‘I am not about to start crying any crocodile tears for the man,’ Alex confessed to me. ‘Sure, I’d rather he was still around. Going that way, well, that’s too bad. But I lost a year of my life and could very well have ended up at the end of a rope myself because of him and I’m not about to forget that any time soon. Heck, this time last year I’d have pulled the lever that dropped the old monster myself! That said, at the end of the day I keep reminding myself that my brothers, Bill and Abe, got their lives back too, I got to marry an honest to God princess like in a fairy tale and here I am now back in the CAF with a long-service commission. So, I suppose anything I say about the old fool now doesn’t really matter a mess of beans!’
Abraham◦– who changed his surname to Lincoln, his mother’s family’s name◦– last autumn, who has been subjected to a disgraceful barrage of hate mail and become the target of vituperative demonstrations outside the gates of the Norfolk Navy Base by racist Getrennte Entwicklung◦– separate development◦– adherents, spoke to me shortly after it was announced by the Information Office of the Atlantic Fleet, that he was to go to sea on board the light cruiser HMS Achilles as that vessel’s assistant surgeon, and as a reserve or ‘emergency’ aviator.
I have been fortunate to have met Abraham and his charming Mohawk-born wife Kate several times, most recently when I was their guest for a meal just after New Year at their Royal Navy married quarters in Virginia. Husband and wife made it clear to me that they wished to ‘cut through’ the storm of misinformation which has dogged them since they returned to New England from Canada last July. Our conversation formed the substance of the lengthy feature article I wrote some weeks later under the by-line ‘Abe and Kate’s Story’ which Abe confided to me, less than a week after its publication, had already prompted numerous ‘book offers’ from houses in London and Boston and ‘imploring’ transatlantic phone calls from several very well-known movie producers in France.
‘I and my wife have chosen to forgive Isaac,’ Abe told me. ‘We still mourn Elder Tsiokwaris of the Mohawk Nation, my wife’s blood father and my soul father, who died on the steps of the court house in Albany so as to end the cycle of death which had enveloped my family in the years since my mother’s passing. Tsiokwaris was a great and a good man: a good and a great man knows humility, Isaac knew neither, he knew only hubris.’
Having originally named their first-born Isaac Kariwase, Abe and Kate Fielding have since christened their son ‘Thomas’ Tsiokwaris, ‘Tom’ having been the anglicised name the New York authorities assigned Kate’s father under the colony of New York’s ‘Separate Development Statute’.
‘Isaac was not my blood father,’ Abe freely confirmed, ‘but I share with my sister and brothers my family’s burden of atonement for the ills done to others by my kith and kin. To that end I will confound Isaac’s legacy of shame and faithfully serve my King, the Empire and my Colony with honour so long as I shall live.’
None of the Fielding siblings intend to travel to England to visit their father’s grave…
Albert Stanton, and extract from ‘Isaac Putnam Fielding: a life of betrayal’ published in the Manhattan Globe and syndicated publications across New England and the Empire on 25th February 1978.
ACT I – BEFORE THE FALL
Chapter 2
Friday 10th March
Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Chinchón
Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle followed their host out onto the terrace of the great house on the hill overlooking the ancient town of Chinchón. It was a warm evening for this time of year and the two women were, for once, comfortable in the flowing ankle-length gowns that protocol mandated they wear in public.
Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome thirty-nine-year-old castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas in which Chinchón sat◦– very much as the jewel in the Medina Sidonia ducal estate◦– ushered his guests to comfortable chairs on the broad, terracotta-roofed veranda overlooking the town lying in the bowl of the hills some thirty miles south east of Madrid. Below them as evening drew in, the streets were coming alive as the crowds funnelled through the narrow medieval alleys to the oval Plaza Mayor◦– which twice a year was transformed into a temporary bull ring◦– at Chinchón’s heart.
There was no bull ‘fighting’ at this time of year, a thing both women were glad of; it was the first day of the town’s annual week-long wine festival, a celebration that drew merchants, connoisseurs, a random selection of the great and the good of Madrid society and over this first ‘festival weekend’ reputedly filled the Plaza Mayor with every other ‘dissolute’ and ‘character’ from within a fifty-mile radius. Not to put too fine a point on it the famous, or if one was being pious about it, the infamous, Chinchón Festival of the Vine, had for more years than anybody cared to remember, provided a priceless opportunity for the otherwise horribly ‘buttoned up’ people of the Mountains of Madrid to let off a little steam. It was just far enough away from the suffocating Inquisition-regulated protocols which governed all aspects of public life in the capital, and for the King-Emperor and all but his hardest-hearted courtiers to turn a◦– somewhat humourless◦– blind eye.
“Things can get a little lively after dark,” Alonso Pérez de Guzmán apologised mischievously, patently not begrudging the gathering revellers their pleasures. He had extended an invitation to his ‘good friends from the Americas’ to join him at his occasional ‘hacienda in the country’ the moment he had heard that the women had been attached to the British Mission.
The two women had been looking forward to this holiday-cum-adventure with no little anticipation as the second week in March drew near.
Formerly Madrid’s man in Philadelphia, de Guzman had been unceremoniously expelled from New England in the wake of last year’s explosive revelations of Spanish◦– albeit Spanish colonial◦– involvement in the Empire Day outrages of July 1976. ‘Alonso’ was an ancestor of the man who had once, nearly four hundred years ago, tried and failed to invade the British Isles; thus, he came from a lineage which took immense pride in taking hard knocks in its stride with élan and no little aplomb, much as he had always greeted his, very occasional, romantic rebuffs from misguided members of the fairer sex.
He was a handsome cavalry officer from one of the oldest and most distinguished Castilian houses to whom, by repute, no woman from a certain class◦– from pubescence to old age◦– was safe who had met every crisis and personal barb in his time in New England with mildly vexed, indefatigably polite bewilderment as if he really did not see what the problem was.
It was all a masterful act but Henrietta De L’Isle had, to her chagrin, not actually realised as much at the time. Alonso had seemed so perfectly representative of the apparent dissonance within the Empire of New Spain. In common with many of the senior envoys in the service of the Emperor Ferdinand and his mendacious Queen, Sophia, de Guzmán had always given the impression he was somehow above the hurly-burly of ‘colonial politics’. In fact, he often reminded interlocutors in Philadelphia that other than for a short interlude in the Philippines ended by an untimely riding accident, that prior to his appointment to New England he was proud to say he had never troubled to travel much beyond the boundaries of Europe.