by James Philip
“Uh, snakes!” The younger woman shuddered, mostly for melodramatic effect. “When we were in Australia mummy and daddy forbade we children to go in the long grass. All the snakes ‘down under’ are pretty lethal.”
Melody had not known what to expect awaited her outside the station; she had certainly not expected the daughter of the Governor of New England to be driving a decidedly beaten up fifteen-year-old Land Rover which looked as if it had not been washed down in months.
“Sorry about the state of the old charabanc,” Henrietta laughed. “I keep meaning to have it cleaned but I’m half-afraid it’s only the mud and the rust that’s holding it together!”
The vehicle belched a poisonous cloud of smoke when it started up; not entirely or wholly from its exhaust pipe. Soon they were rumbling north, crossing the railway lines and bouncing along a tree-lined country road.
“Your call was very mysterious?” Melody shouted above the roar of the engine, the spitting of the exhaust and the clatter of the old four-wheel drive cross-country car bumping and rolling along the narrow, rutted track.
“Sorry about that! Daddy was very specific about what I could and could not tell you, or anybody else about the package we received from the CSS yesterday morning!”
To Melody it seemed as if they drove all the way around the Governor’s Palace estate before arriving at the heavily guarded front gate.
Henrietta was recognised and saluted by the assault-rifle wielding red-coated Guardsmen to whom Melody showed her warrant card. The barrier pole rose and the women drove on. The wheels crunched on deep gravel, squealed loudly as the brakes brought the Land Rover to a juddering stop in the shadow of the mansion.
“Does your father know that you leave the compound without a bodyguard?” Melody inquired as she stepped down to terra firma.
“Yes. But I have to tell the security detachment commander where I’m going and when I will be back. It is up to him if he has me followed.”
“Oh.” Melody thought this was unspeakably sloppy practice and her expression must have betrayed it.
“What’s the point of being alive if you live in a self-imposed prison all the time?” Henrietta countered brightly. “I mean, in your job you meet bad people all the time but according to your personnel file you’ve always refused to carry a firearm?”
Melody fell into step with the younger woman as they ascended the steps to the front entrance of the mansion.
“That’s different. I’m terrified I’ll shoot myself in the foot or something if anything ever happened!”
Henrietta laughed.
“I arranged for a room to be made available to you upstairs. You must want to freshen up after your journey. You must have been travelling for hours and hours?”
In fact, Melody had left Fort Hamilton at about four o’clock that morning. So, when she was shown into a marvellously airy, well-ventilated room with its own en suite bathroom it was like being ushered into a little piece of Heaven on Earth.
“Come down to the morning room when you’re ready. I’ve got the tape queued up to roll. It’s a bit scratchy, I’m afraid, but I also have a full transcript…”
“The tape?” Melody held up a hand, first things first. “I shall be down directly.”
‘Directly’ turned out to be about twenty minutes later. She had gazed out of the bedroom window at the lovingly manicured, landscaped gardens of the Palace Estate and by the time she had ‘done something about her hair’, splashed enough cooling water on her torso, repaired her sparingly applied makeup, dressed anew, convinced herself that she felt wholly human again, and eventually found her way downstairs she had very nearly forgotten that she was supposed to be a detective.
There was chilled lemonade in a jug and long glasses on the table next to the tape recorder, one of the lumpy new cassette machines.
Melody looked askance at her host.
“This is an unedited copy of a recording of a telephone conversation between Sarah Arnold and Abraham Lincoln Fielding. Contact was initiated by the latter on Thursday last week when he was in Bytown, in Ontario.”
Chapter 18
Monday 24th July
Office of the Chief Magistrate of New York, Albany
Sir John Cunningham, KC, the fifty-seven-year-old Acting Chief Magistrate might not have made a name for himself in the law – like many men of middling gifts he had availed himself of a ‘quiet’ life out in the colonies for the last two decades slowly, unspectacularly clambering up the greasy career pole rather than carrying on fighting the good fight back in the crucible of the Imperial legal furnace in London – but in his years as a canny fly half with dancing feet in an England rugby union shirt mesmerising friends and foes alike upon Twickenham’s verdant sward he had learned to spot a hospital pass a mile off.
