I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

For the first time in half a decade, England began the year at peace. Or at least at peace with the major powers. The fighting hadn't stopped. The successes of the Arabs in throwing off the Turkish yoke had inspired the Egyptians to try something similar. The Suez could not be allowed to slip from their fingers… but neither could their holdings in Europe.

Ireland seethed with discontent and even Britain itself shook and trembled in the aftershocks of the Great War. Britain's main continental allies had all fallen into civil wars with their own Socialist elements, and Britain was left threading the needle, trying to provide enough support to their allies to keep them alive while also not aggravating their own unions too severely.

(There had been a terrible scare in the days immediately after the war's end, but they had weathered it.)

Already, Lombardy and Ile de France had fallen. Rome held for now, and the French had secured the Mediterranean coast, but news was dire. The less said about the Russian situation, the better. Of all the Russias, the only one experiencing something like peace was the Ukraine, and that only happened under German supervision.

Unfortunately, while there wasn't much deadlock on the French, Italian, or Russian front, there was certainly deadlock in Parliament. Funny how the blokes in Parliament could do a fat load of nothing and still get their checks while the man on the ground struggled to even find a job. Well, the men in Parliament could occasionally agree on more military spending, but anything beyond that was beyond the pale.

For some reason, Elizabeth thought of Alice in Wonderland. (When did she get around to reading it? Good question. She had been invited to meet some very important people with the Admiral, and somehow she was press-ganged into looking after some slightly less important children….) Well technically it was Through the Looking Glass, but she wouldn't split hairs like that in conversation. Such books were terribly childish, after all. Regardless, there was the Red Queen. Cold, pedantic, a scowling governess of a woman, a strong contrast to the impassioned Queen of Hearts in Wonderland.

The Red Queen said it took "all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," and if that wasn't Britain's situation, she didn't know what was. The shipyards raced to construct ships to secure their control over the seas, the army was straining to tame their colonies and territories, they ran through political (and financial) capital just to keep their allies' heads above the water, and the shipgirls were driven to exhaustion to solve the cube gap.

Shipgirls and the cube gap were all public knowledge now. The attention was nice, although it came with the heavy weight of expectation. They were the British navy personified, the legacy of admirals and officers and seamen back to Nelson, and when the time came, they made the wrong choice. (Or perhaps they were the medium for a bad choice.) The same Britain who made Dreadnought, the same Britain who mastered the old style of naval warfare before rewriting the bleeding book, made the wrong choice with shipgirls.

The German strategy was numbers. You could sneer and say something about quantity over quality, but shipgirls were all quality. That's what they did. Germany saw the good shipgirls could do and designed their strategy around multiplying their numbers. When they gave cubes to Austria-Hungary, it was an investment, one that managed to pay dividends… with careful oversight. In contrast, there was Britain. Britain who picked poor borrowers for her loans, Britain who threw cubes at the dominions and France and Japan while tying their own noose at Texel. For what little it was worth, the ongoing civil wars in Italy and France meant they were producing a decent amount of cubes… not that they were in a state to pay back their lender.

Elizabeth supposed there was one silver lining to all the attention shipgirls received now. Warspite and the other heroes of Texel eventually got the proper burials and ceremonies they deserved. In one of their rare moments of agreement these days, all four of the Queen Elizabeth class wore mourning crepe trim to their public appearances and donned black.

Life trundled on, though, as ill-prepared as Elizabeth sometimes felt. They – shipgirls as a body – were a part of high society life now, even if they inhabited a strange niche. Mourning garb was a social nicety they could adapt to, but the nature of the shipgirl as a fighting woman… complicated things.

(Even then, it caused problems, not that they would show the public that. Ramillies had recently acquired a black gown with white crepe, and nearly got punched for it. She didn't have the right to it, not after sitting Texel out.)

Elizabeth and Malaya both sipped at their tea (top-shelf Assamese, of course, although some domestic trouble in the Raj was pushing up the price uncomfortably) and waited for the other to start the conversation. The morning sun snuck through a window and made their shadows stretch to the wall.

Malaya reached out and picked up the newspaper. One of Lizzie's girls brought the morning news with breakfast. Malaya almost rolled her eyes when she saw which paper – just guess how they leaned – but one of the headlines caught her attention. "The SPD won in Germany."

"Really?"

"Close scrape, it seems like, but yes." Or at least the paper was selling it as a borderline illegitimate victory, she couldn't say what it was actually like on the ground in Germany.

"I heard the Prussians weigh their votes," Elizabeth remarked.

"They do?"

"Yes. The population is sorted by how much tax they pay, three blocks each paying a third. Each block votes for the same number of representatives…"

"What a farce." Malaya did appreciate that they were honest about it, though. Why not just give more votes to the rich straight-out, if you were going to rig the system?

"Do you think Fritz and Victoria would have managed to fix it?" Elizabeth asked.

Malaya took a sip of her tea. "He was fifty-five or so, wasn't he? How much he could have done?"

"And Victoria lived to eighty-one. Even fifteen years would have brought a new Germany into the twentieth century."

"With Bismarck there?"

"Wilhelm got rid of him."

"Fair enough," Malaya shrugged.

"Maybe we wouldn't be here if not for some… minute flaw in one man's larynx."

"And all for want of a horseshoe nail," Malaya murmured.

"May I have the paper?"

"Sure."

Elizabeth flicked through the pages, not paying quite as much attention as Malaya had initially expected. It was a small blessing if Elizabeth could recognize that rag for the trite it was.

"Are you planning on attending the wedding?" Elizabeth asked, face still obscured behind the paper.

Malaya's eyebrows rose and she almost flinched back. "The wedding? Whose?" News of Oldenburg's love affair had seeped across the Channel, but over here… she had rumors about Iron Duke, but that swiftly…?

