by James Philip
No matter how bizarre it was, I believed him.
“The Resistance will still be out there long after the colony hangs me,” I mused, thinking out aloud.
“Old George Washington’s ghost, you mean?”
“Perhaps. Not that I think old GW would have been any friend of the Sons of Liberty.”
“What about Getrennte Entwicklung?”
I grinned: “Well, that’s an open question, I suppose. He was a slave owning planter, after all!”
The Head of the CSS stubbed out his cigarette.
“Florida would have come over to us fifty or sixty years ago if we hadn’t been so sniffy about the rights of slave owners…”
“People don’t like having their ‘property’ summarily taken away from them. That’s human nature.”
Matthew Harrison grunted.
He rose ponderously to his feet, looked down on his old friend now long-time bête noire and latterly, his enemy.
“I’m sorry your boys had to be caught up in all this…”
“You’re the one who widowed my daughter, Matt,” I reminded him, standing up. Facing him down was never an option, he had five or six inches on me and he had always had that policeman’s knack of staring, his clear blue eyes unblinking, for ever, into one’s soul.
“I’m not the one who plotted against the Crown,” I was reminded. “Or the one who associated with a bunch of religious malcontents set on murdering the King, or blowing up a shipyard full of thousands of innocent people and crashing aircraft and boats into battlewagons in the middle of a Fleet Review!”
I wanted to shout in his face.
That was never really my forte.
Instead, I shrugged.
“Like I said, we’ve already wasted two hundred years.”
“Always, the wise cracks,” Matthew Harrison shook his head. He turned as if to go. “Didn’t you think about Rachel once? Just once before you got involved in this thing?”
That would have hurt a lot more a couple of years ago.
Even now it pricked deep.
Worse, it told me that he knew a lot more than he was giving away.
I hated feeling so naked.
“Rachel’s dead, Matt. She isn’t coming back.”
“No,” the big man breathed sadly. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Chapter 16
Thursday 21st July
White Bear Lake, Ontario
Kate had dropped her baby son off with a neighbour, Kahntineta, a woman several years her senior with three children of her own at the local school and set off towards the aircraft shack by the lake to meet her husband on his return from the weekly run up to Bytown.
Kahntineta – whose name signified ‘she makes the grass wave’ – was an influential and well-respected member of the Kempton tribal community who had recently introduced Kate into the wet-nursing circle, a true token of her acceptance within the clan.
The older woman had taken Kate under her wing as her pregnancy had advanced, mothering her somewhat, and that afternoon she had made it known in small, womanly ways that she did not approve of her young friend ‘running around like a hare’ after her husband.
It was ‘not seemly’ and ‘he will only expect it in future!’
Kate had politely vowed that she would put Abe right the moment he started coming to ‘expect things in future’ but as soon as she was out of her friend’s sight she had skipped like a schoolgirl.
It had taken her about an hour to walk to White Bear Lake, along the way she had looked for bushes which would fruit in a month or two, for plants with familiar roots and shamelessly enjoyed her own company and her own thoughts without the constant worry of listening for her son’s slightest whimper. Not that she resented little Isaac’s demands; it was just that she badly needed a few moments alone and from the look in Kahntineta’s nutmeg dark eyes, regardless of her stern words, she had understood as much.
The news from Albany had sunk in now.
Kate had been a little bewildered by Abe’s calmness. Of course, he was worried but, on another level, it was as if he was detached, unsurprised and more than anything, angry, although strangely, not with the English authorities anywhere near as much as he was with his father. She had tentatively tried to draw him out; he had gently changed the subject, tried actually, to make light of things. In the meantime, she had been busily working through her memories.
Abe had always been his mother’s favourite, closer to Rachel Fielding than her husband as a boy. Isaac and Rachel had been distant, separate people in her youth but when Abe’s mother had got ill father and son had briefly, laid aside their differences. Until the last couple of years, that was. Kate had wondered if the renewed break was on account of her. Abe’s medical training had been drawing to a conclusion and no doctor in the colony could afford to marry a ‘squaw’; but that reasoning had never really made sense because Isaac and her father had been like blood brothers since she was knee-high to a Gopher!