In fact, in his prime, he used to reckon he could spot a pass that was going to arrive at the exact moment a herd of galloping flank forwards – each weighing in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds of hard-muscled fast-moving flesh and bone - stampeded into and over him before the ball was even thrown in his direction!
Therefore, he did not need to be told that the transcript on his desk was not so much a professional banana skin as a loudly ticking timebomb.
It was many years since Cunningham had been the lithe, rebellious-haired, lady-killing sporting hero instantly recognisable on the streets of the rugby-playing nations of the civilized world. These days he was balding, plump and his complexion, was overly ruddy on account of his lifelong taste for fine Claret and far, far too many long lunches. He still traded, shamelessly at every opportunity, on his fading sporting fame, speaking with authority and no little wit at charity events and reunions, and every spring he returned to England to attend the three-week Twickenham Festival during which the annual Oxford and Cambridge Varsity match, the Army and Navy and the British Lions and the New Englanders contested the three oldest trophies in the sport’s violent history.
“If you knew where the bloody man was all along why on earth didn’t we extradite him last autumn, Harrison?” He demanded irritably as he mopped beads of fresh sweat off his high-brow with an already damp white silk handkerchief. The heat threatened to exacerbate his chronic gout and he half-expected the shock of the latest developments in the Fielding case – or as his esteemed, if cantankerous predecessor had called it, ‘that concatenation of abominations’ – to strike him down in the middle of this, the first crisis of his uncertain tenure in the top judicial seat in the Crown Colony of New York.
The large, insouciantly assured moustachioed Virginian who had been the Head of the Colonial Security Service for more years than anybody seemed to be able to remember, shifted in his chair as he considered the question.
“The authorities in Ontario would have required possible cause beyond flimsy circumstantial evidence and a filial relationship to the other plotters before they seriously considered any application to extradite him to New York, sir.”
Cunningham snorted.
The advent of the Getrennte Entwicklung movement – in all of the colonies bordering the Canadian dominions no more perniciously enforced than in New York – had caused a number of avoidable cross-border problems with the Quebecois and the Ontarians. Historically, with less pressure for land and fewer European settlers the native peoples of the Canadian wilderness had always enjoyed better, certainly less fraught relations with the colonists and traditionally, London’s laissez-faire attitude to religious freedoms had never been challenged in Canada in the way it was, increasingly, in the First Thirteen. In Canada, English speakers and French speakers, Protestants and Catholics mostly lived in harmony, and members of the Iroquois Confederacy could even vote in provincial elections north of the St Lawrence River!
“The man is married to a Mohawk woman,” Brigadier Matthew Harrison reminded the Acting Chief Magistrate, hardly believing he was having to tell the lawyer what the problem was. “The people in Ontario might, not unreasonably be concerned that he would not ge
t a fair hearing in Albany.”
John Cunningham glared at the head of the Colonial Security Service.
“Abraham Fielding’s squaw is probably involved in this thing up to her neck, dammit!”
Harrison groaned, it was stiflingly hot in the office and he had reached that point in his life when he was fed up to the back teeth having to hold the hands of public officials who were too lazy or too incompetent to do their jobs properly. It vexed him more than somewhat that the Empire Day outrages had so completely overwhelmed New York’s police and judiciary that his hard-pressed organisation – pitifully under-resourced in comparison to the colony’s constabulary - and still woefully starved of resources throughout the First Thirteen was now having to pick up so many of the pieces.
“It is exactly that connotations of that word in our legal system which troubles our Canadian colleagues, sir.”
“Which word? Squaw?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“If one starts a legal proceeding by calling a man’s wife a whore it hardly engenders confidence he’s going to get a fair hearing, let alone trial, sir.”
