, here, and, let's see, Oh yes, and right here, on each of these Himalayan peaks, and my comrades all took a series of dumps over there on those Alpine glaciers, and I urinated on this particular tree over here, as you can see, in these picturesque mountains known as the Andes of South America etc., etc. Let's just skip all of that bathroom crap. We didn't see any reason to risk a fire and the smoke a fire causes and the possible detection of that smoke by a military patrol. We had sugar and instant coffee, so we had ice coffee and bread and cheese and salami and some steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I know it sounds perfectly disgusting. That's why we began our day - though we travelled by night the first week in Scotland - by drinking a few shots of whiskey. And then we kept on drinking whiskey as the night / day wore on. I would estimate it was our 5th morning in Scotland when we ascended a rise and found, looking down from atop the hill, a city having a population of perhaps 5,000 people. Pretty small. Far too small for all of us to simply stroll straight down main street and not arouse suspicion. Hugh thought that he and one other person would be safe while the other 4 stayed hidden in the hills, but then we decided there was no reason to risk. We had plenty of food. At our second cache we found more whiskey. So it was decided we would just skirt the city and plunge ahead for Glasgow. While we were peering down at the town and old woman emerged from the heather far to our left, perhaps a quarter mile off. We might have left immediately but that probably would have aroused suspicion. 1 man and 5 women peering down at a city, and they run off right when the old woman appears. We talked it over and decided we would say Hugh is our father and we girls are his five daughters. The old woman walks straight up to us and we give her the story but the old woman wasn't buying it. She said she could tell right away from our rich clothes that we were rich foreigners. And as everyone knows about Queen Juanita's warlike ways it probably didn't take the woman long to discern the truth, that we were spies from England. Yes, she walks right up to us and accuses us of being up to no good in Scotland, and she even tells us she is going to inform the police about us, about 6 suspicious characters she has discovered. While we were waiting for her to walk up to us we had discussed this very contingency. Of course we weren't going to murder the old woman and throw her body under a snow bank. Still, we couldn't let her march straight off to the nearest police station. When Hugh told her that we had to take her into our custody, at least for a few hours, she started screaming bloody murder. Then Lisa started yanking on her hair trying to get her to shut up. And then Gail and Maya and Maria and i started slapping her, but she screamed louder and louder. So Hugh had to slug her. Knocked her out cold for a few minutes. When she woke up she was gagged and had a rope binding her arms, and she had another rope round her neck. She cut a pretty comical figure, the old Scottish woman gagged and tied to a leash round her neck, leashed up as if she was a dog. Well of course she refused to walk, and we weren't going to drag her to Glasgow. Hugh wasn't comfortable with any more rough stuff, twisting her arm till it snapped or was about to snap to make her walk, so we were sort of at our wits' end, clueless about what to do with her. If we just left her as she was she would tell the police about us, and then we would be rounded up and executed, probably sooner rather than later. At last we convinced Hugh that we women would twist her arm just enough to make her drink a half a liter of whiskey, then she would be good and drunk and no one would believe her story about being forced to drink till she was good and drunk by English spies. Well we took the gag off her. We took the ropes restraining her arms off her. Then she purposely spilled the first glass of whisky that we handed her. I slugged her so hard in the teeth that I bloodied her mouth, and watched her spit out some of her teeth, watched them fall to the snow. Then I told her if she did that again she would lose more teeth. So we got her to drink a half liter of whiskey – that's a little more than two full glasses, and then we watched her for about 20 minutes to make sure she didn't try to induce any vomiting. We had to slap her around some to keep her from falling asleep in the snow, where she might not ever wake up if she got too hypothermic. And while we were making sure she didn't try to empty her gut of all the booze that she just got done pouring into it we were teaching her some songs to sing. The guys from AC / DC grew up in Australia but they were born in Scotland, some were anyway, so we were teaching the drunken old Scottish lady to sing like Brian Johnson: `All you women who want a man of the street but don't know where to turn / just keep a comin and put a hand out to me cause I'm the one that's gonna make you burn...shoot to thrill play to kill, too many women with too many pills...'

