Empire Day Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 2

  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.

  It had taken over ten minutes to proclaim his full titles upon his Coronation in Westminster Abbey. His father had still styled himself ‘Emperor of India’!

  Imperatoris India…

  He had put a stop to that nonsense the day after the Coronation!

  George V, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Rex, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor was more than a mouthful as it was!

  Unfortunately, he could do little about actually still being King Emperor even though the political classes had been talking about Indian independence for decades.

  He was still quite proud about the Consortionis Populorum Princeps honorific; pretending that the Crown Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand were, in effect, imperial fiefdoms governed wholly from London had been a gratuitous misrepresentation of the true state of affairs for over fifty years.

  If only some similar enlightened state of affairs existed in New England!

  Not that there was the remotest prospect that the twenty-nine fiercely independent
, constantly disputatious crown colonies, dependent territories, protectorates and provinces of the North American continent filling the vast hinterland from coast to coast, and north to south between Canada and the lands of the Empire of New Spain, were ever going to unite, or form any kind of union, commonwealth let alone nation in his, or he suspected, sadly, in his lifetimes or that of his children or grandchildren.

  Perversely, in fact, it was the very ‘independence’ – particularly of the First Thirteen colonies, each from each other – which ensured the continuing allegiance of all the other North American territories. Nobody wanted to be ruled by ‘those bloody Virginians’, or Bostonians, or by those Connecticut and Rhode Island puritans, or by those planters in the Carolinas, or by the conniving merchants and bankers in New York, et al. And as for all those industrialists in Pennsylvania, the Ohio Territory and the former Indian country provinces south of the Great Lakes – Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and the South Algonquin Territory – well, what business did people like that have dictating to the East Coast? Nobody imagined that the vast tracts of the once French Illinois-Louisiana lands, the roadless counties and shires of the great prairies at the heart of the continent, still separated, fragmented by the hunting grounds of the ancient tribes despite the railways now connecting the Oregon and Vancouver territories to the Dakotas, and thence to the rest of the continent, wanted any part of any kind of union with the ‘English’ colonies in the east; they had far more in common with their Canadian neighbours. It was only the south western border outlying territories and proto-colonies, particularly those whose boundaries abutted with the unmarked, barely mapped and forever contested limits of Spanish Alta California, Nuevo Mexico, Coahuila and West Texas, which had never stopped demanding ‘strength in unity’.

  Soon after his accession, his ministers had tried to persuade the King to marry off his youngest daughter, Caroline, to the heir to the Spanish thrown. He had put his foot down; there would be no more ‘royal weddings’ of that kind. Little good had such ‘arranged’ matches done his family; all that conniving and Machiavellian manoeuvring back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had resulted in the war to end all wars a little over a hundred years ago!

  The King flicked his cigarette butt over the side of the ship.

  Lion had led her three fifty thousand-ton sisters through the narrows – Hell’s Gate in olden times - into the Upper Bay at dawn and now the 5th Battle Squadron was anchored in line ahead in the main channel with Bucking Island and Bedford Island to port and Governor’s Island to the starboard, with the bows of the four castles of steel pointing straight up the Hudson River.

  As the early morning haze cleared the King gazed thoughtfully at HMS Princess Royal, and behind her the Queen Elizabeth – ships named respectively for his elder sister Margaret Rose and for his mother – and the Tiger, returning for the first time to the waters into which she had been launched over two decades ago.

  To the east, hidden by the urban and industrial sprawl at least two great new vessels were under construction in the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard at Wallabout Bay; but not armour-encased fast battleships like the ‘Big Cats’ and her sisters of the Lion class. No, the future lay, it seemed in the air now that all the great powers had agreed to scrap their undersea fleets.

  Or rather, to build no more of the infernal craft!

  The King loathed politics.

  The ‘Submarine Treaty’ crisis had almost caused a general world war just two years into his reign. The Germans and their fair-weather allies, Japan, feeling that their ‘imperial rights’ had been frustrated for too long had never really wanted to go to war with the British Empire but when the Russians had decided – for reasons nobody could explain – to use the age-old chaos in China to seize a ‘buffer zone’ in Manchuria and blundered into a confrontation with the Japanese the British Government – His Government – had started issuing ultimatums right left and centre!

  Nonetheless, as His Prime Minister – he had had six thus far in his reign - had complacently assured him back in 1965, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’.

  International diplomacy was about understanding what the other fellow actually wanted. Invariably, to get to the nub of the matter one had to discard practically everything everybody actually said!

