New England 11 - Rising Sun, page 33
“Skulking away in the Inland Sea?” The carrier’s captain speculated. “The trouble is,” he went on, “if we got the intelligence ‘big picture’ so wrong in this part of the world; what else must we, by extension, be getting wrong elsewhere?”
“Yes,” Patzig-Green concurred, “that’s what’s worrying me, too.”
Chapter 44
Wednesday 4th July
Fort George
Manhattan
Crown Colony of New York
The invitation to attend the third anniversary Memorial Service for the victims of the Empire Day outrages of July 1976 had been addressed to Colonel P.D.E. Nash, followed by nearly a whole line of capital letters and dots detailing his various awards for gallantry and his long and thoroughly meritorious service.
Melody had finally put her foot down, demanding that he finally explain what all the ‘capitalised vowels, stray consonants and dots’ stood for and reluctantly, with characteristic reticence her husband had humoured her.
It seemed that she had married an even bigger hero than she thought!
Afterwards, she regretted bullying him into sharing his secrets. It had been a mistake of sorts, she could tell – and ought to have known – that he took little or no pleasure, still less, satisfaction from the medals and commendations, mentions in despatches and the rest of it. Each medal ribbon reminded him of dead and maimed friends, and of people he had led into harm’s way who had never come back.
And she had made him relive it all.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had said simply.
He had quirked a smile.
‘If anything had happened to you or Henrietta in Spain,’ he shrugged, ‘or if I’d had to do what I had to do to keep you out of the hands of the Inquisition, I’d have cut my own throat after I’d submitted my report to the powers that be,’ he added quietly.
Melody had planted herself on his lap and melded into his arms.
‘Did I remember to tell you how much I like this marriage thing?’ She had inquired, hearing Lizzie beginning to gribble in the near distance and just knowing, as mothers do, that Pedro was about to demand attention too.
Any minute now.
‘I think you did,’ he had smiled. ‘Does it count if we’re in bed at the time you say it?’
‘Sometimes,’ she had giggled, ‘but we’re not in bed now and I really, really could get used to this marriage deal!’
They kissed and but for Lizzie’s squealing they would have gone on kissing for a long, long time…
Melody had not realised that they and their children would be allotted prime seats in the main reviewing stand, three rows back but elevated and in full view of everybody almost but not quite behind the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England. She felt like she was in touching distance when the great man got to his feet to make his keynote speech to the crowd, conservatively estimated to be in excess of some fifty thousand people gathered in the park next to the old, reconstructed – to stop it falling down - tourist attraction.
More to the point, she and her new family would be in the frame of every picture beamed across New England by television, and similarly, in sharp focus in any number of photographs in tomorrow’s papers.
‘Oh, shit, is this where I get rehabilitated?’ Melody had hissed in askance in her husband’s ear.
‘Your guess is as good as mine but it’s probably a good sign that nobody’s tried to arrest either of us since Lord Washington’s been living in Williamsburg.”
This was true, although Melody was well aware the work she had been doing pro bono work for the Brooklyn Heights Battered Women’s Refuge, its sister organisation in Elizabeth Town, and advocacy for clients fighting to break down the Colonial Health Service’s historic disinclination to provide information to women whose – possibly botched – treatment might have been the cause of avoidable, life-changing harm to them or their children, had done nothing whatsoever to endear her to the managers of the CHS in New York in the last six weeks. However, not even the local constabularies, social services councils or the CHS could accuse her of sedition for just asking them to do their jobs properly and to obey the relevant statutes in respect of the ownership of medical records. Whatever, the legal representatives of the aforementioned publicly-funded bodies thought about it!
She had not gone out looking for the ‘work’, it had come to her; supposedly because Maud Stanton had given one of her ‘activist chums’ Melody’s telephone number, soon after that the ‘Refuge’ and the ‘Clients’ Right’s’ campaigners had come knocking on her door and well, she had thought…what harm could it do?
Melody had tried to operate softly, softly at first, gently easing herself back into legal work but soon discovered that no ‘respectable’ law partnership in the twin colony would even consider taking her on as an intern, the normal way ‘returnees’ to the profession got their feet back under the table; so, she had been doing what she always did when she encountered a brick wall or a glass ceiling, she had started looking for another way to ‘be useful’ while she waited for the authorities in Albany to re-admit her to the Colony’s Bar, her membership having lapsed over five years ago.
And then Maud Stantons ‘friends’ had come calling; the same friend that she and Leonora Coolidge had got to know in their fight to clear the name of the Fielding brothers and generally make life difficult for the dolts running the twin colony’s judiciary; women who like Melody, tended not to take ‘no’ as anything other than a provision negotiating position!
Of course, by then Melody was starting to get frustrated by the limitations of a gently, gently modus vivendi, and had soon begun to revert to type and as anybody who knew her could attest, she could be very, very pushy when she wanted to be and not the least inclined to take ‘no’ for an answer. Whatever else her work for the ‘good causes’ which had recruited here had shot her good intentions, vis-à-vis keeping a low profile out of the water in no time and…now she was where she was!