She was pretty funny the way she would belt out the song with no inhibitions and with no sense of shame, no clue to the fact that she was a really worthless singer. So with her singing and pretending she's Brian Johnson we let her stumble off towards the city. She's staggering and falling down a lot, but she will slowly get up after each fall only to fall again. So we're feeling pretty low. We're feeling like low-lives for doing what we did to her. We're thinking she might fall and break her neck and so we`re almost ready to run after her. But the snow is deep atop the heather. There's quite a bit of cushion up here on the hill. Of course if she fell on a cobblestoned street in town below she might never get up. But we couldn't spend forever watching her. We stayed until we saw some kids help her up after her latest stumble to the ground, and then we ran like hell to put some distance between ourselves and the cops in that little city. Here's where going ape-shit on the cardio really paid off. Here's where giving 200% effort on the treadmill and the stair climber in previous months really worked for us women. Being in shape made us feel super psyched and like totally confident that we were like, you know, big-time bad-ass commandos! We were like members of an elite team of kick-ass special forces, like Green Berets, you know what I'm sayin? Hugh could keep up with us because he was in pretty good shape, but he had to work hard to keep up with us. So we walked / ran all day, walked / ran until we got to a train that was moving slowly enough for us to jump into an empty boxcar. The train gathered speed and in four or five hours we were in Glasgow, pulling in just after nightfall. I think we managed to jump off the train unseen, but who knows?

Sir Hugh Menzies – Let me have control of the narrative again here please. These women will try to control everything, will try to run your life, if you give them half a chance. Our plan was to separate, each taking a room in a different hotel. My girlfriends all had legit American passports, they all spoke in legit American accents and would therefore arouse little suspicion. I had both a phony Scottish passport and a phony American passport, and my attempts to speak in both an American accent and a Scottish accent sounded as phony as my passports. I resolved to pass myself off as a Yank, from Alabama, as the southern USA dialect was easier for me to impersonate than all of the other American dialects. By pretending I was somewhat or slightly mentally retarded, by speaking slowly and by drawing out my syllables, and by putting a dazed and confused look into my eyes, I should be able to convince the locals in Glasgow that I'm a harmless enough American – anyway, that was the plan, and the plan was also for all 6 of us to rendezvous in three days right here where we jumped off the empty boxcar. Giving the narrative reins back to the ladies...

Maria – Well I hit the bar in the hotel where I took a room, and this bloke slides into the chair beside me and offers to buy me a drink, see? He's a colorful loser, just a nobody, or so I'm thinking, but I thought I might as well mine his brain to see if it contains anything interesting, so I says to him: I wanted to see London, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, Oxford, Cambridge, all that and more, but I've heard such nasty thing about that Queen Juanita they got in England, you know how she imports lots of Muslims to persecute the Protestants in England. And then the bloke I'm talking to says that despite the fact that she claims to be a Neo-Lollard, aka a Christian-Communist, though others insist she is a crypto-Roman Catholic, nevertheless, in his opinion, she's most certainly a Muslim, only she wants everyone to think she's a Neo-Lollard, or perhaps a crypto-Roman Catholic, and not the first Muslim to be a British monarch. So I tell this guy that there are people back in the United States of America who would like to see a guillotine place Queen Juanita's head into a basket because of all the hell she's causing True Protestants in England, because of all the Muslims she imports into England, and these people in the USA wouldn't mind at all seeing Scotland invade England and put a Scottish Protestant on the throne of England. Sort of like when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The Protestants would prefer someone like him though of course the Catholics in England would prefer someone like the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. So he tells me he would like to see the Muslim Queen Juanita either remain a Muslim, or convert to Roman Catholicism, or convert to Atheism / Agnosticism, because, he says, there's a lot of `sound sense' in having the Protestants in England persecuted by either a Muslim or a Catholic or an Atheist monarch. He's an Atheist, or at least an Agnostic, he hasn't quite made up his mind yet, so he just wants the Protestant majority in England to be persecuted by some minority, and he doesn't care who the Protestants in England are persecuted by as long as they are persecuted. Well he wasn't giving me the impression he knew of any armies in Scotland bent on invading England and throwing Queen Juanita off her throne any time soon. So I wanted to get rid of him, but I didn't want to be too obvious or too hasty in getting rid of him. But he wasn't leaving: he just kept hanging around. And I was yawning like 50 times and the dumb-ass wouldn't take the hint. You can't say you got AIDS or that type of Herpes that will leave someone's face disfigured, because that looks suspicious, that looks like you're being phony in trying to get rid of him: it looks like you were mining him for information and now you want to get rid of him fast, because he doesn't know anything. He might be a counter-intelligence agent, so you got to play it cool, and you got to appear like a typical clueless American on vacation, as you want to be subtle and successful in trying to convince him you are not a spy for Queen Juanita. Well, he wouldn't leave, he just kept hanging round and hanging round me, so I told him I had a headache and was going up to my room to get some aspirin. He doesn't tell me he works for the Scottish government, but he does say `good night' the way a cop would say it, very formal and courteous, so I'm wondering if he is a Scottish cop hunting English spies, hunting foreign agents provacateurs. I return to my room and try to get some sleep. But I lie awake thinking that staying in Glasgow a second night will look super suspicious even if I do hit lots of museums tomorrow. If I'm arrested I better have a good reason for wanting to stay in Glasgow for more than one night. But I don't know any good reasons for wanting to stay in Glasgow for more than one night. I lie in bed with half my brain telling me to get out of bed and the other half ordering me to stay where I am. After about 4 hours of internal struggle and intermittent sleep I throw on some sweat pants along with a T-shirt and then I run down to the front desk of the hotel at 1:23 am and ask the receptionist if she has any tourist brochures that cover the city. She hands me few and mentions something about me perhaps needing a cure for insomnia, as I'm wide awake by now and sort of hyper, telling the receptionist that there's so much to see and do in Glasgow, why Hampton Park holds the European record for the most people, over 149,000, to see a soccer game, 3-1 Scotland over England, 1937.

