Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3)
Page 28
Sunday 10th April
Cabinet Room, Downing Street, London
Emily Hamilton fussed around her husband, fending off the pestering make-up girl and basically, enforcing what amounted to a six to ten feet wide cordon sanitaire around the poor man. The camera crew had completed their ‘set-up’, everything was ready and the Prime Minister – whom she knew to be anything but the staid, grey man, or the cold fish so many people who ought to know better painted him to be – needed a little bit of space while he composed himself to make his career-defining, and likely, career-ending speech to the Empire in the next five minutes.
She patted his shoulder and on impulse, bent and kissed the top of his balding pate. Her husband looked up and quirked a forced grimace of undiluted affection.
This was undoubtedly the worst day of his life.
In due course His Majesty the King would address the Empire but today somebody had to take responsibility for the political and diplomatic failures of the last twenty years which had brought them all to this sad pass.
The Prime Minister and his wife had breakfasted with the King and Queen at St James’s Palace that morning: it had been a sombre meal while the old friends discussed the feasibility of the various damage limitation plans – most of which were wish lists rather than plausible schemes – which had been discussed in Cabinet in recent days, not to mention during the course of long, exhausting nights.
The King had read the speech Hector Hamilton had drafted and without comment, initialled it.
His Prime Minister had warned his Monarch that there were calls from his back-benchers, and mutterings from members of his government demanding the removal of the incumbent in Government House in Philadelphia, Philip De L’Isle.
‘Over my dead body,’ the King had retorted tersely.
‘Mine too!’ Queen Eleanor had added with a frown. ‘Goodness, at a time like this, Philip and Diana must be frantic with worry over Henrietta!’
If the crisis escaped from the confines of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean, for over a century a crucible of Catholic fundamentalism and nascent nationalistic agendas in the Americas the consequences would be incalculable. The last thing anybody in their right mind ought to be contemplating was dismissing the one man who had single-handedly kept the lid on the situation after the outrageous Spanish-inspired Empire Day ‘provocations’ of two years’ ago.
The Prime Minister began to read his speech.
One last time before the BBC’s Imperial Cable Network links went ‘live’.
Yesterday, His Majesty’s Consul-Generals in Mexico City, Havana, Port-au-Prince and Porto Rico handed the Spanish Imperial Governors of those crown colonies of the Empire of New Spain final notes stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock this morning, Greenwich Mean Time, that they were prepared at once to cease naval operations in the Gulf of Spain and the whole Caribbean region and to withdraw their troops from Jamaica, where fighting is in progress as I speak, a state of war would exist between us and those crown colonies of the Empire of Spain.
He sighed regretfully.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is now at war with Nuevo Granada, the Kingdom of Havana and the Catholic Protectorate of Santo Domingo, also known as Hispaniola, the Colony of Porto Rico and its neighbouring concession, Anguilla.
He planned to pause to allow each paragraph to speak for itself before he proceeded to the next. It was like hammering one nail after another into the coffin of the post-Great War World order.
Peace died by another breath every time the hammer fell.
You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to maintain the peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done or that would have been more successful.
Even after the abomination of the Empire Day outrages which we now know to have been perpetrated under the oversight of and facilitated by elements within the Intelligence Service of the Spanish Empire, I still hoped that reason would prevail. I regret with all my heart that our best efforts have come to nought.
It is my firm conviction that up to the very last it would have been possible to have arranged a peaceful and an honourable settlement with the Emperor Ferdinand and those parties in the Americas bent on abandoning the norms and accepted standards of international conduct. Unfortunately, the King-Emperor, although still nominally on the ancient royal throne of the Spanish is now the puppet of the unholy cabal of Colonels and Cardinals who have seized power in Madrid and who are at this time methodically spreading their web of terror across the whole of that part of the Iberian Peninsula under their control.
Behind the scenes strenuous efforts were made to seek honourable settlements to the border question between New England and New Granada, to address the questions of freedom of navigation and issues such as the equitable distribution of mineral rights across the Caribbean but in the end our entreaties were rejected. Rejected not in quiet rooms where reason might prevail but by dint of the aggression of the so-called Triple Alliance of New Granada, Cuba and Santo Domingo, who have elected to settle their territorial, trade and other disputes with New England and this country by resorting to violence. We put forward reasonable proposals to peacefully settle all the outstanding issues; the Spanish authorities in the region rejected our proposals.
