Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  Male sodomy was still a regularly prosecuted and severely punished offence throughout the First Thirteen; there was, however, no extant legislation – although both Massachusetts and Vermont had recently attempted to mollify Puritan sensibilities by discussing amending this oversight – forbidding or seeking to punish ‘similarly unnatural relations’ between two adult women anywhere in New England. Traditionally, this was because it was deemed that the stigma of ‘public revelation’ was deterrence enough to prevent continuing ‘intimate congress’ between two women. ‘Adult’, effectively the ‘age of consent’ varied from twenty-one in New York to twenty-five in Georgia.

  Melody took it as read that the CSS would have at least one of her past affairs on record and that if the need arose, it was this information which the Governor of New England would employ if it became necessary to rein her in or in extremis, to discredit her in the coming days or weeks.

  I wonder if Henrietta De L’Isle has seen the file?

  Perhaps, it really was time to travel?

  Sarah Arnold was thoughtful.

  “I’ve never met anybody I wanted to marry. What about you?”

  “Yes, once. She was already married.” Melody had no idea why she had told the CSS woman that! “I was a lot younger then. She was my age now at the time. I know now that we don’t live in that kind of world.”

  “Not in the First Thirteen,” Sarah agreed. “For the record, Brigadier Harrison wanted to bring you in on this because you are a top-notch detective,” she went on, “not because we’d found a piece of salacious gossip about you in our files.”

  Melody weighed this for a moment and decided it was high time she got down to business. The Governor of New England had given her one reason why he had drawn her into this imbroglio; sooner or later she was bound to discover what was really going on. The only thing she was absolutely sure about right now was that very little of what she was going to uncover would actually come as news to her principals in Government House and the Colonial Security Service.

  “What actually happened to the Howlands?” She asked.

  “Nothing. They got panicky after Empire Day and we re-located them.”

  “Can I talk to them?”

  “They were contractors working to a script we wrote for them…”

  “That’s a ‘no’ then?”

  “No,” Sarah countered patiently. “Henry’s not very well at the moment – he has a heart condition - and Jennifer’s no longer in the business.”

  “Why did Henry Howland have a copy of my warrant card with his picture on it when Isaac Fielding was arrested?”

  Sarah Arnold spread her heads.

  “That was sloppy documentation work. Sorry.”

  Melody was not letting her off that lightly.

  “How ‘out of the business’ is Jennifer Howland?”

  “During the preliminary wash-up of all the things that went wrong last summer – the one we conducted in the week after the Empire Day disaster - we discovered that Jennifer was in a long-term relationship with an older, married CSS man and she was expecting his child. The guy concerned went off to the Ohio Territory to get a ‘quickie’ divorce – so far as I know his wife was okay with that – and he and Jennifer got married just before young Matt came into the world.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t swallow that story on trust either but strange things happen.”

  Melody had had second thoughts about food.

  She ordered something Mexican off the menu with no expectation it would be anything but ‘hot’. Sarah decided she would have a small plate of fish and chips.

  Inside, there was a lot of groaning, whistling and wincing as a crowd of men circled the TV set above the bar to watch the highlights of the sporting drama in England where the Philadelphian cricketers had, as usual, given the English batsman a torrid ‘going over’ on the first morning of the Second Test Match at Lord’s Cricket Ground in North West London.

  “I don’t understand cricket,” Melody admitted.

  “Does anybody?” Sarah grinned.

  “At least with football I could see the point if both sides had their own ball, but cricket…”

  The food arrived.

  The women nibbled daintily.

  “Help me out,” Melody suggested, conversationally. “I get it that you got angry with Isaac during the interrogation. You were worried about what might be about to happen. I get it, honestly, I do. But you broke all the rules?”

  The other woman had picked up a chip, put it down.

  “I lost my temper. I let it get too personal. I have no excuse, it was unprofessional…”

  “You and Brigadier Harrison are close?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with this!”

  Melody raised an eyebrow.

  “Seriously?”

  This time Sarah made no attempt to brush off Melody’s ‘we’re both adults so don’t take the piss with me’ question.

  “Okay. I’m more than just his goddaughter. I feel more like his niece or something, and he’s always been very protective of me and my career. I know he bumped me up a rank so it wouldn’t hurt so much losing a grade or seniority when sooner or later somebody, like you, came along and called me out over that stuff last year. Anyway, if I get carpeted that’s just fine by me. I’d wanted to slap that self-satisfied, egotistical, selfish bastard for a long time. Trust me, he had it coming to him!”

  “You were his common law wife?”

  Sarah started eating again.

  “You want to know about the sex?”

  “Only if you want to tell me about it.”

  The CSS agent laughed a short, unfunny laugh.

  “Isaac wasn’t the first man I slept with for ‘the team’.” She confessed. “It was just sex. It wasn’t great. It didn’t hurt. I faked a few orgasms, the way all women do. It wasn’t as if he asked or expected me to do anything unnatural.”

  “But you still felt you needed to slap him around?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  It was Melody’s turn to shrug.

  “Maybe,” she said levelly. “But we’re not talking about me. From what I’ve seen in the files the whole ‘sleeping with the enemy’ deal was a waste of time?”