`Isn't that weird to think,' I'm telling the girl / receptionist / night auditor, `that you got these 150,000 guys crammed into a stadium, standing shoulder to shoulder, wedged in like sardines in a can, watching some other guys kick a ball around, and if a few more years tens of thousands of these guys will go off to fight the Nazis, or the Italians, or the Japanese, fight them in the air, on the sea, on the land, fight them in battleships, in aeroplanes, in cruisers, in destroyers, in submarines, in tanks, in trenches etc., and just a few years probably tens of thousands of them had been fighting the Germans in WW1...'

The receptionist can see that I'm sort of hyper and she's yawning and no doubt wishing she could get some sleep, but she's awake enough to tell me that if 150,000 guys are going to pack themselves into a stadium to watch some other guys kick a ball around then their lives must be so boring that getting blown up by the Japanese would be a big improvement. So I see an opening here to try to pry some information out of her. I look right and left in a secretive sort of way, and then I say to her, `I'm worry to death, I can't sleep a wink, I'm afraid my boyfriend is going to get killed in the invasion...I know I'm not supposed to talk about it...but I'm worried sick...'

`Yeah, best not to talk about it,' says the receptionist. `But for far too long now Scotland has been England's slave. I say the invasion can't come soon enough. Just be patient. In a few more weeks we will all be partying in London, once we kick that evil Muslim Queen Juanita off her throne, once we chop her head off and replace her with a proper Scottish Queen.'

`Well, yes, of course , but I'm still worried. I'm a bundle of nerves to tell you the truth. I know I shouldn't talk about it but sometimes I feel as if I will go crazy if I don't talk about it.'

`Just a few more weeks, and then it will all be over. We'll soon be celebrating in Buckingham Palace. We'll be partying at Hampton Court in just a few more days. If you and your man fight well then all our years of poverty and scrapping for pennies will be over, once we get a good Scottish Queen ruling over the UK.'

`That's right. Just a few more weeks. Well, I think I might be able to sleep now. Thanks for the brochures. Good night.'

`Good Night. Just remember to fight hard. Try to visualize yourself swinging your bonnie highlander's sword, slashing them before they slash you. See yourself with your bonnie dagger stabbing those Judas-loving English dogs before they stab you.'

`Yep, that's just the sort of thing we all need to focus on!'

Naturally I didn't get much sleep that night, so excited was I that I might have solid military intelligence on an imminent Scottish invasion England. I was frantically trying to calculate the odds, you know, maybe it was 95% certain that I had 100% solid military intelligence, and only a 5% chance it was just the idle ramblings of girl working the night-shift at a hotel desk, or perhaps it was 79.3% chance of solid military intelligence and only a 20.7% chance of...

