by James Philip
Given that Matthew Harrison was a Virginian in charge of a colony-wide service he could amply attest to the problems an out-of-colony man had in otherwise routine dealings with local colonial politicians, civil servants and individual citizens. In fact, had it not been for the quiet, unwavering support of the Governor his position would have been impossible even before the Empire Day outrages of last year which by rights, ought to have cost him his job, his pension and under some past Governors he could think of, probably his liberty in his declining years.
The events of last July had been the ultimate test of his friendship with, and the personal loyalty of Philip De L’Isle. At his and the CSS’s darkest hour when Harrison had been called to account on the evening of the attack on the fleet in New York’s Upper Bay before the King on board the Flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron, HMS Lion, while that great ship was still making good her damage and recovering her dead, the Governor of New England had stood unequivocally shoulder to shoulder with him.
That had been a sobering day; Matthew Harrison liked to think if their positions had been reversed that he would have done likewise, remained unswervingly staunch but a man never really knew until it came to the crunch.
“How was your journey, Matthew?”
Harrison guffawed. At this time of year, the roads melted in the heat and railway tracks warped. And of course, it was still the Empire Day holiday week so everybody seemed to be out and about on the move. Government House had requested the Colonial Air Force to provide a float plane to bring the Head of the CSS down south from Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The plane had delivered its passenger and his personal aide-de-camp, his goddaughter Sarah Arnold, to a landing stage on the nearby James River where the Governor’s limousine had been waiting to whisk them – in Vice-regal luxury - the short distance to the Governor’s Palace.
Harrison was relieved that outwardly at least, Sarah seemed fully recovered from her traumatic assignment undercover as Isaac Fielding’s common law wife. She looked more her old self – not having to dye her straw blond-auburn hair red as part of her disguise helped – and for the first time in several years she seemed more ‘settled’ in herself.
A bright, ambitious girl she had never, it seemed to him, been very happy in her skin as she blossomed into feisty womanhood but last year’s events had, counter-intuitively, indefinably, changed all that. It was as if having been tested by the fire she had emerged tempered, more trusting in her own worth and the respect in which she was held by others.
The Head of the Colonial Security Service had known Sarah’s parents as a young man, bounced the girl on his knee when she was a toddler, and proudly accepted the duties of a godfather and then – exigencies of the service notwithstanding and so forth - not seen Sarah again until she was a cadet. She claimed not to recollect ever having met him as a child, or that she had sat on his knee on balmy summer days on his father’s plantation…
He had never been at peace with her operating undercover. Long-term he had always had plans to restore Sarah to her former role as his personal liaison officer to the Governor’s Office in Philadelphia.
“On a day like this it was like flying over God’s own country!” He declared.
The two men waited while coffee was served.
“I’m sorry to hear that Elizabeth is suffering again,” the Virginian averred quietly. He had lost his own dear wife May Beth some years ago to a cancer and knew exactly how it was for a friend to watch his beloved partner’s life slowly, painfully ebbing away. “They said it would be all right if Sarah paid her respects…”
“Elizabeth will be grateful for such convivial female company,” his friend sighed. “Henrietta is a real brick but her mother knows how much I rely on her and she feels – wrongly, obviously – that she is somehow letting me down taking up so much of Hen’s time. Stuff and nonsense, of course.”
Matthew Harrison picked up his coffee cup, stared briefly into its gently steaming depths.
“I regret the necessity of leaving Henrietta out of the loop on this one,” he decided. “For a little longer, at least…”
“It cannot be helped.” The Governor moved on. “She appreciates that bringing in a third party, a detective like Ms Danson is, notwithstanding the risks inherent in the exercise, a necessary evil. As we discussed last week she was not wholly convinced of this – other than politely, dutifully as a daughter in her place must be sometimes whatever she thinks, privately – until I showed her the relevant sections of Danson’s security file.”
“You didn’t…”
Philip De L’Isle grimaced, shook his head.
“No. No, I judged the ‘personal’ side of things to be immaterial. It was sufficient to share the lesser known details of the lady’s remarkable professional career with Henrietta. It transpires that Hen was already acquainted with many of Inspector Danson’s ‘firsts’ in both the law and her police service. Professionally, the woman is a positive paragon to her sex, an object lesson to young women like Hen in how, even in the First Thirteen, it is possible to pursue a successful career in a so-called man’s world!”
The Head of the CSS ruminated on this for a moment.
“We may find ourselves in a situation where we have no alternative but to discredit Danson, sir,” he reminded his friend.
They were playing high stakes poker and the rules were brutal; hence the necessity to place, front and centre, of their agreed ‘game plan’ a player with a convenient Achilles Heel.
Just in case things went wrong…
Not that Philip De L’Isle planned to play that particular card unless there was absolutely no other alternative. In an ideal world he would never have built such a contingency into his thinking for it deeply offended his personal sense of honour. Regrettably, there was little room for noblesse oblige in the cut-throat milieu of colonial politics.
The Governor of New England registered the ‘sir’, understood that his friend had wanted to emphasize that he was in deadly earnest.