"The fifth baronet Mosley's son. Oswald." Oh, right. The Tory.

Malaya would admit to not caring overmuch for the affairs of nobles, but he was an MP… "Wasn't he expelled from Sandhurst?"

Elizabeth set the paper down. "He still served."

Other anecdotes cropped up in Malaya's mind. He crashed his plane showboating, didn't he? Spent the lion's share of the war back on the home front because he couldn't wait until his wound was fully healed.

"And who's the lucky bride-to-be?"

"The Foreign Secretary's daughter."

"Ah, I'm not sure…" Malaya said. It sounded like a terrible time, but she couldn't just say that. "Would they appreciate… someone like me?" Again, Malaya didn't care for whatever drama the nobility was undergoing, but she had read about riots in the papers. Race riots, to be specific.

(Capital sure could pull a funny trick like that, couldn't they? Have whites attack Asians and blacks for perceived theft of jobs and housing when the real problem was a fixed game.)

"If they have any problem with you, they can speak to me," Elizabeth said, before giving Malaya a smirk. "Are you going to miss out on a chance to visit St. James's?"

"The St. James's?"

"The Chapel Royal in St. James's."

The oldest palace in London… "I can come along."

Elizabeth grinned.

There was a tendency to see the Elizabeths – the surviving ones, at least – as part of a set, linked by something a little stronger than just sisterhood. Elizabeth was aware of that and played it up or tried to obscure it depending on what she was trying to do. When Malaya was sent to extend a frail, sickly little olive branch to the battelcruisers, she dressed differently than Elizabeth. Certainly not authentic Malayan garb, just something that gently suggested differences between her and Elizabeth.

The wedding wasn't the time for that, though. They wore roughly the same dress – still a little limited by post-war frugality measures and their sputtering industry – with the only real difference being color. (All uniformly conservative and non-offensive, don't you worry your pretty little head.) Elizabeth and Valiant were a deep red and a sort of wine color, respectively, while Malaya had dark green and Barham dark blue.

Elizabeth was over the moon, rubbing elbows with the King and Queen and the exiled prince of Belgium, if Valiant didn't jostle her way to them first, and even Barham was impressed by the politicians she saw… not that she wanted to talk. It was a good chance to brush up on the names and faces of the MPs, at least. (Malaya and Barham weren't really approached.)

For what it was worth, Elizabeth was gallant enough to not leave them marooned for the whole length of the event… although that came with attempts to tease them out into actual conversation with politicians and the like. After an abortive attempt to pitch shipgirls to the prince of Belgium, Elizabeth went off to speak to the man of the hour.

Barham looked up at the roof. "Do you think my namesake ever visited the palace?"

"I don't know," Malaya said. She and Valiant's namesakes certainly couldn't, being a landmass and a concept, respectively.

For a while they both just stared at the roof, trying to ignore the party as best as they could while sharing in each other's company. It was, for what it was worth, a rather well-made roof. She knew the building had been remodeled, but it had sat here for just under four hundred years. Four hundred! Four centuries ago, ships were made of wood.

(For a moment, Malaya wondered what fraction of this building's lifespan they'd manage to reach. The palace had been retrofitted – the Queen's Chapel, for the spouse of the ill-fated Charles I, and the Clarence House – but man's needs and wants when it came to housing had not changed nearly as much compared to his needs and wants in ships of war.)

At some point, Elizabeth hiked up her skirt and practically dashed over to Malaya and Barham. "Something wrong?" Malaya asked.

"He's planning to cross the floor!" Elizabeth hissed. "Mosley, that is."

"To Labor?" Malaya asked.

"No, he's going independent, seems like."

"Then why'd he marry Conservative?" Barham asked.

"I don't know," Elizabeth sighed, looking terribly frazzled. "He doesn't like the Black and Tans, but he doesn't favor Labor, either…"

Malaya thought that she could, on some level, respect a man who tried to find his own way politically, not sticking with a party when it began to act against his morals. That seemed an upstanding thing to do… but something about him just made Malaya's hackles rise.

Call her a cynic, but she wouldn't let herself trust smooth talk.

She was, eventually, vindicated when it came to her thoughts on Mosley, although it was a while in coming, and her relationship with Elizabeth had deteriorated so much that there was no way they could have a civil conversation about it. Malaya would say "I told you so," but Elizabeth didn't even regret it.

Her misgivings about his political independence proved especially true. Malaya wouldn't consider herself some sort of orthodox Labor Party supporter – even if she was glad about how well they were doing – but she didn't appreciate the way he snatched their principles, in part, for his scheme. The New Party, it was called. He had mended fences with Labor and walked the tightrope between them and the Conservatives just long enough to build a coalition.

Ah, not a coalition government-level condition or anything that extreme, but they were ambitious about their chances at the polls, and the people were excited. Mosley could sweet-talk a crowd into a frenzy, but even more than that his words stuck. The passion lasted beyond the end of the rally, it smoldered in the hearts of men with little else to do but think about the ways their nation had been wronged.

One of the things he was stressing was freedom from foreign dependence. Autarky for Britain… or rather for the empire, in all her sprawling extent. They needed new, novel methods of organization that could mollify labor and management both, bringing them into a happy union with the state. Capitalism that served the empire, not an empire that served capital. An end to their embarrassment.

(But could you muzzle the beast, much less tame it? There was a story about a farmer who found a snake in the cold and, taking pity on the creature, warmed it in his own breast. The snake, being a snake, bit the farmer and killed him. Maybe that folly was a little less than nursing the snake in hopes of turning it against someone else.)

For those not on the discord: we've been discussing a sort of reactionary turn in Britain a la OTL Weimar Germany, considering they're not as fragile as France. See also some more complications in the Texel final battle plan. Mosley's corporate state might end up looking a bit too similar to the reds, though...