Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  “What about the Colonial Security Service, sir?”

  “The CSS reports directly to me,” the Governor of New England re-joined tersely.

  “Because of the gravity of the offences, quite apart from it being a capital trial,” Henrietta De L’Isle jumped in, “a full set of prosecution papers is now lodged with the Attorney General in Philadelphia, copies of which are held here in this building. You can get to work as soon as you like, Detective Inspector.”

  “What about my normal duties at Brooklyn Heights?”

  “That’s already been taken care of,” the Governor’s daughter assured her. “Officers currently on leave been notified to return to duty immediately.”

  “I see.” Melody half-smiled ruefully. “All things considered, it’s probably a good thing I will never be coming back to work for Brooklyn CID on Long Island!”

  Chapter 9

  Friday 8th July

  Kempton, Crown Dominion of Ontario

  Kate Fielding, the wife or in her own tradition, iakón’kwe – the woman – of Abraham the healer heard the aircraft approaching from the north east and skipped outside to catch sight of it. Sometimes, her husband circled their homestead on the edge of the woods before setting down on White Bear Lake but disappointingly, today the broken clouds seemed too low as they scudded across the darkening skies. She screwed up her eyes and scanned the heavens.

  There it was!

  A silvery blur in the distance as the setting sun caught the leading edges of its wings, its engine humming like a swarm of angry hornets.

  She had been worried sick the first time she had known her husband was flying alone; then he had taken her with him on a flight up to Bytown on the Ontario River to pick up fresh medical supplies.

  She had laughed and giggled with the joy of it; after, that was, she had got over her terrors as the machine had rattled and skidded across the water as the forested western shoreline of the lake had rushed towards them. Then they had soared like an eagle. Later that day she and her husband had walked together in the big city without shame the way they had only been free before on tribal lands.

  In Canada, the English and the French had learned how to get along with each other way back in the mists of history and each sides’ former native allies had been, more or less, included in that ancient settlement. Consequently, although inevitably there were white men who did not care for, disliked or condescended to ‘Indians’, and there were members of the Iroquois nation who were similarly prejudiced against the Europeans, most people seemed to get along just fine. There was none of the ‘separate development’ bigotry so prevalent, institutionalised south of the border and in Bytown she had seen countless black and oriental faces self-evidently, no more out of place than she had been, happily walking hand in hand with her husband.

  The biplane brushed the bottom of the nearest cloud and turned with a grace which belied the big, clumsy floats it dragged around the sky. The machine circled within fifty yards of the cottage, its wing-tips pointing earthward.

  Kate could clearly see the red, white and blue roundel denoting it was an aircraft on official business.

  For the community of Kempton on the Bytown to Prescott Road the flying machine, a modified ex-Colonial Air Force Bristol Mark VII, was a lifeline. It carried the mails, transported District Commissioners and their baggage to remote stations across the wilds of Ontario, and on occasions, the sick and injured to the main regional hospital in Bytown. In addition to being the local healer, Kate’s husband along with a small coterie of other pilots, flew and maintained the two small seaplanes that made ‘modern life’ possible in the wilderness between the Ottawa River in the north and the St Lawrence in the south.

  The deal was that the pilots were volunteers, unpaid to minimise costs and that the community was responsible for the basic upkeep of the aircraft. Originally, there had been three seaplanes but one had been cannibalized for spare parts before Kate and Abe had arrived in Canada.

  The main north south road had been widened and re-surfaced last year but most of the traffic passed through Kempton without noticing it existed; and to the east and west the land was trackless, impassable other than by horse or mule, accessible only by air employing the numerous lakes and rivers as watery airfields. They said miners and loggers would eventually open up the country but that was just so much loose talk and until it happened the two aging float planes would remain Kempton’s real links with civilization.

  Kate waved.

  Hopefully, her husband would be able to cadge a lift back from the lake; otherwise it was an hour-and-a-half trek and it would be dark before he got home.

