by James Philip
It seemed that all parties were happy with this arrangement.
The Royal Navy made no distinction where a man had been born within the Empire, cared not a jot about the colour of his skin, or his religion or the ethnicity of his wife. The wife of a Royal Navy man was his spouse - and that was that! – and entitled to be treated with the respect that honourable estate rightly commanded everywhere in the Empire.
Melody picked up the handset.
“Hello, this is Detective Inspector Danson speaking!”
“Whoever else would you be?” Henrietta De L’Isle laughed at the other end of the connection.
Melody was smiling and giggling in a moment.
The two women had not had a proper opportunity to talk, about anything really, since that truly strange day in Philadelphia when the ‘Spanish adventure’ had fallen upon them out of a clear blue sky. Melody had had to rush back up to Albany that evening and had been in motion ever since. Which, all things considered, had probably been for the best because after that surreal moment alone with Henrietta in the garden of Government House she had briefly been terrified that she was going to make a complete fool of herself with the younger woman.
She was still trying to work out what that ‘moment’ had meant; a thing not helped by the quietly persistent roiling of her emotions on the subject.
“I’m sorry, I ought to have called,” Melody said uncomfortably; that was so unlike her. Normally, she was the one making the moves, in control. “But there’s been so much going on…”
“That’s okay,” the other woman said quickly, betraying her own nervousness. “I needed time to think about things too…”
“Look, I’m…”
“We’ll have more time to talk soon,” Henrietta blurted. “Oh, dear, I’m making a mess of this. Daddy’s people have booked us on the Centurion the day after tomorrow. Will you be released by the court by then?”
“I hope so.”
“Good. I’ll let the Imperial Airways people know. They usually book single ladies travelling together into a twin cabin? Will that be okay? I’ll book singles if you’d prefer…”
Melody swallowed, dry mouthed.
“No, a twin berth will be fine…”
Chapter 33
Wednesday 10th August
New Temple Gardens, Albany
Kate’s husband had asked her not to attend the court; no wife of his was going to be compelled to sit on the hard benches of the Crown Court’s ‘Indigent Only Gallery’. She had respected his wish because they were on his tribal lands now.
When the Welfare Officer from the Royal Navy, a grey-haired one-armed man with a mottled beard and a hearty chuckling voice had visited the Governor’s Mansion, he had treated her with uncommon respect; as if they were both equal members of the same clan. He had been surprised and pleased to discover that she spoke and read English although he had been very understanding when she had struggled to translate some of the longer words on the forms he had brought with him.
‘We all have trouble with those,” he had confessed jovially.
He had explained that the Royal Navy offered all ‘new wives’ reading and writing lessons in English because ‘it was the only language spoken and written in the Service.’
It was likely that Abe would be posted to Royal Navy Norfolk, the Headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet where over thirty thousand servicemen and their dependents lived in barracks for the unmarried men, and ‘Navy housing’ for family men. Officers and their families lived on different ‘estates’ to those of ‘other ranks’. This was not ‘separate development’ it was simply that the Navy was a ‘disciplined service’ and that ‘some distance between officers and men was inevitable’. Apparently, married men were entitled to what sounded to Kate like exceptionally generous additional family allowances.
It was all a little overwhelming.
It was likely that after a ‘tour’ at the ‘big hospital’ at the base, possibly lasting six months to a year, Abe would be posted to his first ship; either as ‘surgeon in charge’ aboard a smaller vessel, or as an ‘assistant surgeon’ aboard a big ship.
Kate got the distinct impression that the Royal Navy was a colony unto itself…
Presently, she was an anonymous squaw with a baby in a basket waiting patiently on the grass of New Temple Gardens Square for the first sight of her husband as a free man since they had crossed the St Lawrence River.
She thanked the ancient spirits that things had not, as had seemed likely at Fort Oswegatchie, gone as horribly wrong as she and Abe had secretly feared they might. That had been a risk they knew they must confront; a thing she had not fully comprehended until her husband had bared his soul to her that night as they lay together in the bed of their cabin in Kempton after he returned from Bytown that last time.
He had told her he had known he was not his father’s son for many years; recounting to her his mother, Rachel’s words shortly before she passed.
His parent’s marriage had been a sham even before William, their third child had come into the world. Isaac’s cheating on Abe’s mother had been the thin end of the wedge; he was feckless with money and no kind of father to her children. The annual six to ten weeks the family spent in Mohawk lands, or Isaac’s long absences from the family home had been blissful interludes in an otherwise desperately unhappy ‘existence’.
Abe’s father had always had more time for his ‘political friends’ than he had ever had for his family and Rachel and the children had eventually lived almost separate lives from Isaac, even in those summer idylls with Tsiokwaris’s clan.
It was during one of those blissful summer breaks that she had met and fallen in love with Abe’s father.
