Judging by Abe’s attitude – not unpleasant but distant – towards her he had probably realised, or Isaac had tipped him off, that she was not what she seemed relatively early on. Abe would have kept away from her once he suspected he was under surveillance.
Isaac had no doubt believed it was all about his son’s little squaw up north; the respectable folks down in King’s County had no truck with Indian girls and although the ordinances about the free movement of former slaves had been promulgated over a hundred and fifty years ago most blacks knew better than to move into the respectable middle-class settlements of ‘the Island’.
Abe had been weird about that; as if he honestly believed there was something wrong with segregation and the ethnic purity requirement for colonial civil service and local authority jobs. Heck, even Isaac had tried to talk to him about the damage just being seen with a Mohawk girl in Albany was doing to his future prospects. Everybody understood a boy sometimes went with a native or a black harlot, that was usually accepted provided he did not brag about it in polite company.
But marriage…
“He’s good,” the man at her side grunted. “You’ve got to wonder what sort of a man can keep the sort of secrets he must have in his head from his own wife?”
Sarah felt the heat rise in her face, she turned bristling in offence.
Colonel Matthew Harrison raised a hand in apology.
“Don’t you start getting het up at me Sarah Arnold, I didn’t mean anything by that and you ought to know that by now.” He had had reservations, a lot of them, about recruiting his goddaughter into the service. Truth be told there were moments he still felt a little guilty about it. That said, Sarah had taken to the work like a duck to water. She was a natural, sometimes he swore she could change her colours, chameleon-like, at the drop of a hat. “Just you remember I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a chipmunk!”
She was still frowning at him.
The old man tried to be emollient.
“Isaac Fielding has fooled everybody for thirty years, indoctrinated his kids so well they see a CSS agent coming a mile away. You stuck at it, how were we to know the man doesn’t even talk in his sleep?”
Sarah’s frown faded.
“I still don’t get what they’re,” she waved at the window, “trying to achieve, Colonel?”
“If Isaac Fielding was going to give himself away he’d have done it by now. So, what do you think they’re doing?”
“That book you mean?”
The old man nodded, ran his right forefinger across his moustache.
Recognition dawned in Sarah’s face.
“Get him to read enough of it and then we can splice the tape any which way into a confession?”
“Yeah, if need be.”
Chapter 7
Leppe Island, Montgomery County, New York
They had first come to the island in the middle of the Mohawk River south of the ruined settlement of Fort Johnson as seven-year old kids with their parents but not returned again until last summer. In the fourteen-year interval nothing had changed except, maybe, them and the world they now saw around them.
Kate had met him when he jumped down from the train yesterday morning – almost bent double under the two big sea bags he had brought from Albany – at the old deserted logging halt at Amsterdam. Even this close to the Colony’s capital, Albany – little more than thirty miles as the crow might fly – the countryside was still verdant, much of it first growth, forested wilderness and he had probably been the first passenger to disembark at Amsterdam, a ghost town ever since logging and mining rights in this part of Montgomery County were returned to the Iroquois Nation twenty years ago, for several weeks. There were a lot of folk in Albany who still hated that even though, election after election, they voted the same racist Christian fundamentalists back onto the Colony’s Legislative Council who had mandated ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, as the more extreme Lutheran sects insisted on calling the policy.
The tribes of the Iroquois Nation – nobody used the word ‘confederacy’ these days because that was a pejorative white man’s classification – did not care for the reasons why. Cultural and economic detachment from the colonists, who were still viewed after hundreds of years as little better than opportunistic interlopers in the Nation’s ancestral hunting grounds, had suited the peoples of the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora tribes ‘just dandy’, enabling local chiefs and councils of elders to preserve the old ways, and to police and guard their own lands. Of course, young people exposed to the temptations of the colonial world outside the tribal lands by radio and television, dreaming of a life not dominated by the apparent tedium of the traditional hunter-gathering lifestyle, wanting to enjoy and experience all the benefits – no matter how illusory – of modern industrial and urban society, still drifted to the towns and cities of the south, or crossed the St Lawrence River into the northern lands where native Americans lived in relative harmony side by side with the European occupiers.
Kate had looked at the bags and frowned her ‘all men are idiots’ smile before she threw her arms around Abraham Lincoln Fielding’s neck.
‘If we put all that stuff in the canoe it will sink!’
This she declared breathlessly when, eventually, they got past the excitement of seeing each other again for the first time since Easter. That was when they had hatched their ‘Empire Day weekend plan’.
‘We’ll have to make two trips,’ Abe shrugged.
They had forgotten something.
He bent his face down to hers and they rubbed noses; just like the way they had, innocently as kids for all those years before they discovered that growing up, especially puberty, had a lot to be said for it.
Presently, they kissed.
Unhurriedly, breathlessly.
In Albany dating a Mohawk girl was well, impossible. Most of the whites automatically assumed a woman with a dusky skin was a prostitute or a maid, after dark a male member of the nation was liable to be rousted by the police or worse, brutally attacked by local bully boys. So, unlike other students taking his ‘gal for a walk’ down main street, or going to the cinema or more nefariously, taking her to a down town hotel where clients customarily booked a room by the hour, had never been an option. Moreover, everybody had heard about the college authorities and the police intercepting letters and hounding ‘Indian-lovers’ like him; so, inevitably, they had resorted to corresponding via friends, and occasionally trying to talk on the phone. Kate would wait in the tribal office next to her village’s one telephone; Abe would go to a public call box and attempt to persuade a reluctant switchboard operator at the city exchange to put the call through. In the second half of the twentieth century it was beyond bizarre but that was what life was like in the great twin-colony of New York-Long Island!
‘Have you been waiting very long?’ Abe had asked.
‘An hour, maybe.’
People said Kate – Tekonwenaharake – looked ‘very Indian’, very pure-bred, her bloodline visibly undiluted by the European invasion.
Even good people said a lot of crass things these days.
Whenever Abe looked into her dark brown eyes, gazed wondrously at her oval face, her slightly turned up nose, framed by a mane of jet black hair he was simply…entranced. She moved with a ballet dancer’s lithe athleticism and when she was in his arms he was lost in her musky, pine-freshness, wholly transported out of the other reality of his life.