Empire Day

by James Philip

  The King and the Queen walked serenely down the gangway to step foot onto the soil of New England to where the Lord Lieutenant of King’s County – these days a purely honorific ceremonial post because re-organisations in the 1950s had concentrated all the real power in the hands of the Governor’s Office – waited patiently, he and his wife both flaunting their old-fashioned plumage.

  Lord Lieutenancies were sinecures reserved for retired senior colonial civil servants and worthies, their roles and duties a leftover from more feudal times which had tended until relatively recent times to unhelpfully blur lines of responsibility in the old Colonial regimes.

  The King raised his cap to the tumult, belatedly remembering that he had promised Eleanor that he would refrain from so doing and thus frustrate any attempt by the serried ranks of photographers to get a snap of his ‘war wound’.

  Together they stood on the dock.

  The ovation was deafening.

  The 5th Battle Squadron’s Royal Marine Band struck up God Save the King.

  The Union Flag and red and white St George’s flags out-numbered those of the twin-colony twenty to one. In the Upper Bay the three-inch saluting guns of the Ajax and the Naiad began to bark out the customary twenty-three-gun salute.

  King George turned to his wife and said out of the corner of his mouth: “You do realise that all of this is for you, not me, my love!”

  Eleanor, had threaded her right arm through the crook of her husband’s left.

  Now she leaned closer, smiling seraphically.

  “Put your hat back on, darling.”

  Chapter 11

  Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York

  Tsiokwaris had almost lost contact with his roots as a young man; going to work in the mills of Buffalo to send money home. His father had died in a bar room fight at the hands of a European several years before the restoration of the tribal lands yet in those years without hope he had sworn to live without the hate and remorse which had consumed the souls of so many of his childhood friends. Revenge would not feed his mother or his sisters; revenge was what got the angry young men of the Iroquois Nation buried in the ground before their time and their families condemned to live in the squalid, stinking shanties on the edges of the White Man’s towns.

  Revenge and alcohol were still the twin curses of his peoples.

  Thirty years ago, ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, had begun to give his Nation back small parcels of its ancestral lands below the Canadian border; already, some among the White Man wanted that territory back, planting illegal ‘settlements’ around the fringes of Indian ground and then slowly, seeking to insidiously expand into the Nation’s lands, stealing, piecemeal what they were afraid to seize face to face, warrior to warrior in war. It was hardly surprising that some of the young bloods chaffed at the caution of their elders.

  ‘This,’ they claimed, thinking as young people always do that they have the gift of perfect understanding over all things from time immemorial, ‘is the way it began in olden times. First, they come as friends, then they rob us blind and move us off our hunting grounds. After that it becomes submit to our will or starve!”

  It was not that simple of course, there was no Colonial guiding hand in the illegal encroachment upon Iroquois lands; it was mostly the work of a few Christian sects and rogue businessmen and if the ‘big men’ in Government House in Albany were involved at all it was most likely only by association with a few corrupt, bad apples in their secretariats. In a funny sort of way, the men at the top in New England had as little time, and equal contempt for the mainly Puritan extremists and greedy opportunists scratching away at the otherwise – from its point of view – successful separate development policies of the last three decades.

  Nothing that had happened in those years had undermined Tsiokwaris’s belief that the way forward was through dialogue with the white majority. The entire surviving Indian Nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific comprised perhaps some twelve or thirteen million people, of whom less than a third still lived traditional lives. There were over a hundred million whites in the twenty-nine constituent colonies, protectorates and territories of New England, and south of the Rawlings-McMahan Line – which ran from Wilmington in the east to Port Oxford on the Pacific west coast for well over two thousand six hundred miles – was home to at least fifteen or sixteen million of the estimated eighteen million descendants of African slaves still living in the colonies. Hotheads talked of ‘uniting with the black men’ but that was never going to work; geography and arithmetic were too heavily weighted in favour of the White Man.

  And besides, his old friend Isaac Fielding and his wife Rachel had taught him that not all white men – or women – were his enemies, and that good fellowship and reason could be, even if they often were not, the determining virtues of peaceful coexistence. Notwithstanding that the majority of whites were bigoted, ignorant of his Nation and its customs very few among them were bad people, it was just that they could not respect what they did not understand and they brought up their children to look down upon, and to despise ‘natives’.

  Tsiokwaris and his two nephews, both of whom had attained that adolescent age when his brother realised his first mistake had not been drowning them at birth, had waited in the trees until the three aircraft had stopped buzzing Leppe Island and performing acrobatics up and down the adjoining mile or so of the Mohawk River before dragging their canoes into plain sight and rowing over to the island.

  His nephews had pulled faces when he told them that if they wanted to accompany him ‘down river’ they were going to have to dress ‘Indian style’ and travel light. But even modern teenagers could be persuaded to conform to a tribal old fart’s wishes when it meant they could get escape from their parents for a couple of days.

  ‘No transistor radios!’ Tsiokwaris had mandated.

  The last thing he wanted was for his peaceful weekend to be ruined by the loud ‘English music’ – if one could call so much ‘raucous noise’ music – polluting the senses of the tribe’s children. Already facing at least two days without sight of a TV set, panic had briefly creased the youngsters’ faces.

