Empire Day Read online

  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.

  However, the British Empire was different; it was bigger than the next two biggest put together, richer than any three or four of the others, better and more efficiently run, and square mile for square mile, much cheaper to maintain and therefore intrinsically more sustainable. All the other ‘empires’ had to bankrupt themselves and impoverish, to one degree or another, sections of their own populations to finance the armies required to hold down their far-flung lands; not the British, they had the Navy and, in most places, they let the locals get on with the business of business relatively unmolested. The steel mills of New England alone out-produced the entire German Empire, the cotton mills of England clothed half the World, five ships of every six built was constructed in British or American yards, the prairies of Canada and the crown territories beyond the Great Lakes supplied half the globe’s grain, Australasia a third of the meat on and off the hoof, a traveller could walk from Alexandria to the Cape of Good Hope without once stepping off British soil, and the oilfields of Persia and the East Indies kept the greatest navy ever to steam the seas under way.

  But none of these things were the real keys to the greatness of the British Empire. The reason it had come out of the chasing pack and attained a position of such apparently impregnable dominance was very simple.

  When push came to shove the British – well, mostly the English – were utterly ruthless.

  If a thing needed to be done; it was done!

  That was why nobody had been so stupid as to pick a stand-up fight with the British for over a hundred years; and the Pax Britannica was, to all intents, complete.

  Wags in London Clubs and throughout that part of the global atlas painted forever Imperial pink, men winked and nudged each other and boasted that the only place the English had ever ‘given up on’ was Afghanistan; and that was only to give the Romanovs an itch that they could never scratch, let alone eradicate!

  Just like the Emperor Hadrian back in the early years of the second century had decided that the Roman Empire was big enough as it was, the British had called time on the ‘era of expansion’ to secure the peace of Paris’ in 1865, and the World Order which had emerged from that congress had, more or less, guaranteed the peace ever since.

  The so-called Imperial ‘compromise’ had only been so successful because all the other powers understood that whoever stepped out of line first would discover that…the British were absolutely ruthless!

  Such was the perfectly constructed geopolitical strategic calculus which had governed the affairs of the World for over a century.

  Lieutenant Adams’s closed her black notebook and fixed me with her blue-grey eyes.

  “We will address the question of your loyalty to the Crown at another time, Professor. Right now, what is going to happen is that you are going to give me every possible assistance in my inquiries. Do we understand each other?”

  My throat was dry, constricted.

  For a moment I was afraid I was going to have a panic attack.

  I glanced involuntarily towards the mirrored wall to my right.

  Who was listening?

  “Do we understand each other?” The woman repeated, sensing my momentary mental disintegration.

  I nodded.

  “Yes…”

  Chapter 4

  HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

  Eleanor, Duchess of Windsor, could not – try as she might – stop herself fussing around her husband. She had been fast asleep when the shots had been fired at the King and not known what all the excitement was about when the great ship had burst into life all around her. She had heard the news first from one of her junior ladies in waiting.

  Lady Jane Dreyer-Main was the middle daughter of one of her friends at St Johns College where she had spent three blissful years after escaping Cheltenham Ladies College in 1938. Going up to Oxford had delayed the awful day her parents – dear people but so old fashioned about these things – attempted to marry her off to some hopeless dunce of ‘a similar or slightly elevated social standing’, so they were not saddled with her upkeep for the rest of her days.

  But that was another story; that morning her lady in waiting, who was a new addition to the royal retinue and still feeling her feet in the role – basically, as her mistress’s appointment secretary, odd-job girl and her genteel gatekeeper – was flushed and very jumpy.

  “His Majesty was walking and somebody fired at him from the Long Island side of the bay…”

  Eleanor had not really been awake.

  “What…”

  “The King is all right! Oh, sorry, I should have said that first, I…”

  The older woman had ended up having to comfort the frightened girl. Eleanor quickly discovered that her husband’s only injury was a knock to the brow incurred in the excitement as his bodyguards carried him out of harm’s way; and that he was presently being attended to by the battleship’s surgeon.