She had not been surprised when Abe confessed that he had not told his father about their plans last summer while swearing Tsiokwaris to secrecy.
Abe had not been rostered to fly up to Bytown this week but volunteered for the duty, hoping to have the opportunity to put telephone calls through to Albany to find out more than could be learned from the week-old newspaper he had brought back from his last trip.
The sun was still just above the tree line when Kate joined Frank Derbyshire down by the lakeside. The second of the ‘Kempton Fliers’ had been hauled ashore and its engine cowling was propped open. The old man was wearing greasy overalls, an unlit roll-up cigarette between his lips sitting in a deck chair under the starboard wings of the beached Bristol VII.
Today, the workshop was quiet, the old man was on his own; the way he preferred it most of the time. However, for Kate, he was prepared to make an exception. He smiled broadly, the oil and grime of a day spent working on the grounded former CAF fighter-bomber etched into the deep age lines of his face.
“If I had known you were coming down I’d have taken the truck up to your place!” He guffawed, levering himself rheumatically to his feet and wiping his hands.
“I wanted to be alone with my thoughts for a little while,” Kate explained truthfully. “I feel like a bad mother leaving Isaac junior with Kahntineta but…”
“Abe told me about your troubles,” Frank Derbyshire confided. “Not that we all hadn’t already worked out what was going on down south. Well, them of us who’ve got eyes and ears, it ain’t as if you two are exactly living like fugitives.”
Kate shrugged.
“Apart from getting properly married in the European way as well as in the tradition of my own people, we have done nothing wrong under the laws of New York, Frank.”
“I know that. You don’t get to be my age without knowing the world’s full of stupid people. You want some coffee, I’ve had some stewing all afternoon…”
Kate girlishly screwed up her nose.
“No. maybe not,” the old man chuckled.
Kate looked meaningfully at the aircraft on the ramp.
“She’ll be as good as new in a couple of days,” Frank Derbyshire promised. “She was running a mite thirsty so I’m cleaning out all the fuel lines. I’d change out all the plugs too if we had enough spares,” he added philosophically. He had learned his trade in the CAF in the days when mend and make do had been the unofficial motto of the squadrons ‘policing’ the border badlands. He reached over and touched the lower wing. “The Air Force flogged these old girls half-to-death but they’ve still got a lot of hours left in them!” This said, proudly, he grinned indulgently. “Now, if only the other jockeys handled ‘my girls’ with the respect your Abe does, they’d go on flying for ever!”
The old man delved inside his overalls and inspected a small watch. Frowned, put it away.
“Your boy will be back soon,” he muttered.
He sighed with audible relief when a few minutes later they heard the sound of an
aircraft approaching from the north. The silver biplane circled the lake once, lined up and swooped down. Soon it was taxiing with muted bursts of power towards the rickety pier near the maintenance shack. Soon the float plane was tied up and Kate felt her feet lift off the ground as she melted into her husband’s arms.
Practicalities swiftly took over.
The aircraft had to be unloaded, a mail sack and several boxes of provisions carted up to where Frank Derbyshire’s ancient Leyland was waiting. It was too steep to bring the old truck all the way down to the jetty, a thirty-yards climb up a one-in-four gradient. Finally, Abe returned to his flying machine, its engine still ‘ticking’ as it cooled to check for leaks and that everything was ‘off’ exactly the way it ought to be.
“Do we need to move her clear of the pier, Frank?” He asked.
“Naw,” the old man decided. “It’ll be quiet overnight.”
In these parts the west wind that blew down the lake making take-offs and landings ‘a breeze’ could easily ‘bump’ or worse, ‘break’ a relatively fragile machine like a Bristol VII against the jetty.
