Two Hundred Lost Years Read online

  Henrietta was tempted to bask awhile in the quiet pleasure this remark gave her; she resisted the temptation.

  “There’s something else,” she warned her father, conflicted because she was fighting the urge to fling her arms around the poor, misunderstood man. If only all those loud-mouthed idiots in the First Thirteen knew him for the wise and honourable man and loving father she had always known. Suddenly, there was a warning note in her tone. “Sir Henry will be really angry I’ve brought this up.”

  The Governor of New England, within hours of getting ‘home’ to Virginia grimaced stoically as he reflected, as he often did, that the thing about a – more than averagely eventful - career in the military was that it gave a man a salutary perspective on all the things which could go wrong and a practical training in how to deal with real, not imagined, adversity.

  His eyes narrowed as his daughter put down her tea cup and rose to her feet. She stepped over to the side of his broad, marvellously uncluttered mahogany pro-consul’s desk and retrieved something from the voluminous shoulder bag she invariably carried with her through life.

  She placed a slim, brand new paperback book on the table between them. The cover was a coloured woodcut print of a fleet of sailing ships disembarking countless red-coated soldiers into boats which were rowing ashore in their imperious lines.

  He read the title.

  Two Hundred Lost Years.

  The name of the troublesome polemic’s author was boldly displayed. Much in the fashion of a red rag to a bull.

  Isaac Fielding.

  When her father made no attempt to pick up the book, Henrietta took a deep breath and girded her courage.

  “This was printed outside the First Thirteen. It was one of a consignment of three thousand confiscated by the police in Philadelphia last week. I’d be incredibly surprised if half the homes on the East Coast did not have access to a copy of this book by now. If it was legally available for sale it would have been at the top of the bestselling book lists for the last two or three weeks!”

  Her father seemed sanguine.

  “Oh. You knew already?” She asked, scrunching her fading freckles.

  The Governor of New England nodded solemnly.

  “Yes. The book is openly on sale in London. Over there it is not regarded as seditious.” He groaned. “The next thing that will happen is that the colonial administrations will be sued for restraint of trade by London publishers if we continue to embargo and or seize consignments of the blasted book printed in England.”

  Henrietta was relieved and worried at the same time.

  “Something really has to be done about those idiots in Albany, daddy!”

  Chapter 5

  Friday 24th June

  Fort Crailo Prison, Crown Colony of New York

  There was the normal rigmarole before I was escorted from my first-floor cell cuffed to a prison guard who always seemed to be built like a flabby brick shithouse. While I had never been convinced that I was an enemy of the people my jailors were at pains to make sure that I knew that they – to a man - considered me to be public enemy number one.

  We plodded along the corridor to the stairs and carried on down until we reached the basement level. Beneath ground it was cool, and the constant rumbling of the steel, dyestuff and logging mills which had turned the eastern bank of the Hudson River into an industrial wilderness opposite the still elegant, colonial city on the opposite shore, hardly impinged upon one’s consciousness. Nobody had said it but I had assumed from day one that the mirror at the end of each of the two fifteen feet by ten feet subterranean interview rooms was a two-way window, and that every word uttered and every nuance of my body language was being recorded with state-of-the-art equipment.

  ‘Tom Morris’ was standing as still and unbending as an aging pine tree in the forests of the Iroquois Confederacy with his back to the door of Interview Room 1. He was staring, unblinkingly at the mirror and therefore, also at the invisible observers in the small adjoining compartment who at that moment were, most likely, already filming.

  My shackles were released and my bovine minder shut the door at my back. There was a metal table in the middle of the room; bolted to the floor and today, two hard chairs. Overhead, a battery of fluorescent tubes cast a stark, unforgiving light on the scene.

  “Tom Morris?” I chuckled.

  My old friend turned and smiled.

