The King scowled impatiently.
“Yes, well whatever the provocation the Empire won’t have any truck with police state methods!”
“No, of course not…”
The King realised he was allowing his outrage to colour his judgements. It did not help that within the last hour he had had to peremptorily reject both his Prime Minister’s and the First Lord of the Admiralty’s offers to resign their posts. At a time like this the ship needed all hands manning the pumps!
“I apologise, Colonel Harrison,” the King grunted. “Please, you were saying…”
“We attempted to round up the leading members of the Sons of Liberty ahead of the Empire Day celebrations,” Harrison went on. “We have for some time suspected that the guiding hand behind the organisation is a certain Isaac Putnam Fielding, who operates under the cover of being a somewhat dissolute Professor of History at Long Island College. The man who was rescued from the aircraft that crashed into the sea after attempting and failing to attack the Lion is his eldest son, Alexander. We have yet to establish the precise role of his accomplice, a Leonora Coolidge…”
“They are the pair under guard in the sick bay presumably?”
Harrison belatedly recollected that the Governor had told him: ‘First you will address the King as Your Majesty, and thereafter, simply as Sir.’
“Yes, sir.”
“You say you have this Isaac Fielding fellow in custody?”
“Yes, sir. The man who was killed resisting arrest on Friday night was his son-in-law. We have not yet established the involvement or culpability of his wife, Fielding’s daughter Victoria who is seriously ill at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn. Overnight we arrested Fielding’s second son, William, who works at the Gowanus Cove workshops of the Long Island Speedboat Company. We have also put out a Colony-wide warrant for the arrest of Fielding’s youngest son, Abraham. Like his brother Alexander, Abraham Fielding was a pilot so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was piloting one of the planes which crashed into the battleships.”
Eleanor was horrified.
“A whole family of terrorists? What would make them all do such a terrible thing?”
“We believe that Isaac Fielding, who many years ago was the author of a seditious tract called,” Matthew Harrison grimaced apologetically, as did Viscount De L’Isle, “Two hundred lost years: what the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time…”
The Governor of New England stirred.
“I gather that attempts were made to prosecute various persons associated with the book but thirty or more years ago the best advice available to my esteemed predecessor was that quote: ‘freedom of speech means exactly that’. Moreover, at the time according to the papers I have seen, this man Fielding was viewed as a harmless, frankly whimsical pacifistic crank.”
Having made this observation De L’Isle nodded for the security chief to carry on.
Harrison collected his wits.
“As unlikely as it seems we believe that over the years Fielding indoctrinated and radicalised his children, poisoning their young minds against the Crown. Latterly, there is evidence that in league with a Puritan faction called the Brethren of the Mayflower Fielding abandoned non-violence in favour of well,” he shrugged, “the madness we witnessed yesterday.”
The King absorbed this.
“Thank you, Colonel Harrison. On your return ashore please convey my personal thanks and appreciation to your people for the courageous, and I know, sometimes onerous work they do in the service of the Commonwealth of New England.”
Harrison bowed his head.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now,” the monarch went on. “We must turn to the question of what to do next. The ‘security response’ to the events of the last hours will be a matter to be determined by My Government and its agent in New England, Viscount De L’Isle.”
The King had learned very quickly that there was no minute or hour of any day when he was not His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
However, it was also true to say that there were often times when his people required him to be more George V, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Rex, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor than ever!
This was one such moment.
“The Queen and I have discussed the subject of our forthcoming progress through New England and determined that it will proceed as planned.”
He reached out and took his wife’s hand.
“Just so there is no debate about this,” the King added bluntly, “this is our irrevocable decision. This is my last word on the subject.”
Chapter 34
Mohawk Valley, New York
Abe had not realised how much he was going to enjoy sleeping with – actually, just sleeping with – Kate. They had never really done much of that in the past other than occasional post-coital pauses for breath. This morning had been the third dawn in a row he had awakened with his wife in his arms and… it was so damned nice.
To tell the truth he was still in a little bit of a daze; a lot of stuff had not sunken in yet. He and Kate had been married within the Mohawk Nation three years ago but that had simply been promises in Kanien'keháka that Abe had barely understood at the time; words exchanged among his second family in a small gathering of elders and Kate’s female relations. Her mother had died when she was young so her aunts had always been her ‘mothers’; and Tsiokwaris had married or lived as man and wife with the senior aunt Skawennahawi – which translated roughly as ‘she who carries the message’ – an arrangement which Abe had never really got his head around but that did not matter, it had worked well for Kate and that was the important thing.
In any event ‘the aunts’ had organised a proper tribal wedding shindig and people had begun to fill the settlement that morning as the preparations went ahead.
Last night he and Kate had gone up the valley side, found a mossy spot and laid down to stare up at the slow-moving theatre of the starry night. Out here so far from the urban sprawl of Albany, the nearest big city, the air was crystal clear and the great sweep of the Milky Way fell across the heavens like a broad band of distant diamonds.
This morning there were several aircraft flying up and down the Mohawk River, one flew directly over the settlement and headed north.
Kate nudged him gently in the ribs.
The ‘celebrations’ were about to commence.
No time had been set; the party would simply begin when a consensus was reached among the ‘aunts’ that the moment was propitious.
“Those are military planes,” Abe murmured. He was standing just inside the tree line looking down into the valley trying to quell the uneasiness in his soul. Most of the aerial activity seemed to be some miles south, down river. If Kate and he had still been on Leppe Island those machines would be buzzing over their heads all the time!
“I thought today was supposed to be a white man’s holiday?” His wife teased him, on the verge of giggling. Kate had been giggling a lot since we had arrived. She never made any attempt to hide it when she was happy.
True, today was the Empire Day Holiday; the whole of New England shut down and did not get back to normal for a week or so after the ‘EDH’. Originally, the First Thirteen had celebrated the anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival in the New World in November 1620, this had become a colonial second ‘harvest festival’ imported from the old country and later a ‘Thanksgiving Day’ usually on the last Saturday in November each year. After 1776 there had been various festivities to gloat over the subjugation of the infamous rebellion, usually held around the end of August each year which had morphed into a traditional English late summer Bank Holiday. But then back in the 1870s somebody in Whitehall had had the bright idea of having a day of ‘Imperial celebrations’, the then King, Edward VII, had thought it was a marvellous idea and after a Royal Commission had sat and reviewed things Empire Day had been born, its first celebration occurring in 1881 after several years ‘coming and going’ over exactly when it ought to be celebrated.