  She had a pot of stew – coney meat, roots and vegetables - on the stove and fresh bread she had collected that morning from the small tribal bakery. South of the border native communities lived in enclaves which were still laid out in semi-defensible encampments; here in Canada they straggled along paths and sprawled through the woods because the only thing anybody ever worried about was the bears and the wolves which still roamed, albeit ever more rarely, through these lands.

  Awakened by the racket of his father’s aircraft flying so low over his head Kate’s son, Isaac junior, bleated for attention. Although Kate had been generally welcomed at Kempton she had not really felt as if she belonged, or that she had been embraced into the arms of the clan, until the birth of her son. Overnight she had become not a white man’s woman but a tribal wife and mother, that ‘most honourable estate’ as her husband described it.

  At first Abe had been politely scorned at Kempton; the healer had practiced his medicine almost exclusively among the European settlers of the interior. Then one night he had saved the life of an eight-year-old Algonquin girl by performing an emergency tracheotomy – the child had somehow swallowed something which so inflamed her throat she was suffocating – and the next morning flown her and her mother to Bytown to speed the child’s recovery in hospital; afterwards, he was ‘Abe the healer, husband of Tekonwenaharake’, a member of ‘the nation’.

  Kate lifted her baby son from his nest of blankets on the kitchen table. She sniffed the air.

  Okay, that was the first decision made for her!

  She needed to clean him up before she fed him.

  Back in the Mohawk Valley her aunts and the older women of her clan had half-convinced her that child-bearing and rearing was a complicated business. It was not; leastways, not once one accepted that one’s whole life revolved around one’s baby; and that was as complicated as it got. Comfortingly, if she ever got too tired or scared there were the other wives and mothers of the tribe to pick up the pieces.

  She tried not to worry about things over which she had no control and given their circumstances that was for the best. Everybody marvelled at how well Abe had carried these last few months. She understood that his sadness, their sadness, was a thing apart from the day to day lives they lived in Ontario. One day they might confront everything they had left behind but not now or they would have no life at all. They had been living on borrowed time for the last year and living in fear would be no life at all. So, they left much unspoken knowing that they were fugitives.

  Young Isaac squalled at the indignity of being washed and bundled anew in his cocoon of linen; and promptly forgot what the problem was as he sucked contentedly at his mother’s breast.

  Just like a man!

  Kate’s father had wanted them to move farther from the border, to literally disappear into the forests among the brotherhood of the Canadian Iroquois.

  ‘I trained to be a doctor,’ Abe had objected and that, had been that!

  And besides, no matter how bad the news was from Albany, one simply did not desert one’s family, no matter the complications of the filial attachments. This said, Abe’s affection for his eldest brother, Alexander starkly contrasted with his boyhood estrangement from his nearest sibling, William, and to put it mildly, his conflicted emotions regarding his father. Kate had sensed some of this over the years, putting it do
wn to the fact that like many younger sons Abe was naturally closer to his mother than his father. Rachel had been a small, saintly woman who had had her trials with Isaac notwithstanding the pair of them had been inseparable during the years of her final illness. However, even as a boy Abe had known about his father’s casual infidelities, the majority occurring in those days when on account of his academic blacklisting in New York he was a peripatetic travelling lecturer and supply teacher mainly out of colony supplementing his income by publishing articles in magazines and every year or two another popularist history of a new, allegedly unexplored, aspect of New England’s past.

  The whole family had known he was the author of Two Hundred Lost Years. It was an in-joke nobody talked about which had always irritated Kate’s husband, who had once remarked to her of his father that it was ‘the last serious thing he ever wrote’.

  Isaac Fielding had eventually been accepted back into academia in his home colony; by then he had become a harmless eccentric, a man whose opinions were consistently out of kilter with the main stream and therefore, excellent teaching counter points. Isaac was lucky that Long Island College, University of New York, an old, respected, well-endowed faculty had a quaint tradition of tenuring at least one or two oddballs among its Fellows, presumably, just to prove it had a sense of humour.

