Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  Oh, and now and then with the perennially grim-faced representatives of the Colonial Security Service and once a month – usually, the first Tuesday - a member of the Colonial Humane Society, an organization with a long and honorable tradition of standing up for prisoners’ rights visited me; we drank a cup of tea together and we chatted about this and that.

  My conversations with representatives of the CSS were not usually that amiable, or productive. Those ‘interactions’ apart I was left to my solitude; a solitude only made tolerable by the books I was allowed to have and to retain, and the pencil and paper my jailors grudgingly supplied me with so that I might quietly vent some of my existential angst.

  I had a lot of that!

  The knowledge that my jailers would subsequently spend endless futile hours attempting to interpret and or deconstruct my whimsical jottings and anagrams gave me countless hours of harmless amusement.

  Two of my sons, Alexander and William – I had not been allowed to meet either of them since my arrest, not that, in the circumstances, I had any reason to think they would want to speak to me – were also at Crailo awaiting their trials for, among other things, high treason. I confess to having been a tad downcast to learn that my widowed daughter, Victoria, had apparently, made it known – on television, would you believe? - that the sooner they put a rope around my neck the better.

  If that was not bad enough I did not know if my youngest boy, Abraham, was alive or dead and neither, I had learned recently – a tiny chink of light in an otherwise wholly dark imbroglio – did the Colonial Security Service.

  At first the CSS and the Long Island-based colonial detectives investigating the sabotage of the cruiser HMS Polyphemus at the Admiralty Dockyard at Wallabout Bay and the Empire Day attacks on the fleet anchored in New York’s Upper Bay, had assumed that Abe had been killed in one of the aircraft or on one of the speed boats which had crashed into the fifty thousand-ton castles of steel of the 5th Battle Squadron. Problematically for the authorities, neither of the surviving ‘terrorists’; Alex and Bill, had placed Abe at the scene of the crime. As far as I knew Abe had had nothing whatsoever to do with the affair although, true to form, the police had initially brought forward a couple of stooges who had claimed that Abe was ‘in it up to his neck’ only for it to transpire later that these stoolies, notwithstanding they had adamantly claimed to have recognized him from photographs, had never actually met my son.

  In any event, I choose to believe that Abe is still alive.

  That said, from the outset I was very careful to keep my reasons for believing that he was still alive to myself, especially when, as today, I was informed that I had a visitor.

  “I’m done talking to those CSS idiots!” I objected. I had been engrossed in ‘Letters from New Spain’, a fascinating compendium including, verbatim, all the letters sent home from Mexico by the Conquistador, Hernan Cortes between 1519 and 1525, to the Emperor Charles V and Queen Dona Juana chronicling the destruction of the Aztec Empire. On one level it was an object lesson; on the other indubitably one of the most remarkable, albeit Machiavellian, tracts to have survived intact from the Renaissance. Understandably, I was much happier buried in the tragedies of the sixteenth century than I was likely to be in those, very personal ones, oppressing my soul in the twentieth century!

  “We’ll tell the Chief to sling his hook then!”

  I sat up.

  “The Chief?”

  “There’s this Indian downstairs who says he’s a friend of yours. He’s been hanging around Rensselaer the last couple of weeks trying to get into the Fort. A couple of days ago he got some judge down in Manhattan to give him a court order granting him visiting rights up here!”

  The guards at Crailo were of a type. They were not intrinsically bad men but their lives tended to be sedentary, their intellectual and spiritual horizons limited and their xenophobia and racism latent, rather than conscious. ‘Indians’ were not citizens, or even real people, to many of the grey-uniformed, flat-footed officers of the colony’s Prison Service.

  “He says his name is ‘Black Raven’,” I was informed. “His ID card says his proper name is ‘Tom Morris’.”

  My wry smile obviously irritated by interlocutor.

  “What?” He demanded, as if it was my fault he was ignorant; as well as stupid.

