I stopped reading.
“From memory I think John Hancock the President of the Second Continental Congress was the last man to be hung.” I grimaced: “I think that was only because his was the biggest signature on the ‘heinous’ document.”
“Well,” Lieutenant Adams purred like a cat toying with a bird with a broken wing, “as any woman will tell you, Professor,” she went on smiling the sort of smile that made me want to wince, “size is very important.”
Chapter 6
East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island
Everybody had been on edge since the news of the shooting in the Upper Bay had come through. Whoever had taken aim at the King – over a mile away – as he walked on the quarterdeck of the battleship HMS Lion had been very good. The shooter had winged one of King George’s bodyguards as he bundled his monarch to the planking.
Sarah Fielding had raised an eyebrow when she was told that King George and Queen Eleanor planned to go ahead with the ‘planned itinerary’ regardless.
“They think the shooter probably used a long-barrelled Martini-Henry,” the grey-haired, heavy-set moustachioed man sitting beside her in the observation room reported, sotto voce.
“That’s a bit old-school,” she murmured distractedly.
“I don’t know,” her companion shrugged. “A real pro wouldn’t take on a shot that long but a re-chambered Martini Henry with a 0.303 barrel-liner is still a good sniping piece.”
The 0.50 calibre Mark II and Mark III had been standard British Army issue until the 1930s and retained by specialist units into the 1950s, mainly because of its reliability and its lightning fast trigger action. It was this latter trait which made the gun a favourite for hunters, and of course, snipers.
“They’re sending a float plane out to the Lion to collect the round they dug out of the deck. We should know more by tonight,” the man continued.
“I can’t believe today’s events are still going ahead?”
“The King and the Queen will be transported from the Lion to Wallabout Bay by one of the escorting destroyers. HMS Cassandra, I think they said. She’ll take the Royal Party across the East River when they’re done at the Admiralty Dockyard and take them back to the Lion this evening. If anybody blinks at the wrong time the whole fleet will probably open fire!”
Sarah sighed.
“You know that he knows we’re watching him, don’t you?” She put to the man she had first met as a teenage cadet.
“Oh yes,” he confirmed.
“Why are we watching him, sir?”
When the man said nothing she asked another, very pertinent question.
“What the fuck are those two clowns playing at?” This she asked waving at her husband’s two interrogators.
My husband…
Well, strictly speaking that was not true. Isaac was a registered agnostic so there could be no church wedding and as they had never gone to a lawyer and signed a marriage contract their ‘union’ was of the ‘common law’ variety. Her ‘legend’ had worked surprisingly well with a ‘partner’ so deeply embedded in the lazy, complacent ways of academia. These days you had to work hard for a fellowship, literally do the hard miles and hope something turned up at one of the colleges one was ‘associated with’; it meant living away from home for weeks at a stretch, and sometimes working ‘out of colony’. Few husbands would put up with that sort of life but then Isaac was not the possessive sort and she had told him that she did not plan on having any children. Their ‘marriage’ would, therefore, be one of mutual convenience and basically, he got to sleep with a woman half his age now and then: what middle-aged man was going to turn down a deal like that?
Sarah still thought the whole thing had been a complete waste of time. Leastways, for her personally although not professionally because six months ago she had been promoted to probationary Captain in the New England Security Service.
Isaac Fielding had first been arrested in 1939; in those days nobody called student activism ‘sedition’. He was active in student politics, involved in any number of protest marches and demonstrations. During that era all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven were liable to be randomly ‘drafted’ into the Colonial Militias for service in the Alta California-Nuevo Mexico Border War; there was a lot of bad feeling about both ‘the Draft’ and the fact that the sons of politicians, rich merchants and whose families had friends in high places could, and often did, gain draft exemptions and or purchase ‘substitutes’ so that their sons were kept well out of harm’s way.
The suspension of the draft between 1943 and 1955 had undermined the Sons of Liberty and ushered in a period of happy stasis across the college and university campuses of the East Coast and knocked all that stupid talk about a developing youth counter-culture on the head. Oddly the re-introduction of the draft, or as it was properly termed the ‘Colonial Service Obligation’ in 1955 had not been the trigger for renewed civil unrest many had feared. Possibly, because so many of the subversive mainstays of the still-born ‘counter culture’ had withered on the vine in the previous decade.
Nobody like ‘the draft’ but most people accepted it was a necessary evil if the boundaries of the colonies were to be protected. Leastways, that was the way most patriots felt about it!
Back in 1939 Isaac Fielding had torn up his draft documents and thrown them on a bonfire outside the Governor’s mansion in Albany. Strictly speaking, as he was still in the second year of his degree course at college in Buffalo he was de facto ‘exempted from militia service’ at the time, having only been issued with his ‘draft card’ in error. Nonetheless, he was hauled up before magistrates, found guilty of disorderly conduct and defacing official documentation and given a six-month suspended prison sentence.
Later he was listed in Colonial Security Service files as a member of the New York Sons of Liberty, an anarchistic group whose name harked back to a secret society formed in the founding First Thirteen colonies in 1765 to fight taxation designed to pay for the then 10,000-man imperial garrison of New England. Its motto had been ‘no taxation without representation’, a colonial grievance not remedied until the early nineteenth century. The initial incarnation of the Sons of Liberty had faded away after the supposedly pernicious Stamp Act was repealed by the British Parliament in 1766, however, ‘Sons of Liberty’ had become, over the years a generic rallying call for misfits and malcontents who blamed the old country for all their own colony’s woes.
Frustratingly, although the security services had long suspected that the Sons of Liberty – certainly in the East – had had a guiding hand, either a council or a single leader, it had proven impossible to penetrate the organisation’s high command. The SOL more closely represented some kind of cellular free-masonry than the guerrilla or insurgent movements encountered elsewhere in the Empire; uncover one cell, or two or three and it made no difference, always, the trail ended where it had started. It was like chasing shadows. For all that it was an article of faith within the upper echelons of the colonial administration in New England that the Sons of Liberty was just the tip of a widespread conspiracy embedded in the very fabric of the American colonies; problematically, back in England they probably still believed the ‘bumpkins across the other side of the pond’ were crying wolf.
Sarah had assumed that Isaac must have discovered that she was a CSS plant by now. He would have kept her close. The first rule of politics, life, war, anything was: ‘keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.’