  That was not to say that Kate’s father-in-law was not a good man. Isaac senior had successfully inculcated a colour-blindness in his children – although Vicky, the eldest sibling, had never been comfortable around Kate’s people in those days when the Fielding clan had summered in Mohawk country – and he and her father were like brothers. No, the joke had always been that Isaac’s problems were with the ‘whites’ not wife the ‘red men’!

  Abe’s self-imposed ‘distance’ from his father since his mother’s death had confused Kate the last couple of years; and she had never held it against Isaac that he had wanted to talk to Abe about ‘throwing away his career’ for her.

  She had felt guilty about that too, although not very – guilty, that was - if the truth was known.

  Isaac was one of those men whom, she suspected, only ever let those closest to him see what he wanted them to see. Outwardly, he was the life and soul of the party, the funniest, most gregarious man in the room and yet when he turned away one wondered who he was and what he was really thinking.

  I am thinking too hard about it.

  How well does one ever really know anybody?

  Kate reckoned she knew Abe as well as anybody could know anybody! But that was different, they had hardly any secrets because when you had grown-up with each other as kids the way they had, secrecy, inner space was never really an option.

  That was how she knew that although Abe had not said it – he did not need to say it, and probably could not have explained it – there was an insistent, never to be quelled little voice in his head that blamed his father for what had happened to his brothers and his sister last year. His sister was a widow, his nieces fatherless, Alex and Bill were in jail accused of the most monstrous and unjust things but some small part of him could not, would not believe that his father was the innocent man Tsiokwaris had painted him to be in those days after the Empire Day atrocities.

  At that time there had been no time to think things through. There were troops trespassing on native lands, searching, interrogating and in several instances, roughing up Mohawk men and women they encountered wanting to know if they had seen a tall white man and his ‘squaw’.

  Down the years Abe and Alex, and once, Bill had got into a fight on account of somebody calling Kate a ‘squaw’; a term they understood, and had always understood to be a vicious, cruel, contemptuous insult akin to calling a respectable white woman a ‘slut’ or a ‘harlot’ or a ‘whore’.

  So, maybe Isaac Fielding had not done such a bad job bringing up his sons…

  Kate heard the truck grind to a halt outside the cabin.

  Her son had dozed off to sleep at her teat. Rather than risking disturbing him she pulled a shawl about herself to be ‘decent’ and went out to meet her husband, whom she had not seen for the best part of forty-eight near intolerable hours.

  Frank Derbyshire, the seventy-some year-old head mechanic at White Bear Lake waved from the cab of his ancient Leyland three-tonner and in a clanking of gears drove off to leave the ‘young lovers’ to get on with the serious business of getting re-acquainted.

  Kate lifted her shawl to reveal Isaac junior renewing his sleep-interrupted early evening meal.

  Her husband, who had seemed dusty, greasy and dog-tired the moment before beamed broadly. He bent his head and kissed her. His stubble tickled but she never minded that.

  “That boy,” he chuckled, gazing at his son hanging on for dear life, “sure knows when he’s onto a good thing!”

  “What about his father?”

  “Oh, I’ve known that from the first time I saw you naked, Tekonwenaharake, my love.”

  When he said her name like that Kate’s knees tended to buckle and she got the most distracting tickling sensation in her intimately private womanly parts.

  “We were only three years old at the time!” She reminded him, giggling.

  There was worry in Abe’s eyes.

  She sobered.

  “What is it, husband?”

  “Tsiokwaris has been arrested. I saw the story in one of the Bytown papers. The reports are a bit vague but it seems he got in to see my father at Fort Crailo and there was an incident of some sort.”

  “My father is an idiot,” Kate decided sagely. Even before she heard anything like the whole story of this at least she could be absolutely certain.

  “He’s the most honest and honourable man I’ve ever known,” Abe said, in defence of his father-in-law whom he knew to be a profoundly good man.

  “That’s what I said,” his wife frowned. “He’s an idiot!”

