Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3) Read online

  James Philip

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  TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND

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  The New England Series – Book 3

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2019.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES

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  BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY

  BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS

  BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND

  Coming later in 2019

  Book 4: Remember Brave Achilles

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  ACT I – BEFORE THE FALL

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  ACT II – THE MADNESS OF PRINCES

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  ACT III – THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  EPILOGUE

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Author’s Endnote

  Other Books by James Philip

  TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND

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  The New England Series – Book 3

  A.D. 1978

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  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  It was announced that Isaac Putnam Fielding, the sixty-year-old New Yorker awaiting trial for his part in the Empire Day outrages of 1976, took his own life on 18th November 1977. The statement issued by the Home Office reported that he was found hanging in his cell at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, in West London, in the early hours of that morning. Attempts to revive him were made but he was declared dead on arrival at St Thomas’s Hospital.

  Fielding was the author of the book ‘Two Hundred Lost Years’, for three decades the semi-liturgical source book for a succession of obscure secessionist and anti-imperialist groups mainly based in the Crown Colonies of Massachusetts, New York, Delaware and Virginia. His history is a murky one given that he was for many years an undercover operative of the Colonial Security Service (CSS), for whom he remained a so-called ‘confidential informer’ until as recently as 1972. Rumours abound that Fielding was at various times used as a paid agent provocateur by more than one New England constabulary, infiltrating a group known as the ‘Brothers of Liberty’. His association with the CSS appears to have terminated unhappily, coincidental with a brief mental breakdown he suffered after his wife, Rachel’s, death in 1973.

  By all accounts Fielding was estranged wholly or partly from each of his four children at the time of the Empire Day atrocities. Not least the most extraordinary aspect of his part in those tragedies is that he seemed, to many observers, to go out of his way to tacitly implicate his daughter, her husband and all three of his sons in the affair, a pretence he doggedly maintained for the best part of a year after his initial arrest.

  I am given to understand that Fielding was confronted by his sons at Fort Crailo Prison in Albany shortly before his first, abortive trial. This was, apparently, a somewhat fraught affair during which a punch, or punches were thrown. It is telling that none of Fielding’s children visited him prior to his transfer to England last September, or according to prison authorities, subsequently made any attempts to communicate with him directly, or through third (legal) parties.

  Contemporary colonial historians and – I confidently say – every journalist in the Empire worth his or her salt, were eagerly looking forward to Fielding’s forthcoming trial hoping against hope that previously classified details of his activities during his long career with the CSS would see the light of day in court.

  Unfortunately, it now seems likely that these documents – normally embargoed for sixty years under the purview of the Official Secrets Act – will now be buried in the archives of the CSS in Virginia for the ‘full term’, thus denying New Englanders access to papers which might shed untold light on the true history of the First Thirteen in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Notwithstanding that Fielding made what he claimed to be a full confession to the authorities in respect of his crimes and entered guilty pleas to all charges laid against him at his trial in Albany (abandoned after the attempted assassination of the head of the CSS, Brigadier Matthew Harrison) last November, his death just three months into a probable sentence of life imprisonment without the option of remission, leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth. Not least because it is now unlikely that the whole story of the 4th July 1976 outrages will ever see the light of day.

  This is a most unsatisfactory outcome.

  Melody Danson, the woman credited with finally persuading Isaac Fielding to confess to his heinous crimes, echoed this sentiment while she was in London when we exchanged correspondence in December, shortly before she travelled to Madrid. Ms Danson, who is currently attached to the Joint Anglo-Spanish Commission of Inquiry into the alleged involvement of rogue elements in the Empire of New Spain in the Empire Day events, was commenting upon hearing the news of Fielding’s death and she kindly gave me leave to quote her words verbatim.

  ‘I felt all along that Isaac only understood a small part of the bigger picture. Yes, he claimed responsibility for everything but when one drilled down into his confession it soon became obvious that he had had no knowledge of key elements of the conspiracy. True, he might in one sense have been the father of that conspiracy but like many fathers, what happened post-conception was largely out of his control.’

  Former Detective Inspector Danson of the New York Constabulary, was the high-profile investigator brought in by the Governor’s Office to review the evidence against Isaac and his sons in June last year. She was remarkably – dare one say, refreshingly – candid with this reporter.

  ‘No, there was never any cover up. Frankly, the monstrosity of the outrages on the 3rd and 4th of July 1976 beggared the imagination of us all, myself included. Given the atmosphere of suspicion, public alarm and the need for the civil powers to keep good public order and to safeguard innocent third parties who might otherwise have been caught up in a violent backlash, I honestly believe that the New York authorities did all that was in their power in the extraordinary circumstances which confronted them in the days after the atrocities. My own role in this? Well, I was simply brought in to dot the ‘I’s and cross the ‘T’s, which is what professional detectives do every day of their working lives. Why me? Because I was an outsider who had not been involved in the initial investigation. I just happened to be in the right place, available at the right time and was honoured to be of service to the Office of the Governor.’