‘He was a dangerous, solitary man set apart from his clan and yet, he was neither of those things with me. But for your half-sister and brothers I would have never have returned to Long Island; I would have gone wherever he went. I might have become in time, the better angel of his hunter’s soul. He had embraced violence in his younger days and was afraid he was its prisoner forever. He made me swear that you would never make the same mistake; I believe that when he heard that you meant to become a healer he was finally at peace with the broken lives we had led.’
Tears still welled in Kate’s eyes to think of that lost, pure love in an affair carried out over the latter half of two long lifetimes in snatched moments forever afraid of betrayal.
The love of Rachel’s sadly cut short time had ghosted in and out of her days until near the end.
‘Without him, and you,’ she had told Abe, ‘my life would have been wasted…’
Kate had never asked her husband his father’s name.
She loved him too much to take from him his last secret…
Lost in her thoughts Kate belatedly realised that something was happening outside the court building.
Suddenly, the journalists and cameramen on the steps were jostling for position. Her heart leapt a beat. People hurried past her to be closer to the action. She stood still with her baby basket in her hands, unmoving like an island in the stream. On tribal lands she would sprint into her husband’s arms with wanton abandon; here in the white man’s domain she had no idea how she was supposed to behave. That was a thing she was going to have to learn by trial and error.
She saw the three brothers.
Arm in arm with Abe, almost a head taller than either of the others grinning in the middle. A shorter, balding man with bird-like, pecking mannerisms stood before the three much younger men – he would be their famous lawyer - and began to speak to the bodies crushing against the police lines.
Kate waved.
Abe saw her and disentangling himself from his brothers returned her wave.
The crowd turned and Kate, who had been virtually alone some distance back from the road, adrift since everybody had surged forward towards the steps to the court complex, felt horribly naked in the sudden glare of attention.
Later she pieced together a ragged, half-fract
ured sequence of events.
At the time things had happened too fast.
She had thought she was dreaming.
Her father was on the steps, grappling with a bigger, broader man of perhaps, his own age and pandemonium broke out.
She had heard the crack of the rifle.
One shot, then another…
Women were screaming, men were diving for cover and she was running with her baby son towards the sanctuary of the nearest trees with no thought but to avoid being trampled underfoot by the panicked crowd.
Abe had found her a little later.
There was blood spattered on his face and across his ill-fitting jacket and shirt.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Kate had curled herself protectively around their son.
“So are we,” she had gasped.
“Good, that’s all that matters.”
Chapter 34
Wednesday 10th August
Third Floor, Dawlish House, New Temple Gardens, Albany
There had been so much blood that Melody Danson had initially thought Matthew Harrison must be dead as the first uniformed officers rolled the limp, shattered body of Elder Tsiokwaris off the fallen Head of the Colonial Security Service.
Within seconds it was clear that the dazed Virginian had probably suffered only superficial injuries; the dead Mohawk had taken the full force of both bullets. One must have hit him near the right shoulder and passed through the width of his torso, disintegrating as it went, the other had smashed through his chest, entering below his heart and exiting through his back, again in splinters whose momentum was by then so retarded as to hardly penetrate deeper than a fraction of an inch into Harrison’s lower arms and midriff.
She had no idea why there had only been two shots.
Harrison must have been a sitting duck half-prostrated on the steps.
The Hunter…
She looked across New Temple Gardens, now miraculously depopulated barring a few people who had taken a fall and been trampled in the panic and here and there, couples or small groups comforting each other.
She sighed with relief when she spied Abraham Fielding down on his knees hugging his wife, with their baby son safely in his basket hopefully unaware of the general commotion.
Her uniformed colleagues were standing around pointing haphazardly at the buildings in the near distance. The manhunt would have to wait, people had fallen and been injured on the steps in the confusion and others might have been wounded by ricochets or shrapnel.
She waved her warrant card high and began to bawl orders.
Soon after that Melody became peripherally aware of the tall man by her side.
“What do you want me to do?” Abraham Fielding asked.
Moments later he was examining Matthew Harrison.
In the near distance ambulance and police sirens blared, the changing pitch of their wailing banshee approach rising as they drew closer.
Presently, a well-fed man with Superintendent’s tabs on his uniform collar arrived and Melody happily handed over to him.
She guessed, wrongly that the madness was over.
It had taken over an hour to find the body lying in its puddled life blood on the floor of the empty office on the third floor of Dawlish House.
The Hunter’s long rifle was propped against the window sill.
The man had literally fallen on his knife.
Quite deliberately; up to the hilt through his heart.
“This was on the floor by the gun, Ma’am,” a constable explained, holding out a sheet of paper.
It was a suicide note of sorts addressed to: Abraham son of Rachel, the Healer.
I was born Kicking Horse among my people.
I lived among the dog soldiers on the Border as Long Rifle.
Your mother knew me as Dan Brown, the name the Army gave me.
