Tomorrow, Viscount De L’Isle, the Governor of New England, would join the Royal Party for the Empire Day Fleet Review, and the evening’s state banquet at the mansion of the Lieutenant Governor of the Crown Colony of New Jersey in Elizabethtown.
Eleanor always approached days like this with a deliberately positive spirit but the day had hardly started and already some idiot had taken a pot shot at her husband!
Chapter 5
East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island
Surely, this could not all be about Abe?
“Is Abe in trouble?”
Lieutenant Adams ignored the question.
I was beginning to get a better sense of her now. Thus far, she had intimidated, damned nearly scared the shit out of me without ever threatening to raise her voice. There was something haughty, aristocratic in her tone, although not a haughtiness to set one’s teeth on edge. No, it was more that her certainty, her absolute lack of doubt which battered one into submission.
“Help me here,” I went on, in hope rather than conviction. “I have no idea what’s going on. How the fuck am I supposed to help you? Or Abe?”
The woman thought about this.
She sat back in her chair and glanced to Detective Inspector Danson who had been a mute witness – presumably an admiring bystander – as the young Redcap officer had verbally torn me to shreds in two minutes flat.
“I am not a professional detective like Mr Danson,” Lieutenant Adams said. “I’m a psychological profiler. My job is not to catch traitors but to identify them. I characterise their patterns of behaviour. I give my superiors advice as to whom is dangerous, and whom is harmless. For example, the majority of your disloyal tendencies and resultant actions are harmless, with the notable exception of your well-practiced capacity to spin a tale, to contextualise an injustice whether real or false notwithstanding with equal persuasiveness. You are a man who might in another, less enlightened age, have spent most of his adult years incarcerated, or swung by the neck until dead at a sadly young age. In New Spain they might have burned you at the stake or crucified you, in Germany you would have been liquidated or sent to fight in one of the Kaiser’s interminable small wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Russia you would have died of frostbite in Siberia building a railway or working in a mine or suchlike. Fortunately, for you, you live in a civilised country whose leaders respect the rule of law. Even today, accused mostly out of your own mouth of sedition, and suspected of conspiracy to betray your Monarch, you may rely on due process. Inevitably,” she went on, as if she was a cat slowly drawing its claws across glass, “if the Empire is to continue to pursue this laissez faire attitude in cases such as yours, it must be well-informed. It must understand what it is up against. Clemency, mercy always had its price, Professor. I think that you are a very dangerous man.”
I had no idea where this was going.
Every nerve in my body was saying: ‘get up and run away; run through the nearest wall if you have to!’
“Me, dangerous? Seriously?”
“Ideas are much more dangerous than bullets, Professor.”
I would have disagreed, except I did not. Disagree, that was.
Lieutenant Adams viewed me like a Lioness sizing up her next meal.
“Tell me about George Washington?”
Oh shit!
I told every class the ‘George Washington’ story.
I wanted to get my students thinking, really thinking about what history was, how it worked and why it mattered. If kids wanted to learn a list of names and dates by rote that was fine by me but that was not actually learning anything at all. History was a thing that flowed through one’s veins, that branched and died back, twisted and turned and was therefore, rarely predictable. The past tells you very little about the future but it tells you a lot about people.
“I don’t use the George Washington story in the manner of a political polemic,” I protested. “I use it as a thought experiment to encourage young minds to grow, to develop, to form their own opinions. To get young people interested in our history.”
To my surprise, and consternation, the young woman smiled.
“So, imagine I am one of your students, Professor. Assume that I want to know if history is the autobiography of a madman or something that I, as a mere woman, can understand and that might, in some way I do not as yet comprehend, be of more than passing relevance to my normal life.”
I fell for it.
I was suckered in hook, line and sinker.
No fool like an old fool!
“If you live in some parts of New Spain history must seem like pages straight out of the autobiography of a madman,” I observed. I thought I was being quite pithy but I got the same ‘new student’ look I always got.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
I was already guilty of something; albeit I had no idea what so with a sigh I started talking.
“I take what I do, teaching, very seriously. Our kids need to be taught well. When we send them out into the world they need to be ready for what’s out there; that’s what education is for. So, I have my own credo, as it were. And that’s what I try to communicate with my students.”
Neither of his executioners told me to shut up.
“I believe,” I said, ‘that now and then historians should stand back from what actually happened and why, and ask themselves what might have happened? It does not matter if one is a determinist or a fatalist; a believer in the great man (or woman) theory of things, or a conspiracy theorist, or simply a believer in ‘what will be will be’. Frankly, there are points in the past where the world might easily have taken a different course. And no, I am not talking about chaos theory, whereby a butterfly flaps its wings and the world, in some non-specific, indefinable way is never the same again. Randomness and chance, the roll of the dice of death, birth, redemption, atonement or calumny are incalculable variables; that is a given. That is just life; c’est la vie. No, what I am alluding to is the possibility that there might be moments – perhaps, identifiable moments – when something happened that was of such moment that history thereafter took a radically different path from than that which it might otherwise have taken. That literally, in that moment the fate of great nations, of empires was changed by a single, decisive event.”
“Hence the George Washington story?” Lieutenant Adams asked rhetorically.
“Yes,” I nodded. “It is in all the standard histories of the First Rebellion but modern historians tend to underplay Washington’s significance.”
“But you don’t?”
“No.”
“I’m no student of mid-New England history,” the woman admitted. “Tell me George Washington’s story.”
I was genuinely at a loss.
I thought I was being interrogated.
And still not sure why except it probably had something to do with Abe.
“What’s happened to Abe?” I asked, doggedly.
Lieutenant Adams crossed her arms across her breasts, which were small, pert and generally proportioned in a most complimentary fashion to the rest of her personage. This I noticed because despite my advanced years – fifty-seven and counting, although the way things were going, not for much longer – I still notice these things. As Sarah would say, and Rachel, bless her, was also wont: ‘Men!’