  Ms Danson was rather more elliptical when questioned about her current assignment in Madrid.

  ‘My work here is
governed by diplomatic confidence; you must speak to the head of our joint mission with our Spanish hosts.’

  At the time of writing the circumstances around the death of Isaac Fielding remain the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the Metropolitan Police’s elite Criminal Investigation Department. A spokesman for Scotland Yard has refused to comment further other than to emphasise that ‘any death in custody within a high security environment’ is automatically treated as suspicious until proven otherwise.

  In the meantime, the continuing silence from the Foreign and Colonial Office on the progress – if any – of the Joint Commission’s work in Spain must give rise to concerns that the involvement of Spanish nationals and sympathisers in the Empire Day abomination, may not have just been the work of a handful of fanatics operating on their own initiative but, perhaps or in part, been instigated by organs of the Spanish Government, or even by agents close to the King Emperor, Ferdinand and his court in Madrid.

  The death of Isaac Fielding cannot but further unsettle the mood of many New Englanders who rightly, believe themselves to have been the victims of an outrageous, cowardly attack and that the Crown has, in the intervening twenty-one months done little to obtain satisfaction from those shadowy parties they, New Englanders, hold substantially responsible.

  Isaac Fielding’s daughter, Victoria and his middle son, William declined to comment on their father’s death. However, Fielding’s eldest and youngest sons, Major Alexander Lincoln Fielding of the Colonial Air Force and Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln Fielding of the Royal Naval Air Service, both of whom are currently on active service were so good as to find time in their busy schedules to speak with me.

  Many readers will recollect that, coincidentally, I actually flew with ‘Alex’ Fielding on the morning of the Empire Day attacks. Since his release from prison last year I have been privileged to get to know him, and his wife, Leonora well. At the time we spoke Alex was preparing to take his squadron down to the South West and his wife was expecting the couple’s first child.

  ‘I am not about to start crying any crocodile tears for the man,’ Alex confessed to me. ‘Sure, I’d rather he was still around. Going that way, well, that’s too bad. But I lost a year of my life and could very well have ended up at the end of a rope myself because of him and I’m not about to forget that any time soon. Heck, this time last year I’d have pulled the lever that dropped the old monster myself! That said, at the end of the day I keep reminding myself that my brothers, Bill and Abe, got their lives back too, I got to marry an honest to God princess like in a fairy tale and here I am now back in the CAF with a long-service commission. So, I suppose anything I say about the old fool now doesn’t really matter a mess of beans!’

  Abraham – who changed his surname to Lincoln, his mother’s family’s name – last autumn, who has been subjected to a disgraceful barrage of hate mail and become the target of vituperative demonstrations outside the gates of the Norfolk Navy Base by racist Getrennte Entwicklung – separate development – adherents, spoke to me shortly after it was announced by the Information Office of the Atlantic Fleet, that he was to go to sea on board the light cruiser HMS Achilles as that vessel’s assistant surgeon, and as a reserve or ‘emergency’ aviator.

  I have been fortunate to have met Abraham and his charming Mohawk-born wife Kate several times, most recently when I was their guest for a meal just after New Year at their Royal Navy married quarters in Virginia. Husband and wife made it clear to me that they wished to ‘cut through’ the storm of misinformation which has dogged them since they returned to New England from Canada last July. Our conversation formed the substance of the lengthy feature article I wrote some weeks later under the by-line ‘Abe and Kate’s Story’ which Abe confided to me, less than a week after its publication, had already prompted numerous ‘book offers’ from houses in London and Boston and ‘imploring’ transatlantic phone calls from several very well-known movie producers in France.

  ‘I and my wife have chosen to forgive Isaac,’ Abe told me. ‘We still mourn Elder Tsiokwaris of the Mohawk Nation, my wife’s blood father and my soul father, who died on the steps of the court house in Albany so as to end the cycle of death which had enveloped my family in the years since my mother’s passing. Tsiokwaris was a great and a good man: a good and a great man knows humility, Isaac knew neither, he knew only hubris.’

  Having originally named their first-born Isaac Kariwase, Abe and Kate Fielding have since christened their son ‘Thomas’ Tsiokwaris, ‘Tom’ having been the anglicised name the New York authorities assigned Kate’s father under the colony of New York’s ‘Separate Development Statute’.

  ‘Isaac was not my blood father,’ Abe freely confirmed, ‘but I share with my sister and brothers my family’s burden of atonement for the ills done to others by my kith and kin. To that end I will confound Isaac’s legacy of shame and faithfully serve my King, the Empire and my Colony with honour so long as I shall live.’