Regrettably, the actions of the members of the Triple Alliance, possibly acting as proxies for other parties…
The Kaiser and his ministers could interpret that back-handed ‘swipe’ any way they wanted!
…Now leaves us no option but to honour our imperial commitments to the colonies, dominions and protectorates who look to us for succour and their defence, and in the final resort, to meet force with force. Sadly, tyranny, we learned long ago can only be stopped by force.
Last Wednesday German warships re-flagged to serve in the Armada de las Americas, the Navy of New Granada, mounted a series of unprovoked, aggressive – frankly, murderous - operations against Jamaica and Royal Navy units in the Caribbean. During these actions two of our cruisers, the Cassandra and the Achilles and several smaller vessels engaged and were defeated, by a force of at least five modern German cruisers and eight fleet destroyers.
HMS Cassandra was attacked while in harbour at Kingston, severely damaged and forced aground to prevent her total loss while simultaneously Spanish and Cuban troops made landings at Montego Bay on the north west coast, and units of the Dominican San Lorenzo Commando came ashore at St Margaret’s Bay in the north east. Heavy fighting is still going on between garrison troops and a brigade hastily formed from the survivors of HMS Cassandra and other naval shore detachments in and around the capital of the colony, Kingston. The situation is desperate as more enemy ships arrive to land more invaders and to intensify the bombardment of our positions.
Simultaneously, HMS Achilles was ambushed in the Windward Passage by the former German heavy cruisers SMS Lutzen and SMS Breitenfeld in company with at least two large fleet destroyers. Achilles’s sea planes had previously valiantly attacked and disabled a third cruiser, the former SMS Karlsruhe. However, confronted by two modern cruisers with hugely superior firepower whose armoured sides her own, much smaller guns could not hope to penetrate, Achilles fought like a lion at bay to the very end, until overwhelmed by her attackers she sank with the loss, we fear, of over four hundred lives.
I must emphasise again that these were unprovoked, sneak attacks mounted in flagrant contravention of the accepted rules of war and those responsible for them will be held accountable.
The Empire will go to the aid of Jamaica.
The Empire will remember the men who have died this week.
The Empire will remember brave Achilles!
Today, in fulfilment of our solemn imperial obligation we shall meet force with force. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to keep the peace.
Peo
ple will ask why we have not declared war on Spain itself. Had not that sad country descended into madness in recent weeks that might have been a consideration which sorely tried my government. Nobody should be under any illusion that if ‘Old Spain’ threatens or in any way instigates military aggression against our ally, Portugal, or against our colony at Gibraltar or in any way seeks to impede traffic in international waters the consequences will be immediate, and severe. As always, we stand by our Treaty of Paris commitments to guard in perpetuity the historic northern border between Spain and France.
For the moment we are content to sever normal diplomatic relations and all trading links with ‘Old Spain’. At some point in the near future we will raise as a matter of urgency the disgraceful treatment of our diplomatic personnel and property in Madrid and elsewhere. Rest assured that we will demand justice for our murdered people and continue to pursue the prompt return, unharmed of members of the Empire and international community still unaccounted for in Spain.
Hector Hamilton well understood that the neo-barbarians currently consolidating their power in Madrid would claim the burning of the British Embassy was the work of a mob, and that this and other excesses of the enraged crowds were the very things they had mounted their coup to put an end to… And in the meantime, death squads roamed the country settling old scores and quietly liquidating what little survived of Queen Sophia’s faction’s influence outside the big cities. There had already been two botched attempts on that courageous lady’s life in the few short days she had been in exile in Lisbon.
Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brutish force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and religious persecution - and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
It is my fervent hope that the military actions initiated by my government to quickly snuff out the real and present threats posed to our cousins in New England by the so-called Triple Alliance to their south, will soon restore sanity to the region.
That was no lie.
In the meantime, I say to New England, trust in God and remember brave Achilles!
Chapter 42
12:55 (New England Time)
Sunday 10th April
Anson Road, Norfolk, Virginia
Everybody in the married quarters estates surrounding the great naval base and dockyards, and across Hampton Roads in the settlements around Newport knew that something awful had happened last week in the seas of the Gulf of Spain and the northern Caribbean. Something so bad that the Royal Navy had rigorously enforced a previously unheard of – certainly in recent times - complete news blackout about all its operations in the Americas. In effect, the whole of the base had been ‘locked down’ and all normal communications with the families of men currently on active service at sea had been ‘temporarily suspended for operational reasons.’
