Politics was one thing but business was business.
Florida was about to become the sixteenth Crown Colony, joining, in order of their Royal Grants of full Colonial status: Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine.
De L’Isle had been disconcerted by how little real push back there had been when, early in his administration he had spoken to New Englanders of his mandate to complete the ‘process of colonisation’ from ‘shore to shore’ of this mighty land. In many instances granting full crown colonial status and rights was long overdue. In the cases of the Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Louisiana and Illinois territories it was going to be a matter of simply rubber-stamping long-established realities on the ground. Over forty million of the King’s subjects lived in those lands and had enjoyed what amounted in reality to a semi-colonial settlement dating back to the early days of the century.
The prima facie case for full colonisation was less clear cut for the other eight parcels of ‘real estate’ and their growing mining, industrial, farming and settler populations. In many of them there were unresolved questions as to what to do with the minority but still large indigenous populations, although it was recognised◦– with no little discomfort in Government House◦– that as time went by European diseases, the diminishment of their traditional hunting grounds and emigration to the industrial cities of the interior was gradually winnowing the extant populations of the native nations.
That said, around half of all native Americans◦– some six or seven million souls◦– lived east of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the great plains of the interior and it remained unclear how exactly, they might be humanely accommodated in the final regularisation of the disparate polities living in the areas designated on maps of New England bearing labels such as: the Minnesota Farmland, the Dakotas, the Missouri Valley and Basin, the Mississippi Plain, and the Oregon Country.
The railways had rolled across the hunting grounds of the Lakota Sioux and the other clans of the Great Plains a hundred years ago, punching through the towering continental divide of the Rocky Mountains and driven north and north west to link into the railroad system of the Canadian colonies by the turn of the present century, connecting the Eastern economic power house of New England to the great Pacific port cities of Vancouver and Sammanish and opening up the Oregon country.
Last but by no means least, was the fate of West Texas, Texas, Sequoyah and the highlands of the Colorado Valley, contested lands located along the vulnerable South Western borderlands running from the Gulf of Spain in a ragged line all the way across Alta California to the Pacific at a place called Port Orford, notwithstanding that to this day nobody had ever comprehensively mapped that border.
Throughout these territories the gathering ‘land rush’ of the last decade was constantly changing the facts on the ground, populating former Indian land. Change was happening so fast that the maps drawn by the mandarins in Whitehall were out of date before they ever saw the light of day in Philadelphia.
Watching those ‘facts on the ground’ changing virtually before their eyes it was, in one way, hardly surprising that the rulers of New Granada, seething angrily in the corridors of power in Mexico City, should be chomping at the bit and beginning to plan for one new, possibly last war to turn back what to them must seem to be an unstoppable tide of ‘English’, protestant invaders into provinces that in living memory, had actually been ‘Spanish’ buffer zones between the further expansion of the British Empire and their sovereign realm…
That was the trouble with the bloody Spanish.
One could not have a straightforward war with them; everything was stained, usually, blood-stained with them…
The telephone by his right hand rang.
More bad news?
“The Lieutenant-Governor of New York is requesting to speak to you urgently, My Lord,” a prim female secretary informed him.
“Put him through, please.” De L’Isle waited. “Hello, John,” he welcomed his caller the moment the line connection crackled in the earpiece of the handset. He knew Sir John Waverley from his time in the Cape and had been happy to recommend him for the sinecure he now held, with immense charm and dignity on Long Island. “Always good to hear your voice, what can I do for you, old chap?”
There was a crackle of static down the line.
“I’m afraid I am the bearer of bad tidings, Philip,” the other man apologised.
De L’Isle waited patiently, bracing himself.
“There was an incident outside the Governor’s mansion this morning,” Sir John Waverley explained, his tone very grim. “The Governor’s official car was rammed by another vehicle and there was a large explosion. The Governor and his wife were both declared dead at the scene. I fear there will be news of many other fatalities and serious injuries as the day progresses.”
De L’Isle and Lord Cumberbatch, the Governor of New York, had been at daggers drawn◦– very politely, of course◦– ever since he had appointed Melody Danson to look into the apparent discrepancies in the prosecution files of Isaac Fielding and his sons in respect of the Empire Day atrocities. Subsequently, Cumberbatch’s regime had come in for something of a roasting in the New England press and he had been a somewhat reclusive figure in recent months.
“Damn,” the Governor of New England muttered. “Thank you for giving me a warning that the story was about to break, John. It goes without saying that my office will render all assistance to you up there in New York.”
“Thank you…”
“I’ll let you get about your business,” De L’Isle concluded.
No sooner had he put the phone down Sir Henry Rawlinson knocked on the door and entered his room. He had been listening in on the call in his own office.
“We’re also getting reports of an incident outside the law courts in Albany,” De L’Isle’s Chief of Staff announced grimly. “At least one, perhaps two suicide car bombers. There are many casualties in Temple Gardens.”
Two attacks…
How many more were to come?
Chapter 18
Maundy Thursday 23rd March
North Atlantic, 25 Miles east of Sandy Hook
Major Alexander Lincoln had done a lot of crazy things in his barnstorming days but flying through a prematurely initiated firework display◦– set off by an imbecile he had punched out the night before who had accused him of ‘hitting on’ his girl in a bar◦– while looping the loop in a souped-up Bristol VI with two buxom wing walkers strutting their stuff on the old kite’s top wing had pretty much taken the biscuit… until now.
That said, veterans like Alex who had survived four tours down on the Border in those years when peace had been◦– more or less◦– unofficially declared everywhere except in the skies above the disputed territories, got inured to being handed the shit end of the stick. So, when he had finally discovered why 7NY’s transfer out of Colony had been delayed not once but three times in the last month he had been uncharacteristically phlegmatic. Of course, breaking the news to his pilots had been… challenging.
‘Look, I’d sugar-coat this, chaps,’ he had apologised, trying to be as pugnacious as a British bulldog, ‘but the sooner you know what’s going down the sooner we can start getting our heads around it.’
That had got the boys’ attention!
‘We’re swapping our Mark II Goshawk’s for Mark IVs.’ His pilots’ eyes had been as wide as his had been when he had first choked down the implications of this. ‘Then we’re going to learn, very quickly, how to operate them off the Navy’s biggest flight deck!’