Matthew Harrison ostentatiously studied the face of his watch.
“You asked me to attend your office to discuss my report, sir?” He prompted.
You might have all day but I do not!
“I’ll thank you not to be impertinent, Harrison!”
The CSS man had only returned from Florida forty-eight hours ago. The Spanish on Cuba were attempting to run guns to dissidents – again – and agitating to foment an unlikely popular uprising among a population that was systematically, and enthusiastically, striving to be ever more British than the British.
Unfortunately, the Spanish had still clearly not ‘got it’.
Florida was gone, lost forever to the Empire of New Spain but the recently revamped regimes – filled with Madrid’s place men after a series of small, nasty palace coups in the last three or four years - in Havana and Santa Domingo had not got the message.
Absurdly, although it went without saying that the Spanish – especially those back in ‘old Spain’ were desperate not to provoke a major clash in the Gulf of Spain; if things kept on the way they were going it was hard to see how the activities of the ‘Cuban’ Spaniards could not, eventually, fatally undermine the uneasy peace in the Caribbean, the Gulf and in the whole South West.
The trouble was that people too readily forgot that the Empire of New Spain was not a homogenous entity ruled, like the British Empire, from London. Notwithstanding the King Emperor in the Royal Alcazar in Madrid was theoretically, the dictatorial master of his dominions in a way that King George V was not; whereas, the British monarch was a constitutional figurehead with limited real political hard power or authority, the ‘guiding hand’ of the Colonial Office in Whitehall was exactly that.
The policy of the Empire was the policy of the Foreign and Colonial Office enacting the will of the British Government. In contrast, the Government in Madrid was a positively Byzantine Royal Court with little power to exert actual authority beyond Spain’s European boundaries other than in the empire’s remaining North African protectorates. In the New World, in Madrid the traditionalists still called the American colonies ‘Nuevo Granada’. and elsewhere – the Philippines, for example - Spanish colonial governors, unable to call on military, economic and financial support from elsewhere in the empire in the manner of any British pro-consul anywhere in the world, tended to be a law unto themselves. Therefore, Cuba was a mini empire in itself, Santa Domingo another, New Spain – comprising an historically now shrunken territory of the American South West, Mexico and much of Central America – another, and the disparate Spanish imperial fiefdoms of the great South American littoral, built upon the skeletons of ancient now extinct civilisations in the main, were ‘Spanish’ in name alone, in reality no more than a gaggle of disarticulated wholly separate entities often warring with their neighbours.
By an accident of geopolitical history, it happened that the southern shores, deserts and mountain borders of New England abutted the seaborne and land frontiers of the spheres of influence of the two most coherent and thus, powerful, ‘colonies’ of the Spanish Empire.
Of these, Cuba, having lost its Floridian foothold on the North American continent within living memory was by far the weaker, although counter-intuitively the more aggressive of the two Colinies de Nueva Granada, its Caribbean influence greatly enhanced by an alliance with Colonia Santa Domingo, the dominion whose harshly-enforced – some said, medieval – Catholicism had in the last few years threatened the uneasy peace of the Gulf of Spain for much of the post-Floridian revolt period.
Troublingly, in the last decade Cuba and Havana had steadily begun to build up their naval forces; in recent years there had been several stand offs between the Royal Navy and invariably modern but weaker Spanish ships and squadrons in the Gulf and the Atlantic approaches to the northern Caribbean. Thus far the Cubans had paid heed to ‘back channel’ diplomatic warnings that similar ‘posturing’ by their forces in or in the vicinity of the territorial waters of British possessions in the south, west and south west of Cuban and Santa Domingo would ‘not be tolerated’. To enforce this message the Royal Navy now routinely stationed guardships and flotillas at Jamaica, Antigua, throughout the Windward and the Leeward Islands, Barbados and Trinidad; usually a light cruiser or a brace of destroyers, or a frigate just flying the flag in as many places as resources allowed. Periodically, one or other of the battleships of the Atlantic Fleet would perambulate unhurriedly between the widespread islands in company with one of the more modern heavy cruisers and half-a-dozen escorts, just to remind the Spanish that while British diplomats might speak with a quiet voice the ‘big stick’ of the Royal navy was always in the background.