  The old man’s daughter had told him where she and her husband planned to camp, tonight he and the boys would set up far enough away to ensure the young lovers’ privacy was respected. Nonetheless, that afternoon he was looking forward to renewing acquaintance with his unlikely son-in-law.

  Abe reminded him of his father, Isaac, when he first met him. Isaac would have been five or six years older at the time but the son had the same sparse, yet to fill out frame and optimistic grey-blue eyes and a mind always open to new ideas. That said, Abe was by far the more practical man. Isaac was a dreamer, a dilettante and Tsiokwaris suspected, a little lost in the world these days without his beloved Rachel.

  The old man’s daughter emerged from the trees as he hauled his canoe out of the water, from habit dragging it over stones not mud so as to leave no trace of his arrival in the mud to alert strangers to their presence on the island. His nephews followed his example and soon the canoes were hidden from anybody on the river.

  Abe Fielding approached his second father with a broad smile and the two men embraced.

  “I might have guessed you two would turn up!” he chuckled at his teenage cousins, both boys grinned and hands were slapped in the colonial way as if Abe was just another teenage confederate of the two youthful miscreants.

  “You were right,” Kate told her father as the group moved up the shallow slope deeper into the trees which covered well over ninety percent of Leppe Island. “The snakes must have killed all the rats.”

  Colonials killed snakes as vermin and wondered why rats and other rodents infested their towns and cities!

  Truly the ways of the White Man were a mystery to the Mohawks.

  “You guys watch where you are putting your feet,” Abe told the youngsters. Every Mohawk used to know that unless you trod on a rattler it was going to go out of i
ts way to keep out of your way. Likewise, you never put your hand down a hole unless you knew exactly what was living in it.

  “You talk to your Pa lately, Abe?” Tsiokwaris inquired.

  “A few weeks back,” the young man replied with a shrug. He changed the subject. “I reckon that was Alex up there in one of those planes,” he went on, chuckling. “He threatened to come up this way. He’s going down to Jamaica Bay tonight. He says he’ll make more in a day from flying photographers over the Fleet than he usually makes in three months at the flying club in Albany!”

  “It must be quite a sight down there?”

  Abe shook his head, his smile rueful.

  “Some of the big ships are bigger than this whole island!”

  Tsiokwaris had had his fill of big cities working in Buffalo all those years ago. He had visited Newark once but never Manhattan. One colonial city looked very much like any other; they all had a similar grid of broad streets at their heart and confusion and incoherence the farther one walked from the centre until at last one reached the sanity of the surrounding countryside.

  He was tall for a Mohawk, five feet and about ten inches, with the taut musculature of a man some years younger than his sixty or so years. The brown in his eyes had faded down the years, and his long hair, now gathered into a single pony tail, was streaked with grey. In another age he might have been proclaimed Chief amongst his people; instead he was an Elder of his clan, one of a handful of men who spoke for the Mohawk in the councils of the Iroquois Nation.

  Knowing that Abe wanted to seek her father’s counsel Kate had led her cousins away demanding they catch some fish to ‘earn your keep’.

  The two men stood alone in the sepulchral quiet stillness of the woods, listening to the slow rushing of the river down the flanks of the island in the stream.

  “I don’t want to live a lie anymore,” Abe explained hesitantly. “But…”

  “What about your doctoral degree?”

  “That’s just a piece of paper, I…”

  The old man knew where this was heading. The kids wanted to be properly married, to live as man and wife and if he understood anything about his daughter – she was a force of nature like her late mother – Kate ached to start having babies.

  “You don’t have to ask my permission,” Tsiokwaris observed neutrally, “to take Kate away from here.”

  “No…”

  “You’ve talked about this?”

  Abe nodded.

  “If we go far enough west, into the outlying territories, or perhaps right the way over to Vancouver, well,” he shrugged helplessly, “we could live together openly. Without fear.”

  “Without fear,” the old man echoed. “There’s a lot of frontier country between here and the West Coast?”

  “We’d cross into Canada and take passage on the Dominion Trans-Continental Railway all the way from Ottawa to Vancouver. The other possibility is maybe going into practice at Winnipeg or Calgary, either way there’s hardly any of this Getrennte Entwicklung nonsense north of the border.”

  The colonial settlement with the French and the native populations north of the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes was the consequence of an entirely different approach to that taken in New England. 1776 was one of those years that had a lot to answer for! Whereas, the British had wrested Quebec from the French only a few years before the rebellion they had not attempted to inflict a single colonial model on the whole vast, then largely unexplored country. The French in Canada had been assimilated into the Empire with their culture and traditions intact; in New England the ‘English’ way had been the only way and the ruthless brutality of the retribution meted out to traitors and to whole colonies had been every bit as savage as that suffered by the Scottish clans after the Jacobite rising of 1745. North of the St Lawrence River slavery had never been enshrined in daily life, nor the inflexible missionary Christianity of the first East Coast colonies.

