James Philip - Empire Day

Bertie had proposed to her the day after he arrived back in England and the rest was, well, history…

This had provoked a dreadful schism within the Royal Family.

The old King was so upset he had refused to issue letters patent therefore before Bertie’s accession to the throne she had never been ‘Your Royal Highness’, or really a ‘Princess’ of any kind in exactly the same way she was not, strictly speaking, actually the ‘Queen’ even now. Other, that was than in the hearts of many of her husband’s subjects.

Bertie had never been a big one for all that nonsense; just because the bloody Arch Bishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister of the day had a problem with crowning her Queen upon his Coronation he had made it known on the day of his accession that anybody who failed to address ‘my wife as anything other than Your Majesty will be in trouble!’

In the end the Church, Parliament and the Prime Minister had suggested that officially she be styled Princess Eleanor, Duchess of Windsor thereafter.

Bertie, bless him, simply referred to her in public as ‘the Queen’.

Honestly and truly, it was a mystery to her how the Empire had knocked along so well for so long; a mystery in exactly the same way it was no mystery at all why it was in so much trouble now.

Like her husband Eleanor blamed the old King, his courtiers and the nincompoops who had been running ‘the circus’ for much of the last century and whatever her reservations about the present administration in Whitehall, she and Bertie were of one mind where their duty lay. Somebody had to paper over the cracks while the Empire’s crumbling foundations were if not repaired, then shored up for another generation or two!

“I don’t understand why you were strutting about on the deck in full sight in the first place?” She whispered.

Her husband was sitting on a chair in the sick bay – more a fully-equipped floating hospital – in the bowels of the battleship. His recently stitched left eyebrow was still weeping and a nurse, one of the dozen or so onboard the flagship – periodically dabbed the decreasing dribble of blood.

Actually, Eleanor knew exactly why her husband had been walking the quarterdeck at such an ungodly hour of the morning. He was a creature of habit. He was the same at home. He walked the corridors of Buckingham Palace, or Sandringham, or Balmoral at or before the crack of dawn to compose himself for the coming day.

“They recovered a bullet from the deck just where you’d been walking, Bertie!”

Eleanor realised her husband had taken her right hand in his.

“Sorry, I’m making a scene,” she apologised.

Her husband smiled wanly and glanced meaningfully around the compartment.

“We are surrounded by friends here,” he murmured. And waved at the nearest bulkhead: “and by several inches of the best cemented armour plate that the master forgers of Sheffield can produce, my love.”

Eleanor pulled herself together.

“So, what is our plan of action today?”

“We carry on as normal.”

She accepted this without demur, leaned forward and kissed her husband’s brow, well away from his wound.

“I shall make sure they put out the right uniform.” She ran a hand over her hair. “I must look a mess, that will never do,” she declared.

The King took his wife’s hand anew.

“My dear, you are ever as beautiful to me as the day we wed.”

“Men!” She whispered, sniffing back a tear as she made her departure.

Both Eleanor’s sisters had had that high-cheeked, willowy natural ‘look’ that all the fashion magazines worshipped. She was shorter by an inch or so, less busty and a lot less preoccupied with what she looked like although that first night she had dined with Bertie, she had spent most of the previous afternoon in front of a mirror trying to get her face ‘just right’, never realising that he had probably already decided that she was perfect the way she was.

In retrospect, in exactly the same way she had decided he was… the one .

Albeit the unattainable, impossible one , whom a girl like her was never, ever going to live happily ever after.

Cinderella, you shall go to the ball…

All those years living as a detached member of the Royal Family, politely and sometimes not so politely shunned by ‘the family’ now seemed so long ago as to belong to a lost age.

She had assumed that Bertie would speak fluent German, discovered that her father and his brothers apart, the rest of the family detested the language. Oh, he could speak it at a pinch, badly, you had to in the circles in which he had been raised but he was not fluent in German in the way he was in French or Spanish, the languages of the ‘old enemies’.

Eleanor had taken German lessons to appease the old King; a waste of time. It must have been horribly galling for the surviving members of the Court to have to kow-tow to a brazen little hussy gold-digger from Northamptonshire when Bertie became King.

She and Bertie had promised each other that there would be no settling of old scores. Everybody started with a clean slate. Bertie planned to run a tight ship in which each and every member of the crew got a fair chance to show his or her mettle.

He was the accidental King; and she was his unlikely Guinnevere.

Eleanor was tempted to pinch herself some days.

It was as if she was living inside a fairy tale.

Tomorrow, Bertie and she would board a destroyer to review the fleet, or rather, fleets; half the Atlantic Fleet would be moored in the Lower Bay, there would be flypasts, visits to several big, and small ships of the visiting navies. As well as the Spanish the Portuguese, the Germans and the Japanese had sent impressive flotillas to New York.

The Germans had sent three battleships.

The Japanese had sent a couple of cruisers and several destroyers on a round the world cruise just so that they might be represented at the Empire Day celebrations.

However, today the Royal Party was due to visit the Admiralty Dockyard at Wallabout Bay, there to launch the new anti-aircraft cruiser Polyphemus, and to partake of luncheon with the Governor of the twin state of New York-Long Island, before going across the East River to tour the city – which ought not to take too long because it only occupied the lower couple of miles of Manhattan Island – and to inspect various military bases and take the salute at a march past at Battery Field, the site of a fort in former times. That evening the Governor of New England would formally welcome the King to the Americas ahead of a banquet to be held in his honour in the ballroom of the biggest hotel in the city, the Savoy.

Tomorrow, Viscount De L’Isle, the Governor of New England, would join the Royal Party for the Empire Day Fleet Review, and the evening’s state banquet at the mansion of the Lieutenant Governor of the Crown Colony of New Jersey in Elizabethtown.

Eleanor always approached days like this with a deliberately positive spirit but the day had hardly started and already some idiot had taken a pot shot at her husband!

East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island

Surely, this could not all be about Abe?

“Is Abe in trouble?”

Lieutenant Adams ignored the question.

I was beginning to get a better sense of her now. Thus far, she had intimidated, damned nearly scared the shit out of me without ever threatening to raise her voice. There was something haughty, aristocratic in her tone, although not a haughtiness to set one’s teeth on edge. No, it was more that her certainty, her absolute lack of doubt which battered one into submission.

“Help me here,” I went on, in hope rather than conviction. “I have no idea what’s going on. How the fuck am I supposed to help you? Or Abe?”