by James Philip
“What happened at Brooklyn yesterday?” Alex inquired belatedly. More to be civil than from any existential curiosity.
“There was a dreadful accident, some say sabotage, at the launch of HMS Polyphemus. Over a hundred people were killed and the CSS have been making large scale arrests.
“Oh, maybe I won’t fly as close as I usually do to Navy ships today!”
From the look on Albert Stanton’s face the photographer suspected he was about to be short-changed. The first aircraft were running up their engines.
Alex checked the field’s windsock and flags.
The wind was southerly to south westerly.
A little high cloud apart the sky was already azure blue all the way to the invisible stars above.
Stanton had one of the new heavyweight British cameras with a stubby telescopic lens. Seeing Alex’s interest in his equipment the man in spectacles became positively loquacious.
“I’m using the latest Ealing one-inch colour stock film today. So, especially as the sun is quite low at this time of day I need to be ‘down sun’ to avoid extraneous glare off the water…”
“Do you need to land to re-load a new magazine of film?”
“No, that’s the marvellous thing about these cameras.”
“Do you want to go in the front or the back seat? This is a dual control machine so it doesn’t matter to me.”
Passengers usually wanted to go in the front seat but Stanton was a professional and he knew he would get better shots, less obstructed by the wings from the back seat.
Out of the corner of his eye Alex saw Rufus McIntyre and Paul Hopkins trudging towards their Bristol VIs like men off to the funeral of somebody they despised. They had had their aircraft fuelled up last night. Alex had been unwilling to pay a premium for the privilege, not everybody was made of money.
Alex gave Albert Stanton the normal ‘talk’ as the two of them went to the tail of the Bristol, picked it up and walked it around until the nose of the trainer was pointing into the wind.
“Make sure you are strapped in at all times”
“Hang onto your camera like grim death.”
“Don’t touch any of the controls.”
And: “Don’t be sick until we’re back on the ground again!”
Then Alex was running up the engine.
Chapter 20
Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York
Abe Fielding had been aware from a relatively young age that in its tribal grounds the Iroquois Nation operated so separately from the normal colonial administration that it, in effect, constituted a kind of shadow, or ghost society. It was more than just separate development, it was a nation within a nation in the northern counties of New York. However, it was only when in late adolescence that he realised that ‘the system’ might have been designed to stop Kate and he being together the way his own father and mother had been that he had really understood both its cruel iniquities and the remarkable possibilities it might offer a self-elected fugitive.
In the ‘white’ colonies of the East Coast a man needed identification papers to prove ownership, and as an adult a web of contracts determined his place in that society; among the tribes of the Iroquois peoples there were no records, no formal checks or balances other than personal recommendation, or a friend or an ally or a kinsman to vouch for one, no meaningful money economy, everything was personal, not commercial and every social transaction was by the free will of all the parties concerned.
Obviously, the system was imperfect and human foibles and follies made for what in Abe’s world might have been called a feudal society but that said, there were few native tricksters and shysters preying on the unwary and the vulnerable, violence was restricted in the main to consenting males, and more often than not expressed in ritualised non-lethal forms and unquestionably, the biggest difference from the ‘white’ colonial model, was that women were regarded as equal members of most communities.
In other words, the worst excesses of Getrennte Entwicklung in the First Thirteen colonies – directed against blacks in the south and mainly against the native nations of the north – had created not just ‘separate’ communities but an underground movement of which the Colonial authorities knew little and understood less. Since most whites did not consider full-blood Indians or African-Americans as citizens, and in some places did not regard or treat persons so classified even as human beings the borders of tribal lands and former slave reservations were porous, unregulated. The situation skewed trade and consequently the tax-raising competence of individual colonies creating huge unregulated, shadowy black-market sectors in ever local economy and meant that it was hard if not impossible to track people or realistically, to control cross-border movements.
The really odd thing was that most white colonists – certainly most of their leaders – either did not see the problem or simply did not understand the way clinging to, and latterly, actively pursuing Getrennte Entwicklung policies had hollowed out the eastern half of New England. Society and the economy had stagnated in the East while in the Mississippi valley and many of the western colonies and territories, despite the never-ending Border War in the South West, migration from the old ‘First Thirteen’ colonies had fuelled a twenty-year runaway boom. Out west there was still unclaimed land and new industries had sprung up along the whole length of the mighty Mississippi from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Spain twelve hundred miles to the south. Out in the ‘new colonies’ there was little of the bureaucracy that strangled daily life and business on the East Coast, no straightjacket of stupid ‘Separate Development’ legislation and the hand of imperial administration was ‘light’ to ‘non-existent’. The West was once what the East had been a hundred years ago, the great unstoppable economic and commercial engine of the North American continent allowed to run free by the masters of the colonies back in London.
What so many religious fundamentalists in the East viewed as a slow disintegration of moral and religious coherence was really just the logical corollary to the unresolved imbroglio of the border with the Empire of Nuevo España, and the hiving off of between twenty and thirty percent of all the land of their own colonies into huge ghettos or tribal lands where the white man’s writ no longer ran, and the ever-quickening pace of change in the far west.
Abe had no illusion that as he and Kate packed up their camp early that morning that he was about to become anything other than a fugitive voluntarily exiled from the society into which he had been born; and that among his own people in the twin-colony there would be little or no Christian sympathy for his decision.
To the Getrennte Entwicklung crowd, he was a moral and racial degenerate ‘going native’; to the authorities he would be a runaway shirking his responsibilities to his Colony, a draft-dodging good for nothing who had cheated the Commonwealth of New York-Long Island of his period of medical indenture. If he ever returned he might be arrested and if he failed to recant and to fulfil his servitude to the Colony, face imprisonment. The shame would live with him forever.
Kate was subdued.
“I know what it is that you do for me,” she said eventually as they carried their bags through the trees to where they had hidden the two canoes. Invisibly through the foliage they heard her father and cousins breaking camp; the group would travel together deeper into the Iroquois Nation before the husband and wife finally went their own way. “I know what you are giving away.”
Abe halted, put down his load and turned to face Kate.
“I am giving away nothing that is of any worth in the world and gaining everything that is,” he shrugged, “priceless, Rone.”
She threw her arms around his neck and he wrapped her in a bear hug that lifted her feet off the ground as they kissed.
“Tekonwenaharake,” he whispered in her ear, “she whose voice travels through the wind,” he cooed, “without you I am like dust in that wind.”
Kate sniffed, kissed him again.
Stepped back, and with a giggle, frowned
.
“Men are so full of shit!” She murmured in Kanien'keháka, with a limpid-eyed fondness.
“This is true,” he confessed.
Chapter 21
HMS Cassandra, Upper Bay, New York
The sleek fleet destroyer had come alongside HMS Lion during the night. The King, the Queen and their entourage had gone onboard while it was still dark and stepped off the Cassandra onto Gravesend Pier literally at the crack of dawn for the short drive – about four miles – inland to the Royal Military Hospital located on the outskirts of the town of Flatbush. The Lieutenant Governor of Long Island had sent his Rolls-Royce to collect the King and Queen, and other members of the party were accommodated in one or other of the dozen or so Land Rovers and cars waiting ‘in convoy’, which was to be led and trailed by armoured cars of the 16th Lancers.
To assert that security for this hastily scheduled ‘visit’ was ‘heavy’ would be to recklessly understate the case. The road from the coast to Flatbush had been cleared with military vehicles blocking every side turn, and infantrymen in full battle order patrolling everywhere. Belying this visible demonstration of armed might the hospital itself had had less than an hour’s notice of the visitation, and other than lending his official car, the Lord Lieutenant had been asked to not alter his personal Empire Day diary so as to avoid drawing too much attention to Flatbush ahead of the King and Queen’s arrival.
King George was hugely impressed, as he invariably was, by the efficiency with which his own Household, his advisors, colonial administrators and the armed services facilitated, and obediently carried out his commands.
If only we ran the rest of the Empire the same way…
In his unscheduled absence from the flagship the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England had been left ‘holding the fort’ and acting as the King’s Chief of Staff. Something always came up at the worst possible moment in the run up to great state ceremonial demonstrations and whatever came up the King implicitly trusted Philip De L’Isle to ‘sort it out’.
The visit to the hospital had been harrowing.
These things often were in his experience.
Without Eleanor he would have been lost, a useless stuffed shirt in a ridiculous antique uniform!
The old fuddy-duddies in his father’s court still tut-tutted but trying to stop Eleanor hugging a sick child or comforting a grieving mother, father, daughter, brother or sister was like Canute trying to hold back the tide.
The Queen simply was not made that way.
George was proud of her.
Of course, he was always proud of her but that morning, especially so after the trauma of yesterday. Because she was so naturally tactile it suddenly became a hundred times easier for him to forget that he was the King Emperor and behave like a normal human being. The old King had never picked up a child in his life; not even one of his own. The very thought would have horrified the old curmudgeon and given half his doddering old courtiers a nervous breakdown!
As for King George’s mother. Goodness, once she had squeezed out sufficient ‘spares’ to preserve the royal line she had washed her hands of her offspring until they were toileted, well-mannered, presentable in public and more or less educated.
Tactile had been a swear word in the Royal palaces of England for a generation until Eleanor had come upon the scene, first as HRH, the Duchess of Windsor in a small way, and then as Queen Consort, in a way that had made her the nation’s and the Empire’s Queen Mother almost overnight.
The King had taken the son of a maimed dockyard worker in his arms, Eleanor had embraced the boy’s mother, sat awhile with her holding her hand.
How on earth could people be so solicitous about us at such a dreadful time?
There were still people in England, within the Royal Household, the establishment and the Government, who disapproved of his and Eleanor’s ‘way of monarchy’. The diehards still imagined that in this modern, technological age when the globe was connected by radio and television, in which the gathering cry for self-determination and a loosening of the shackles of empires was daily shaping social and political changes unimagined only twenty years ago, that the Monarchy could somehow remain the unchanging, rigid monolith that it had been for centuries.