  He looked a little odd in a Navy blue ‘English’ three-piece suit – jacket, pants and waistcoat – of the type one might expect to adorn one’s bank manager. There were more grey streaks in his long once black hair than I remembered, which today was tied back in a ‘respectable’ pig tail. He was a man of about my height but unlike me still fit, vital and leanly muscled.

  In a moment we embraced.

  Physical contact between visitors and ‘guests’ of the Crailo establishment was strictly forbidden but we both knew that this afternoon the Colonial Security Service was preoccupied with listening in on our conversation rather than rigidly applying the letter of the Fort’s mean-spirited regime.

  “It is good to see you again, brother,” I muttered, a little choked up.

  “And you, too, my old friend,” Tsiokwaris echoed, holding me away at arm’s length to study me. “You are well?” He asked, clearly relieved to find me in relatively rude good health.

  “I’m getting by,” I shrugged, knowing my oldest friend in the world would read a hundred things into this without my having to say another word on the subject. My gaze flicked past his shoulder at the mirror at his back, and then, imperceptibly to the corners of the room,

  Black Raven, Tsiokwaris in Kanien'keháka, the language of the Mohawk nation, nodded. The elder of the Iroquois of the Upper Mohawk Valley sighed.

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “if you recollect sufficient of the old tongue we should talk in Kanien'keháka?”

  I nodded.

  Tsiokwaris had been a young blood when we first met. In those days I was a post-graduate student scoping out a possible history of the Iroquois Confederacy blundering about in Mohawk country like an idiot, really. Rightly, the native Indians whom I encountered at the time regarded me with great suspicion and I suspect, no little contempt. In retrospect, the one thing I had in my favour in those days was that I was a clueless backwoodsman. That, and the fact that both I and Rachel, my late wife, both wanted to learn to speak Kanien'keháka. Later, we tried to get the kids interested in the language but Abe was the only one who ever became truly fluent…

  My old friend must have glimpsed the pain in my eyes, read some of my thoughts. He placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “You should know,” he said speaking very slowly in Mohawk, knowing from past experience that it took me a little while to get my ‘ear in’; I had not spoken or heard Mohawk in over a year, “that your son, whom among our people is called Abraham the healer and my daughter Tekonwenaharake were blessed with a son two months ago. They have named him for you in your tongue; and Kariwase in our shared tongue.”

  I thought I was going to fall over.

  Not only was Abe alive but I was a grandfather again!

  “Kariwase,” I blurted.

  “It means ‘a new way of doing things’ in Kanien'keháka.”

  My mind was spinning and for several seconds I was incapable of forming words in English let alone the fiendishly counter intuitive – to me at least although Rachel, bless her, had taken to Mohawk like a duck to water - Kanien'keháka.

  Tsiokwaris’s youngest daughter, Tekonwenaharake, a brown-eyed twinkling-eyed force of nature who had had Abe in the palm of her hand since they were teenagers, had always been ‘Kate’. Tekonwenaharake translated, some said, to ‘her voice travels through the wind’.

  “They?” I mouthed haplessly.

  “They were married in the way of ‘the people’ four summers ago, my old friend,” I was informed, a little apologetically.

  I must have stared like an idiot.

  My old friend grimaced wit
h mental pain.

  “They were married before the world at the time of the atrocities last year,” Tsiokwaris went on. “At first under the rites of my people, and later, in Canada in a white man’s church.”

  A tsunami of relief washed over me.

  I must have been grinning like an idiot.

  “Abe had…”

  Tsiokwaris shook his head.

  “Your son, our son now, had nothing to do with that bad medicine last year.” He held up a hand to forestall questions, sensing that the prison authorities, frustrated that they could make no sense of the conversation might burst into the room at any moment. “Also, he is convinced that your first born, Alexander, had no knowledge of what others planned that day.”

  I too was suddenly aware of the urgency of the situation.

  We had so little time.

  “We still track the Hunter,” Tsiokwaris murmured elliptically.