  I shook my head, trying very hard not to smirk like a schoolboy struggling to figure out what the man and the woman on the inside pages of the first smutty mag he had ever got his hands on, were…doing.

  The ID cards were a colony-wide thing introduced in the last six months or so, railroaded through the quiescent Colonial Legislative Councils of several of the First Thirteen by the ‘separate development’ surrogates of the Getrennte Entwicklung movement in the wake of last year’s Empire Day attacks. That the ‘Proof of Identity Act’ initially applied only to ‘indigenous or native peoples otherwise not living on tribal lands’, effectively in a two-year long pilot to establish how – or if it was even going to be feasible - the regulations might be applied colony-wide and to cover ‘out of colony visitors and other transients’, said it all about the mindset of the good men.

  I say ‘good men’ because the last time I counted there were only three women members of the forty-two ‘person’ Legislative Council of New York. Twenty years ago, there had been a movement for ‘equal representation’ and positive discrimination; unfortunately, the Getrennte Entwicklung deplorables were sexist and misogynistic as well as being racist and religiously intemperate, so, the seeds of what was seen as ‘ungodly feminism’ had been well and truly crushed in the intervening years.

  Two of the First Thirteen Colonies – North Carolina and Georgia - had no female representation whatsoever on their premier elected forums.

  Within the Proof of Identiy Act I half-suspected that the enforced anglicization of ‘native’ as opposed to specifically non-English, European or Slavonic names was some kind of misbegotten attempt by ‘reasonable’ men to thwart what they perceived to be the underlying purpose of the ‘separate developers’. It was a classic case of good men doing something – too little too late - to salve their unquiet consciences instead of actually doing what they all knew they ought to be doing, namely, standing up and fighting for what they really believed in.

  “Tom Morris,” I murmured.

  I would have explained if I had thought the guard was interested, or bright enough to get the joke.

  “Sure, I want to meet Tom Morris,” I said, marking my page and putting down my book.

  Chapter 3

  Friday 24th June

  Gum Point, York River, Virginia

  The great six-engined Empire flying boat circled once, twice and then a third time as the pilot waited for the lingering wraiths of mist to burn off in the early morning sunshine. That happened fast at this time of year beneath otherwise cloudless skies as soon as the sun rose fully over the horizon which was why the big birds from the Old Country timed their arrival on this stretch of the East Coast for about two hours after dawn. Inevitably, wind and weather conditions over the North Atlantic sometimes played merry-Hell with the meticulously plotted schedules but that was just something you had to get used to if you were crossing such a wide ocean aboard aircraft with a top speed of only around two hundred miles an hour.

  They said the days of the flying boats were numbered; that the advent of the jet engine was going to change everything. Each of the First Thirteen was planning or had started building sprawling civilian airports with two to three-mile-long concrete runways in anticipation of what ‘experts’ – well-educated snake oil salesmen by any other name – were speculating would be a ‘boom’ in ‘affordable mass aerial transportation’ when the first new jet-powered passenger aircraft, the prototypes of which had as yet, barely begun to take to the skies began to roll off the production lines.

  The Hunter thought it was literally ‘pie in the sky’; maybe jet engines were the future, the military certainly thought so, but clumsy, magnif
icent old flying boats like the ‘Centaur’, now lining up for landing against the stream on the York River represented proven, reliable technology and nobody was reckless enough to say that about ‘jets’. Only a fool paid money to jump on board a plane capable of flying at or near the speed of sound that was barely off the design room drawing board.

  These thoughts turned slowly in his mind.

  He breathed long and deep; willing his pulse to slow as he waited.

  It was going to be a challenging ‘shot’.

  Heavier than normal spring rains meant that the river was running higher than seasonally, it ought, and there would be a small, unquantifiable ‘chop’ as the tide began to come in around the time the target transferred from the forward starboard passenger hatch of the aircraft to the launch which would carry him ashore to disembark on the opposite, southern bank of the river.

  The York River was over a mile wide at this point and at no time would the Centaur be closer than around nine hundred yards to his birch and turf hide concealed within the tree line a few feet above the muddy foreshore.

