James Philip - Empire Day

I was an idiot back in those days!

In my defence I was an idealistic idiot; not that that is any real defence as anybody who has tried to rely on it in a court of law will attest.

The real reason Abe had applied to Churchill College, Albany, was Tekonwenaharake, ‘Kate’. She and Abe were of an age and the two of them had been peas out of the same pod from the day they first rubbed noses when they were three years old.

Tekonwenaharake translated as her voice travels through the wind in English but her father stoically maintained that it sounded even more poetic in the native Kanien'keháka.

Kate had grown up a full head short of Abe, the tallest of the three brothers at six feet and a fraction of an inch, and her slim litheness was like poetry in motion compared to Abe’s gangling clumsiness as a teenager. Abe had thickened out a bit, turned into the family’s one, real sportsman in his last couple of years at Grammar School. He had been too whole-hearted playing football, a little prone to get himself injured chasing lost causes; at cricket he had been a star with bat or ball, and his big hands never dropped a catch. All things considered, Abe had been exactly the ‘late developer’ his mother had said he always would be.

And as soon as he could he had run away to Albany to be with Kate. Sarah and I had fretted about that. He had a brilliant career ahead of him; Kate might be a girl in a million but…

She was pure bred Mohawk and in the professions; in any profession, everybody knew that if he married her Abe could kiss his career goodbye.

Rachel had said ‘Abe’s happiness is the only thing that matters’.

After she died I lost my bearings; my moral compass went awry and like a fool I had had ‘that conversation’ with Abe. It had not gone very well.

‘It’s none of my business,’ I had confessed.

He had confirmed that he was of the same mind.

I had rowed back.

‘You know I’ll support you whatever you decide…’

Abe had come home a lot less after that.

Kate was the one non-negotiable thing in my youngest son’s life and now I was asking myself if that was what all this was about.

For all I knew Abe had married the girl by now; that was a thing easily achieved in the Mohawk country, a simple matter of words exchanged between the prospective husband of a young woman and her father or guardian elder. In theory Kate’s views would not actually have been canvassed but in practice, having known the kid since she was knee high, it would have been the only thing my old friend Tsiokwaris would have taken into account.

Heck, why did life have to be so goddamned complicated?

At around ten o’clock I was escorted into a small, well-ventilated windowless interview room on the first floor of the police station.

A blond woman in her twenties brought in mugs of tea and joined Detective Inspector Danson on the opposite side of the room’s single table. She had entered the room juggling the mugs on a tin tray with a slim brown attaché case under her left arm.

Danson had relieved her of the tray so she could divest herself of her case, which she dropped on one of the chairs, and wordlessly delved inside. I registered the small black notebook and the silvery propelling pencil, or pen, which she withdrew from it before putting it on the floor by the nearest table leg.

I tried to wake up.

I had been brought a cooked breakfast from the station canteen, allowed to wash and perform my personal ablutions in private in a washroom at the end of the corridor nearest my holding cell, and nobody had bothered to re-cuff me after I had been processed into custody in the small hours.

I sipped my tea.

There was a waist high-to-ceiling mirror across the end wall of the interview room; presumably a two-way mirror to permit the full observation of proceedings. From past experience I automatically assumed that there would be microphones buried in the walls, too.

Interview rooms had been dirty, smelly places in the old days. It appeared that things had moved on more than somewhat since the last time I had been in police custody.

Another pleasant surprise was that the tea was only middlingly vile.

“Sorry,” the young woman apologised. She sounded very English. Her blond hair was cut short, almost like a man’s and her freckles took years off her age.

Danson stirred.

“This is Lieutenant Judith Adams of the Royal Military Police,” he announced. “She is a member of His Majesty’s Personal Security Detail and for the duration of the Royal Visit to New York, New Jersey and Long Island she is acting as the Redcaps’ Liaison Officer with the Special Branch of the Colonial Police Service.”

“Delighted to meet you, Lieutenant,” I muttered.

What the fuck was going on?

Danson sat back, clearly leaving the floor to the woman.

“Inspector Danson tells me that you haven’t seen or spoken to your son for several days, Professor Fielding?”

“Weeks, actually. Last time we spoke was about a month ago, I suppose…”

“Yes,” the young woman said, checking something in the notebook she had opened. “That would have been on 8th June. You spoke for about five minutes.” She hesitated, frowned. “About little of any substance. Our analysts could not rule out the possibility that you were communicating using a code employing keywords. Prior to that you spoke on 23rd May. This conversation was a little less stilted, likewise not obviously suspicious.”

Lieutenant Adams looked up.

“Yes, we were tapping your phone line. We also tapped your office line at the Long Island College and you and your wife have been under surveillance for the last five weeks.’

She could have bowled me over with a very small feather!

“I don’t…”

“Understand?” The woman queried abruptly. “No. Neither do we. That is a profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs.”

The woman had switched from a tray-bearing human being to a mountain lioness with her prey in her sights.

It was all I could do to stop myself apologising.

“I spoke to your wife earlier, Professor Fielding. Colleagues of mine will interrogate her again later this morning when,” she sniffed, “she is a little less distraught.”

I began to react.

Angrily.

I opened my mouth to object but was beaten to the punch.

“You and your wife,” the woman snarled, “will be at liberty to protest about your treatment when the clear and present threat to His Majesty the King has been dealt with. Until that time please understand that any failure to fully co-operate with my inquiries will be referred to the appropriate prosecuting authorities under the auspices of the Treachery Act. Do I make myself clear, Professor Fielding?”

‘Yes…’

Okay, now I am a professional historian so I know a little bit about how the British – in the colonies the generic term ‘English’ is interchangeable with ‘British’, although in fact the Empire was carved out by Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk in equal measure to the ‘English’ – had carved out and up until now, have managed against all the odds, to hang onto the biggest Empire in the annals of planet Earth.

Granted, New Spain controlled – well, sort of – huge tracts of land in the Americas, and of course, the Philippines. Portugal still nominally runs its Brazilian Empire and various other lumps of territory in Africa and Far East. One ought not to discount the German Empire, which oversees most of Central Europe and the Balkans as well as miscellaneous African territories. Then there were those beastly Ottomans based in the Turkish littoral and dominating the Middle East, not to mention the increasingly despotic Romanovs and their ramshackle disaster area excuse for an imperium of all the Russias, or the kingdom of the medieval, much preyed upon Chinese now half-occupied by the Japanese.