Empire Day

by James Philip

  On Long Island hotel and bed-and-breakfast proprietors eagerly rubbed their hands together for the coming of Empire Day which marked the end of the first summer school term, and the real start of the holiday season which went on into the early autumn.

  However, apart from thrilling the crowds at air show the CAF tended to stay well and truly grounded during Empire Day Week. It was a standing joke in New England that if anybody wanted to invade then the day or two after Empire Day would be the best time; because probably, nobody would actually notice!

  So, the question was: what were those fellows doing flying up and down the valley?

  “It is supposed to be a holiday,” Abe murmured, unable to shake of his uneasiness.

  “What is it, husband?”

  “Nothing. I guess I’m still a bit getting used to stuff,” he apologised.

  Kate was quiet, very serious.

  “I know you’ve given up a lot for me.”

  Abe shook his head.

  “I’d give up everything for you, wife.”

  She buried her face in his chest and he hugged her.

  The breeze was blowing up the Mohawk valley from the south east, rustling the leaves overhead and carrying the roaring of aero engines in faint waves from far, far away, like waves crashing on a distant shore.

  Chapter 35

  New Brunswick, New Jersey

  “Dad!”

  After the excitement of recent days Henry Howland had determined to spend the day – which had dawned gloriously sunny – catching up with the garden chores he had neglected last week. The Colonial Security Service always paid well but frankly, lately some of the commissions he and his daughter, Jennifer, had been asked to undertake had been, to say the least, challenging.

  He and Jennifer’s dearly departed mother, Samantha, had first started working for Matthew Harrison about twenty years ago. The CSS had ‘talent spotted’ them, it seemed, after a Special Agent had attended the New Brunswick Players Christmas production of A Winter’s Tale at the local playhouse. Jennifer had demonstrated a natural aptitude for ‘the work’ almost as soon as they had tested the waters of the ‘surveillance and smoke and mirrors game’.

  Usually, their work involved being anonymous, frequenting and listening, looking and occasionally spying on ‘persons of interest’ in public places, or impersonating this or that character. They were paid on a job by job basis, invariably in cash and if necessary, given ample time to prepare, to read themselves into their roles, and to rehearse. Occasionally, they were ‘briefed’ on the generalities, never the specifics, of a given CSS ‘operation’. He and Samantha had never wanted to know anything they absolutely did not need to know. Jennifer was more curious but that was simply the consequence of her precocious youth.

  Nonetheless, the last week had been something of a trial for them both.

  Henry had been uncomfortable impersonating a police officer and told his employers as much. And as for actually attending that dreadful raid in the middle of the night in Gravesend. Goodness, the police had gone out of their way to wake up the whole street!

  ‘What do you mean?’ He had queried in alarm. ‘I might be left alone with the suspect?”

  “He’s not violent and he’ll be cuffed all the time.’

  Both he and Jennifer had given each other odd looks when they finally got the interview scripts in the small hours of Saturday morning. It was one thing to ask them to distract everybody with a faux argument in a shopping mall or listen in a crowd as an agent provocateur stirred up trouble, or act as couriers across colony lines, or even to attend services or meetings where sedition might be talked but to actually conduct an interview in a police station!

  ‘Just follow the script. We’ll be just outside the door all the time.’

  The CSS had put them up in a nice hotel at West Sayville last night after keeping them waiting around in Hempstead incommunicado all day yesterday so they had missed all the unpleasantness at the dockyard and out in the Upper Bay. That business at Wallabout Bay sounded bad enough but what had happened in the Upper Bay was a positive outrage…

  “Dad!”

  Henry had been on his knees weeding half-way down the garden, some twenty yards from the back door of the family’s four-bedroom wood-framed house on Somerset Drive. Beyond the neat, pine-board fence at the bottom of the property one could always - whatever the time of year – see the masts of sail boats moored in the Raritan River. At this season there were always sails flapping, and elegant movement in the near distance.

  Samantha had loved that view across to Middlesex County from whence she had hailed. They had met as student teachers at the old Cornwallis College – now long gone – and it had been if not love at first sight then the nearest thing to it!

  “Daddy!”

  Henry looked up, realising he had been wool gathering.

  “That man that we interviewed at Hempstead has just been on the TV!”

  The father staggered to his feet.

  “Well, we knew he was suspected of being involved in…” He was going to say ‘serious offences against the crown’ before he was cut off.

  “The CSS has just issued a statement saying he is suspected of being the guiding hand behind the disaster at the shipyard on Saturday afternoon, the attacks on the fleet yesterday and have asked the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge him with attempted Regicide!”

