Empire Day

by James Philip

  I always thought of the George Washington fable as one long, convoluted shaggy dog story; the sort of thing one could drag out all night or conclude at a moment’s notice. Most of the people one told the story to already knew the punchline so it was all about the twists and turns on the way, the journey not the destination.

  “George’s luck ran out around midnight. First the wind veered away from the north. First by a point to the east, then the south. For about an hour a fine rain began to fall, afterwards the clouds scudded inland to uncover the panoply of the heavens as the summer squall blew inland. Even by starlight the men on the shore could see the sails billowing from the top gallants of the ships of the line anchored off Staten Island. It must have been like watching one’s death walking, very slowly towards you knowing that there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. Legend has it that a collective moan rose from the throats of the Continentals manning the redoubts as the English dowsed their cook fires and formed up to renew the assault at dawn’s first gleaming, knowing now that their quarry was without hope.”

  The Battle of Long Island was a cautionary tale that ought to be ingrained into the heads of all young officer candidates.

  “The Continentals had no control over the wind but by rights more seasonal westerlies would have blown Admiral Howe’s fleet into the Upper Bay long since. But there’s always the human element in the best tragedies; and that was supplied by Thomas Mifflin, one of Washington’s commanders. Supposedly, he misunderstood his orders – many of my colleagues in the history game think he was either a fool or just one of those men who misunderstand orders because they always think they know better – and pulled his regiment out of the line around the time the first boats from Manhattan were landing at Brooklyn Pier.”

  I sat back and studied my interrogators.

  “Why the Hell am I telling you this stuff?”

  It was as if Lieutenant Adams had been waiting for exactly this cue; she leant down, grabbed her attaché case and pulled out a battered book which she proceeded to place equidistantly between me and her on the table.

  Oh…double shit!

  This just gets worse!

  The woman nudged the book towards me.

  “Open it at the title page please, Professor.”

  I did as I was instructed.

  I knew that I was not playing this thing anywhere near as calmly as I hoped I was.

  “Please read that page to me.”

  “Er,” I looked up, as if bewildered.

  “Read it.”

  “Two hundred lost years,” I muttered. The book was subtitled: “What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time!”

  I had to smile; I could not help myself.

  “By a Son of Liberty…”

  I made as if to thumb deeper into the book, which was old, dog-eared and smelled musty. The dust jacket had long since disintegrated and the front and back boards were scratched, scuffed and a little deformed, probably by dampness. However, the spine was relatively sound and it looked as if all the pages were still in situ…

  “Please turn to page twelve, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams put to me like a threat. “Start reading at the beginning of the second paragraph and don’t stop until I tell you to.”

  Shit! Shit! Shit!

  They would be taping this whole thing and sometime later today some goddammed voice expert would be comparing my voice with thirty-year-old tapes.

  “Today would be good,” Danson suggested tight-lipped.

  I cleared my throat.

  Remembered my mug of tea, took a couple of mouthfuls to wet my suddenly arid throat and to lubricate my larynx one last time before these comedians gave it a good stretch at the end of a rope…

  “George Washington suffered adversity with the cool dignity that he welcomed success. Reportedly, he re-assured his men that ‘our guns will put those frigates in their place’, waving at the Upper Bay. Hulks had been sunk in the East River and any warships foolhardy enough to brave sailing into Buttermilk Channel between Governor’s Island and the coast would surely be roughly handled. But there were so many damned ships…”

  The words seemed familiar and yet strange; it was the feeling one sometimes gets looking at pictures of oneself as a child or as a young man when everything was different and the world so replete with possibilities.

  “Washington had ridden down to Fort Stirling opposite the southern tip of Manhattan to supervise the first companies preparing to board the boats now straggling across the mouth of the East River towards the Ferry Pier by the time he encountered Thomas Mifflin’s men trotting down to the shore. He was aware that scores of men had already deserted the lines on Brooklyn Heights and had detailed officers to staunch the tide. Mifflin’s men would not be turned back and on the high ground to the east the remaining defenders could clearly see their fellows deserting the defence works around them. Briefly, Washington’s presence calmed what might have turned into a riot.”

  I made every pretence of having to read the text closely as if I had no idea what lay in the next sentence, paragraph, page or chapter.

  “The first men were embarking on the rescue boats when the guns of the frigates Phoenix and Rose and the 54-gun ship of the line Antelope began to engage the forts defending the mouth of the East River. Six, twelve, eighteen and twenty-four-pound round shot began to skim through the helpless flotilla straggling across the East River. The first broadside, probably from one of the frigates raked Fort Stirling. At first the ships out in the Upper Bay took a battering but inexorably, they came closer and closer inshore, as if pressed by the weight of the big ships entering those enclosed waters behind them, duelling and subduing the batteries at the southern tip of Manhattan, on Governor’s Island and Fort Defiance on Red Hook.”