“I truly hope it does not come to that,” he confessed. “Nevertheless, in the event that it does I have emphasised to Henrietta that it would be wise for her to keep a safe distance between herself and Ms Danson.” He passed a hand through his thinning, greying hair. “She will probably ignore me, of course.” He gazed into the middle distance, suddenly weary. “It is a tricky thing trying to safely manage letting an angry genie out of a bottle, what?”
Harrison grimaced.
London had mandated that the true story of last year’s outrages - presently, a ticking bomb - be, if not defused, then detonated in a ‘controlled fashion’, thereby minimising the unavoidable resultant collateral damage.
“I have briefed the people who need to know within the CSS that the Danson ‘inquiry’ will not be without pain,” Harrison confirmed uncomfortably. “As I said at the time the scale of the Empire Day attacks took us all completely by surprise; frankly, we’ve been playing catch-up ever since…”
Philip De L’Isle was shaking his head.
“We both knew that the CSS was severely under-strength given the threats facing us. Moreover, we had already taken steps to address matters. We were not to know that we were to be confronted by something hugely more sinister that what at the time had every appearance of rag-tag unholy alliance of old-style Sons of Liberty and Getrennte Entwicklung fanatics. We mistakenly imagined we were facing demonstrations and protests, perhaps, some level of organised civil disobedience. We were not to know the lengths to which our enemies were prepared to go to conceal their true identities and purposes. If the police force of New York had been on its toes, if other neighbouring law enforcement and colonial intelligence agencies had pooled their information it might not have been left to the CSS to operate in a vacuum. If we knew now, or rather suspect now a year ago, we would not be where we are now. You did what you could with what you had to hand and made a damned good fist of it, Matthew.”
Harrison shrugged.
“Mistakes were made,” he ins
isted doggedly. “The Danson woman is very good at her job. Did you know that the real reason those idiots in Albany took her off the Empire Day investigation before it properly got started last year because she was making most of the people, men, that is, around her look like idiots? Dammit, she was the only one who actually got any level of cooperation from the Royal Navy and you know how hugger-mugger they are about having ‘outsiders’ involved in ‘their’ business!”
Philip De L’Isle smiled ruefully: “Perhaps, we missed a trick not recruiting her into the CSS last year, Matthew?”
Harrison involuntarily brushed his moustache with the back of the forefinger of his left hand, chuckling softly in his bear-like way. He had contemplated an approach to ‘the lady’ more than once, originally over three years ago, discounting it only on the grounds that he had enough problems already!
“It does worry me that Henrietta is caught up in this thing,” he countered.
“Hen is a bright little thing, razor-sharp, as you well know, Matthew,” the Governor of New England retorted resignedly. “I strongly suspect that she sees and understands an awful lot more about what is really going on than she lets on. She and I have not discussed it but I have taken it as read that she realises that in our position we have no choice but to play this game at multiple levels. We cannot have a general inquest into what went wrong last year because we all know exactly what went wrong; the police and intelligence services of the First Thirteen did more or less everything they could short of openly defying my Office to thwart the activities of the CSS in their domains. Unbeknown to us this gave our enemies a priceless opportunity to strike. It is in nobody’s interest for that to be publicly known.”
Harrison nodded.
“The Danson woman will dig up a lot of dirty linen.”
“Yes. That can’t be helped.”
Both men knew the CSS has been grossly under-resourced and over-stretched in no small measure because the First Thirteen had collectively frozen its tythe at 1972 levels! In retrospect, it positively beggared belief!
The Governor set aside his exasperation.
This was the first time the two men had had an opportunity to frankly hammer out specifics since his return from England. Aboard the Centaur there had been too many other witnesses and time had been at a premium. All that had been possible was for Harrison to fully brief him on the latest developments and to flag the idea of bringing in a quasi-outsider to cut through the mired conflicting political vested interests and the locals’ natural instinct to cover up their blunders in New York. Subsequent telephone conversations and the exchange of minutes, the terse prose of official reports, were no substitute for a face to face meeting of minds.
“So,” De L’Isle determined, “where are we with this, Matthew?”
“I have not formed a judgement as to whether the sudden resignation of the Chief Magistrate is good or bad news.”
“Probably bad,” the Governor of New England remarked. “John Murray is an awkward cove but I’d rather have him on our side than not. What the Devil happened at Fort Crailo the other week?”
“Crailo’s Governor permitted a Mohawk clan chief – whom we suspect but cannot prove was a co-conspirator in this affair – to visit Isaac Fielding. The two men were permitted to speak together alone in a native tongue none of my boys at the prison could make head or tail of, and then,” Harrison groaned with weary disbelief, “rather than letting the pair of them talk ‘for the tape’ so that my people could decipher what they were saying later, the guards intervened in such a way as to put both men in hospital!” Another groan. “It is only a matter of time before that gets into the papers outside the First Thirteen.”
‘D’ Notices were notoriously ineffective the further one travelled west from the East Coast; meaning that sooner rather than later, lurid descriptions of the brutal treatment of the prisoners – both comparatively elderly men - would filter back into the mainstream consciousness of the citizens of the First Thirteen. Frontier justice was fine along the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers; but ‘back east’ was supposed to be ‘civilised’.