“I’ll double up her moorings,” the younger man suggested and went about his work.
Kate happily planted herself on Abe’s lap in the cramped cab of the Leyland as it bumped, and with a grinding of gears, rumbled through the woods back to Kempton. It was still fully light when the old man dropped off the young lovers and drove away in a cloud of dust.
Kahntineta might not approve of Kate’s ‘running around’ after her husband; contrarily, the older woman definitely ‘approved’ of Abe. The community had never had its own resident healer before and the novelty of their healer being a white man who was so obviously conversant with, and genuinely respectful of tribal sensibilities was a thing many were still struggling to come to terms with. That he could as easily speak to them in one of their own languages, a colloquial, southern form of Mohawk, had been truly revelatory even though it was generally accepted that Abe and Kate were only really passing through because their life journey had only just begun. Or perhaps, it was simply Kate’s husband’s brown eyes; eyes that marked him out from practically every other grey, green or blue-eyed European that the Iroquois of Kempton and the surrounding lands had ever met.
One day it might vex Kate that her baby son gurgled and hiccupped with pleasure when his father picked him up rather than squall as so often he did when she tried to sooth him. However, that was a day probably in their far futures, she suspected. The stove was cold in their small cabin so they ate bread before it went stale and chewed dried fish, drank a little of the weak herb beer everybody drank this time of year because the water was never safe in summertime. To Kate a life without electricity, or light other than by fire was all she had ever known. Now they lit candles at night, went to the midden to relieve themselves, lived as both their forefathers and mothers had lived a hundred years ago even in some of the bigger cities of the modern, sparkling civilisation throughout the First Thirteen and rapidly spreading all the way into the still mostly dark midwestern hinterland. On a clear night the lights of the nearest ‘new town’, some twenty miles to the south glowed low on the horizon.
There was talk of stringing ‘night lamps’ all the way along the highway from Prescott in the south to Bytown in the north. Soon the immemorial darkness of the night would be gone forever, and this, among many other things troubled Kate if she was so unwise as to allow her mind to wander from the blissful small rooms of her marriage, motherhood and the life she had had these last few months.
They stripped naked and washed in the brackish water from the half-barrel behind the cabin, folded their son in his blankets and went to bed, made love with no regard for time or place and later lay together in the sultry heat of the night.
When Isaac junior stirred his mother put him to her breast.
“The Office of Indian Affairs allowed me to make the calls I wanted to make to Albany,” Abe told his wife, whispering confidentially. “I got through to the Clinton Avenue Police Station – I knew the number because I had to bail out a couple of friends who drank too much now and then when I was at medical school – and explained who I was. I informed them where I could be contacted in the next hour and hung up. I didn’t know if the Mounties were going to turn up to arrest me or if somebody would call me back…”
Kate had had no idea that Abe was going to take that sort of crazy risk!
“Husband,” she hissed, worried.
“The reason I was over an hour-and-a-half hour late getting back tonight was that I waited until something happened.”
“What if nothing had happened?”
“I’d still be there, I suppose.”
“I’d be worried…”
Her husband nuzzled and kissed Kate’s brow.
“I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”
“No, you’re not. You are a good man. Abe Fielding.”
“I do not deserve you,” he murmured in Mohawk.
Had she not had her son at her breast Kate would have climbed atop her husband then and there.
“Well?” She prompted breathlessly.
“I was called back to the telephone in the office manager’s room, and,” the man hesitated, “it was Sarah on the other end of the line.”
ACT II – The Case for the Defence
Chapter 17
Monday 24th July
Williamsburg Railway Station, Virginia
Henrietta De L’Isle waved to Melody Danson as she stepped down on to the platform. It was mid-morning, long past the rush hour which in any event marked an exodus, not an inrush, of commuters to the nearby Royal Navy and Royal Marines bases at Newport News and Hampton. The days when those outposts were the home to fighting ships and combat hardened troops ready to embark for anywhere in the world were long gone; the one was now a hydrographic research establishment and the other an induction and assessment facility processing new recruits. These days the James and York Rivers and Hampton Roads were the playground of yachtsmen of every description, a safe harbour for ocean racers and humble dinghy sailors alike.