  “We reckoned if nothing else I’d cramped the bastard’s style…”

  “You wanted to know if the youngest son, Abraham Lincoln Fielding was a part of the conspiracy. Was he?”

  “We still don’t know. He’s a hard guy to know. Completely unlike either of his brothers. I mean, to look at him you wouldn’t know Alexander and William were his brothers. I don’t mean because he’s so much taller, he’s just…different.”

  Melody asked the obvious question: “Did Isaac’s first wife play around? You could hardly blame her; Isaac sounds like he was a serial philanderer back in the day?”

  “All that’s kind of academic,” Sarah objected. “The thing for us was that Abraham Fielding had a genuine front and centre reason to hold a grudge against the colony and the Crown.”

  Melody made no attempt to pronounce Abraham Fielding’s girlfriend’s Mohawk name.

  “Kate?”

  “Yeah. I mean, personally, I don’t necessarily hold with all this ‘separate development’ stuff. Heck, most whites are a mixture of a dozen European races so what’s the difference with adding a dash of Indian too? But if a guy’s looking to pursue a career in the professions and he gets involved with, or if we’re being slushy about it, falls in love with a squaw, he’s screwed every which way and that’s got to suck. Don’t you think?”

  Melody hesitated. Having inadvertently chomped down on a particularly vicious chilli she had to wait for the lingering after-burn to subside and her eyes to cease to water.

  “Well,” she gasped, “I’ve only been in love a couple of times in my life and when those relationships went south I was the one to blame so, really, I’m not the one to be the judge. I get it that there’s mileage in Abraham blaming Getrennte E
ntwicklung for ruining his life. But…”

  “I know, I know… It’s at the extreme end of the motivational scale when you’re talking about committing mass murder to get even,” Sarah conceded.

  Melody was enjoying the exchange so much she needed to remind herself she was still at work.

  “I have to ask,” she apologised. “The attempt to get Isaac to read long enough sections of Two Hundred Lost Years for you to cut together incriminating propaganda tapes was a bit lame?”

  “Tell me about it! Look, you have no idea how thin the CSS was, it still is, there are still less than a thousand of us spread across the First Thirteen and the Border Territories. Before the Empire Day disaster there were three hundred of us and about as many contractors, part-timers like Henry and Jennifer Howland. That was that, the whole deal. Apart from Brigadier Harrison and a core of about a hundred agents none of us were permanent, all our commissions were short service or on rolling year on year contracts that could be, and often where torn up at twenty-four hours’ notice because one or other of the colonies had withheld its tythe one month. It’s a completely ridiculous way to run an intelligence service! We were incredibly lucky that what happened last year was not ten times worse!”

  Chapter 15

  Monday 18th July

  Fort Crailo Prison, Albany

  I had been allowed to exercise – walk around briefly – in the prison gardens several times that spring. Everything had seemed bare then, now the beds were full of blooming flowers and the lawn was a green, manicured carpet beneath my feet. It crossed my mind that possibly Alex and Bill had cells with views of the garden and that this was some kind of new CSS ploy to screw us about. If so, it was lame because by now our various middlingly incompetent ‘public defenders’ would surely have gossiped between themselves, meaning we were all as confused as each other. Our sad reality was that there was nothing the CSS could do to us that was going to ‘screw us over’ as efficiently as the good – or indifferent – intentions of the colony’s judiciary. Therefore, I decided to enjoy the sunshine and what passed for fresh air in the Rensselaer district of Albany without worrying about why I was being allowed an ‘airing’. In the way of things, I reckoned I would find out what was going on soon enough.

  I sat on a bench and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my face, shut my eyes and listened to the trilling of a nearby bird and the buzzing of the bees. Beyond the walls of the garden the distant rumbling roar of the mills and factories on the eastern bank of the Hudson River up and downstream was louder out here in the open air. Those great works stretched for several miles, sprawling far across the land away from the river bank like a blight. Albany, a relatively small industrial city by the standards of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and positively dwarfed by some of the conurbations in the ‘Free Trade Zones’ in the Ohio Valley and around the Great Lakes, was merely a token of the power of the sleeping giant that was New England.

  They said more steel was turned out by the blast furnaces along a couple of stretches of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers than in the British Isles and the whole German Empire combined. The heart of the North American continent was a giant bread bowl that someday would extend to the Rocky Mountains; its plentiful cheap grain had fed the poor of Europe and Russia for decades. Half the world’s ships – and half the Royal Navy – had been built in New England yards and New Englanders served in practically every regiment of the British Army, patrolling the ends of the earth. The merchant banks of Boston, Manhattan, Baltimore and Philadelphia had long since rivalled and surpassed their founding fathers in the City of London. It was hardly surprising that in recent years the tide of emigration from the Old Country had risen from a trickle to tens of thousands each year. Twenty or thirty years ago the influx of new ‘settlers’ or ‘colonists’ had mainly comprised people returning to the First Thirteen to retire – attracted by the cheaper housing and the much lower cost of living than that back in the Old Country – with younger, well-educated, ambitious New Englanders heading in the opposite direction or sailing for Australia or South Africa to make their fortunes. Back in those days the big worry had been of a ‘brain drain’, nowadays, most of the newcomers were skilled workers and graduates, young families wanting a better life for their children in a land where opportunities were not shackled by the anti-diluvian mores of class and cast, where trade guilds increasingly held governments dominated by doddery old men to ransom…

  The only thing I had never understood was why New Englanders had put up with being ruled from London in the first place!