  Nonetheless, this was an exponentially easier ‘shot’ than the one those fools back on Long Island had goaded him to take last year. Even with the latest 6x magnification German sights, his customised re-chambered 0.303-inch 70-calibre silenced Martini-Henry and all those years’ experience down on the Border, targets on the deck of a ship over a mile away were literally the longest of ‘long shots’.

  This ‘contract’ was less problematic.

  The Centaur kissed the grey-green waters of the York River and the pitch of her motors quietened as her crew throttled down her inner Hercules radials. The flying boat slowed and began to turn across the stream presenting her towering silver tail plane to him. The Empire boats were built on a truly gargantuan scale with wingspans in excess of one hundred-and-sixty feet with a capacity to ‘sleep’ over forty to fifty passengers in near ‘liner’ luxury.

  The Hunter had never set foot on one of the monsters.

  All he knew was that their aluminium skins were paper thin and that he had absolutely nothing in common with the sort of people who could afford to travel on these hated symbols of imperial domination.

  He ignored the gnats rising with the tide, swarming along the waterline. He was used to getting dirty, coping with critters, the heat, the cold, the humidity, the inherent discomfort of waiting, waiting, waiting wherever one had to wait for as long as it took to get ‘the shot’.

  It was his childhood learned ‘native’ patience that had made him the Dakotan Scouts trophy sniper in Alta California and in the Rio Grande Country all those years ago. Mostly it was desert and mountains down there; the scorpions and snakes came out at night and the temperatures plummeted. He was the only one who kept on making ‘the shots’. That was what he did, why the elders of his clan called him ‘The Hunter’ and why they had once sent him East to strike blows against the empire they knew would, sooner or later, surely rape their ancestral lands and eradicate their traditional way of life.

  The Hunter knew little of the politics of the struggle.

  As a young warrior he had been one of many Lakota to volunteer for colonial service; not understanding in his youth what his people lost by collaborating with their real enemies. During his years in the Army he had been a good soldier. Afterwards, he was a lost soul neither Lakotan or New Englander despite his ‘service’ to the Crown. His own people had mistrusted him; the colonials, the English, had wanted nothing to do with him. So, he had wandered the native lands until eventually, he had re-found his path.

  Now he was studying the huge flying boat with the cold, clear eyes of a master predator as it maneuvered to tie up to the rusting Imperial Airways buoy in the midstream.

  Normally, the Empire boats put down in Hampton Roads; there had once been a jetty on the south bank of the York River but this had fallen into disrepair years ago when Imperial Airways had balked at the ongoing costs of dredging and surveying the waters closer inshore. Hence, when during the summer months VIPs came out from England to visit the Governor in his summer retreat at Williamsburg the giant flying boats moored in the midstream and their passengers went ashore by launch.

  The Hunter had accepted last year’s commission on trust, then discovered that HMS Lion was to be anchored over five hundred yards father off shore than anticipated. This time around he had done his own reconnaissance well in advance, setting up his sniping hide twenty-four hours before the scheduled landing of the Centaur. And this time he had demanded that his mission should be expressed succinctly with an exactitude which matched that with which he plied his trade.

  This was a yes-no job.

  There was a single target.

  Last year the idiots had come to him with a ‘wish list’ – white men rarely knew their own minds - and he had had to flee like a scalded cat pursued by the humiliation of a very, very rare failure. In the event, he might not have escaped at all but for the confusion following the Wallabout Bay – of which he had had no foreknowledge - bombing and the Empire Day attacks. Now, nearly a year later he wondered, albeit idly, if or how his mission fitted into a bigger picture but only briefly, he was a killer for hire and although he preferred to work for men with the interests of the native nations in their hearts this ‘shoot’ was, when all was said and done, just another job.

  The face of the man he was to kill was burned into his consciousness. Photographs of the man had been passed to him in Iroquois country, since when he had made no attempt to discover who he was or why he was important to his principles; because that did not matter.

