Free A Season of Secrets by Margaret Pemberton Page B

minister. So all in all, life looks good – and the very, very best thing about it, my dearest darling wife, is that you are soon going to
be here with me in London.’

Chapter Six

    In late August, wearing well-worn country tweeds and with two cocker spaniels at his side, Gilbert Fenton walked down off the moor towards Gorton Hall a happy man. The sun was
hot, the air heavy with the fragrance of heather and the sound of bees. It was only the second time he’d been back to Gorton since having been given a junior ministerial appointment and, with
Parliament now in recess until mid-September, he had every intention of enjoying as much of that time in Yorkshire, with his family, as he possibly could.
    Politically the last few months had been momentous and the chance to reflect on things was welcome. In Paris the Peace Conference, in which a treaty between twenty-seven Allies and associated
powers had been drawn up and signed, had finally ended, but nobody – not even the French – thought it had ended satisfactorily.
    Lloyd George had promised to ‘squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’, but even he had been aghast at the demands made by France. Not all of them had been acceded to.
Together with Great Britain, America had baulked at the French demand that Germany be partitioned and a separate peace made without Prussia. France had still carried the day, though, on lots of
other issues and the end result was a Germany impoverished, humiliated and burning with bitterness.
    Gilbert’s longtime friend Winston Churchill, who, as Britain’s Minister for War and Air, had attended the talks at Versailles, had said grimly to him when congratulating him on his
new appointment, ‘Instead of seeking Germany’s utter ruin, our watchword should be magnanimity in victory and, in peace, goodwill. If cripplingly excessive war reparations are demanded
of Germany, her working classes will be reduced to conditions of sweated labour and servitude – and the result will be another war in twenty or twenty-five years’ time.’
    Winston’s opinion hadn’t carried any sway. The terms finally agreed – and which the Germans had had no choice but to sign – stipulated a provisional compensation payment
from Germany of billions of gold marks, with the final reparation figure to be decided later, and a stripping-away of all her territories.
    Gilbert brushed past a clump of gorse, sending a cloud of yellow petals scattering. Ahead of him Caesar and Pluto, his two spaniels, were fruitlessly chasing a rabbit.
    Still deep in thought and with his hands in his pockets, he continued walking in the direction of the river and the bridge. Gloomy though he felt the results of the Paris Peace Conference had
been, there was a ray of light where world politics were concerned, and that ray of light was the newly formed League of Nations. The League had been dreamed up by President Woodrow Wilson, its
purpose to sort out international disputes, as and when they occurred. In this way – and by sanctions – world peace would be maintained. It was an idea that fired Gilbert’s
imagination and he couldn’t understand why Lloyd George was so lukewarm about it.
    Now on the bridge, he paused, leaning against the moss-covered stonework, staring down into the water. Lloyd George was a Liberal, as had been the former prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and the
present government was a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives. As a Conservative, Gilbert had issues with many Liberal policies, but nothing disappointed him more than the prime minister’s
lack of fervent enthusiasm for President Wilson’s great vision.
    The water below him flowed down towards the village, gin-clear. A fish leapt in a flashing silver arc. A dragonfly darted low, skimming the surface.
    Watching it, he turned his mind from the League of Nations to the latest death-by-influenza figures, which showed that the Spanish-flu pandemic – which had taken nearly as many