Two Hundred Lost Years

by James Philip

  “Perhaps, you could speak to him. Explain the sensitivities of the…”

  “No, sir. As you and your officials remind me, at regular intervals, I am not a commissioned officer of the Crown Colony of New York. I serve at the pleasure of the Governor of New England. I am neither your servant nor your messenger boy, sir!”

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday 25th July

  Fort Crailo Prison, Albany

  A week ago, I had felt like shit when I got back to my cell after the reunion with Matthew Harrison. The cheap shot about Rachel being dead and not coming back must have been a stab in the guts for him, too. Ideals are dangerous things; honestly and truly our ideals had probably never been that far apart and yet somehow, somewhere along the line we had become enemies without, cruellest of all, ceasing to ever be friends. At the heart of it all, literally at the heart of it for both of us, had been and still was, in memory at least, Rachel, even though she had died three years ago.

  There is a lot of craziness when you lose somebody you love – whom you know you have treated badly not once but many times down the years – and perhaps, I ought to have rationalised my state of mind through the prism of grief and loss. Not that I could say at this remove if it would have changed a damned thing.

  I never believed in violent resistance while Rachel lived.

  Heck, I have never laid a hand on anybody in my whole life except, inadvertently, deranged with fear, when I back-handed Bill when he was fifteen after discovering he had pushed an elderly lady to the ground attempting to get away from the police. I could not stop myself. SLAP! And it was done and the look on his previously complacent teenage face had told me everything I needed to know about how I had already lost my second son. Rachel gave me seven bells of Hell over that and even now I still feel dirty when I remember it.

  Truly, there is no straight road to perdition; just an infinite number of small steps, compromises one makes with oneself, tiny moral lapses and intellectual compromises, all of which make a kind of sense at the time. The process is so slow, so gradualist that it seems natural, a logical progression from one side of an argument to the other. I had got used to taking the line of least resistance, of not questioning things that were obviously too good to be true a long time before Sarah Arnold jumped into my bed.

  I knew what she was even if at the outset I did not know who she was. At one point I even hoped stringing her along would be another spike up Matt Harrison’s arse! Of course, in the beginning I did not know Sarah was my old friend’s, now nemesis’s protégé. Looking back, I ought – at my age – to have recognised cold, loveless sex when I was having it. The trouble was, I was far too busy making a pig of myself at the time to notice.

  “I find myself in an invidious position, Mister Fielding,” Lord John Ansty Shilton Murray, KC, 13th Earl of Dunmore, the man who had originally sent me for trial on charges of attempted regicide, multiple murders and approximately two hundred or so other counts of high crimes and misdemeanours, admitted.

  Bygones!

  That was before he gave up the whole Chief Magistrate game as a bad deal and swapped sides mid-season like a footballer who has had an offer he cannot refuse from a rival team.

  “I cannot in all conscience offer my services to your defence because I know in my heart that you are as guilty as sin.”

  I thought that was a peculiarly moral thing to hear spewing from the lips of a lawyer. The man compounded his dilemma and baffled me to the very quick with his next confession.

  “However, I concede that I would be more confident in my assertion if I had the foggiest idea of what exactly you are actually guilty of!”

  Apparently, the garden session with the Head of the Colonial Security Service had set a precedent because this interview was also being conducted as I strolled with the dapper little man who had been engaged by the Coolidge family to represent my oldest boy, Alex, and against his better judgement, Bill at the forthcoming preliminary hearings at the Crown Courts across the river in downtown Albany.

  “I think we can agree on one thing,” I observed wryly.

  “Oh, really, what would that be?”

  The man had obviously had an empathy bypass at some stage and there was something profoundly combative, querulous about him that automatically put a man’s back up.

  “Neither of us really understands what happened, or why, last year.” Before my companion could get a word in edgewise, I went on: “Are you always this candid?”

  “Yes, I find it saves a lot of time. The only time I ever dissembled in my professional life it wrecked my career in politics. Only a fool fails to learn from his mistakes!”

  The barrister’s ancestor, the 4th Earl of Dunmore had only warranted a couple of paragraphs – moderately excoriating ones – in Two Hundred Lost Years.

  I was not left long in suspense as to what the present Earl thought of that work.

  “I believe that your view of what would have happened if George Washington had survived the Battle of Long Island is fundamentally flawed,” the other man declared. “My distant ancestor’s papers make very clear that the Crown would have redoubled its efforts to put down the rebellion. And even had that revolt succeeded, in some limited way, the so-called United Colonies would eventually have torn itself apart – encouraged by the Crown and the French and probably the Spanish also – over the slavery question, or the primacy of Virginia, or some other local, tribal issue.”

  There was not much I could do about whether the man was prepared to represent me in court but I was damned if I had to put up with half-baked literary criticism.

  I was supposed to be the historian in this conversation!

  I opened my mouth to fight my corner only to be beaten to the verbal punch.

  “You should be aware that the Crown has new and compelling evidence against you.”

  This hit me like an unexpected elbow to the solar plexus.

