Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  Chapter 11

  Monday 11th July

  Fort Crailo Prison, Albany

  My fifth or sixth – honestly, I had lost count - court-appointed public solicitor had introduced herself to me in my room at the Queen Eleanor Hospital the day after the turnkeys had beaten up on Tsiokwaris and me.

  Honestly, you wonder what the world is coming to when the colony’s employees rough up two old men trying to have a quiet chat about their families!

  It was a different, very junior or aging, more often than not nearing pension-time ‘court officer’ who visited me every time. None of the rostered list of jobbing attorneys wanted to touch my case with a bargepole so the court had to send whoever it could find. Last time in hospital the girl was straight out of college and probably still only half-articled. Today, now that I was back in my cell at ‘the Fort’ my ‘brief’ was a podgy, self-satisfied shyster in a shiny suit who thought the way to a condemned man’s heart was via a fixed, flimflam man toothy smile.

  It turned out he was Irish and his people came from Connemara. I say ‘Irish’ but as was to be expected from a third generation New England-born son of the Emerald Isle, it was patently obvious that he had very little time for the ‘English’, which made two of us.

  Desmond Dermot O’Flaherty, his card said.

  He had a lot of letters after his name which I took to mean he had qualified via correspondence courses rather than a proper college and had probably never worked in a respectable law firm. The colonial judiciary’s lip service to its duty to ensure that every person who came before its courts had ‘appropriate legal representation’ was of the parsimonious variety; so, nobody got rich as a public defender and inevitably, most times you paid peanuts you got lesser primates queuing up to do the job.

  I liked Desmond O’Flaherty!

  And he liked me because potentially, I was his ticket to fame.

  It is always good to know where you stand.

  “Is this room bugged?” My cheery new friend inquired.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter, they can’t use anything they tape after they’ve charged you.”

  I had to put him right on this point of law; which was not a very good start to a client-lawyer conversation.

  “They can, actually,” I told Desmond, “all they have to do is vary the charges. A comma here, a definite article there, that’s all it would take.”

  “Oh, you might be right,” the younger man agreed, a fellow in his shoes could not afford to be proud. “I didn’t realise you had legal training?”

  “I don’t,” I confessed. “Do you?”

  O’Flaherty, who was in his mid-thirties and already afflicted by the onset of middle-aged spread laughed like a horse at this.

  “Do I?” He chortled, shaking his head. “Do I ever! I can see why you’ve upset so many people, Isaac!”

  Now, in my time I have had a lot of conversations with a lot of lawyers: that is what you get for being an enemy of the people on and off, most of your life. However, this one took the proverbial biscuit!

  “Yes, well,” I explained, “that’s a thing that has surprised me down the years. As you see, I’m a fairly harmless sort of chap. Oh, and amiable with it and I like to think, witty.”

  Desmond had pulled a heap of papers – one could hardly call it a file, it was more like the contents of a waste paper basket turned out into an attaché case – and was rummaging through the creased sheets as if he had just mislaid the stub of a winning ticket at the track.

  Presently, he withdrew a crumpled sheet in triumph.

  “My esteemed predecessor reported that you had been the victim of an assault?”

  My cracked ribs were still mending.

  “I don’t think they meant to put us in hospital.”

  “But they do mean to hang you, Mister Fielding?” The lawyer paused. “Can I call you Isaac, by the way?”

  It was all the same to me.

  “Sure, Desmond.”

  “Tell me all about Two Hundred Lost Years?”

  The flip-flop questioning was part of the deal with Desmond, it seemed!

  “Haven’t you read it?”

  “Sorry, I’m not a great book reader. That’s why I flunked so many law exams, I suppose.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Yeah. I knew I’d find an examiner who appreciated the gift of the gab, sooner or later, so why ever would a young blood like me want to waste good drinking and wenching time with my head in a load of dusty old law books?”

  Before I could answer this proposition, I was presented with a second.