Being a private citizen was not an option.
She had bearded the editors of newspapers on their doorsteps, pestered the local radio stations and in no time at all, got herself onto TV. The Empire Broadcasting Service would not touch her with a very long bargepole; okay, they had blacklisted her. No matter, that just made her even more attractive to the independent broadcasters in New Jersey, New York and on Long Island who wanted her on their screens even if they were lukewarm about highlighting the iniquities suffered by her exclusively female clients. So, her time as a ‘private’ citizen in Manhattan had been short-lived…
In the days leading up to the Memorial Service, Melody had toyed with the idea of leaving the little ones with Maud Stanton; her friend hated these public ‘circuses’ and besides, Albert would be working all day so she would be left, literally holding the baby fending for herself among the glitterati of the First Thirteen, the majority of whom she regarded with poorly-veiled contempt. As, of course, did Melody. But in the end she had listened to her husband’s wise counsel.
‘If we go, we go as a family,’ he had declared, leaving the decision to her. ‘Most of the people out there don’t really know you, us at all which is why some of them still probably believe all that tosh the Governor’s Office put out about you last year. Let them see you with Pedro and Lizzie, and anyway, I’ll be there so nobody will even think of trying to score points while I’m in earshot.’
Yes, there was a lot to be said to being married to a man anybody who was anybody knew could kill them with his bare hands in the blink of an eye!
In the end the biggest problem had been finding a hat.
Maud had come to her rescue, loaned her one of her creations; serendipitously, unlike Melody, her friend was a ‘hat person’.
‘What you need is something simple and tasteful to keep the sun out of your eyes and that you can take off without ruining your hair when you go to the ladies room,’ Maud, ever practical, had mandated.
Even better, the creation – straight from a French couture designer’s studio – had a grey-pink tint that matched the colour themes of one of her favourite summer frocks. This latter was an off the peg number but it looked ‘expensive’ enough for the occasion, as did her strappy cork sandals with half a heel, her one purchase made specifically for the day.
Relieved that other mothers had brought infants, it was supposed to be ‘a memorial for the people’, after all, Melody relaxed, hoping the Governor would not talk too long so she could find a place where, in the nature of things, she could change and feed her daughter sometime in the next hour or so. She was surprised, and pleased to see the Governor’s own daughter, Constance, rocking her new little one, Martha Dandridge Washington, seated beside her mother in the front row.
Lord Washington was attired in a lightweight suit, something neatly tailored to fit his broad shoulders that emphasised his lean, angular build. This Governor of the Commonwealth was no fat cat and the moment he opened his mouth, he did nothing to mask the southern drawl he had acquired in his years in Texas. Tellingly, his wife and daughter had dressed stylishly but like Melody, almost certainly with local ‘shop bought’ dresses.
On his inauguration George Washington had promised to be a ‘Governor of the people, for the people; my people, and all the peoples of New England. I plan to be colour blind; a person’s beliefs are their own, they own their history and I will only ever judge a person by their actions, not what they think. I am here to defend, not to proscribe the freedoms of the peoples of New England…’
Insofar as Melody could tell, he had been as good as his word although in the wake of the War with the Triple Alliance and the new war in the Pacific, these were not exactly ordinary times which was probably why the raft of Commonwealth-wide tax increases he was overseeing had not yet caused riots on the streets.
The Governor stepped up to the microphones.
Those behind him, and too far away to see much of anything, automatically looked to the big screens set up all around the park. Those screens were another, previously barely imagined boon of the galloping technological revolution financed – money no object – by successive Imperial administrations in the old country. Dozens of ‘flat’ screens, each incorporating something called light-emitting diode generators, linked to a central ‘brain’ converted the image on one screen across the whole ‘visible array’, or something… Maybe, Paul was right when he said the biggest technological shift was going to from a world in which most people understood something about how the machines around them worked to one in which most people knew virtually…nothing.
Melody could see herself…
Fortunately, she had learned some time ago that a TV camera always made it look as if one was at least one dress size plumper than one actually was.
Lord Washington paused, turning to raise an arm in acknowledgement to the selected dignitaries and guests seated in the tiered rows behind him.
Then he got down to business.
“Three years ago,” he began, his voice ringing with authority, paternal and patient, no longer the tone of a man the papers of the middle and southern First Thirteen colonies had unfairly accused of feeling his way, ‘groping’ into his vice-regal role in the early days of his administration. “New England was, it seemed at peace but tragically, that was an illusion that was to touch and change forever the life of an old Texas rancher who honestly believed, that the great challenges of his life were behind him. Oh, how little we know!”