  “What…”

  The lawyer walked on a couple of paces not realising I had halted.

  He turned, sniffed.

  “You will be re-interviewed in the next few days. So as to best protect the interests of my other clients I wish to be present.”

  “Don’t I get any say in this?”

  “Yes, but if you refuse to answer any questions put to you the jury will be at liberty to conclude that you have something,” John Murray paused, thought about it, “even more heinous to hide and that will inevitably reflect badly on your sons.”

  “But you said you would not represent me?”

  “That is correct. Are you guilty of all the charges laid against you?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” I admitted truthfully. “I wasn’t at Wallabout Bay when that bomb went off. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside the Admiralty Dockyards.”

  “Nobody alleges that you were inside the yards,” the hard-faced little pedant snapped. “Charges relating to Wallabout Bay are in respect of conspiracy to murder…”

  “Oh, well, I would have remembered a thing like that!”

  “Have you ever given a straight answer to any question in your whole life, Fielding?”

  “Yes. The day of my marriage. I said: ‘I do’!”

  “Umm….”

  “I don’t want you to represent me,” I decided angrily.

  “You have a right to be represented by a counsel of your own choosing but bear in mind that that oaf Desmond O’Flaherty is an even bigger fraud than you are!”

  The funny thing was I was beginning to take to John Murray, Lord Dunmore.

  “You can sit in,” I conceded, “but only if you defend all three of us when it gets to the trial.”

  The other man contemplated a moment.

  “What of your Indian friend?”

  I must have given him a blank look.

  “He has been charged with no offence at this time,” the former Chief Magistrate informed me. “Sir John Cunningham, my learned deputy, will show himself to be an even bigger damned fool than I gave him cred
it for if he does anything other than deport Tsiokwaris, ‘Black Raven’, back to his tribal lands.”

  “Oh…”

  “Even though,” John Murray added, ruminating, “one sentence of your conversation with him is causing the CSS particular concern.”

  Okay, they were bound to bring in an interpreter sooner or later.

  “Specifically?” I inquired, attempting to be helpful.

  “We still track the huntsman, or hunter?”

  I must have still looked...blank.

  “To which you replied,” the lawyer continued, “something along the lines of ‘still…I thought…’ but did not elaborate?”

  I swallowed involuntarily.

  “Nobody knows his name,” I said, my voice sounding like a stranger’s. “Supposedly, he was in Mohawk country last summer. We didn’t know why.”

  John Murray was giving me the unblinking treatment.

  “Does this man own a .303-calibre sniping rifle?”

  “Probably. Legend has it he has this long-barrelled Martini Henry. A batch of those were fitted with a .303 barrel-liner and re-chambered years ago for use down on the Border.” It was my time to narrow my eyes. “Why? Is it important?”

  “Possibly, possibly.” My companion seemed to realise he needed to be somewhere else five minutes ago. “We shall meet again, Isaac Fielding.”

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday 25th July

  Fort Hamilton, Long Island

  Sarah Arnold was fit to spit by the time she picked up the handset. The ramifications of what Abraham Fielding had told her – unsuspectingly supplying a key to unlock what until then had been a seemingly impenetrable puzzle – had not sunk in all at once. Rather, the implications had accumulated, coagulated and hit her like a series of psychic body blows which had left her feeling used, abused and humiliated. Suddenly, there was an entirely new context to the chaos of her life these last two years and she realised that the man she trusted most in the world had been lying to her all along about…everything.

  She had shut and locked the door of the office she shared with Melody Danson before she had gone to the desk by the window and put through the call to her boss.

  “How could you?” She blurted, too angry for tears.

  “Slow down, young lady…”

  “Slow down!” She yelped, almost as if in pain. “Slow down? You knew all along and you never said a word! The whole operation last year was a sham! I trusted you! Why else would I have agreed to live as that man’s wife for so long?”

  “Maybe,” Matthew Harrison suggested gently, “we ought to have this little talk another time when you’re more yourself, Sarah?”

  “More myself!” She cried down the line to Albany.

  The Head of the Colonial Security Service, currently fully engaged ‘clearing out the stables’ in the colony’s capital astutely concluded that now was not a good time to interrupt a woman wronged who was just getting into her full flow.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me the fucking Spanish were up to their necks in this?”

  Okay, I always counted on her still being too het up about having to sleep with Isaac Fielding to get to the nub of the matter so soon…

  Matthew Harrison took a long, deep breath.

  “I didn’t know the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España was ‘involved’ in this thing, and I still don’t know if we’re dealing with the Cubans or the crowd from Santa Domingo or the real players back in Mexico City in New Spain,” Harrison explained patiently. “But I always suspect the ‘fucking Spanish’ when there’s a major conspiracy anywhere in New England.”

  This was no lie or exaggeration. The Intelligence Service of New Spain was by far and away the best funded and most active foreign intelligence agency in the Americas, parts of the Western Mediterranean and throughout the East Indies with its Pacific base in Manila in the Philippines.