  The Germans wanted the international status of their ‘possessions’ and ‘concessions’ in Africa ‘clarified’, specifically their right to hold and administer the mostly desert province of South West Africa and one or two territories on the shore of the Indian Ocean, while the Japanese wanted to be left to get on with whatever they were up to in China. Luckily for all concerned by then the Russians just wanted the war with the Japanese to stop.

  In any event, the King had travelled to Berlin and Moscow and behind the scenes finessed the bare bones of a quid pro quo in which the British Empire underwrote ‘adjustments to the colonial governance of regions in southern Africa’ and in league with the Germans quietly mediated a cessation of hostilities in the Far East; and with a collective sigh of relief the British Empire had not got into a ruinously expensive new undersea arms race.

  Even though he was the captain of a battleship at the time the King had been utterly unaware of the momentous, literally earth-shaking scientific advances preoccupying his ministers and his superiors at the Admiralty back in 1962.

  Of course, within a year of his accession the genie had been well and truly out of the bottle but at the time he had been utterly flabbergasted to learn that Pandora’s Box was about to be flung open!

  The atomic age had been about to dawn.

  City destroying bombs the size of a small dinghy!

  Limitless peaceful power supplies!

  Submarines the size of battleships which could steam around the globe underwater ten times without needing to refuel…

  The idea of having one’s cities demolished by a single aircraft carrying a single bomb was bad enough; the idea of submarines so formidable that all existing surface navies would become obsolete in less than a generation had horrified the Admiralty, and axiomatically, the King’s ministers. It was one thing to get involved in an arm’s race one could win; another entirely, getting into one everybody understood nobody ever win.

  Thus, nuclear power would stay, for the moment above the waves signifying that the future lay in the air which in turn had spurred every major power to deluge previously unimagined, impossibly large quantities of treasure upon their new aerospace industries. The first fruits of all this investment in research and development had been the revolutionary ‘jet’ aircraft now undergoing testing in the British and German Empires.

  Virtually overnight aircraft carriers, until then the poor relations of the battlefleet equipped with flimsy, short-range and low performance first and second-generation propeller driven scouts and fighters, had never needed to be over-large. However, in the coming age in which it was anticipated that heavyweight jet-powered aircraft ten times the weight and operating with landing and take-off speeds perhaps five to six times faster than their lightweight forebears would have to be accommodated, it was clear that the new breed of fleet carrier were going to have to be huge beasts.

  Both the ships under construction in the monstrous Wallabout Bay dry docks were forty-thousand-ton behemoths with flight decks nearly a thousand feet long. They were to be equipped with great steam catapults capable of flinging twenty-ton aircraft into the air and of steaming at up to thirty-three knots. At yards around the Empire – at Halifax in Nova Scotia, Rosyth in Scotland, Birkenhead on the River Mersey and East London on the Thames, and at Norfolk in Virginia – other King George V class ships were on the slips.

  ‘Why the Devil didn’t I know anything about this atomic business?’ The King had demanded that momentous day in July1962.

  ‘It was not felt that you needed to know, Your Majesty,’ he had been informed.

  The Empire’s ‘bomb project’ – code-named ‘Blue Danube’ – had been, and still was mainly based in New Engl
and, albeit a long way away from the curious eyes of most colonists in Tennessee, the badlands of the Dakotas and the mountains and forests of British Columbia. Other than that the Empire had its own ‘bomb’ – tested in 1966 off Christmas Island, and subsequently at the Montebello Islands, off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia in 1967 and 1968 – the man in the street throughout the Empire was blissfully unaware of the true history of the Anglo-German and now Anglo-German-Russian nuclear bomb race.

  Thank God…

  “Good morning, sir.”

  The respectful salutation broke the King out of his brooding introspection. He turned to face Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Packenham, Flag Officer Commanding 5th Battle Squadron.

  Like his monarch Packenham was wearing his Blue No. 3 – general duties - dress uniform. There would be plenty of time later to don their full No. 1 ceremonial ‘rags’. For the moment they were comfortable in their double-breasted reefer jackets over white long-sleeved shirts and blue ties. Although the King was entitled to wear a rig which boasted enough gold braid to sink a medium-sized barge on his jacket sleeves – he was after all, among other things, Admiral of the Fleet – he never wore more than the four rings he had earned in his years of professional service when he was onboard a Royal Navy ship.

  “I gather the weather is set fair, Tom?” The Squadron Commander had been at Dartmouth with the King and the two men and their families had been very close ever since. Time and again in recent years William Hugh George Albert Hanover-Gotha-Stewart – he had always been called ‘Bertie’ in the family and by his wide circle of friends in the Navy – had been thankful for those long years of grace when he had lived as a relatively normal man, and for the large number of ‘real’ lifelong friends he had made in that interregnum. One such was Tom Packenham.