Chapter 7. Moves and Counter-Moves

Maya – Yeah we all promised to be subtle and not too obvious in digging for information of any imminent Scottish invasions of England. I went to the docks in Glasgow pretending I was a prostitute, but I wouldn't say this means I didn't hold to my promise to be subtle and discreet. I did feel ridiculous wearing a big heavy wool coat with only a miniskirt and some high heels on below. But it was too cold not to wear a big coat, so what could I do? The stevedores, that's what you call them, dudes who unload ships, would proposition me. But to my mind they were all rather creepy or ugly or good-looking but cheap as hell in what they were willing to pay, so after a few minutes of pretending I was a prostitute I went back to my room at my hotel and tried to think of some better tactics. I wanted to wear something skimpy, something revealing, something feminine, because that's just what makes me feel most comfortable, so I kept the sleeveless blouse and the miniskirt but I lost the big coat. This meant I stayed inside the hotel and loitered round the coffee shop, and the swimming pool, and lots of guys were leering at me and trying to chat me up but they were all tourists: Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Yanks, Frenchies, Krauts, Ruskies etc., so this latest tactic just wasn't working for me either. So, therefore, I go back to my room, watch some TV, and pretty soon I start to feel lazy, really worthless and lazy, and I start to feel guilty and depressed too, the way you feel when you skip out of work and just stay home and sit around watching TV all day, when you know you should be working and doing something productive. I force myself to turn off the TV. That was tough but I did it! Then I put on my Adidas track suit, and put on my Adidas cross-trainers, so now I look like an Eastern European gangster in this new get-up. Anyway, I leave the hotel and start jogging toward downtown Glasgow. I'm sizing up the guys heading toward me on the sidewalk. I'm looking for unconventional guys, not guys working corporate jobs, not guys tied to the establishment or to the status quo power structure. I want guys who look intelligent and who do not look like thugs, but I also want guys who look street-wise: I want guys who look like they might be part of some political conspiracy. So I find one who fits my profile and I run right up to him and I'm just about to speak to him but before I can say anything he tells me he's a cop, and then he tells me to not proposition him because he will be forced to arrest me for solicitation of prostitution if I proposition him. So I appreciate the warning, but I'm still nervous that he's a cop. I just tell him I'm just a tourist and I was running a little short of cash, and then he says he knows exactly what I'm up to. So I don't like the sound of that, as you can well imagine! Anyway, he has to get to work so I get back to my task of jogging toward the tall buildings which I take to be downtown Glasgow, and I'm thinking that my profile of the guys I want to speak with is not a bad profile, but I thought I better let the dudes make the first move, let them approach me. So I increase my speed, not quite to 100 meter dash speed, but at least to 800 meter speed, and hold that speed for a minute, and then this soon gives me a chance to slow down and catch my breath, gives me a chance to walk at a pace where some guy can see I'm catching my breath, and, naturally, I need to walk at his pace in order to catch my breath. Of course, as you might expect, no guys come up to talk to me when I'm walking slowly! I suppose they're trying to be gentlemanly, trying so politely to not interrupt my intense work-out. So I break my rule of not approaching the guys first, and I see one, and I approach him, and I tell him that if I'm to get back into Olympic form I must dig down deeper into my heart and soul than I've ever dug before, and I must find new well-springs of intestinal fortitude, must discover new powers and resources which I never knew I had. And I give him a big song and dance about having two babies at home though it's still my dream to represent the USA once again in the next Olympics. He buys my story that I came in 12th place in the 5,000 meter steeplechase at the last Olympics, but, he's like – `Oh 12th place! Well, then, I don't have time for some crazy lady with babies chasing down delusional dreams of Olympic glory when, clearly, she's gone insane in chasing after these insane dreams of Olympic glory, when she ought to be looking after her babies. 12th place and still living the delusion! The nerve of some women!'

He didn't say those exact words but I could tell that's what he meant to say.