The younger woman approached the detective and hands were shaken in the stifling heat.
Melody Danson had not really known what to expect when she received the summons to the Governor’s Palace.
‘I’m sorry but I can’t explain over the phone,’ Henrietta had apologised. ‘Can you come down to Williamsburg tomorrow?’ The Governor of New England’s daughter had apologised again for ‘mucking up your schedule,’ explaining that ‘it can’t be helped’.
Melody had not played hard to get.
Henrietta De L’Isle was the daughter of the most powerful man on the continent; and in effect, Melody worked for her for so long as she was trawling through the detritus of the Empire Day prosecution papers.
“How was your journey?”
“The train down to Richmond was packed most of the way. I’d forgotten how beautiful the country of the Lower Peninsula is,” she smiled. Today her mane of red hair was restrained by a band and she had dressed in her lightest, most summery cotton frock and cork sandals. She had packed a small travelling bag, leaving practically all her paperwork locked in the safe at Fort Hamilton. In the oppressive heat the handle of her bag was already sweaty in her hand.
“It is only a mile or so to the Palace,” Henrietta explained. “Father had to go up to Philadelphia yesterday evening so we’ll have the house to ourselves almost. I’m sure Mama would love to meet you at some stage. Although, I wasn’t sure if you’d want to rush straight back to Long Island after our business was completed here…”
Melody grimaced.
“Since Miss Coolidge won’t speak to me and my ‘appointments’ to interview the Fieldings at Crailo are not until Friday,” she shrugged, “frankly, I’m at a little bit of a loose end for the next couple of days. Normally, I’d have barged into the Coolidge mansion out at Shinnecock Hills and made a nuisance of myself until Leonora talked to me. As for the authorities at Crailo, wel
l, if I wasn’t supposed to be ‘playing the game’ with the straightest of straight bats, I would have turned up at the gates with a court order by now.”
The two women turned and walked to the exit.
Williamsburg Station was one of those railway hangovers from a past era when architects designed such halts to be mirror images of their counterparts in the Home Counties of England, sturdy red brick constructions like modestly substantial country houses festooned with hanging baskets, with the barest modicum of waiting and toilet facilities, and each with their claustrophobic ‘tea room’, nearby Station Master’s cottage and ubiquitous local signal box. Williamsburg, like so many other rural stations in this modern age still retained its overgrown coaling sidings and derelict engine sheds with ash pits unraked for the best part of twenty years. Nowadays, the overhead electricity cables that powered the two or four-coach trains that plied up and down what was now no more than a branch line from Hampton Roads to Richmond, rather spoiled the oldy-worldy feel of the station. That said, it took only a small flight of imagination to picture it in its pomp a hundred years ago with puffing locomotives hauling coal and uniformed men down to the sea to the great ships moored in Hampton Roads…
“Sorry,” Melody apologised. She had been lost in her reverie. It was many years since she had been in this neck of the woods. “It is quite distracting coming back to a place one knew so well as a girl. I didn’t catch what you just said.”
Henrietta De L’Isle giggled.
“Did you grow up on the Peninsula?”
“When I was seven or eight and again when I was twelve or thirteen, we lived in Richmond. I was born in Fredericksburg and although my family was peripatetic and I grew up mostly in Europe we always seemed to come back to Virginia. We holidayed in and around Williamsburg some years. If you can believe it I was a Girl Guide, under protest, you understand and I used to be sent off camping in the woods with all the other middle-class girls. Despite,” she added, grimacing, “the insects and the snakes. I’m sure no parent would allow their children out in the woods of the Lower Peninsula alone these days!”