  “Do you mind if I join you, Isaac?”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Please yourself, Colonel,” I groaned as I looked up at the heavily fleshed Virginian ring-master of the Colonial Security Service. “Or is it Field Marshal, these days?”

  The other man brushed aside my caustic query with a wan half-smile as he settled on the bench to my left, carefully apart.

  “Brigadier, for what it’s worth,” he replied evenly.

  “How’s Sarah?” I inquired solicitously.

  “She’s still as mad as Hell at you. But that’s to be expected, I suppose. I think she was mad at me for a while, too but that passed.”

  “The colonial system uses and abuses women,” I observed.

  Matthew Harrison had not come to Albany to swap polemics with a condemned man.

  “This will all be over soon,” he commented, looking sidelong at me. “One way or another, it’ll soon be over; you know that, I know that. I sure as Hell never wanted it to end this way.”

  This was not the first time the Head of the Colonial Security Service had softened me up for the ‘patriot to patriot’ pep talk. The bastard must be getting desperate. Which was kind of ironic given that I was the one with a noose around my neck!

  “Okay,” Harrison went on. “I get it, you’re not feeling talkative. That’s fine. It just means I get to say a mess of things that I ought to have said to you years ago. It’ll all come out in the end, anyway. The way we infiltrated the Sons of Liberty and put all those idiots in jail. The way we put off this day, where we are now, for thirty years. Heck, Two Hundred Lost Years was our ticket into that world; those ‘true believers’ hauled us in like we were fish on the end of the line and suddenly, the ‘brotherhood’ was wide open. Do you remember how we felt about that? The bender we went on the day those guys went down?”

  There were some things you went out of your way to not remember.

  “We were a heck of a team, Isaac,” Matthew Harrison continued ruefully. “You with your words; me with my…”

  “Ruthlessness?” I suggested dryly.

  “You were the dreamer; I was the realist,” the big man countered. “Just like we were as kids. Do you remember that night we tried to nail that goddammed plaque up on the footings of the Manhattan-Long Island Bridge?”

  I had to smile.

  That was over four decades ago; we were among half-a-dozen schoolboys having ‘a lark’. We were the George Washington Memorial Society looking to mark the place where that long dead hero of a failed revolution had died. I had not known at the time that he had probably been decapitated by chain-shot from a British frigate at least a hundred yards to the south…

  “What happened to you, Isaac?”

  “You know what happened to me, Matt.”

  The big man dug into his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  “I thought you gave up?”

  “I did. Some days, I don’t give a heck if the bloody things will kill me before my time.”

  He offered me the pack but I shook my head.

  Matthew Harrison struck a match and lit up.

  He inhaled deep and we sat awhile in silence.

  “It all came as a big surprise to you, didn’t it?” I chuckled, I could not help myself. This was the surreal conversation from Hell and we both knew it.

  “Wallabout Bay? The atrocities in the Upper Bay?” Matthew Harrison retorted rhetorically. “It al
l came as a surprise to you too, I reckon. But like I keep telling people the sort of folks who think Getrennte Entwicklung is a neat idea are usually just plumb crazy.” He sucked on his cigarette. “Tell me you didn’t know they were going to blow up that ship and crash those aircraft and those speedboats into those battlewagons, Isaac.”

  It was not a question; it was a plea, albeit one he must have known in his heart of hearts was going to fall on deaf ears.

  I said nothing.

  When eventually, my day in court came it was going to take most of the first day just to recount the charge sheet. The names of the dead and the injured would be ‘read’ into the court transcripts. The average age of the sixty-six men who had died on board the battleships of the 5th Battle Squadron had been twenty-one years and two months; and a further one hundred-and-one Navy men had been hospitalised as a result of injuries sustained that day.

  Elsewhere in the Upper Bay that day at least eighteen ‘innocent’ civilians had died or were missing and seven others had suffered serious injuries, mostly the accidental victims of the immense weight of fire turned onto the attacking aircraft and boats.

  At the Admiralty Dockyard the previous afternoon eighty-seven men, women and children had been killed, and another two hundred and seventeen injured when HMS Polyphemus had been wrecked.

  Between twenty and thirty persons had perished on the six aircraft and the six fast speedboats and launches which had mounted the suicide attacks on the Fleet.

  “Self-immolation,” Matthew Harrison murmured. “is that what we’ve come to, Isaac?”

  I cleared my throat.

  “We’ve already lost two hundred years.” I switched tack. “Aren’t you even a little bit worried about what might come out at the trial?”

  “About you and me back in the day?”

  I nodded.

  “No. I’ve lived with too many things for too long. I never planned to take those things with me to my grave.”

  I believed him.