Sean Gabb - The Break

Michael now walked in through the open door, followed by the Grand Chamberlain, who was reading out yet again from a stack of stapled sheets half an inch thick. The secretary and all the maids fell to their knees. “What is going on?” he said to Jennifer. “You were supposed to be on your throne twenty minutes ago. The Pope is muttering the most horrible things in English. The television people are in a panic. The Caliph will be very upset. All else aside, the chains I’m supposed to strike off him are heavy.”

The Chamberlain took that as his prompt. “The Commander of the Faithful will come forward three paces,” he recited. “The sultans and kings and other former tributaries will stay back for their prostrations. The Caliph will perform his at the third stroke of the gong. He will then swear allegiance and render up the Holy Places and all his realms. His Holiness of Rome will be followed, after the smallest interval, by His Holiness of Constantinople, as they….”

“Do shut up!” Michael groaned. “Much more of this, and I’ll wonder if the Caliph isn’t having a better time of the occasion.” He sat down beside Jennifer. “I was told your cheeks were still painted different colours,” he said accusingly. “You really should have let the makeup girls do the whole job themselves.” He looked at her and frowned. “But I can’t see any difference of colour.” He got up again and reached out a hand. “Come on. There are twenty thousand people waiting outside the Hall of Audience. If we keep them waiting much longer, women will start delivering babies, or whatever happens when these things go on too long.”

Jennifer let the maids tie the veil over her face. Someone else rushed in unbidden to place a gold crown on her head. Hand in hand with the Emperor, she crossed the floor, nearly tripping over a dress of silk brocade that felt as heavy and unyielding as a suit of plate armour. She let her husband push her first into the carrying chair that would take them to what everyone would have called the greatest victory ceremony since Heraclius, over four centuries earlier, had celebrated his total defeat of the Persians—or would have called, that is, if Heraclius hadn’t almost immediately lost everything again to an enemy that only the present Great Augustus had been able to crush.

“Please don’t do that!” she cried in Latin as Michael climbed in beside her.

“Now, why shouldn’t a man pinch his own wife’s bottom?” he asked grandly.

“Because I still worry that I might wake up!”

They both laughed. They were still laughing as they were carried into the glittering immensity of the Great Hall of Audience.

Many thanks for reading my book. If you liked it, please consider taking the time to leave a review at your favourite on-line bookseller.

You may also wish to read some of the other books I have written. There are many of these, both fiction and non-fiction, and as both Sean Gabb and Richard Blake. Some of them are listed and described in the following pages.

My novels as Richard Blake are published by Hodder & Stoughton in London, and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Slovak, Hungarian and Chinese. My other books are published by The Hampden Press. All are available in both printed and e-book editions via your favourite bookseller.

I am very active on the Internet. You can follow my doings in these places:

As Sean Gabb

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/sean.gabb

http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/seangabb

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/seangabb

As Richard Blake

http://richardblake.me.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/richard.blake.7773

This book was read in beta version by:

David Davis

James Oliver Deckard

Robert Grözinger

Mario Huet

I thank them for proofing and for their general comments. The faults of this novel, of course, are entirely my own.

I also thank Christopher Bevis for his improvements to my product description.

The cover image is my own work.

“Fascinating to read, very well written, an intriguing plot and I enjoyed it very much.”

“Vivid characters, devious plotting and buckets of gore are enhanced by his unfamiliar choice of period. Nasty, fun and educational.”

“He knows how to deliver a fast-paced story and his grasp of the period is impressively detailed.”

“A rollicking and raunchy read… Anyone who enjoys their history with large dollops of action, sex, intrigue and, above all, fun will absolutely love this novel.”

“As always, [his] plotting is as brilliantly devious as the mind of his sardonic and very earthy hero. This is a story of villainy that reels you in from its prosaic opening through a series of death-defying thrills and spills.”

“It would be hard to over-praise this extraordinary series, a near-perfect blend of historical detail and atmosphere with the plot of a conspiracy thriller, vivid characters, high philosophy and vulgar comedy.”

Hampden Press, London, 2014

ISBN: 9781311160829

A thriller in the style of John Buchan and Sapper and the early Ian Fleming, The Churchill Memorandum presents an exciting alternative history of the twentieth century.

Imagine a world in which Hitler died in 1939. No World War II. No US-Soviet duopoly of the world. No slide into the gutter for England.

Anthony Markham doesn’t need to imagine. It is now 1959, and this is the only world he knows. England is still England. The Queen-Empress is on her throne. The pound is worth a pound. Lord Halifax is Prime Minister, and C.S. Lewis is Archbishop of Canterbury. All is right with the world—or with that quarter of it lucky enough to repose under an English heaven.

Not surprisingly, Markham loves England. He worships England. Never mind that he’s Indian on his mother’s side, and not entirely as he’d like to be seen in one other respect: he keeps these little faults hidden—oh, very well hidden!

Now, twenty years after Hitler’s death in a car accident, he is taking leave of a nightmarish, totalitarian America. He has a biography to write of a dead and largely forgotten Winston Churchill, and has had to travel to where the old drunk left his papers. But little does he realise, as he returns to his safe, orderly England, that he carries, somewhere in his luggage, an object that can be used to destroy England and the whole structure of bourgeois civilisation as it has been gradually restored since 1918.

Who is trying to kill Anthony Markham? For whom is Major Stanhope really working? Where did Dr Pakeshi get his bag of money? Is there a connection between Michael Foot, Leader of the British Communist Party, and Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan? Why is Ayn Rand in an American prison, and Nathaniel Branden living in a South London bedsit? Why is Alan Greenspan dragged off and shot in the first chapter? Where does Enoch Powell fit into the story?

Above all, what is the Churchill Memorandum? What terrible secrets does it contain?

All will be revealed—but not till after Markham has gone on the run through an England unbombed, uncentralised, still free, and still mysterious.