  The telephone in her cabin rang. Lady Jane picked up. Apparently, HMS Lion’s Captain wanted to speak to her and put her mind at rest.

  “Thank you, that will not be necessary. I shall dress and go to my husband in due course.”

  No sooner had she put the phone down than Lady Jane blurted out that ‘one of the bodyguards was wounded!’

  Although, mercifully, not seriously.

  A bullet had grazed his right hip.

  ‘We,’ Bertie always insisted, ‘must be calm while all around us lose their heads, Ellie. That is our job. That is why we are the ones who live in the great palaces and are feted and acclaimed, and inevitably, sometimes abused, wherever we go.’

  ‘Rather like the boy left standing
on the burning deck,’ she would observe and they would smile, one to the other because in this as in so many things they were of one mind.

  Graceful as a swan outside; paddling like a lost duckling inside.

  Bertie had burned practically all his bridges marrying a virtual commoner such as she. She was a Spencer, once upon a time her family had infiltrated the dynastic lines of half of Europe; however, those days were history, mostly pre-1860s and her father had hardly had the wherewithal to keep the family’s Northamptonshire pile at Althorp standing by the time she met her future husband.

  Bertie had just refused a posting to the Royal Yacht at the time so he was in particularly bad odour with his father, who had been dead set on bringing him back into the regal fold. The upshot had been that Bertie found himself posted to the Hong Kong station for the next two years.

  To Eleanor that first encounter had been a pleasant evening; and their subsequent dinner in London about a month later, equally ‘fun’. Prince Albert had behaved with the utmost decorum, been charming, amusing and kissed her hand as they parted that evening.

  She had thought that was that until his first letter arrived.

  ‘Dear Miss Spencer,’ goodness, how sweetly formal that sounds now, ‘As I mentioned during our recent most convivial meetings it is my fate to be exiled to the East for a spell. Might I impose on you so as to make my time away more bearable?’

  They must have written each other two or three hundred letters over the course of the next twenty-six months. For her part she had refused to discuss or to disclose the substance of her correspondence to her father or mother, and especially not her sisters, all of whom were the most terrible gossips. During that period, she had also turned down two proposals of marriage, including one from a prosperous Virginia planter twice her age visiting England looking for a wife, his first having perished without issue of some local malady. Eleanor’s mother had put the man up to it.

  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 l
uncheon 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!

  Chapter 5

  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?”

  The woman thought about this.

  She sat back in her chair and glanced to Detective Inspector Danson who had been a mute witness – presumably an admiring bystander – as the young Redcap officer had verbally torn me to shreds in two minutes flat.

  “I am not a professional detective like Mr Danson,” Lieutenant Adams said. “I’m a psychological profiler. My job is not to catch traitors but to identify them. I characterise their patterns of behaviour. I give my superiors advice as to whom is dangerous, and whom is harmless. For example, the majority of your disloyal tendencies and resultant actions are harmless, with the notable exception of your well-practiced capacity to spin a tale, to contextualise an injustice whether real or false notwithstanding with equal persuasiveness. You are a man who might in another, less enlightened age, have spent most of his adult years incarcerated, or swung by the neck until dead at a sadly young age. In New Spain they might have burned you at the stake or crucified you, in Germany you would have been liquidated or sent to fight in one of the Kaiser’s interminable small wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Russia you would have died of frostbite in Siberia building a railway or working in a mine or suchlike. Fortunately, for you, you live in a civilised country whose leaders respect the rule of law. Even today, accused mostly out of your own mouth of sedition, and suspected of conspiracy to betray your Monarch, you may rely on due process. Inevitably,” she went on, as if she was a cat slowly drawing its claws across glass, “if the Empire is to continue to pursue this laissez faire attitude in cases such as yours, it must be well-informed. It must understand what it is up against. Clemency, mercy always had its price, Professor. I think that you are a very dangerous man.”