Lord Washington’s investiture had been something of a rude shock to the planter grandees and the captains of industry of the East who had, certainly early in Lord De L’Isle’s tenure, been hand in glove, some said ‘as thick as thieves’ with the man in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg. Then there had been ‘northern’ suspicion of a man so intrinsically of the ‘south’. On top of this, men and women in the street, the so-called silent majority, accustomed to the patrician ways of Washington’s predecessors had honestly not really known what to make of the new man. True, New Englanders were proud that one of their own was sitting in Government House; but others were uneasy that this break from tradition might bode an end to the old certainties, inflaming old enmities in a society already shaken out of its comfortable ways by one war and the shock of the Philadelphia bombings, now wondering how the great naval battles in the Pacific might eventually reverberate through the staid fabric of the two century-old New England constitutional…fudge. As always, it was the frisson of uncertainty, a feeling that change was in the air that most New Englanders found so unsettling.
Melody’s impression was that Lord Washington was threatening to be a much-needed breath of fresh air; but then she was firmly seated in the camp that was convinced, and had been for years, that the First Thirteen needed a damned good shaking up!
Her husband touched her knee and she looked to him.
He smiled that smile of his, the one that said ‘everything is fine in the world’, and she nodded, her own expression a little tight-lipped. Not least because her stomach had been upset again that morning. He had suspected it was something she must have eaten over the weekend; but that did not really work because Paul had been okay and Pedro – who seemed to have the constitution of a small horse – had been likewise unaffected. Perhaps, she had caught a sniffle or a bug at one of the meetings she had attended in New Jersey or on Long Island, or on that visit to Manhattan Central to support a client? Maud had mentioned that there was some kind of mild summer influenza going around. Anyway, she had been sick again that morning, twice before she had started to feel like a human being again.
‘It is nothing!’ She had snapped at Paul at breakfast for the heinous sin of worrying about her. ‘Just nerves,’ she had apologised. ‘Big crowds, that sort of thing. And being in the same place with all those people who wanted to lock me up and throw away the key last year!’
‘Actually,’ he had reminded her, ‘I imagine most of them still want to lock you up and throw away the key, my love.’
Anyway, Melody’s stomach had quietened in good time and while they had waited patiently for the arrival of the Governor, one passing bout of mild queasiness apart, she had enjoyed the warmth of the sun and oddly, the very fact of being so visible in public with her family. Lately, her world had suddenly become a saner, safer place to live in and at some stage, she hoped she would resign herself to being happy.
The Governor was settling into his work.
“We remember the dead, the victims who are no longer with us and those who bravely, live with their injuries and scars. We condemn the evil-doers and their collaborators, both here in New England, in the Caribbean and the Americas, and of course, the true architects of the outrages which struck this city on Empire Day 1976, and we are now discovering, other calumnies leading up to the events in Philadelphia in December, the handiwork of dark agents of Old Spain. We remember the fallen, we salute them and,” George Washington’s gaze ranged across the crowd in the park, “promise them that they will not be forgotten.”
Melody could tell that the Governor had no intention of droning through the normal, quasi-religious rites of memorialisation, that today he planned to use this event for something else.
“You all lost friends and relatives, as I have in the recent war in the Gulf of Spain, and in Philadelphia. My first reaction was anger, to lash out. But that is what our enemies want. We are better than that. That is why I refuse to lock up law-abiding New Englanders, or anybody else, on no better grounds than that they or their ancestors hail from a Hispanic background, or because of the colour of their skin, the character of their beliefs or simply because certain great men of these colonies believe that they have the right to demand that other citizens should be locked up. We are better than that; you, the people of New Jersey, New York and Long Island proved that on that fateful day in July three years ago. You did not panic, you did not flee for the hills, you stood up to tyranny, you stood firm, and even as the smoke was still clearing over the Upper Bay, you picked up the pieces, consoled the bereaved, cared for the injured and the next day, you got on with your lives.”
Maud Stanton had mentioned that there had been some talk of Albert ‘consulting’ with a speech-writer on the Governor’s Staff. Her husband had not been overly enthusiastic about entertaining the idea; however, Melody thought she was hearing a little of her friend’s prose, certainly its cadence, pace and tenor, in the Governor’s address.
“Of course,” Washington continued, “for many among us today, the drama of 4th July 1976 was the beginning, not the end of their stories.”
Melody had a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Oh, no, please don’t throw up again…
“The mendacity of the regime in Old Spain has much to answer for. I will leave it to historians to detail Madrid’s malevolent part in fomenting the War with the Triple Alliance, but I think it is high time that the truth about its crimes against one among us today, are laid bare.”
Melody wanted to hide under her chair.
No, no, don’t do this…
The Governor of New England had half turned and was looking straight at her.
This is what a rabbit transfixed in the glare of the headlamps of an oncoming juggernaut must feel like!
“My former aide and adviser, Misses Melody Nash nee Danson, for many years a respected detective in these parts, not only exposed the truth about the 1976 atrocities and in the process averted a monstrous injustice against three innocent men but subsequently, volunteered to take part in a perilous mission to Old Spain, from which she and my esteemed predecessor, Lord De L’Isle’s daughter barely escaped with their lives. Later, agents of Old Spain plotted to frame her for crimes of which she was wholly innocent, and then these colonies summarily imprisoned her while those plotting the mass murder of our Philadelphian brothers and sisters were allowed to go about their heinous business uninterrupted.”