Then, in a scratchier hand as if he knew his time was running out:
My soul died a little bit to murder that woman on Long Island. Tsiokwaris should have let me finish what I began but he has shown me how a great warrior might die.
Melody looked around the room anew.
“This was all?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Other uniformed bodies were gawping at the dead assassin.
“Anybody who does not need to be in here leave now!”
An hour ago, she had thought she understood what was going on; now she was not so sure.
Chapter 35
Friday 12th August
Imperial Airways Flying Boat Centurion, Upper Bay, New York
“You have no idea why Black Raven saved Brigadier Harrison’s life?” This Henrietta de L’Isle had asked as the two women shared a taxi down to the Imperial Airways Pier on Brooklyn Beach.
Melody was relieved that the Governor’s daughter was as nervous and excited about their forthcoming odyssey as herself. They had rather gabbled at each other for the last few minutes, which was not their style.
“The conspiracy theorists will have a field day,” she sighed. “One might speculate that Captain Arnold and Matt Harrison were on some kind of assassination list because they knew too much but we’re really into the realms of pure shots in the dark – if you’ll forgive that turn of phrase – guesswork!”
Henrietta was tempted to press her further.
Decided to change the subject.
“Do you think we should start talking in Spanish, between ourselves, I mean, just to be ready for our arrival in Madrid?”
“I should imagine we’d get ourselves arrested as spies given the current public mood!”
“Oh, there is that, I suppose!”
The huge six-engine silvery flying monster was rocking gently at her moorings, about to embark her first passengers by the time the women clambered out of their taxi at the pierhead. Imperial Airways stewards quickly grabbed their bags.
Melody gazed at the magnificent apparition.
CENTURION was proudly emblazoned on her nose beneath the cockpit windows twenty feet above the lapping waters of the Upper Bay. They said that in a decade this ‘boat’ and all her famous sisters would be on the scrapheap, replaced by jet aircraft capable of racing across the North Atlantic at stratospheric altitudes and at breakneck speeds only a smidgen short of the speed of sound. Then, the same futurologists proclaimed these superb machines and the great ocean liners that currently plied the trade routes of the Empire would be outmoded, things of the past.
She would regret their passing.
Struck by the thought that coincidentally, one part of her own life was drawing to a close at the same time she was witnessing the swansong of imperial icons, the chaos of recent weeks distracted her as she stepped aboard the Centurion.
Champagne was served in glistening Waterford fluted glasses as Melody’s and Henrietta’s luggage was placed in their cabin. Their fellow passengers seemed to be a mix of captains of industry, military officers, senior civil servants and well-to-do Long Islanders, keen to catch the end of the London summer season. Melody was very nearly the youngest person in the Centurion’s lounge that afternoon; Henrietta must have felt like a schoolgirl!
It was predicted that the imminent coming of the ‘fast-jets’ would slash the cost of transatlantic tickets and make international travel affordable and therefore available to the middle classes. The age of airborne leisure and luxury was coming to an end.
Two glasses of bubbly made Melody a little light-headed as she and Henrietta investigated their quarters in the thirty minutes or so before take-off. Everybody had to be strapped into their seats on the upper deck for departure, thereafter the flying boat would rumble unhurriedly up the coast of New England to its first refuelling stop at Halifax. Customarily, most passengers tended to spend this part of the flight in the lounge whiling away the time between meals partaking of exotic cocktails and enjoying the breath-taking scenery drifting past two to three thousand feet below.
“These berths are always quite snug,” Henrietta observ
ed as the two women patted the narrow bunks affixed to the inner fuselage. There was literally no room to swing a cat in these ‘double’ cabins. Each bunk had its own curtain; otherwise there was no concession to privacy back here in ‘steerage’.
The women joked about this.
Actually, there was no second, third or steerage class accommodation on the Empire class flying boats; simply First Class (F) for forward and First Class (A), aft of the main spar which held the wings on!
Henrietta smiled, reached up and pulled the pin from her piled up auburn hair, which instantly cascaded over her shoulders, down her back and half-obscured her face.
Melody hesitated.
She raised a tentative hand to brush the younger woman’s hair aside, and touch her cheek.
They were standing very close to each other; there was no option to do otherwise in the cramped cabin.
Henrietta raised her hand and probably inadvertently in her anxiety her fingertips encountered Melody’s left breast. The older woman responded without conscious unction, pressing the Governor’s daughter’s palm to her chest with her own hand.
And then she kissed her.
And with parted lips Henrietta kissed her back.
And they were laughing.
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
‘Two Hundred Lost Years’ is the second book in the New England Series set in an alternative America, two hundred years after the rebellion of the American colonies was crushed in 1776 when the Continental Army was destroyed at the battle of Long Island and its commander, George Washington was killed.
I hope you enjoyed it - or if you did not, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
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