  However, that the Nacional de Inteligencia de Nuevo España should have so comprehensively infiltrated what had been for many years an illegal, subversive but essentially non-violent underground anti-imperialist clique – the Sons of Liberty - which had been virtually dormant in recent years and therefore not been on the CSS ‘watch lists’, beggared belief. Understandably, the fact that foreign interlopers had subsequently mobilised elements of that group into a band of fanatics capable of turning last year’s Empire Day Weekend celebrations into a bloodbath which might yet undermine the historic political settlement of the First Thirteen, was an awful lot to try to take on board in one go.

  Sarah was having a tough time coming to terms with how they had both been duped for so long by Isaac Fielding. It was equally explicable that she was looking around for somebody to blame, and upon whom to vent her wholly natural existential angst.

  That would be me…

  “You seriously expect me to believe that you didn’t know about Isaac’s connections with the fucking Spanish?”

  “I suspected it. I did not know it.”

  “I want to sit in when you re-interview Isaac!”

  “No can do. We’re out of that particular loop. We, the CSS screwed up. So, did everybody else. We’d cover up if we could. As it is the only person who gets to call the shots now is Melody Danson.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the Governor?” Sarah realised this was a dumb question too late to take it back.

  “Because he might have to fire me someday soon and I don’t plan to make his duty any more painful, or complicated than it already is!”

  “Sorry. I ought to have worked that out already.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Sarah winced; from her godfather’s tone she deduced that very little was ‘okay’.

  Suddenly, there was no mystery about how the conspirators had persuaded so many men – and they believed at least three women – to embrace self-immolation by crashing aircraft and high-powered speed boats into the near impregnable armoured decks and flanks of those battleships out in the Upper Bay. Or for that matter how that same bunch of mainly ‘airhead’ malcontents and marginalised political activists – the Sons of Liberty - had facilitated the sabotage of the launching of the Royal Navy’s most advanced cruiser on the eve of Empire Day.

  Suicide was a thing reserved for religious fanatics cut from an entirely different cloth than the adherents of the ‘separate development’ Getrennte Entwicklung movement. Suicide attacks were tactics encountered now and then down on the Border; or less frequently, in Florida, pretty much wholly unknown in the occasional outbreaks of violence between fundamentalist sects and factions in the upper East Coast colonies of New England, who in the main, contented themselves denouncing each other and the ‘faithless’ – people who did not agree with them – from pulpits and soap boxes.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered. “What else have we missed?”

  “It gets worse,” Matthew Harrison warned her.

  She had already worked that out for herself.

  If the Spanish really were involved, up to their necks, in the Empire Day outrage it followed that the reason none of their agents had flagged anybody’s attention was that they had either been long-term residents in the colony – unlikely because by now they would have been missed – or they had been transient visitors, students perhaps who would have had no colonial employment or welfare documentation, or they had only come ashore briefly before the attacks.

  Her godfather told her what he had told the Governor of New England after he had heard what Abraham Fielding had said to Sarah. There was no smoking gun in that conversation; simply a cornucopia of circumstantial, corroborative evidence to underpin his darkest fears.

  “One hypothesis is that the Spanish put a special service unit ashore to blow up the shipyards and loaded other operatives straight into the boats and airplanes their agents had procured weeks and months, possibly up to a year in advance, that attacked the Fleet on Empire Day.”

  Matthew Harrison let this sink in.

  “Hard to see how else it could have happened,”
he growled. “The bastards must have been on the Armada de Nuevo Española squadron that came up from Cuba. Probably aboard the Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad. The Spanish would have anticipated that there would be so much traffic in the Upper and Lower Bays that nobody would notice a few extra transfers ashore. Anyways, against CSS advice the ‘civil authority’ allowed hundreds of their people ashore as a ‘good will gesture’, if you recall?”

  Sarah also recollected that there had been a Spanish destroyer and a supply ship moored off Red Hook in the month before the Empire Day Fleet Review so that Spanish officers could liaise with the Royal Navy and the colonial authorities supposedly to ‘avoid the occurrence of any unfortunate incidents.’

  At that time what everybody had had in mind was more along the lines of members or groups of the local citizenry spontaneously attacking or harassing Spanish personnel on land, or foolhardy ‘patriots’ demonstrating against the Empire of New Spain’s abysmal human rights record – and the activities of the local ‘inquisitions’ - in the Caribbean and the Central Americas.

  In the event, many of the Armada Española vessels which took part in the Empire Day Review were fresh from ‘patrol duties’ in the Gulf of Spain where their primary role had been to detain, or if a captain was feeling liverish that day, sink on sight any refugee vessel making for New England waters.

  Sarah swallowed hard.

  Her ire had subsided.

  She just felt physically sick.

  If as now seemed likely, the Empire Day attacks had been an act of war by the Empire of New Spain, when the truth became commonly known there would be an outcry in the First Thirteen for revenge and in due course, for the sacrificial offering of scapegoats.

  She had no illusion whatsoever that the Colonial Security Service would not be at the top of the ‘scapegoat list’.

  She swore under her breath.