  “Still…” I forgot myself for a split second, speaking in English. “I thought…”

  “You have been out of circulation a long time. It is a long story.”

  I was an idiot; I had forgotten who I was for a moment.

  That was unforgivable.

  And stupid.

  No fool like an old fool.

  I remembered myself: “Tell me about our son and daughter, old friend?”

  “They are safe. They are beyond the reach of the colonial authorities in the North...”

  The interview room door banged open and moments later Tsiokwaris and I were at the bottom of a scrum of sweating, swearing and very red-faced prison guards.

  I felt something crack and would have cried out had somebody’s knee – or elbow, it was not easy to tell when one was at the bottom of a heap of bodies – knocked me senseless. I must have blacked out momentarily because by the time I came around they were dragging Tsiokwaris out of the room.

  Abe was alive…

  I was a grandfather again…

  And the English must know by now that Alex had had nothing to do with the Empire Day outrage…

  But why was the Hunter still in New England?

  Chapter 6

  Friday 24th June

  Clinton Avenue Police Station, Albany

  It was not until Leonora Coolidge had attempted to throw the first balloon filled with a cocktail of diluted Butter Acid and purple dye that she realised that the others might have had a valid point when they had cautioned her that ‘it looks a lot easier than it probably is in practice’.

  The jostling of the crowd, the infectious febrile temper of the moment and the fact that the police had pushed her little group of protesters to the opposite side of Clinton Avenue, a thoroughfare which was significantly broader than it first looked when one was attempting to lob a two-pound wobbling missile at a moving target on the opposite side, had combined to largely thwart her latest masterplan.

  Or that at least, was what she had feared in the immediate aftermath of the affair. Only one of the ‘Butter Bombs’ had so much as splashed the Chief Magistrate’s official car, most of the rest had exploded on contact with several now mightily aggrieved, and extremely smelly uniformed policemen and women, and upon the heads and shoulders of several of Leonora’s fellow troublemakers.

  She had honestly not had the remotest idea exactly how savagely noxious Butter Acid was until she was covered in the foul stuff. After, that was, she had stopped retching and she had had a couple of hours to think about it.

  Now, the holding cell at the Clinton Avenue Police Station, conveniently located adjacent to the Office of the Chief Magistrate of the Crown Colony of New York reeked, overpoweringly despite the installation of half-a-dozen big propeller fans operating at full blast, of the most acrid, pungent, nasty vomit one could conceivably imagine. In fact, the whole station now smelled like a giant, over-flowing sick bucket.

  “Well, I did point out to you that the average human nose can detect distilled Butter Acid in concentrations above ten parts per million,” Maude Daventry-Jones, gently reminded Leonora as they sat on the hard bench trying not to make eye contacts with any of the other, ‘normal’ customers of the station.

  Where Leonora was tall, willowy and blond Maude – a chemistry graduate – was barely five feet in her heels and pertly plump. Although Maude’s father was a libertarian member of the Colonial Legislative Council and her mother had been a noted campaigner for women’s rights in her youth, Leonora had always regarded the senior Daventry-Joneses as airheads. Notwithstanding, she had always got on swimmingly with Maude, although not Joan, her older sister who was something of a stick in the mud, who had never made any bones about the fact she viewed Leonora as a wanton woman.

  “Do you think the dye will wash out of our hair?” Leonora asked, dreading looking at herself in a mirror.

  “Oh, eventually,” Maude speculated.

  “Next time we’ll do a little more research,” her friend decided. “I wonder what they did with the others?”

  “They must have got away.”

  “I hope so.”

  The two women lapsed into silence.

  Leonora had spent over two months locked up in solitary confinement at Massapequa Prison for Women – a most unpleasant little ‘hotel’ with abysmal standards of service and hygiene, not to mention a most unconvivial clientele – after she got out of hospital last July. Subsequently, notwithstanding the absence of any evidence that she was in any way actually ‘treacherous’ the authorities had had the bare-faced gall to try to prosecute her for ‘participating in an illegal flight’!

