James Philip - Empire Day

“Do you and your sons ever talk about the ‘old days’, Professor?”

The question blind-sided me for a moment.

“I, yeah, well, you know…’

“This isn’t part of the official police interview,” Danson assured me. “We’ll do all that later. When the tapes are running. I’m just interested. That’s my problem. That’s why I do what I do. I just like to know, to find out stuff, things.”

“Yeah, I suppose I talked to the kids about why their old man was always getting locked up. Rachel always stepped in when I started proselytising. She was Lutheran, straight up and down and me, well I’m a confirmed agnostic about most things. None of the kids were ever interested in politics. I’d tell them history as stories, I reckon they thought I was telling them fairy tales when they were little and when they grew up they weren’t interested. Isn’t that always the way?”

“I reckon so. Why did Abe go up to Albany; there’s a teaching hospital, St Paul’s, in Manhattan?”

“He planned to specialise in research once he qualified. Churchill College has a really good post-grad regime.”

I moved on quickly; the notion that Abe had planned all along to go into medical research was a fiction; albeit a useful fiction because it deferred both his colonial indenture to serve with the twin-colony public health service for not less than five years and kept his name off the draft lists for at least the next two, plus those indentured five years. Both Abe’s brothers had jumped at the chance to go into the military; Abe was not like his brothers and when he had qualified for medical school Rachel had made damned sure her baby boy had got all his ducks in line.

“Besides, Abe likes it up there. We used to take family vacations up in the Mohawk Country. We made a lot of friends over the years,” I thought about it, suspecting it was a mistake to go on talking. Oddly, I did not think I had anything to be guilty about; old-timers like me had been outflanked by the ‘Devolution not Revolution’ movement years ago. Heck, in the last Colony-wide Legislative Council elections I had campaigned for and voted for the Social Democratic and Liberal Party! “I sort of lost contact with a lot of people up there after Rachel died. Setting up house with Sarah put a lot of people’s noses out of joint, I suppose.”

“What about Abe?”

“Abe was closer to his Ma than he was to me. Don’t get me wrong, we were, still are, so far as I know, tight but a kid’s always closer to his Ma or his Pa and Abe was always Sarah’s ‘little boy’.”

“How did he feel about Sarah?”

“He missed his Ma; how do you think he felt about another woman coming into the family home?”

“Sorry, dumb question.”

I did not get the impression Detective Inspector Danson asked a lot of ‘dumb’ questions. Not unless he had a good reason.

HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

His Majesty George the Fifth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith was an early riser. Especially, when he was at sea with his Navy.

The Royal Marines attired in their dress redcoats – a hangover from another age which always rather jarred the King’s sense of…perspective and seemed more and more out of place in this modern age – snapped to attention as he moved through the Royal suite of cabins in the battleship’s aft superstructure on his way up to the quarterdeck for his morning constitutional and the one cigarette his beloved wife permitted him before breakfast without censure.

Because she thought smoking was bad for him.

Bless her…

His wife, Her Royal Highness Princess Eleanor, the Duchess of Windsor – because the hidebound fools his father had gathered around himself during his fifty-seven-year reign were petty-minded stick in the muds who had not believed she was of sufficiently ‘high birth’ to ever be deemed ‘Queen’ – was a late-riser, a minor incompatibility they had ‘worked around’ in their long and happy marriage. In any event, when they travelled together on Royal tours and suchlike they slept in separate quarters, and often, Eleanor was fully engaged on her own work connected to the many charities and educational foundations of which she was a patron, while he had to deal with the local ‘politicos’ and their ghastly ‘mercantile’ paymasters.

No, that was unfair…

In comparison with other colonial regimes he honestly believed that the British model was fundamentally, if not squeakily clean and proper, then infinitely less venal and corrupt than most of the other – foreign – ones he had encountered down the years.

The happiest days of his life had been the twenty-three years he had spent in the Royal Navy. While his three elder brothers had led unfulfilled wastrel lives readying themselves to assume, sooner or later or never at all, the full weight of the crown he, as the youngest, practically forgotten issue – his parents had been in their early forties at the time of his birth – of the house of Hanover-Gotha-Stewart, he had quietly graduated from the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1941, been regarded with so little unction within the family that he had been permitted to marry a woman of middling aristocratic lineage whom he actually liked, to raise a family more or less out of the public eye and to pursue what in the end was a brilliant career cut short by the combined predations of age, alcohol, accidents and eventually, the murderous activities of the Irish Republican Army on Empire Day in 1962 upon the rest of his blood line.

His father, the late King had passed away in May 1962 and preparations had been well in hand for the Coronation of his surviving brother Edward until those blasted Fenians had intervened. He still missed ‘Teddy’, with who he had always enjoyed relatively cordial relations.

‘You’re a lucky beggar, Bertie!’ Teddy had said to him wistfully a fortnight before his death. ‘You’ve got Eleanor, the Navy, those well-adjusted, sensible boys and girls. All I’m going to end up with is the bloody Crown, which will set off my lumbago every time I put the damned thing on, a wife who can’t stand the sight of me and two brattish sons who can’t wait for me to shuffle off this mortal coil!’

Her Royal Highness Princess Sophia, Duchess of Cornwall, Albert the Duke of Northumberland and his brother Charles Duke of York had perished with Teddy, still at that time the titular Prince of Wales and Monarch uncrowned in Dublin fourteen years ago. Since both of Teddy’s sons had died in the 1950s without male issue the ‘family firm’ had passed to George.

He had been well and truly ‘lumbered’ with it ever since!

By then he had attained the rank of Post Captain and was in command of the very ship upon whose quarterdeck he now strolled enjoying his morning cigarette.

HMS Lion had been half-way through her second commission in those days, less than four years old and in passage home from a world cruise in company with the old battlecruiser Vanguard and half-a-dozen fleet destroyers.

The Vanguard had gone to the breakers yard in the mid-sixties; a sad fate for the ship which had been the flagship of the greatest navy in the history of the World for over thirty years. There had been some discussion about dry docking her in perpetuity at Portsmouth but in the end the cost of maintaining such a leviathan as a mere ‘museum ship’ had decided her fate.

The King’s old uniforms still fitted him, although a little snugly of late. His father and brothers had fleshed out from high living in middle age, in the process becoming the subject of numerous bucolic cartoons and endless ribaldry among the peoples of the Empire. That was the trouble with his family; it had grown fat on the prerogatives and privileges of the Monarchy and it was hardly surprising that at the time of his accession the whole institution was threatening to become an impotent fig leaf for the largesse and the indolence of the political classes in the second half of the twentieth century.