Optimists argued that the ‘present arrangements’ have guaranteed the peace for many years; pessimists regarded the ‘peace’ of the last decade or so as the lull before the storm. In either event, nobody in New England honestly believed that a renewal of open hostilities with Nuevo Granada was likely to be good for business.
New Spain, with whom New England had been at war – officially, unofficially, declared or undeclared for most of the twentieth century – was, on paper at least, the match of any European second rank power and unlike any of Spain’s ‘South American’ dominions, fully capable, industrially and by dint of its large population and strategic geographical position commanding the whole of the Central Americas, of, if the worst came to the worst, militarily threatening the very existence of large tracts of New England west of the First Thirteen.
Over the years, imperial strategists in the corridors of Whitehall had likened the ongoing ‘South West Question’ in New England with that of the Northwest Frontier of the Raj in India, forever threatened by the looming presence of the great Russian bear.
Matthew Harrison’s secret service predecessors had been playing the ‘Great Game’ with the Russians from the Balkans to the foothills of the Himalayas for generations; here in the Americas the Spanish had been allowed, literally, to get away with murder and if the peoples of New England ever found out what had really been going on a general war in the Americas – with unthinkable consequences elsewhere – might become inevitable.
The Governor of New England’s master of spies had always known in his bones that the Spanish had to have been behind the Empire Day atrocities.
Now, for the first time he actually had evidence!
Evidence that he could not indefinitely suppress.
It was like sitting on top of a keg of dynamite watching the fuse burn ever closer to his feet…
The problem was that at the precise moment when all his energies were needed trying to damp down the fuse he was having to babysit these useless passengers in Albany!
Of course, the Acting Chief Magistrate cared not one jot for any of that!
But then he was not privy to the ‘Spanish dimension’ of the affair. Nor
was he likely to be briefed upon this matter until such time as the Governor’s Office determined he ‘needed to know’.
Harrison had not the first idea how his friend, Philip De L’Isle, a man he had first met over twenty years ago when he was still a cavalry officer and was now for his pains, Governor of New England, put up with these people!
“Your report presents difficulties we could well have done without,” Sir John Cunningham complained querulously.
Harrison shook his head.
Cunningham’s predecessor had castigated him for not tying up all the loose ends, rightly the responsibility of the colony’s police force not the CSS; now the present incumbent was unhappy because Harrison had finally – albeit by accident – discovered a missing piece of the jigsaw that the overlarge police task force put together by the New York Constabulary to investigate last year’s attacks ought to have uncovered at the outset!
“Now more than ever the prisoners need to be re-interviewed by my people,” he retorted, allowing his impatience to flare.
“That’s out of the question!” Retorted the acting Chief Magistrate. “We are talking about men who have been charged with capital offences. You can’t just waltz in and re-interrogate them at this late stage. We’d look like barbarians trampling all over their customary rights.”
Matthew Harrison had hoped it would not come to this.
And so, had the Governor of New England.
“Sir,” he said as respectfully as he could in the circumstances, “I should remind you that the officer charged by Government House in Philadelphia to ‘review’ the handling of this case has unlimited ‘rights’ to interview whomsoever he or in this case, she, deems fit at any time during the judicial cycle of the laying of charges, detention, trial and disposal thereafter. As a matter of courtesy that officer is, at this time, in the process of being briefed on the new developments.” He held up his hands. “Therefore, if you have a problem with the prisoners at Crailo being re-interviewed I am duty bound to warn you that you must take this up directly with the Lord De L’Isle.”