  Talk about adding insult to injury!

  That had been bad enough but when she belatedly discovered they were trying to hang, and probably draw and quarter, the man who had been at the controls of the said aircraft which had conveyed her on that ‘illegal flight’ for attempted Regicide, well, that was the absolute limit!

  Leonora wanted compensation, an apology at least, for the treatment meted out to her and the gratuitous lasting stain upon her name inherent in having been locked away in that disgusting ‘toilet’ at Massapequa for sixty-two interminable days.

  Most of all she wanted justice for Alexander Fielding.

  It was the first time in her life that she had had ‘a cause’ and it was a truly heady thing!

  Had she sat down and thought about it she might have realised that she was no longer the person she had been before Empire Day last year. That there was purpose to her life; that she was no longer the lost soul drifting from one doomed relationship to another frequently too drunk to care. She hardly saw any of her old friends; many of whom avoided her like the plague. She did not miss her old set, the parties, that glamourous, pointless life she had imagined was so perfect right up until the moment she had climbed, with mounting trepidation into that string bag of a canvass and wooden aircraft last year.

  She had been terrified, fascinated, and intensely alive that day…

  And at the root of it all was Alex Fielding…

  She was absolutely convinced that the former barnstorming aviator who was – for goodness sake - a bone fide fighter ace from the Border Wars was anything but the traitor the Colonial Security Service, the police and the press wanted everybody to believe he was.

  Her recollection of the events of Empire Day last year was that he had chased and was in the process of attempting to do damage to that aircraft which had eventually crashed into HMS Lion; moreover, he, they, might have succeeded if the battleship’s guns had not chopped off one of their flimsy biplane’s wings at the critical moment.

  She had tried to get her side of the story across: discovered that none of the popular daily papers wanted to upset the authorities and anyway, they regarded her as a poor little rich girl with a score to settle who belonged on the society and gossip pages not the ‘serious’ end of their publications.

  Protestations to members of the New York Legislative Council had drawn a blank. Even Maude’s father had been lukewarm about defending ‘traitors’. The final straw –
well, two straws – had been the refusal of the Governor of Crailo Fort Prison to allow her to visit Alexander Fielding, and the letter she had received shortly thereafter from the Office of the Chief Magistrate of New York, warning her that her public pronouncements risked ‘overstepping the line between legitimate free speech and contempt of ongoing court proceedings’.

  In other words, stop being a nuisance or enjoy the comforts of Massapequa anew.

  Whatever…

  Playing nicely had not worked, so, now she was committed to direct action. Moreover, it had turned out she was not the only woman in the twin colony who knew somebody who had been falsely swept up in the CSS dragnet last summer. A lot of people had lost jobs, been bankrupted by legal fees, others had simply disappeared for weeks on end causing unconscionable worry and alarm to their families and friends. Basically, Leonora had found out that in many respects, she had got off lightly.

  If, that was, one discounted being treated like a pariah for no good reason and having what amounted to a ‘not proven’ stigma hanging over her head. She had allegedly been on one of the ‘terrorist aircraft’; it was guilt by association. Either she ought to have known better or she was a simplistic innocent dupe. Heads she lost, tails the authorities won and it was not good enough!

  All that week she and a growing band of mostly, female, protesters had been picketing senior police officers’ homes, waving placards and chanting in Clinton Avenue and suddenly, hey presto, the media was paying attention.

  Leonora did not care overmuch to be referred to as ‘the socialite’ daughter and heiress to the fortune of the land-owner, hotelier and banker Sir Max Coolidge – and neither in this context, did daddy who had already been obliged to shed a slew of lucrative directorships on account of the unreasoning disapprobation of stockholders whom he had never let down in all his years in business - but if it helped get her onto the front pages of the papers and mentioned in the first two to three minutes of prime-time radio and TV news broadcasts then she could live with it.