Notwithstanding, under the informal leadership of the wife of HMS Achilles’s Executive officer, the redoubtable Melanie Cowdrey-Singh, the cruiser’s ‘wardroom wives’ had rallied together, attempting to include every member of the Achilles family in a series of impromptu gatherings both large and small. The older wives had appointed themselves ‘comforters in chief’ and done what they could to keep up spirits and basically, to inculcate a ‘never say die’ attitude towards what they all tacitly expected was not going to be good news, when eventually, they learned what had befallen their menfolk.
Inevitably, dark, horrible rumours were rabidly stalking the neat, superficially calm streets of the married quarters estates fuelled by the reckless abandon of many of the East Coast’s bestselling newspapers and the inability, because of censorship, of the television stations, led by the New England Broadcasting Corporation, and the majority of the radio broadcasters to cast any meaningful light on the subject.
Literally, people did not know what to believe.
At one end of the spectrum some commentators said the whole Caribbean was on fire, the British and German Empires were about to go to war with each other. And as for Spain and its dastardly colonies around the World, what on earth was going on? There was civil war in Old Spain, frenzied sabre-rattling in New Granada, Havana and among those religious fanatics on Santo Domingo…
The one voice that was getting drowned out by the media background noise, was that of calm.
Kate Lincoln had promised herself that she would wait to hear ‘real’ news before she panicked. This despite some of the other wives, including her next-door neighbours on both sides, being already in mourning: in her tradition mourning was a thing one did in memory of loss, not in the anticipation of it. Rumours and gossip were not facts. If the worst came to the worst her husband still lived in, and would for ever more, in her heart and her thoughts and in their son’s blood and in the veins of their unborn child, and she would always remember the joy of her life with Abe.
Nevertheless, just before one o’clock that afternoon she carried Tom, a chubby, precocious toddler, into the apartment’s small lounge and turned on the small, black and white, television in the corner of the room. She bounced her happily gurgling son in her lap as the TV set warmed up.
The other wives all seemed to have larger, colour TV sets. She and Abe hardly watched the set, preferring to listen to the radio and besides, her husband was a voracious reader, not a slavish watcher. Modest living was a virtue in her culture, a thing Abe had embraced from boyhood. They had each other – and Tom – and no need to surround themselves with ‘things’ they neither needed, or remotely cared about just days after they had acquired them.
“The Prime Minister, the Honourable Sir Hector Hamilton, MP, KCB, will now address the Empire,” the stentorian tones of the announcer warned viewers. “For the first time he is speaking directly from the Cabinet Room in Downing Street via the BBC’s newly commissioned transatlantic link to the Imperial Cable Network.”
Abe had spoken to her about how recent scientific advances were on the verge of completely ‘revolutionising international telecommunications’ and, that in the next few years ‘anybody who wants to will be able to quickly and easily communicate with anybody else anywhere in the world, instantaneously, at the touch of a button.’
That the Prime Minister was able to speak to a housewife in her own living room on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean was proof positive that the times were changing.
Abe called it ‘the second industrial revolution’.
She loved it when he talked to her about the wide world even though – and she knew he knew it – much of what he said went straight over her head!
The doorbell chimed musically just as the Prime Minister of England’s – she had never got her head around the distinction between England, the United Kingdom, Great Britain, or the British Isles – grim face filled the small, grainy monochrome screen of the Lincoln family TV set.
Kate sighed, hefted Tom in her arms and went to answer the door.
“Mrs Lincoln?” A grave-faced man with the two-and-a-half ‘wavy navy’ rings of a lieutenant-Commander in the Volunteer Reserve who wore a base staff badge on his upper right arm, asked very gently.
The man was accompanied by a woman in sober civilian attire of about Kate’s own age, sporting a tab above her left breast identifying her as Second Officer – lieutenant – A.D. Brigham, in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, more popularly known as the WRENs.
“I’m Simon Wakeley, Ma’am,” her older, male partner explained.
Kate read the look in the other woman’s eyes and the tone of Lieutenant-Commander Wakeley’s voice and she…just knew.
They had come to tell her that Abe was dead…
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
‘Travels Through The Wind’ is the third 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 kill
ed.
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!
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
Book 12: Only in America
A Timeline 10/27/62 Novel
Football in The Ruins – The World Cup of 1966
Coming in 2019
Book 13: Warsaw Concerto
Book 14: Eight Miles High
Coming in2020
Book 15: Won’t Get Fooled Again
Book 16: Armadas
USA Series
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming