Empire Day

by James Philip

  The Mohawks had no need for great ribbons of concrete across their lands, the great river was their highway, its creeks and tributaries their by-roads and border markers. Motor vehicles were increasingly rare deep in the forests; whatever was needed for the common good, food staples, medicines and fuel for generators, spare parts for the old machines in the handful of factories still operating in the hinterland all came up, or down the seasonally moody waterway in its heart. That the river froze over in winter, was unnavigable in the spring until the ice had melted, flooded and was effectively closed to traffic for half the year was of no matter; the People of the Flint understood as much and lived their lives accordingly, in tune with the whims and the boons of the seasons.

  Understandably, more than one kind of exile or fugitive sought sanctuary in Iroquois country and Tsiokwaris’s people did not extend the hand of friendship to every manner of interloper. That could be cruel for although this land could seem like a new Eden this was a harsh country for the unwary, the city-born and bred for whom ‘living off the forest’ was as unrealistic as it was foolhardy.

  It was mid-day by the time the Leyland ground to a halt in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains on the northern slopes of the Mohawk Valley overlooking what had once been the village of St Johnsville. Like so many communities in the valley it had briefly boomed when the order had come from Government House in Philadelphia to drive a ship canal from Lake Erie down the valley – which bisected the Catskill Mountains to the south and the Airondacks to the north – all the way to the Hudson River. But when the money ran out in the 1860s the half-finished ‘great trench’ was forgotten and with it, a dozen places like St Johnsville.

  Several long log dwellings were arranged randomly in the trees on the high side of a babbling brook whose course down to the valley was interrupted by the derelict mill ponds of the district’s first European settlers. Now the creeks fell down the hillsides in a series of small artificial waterfalls from one crumbling dyke to another, and here and there fallen trees had formed additional temporary low weirs.

  The Iroquois had robbed out the stones of the settler cottages and mill-houses for the foundations for their cabins and to make permanent paths through the trees and across the boggy down slopes adjacent to the creek.

  The settlers had cleared the land either side of the waterway; now the forest was growing back, reclaiming its banks and the log long houses almost seemed like a part of the land.

  This place would be almost invisible from the air…

  Abe found himself being introduced to a dozen aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins most of whom he had never met. He caught a few words in Kanien'keháka, smiled and nodded his head acknowledging each new smiling face.

  Hopefully, his ear would quickly attune to voices and inflexions other than Kate’s, allowing him to begin to understand what was being said to him.

  His wife had warned him that few of her people ‘in the forest’ understood or spoke English and that few of her tribe had ever troubled to learn to read or write. In her own land Tsiokwaris was viewed as something of an eccentric – still very respected – elder for still insisting that every member of his immediate family was literate in the White Man’s tongue.

  Getrennte Entwicklung was a thing that cut both ways.

  For many in the Iroquois Nation it was a blessing to be cut off from the infernal noise and confusion of the colonial world; to be saved from the bizarre religious conventions of the cities and to be able to live again as their ancestors had lived.

  Presently, Kate drew Abe aside.

  They sat on a rock staring into the waters of the creek tumbling gently down to the valley.

  “What are you thinking?” Kate asked.

  “I thought I’d be more afraid,” Abe replied.

  “Me too,” she confessed.

  ACT III – THE DAY AFTER

  Monday 5th July 1976

  Chapter 33

  HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

  The King was in a grim frame of mind. He and his wife had visited the battleship’s sick bay that morning before returning to what had been Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Packenham’s day cabin to chair the meeting which would determine whether or not the New England leg of the forthcoming Royal Tour went ahead.

  However, first he had received the first casualty and damage reports from Rear Admiral Christopher Trowbridge, the Commander of the First Cruiser Squadron.

  Trowbridge was a direct descendant of one of Nelson’s band of brothers, a tall, hawk-browed man nearing retirement under whom the King had once served as a junior gunnery officer back in the late 1940s.

  “Queen Elizabeth will need to proceed to Norfolk to dry dock for repairs, sir. At a pinch she could steam at twenty-four or five knots and hold her station in the battle line. Princess Royal’s upper deck is a bit of a mess but again, a week or two in dockyard hands will see her as good as new. Tiger’s damage is superficial, a few scorched deck planks. Repairs on ‘Y’ turret’s range-finders will be completed within forty-eight hours.” Trowbridge paused, sucked his teeth. “Lion is fully operational. Negligible structural damage was caused to her bridge superstructure by the crash of that small aeroplane yesterday. The ship’s company expects to have cleared all debris and recovered the bodies of the dead this day. Repairs will be completed in the next twenty-four hours.”

  Of the four Lions, only the Tiger had suffered no casualties.

  Princess Royal reported seventeen dead, two missing and thirty-nine injured. Queen Mary had twenty-eight dead and four men missing, and another fifty-one injured. Lion had sustained fifteen dead and eleven seriously injured.