An enormous crowd had gathered on Gravesend Pier by the time the Royal Party returned to board the Cassandra.
“Don’t let go of my hand, my dear,” Eleanor murmured as they stepped out of the Rolls-Royce. She had dried up her tears on the short ride from the hospital. “I must look red-eyed and blotchy,” she sighed.
“Not a bit of it, my love!”
They went straight to the barrier where behind a line of infantrymen – regulars not militiamen – a throng of cheering men, women and children had awaited, patiently for a glimpse of the royal couple, possibly for many hours.
“Why, thank you for coming out to see us,” Eleanor beamed at the sea of faces.
The King doffed his cap to the crowd.
Henrietta De L’Isle had scurried across the pier, heedless of her own dignity, and virtually on hands and knees planted a single microphone on a stand before the King and Queen.
Goodness, Eleanor thought, that girl thinks of everything!
“The Queen and I,” the King declared, “have had the honour of visiting a number of the men, women and children so grievously injured in yesterday’s outrage in Brooklyn, and sadly, the opportunity to give what little comfort we might to those whose loved ones have perished, or for whom there must be little hope of recovery. As always, we were humbled by the fortitude, courage and pluck of everybody we encountered.”
At a squeeze of his hand he surrendered the microphone to his wife.
“We cannot praise the tireless work of the dedicated doctors and nurses at the Flatbush Royal Military Hospital enough. Tragically, it is only at the worst of times that one becomes aware of the very best in us all. I could not help but weep, neither of us could, meeting so many good people laid low through no fault of their own, and yet so bravely confronting things…”
Eleanor’s voice failed her. She lowered her head for a moment, sniffed back a flood of tears. Overhead two aircraft circled like distracting, angrily buzzing bees as she re-composed herself.
“It is at times like this, on days like this that I and my husband are reminded that we are honoured and privileged to be your King and Queen, and we are reminded that the only reason that we are here today is to serve you!”
The King drew his wife’s hand to his side and she moved close.
Spontaneously, he planted a pecking kiss on her cheek, and in a similar moment of abandon she kissed him back.
“God save you all!” King George declared.
The Royal Standard broke from the port halyard of the destroyer’s old-fashioned mainmast.
Onboard HMS Cassandra as the warship cast off and began to back away from the pier the King and Queen waved to the masses on the pier.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get so emotional,” Eleanor said, smiling despite her roiling angst.
“You are their Queen, my love,” he husband reassured her. “You are their Queen and the Mother of the Empire. The world is changing and there are no rules in the King and Queen game anymore.”
She leaned against him as they smiled their fixedly regal smiles.
Henrietta De L’Isle and her two personal bodyguards had literally jumped onto the destroyer as she departed. Now the young woman approached her Sovereign.
She was a little breathless.
“I’m sorry, I should have had that microphone in place before your car arrived, sir.”
The King laughed.
“My dear, you are a marvel!”
“Oh,” Henrietta blushed and momentarily stared at her feet. “I, well… Thank you, sir…”
The King waved one last time and turned away from the pier, now some fifty to sixty yards away.
“We shall repair to the wardroom,” he commanded. “My wife and I need a stiff drink be
fore we show our faces again!”
The original schedule for this day, Empire Day, had ordained that the King and Queen should attend morning service on the quarterdeck of the Lion, and partake of sherry and sweetmeats in the flagship’s wardroom preparatory to boarding the Cassandra shortly before eleven o’clock.
Thereupon, the Fleet Review would commence with the destroyer steaming slowly up and down the columns of ships anchored in the Lower and Upper Bays for well over two hours amidst the constant firing or royal salutes, the flying of thousands of flags, and the cheers of every ship’s company as it lined the rail.
These things almost always over ran; for one, both bays would be full of sailing craft and motor boats impeding Cassandra’s stately progress; and for two, it was a huge party and nobody worried overmuch if a party went on a little longer than the timespan mentioned on the original invitation!
Henrietta De L’Isle and the Queen disappeared briefly while the King chatted with the destroyer’s second-in-command – the Captain was making sure Cassandra did not run down any of the yachts cluttering Gravesend Bay – and Eleanor re-emerged with her face ‘restored’.
Word came from the bridge that ‘Cassandra will be on station in ten minutes’, and the Royal Party dutifully trekked up to the destroyer’s open compass platform.
Cassandra’s modern successors had enclosed bridges; marvellous for conning the ship in a North Atlantic blow but not so good for viewing and being viewed during the course of a Fleet Review.
The destroyer was making fifteen knots through the slight chop in the Lower Bay, hurrying to her start position abreast the starboard flank of HMS Lion by the appointed hour. The ship cleft through the sea with effortless ease, the roar of her engine room blowers like the purring of a mighty beast of prey.
Eleanor put a hand to her head, wondering if perhaps she ought to put her hat back on before her hair became totally windswept.