Brigit – We've only been over Maria's and Maya's accounts of what we women did for three days in Glasgow. Lisa, Gail and I also tried the sleeveless T-shirt with the plunging neckline together with the miniskirt get-up. And we actually had some success. We actually caught some fish using just that sort of bait. We most certainly did learn about some anti-English plots spinning in the heads of some Scottish blokes. But Hugh baby was all about getting out of Glasgow before we were arrested. He was all about not investigating any anti-English Scottish plots any further. Sir Hugh was a member of the Church of England and he didn't see any reason to die or get sent to prison for being the faithful spy of some head of the Church of England who wasn't even a member of the Church of England. Hugh got greedy! He was all about getting his hands on the cash! Well, his girlfriends can understand that. Who can't understand it? We know what it's like to be desperate for money! Anyway, Hugh was all about piling up lots of detailed info on any sort of train or lorry transport to make sure we could impress people back in England that we were good spies, and of course everyone is all about getting safely back to England and collecting the money promised us by Queen Juanita.

Sir Hugh Menzies – I don't know if it's right to allege as Brigit does that I got greedy. Good heavens, we are looking for signs of an imminent Scottish invasion. We haven't given up on the mission. Though we are now clothed in grubby garb which lets us blend in with the grubby crowds here in Scotland and though you see lone males accompanied by two or three or more females now and then in Glasgow, nevertheless, I don't think it is farfetched to think that Scottish counter-intelligence is closing in on us at this very minute. My gut instinct is telling me that we are in danger. Perhaps you think I am being fanciful, or cowardly, or delusional. But the fear of being hunted is unshakable. That's why my girlfriends and I are not hanging around the Glasgow rail yards waiting for an empty boxcar to come by. It was early evening, quite dark in this winter season, when I begged my girlfriends to make a run for it with me. And so we ran, ran down a single line of railroad tracks in the Glasgow rail-yards. I was right to run because seconds after we made a bolt for freedom one could hear the blare of police whistles all round us. It was difficult or impossible to determine if the police were receding into the distance or if they were gaining upon us. Well in a couple minutes of sprinting and staggering, and more sprinting and more staggering, we came to a bend in the railroad tracks, and so this meant those pursuing us couldn't see us any longer. Even at night the glow of a large city, streetlights light reflecting off the clouds, neon billboards reflecting off of miles of concrete, off of patches of drifting snow, will enable a policeman to see quite some distance in a city, even at night. But the buildings at this bend in the railroad tracks would block us from the view of our pursuers. Now it was simply a matter of stepping from the rail line and stepping onto the pavement in this section of Glasgow without leaving any telltale sign of our passage, such as a footprint in a patch of snow. Easy enough that I dare say. Indeed, quite simple. No genius is now needed to see that we require deserted alleys and side streets devoid of witnesses. It is just a matter of sprinting down the alleys, and then catching our breath and walking at a slow pedestrian pace down these here side streets. And in a few minutes we no longer heard the sound of any police whistles. Of course our description would be circulated to the police, and the police are all round us. That's no big mystery. It's amazing how much ground you can cover in Glasgow if you have the stamina, endurance built up from years of training, to sprint the full length of 20 back allies. There's even some time to rest up for the next sprint while strolling leisurely down a wide avenue. I ditched the canvas tent far back but that was all we ditched. Really didn't have time, at first, to stop and empty our packs of non-essentials when the police whistles were blaring all round us. We didn't have time to ditch our bottles of rum and gin and whiskey. And then, once we put some distance between ourselves and the pursuit, it didn't seem a pressing need to go super light and abandon even a single bottle of liquor. The packs on our backs couldn't have weighed much more than 25 pounds, I should think, 35 at tops. By the time we encountered a park full of trees we were terribly proud of ourselves in not being hasty, in not succumbing to fear and panic by throwing away any bottles of whiskey, rum or gin, seeking to lighten our loads. We rested in this park for perhaps 5 minutes, rested well concealed in a grove of evergreens. There was just no possible way of knowing if anyone saw us entering this park, no possible way of knowing if, assuming someone had seen us enter it, they found us suspicious, no way of knowing if they would make a connection between us and the police whistles, assuming they heard any whistles, perhaps in the coming minutes or hours. What else could we do but rest for a few minutes, catch our breath, chat about any bright ideas anyone might have, and then shove off? Make for the suburbs and then the open countryside. That was the plan. Try to advance without being seen. Yes, remaining invisible to the police is always sound policy during times such as these. Have a few chocolate bars. Build up some energy. Have a gulp of rum to calm the nerves. Have another gulp to get some relief from nervousness and tension. Not too many gulps now. Don't want to get sleepy or obtuse here. Your wits are at their sharpest when you're not strung out on nervousness, but also when you are not stumbling down drunk. It won't do whatsoever to be a muddle-headed fugitive. No, a muddle-headed fugitive from the law is one who will soon be an incarcerated ex-fugitive from the law. If you want my opinion then I'll give it to you. A fugitive must strive to keep his wits about him. Just grab a bit of rest, just catch your breath, that's it, have a shot or two of whiskey, or run, or gin, to calm the nerves, those nervous old nerves, and then shove off. And after shoving off, try to act naturally, normally, unselfconsciously, well it is OK to be self-conscious, just don't give anyone observing you the impression you are acting in any sort of strange or interesting way, in case you are seen and observed by a curious observer. If, for instance, a Scottish bloke or a Scottish bird was to observe and study your fugitive movements, what you want to do, in this scenario, is blend into the scenery. You want to be an object of dull dreary mindless inanity to that bloke or that bird observing you. You don't want to drive either the bloke or the bird from the state of being incurious to the state of being curious. Yes, now, granted, I'll concede the point, dear fellow, or dear madam, at times you want to be conspicuous. On some occasions you want to grab all the attention for yourself. At times you want the spotlight to be shining brightly on you and only on you. But at other times, such as during those times when you are a fugitive from the law, or when you are a spy being hunted down in enemy territory, well, I don't think it is necessary for me to explain to you every last obvious detail which any sensible...

