Empire Day Read online

  James Philip

  ________

  EMPIRE DAY

  ________

  The New England Series – Book 1

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2018.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES

  ________

  BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY

  BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS

  BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND

  Contents

  ACT I – THE DAY BEFORE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  ACT II – EMPIRE DAY

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  ACT III – THE DAY AFTER

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Author’s Endnote

  Other Books by James Philip

  EMPIRE DAY

  ________

  The New England Series – Book 1

  ACT I – THE DAY BEFORE

  Saturday 3rd July 1976

  Chapter 1

  Gravesend, King’s County, Long Island

  It is a fact generally acknowledged that when a squad of heavily armed policeman and soldiers breaks down one’s front door, drags one out of bed – ignoring the screams of one’s wife; incidentally, I had no idea she could scream so loudly – and pins one to the floor with the muzzle of a gun to one’s head that, all things considered, it is not wholly unreasonable to conclude that one is probably in a lot of trouble.

  Things calmed down a little after the initial excitement.

  ‘Isaac Putnam Fielding,’ a plain clothes police officer had informed me, a little breathlessly, ‘you are under arrest for suspicion of fomenting sedition.’

  That had not happened lately.

  What was it they said about variety being the spice of life?

  I was hauled to my feet.

  Sarah, my wife, had stopped screaming; we had only been married a year or so – well, in the common law sense of the term - but none of that ought to have come as much of a surprise. Our very common law ‘marriage’, I mean. She was twenty-eight years my junior, had been one of my graduate students and in the beginning at least, seemingly infatuated by my reputation for being one of, well, most of the time, the University’s only surviving dissident from the old days. That had been the attraction: Sarah was bright, ambitious, angry – and as cute as Hell – a redhead with Irish green eyes who ought to have shacked up with somebody her own age and started a family by now. Instead, she had moved in with my much-diminished brood; or as my unwanted guests would say: former ‘nest of seditious vipers’.

  My father always used to say that the thing which really got his goat about the English was that they were always so ‘goddammed polite’.

  My midnight guests – actually, they had come through the front door at around one o’clock that morning – had apologised to Sarah once she stopped screaming, whom a female officer had quickly guided out of the bedroom of our big old white boarded house on the rising ground on Howe Street overlooking Gravesend Bay. Then they suggested to me that I should get dressed.

  ‘Do I need my courtroom rig?’ I had inquired, without irony. This shit had not happened to me for a while but I remembered ‘the form’. If I got hauled up in front of a magistrate there would be photographers outside and sketch artists inside the chamber; one wanted to look one’s best for one’s public on TV and in the papers.

  ‘Casual is good,’ the senior cop grunted.

  Everything had settled down now although I could hear methodical movement all over the house. These people were from Manhattan, the locals would have crashed about like a herd of stampeding Bison.

  Two men stayed with me as I got dressed.

  Slacks, a chequered shirt – twenty years ago I would have said ‘to hide the blood’ – but that was then and this was now; the rough stuff was over for the minute and the Governor of the twin-colony, formerly a High Court Judge back in the old country, took a dim view of his officials beating up on suspects. I pulled on open-toed sandals - this was going to be a long day and I might as well be comfortable - and nodded to the wardrobe before picking out an old jacket with leather elbow pads.

  The cops patted down my pockets.

  We all knew the drill.

  These raids had been much more traumatic while Rachel had still been alive and the kids had been younger. I had got older, complacent, and Abe apart the kids had completely cut the parental umbilical cord and moved out for good.

  Not that my youngest boy spent much time at home these days. He was up at college in Albany, a fourth and final-year medical student. Abe did not get on with Sarah, and basically, he only came home to catch up with his boyhood friends on high days and holidays.

  I pulled on my jacket and held out my wrists.

  The handcuffs clicked.

  “That okay,” the younger of the two cops asked solicitously.

  I flexed my hands.

  “Yeah, that’s a good fit, son.”

  The older of my visitors showed me his warrant card.

  Detective Inspector M.R.D. Danson.

  He was my age, greying at the temples with watchful grey eyes and he had kept well out of the way while his people had jumped on me.

  Special Branch…

  “Do you know where your son is, sir?”

  “Which one, Inspector?”

  Danson indicated for his sidekick to leave the bedroom, pointed for me to sit on the bed while he pulled up the chair by Sarah’s dresser and planted his obviously weary bones on it about a yard away from me.

  “You know how this works, Professor,” he sighed. “We’ve never met but I’ve seen your file. You and me, we’re old school. We play the game, that way nobody really gets hurt. But what’s going to happen when I take you to Hempstead is that my boys are going to tear this place apart looking for firearms and explosives…”

  “Seriously?”

  “I need to know where Abe is?” Danson asked quietly, his grey eyes suddenly boring into my face.

  “Abe?” I felt as dumbfounded as I must have looked. We had got of lightly with Victoria, our eldest kid, but Alexander and his brother William had both gone through phases when Rachel and I had got so fed up having the local constabulary calling we had, very nearly, thought better of our vow never to lay an angry hand upon any of our offspring.

  Victoria had married a widower and lived in fashionable Clintonville on the north shore of Long Island. I did not get to see my two grandchildren very often; Vicky was probably afraid I would corrupt their innocent young minds. Her husband, John Watson, was a big man at the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard at Wallabout Bay, he was more or less my age but we had always got along civilly.

  Alexander had gone into the twin-colonies militia straight out of school, learned to fly and led a harem-scarum life ever since. I had tried to get him to talk about his time flying scouts down i
n the South West; but like most veterans of the Border War he rarely spoke about what it was really like down there.

  William, my middle boy, had become a real teenager after Alex went into the militia, moody, introspective and argumentative at the drop of a hat he had bummed out of school without matriculating, learned to be a mechanic doing his militia service ‘in state’ and these days worked for the Long Island Speedboat Company. So far as I knew he spent most of his free time at church – he had turned Puritan in recent years – because I had not seen him since the Christmas before last. We had had words and the sanctimonious little runt had not shown his face in Gravesend since. I ought to have felt worse about that but actually it was a relief.

  But Abe…

  Abe was our accidental fourth child, by six-and-a-half years the youngest, the baby of the family who had grown up to be the tallest, and by far and away the brightest addition to the Fielding brood.

  Abe was the gentlest boy in the neighbourhood, bookish, shy as a kid behind his spectacles – he was a little short-sighted as a child, a thing he had grown out of – the sort of kid the girls tried to protect in the playground. Heck, the colonial militia had turned him down for service on account of his ‘eye history’ when he was eighteen, and that alleged brush he had had with rheumatic fever – which Rachel had had conveniently documented in advance - as a kid. Heck, Rachel was never going to let her third son get drafted without a fight…

  “Abe?” I repeated, wondering if I had misheard. “Abe’s up at Albany studying…”

  “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 Eng
land’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’.

  “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?”