  When I was a boy I used to walk across the nineteenth century causeway to Red Hook and explore the ruins of the old fort; the Royal Navy took over the island – more an isthmus now that so much land has been reclaimed from the sea around it – in the 1930s. I would stand on the rubble, gaze out across the Upper Bay and imagine the sight which might have greeted an onlooker as dawn broke that morning.

  “The Antelope’s foremast crumpled and went over the side but her captain merely anchored his command and, ignoring the fire from the gunners at Fort George – whose efforts were now much inconvenienced by the smoke blowing away from the ships and over the southern extent of Manhattan – poured a withering barrage into the men gathering, mostly cowering, south and east of the now smashed Ferry Pier. Meanwhile, on the heights the Hessians had carried Fort Greene by force majeure and everywhere the Brooklyn Heights line was buckling, splintering into a hundred, desperate close-quarter battles in which the part-time riflemen of the Continental Army were helpless before the bayonets of the British Redcoats and the tide of German mercenaries.”

  The carnage around the wrecked Brooklyn Ferry Pier must have been indescribably. What might, wind and military competence permitting have been a classic evacuation of a besieged force under fire swiftly turned into a nightmarishly bloody rout.

  “It is not known at what point in the battle George Washington was dashed from his horse. As the sun rose over Brooklyn Heights the warships were so close in shore they were firing grape and chain-shot into the Continentals milling very nearly within hailing distance. ‘Grape’ was like being blasted by a giant shotgun with balls of buckshot an inch in diameter; ‘chain’ was what it said it was, chains attached to iron bars normally employed to rip up another ship’s rigging. Suffice to say that the decapitated body of the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army was identified the next day lying some one hundred yards east of the site of the Brooklyn Ferry Pier…”

  I made a point of pausing and studying the spine of the book as if I was still curious about its title.

  “I didn’t tell you to stop reading, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams reminded me.

  I had not really bought any of that horse manure about her b
eing a plain clothes cop with the Royal Military Police; she had the look and emitted the bad vibes more characteristic of the Crown’s secret policemen, and now it seemed, women, too.

  I had no idea what department she might work for.

  I had been out of that game thirty years; ever since I hooked up with Rachel and as for the Sons of Liberty, heck, that was all ancient history like the Greeks and Trojans.

  “Unlike so many of his fellows the British initially interred George Washington’s body in a marked grave somewhere in the earthworks of Fort Stirling. Some years later it was believed to have been exhumed and re-buried in consecrated ground associated with St Thomas’s Chapel, a Lutheran house which once stood on the Old Jamaica Road but was demolished sometime in the 1870s.”

  I looked up and met the woman’s stare.

  I realised she was older than I had guessed, maybe in her early thirties and she did not quite have the scrubbed and polished, unnaturally immaculate aura of a real Redcap

  She nodded towards the book.

  “The British did not call a halt to the bloodletting until the end of November 1776. By then three of Washington’s five generals at the Battle of Long Island – Israel Putnam, Henry Knox and William Alexander - had been executed for high treason, Thomas Mifflin whose negligence had hastened the rout was a prisoner of war, as was John Sullivan who had been captured the previous day.”

  I suppose I ought to have been more scared.

  “A lot more is known about the battle and the ‘cleaning up’ operations which went on throughout the rest of 1776 and the first half of the following year. King George III – German George as the colonists called him – wanted all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, that ‘heinous treachery’, hung, drawn and quartered but much to his chagrin his ministers told him ‘we didn’t do that sort of thing anymore.”

  I stopped reading.

  “From memory I think John Hancock the President of the Second Continental Congress was the last man to be hung.” I grimaced: “I think that was only because his was the biggest signature on the ‘heinous’ document.”

  “Well,” Lieutenant Adams purred like a cat toying with a bird with a broken wing, “as any woman will tell you, Professor,” she went on smiling the sort of smile that made me want to wince, “size is very important.”

  Chapter 6

  East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island

  Everybody had been on edge since the news of the shooting in the Upper Bay had come through. Whoever had taken aim at the King – over a mile away – as he walked on the quarterdeck of the battleship HMS Lion had been very good. The shooter had winged one of King George’s bodyguards as he bundled his monarch to the planking.

  Sarah Fielding had raised an eyebrow when she was told that King George and Queen Eleanor planned to go ahead with the ‘planned itinerary’ regardless.

  “They think the shooter probably used a long-barrelled Martini-Henry,” the grey-haired, heavy-set moustachioed man sitting beside her in the observation room reported, sotto voce.

  “That’s a bit old-school,” she murmured distractedly.

  “I don’t know,” her companion shrugged. “A real pro wouldn’t take on a shot that long but a re-chambered Martini Henry with a 0.303 barrel-liner is still a good sniping piece.”

  The 0.50 calibre Mark II and Mark III had been standard British Army issue until the 1930s and retained by specialist units into the 1950s, mainly because of its reliability and its lightning fast trigger action. It was this latter trait which made the gun a favourite for hunters, and of course, snipers.

  “They’re sending a float plane out to the Lion to collect the round they dug out of the deck. We should know more by tonight,” the man continued.

  “I can’t believe today’s events are still going ahead?”

  “The King and the Queen will be transported from the Lion to Wallabout Bay by one of the escorting destroyers. HMS Cassandra, I think they said. She’ll take the Royal Party across the East River when they’re done at the Admiralty Dockyard and take them back to the Lion this evening. If anybody blinks at the wrong time the whole fleet will probably open fire!”

  Sarah sighed.

  “You know that he knows we’re watching him, don’t you?” She put to the man she had first met as a teenage cadet.

  “Oh yes,” he confirmed.

  “Why are we watching him, sir?”

  When the man said nothing she asked another, very pertinent question.

  “What the fuck are those two clowns playing at?” This she asked waving at her husband’s two interrogators.

  My husband…

  Well, strictly speaking that was not true. Isaac was a registered agnostic so there could be no church wedding and as they had never gone to a lawyer and signed a marriage contract their ‘union’ was of the ‘common law’ variety. Her ‘legend’ had worked surprisingly well with a ‘partner’ so deeply embedded in the lazy, complacent ways of academia. These days you had to work hard for a fellowship, literally do the hard miles and hope something turned up at one of the colleges one was ‘associated with’; it meant living away from home for weeks at a stretch, and sometimes working ‘out of colony’. Few husbands would put up with that sort of life but then Isaac was not the possessive sort and she had told him that she did not plan on having any children. Their ‘marriage’ would, therefore, be one of mutual convenience and basically, he got to sleep with a woman half his age now and then: what middle-aged man was going to turn down a deal like that?

  Sarah still thought the whole thing had been a complete waste of time. Leastways, for her personally although not professionally because six months ago she had been promoted to probationary Captain in the New England Security Service.

  Isaac Fielding had first been arrested in 1939; in those days nobody called student activism ‘sedition’. He was active in student politics, involved in any number of protest marches and demonstrations. During that era all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven were liable to be randomly ‘drafted’ into the Colonial Militias for service in the Alta California-Nuevo Mexico Border War; there was a lot of bad feeling about both ‘the Draft’ and the fact that the sons of politicians, rich merchants and whose families had friends in high places could, and often did, gain draft exemptions and or purchase ‘substitutes’ so that their sons were kept well out of harm’s way.

  The suspension of the draft between 1943 and 1955 had undermined the Sons of Liberty and ushered in a period of happy stasis across the college and university campuses of the East Coast and knocked all that stupid talk about a developing youth counter-culture on the head. Oddly the re-introduction of the draft, or as it was properly termed the ‘Colonial Service Obligation’ in 1955 had not been the trigger for renewed civil unrest many had feared. Possibly, because so many of the subversive mainstays of the still-born ‘counter culture’ had withered on the vine in the previous decade.

  Nobody like ‘the draft’ but most people accepted it was a necessary evil if the boundaries of the colonies were to be protected. Leastways, that was the way most patriots felt about it!

  Back in 1939 Isaac Fielding had torn up his draft documents and thrown them on a bonfire outside the Governor’s mansion in Albany. Strictly speaking, as he was still in the second year of his degree course at college in Buffalo he was de facto ‘exempted from militia service’ at the time, having only been issued with his ‘draft card’ in error. Nonetheless, he was hauled up before magistrates, found guilty of disorderly conduct and defacing official documentation and given a six-month suspended prison sentence.

  Later he was listed in Colonial Security Service files as a member of the New York Sons of Liberty, an anarchistic group whose name harked back to a secret society formed in the founding First Thirteen colonies in 1765 to fight taxation designed to pay for the then 10,000-man imperial garrison of New England. Its motto had been ‘no taxation without representation’, a colonial grievance not remed
ied until the early nineteenth century. The initial incarnation of the Sons of Liberty had faded away after the supposedly pernicious Stamp Act was repealed by the British Parliament in 1766, however, ‘Sons of Liberty’ had become, over the years a generic rallying call for misfits and malcontents who blamed the old country for all their own colony’s woes.

  Frustratingly, although the security services had long suspected that the Sons of Liberty – certainly in the East – had had a guiding hand, either a council or a single leader, it had proven impossible to penetrate the organisation’s high command. The SOL more closely represented some kind of cellular free-masonry than the guerrilla or insurgent movements encountered elsewhere in the Empire; uncover one cell, or two or three and it made no difference, always, the trail ended where it had started. It was like chasing shadows. For all that it was an article of faith within the upper echelons of the colonial administration in New England that the Sons of Liberty was just the tip of a widespread conspiracy embedded in the very fabric of the American colonies; problematically, back in England they probably still believed the ‘bumpkins across the other side of the pond’ were crying wolf.

  Sarah had assumed that Isaac must have discovered that she was a CSS plant by now. He would have kept her close. The first rule of politics, life, war, anything was: ‘keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.’

  Judging by Abe’s attitude – not unpleasant but distant – towards her he had probably realised, or Isaac had tipped him off, that she was not what she seemed relatively early on. Abe would have kept away from her once he suspected he was under surveillance.