There would be Hell to pay when the Governor was forced to insist that for the first time in a generation the Colonial Exchequers re-introduce the direct taxation of personal rather than just commercial income. In peace time levies on raw materials and manufactured goods entering the Commonwealth from outside the Imperial Preference Zone, duties on household goods other than foodstuffs and taxes on petrol and heating oil when supplemented by local tariffs imposed by Colonial Legislatures were usually sufficient to fund basic public services, universal health provision free at the point of contact to all persons as per the original ‘British model’, the Constabulary, urban sanitation and waste disposal, the maintaining of the road system and so forth. The railroad combines were privately owned, as were the river and canal conservancies who kept the waterways in operation. Historically, the colonial militias◦– part-timers or as the English termed them ‘Territorials’◦– were the responsibility of individual ‘home colonies’, whereas, regular troops were paid for directly by the British taxpayer, although many argued the profits, dues and taxes the Chancellor in Whitehall collected abroad were as much Empire as solely British taxes.
The Colonial Air Force had always been a different kind of animal; funded directly by the colonies themselves. In the beginning the quid pro quo had been that all the CAF’s aircraft would be built under licence in New England, bringing skilled employment and guaranteeing routine technology transfers, mainly to the benefit of the economies of the middle and upper First Thirteen. That had become contentious as the complexity and cost of modern aircraft had rocketed through the roof; currently, London paid for approximately sixty percent of every airframe flown by the CAF.
The Royal Navy, of course, had always been wholly ‘owned’ and funded by the British Government.
However, all that was going to have to change if there was another war. If that war turned into a general conflagration the privileged, comparatively wealthy citizens of the First Thirteen would have to be squeezed until the pips started to squeal. As historians quipped: ‘It would be 1857 all over again!’
Matthew Harrison knew that his friend, Philip De L’Isle and his principals in London shivered at the likely implications of that scenario.
Personally, Matthew Harrison was agnostic about it while accepting that nobody could deny that the imposition of possibly penal ‘war taxation’ upon the First Thirteen was a thing likely to have long-lasting political implications.
Isaac Fielding had always maintained that if and when the ‘English’◦– for whatever reason◦– ‘came calling’ for the wealth of the Virginia planters, the New York and Boston money-changers, and looked to claim a meaningful tythe from the industrial robber-barons of the Great Lakes territories, that would be the cause célèbre that finally ignited ‘the spirit of the Boston Tea Party’ and that then, ‘they would really be in trouble’ because ‘old George Washington’s ghost would surely rise again from the cold ground of Long Island!’
Two Hundred Lost Years had a lot to answer for.
Personally, the Head of the Colonial Security Service thought that the jury was out on the question of whether even a punitive ‘war tax’ burden might be sufficient, of itself, to begin to unite the fiercely independent East Coast colonies against their Imperial overlords…
Basically, New Yorkers had little time for Virginians, the two Carolinas would be at war with each other anyway were it not for ‘the English’, Bostonians looked down on the rude country folk of Vermont and Maine, and so on.
One had to be sceptical that anything would ever change that!
Matthew Harrison never saw the Morris speedster coupe which suddenly accelerated, mounted the curb and hit him at a speed later calculated to have been in excess of sixty miles per hour.
He was already dead before his broken body hit the ground.
Chapter 20
Good Friday 24th March
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
Melody Danson had begun to lose track of time, of days passing and even though she knew that today was Good Friday if felt as if she had been at the monastery weeks rather than just five long, cold miserable days.
On the first morning after she and Henrietta De L’Isle had arrived two nuns◦– ‘sisters’ or whatever◦– had roused her from her bed, a straw palliasse on the stone floor of her ‘cell’, more a dungeon, that would have had any right thinking-colonist up in arms back home had it been located in say, a New England police station or prison, ordered her to strip naked and then cut her hair. Well ‘cut’ was being a little generous, it had seemed to her that they were ‘shearing’ her with a lot less care and attention than they would have paid had she been a sheep!
Thereafter she had been dunked in a very cold bath◦– one of her ‘helpers’ had pushed her head under the water several times while muttering an angry prayer in what she later decided was a demotic, or at least a very rural, Asturian dialect◦– and left to stand naked and shivering uncontrollably for some minutes before being allowed to dry herself with a towel so coarse it actually scratched her, before being instructed to get dressed. Thereupon, she had been required to don a white linen surplus tailored to fit a woman of twice her breadth, and a faded brown, horribly itchy◦– it might have been horsehair◦– habit with a hood that she was specifically commanded to always employ to cover her head when she was ‘outside’.
With her teeth still chattering, feeling literally like death warmed up she had been frog-marched barefoot to a small, damp chapel and forced to kneel on the floor, just frigid flagstones, for an interminable period while all manner of chanting, praying of the silent and communal kind and various incantations were, it seemed◦– she was feeling so ill by then she did not care◦– directed at her.
Next, she had found herself back in her cell.
‘Found herself’ because she must have fainted or passed out at some stage because a different nun with none of the righteous hutzpah of her former ‘escorts’ had sat her up and was trying to get her to eat what looked like lumpy vomit dripping from a rudimentary wooden spoon.
Actually, to be fair, ‘the food’ turned out to be some kind of watery gruel made from crushed maize which only tasted like vomit.
‘Our ways will be strange to start with,’ the other woman, who might have been Melody’s age but it was hard to tell when she could only see a part of her face in the gloom of the cell, assured her without malice.
Melody had been so hungry she did her best to keep her ‘breakfast’ down, notwithstanding how just the smell of it made her gag. Thinking about that morning she realised now that at one point she must have been borderline hypothermic, so cold that her body was starting to shut down and the gruel, in addition to the blankets her gentle saviour had wrapped about her shoulders had probably been all that kept her going.
For all she remembered they could have locked her away for the rest of that first day. She had slept fitfully as if in the throes of a fever, awakened only with the sharp pain of her bladder protesting. There was a large terracotta-type bowl by the door which she used to relieve herself before collapsing back onto the lumpy palliasse again, not waking again until it was dark.
Her cell door was wedged open the next morning.
Cold gruel was placed on the floor, an earthenware jug with brackish water next to it and a chunk of bread so black and hard she initially thought it was a rock of some kind. She had had to soak the bread in the gruel to soften it sufficiently to attempt to eat it.