  There had been less poison in the system north of the border, less colony versus colony competition, thus, Canada was a nation in the making within the Empire while New England remained, and probably would be ever more, a collection of – albeit peaceably – warring colonies.

  Canada was no kind of Heaven on Earth; but there was no law prohibiting marriage across racial, ethnic or religious divides and if he and Kate might have trouble finding a Christian communion which would marry them in the sight of Colonial Law, any magistrate or registrar could perform the ceremony and thereafter, Kate would be as respectable as any lady living in a great mansion or carried everywhere in a gilded carriage.

  In Canada their children would be born legitimately.

  Tsiokwaris’s brows knitted for a moment and his eyes darkened.

  He and Abe had talked of this day many times but still he ached for the coming loss of his daughter and his second son. He had suspected that this might be the parting of the ways; that within days Tekonwenaharake would be gone, her voice travelling through the wind of different lands.

  When he and his ‘son’ had last spoken the discussion had been whether to leave this year or next; in his heart the old Mohawk had known the time was now it was just that he had not, nor would he ever, really come to terms with it.

  The two men halted, faced each other.

  “Does Isaac know?”

  Abe shook his head.

  “He’s under Sarah’s thumb and he’s an awful liar.”

  The old man said nothing but he gave Abe a very odd look, one full of irony and oddly, gentle amusement.

  “What did I say?”

  Tsiokwaris shook his head.

  “Nothing. Have you figured out what you’ll do for money until you get settled where you’re going?”

  Abe nodded.

  The Mohawk chuckled almost but not quite under his breath.

  Isaac Fielding’s son would have worked out everything. Life father like son. His old friend’s other sons could have been any man’s; Abe could only have been Isaac’s boy. They were too alike; which was probably why they had become a little distant in recent times. He wondered if the boy realised that his common law step mother was not what she seemed to be?

  On balance, no, he decided.

  But there was no need to burden Abe with that as well, he had quite enough to worry about as it was.

  Tsiokwaris walked on.

  O, me oh my…

  What would we all be without our secrets?

  Chapter 12

  Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard, Wallabout Bay, King’s County

  Thirty-four-year old Victoria Fielding Watson sat in the crowded temporary scaffold-seating within less than twenty feet of the King and Queen. Notwithstanding she was seven months pregnant with her third child she had jumped to her feet with everybody else when the Royal couple had ascended to the launching platform – a stage erected under the bow of Yard Job Number 309, it was bad luck to say the name of a ship on launch day until the moment before the traditional bottle was cracked on her plates – and ecstatically clapped and cheered. She had been quite hot and bothered by the time she resumed her seat with the other ‘senior wives’.

  Vicky was fifteen to twenty years younger than the majority of the women around her. John Watson, her husband had lost his first wife in the influenza pandemic of 1958-59; and by all accounts buried himself in his work for over a decade before her arrival on the scene. A lot of the other dockyard wives had regarded Vicky as a gold-digger, although she had never been that. The fact of the matter was that she had liked – and felt a little sorry for John – from the first morning she walked into his office to take dictation. His long-time secretary, a formidable spinster who had been at Wallabout Bay for over forty years had finally retired, and Vicky was one of several ‘temps’ sent up to the ‘First Floor’ from whence the big men of the Yard ruled like not so minor princes and potentates.

  John was under-manager of Slipways 3 and 4 at the time. For the last two years he had been Director of Operations for Small Ship Construction. This t
itle was a misnomer because in Wallabout Bay terms ‘small ship’ simply meant any vessel ‘small enough’ to be safely launched from a slipway into the waters of the East River. The two big fleet carriers – Ulysses and Perseus - were, at nearly a thousand feet long and well over forty-thousand tons, being constructed in dry docks; but anything under six or seven hundred feet long and weighing in at less than twenty thousand tons still qualified as ‘small’, such was the scale of things in the great yards.

  Vicky had not exactly made a beeline, or any kind of overt ‘play’ for John Watson. He was twenty-three years her senior, dapper without being especially handsome. However, once she had got to know him a little better she had discovered he was the most sensible man she had ever met and although he could be a hard task master in the Yard, underneath he was kindly, and very lonely.

  She had made it very clear to him that she was not going to sleep with him until or unless they were married and he had greeted this with a smile.

  He had kissed her brow: ‘of course not, my dear.’

  They had moved into his apartment at Fort Hamilton – which had had a marvellous view across the narrows of Hell’s Gate which protected the Upper Bay to Staten Island – but the place had had too many lingering memories of John’s late wife and after a year they had moved to a big house at Whitestone, a part of the Clintonville community set back about fifty yards from one of the estuarine tributaries of the East River shortly after Vicky produced their first offspring, Caroline Fielding Watson. They had since had a second daughter, Mary and they both hoped junior, who was kicking with excitement right then, would be a boy to complete their little family ‘triumvirate’. Mary’s birth had not been entirely straightforward so husband and wife had agreed that ‘three’ children would be a good place to stop.

  Vicky had left the girls with Noma, their middle-aged Algonquian nanny and driven to Brooklyn with her husband where she had spent the morning mixing and gossiping with the other wives before trooping up into their grandstand seats to enjoy the ‘main event’.