  “Besides, you learn a lot more about human nature at the race course than you do in a classroom!”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do! Anyways, tell me about Two Hundred Lost Years?”

  I decided to humour him.

  It was not as if I had anything better to do with my time.

  “I posited that if George Washington survives the Battle of Long Island because the wind shifts and the British Fleet can’t block the East River that the Continental Army escapes to fight another day and eventually, many years later the British get fed up – or rather, run out of money – and say ‘to Hell with New England’, and sail away. George Washington, or somebody like him, or Patrick Henry, the President of the First Continental Congress and the first signatory of the Declaration of Independence is elected as the President or Prime Minister, whatever, of the First Thirteen…”

  “That’s a bit fanciful, isn’t it?” Desmond O’Flaherty objected.

  This irritated me.

  “No!”

  “Have it your own way, it’s your book!”

  “In any event,” I continued, “thereafter, it seemed logical to me that the First Thirteen would inevitably seek to extend their own empire to the west, sooner or later coming into conflict with the French in the then Louisiana Territory – which stretched from the Gulf coast to Canada – and the Spanish in the South West. Likewise, it seemed logical that once the First Thirteen got a taste for empire building that they would covet Canada and take on the British again…”

  “Sooner or later?”

  “Exactly. That, after all, is the logic of empire.”

  “So, where does that lead?”

  “If you look at the Americas the best farmland, most of the key industrial minerals like coal, iron, copper, tin, zinc, oil and so forth are easily accessible in vast quantities north of Mexico. Given the wide-open spaces and the pre-existing network of navigable waterways, no shortage of timber for ships and so forth, one could see an American industrial revolution outstripping anything that was going on in Europe by say, 1850 or 1860. By then the Empire of New England might have stretched from the Canadian Arctic to the forests of Central America, possibly all the way down to Cape Horn. If one fast-forwards that alternative history to the present day what we might have now is the Navy of New England ruling the global sea lanes, linking together an American Empire which straddles the planet.”

  Desmond O’Flaherty thought about this.

  “So, where does this leave the Old Country.”

  “England? With precisely nowhere to go, probably. Right now, the British Isles would be home to a people dreaming about their past glories slowly growing more impoverished in their lonely little cold, windswept islands sandwiched between the great European Powers, say France, Germany and Russia in the east and the planet’s single global superpower across the other side of the North Atlantic, the Empire of New England.”

  The lawyer shrugged.

  “So, we’d be calling the shots?”

  “Yes…”

  “The English would never put up with that!”

  “They’d have no choice. Without the manpower and resources of New England the British Empire would be a busted flush. True, the English would have found a way to muddle along after they were kicked out of New England; they might even have manufactured another Empire elsewhere by playing off the
other Great Powers against each other but in the end, the result would have been the same. By now, there would be no British Empire and England would once again be relegated to the status of a third or fourth rate power, its situation analogous to that it experienced in Elizabethan times in the latter sixteenth century when Spain was the great western superpower.”

  “But the English still defeated the famous Spanish Armada?” Desmond O’Flaherty objected.

  “In 1588, yes. But they probably would not have if Philip II had sent another one the next year, or the year after.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  I ought not to have entertained this digression.

  However, I was in full flow.

  “Because Elizabeth I and the British Isles were irritants, not existential global geopolitical threats to the Empire of New Spain. The English protestants were theocratic anomalies which offended Philip II’s soul, a problem he could sort out some other time…”

  “Okay, I get it, I think.” The lawyer had stopped looking through his mess of papers. “So, what would happen if some George Washington-type troublemaker came along now and won his Battle of Long Island instead of getting his head blown off?”

  I could not resist it.

  “Without New England at its back its enemies would tear the British Empire to shreds inside a decade!”

  The younger man grinned at me.

  “Have you considered a plea of insanity?”

  “There’s nothing at all insane about anything I wrote in Two Hundred Lost Years!”

  My lawyer scratched his head.