  Henry had not seen his daughter this agitated since he could not remember when. She had been marvellously combative in the interview at Hempstead; her mother would have been proud of her. The way she carried off her performance was a thing of beauty…

  “The CSS has arrested the poor man’s whole family,” the young woman told her father, her tone of voice indicating that she thought he was being more than usually hard of understanding. “His son-in-law was killed resisting arrest at the Admiralty Dockyard, his daughter is in hospital under heavy guard. They say one son worked on the speedboats that crashed into those big ships, and the other two might have tried to crash their aeroplanes into ships in the Bay. One of them is still alive. You’ll never guess who was in the aeroplane with him?”

  “This is true,” her father confessed dryly. “I’ll never guess!”

  “Leonora Coolidge!”

  “Who?” Henry Howland inquired patiently.

  “The heiress, daddy!” Jennifer despaired of him. “Her father owns practically all the Hamptons and three or four of the biggest hotels on Long Island! Those Coolidges!”

  “Oh… What on earth was she doing in one of those aeroplanes?”

  It seemed like a reasonable question.

  The daughter shook her head in frustration.

  “I should imagine that’s what the CSS is asking her right now, daddy!”

  “Yes, I should think so…” Henry Howland frowned. “You wouldn’t have thought that chap was the sort, would you?”

  “Isaac Fielding?” Jennifer paused for thought. “Well, the CSS are continually telling us that you can’t tell that much about a book just from its cover.”

  Her father pursed his lips.

  They had both read Two Hundred Lost Years from cover to cover as part of their preparation for the scene in the police station. All their assignments were ‘scenes’ or ‘tableaus’ of a theatrical nature, nothing to do with real life. That was what had been so unnerving about the last few days even before they heard about the tragic events elsewhere that weekend.

  “No, but you can never tell. Can you?”

  “Daddy!” Jennifer snapped angrily.

  “What, my dear?”

  “That man will be put on trial for his life.”

  “Quite right, he deserves whatever he gets…”

  “You were at his house when he was arrested. You were in the car alone with him for over an hour. We both spent several hours with him or observing him on the day other members of his family tried to kill the King!”

  “Oh,” Henry Howland groaned, the penny dropping. “Oh, dear…”
/>
  “We could be called to give evidence at his trial!” This Jennifer impetuously said, out aloud, expressing what they were both thinking.

  One way or another their career as well paid undercover – albeit dedicated thespian – undercover agents of the Colonial Security Service had just crashed into a brick wall.

  Jennifer swallowed, dry-throated.

  Her parents had been CSS informers most of her life, she had been one since she was a teenager and that had never been a problem.

  Until now.

  Now, everybody would soon know their dirty little secret!

  Chapter 36

  HMS Lion, Upper Bay

  “What happened to the lady?” Alexander Fielding asked. He hurt everywhere. That was new, the pain had always been localised all the other times he had crashed. Not that he had been in much of a position to do anything about it; the battleship’s 0.8-inch cannons had virtually chewed his Bristol V to pieces by the time it hit the water. He had no idea what had happened to the other aircraft. He assumed it must have been blown to smithereens.

  “Your accomplice was only lightly injured. She was transferred ashore by police officers about an hour ago,” a man with one of those English, stick-up-the-arse superior voices said dismissively as if he was addressing a dog turd.

  “What do you mean,” Alex protested feebly, ‘my accomplice?”

  Answer came there none.

  “She was my bloody passenger, that’s all…”

  He must have passed out because the next time his eyes blinked open – not an easy thing because they seemed full of gunk – a stern-faced middle-aged woman in nursing apparel was standing over him taking his pulse.

  Alex realised he had no idea where he was.

  “You are in the sick bay of HMS Lion,” the woman informed him. “The ship you tried to sink yesterday.”

  Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence?

  Okay, so that was the way it was.

  “The lady was okay?”

  “Yes, cuts and bruises mainly. Unlike you, she was certified fit to be interrogated by the authorities on shore without delay.”

  “Anybody wants to talk to me I’m game,” Alex insisted. “I’ve got nothing to hide. I tried to tip that idiot McIntyre into the sea. I would have if you hadn’t shot off one of my wings.”

  He felt a beaker being pressed gently to his mouth, blissfully cool liquid wetting his cracked lips and tricking down his chin. Then he slept again.

  “…I’ve got no time for traitors but if you badger this man I will have you thrown off the ship, do we understand each other Detective Inspector Danson?”

  Alex would have sworn that the answering voice was feminine.

  “I’m not here to ‘badger’ anybody, sir!”

  She had brown eyes, a mane of red hair and she was watching him like a cat watches a mouse hole. Or at least that was the way it seemed to him.

  The woman smiled wanly.

  “This hasn’t worked out very well for you, has it, Mister Fielding?”

  She had a Vermont accent.

  Alex tried to focus on the warrant card she held in front of his face.

  Detective Inspector M.R.D. Danson.

  “What does the ‘M’ stand for?”

  It was not the most original chat-up line he had ever deployed; beggars could not be choosers.