  Chapter 10

  Saturday 9th July

  Governor’s Palace, Williamsburg

  The Governor of the Crown Colonies of the Commonwealth of New England, Edward Philip Cornwallis Sidney, 7th Viscount De L'Isle, rose a little rheumatically from his wicker chair on the veranda to greet his visitor with a wry but in no way unfriendly welcoming smile.

  Brigadier Matthew Harrison mirrored De L’Isle’s somewhat rueful expression as the two men shook hands and the Governor waved for him to join him enjoying the tranquil aspect of the walled grounds of the old, Georgian-style colonial mansion.

  “Thank you for changing your schedule at such short notice to come out to Williamsburg, Matthew,” the Governor of New England said as he and his friend took their chairs.

  The two men had not had a chance to talk properly since Harrison had come on board the Centaur, the Imperial Airways Empire flying boat bringing the Governor back to New England when it had stopped over in Manhattan to refuel ahead of its final ‘hop’ down to the York River over a fortnight ago. On that occasion the hard-pressed Head of the Colonial Security Service had stayed on board the Centaur and flown straight on down to Florida where it was known that Havana-based Spanish agent provocateurs had recently stepped up their efforts to inflame the Latino part of the population of the newest ‘American’ protectorate – Colonia de Florida - of the Commonwealth of New England.

  However, today, the niggling irritation of the Empire of New Spain’s attempts to inspire a resistance movement among a population which basically, had been ecstatically glad to see the back of the Catholic-dominated, feudal regime in its capital, St Augustine, less than twenty years ago and was now well on the road to full economic and commercial integration with the neighbouring colonies and protectorates of the South East and prospering to such an extent that every year it sucked in tens of thousands of immigrants from all over New England, was the least of their problems.

  That was not to say that the prosperity of British Florida was not both an irritant, and a temptation to the Spanish in Cuba, Santa Domingo and even in faraway Mexico. Back in the late 1950
s New Spain had virtually surrendered Colonia de Florida, a territory wracked by the predations of the Inquisition and absentee landlords, a verdant potentially bountifully productive territory hollowed out by hardship and pestilence. In those days the Spanish had been preoccupied with the war in the South West and at the critical moment the Royal Navy had blockaded the eastern Gulf of Spain, cutting off the rump regime in St Augustine and the desperate Floridians, with a modicum of encouragement and weapons surreptitiously supplied by Philadelphia had done the rest in a short, bloody uprising before inviting New England to send in troops to ‘keep the peace’.

  As recently as 1960, Florida’s first democratically elected Legislative Counsel had adopted a constitution similar to that of neighbouring Georgia and declared its unequivocal allegiance to the British Crown, thus becoming the 12th Protectorate and 28th member of the Commonwealth of New England…

  An immaculately red-jacketed Royal Marine steward appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Coffee for me, son,” the newcomer requested, adding: “if you please,” because he had never met a British Royal Marine who did not deserve a man’s respect.

  He met Philip De L’Isle’s eye.

  In public the two men had maintained a studiously distant, wholly master-servant relationship over the years; however, early in their acquaintance De L’Isle – a man with none of his predecessors prissy, arcane illusions about what really kept the peace in New England – had brought the then, acting head, of the Colonial Security Service into his confidence.

  Traditionally, Governors of New England were always outsiders with no previous links or entanglements and without significant family ties to the First Thirteen. Wisely, London had learned long ago that the only sure-fire way to ensure that the American colonies never turned their ire, or their guns, on each other – or, hopefully, the Old Country - was to install a ‘neutral’ outsider to ‘Govern’ over them. Only in that circumstance could a man in Philip De L’Isle’s position be seen to be truly even-handed. That was vitally important because in the politics of the First Thirteen – although not so much in the ‘new’ sixteen dominions, protectorates and concessions – colonies the man and the woman in the street valued nothing more than the warming sense that they were getting a ‘fair deal’ from the Crown.