Gail – Hugh darling is so weird when he's drunk because he knows he's drunk, he will concede that he's wasted, but then he thinks he can reason more clearly, and can reach new heights of creativity, when he is drunk and thoroughly wasted, which of course is absurd. A drunken fugitive is far more likely to be apprehended than a sober one. To argue a point as self-evident as that is to descend into madness. I give Hugh credit for sensing the police were closing in on us before we heard any police whistles. But, in retrospect, we were all separated for three days and of course the cops would want to wait until we were all reunited, before they made a bust, because they wanted to make sure they busted everyone in our spy ring. So there's no ESP or anything supernatural or terribly uncanny about Hugh's decision to run and to beg us to run prior to the time when we first heard the cops blowing their cop whistles and closing in on us. Hugh got jumpy at precisely the most logical time for a spy to get jumpy, when we reunited after being separated, when the cops had us all close together, right when the cops had us surrounded and were holding off on arresting us while they waited for any additional members of our spy ring to show up, spies that they didn't know about. That's all there is to that. I mean, the rest of us didn't get jumpy, but he did, so we'll give credit where credit is due.

Lisa – Gail is jumpy herself, all jumpy in jumping to the conclusion that we have escaped and are out of any immediate danger of arrest and execution. Now that right there makes no sense. The cops know we are on foot. They know we can't have gotten too far. They know we can't be more than ten miles from that rail yard in Glasgow. Every train station will be watched. Your typical fugitive thinks that your typical cop doesn't know thousands and thousands of faces. If any one of us was to walk into a town or small city in Scotland every cop in that place would know we are strangers, and every cop in Scotland is on the watch for strangers.

