The Third Uncle

Chapter Six: Authorised Personnel Only (if you please)

 Chapter Six: Authorised Personnel Only (if you please)

   Joseph L. Bandyford was a young man who was destined to do great things, he was a doer, fated to be feted ... better than feted, exalted! 

   He strolled over to the large window of the airship and looked out over the verdant rolling hills, and patchwork farms of Tuscany. Charming, beautiful, stupendous! He thought. A wide grin stretched over his pale face.This was why I joined the European Grande Alliance of Airships and Dirigibles! This was the only place a young foreigner could really see Europe and earn a wage in Napoleon’s Europe. 

   He left home after the British lost at Waterloo, and sought a way away from the depressed and depressing homeland. No sir, he wasn’t going to sit at home and complain about the French soldiers, the post-war economy and the ostentatious new architecture Napoleon had going up all over London. 

     He was going to escape all that. 

   He was going to see the Empire and make his fortune doing it! To some, like his father, he was considered a wastrel and a traitor to King and Country, but in his mind he was an adventurer taking advantage of what destiny offered him. Joseph was the youngest son in a family of five, three older brothers and a sister. His eldest brother won himself a great reputation in the Navy, and the other two fought well in the Army and Cavalry respectively. His sister fortuitously married a gentleman pastor, and then? Then there was him. 

   He had just come of age to join the King’s Aviators when the war was decidedly, and definitively lost at Waterloo due to the timely intervention of Milhaud’s Cavalry Corps of Cuirassiers crushing blow to the Allied line. Joseph frowned, and that as they say, was that. No more war glory left for him.

   Joseph walked across the polished floor and opened the great glass and iron door, and stepped out onto the observation deck. He quickly glanced outside, and seeing it to be unoccupied, he walked out and took a deep breath of fresh air. 

   This really is fantastic, he thought. Who would’ve thought I’d be the first in our family to fly on an airship of this magnitude? Yes, they were French airships, but what wasn’t French that was worth anything nowadays? This was the New Age of Peace, and someone had to make an effort to get along, right? 

   He leant out over the banister and watched the ship's long shadow slide over a farmstead below and tried counting the cattle before they slipped out of sight underneath him. Smiling contentedly again, he supposed he really ought to get back to work. He moved back into the ship, and strolled on by the flight deck, he paused, and loitered over the register, noticing that they would be docking at Florence that evening. Florence! He could barely contain his obvious excitement when one of the ship’s blue and gold clad officers walked out into the corridor and spotted him. ‘Bandy!’ Joseph swore under his breath, he hated being called that. 

   Joseph came to attention, ‘Sir! Yes, Sir!’

   ‘Bandy, what are you doing out here when we have paying customers in there?! Joseph cringed. ‘Get back to your post and don’t let me catch you lazing on company time again, do you understand?’

   ‘Sir! Yes Sir!’ Joseph gave a smart Aviator salute and spun on his heel to go.

   ‘Oh, and Bandy?’

   ‘Yes Sir?’ Table five would like a refill of cognac.’

   ‘Yes Sir.’ Joseph gathered up his rolls of cutlery, tea-towels and clean glasses and walked towards the dining room.