  “But the whole think is just a big joke, isn’t it?”

  “No!” I snapped, losing my temper.

  “Oh, right. In that case, they’re definitely going to hang you,” Desmond O’Flaherty declared. His eyes narrowed: “Was that the idea all along, Isaac?”

  Chapter 12

  Tuesday 12th July

  South Street, Lower Manhattan

  When Melody Danson had rung him that morning Albert Stanton had suggested they meet at a coffee shop which, coincidentally, was well-known to both of them. In the detective’s experience journalists tended not to want to speak to the police in their own offices, so, she was happy to accommodate the man from the Manhattan Globe.

  Stanton, she discovered was a dapper, bespectacled man of about her own age dressed, to her surprise, in workman’s dungarees. His shirt was unbuttoned and he wore no neck tie, although bizarrely, his expensive uptown designer jacket was casually hung over the back of his chair where he sat in the window awaiting her arrival. She was deliberately late – a woman’s prerogative – because she wanted to know if he recognised her.

  He did.

  He waved and after a moment she signalled she had seen him and was coming over to join him. The choreography of first meetings fascinated Melody; the guy obviously wanted this to look like she was his date. Okay, when they were done she would leave him the bill.

  Just for the sake of authenticity!

  Like a perfect gentleman Albert Stanton rose to his feet and waited patiently with courteous attention for her to make herself comfortable opposite him before he settled anew.

  “You’re not my type,” she smiled.

  “You’re not mine, either,” the man replied, amused. “No offence meant.”

  Okay, so he has done his research on me.

  Ought I to be impressed?

  “None taken.”

  “The last I heard you’d been exiled to Brooklyn, Detective Inspector?”

  “My, my, you are well informed Mister Stanton.”

  “Is any of this on the record?” The man asked.

  “No. But I’m the sort of girl who remembers who played nice and who tried to stab me in the back.”

  Melody knew the fact she had dressed down, dowdy like a harassed housewife and not taken a whole lot of trouble with her hair that morning would not be lost on the reporter. Stanton had started out as a jobbing photographer who could get the pictures others could not get, moved seamlessly into ‘proper’ photo-journalism and lately, he had become one of his editor’s go-to investigative rottweilers. Albeit, still an attack dog with a camera in his satchel.

  It had not taken long for the story of her secondment to Government House to get around; there was nothing quite so leaky as a police station filled with under-achievers!

  “And you’re the kind of chap who is far too busy to get into a fight with my new friends,” she observed, smiling. “So, I strongly recommend that you save our little chat for your memoirs.”

  The man smiled, shook his head.

  “You’re also,” Melody added, “smart enough to figure out that I’m starting with you because you’re right at the bottom of the feeding pyramid. You work a story from the bottom up; that’s how I work a case. Any case, any time. There isn’t any other way. Tell me I’m wrong?”

  Albert Stanton shrugged.

  “I made a full statement a couple of days after the attack on the fleet. That was a year ago. I haven’t got anything to add to that…”

  As they had taken their seats he had beckoned to a waitress who now hovered over the couple.

  “A small pot of tea and a cream scone, please,” Melody requested.

  “Another coffee for me,” the man ordered urbanely.

  Melody picked up their conversation.

  “That’s fine. First things first. I need to know if everybody still remembers what they think they remembered. People leave things out. People realise they got things wrong. People rationalise what they saw, when and what it actually meant. I always go back and check witness statements.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he sighed.

  Melody looked out towards Brooklyn Heights beneath the looming span of the towering King Edward VI Manhattan Bridge – carrying the road from Long Island on its top level, and two railway tracks on the lower - across the grey, churning East River. Through the haze she could just make out the great, slab-sided hulks of the two new ‘fleet aircraft carriers’, the Ulysses and Perseus, both leviathans rising amidst the maze of cranes and derricks of the Admiralty Dockyards of Wallabout Bay. Perseus was the nearer to completion, two to three months away from embarking on her maiden voyage.