Brigit – Let me weigh in to give my assessment of our adventures in Scotland. Yes, perhaps I was a bit hasty in saying that Hugh darling got greedy. I suppose he was thinking about the money to some degree, but perhaps not to the degree I insinuated earlier. Sorry darling. And how exactly is one supposed to untangle the tangle of all our conflicting emotions and motivations which drove us to do what we did? Certainly the fear of capture and execution clarified matters swiftly enough. We were driven toward the northeastern suburbs of Glasgow. Now being seen in either the city or in the open country, such as being seen strolling along our merry way during daylight hours, was a sure way to the hangman. We were forced to flee on foot during the nighttime hours, forced to lay up unseen in the daylight hours, hiding out in a copse, or in a ditch, or really anywhere in the countryside away from the eyes of farmers or shepherds. But once we realized that there was very little chance of our capture – our caches contained plenty of food and drink – so we didn't have to put ourselves at risk by buying food in towns, or by stealing food from farm houses – and as it was easy enough to travel unseen at night and easy enough to lay up unseen during the day – and easy enough to try to fill notebooks full of info on train and lorry movements – no doubt most of this was useless info but these notebooks of info would help us in getting our money out of Queen Juanita, in case she wanted to be stingy – therefore, it was only overconfidence, making a slip-up due to carelessness springing from overconfidence which we had to worry about. Nothing you can do about bad luck. It's odd how you can tell yourself, over and over and over, to not get careless, and yet you still get careless! I wanted a warm bath so badly. All of us did. We were clean and fresh from washing with soap and water every day, but you get sick and tired of shivering in the cold winter winds as you wash yourself in a stream or river. So we were traveling south one night, still in Scotland but getting closer to Hadrian's Wall, and we see a farm house and I suggest we interrogate the owners of the place. I suppose it would be a home invasion, but we weren't going to shoot and kill anyone, not as long as we didn't have to. I didn't like returning to England without a look at a recent newspaper. I didn't want to show up at Hadrian's Wall and tell the regular army officers we met there that we were spies for the English and we didn't find any evidence of an imminent invasion from Scotland, and then have them respond that there was an attempt, perhaps a huge attempt by a large Scottish army to invade England, but was repulsed, or some such contingency. I also didn't want to show up at Hadrian's Wall one day and discover that it was occupied by Scottish soldiers. Well, you say, find a newspaper in some town and read it! Go to a Scottish grocery store, and buy some odds and ends, and purchase a newspaper while you are at it! Yes, well, that sounds simple and easy to some degree, but as was stated earlier, the cops in Scotland are very good at their jobs, and these cops are hunting for us, for us in particular, and they are on the lookout for spies and fugitives in general. If we went into a town we basically would need to have our hands on our weaponry all the time, and would need to be very ready to shoot to kill, if several of us merely went to buy a newspaper. It just seemed safer for everyone, for us and for those we held at gun point, to find a lonely farm house and invade it, and learn its secrets. Well, of course, Hugh had a good deal of military experience in his younger days, but he's a bit out of practice these days. And as for his 5 American girlfriends / espionage associates, truth be told, we really aren't very experienced at home invasions! We are not what you would call super comfortable and totally at ease with holding people at gunpoint, telling them we'll blow their heads off if they try to escape or fight us. To become a professional at something you first have to go through a learning process. You start out as a rank amateur, and then with practice you become a fairly skilled amateur, and then with more practice you become a professional, you see. You can't just announce that you are a professional home invader and then as if by magic you are a professional home invader. With us 5 women, you see, we are better at seduction and better at getting stupid men to spill their guts, but we are not so great at shooting and killing. I hope I'm clear on this point. I mean you wouldn't think I would have to write a huge encyclopedia to spell everything out for you in tedious detail in order for you to...anyway, to get to the point of all this, the home invasion was botched pretty badly but it was not a total disaster. No one got killed. But we failed in our mission to get a look at any recent newspapers. If you must now all the details, well, it was embarrassing in how bad we botched it: it was just not at all a very professional job on our part. So here's how it went down. It's night, see, it's an hour before the first light of the breaking dawn, OK? We sneak up on this lonely house, and, as I say, we sneak up on it while it is still dark, but also while the wind is very still, and all you can hear is the sound of our footsteps crunching on the frost of the frozen turf as we advance upon on the dark and barely discernible shadowy eerie spooky farm house lurking in silence in the distance. We tell ourselves beforehand that if we hear any dogs barking we're just going to turn and run away. Well, there's this huge dog, a mastiff I imagine – it's dark so I can't see for sure what kind of dog it is, but you can see its outline, and you can tell it is a big huge dog – anyway, the beast is coming straight towards us with this super deep and super aggressive growl; it's not barking, at least not loudly, but that growl is really unnerving, very