  None of the Fielding siblings intend to travel to England to visit their father’s grave…

  Albert Stanton, and extract from ‘Isaac Putnam Fielding: a life of betrayal’ published in the Manhattan Globe and syndicated publications across New England and the Empire on 25th February 1978.

  ACT I – BEFORE THE FALL

  Chapter 2

  Friday 10th March

  Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Chinchón

  Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle followed their host out onto the terrace of the great house on the hill overlooking the ancient town of Chinchón. It was a warm evening for this time of year and the two women were, for once, comfortable in the flowing ankle-length gowns that protocol mandated they wear in public.

  Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome thirty-nine-year-old castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas in which Chinchón sat – very much as the jewel in the Medina Sidonia ducal estate – ushered his guests to comfortable chairs on the broad, terracotta-roofed veranda overlooking the town lying in the bowl of the hills some thirty miles south east of Madrid. Below them as evening drew in, the streets were coming alive as the crowds funnelled through the narrow medieval alleys to the oval Plaza Mayor – which twice a year was transformed into a temporary bull ring – at Chinchón’s heart.

  There was no bull ‘fighting’ at this time of year, a thing both women were glad of; it was the first day of the town’s annual week-long wine festival, a celebration that drew merchants, connoisseurs, a random selection of the great and the good of Madrid society and over this first ‘festival weekend’ reputedly filled the Plaza Mayor with every other ‘dissolute’ and ‘character’ from within a fifty-mile radius. Not to put too fine a point on it the famous, or if one was being pious about it, the infamous, Chinchón Festival of the Vine, had for more years than anybody cared to remember, provided a priceless opportunity for the otherwise horribly ‘buttoned up’ people of the Mountains of Madrid to let off a little steam. It was just far enough away from the suffocating Inquisition-regulated protocols which governed all aspects of public life in the capital, and for the King-Emperor and all but his hardest-hearted courtiers to turn a – somewhat humourless – blind eye.

  “Things can get a little lively after dark,” Alonso Pérez de Guzmán apologised mischievously, patently not begrudging the gathering revellers their pleasures. He had extended an invitation to his ‘good friends from the Americas’ to join him at his occasional ‘hacienda in the country’ the moment he had heard that the women had been attached to the British Mission.

  The two women had been looking forward to this holiday-cum-adventure with no little anticipation as the second week in March drew near.

  Formerly Madrid’s man in Philadelphia, de Guzman had been unceremoniously expelled from New England in the wake of last year’s explosive revelations of Spanish – albeit Spanish colonial – involvement in the Empire Day outrages of July 1976. ‘Alonso’ was an ancestor of the man who had once, nearly four hundred years ago,
tried and failed to invade the British Isles; thus, he came from a lineage which took immense pride in taking hard knocks in its stride with élan and no little aplomb, much as he had always greeted his, very occasional, romantic rebuffs from misguided members of the fairer sex.

  He was a handsome cavalry officer from one of the oldest and most distinguished Castilian houses to whom, by repute, no woman from a certain class – from pubescence to old age – was safe who had met every crisis and personal barb in his time in New England with mildly vexed, indefatigably polite bewilderment as if he really did not see what the problem was.

  It was all a masterful act but Henrietta De L’Isle had, to her chagrin, not actually realised as much at the time. Alonso had seemed so perfectly representative of the apparent dissonance within the Empire of New Spain. In common with many of the senior envoys in the service of the Emperor Ferdinand and his mendacious Queen, Sophia, de Guzmán had always given the impression he was somehow above the hurly-burly of ‘colonial politics’. In fact, he often reminded interlocutors in Philadelphia that other than for a short interlude in the Philippines ended by an untimely riding accident, that prior to his appointment to New England he was proud to say he had never troubled to travel much beyond the boundaries of Europe.

  His wife, Eugenia, a niece of the Emperor was, like that oddly unworldly man in the modern Royal Alcazar of Madrid, pious to a fault and had remained, presumably, blissfully unaware of her husband’s amorous adventures in the Americas. Axiomatically, that lady had not accompanied Alonzo’s party to attend the Festival of the Vine.

  Melody Danson had never met the Duke of Medina Sidonia in New England; nor had she ever swallowed the idea that Old Spain’s man in Philadelphia was a congenial, somewhat dim-witted nobleman. So, whereas, Henrietta had been positively speechless, and then a little angry when she encountered the ‘real’ Alonso Pérez de Guzmán in Madrid last autumn, Melody had very nearly allowed the dashing, marvellously well-read and informed nobleman to charm her knickers off the first night they had met. She had not, of course: allowed him to bed her that night although in retrospect, it had been a ‘close run thing’, as one famous admiral of the Great War had observed viewing the carnage all around him after the British Fleet had bloodily forced the Skagerrak.