  “We now believe that at least six aircraft and as many fast motor launches or speedboats attempted to crash into one or other of the Lions,” Trowbridge continued grimly. Of these; four aircraft and four boats succeeded in their suicide missions. The survivors of the second aircraft which attacked the Lion are presently being held under guard in the sick bay. There were no other survivors from these attacks.”

  Queen Eleanor coughed genteelly.

  At the beginning of his reign her husband’s predilection for inviting her to sit in on his tête-à-têtes with his closest advisors and courtiers had put a lot of noses out of joint. Nowadays, her presence rarely raised an eyebrow. In fact, it often calmed otherwise heated situations and made it easier for everybody to remember their manners and to keep their passions in hand.

  “What of casualties among the civilian fleet, Admiral Trowbridge?” She inquired quietly. “All those poor people who found themselves caught, through no fault of their own, in the cross fire?”

  “We believe that as many as a dozen craft may have been hit and some twenty persons may have died or gone into the water or been injured. Our rescue boats recovered some two dozen persons from the water yesterday, all bar one of whom was alive at that point, Ma’am.”

  The King looked to the stocky, moustachioed brooding presence of the Head of the Colonial Security Service, Colonel Matthew Harrison. The man’s Lincoln Green uniform sat uneasily on his large frame.

  “I believe that the man you suspect to have been behind that dreadful business at Wallabout Bay on Saturday was shot and killed in the process of being apprehended by your people?”

  Harrison shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Yes, Your Majesty…”

  “Damned unfortunate!”

  “Yes…”

  “But you have others implicated in recent events in custody, I gather?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” Harrison swallowed hard. He glanced to the impassive figure of the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England, Viscount De L’Isle, who was sitting next to him before continuing: “We’ve been attempting to infiltrate and to keep under close observation a subversive, terroristic organisation called the Sons of Liberty for some time, Your Majesty. Legally, you appreciate, our powers of arrest and our ability to maintain close surveillance of suspect individuals is limited…”

&nbs
p; The King scowled impatiently.

  “Yes, well whatever the provocation the Empire won’t have any truck with police state methods!”

  “No, of course not…”

  The King realised he was allowing his outrage to colour his judgements. It did not help that within the last hour he had had to peremptorily reject both his Prime Minister’s and the First Lord of the Admiralty’s offers to resign their posts. At a time like this the ship needed all hands manning the pumps!

  “I apologise, Colonel Harrison,” the King grunted. “Please, you were saying…”

  “We attempted to round up the leading members of the Sons of Liberty ahead of the Empire Day celebrations,” Harrison went on. “We have for some time suspected that the guiding hand behind the organisation is a certain Isaac Putnam Fielding, who operates under the cover of being a somewhat dissolute Professor of History at Long Island College. The man who was rescued from the aircraft that crashed into the sea after attempting and failing to attack the Lion is his eldest son, Alexander. We have yet to establish the precise role of his accomplice, a Leonora Coolidge…”

  “They are the pair under guard in the sick bay presumably?”

  Harrison belatedly recollected that the Governor had told him: ‘First you will address the King as Your Majesty, and thereafter, simply as Sir.’

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You say you have this Isaac Fielding fellow in custody?”

  “Yes, sir. The man who was killed resisting arrest on Friday night was his son-in-law. We have not yet established the involvement or culpability of his wife, Fielding’s daughter Victoria who is seriously ill at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn. Overnight we arrested Fielding’s second son, William, who works at the Gowanus Cove workshops of the Long Island Speedboat Company. We have also put out a Colony-wide warrant for the arrest of Fielding’s youngest son, Abraham. Like his brother Alexander, Abraham Fielding was a pilot so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was piloting one of the planes which crashed into the battleships.”

  Eleanor was horrified.

  “A whole family of terrorists? What would make them all do such a terrible thing?”

  “We believe that Isaac Fielding, who many years ago was the author of a seditious tract called,” Matthew Harrison grimaced apologetically, as did Viscount De L’Isle, “Two hundred lost years: what the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time…”

  The Governor of New England stirred.

  “I gather that attempts were made to prosecute various persons associated with the book but thirty or more years ago the best advice available to my esteemed predecessor was that quote: ‘freedom of speech means exactly that’. Moreover, at the time according to the papers I have seen, this man Fielding was viewed as a harmless, frankly whimsical pacifistic crank.”

  Having made this observation De L’Isle nodded for the security chief to carry on.

  Harrison collected his wits.

  “As unlikely as it seems we believe that over the years Fielding indoctrinated and radicalised his children, poisoning their young minds against the Crown. Latterly, there is evidence that in league with a Puritan faction called the Brethren of the Mayflower Fielding abandoned non-violence in favour of well,” he shrugged, “the madness we witnessed yesterday.”