terrifying, anyway this huge thing is coming right towards me. I mean, if it had been barking we would have turned and run as we had been prepared to do. So now I'm thinking that Hugh might go silent mode, and I'm thinking and maybe he has drawn a knife, to kill the dog quietly so as to not waken the people in the farm house. So I ask in as clear a voice as I can ask in, but I'm pretty scared: `anyone got a knife?' Well no one has a knife, at least not one they can draw fast, so I was thinking that Hugh baby would shoot it, but no one is shooting it! Not Hugh, not anyone! So the huge thing is about at my throat, and I wasn't going to wait till the thing had its jaws on my throat, so I was just about to shoot it when Hugh finally woke up and shot it. The sound of that shotgun blast was so freaking loud! It just took the silence and shattered the hell out of it. Of course, on the one hand, I was glad to see that Hugh's Made in China 12 gauge shotgun took care of the big dog, but then everyone in that farm house was now awake and no doubt reaching for their guns. And that's just what happened. All the lights in the farm house start coming on. And we're 20 or 30 yards from the house, all together in one group, so anyone inside with a rifle could pump some bullets right into us easily enough. So we turn and sprint at full speed away from the place. Go into full ape-shit retreat mode. We really don't need to see a newspaper all that badly! We really don't need to have a gun battle with these people over a stupid paper. And farmers in these lonely farm houses, you just know, always have lots of guns at their place. Long story short, we were hauling some serious ass getting out of there, and we were pretty much invisible to anyone in the farm house once we had been sprinting for 10 or 20 seconds, and then, soon enough, we had some cover from some hillocks to let us escape unhurt. We heard some gunshots coming from the farm house but they didn't hit nothing. So, we're running and running, and we're slowing down a little to catch our breath from time to time, but never stopping completely, just plunging forward, going as fast as we could. By the time our hearts and lungs were bursting then of course we had to stop, had to rest. We rest up and look for anyone chasing us. No one chasing. Good deal. I'm cool with that. So we discuss among ourselves our next move. Ideas get tossed out. Good ideas are selected and bad ones are discarded. Those farmers or shepherds or whatever they are had no reason to think we were English spies. Our attempt at a home invasion wouldn't look to the cops like the work of professionals, that's for sure. So the police probably wouldn't focus much attention on rounding up a gang of amateurs. I suppose if they had concentrated their forces on rounding us up they would have gotten us. Anyway, we rested up and then pushed on till we found some woods to hide in during the day. Two more nights of fast walking got us to Hadrian's Wall, and Hadrian's Wall was still occupied by the English, and so it didn't matter none that we returned to England all clueless and uninformed about current events transpiring in the great big world, didn't matter none that we hadn't read a newspaper in ages and ages. The only question now was one of getting paid by Queen Juanita. If we made a big deal out of a receptionist girl working the night shift at a hotel, made a big deal of her talk of a Scottish invasion England going down in a few weeks, and then if it didn't happen, then no money for us. But if we didn't make a big deal out of what she said, and then if an invasion did happen, then, still no money for us. So it was a tough dilemma in some ways. We had a few weeks to think it over and plot our next move. Most likely what would happen is that Lisa, Gail, Hugh and me would wait at Hadrian`s Wall for two weeks and then we would make another run over the Scottish line to look for advancing armies. While the 4 of us went back into Scotland, Maya and Maria would remain behind, you know, holding themselves in reserve in case the 4 of us were captured, in which case they would scout for advancing armies by slipping back into Scotland, and do a better job than us in not getting captured. But for at least 2 weeks it would just be the 6 of us hanging out here at Hadrian's Wall, loitering aimlessly I suppose you would have to call, to some degree, probably not reading too many thick textbooks, just more or less hanging out, drinking lots of beer under the fake palm trees they got here, sitting around in the warm spas, luxuriating under the Jacuzzi jets, flirting with Hugh and with all the other English soldiers they got around here as they stroll by us girls on their patrol duties atop the wall - that sort of thing. Of course there will have to be lots of eating and drinking, of course of course, little doubt of that! - you know, lots of just sitting around in our bikinis flirting with soldiers, telling jokes, singing songs, dancing seductively in the voluptuous moonlight, the usual sort of stuff hot young women do when we're all about getting hammered and having fun, but exercising too, getting in lots of cardio every day. We certainly don't want to get fat and lazy by eating and drinking too much, gotta keep our figures slim and feminine, especially if we have to do some serious fighting or some more serious reconnaissance work in the weeks to come, running cross-country perhaps, fording icy rivers and swift-flowing streams, fighting barbarians on the land, in the air, on the high seas, you know, just generally following the heroic lead of those who came before us: `Nevah, Nevah Surrender', as Sir Winston used to say - just doing the typical patriotic stuff you would expect from espionage agents in the employ of the British monarch - fighting off hostile foreigners, battling internal Judases - carrying on in the great tradition: Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves etc., etc.'

The End
