James Philip - Empire Day

“At medical school, I know,” the detective said, completing my sentence.

There was a knock at the open bedroom door.

“It’s just the Professor and his wife in the house, guv,” a uniformed constable reported.

“Knock up all the neighbours and check out their garages, their out houses and their gardens.”

Some of this was new to me.

“Whatever this is, my wife has nothing to do with it,” I protested mildly. Detective Inspector Danson did not seem to be the kind of cop who was going to be swayed – either way – by voluble pleas or expressions of innocence.

“What do you think this is?” The other man asked.

“If you’d asked me that twenty years ago I’d have been in a much better position to assist you in your inquiries, Inspector,” I confessed ruefully. I shrugged, aware that the cuffs on my wrists were already feeling heavy. I was getting too old for this nonsense. “Nowadays, I keep my head down. What you see is pretty much what you get.”

“Tell me about Abe?”

This was getting a little surreal.

Twenty minutes ago, I had been tucked up in bed with a woman half my age doing what dirty old men like me do in a situation like that; and now…

What was I doing?

Honestly and truly, I had no idea what was going on.

I was an eccentric has-been academic who owed his tenure at Long Island College, University of New York, to the fact that every old, respected, well-endowed faculty of higher learning traditionally had at least one or two oddballs among its Fellows. At LIC I was it, a sometime Professor of Colonial History, and the author of numerous hardly read books and dusty papers. Nobody was really interested in ancient history – my specialisation was the colonization of New England, and the formation of the thirteen original colonies – so these days I took a lot of classes and tutorials in mid-nineteenth century politics, supervised doctoral students and made peripatetic appearances at college functions in the role of court jester because nobody was remotely interested in the early days of settlement except Puritan fundamentalists and they did not tend to send their kids to notorious centres of Devil worship like the University of New York…

“Sorry,” I realised Danson had asked me another question.

“Tell me about Abe, Professor?”

“He’s a good kid.”

“Have it your way,” the policeman said. He shook his head and rose to his feet, beckoning me to follow him.

All the policeman, even the uniformed men were carrying firearms. It was about then that I started getting worried. In the German or Russian Empires every man in uniform carried a sword or a gun; throughout New Spain the Guardia Seville and the members of the various religious para-military orders routinely carried weapons but here, throughout New England – certainly east of the Mississippi and the Louisiana Country, most police officers recoiled in horror at the very notion of going about their duty with a six-shooter on their hip. Sure, out west most lawmen were armed but there was a reason they called places like the Oregon, North West and the Mountain Territories the ‘Wild West’! Here in the ‘first thirteen’ colonies it was a matter of civic pride that some, at least, of the values of the old country were preserved, as if in aspic, in New England.

“Why all the guns, Inspector?” I asked as I was led outside to where a Bedford four-ton lorry and three Bentley police cars were parked. I could see there were other vehicles blocking each end of Clinton Road at the junction of Clinton and Jamaica Drive to the east and Flatbush Pike to the west.

Danson dropped onto the back seat of one of the cars beside me and patted the driver, a large, horsy woman in the dark blue uniform of the Long Island Constabulary.

“Straight back to the office, Mary.”

“Where’s the office?” I inquired, less than laconically. I was getting a tad panicky and made a concerted effort to get a grip.

“Hempstead, like I said,” Danson replied. “Your wife will be taken to another station.”

The detective was not New England born, there was an English West Country burr lingering deep down in his vowels that he had never made any attempt to cure.

“Sarah’s done nothing…”

“Wrong? We shall see.”

“Look,” I tried again. “I don’t know what this is about but if all this is,” he reasoned, “is some kind of precautionary roundup because tomorrow is Empire Day…”

I heard my voice trail off into the ether.

Tomorrow was not exactly any old Empire Day.

1776 had been the year the American colonies had rebelled against the crown; and the decisive battle of that failed ‘revolution’ had been fought only a few miles from where they sat as the car bumped and rolled along the narrow Long Island roads towards Hempstead.

28th August would be the bicentennial of the crushing of the First American Rebellion…

While Hempstead was only some twenty miles from Gravesend as the crow flew until the work to widen the south coast pike was completed sometime next year it would take – even in the middle of the night with hardly any other traffic – over an hour to get to Hempstead. It was hardly any wonder that most non-religious Long Islanders were more worried about traffic jams and the abysmal state of the roads than they were about politics!

The last two winters had been long and hard, ice had got into men’s bones like it had into fissures in the tarmac, neither the road crews or the island’s hospitals had been able to cope with the harshness of the seasons. That was the trouble; when the Governor was a good man everything went well, ticketyboo, in fact, but when he was a dolt like the current incumbent the whole shebang soon went to Hell!

Not that all the ills of King’s County, or any of the other three counties of Long Island were all the fault of the current Governor or of his office in Albany. The Colonial, County and District Councils all had to take their share of the blame; although, as friends and correspondents back in the old country were always telling him, the two Houses of Parliament, and the county and district system of national, supra-national and local governance ‘at home’ was hardly infallible. Of course, nobody in the British Isles had to suffer the additional executive-bureaucratic burden of having an imperial consul – the Viceroy, officially the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England – lording it over them from his palace in Philadelphia in between the Crown and the apparatus, or rather, the fig leaves of democracy. Whichever way one cut it no citizen of New England’s vote counted in the way a man or a woman’s vote did back in the so-called United Kingdom…

“So, what’s your story, Inspector Danson?” I asked, curious to discover if the man was going to give me the silent treatment all the way to Hempstead. He had not risen to my baited remark about Empire Day.

“I came over here so long ago you could still get free passage if it was to take up a civil service appointment across the pond,” the policeman answered, suppressing a wry chuckle. “Clerking didn’t have much charm, or square-bashing with the militia so I went to night school, got a degree and joined the Colonial Police Service. That was in forty-nine. I moved down here from Boston five or six years ago. My wife’s people come from Philadelphia.”

“Do you have kids?”

“Two girls at college in New York. Garden City College.”

“Oh right…”

“That was part of the deal when I transferred to Special Branch in the twin-colony,” Danson freely admitted.

During the course of their shared histories New York and Long Island had parted company more than once. Eventually, the Colonial Office back in London had got fed up with the ‘coming and going’ and put its foot down. That had been back in 1902; but history never really goes away so even though most of those who were alive at the time were long dead and gone everybody in the Crown Colony of New York still referred to it as the ‘twin-colony’.