“Before I left for England we discussed the possibility of seeking Abraham Fielding’s extradition from Ontario?” De L’Isle queried.
“My information is that the Governor of Ontario would require full disclosure of ‘probable cause’ before he considered such an application. The man lives in Iroquois territory, he’s married to his squaw, he’s a practicing doctor and they don’t have many of those out in the country and he has made no attempt to assume a false identity…”
“Was Abraham Fielding involved in the Empire Day attacks?”
Harrison pursed his lips.
“The police in Albany are still convinced that the whole Fielding brood was involved. Personally,” he shrugged, “I have no direct evidence, or for that matter any compelling circumstantial reasons to believe that he was implicated in any of the atrocities. Other, that is than he disappeared a couple of days before the Empire Day weekend. As you know, originally, it was believed that he was the pilot killed crashing his aircraft into HMS Tiger.”
The Governor of New England was ticking names of his list.
“You’re satisfied that the daughter, Victoria Watson is an innocent victim in all this?”
“Yes, after witnessing the sabotage of the launch of HMS Polyphemus she had a miscarriage and very nearly died. We never established the guilt or otherwise of her husband, John Watson.” The Head of the CSS scowled. “For what it is worth I’m pretty damned sure he was an innocent man. Heck, I’ll have what those morons did to that poor man on my conscience until the day I die.”
De L’Isle said nothing.
In the emergency of last summer, the CSS had had to bring in a host of outsiders, including former military men like those in the lynch mob who had shot dead John Watson, the much-respected Director of Operations for Small Ship Construction at the Admiralty Dockyard – and two others at Wallabout Bay – when all they had supposed to be doing was making a show of detaining the three men for routine questioning. Harrison had been going through the motions and had confidently expected Watson would be quickly, routinely cleared of all suspicion.
“Danson is bound to focus on the role of ‘contractors’,” he went on. The CSS had been operating on such a shoestring for so many years that it had become normal practice to recruit part-time, casual, half-trained, inexperienced staff, as and when required; the Empire Day outrage had brought all its proverbial chickens home to roost at once. “She’ll probably start with the two ‘actors’ I employed for odd jobs. I had to let them go after the press got wind that they had been involved in Isaac Fielding’s initial interrogation.”
The Governor of New England had been immensely impressed by the imaginative ways Matthew Harrison had stretched his ever-shrinking departmental budget over the years. The man was a master of improvisation.
“Sarah’s role in all this will be of great interest to the courts, to Ms Danson and in the fullness of time, to the more salacious of the daily newspapers,” he sympathised. “I gather the case against the middle Fielding son, William, is more damning than that against his elder brother, Alexander?”
“By his own admission and confirmed by yard records, William Fielding worked on three of the speedboats involved in the attacks in the Upper Bay. He is a member of a fundamentalist Lutheran congregation at Flatbush, and he was a known associate of at least two of them men who flew aircraft involved in the attacks on the 5th Battle Squadron. One of whom, Rufus Nathaniel McIntyre, was at the controls of the Bristol VI machine which crashed into the bridge of HMS Lion. William Fielding claims to have been unwittingly duped into assisting the terrorists. However, a part of his brother, Alexander’s ‘defence’ is that the only reason he assisted McIntyre and another suicide flyer, Paul Franklin Hopkins, to fly down to Jamaica Bay on the eve of Empire Day was because William had vouched for them.”
“You know that Government House has received representat
ions from the Governor of New York on behalf of Sir Maxwell Coolidge?”
Harrison tried not to wince.
“It was unfortunate that Miss Coolidge could not be ruled out of our inquiries more expeditiously,” he conceded. “It is my understanding that it was the Chief Constable of Long Island, no friend of the Coolidge family, I gather, who over-ruled my field officers and insisted that she be held in custody until all reasonable doubt had been removed in the matter.”
The Governor of New England would have despaired but it would not have helped. Presently, the young lady in question was being entertained anew at the Massapequa Prison for Women, this time for being in contempt of a court order restraining her from standing anywhere along a quarter-mile length of Clinton Avenue, Albany.
“I can’t be seen to intervene,” he said sadly.
Harrison put down his coffee.
“For want of new evidence, it is still our contention,” Harrison explained, without conviction, “well, our ‘official’ working hypothesis, that Alexander Fielding may well have been the airborne co-ordinator of the attacks on the 5th Battle Squadron. He had reconnoitred the Upper and Lower Bays earlier in that day and facilitated the taking of aerial pictures of the wreck of the Polyphemus at Wallabout Bay. Moreover, there is evidence that he took both McIntyre and Hopkins on a training flight over the Mohawk Valley the day before the attacks in which aircraft were seen to be practicing acrobatics and bombing runs…”
Philip De L’Isle held up a hand.
“You know you don’t have to justify yourself to me, old man,” he reassured his friend. “It seems to me that whatever questions might be raised about the culpability of the sons, damning or slight as they may be, there can be no doubt whatsoever about the guilt of the father!”