  A steward in the blue uniform of Imperial Airways had undogged the hatch and was carrying out a shouted conversation with the three-man crew of the twenty-foot River Police launch which had chugged sedately out to meet the Centaur.

  The lines to the mooring buoy had dragged out now, holding the big flying boat steady downstream with her blunt nose pointing up river as the morning sun began to gleam and sparkle off the water and the silvery skin of the flying machine.

  The Hunter doubted any of the new ‘jet aircraft’ would ever match the Centaur and her sisters for sheer majesty and grace.

  He held the man in the hatchway in the crosshairs.

  Kept watching, waiting.

  This man disappeared back into the fuselage.

  A young man in a civilian suit appeared and within moments had stepped down into the launch, turned and looked back up into the Centaur.

  The Hunter’s sights fixed unwaveringly on the handsome, moustachioed features of the stiffly erect much older man who next stood in the hatch. This man paused, looked around and seemed to be taking the airs, in no hurry to disembark.

  Presently, he turned, spoke to somebody out of sight.

  Hands were shaken and he waved to the men in the launch.

  Two cases were handed down.

  Then a canvass sack; the diplomatic mails for Williamsburg, presumably.

  And then the distinguished, even at a distance of over nine hundred yards through telescopic sights, commanding figure was standing in the waist of the launch chatting affably with those around him.

  The Huntsman’s eye followed the Governor of New England. It was an easy kill, even some of those ignorant farm boys he had served with in the South West could have made the shot.

  He sighed.

  He had not been paid to assassinate this man.

  He focused anew on the cabin door.

  He blinked.

  The hatch was swinging shut.

  Something had gone wrong!

  He had been informed that his target would disembark with the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England…

  THIS MIGHT BE A TRAP!

  Instantly, he was reaching for his rucksack and the case for his gun, backing out of the birch and turf hide and within seconds running low, loping soundlessly into the woods down the twisting, mostly overgrown track he had identified as his best escape route if anything went wrong…

&nbs
p; Chapter 4

  Friday 24th June

  Governor’s Palace, Williamsburg, Crown Colony of Virginia

  The Governor – the usage of the title ‘Viceroy’ was retained only for ceremonial and Court functions in England these days - of the Crown Colonies of the Commonwealth of New England, Edward Philip Cornwallis Sidney, 7th Viscount De L'Isle, who, in these more egalitarian and democratic times only employed his full title ‘The Lord De L'Isle, Dudley and Northampton’ in his annual appearances in the House of Lords to make his customary report on the year just completed in the Americas, from which he had just returned, was in a particularly ill humour that morning.

  Sixty-year-old De L'Isle still cut a lean, proudly erect figure of a man; recognisably the one-time athletic sportsman who had rowed victoriously for Oxford in the Boat Races of 1937 and 1938, and served with immense distinction in either three, or four – as most old soldiers will attest, these things are best forgotten about – small wars with the Grenadier Guards before laying down his sabre and signing up with the Colonial Diplomatic Service.

  “Dammit, what the Devil are they playing at in Albany, Hen?” He demanded irascibly, having contained his displeasure just long enough for the door to his office to close, leaving him alone with his companion for the first time since his return to the Governor’s Palace.

  Twenty-six-year-old Henrietta Eleanor Georgiana De L’Isle, the Governor of New England’s youngest daughter carried on pouring a restorative cup of tea for her sorely-tried father. The poor dear had just this moment got back from his unspeakably onerous yearly chore of keeping the ‘grubby fingers of those bloody bankers and merchants in London out of my bailiwick’ to discover that her mother had been taken ill again – a thing Henrietta had been actively complicit in keeping from him in his seventeen days away – and now, having previously been told that a date for the trial of the ‘Empire Day Traitors’ would be promulgated in his absence in the Old Country, he had learned that there had been yet another, this time, possibly indefinite delay in bringing the aforementioned ‘traitors’ to justice.