  It had taken the salvers over five months to break up and remove the wreck of the Polyphemus so as to permit the rest of the yard to recommence work and launch other completed hulls to clear the slips for new contracts.

  Melody had spent the best part of two days and most of the nights in between working through the prosecution papers of Rex versus Fielding, Isaac, et al. Reading between the lines – and there was a lot of that to be done in the documents she had seen – the sabotage of HMS Polyphemus’s launch and the attacks on the Fleet in the Upper Bay had come as a complete surprise to everybody. The CSS had believed – or convinced itself, she had not figured out which clause applied yet - it had nipped a decidedly non-specific conspiracy in the bud: the constabulary had honestly believed their security arrangements were, to use an unfortunate term, ‘watertight’; and the Royal Navy had steadfastly pooh-poohed all suggestions that there could possibly be any danger to anybody during the Fleet Review right up until the moment the first four-ton speedboat had piled into the side of the battleship HMS Princess Royal travelling, it was estimated, in excess of fifty miles an hour!

  Even a year later only the bare bones – well, more like a fragmentary partial skeleton – of the monstrous conspiracy had been fully revealed. Problematically, most of the key participants in the Empire Day outrages were dead and more than one suspected key player behind the scenes had committed suicide, been killed resisting arrest or simply disappeared with a trace. So, a year on, all the authorities had was a father with a long history of dissidence and pacifistic anti-imperialist activism whose lifelong contacts with persons within the Iroquois Confederacy gave rise to unquantified ‘security concerns’, his two eldest sons – all three of whom were presently incarcerated at Fort Crailo essentially denying e
verything – and a third, missing son, who may or may not have been involved in anything more felonious than dodging the obligations of his colonial indenture, and a very, very long list of maddeningly unanswered questions.

  Understandably, the Colonial Security Service had lobbied to delay the trial of the Fieldings. Not because it was afraid a right-thinking jury – if such a thing was not an oxymoron – was likely to acquit the defendants but because such a high-profile trial, it was hard to think of a higher profile trial in the history of the First Thirteen, would have to be held in the full glare of the public eye and it, the CSS, knew that it was not going to come out of the affair smelling of roses.

  In fact, the whole dysfunctional apparatus of colonial intelligence gathering and home security was likely to be kicked about like a football before one or other, perhaps, all of the Fieldings finally had their inevitable appointment with the hangman.

  Um…

  The Governor had not struck Melody as the sort of proto-typical imperial pro-consul of yesteryear who did not care a damn if he manufactured a slew of martyrs…

  “Do you think Alexander Fielding was planning to crash his aircraft into one of those battleships?” Melody asked after her tea and cream scone had arrived.

  The man poured her tea.

  She gazed at her scone.

  Her mother’s figure had gone to pot while she was still in her thirties; however, Melody consoled herself that she had not made the elementary mistake of having babies, a thing she considered her wisest life decision to date and therefore she had retained the same modestly shapely – if not classically wine-glass busty – curves she had had in her mid-twenties as a result. Men might prefer blondes; she guessed they also like mature redheads with big hair and an almost willowy confirmation just as much.

  It was a pity it was wasted on them.

  C’est la vie…

  “Not while I was riding with him,” Albert Stanton remarked at length. “He took me on a grand tour of the two bays and a circuit of Wallabout Bay then he put me back on the ground so I had plenty of time to get my pictures back to the Globe for the later editions.” He chortled, looked out of the window across the East River following Melody’s earlier gaze. “The guy was passed out under the wing of his plane when I got to Jamaica Field that morning. I had to kick his foot to wake him. He had that military knack of waking up, sobering up in a split second. I had him down for one of those drink-sodden old Air Force guys but he was still all there. He flew that aircraft like it was an extension of his body. If he’d wanted to crash onto one of those battlewagons,” he grimaced, “I reckon he’d have come down somewhere where it would have caused real damage, not just bounced off like most of the others did.”