  “Melody,” she explained. “My parents were musical. I’m not, probably because of all those piano lessons they forced me to attend when I was little.”

  Alex guessed she was in her mid-thirties.

  No ring on her finger…

  She was dressed like a Long Island middle-class housewife but had not bothered with any of the make-up too many women plastered over their faces these days.

  Putting away her warrant card she sat in the chair at the foot of the bed and went on studying the injured man.

  “You were a fighter ace in the Border War?”

  “I shot down five Spanish scouts, if that’s what you mean?”

  Melody Danson shrugged.

  “Tough guy, yeah?”

  Alex would have shrugged but it would have hurt too much.

  “Okay,” she sighed, drawing some kind of conclusion from the man in the cot’s silence. “I’m here because Surgeon Commander Coverdale, this ship’s chief doctor, is too English to tell me, a woman, to go to Hell. Just looking at you I know you are too badly knocked about for anything you say to me to be taken seriously in a court of law, even in the twin-colony. Not that this thing will go to court up here, the Governor will want to see justice done in Philadelphia. So, at least you’ll get a fair trial before they hang you. I’m told that strictly speaking treason is still a hanging, drawing and quartering offence but I think Viscount De L’Isle will probably stop short of all that medieval nastiness.”

  “I’m not guilty of…”

  “No, of course you’re not, Mister Fielding,” Melody Danson agreed. “But, when I tell you what you are up against you’ll have to admit that things are not looking good for you.”

  Alex reckoned passing out again would be a good idea.

  However, consciousness stubbornly persisted.

  “This is the thing,” the woman went on, matter of factly. “I’m only on the case because my colleagues were just about bright enough to work out that either they let me work my magic on Surgeon Commander Coverdale, or they would have to wait a week, or maybe two, to interview then and by that time the big boys in Philadelphia will be all over this one and their day or two in the spotlight will have come and gone before they even got the chance to get their dancing shoes on. So, the next person you talk to will be, I suspect, a jaundiced, somewhat embittered senior member of the Colonial Security Service who once gave somebody the benefit of the doubt in nineteen-fifty-three and has been regretting it ever since.”

  The man said nothing.

  “Your father, your brother William and when she gets out of hospital, if she lives…”

  “Vicky’s in hospital?”

  “Yes, she lost her baby. They won’t have told her that her husband is dead yet. They say he was in league with your father and together they conspired to blow up HMS Polyphemus as she was launched on Friday afternoon.”

  Alex must have been staring at her like a madman.

  “Oh, you don’t know about that?”

  “I only flew down to Jamaica Bay on Friday evening. Sure, I heard about the accident, I flew over Wallabout Bay yesterday,” he hesitated, “assuming this is Monday…”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t know it was sabotage…”

  “John Watson was shot attempting to evade arrest by CSS officers.” Melody Danson did not give this time to sink in. “The CSS are trying to establish if your brother Abraham was in one of the other aircraft involved in the suicide attacks on the big ships yesterday.”

  Alex tried to join up the pieces.

  Nothing made sense.

  Nothing except that he knew that Abe was nowhere near the Upper Bay at the time of the attack on the battleships. But if the CSS thought differently, then he was a marked man.

  They had shot John Watson…

  That guy was the straightest straight arrow he had ever met in his whole life!

  But the CSS had shot him anyway…

  They already had his father; and they had him, too.

  If they were after Vicky as well this thing was insane, hopeless.

  They did not have Abe.

  And if he had anything to do with it they were not going to get their hands on him any time soon!

  Alex tried to speak.

  No sound other than a hoarse croak passed his lips.

  Melody Danson leaned over him.

  “Abe didn’t make it,” Alex gasped, slipping back into the darkness.

  “Sorry, say that again,” the woman pleaded.

  “Abe didn’t make it…”

  [The End]

  Author’s Endnote

  ‘Empire Day’ is th
e first book in the New England Series set in an alternative North 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.

  ________

  Oh, please bear in mind that:

  Inevitably, in writing an alternative history this book has referenced, attributed motives, actions and put words in the mouths of real, historical characters.

  No motive, action or word attributed to a real person after 28th August 1776 actually happened or was said.

  Whereas, to the best of my knowledge everything in this book which occurred before 28th August 1776 actually happened!

  COMING NEXT IN THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES

  COMING IN NOVEMBER 2018

  COMING IN MARCH 2019

  Other Books by James Philip

  The Timeline 10/27/62 Series

  Main Series

  Book 1: Operation Anadyr

  Book 2: Love is Strange

  Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules

  Book 4: Red Dawn

  Book 5: The Burning Time

  Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses

  Book 7: A Line in the Sand

  Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon

  Book 9: All Along the Watchtower

  Book 10: Crow on the Cradle

  Book 11: 1966 & All That