  The King absorbed this.

  “Thank you, Colonel Harrison. On your return ashore please convey my personal thanks and appreciation to your people for the courageous, and I know, sometimes onerous work they do in the service of the Commonwealth of New England.”

  Harrison bowed his head.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now,” the monarch went on. “We must turn to the question of what to do next. The ‘security response’ to the events of the last hours will be a matter to be determined by My Government and its agent in New England, Viscount De L’Isle.”

  The King had learned very quickly that there was no minute or hour of any day when he was not His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

  However, it was also true to say that there were often times when his people required him to be more George V, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Rex, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor than ever!

  This was one such moment.

  “The Queen and I have discussed the subject of our forthcoming progress through New England and determined that it will proceed as planned.”

  He reached out and took his wife’s hand.

  “Just so there is no debate about this,” the King added bluntly, “this is our irrevocable decision. This is my last word on the subject.”

  Chapter 34

  Mohawk Valley, New York

  Abe had not realised how much he was going to enjoy sleeping with – actually, just sleeping with – Kate. They had never really done much of that in the past other than occasional post-coital pauses for breath. This morning had been the third dawn in a row he had awakened with his wife in his arms and…it was so damned nice.

  To tell the truth he was still in a little bit of a daze; a lot of stuff had not sunken in yet. He and Kate had been married within the Mohawk Nation three years ago but that had simply been promises in Kanien'keháka that Abe had barely understood at the time; words exchanged among his second family in a small gathering of elders and Kate’s female relations. Her mother had died when she was young so her aunts had always been her ‘mothers’; and Tsiokwaris had married or lived as man and wife with the senior aunt Skawennahawi – which translated roughly as ‘she who carries the message’ – an arrangement which Abe had never really got his head around but that did not matter, it had worked well for Kate and that was the important thing.

  In any event ‘the aunts’ had organised a proper tribal wedding shindig and people had begun to fill the settlement that morning as the preparations went ahead.

  Last night he and Kate had gone up the valley side, found a mossy spot and laid down to stare up at the slow-moving theatre of the starry night. Out here so far from the urban sprawl of Albany, the nearest big city, the air was crystal clear and the great sweep of the Milky Way fell across the heavens like a broad band of distant diamonds.

  This morning there were several aircraft flying up and down the Mohawk River, one flew directly over the settlement and headed north.

  Kate nudged him gently in the ribs.

  The ‘celebrations’ were about to commence.

  No time had been set; the party would simply begin when a consensus was reached among the ‘aunts’ that the moment was propitious.

  “Those are military planes,” Abe murmured. He was standing just inside the tree line looking down into the valley trying to quell the uneasiness in his soul. Most of the aerial activity seemed to be some miles south, down river. If Kate and he had still been on Leppe Island those machines would be buzzing over their heads all the time!

  “I thought today was supposed to be a white man’s holiday?” His wife teased him, on the verge of giggling. Kate had been giggling a lot since we had arrived. She never made any attempt to hide it when she was happy.

  True, today was the Empire Day Holiday; the whole of New England shut down and did not get back to normal for a week or so after the ‘EDH’. Originally, the First Thirteen had celebrated the anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival in the New World in November 1620, this had become a colonial second ‘harvest festival’ imported from the old country and later a ‘Thanksgiving Day’ usually on the last Saturday in November each year. After 1776 there had been various festivities to gloat over the subjugation of the infamous rebellion, usually held around the end of August each year which had morphed into a traditional English late summer Bank Holiday. But then back in the 1870s somebody in Whitehall had had the bright idea of having a day of ‘Imperial celebrations’, the then King, Edward VII, had
thought it was a marvellous idea and after a Royal Commission had sat and reviewed things Empire Day had been born, its first celebration occurring in 1881 after several years ‘coming and going’ over exactly when it ought to be celebrated.

  The First Thirteen colonies of New England had acquired, and maintained ever since, an influential, and periodically, powerful lobby in Westminster during the World War of 1857-65 and it had been a famous New England parliamentarian, Jefferson Wilson, who had laid the Private Member’s Bill before the House of Commons proposing that Empire Day should henceforth be the first Sunday after 4th July unless that day was actually the Sabbath. In later years Wilson had courted no little controversy by plainly and repeatedly stating that his motive in making 4th July – the anniversary of the treachery of Philadelphia – Empire Day was no more or less than to ‘rub the noses of recidivist republicans in the mire of 1776’.

  On the East Coast the festivities went on until, as Abe’s father used to say ‘until they stopped’ every year. In some colonies factories and whole towns literally shut down and the whole population went on vacation. Perhaps, half the people who would have flocked to the shores of the Upper Bay yesterday to enjoy the spectacle of the Fleet Review and to try to catch a glimpse of the King and Queen, would probably have been ‘out-of-towners’.