Involuntarily they both cocked their ears to the sky, alerted by the distant thrumming of an aero engine. The skies of the Iroquois Nation were unregulated, an oversight the authorities had allowed to go unamended because it meant ‘decent’ – that is, white – people were not troubled by the increasing overflights of the ever more powerful and noisy flying machines of private citizens and the military.
‘Alex and I flew over this way last weekend,’ Abe said.
Alexander, Abe’s eldest brother did not really approve of Kate but he had always been a complete gentleman about it, not so William, his other big brother. ‘Bill’ was a prick. Much though she hated to say ill of any of Abe’s relations, Bill was a prick, there was no other word to describe him.
‘The military are scrapping or selling off all their old aircraft. Alex got hold of a Bristol Model V – a two-man biplane fighter – that flies like a bird with all the guns and bomb racks taken off it.’
Alex had learned to fly when he was an officer cadet, done his time down in the borderlands of the South West and got a job as the secretary-training instructor at the Albany Flying Club. Supposedly, veterans like him were liable to a recall at any time after eighteen months in civilian life. Kate could not imagine that the thought worried Abe’s brother in the least.
Alex had been teaching his little brother to fly the last time Kate had seen Abe. At that time Alex had given Abe a dozen flying lessons and while he had allowed him to land ‘the kite’ when they got back from one ‘jaunt’ over Mohawk country Alex had told him he was not ready to ‘go solo’ yet.
‘I went solo for the first time about a month ago,’ Abe reported.
Kate kissed him until they both came up for air.
‘Is it really like flying like a bird?’ She asked.
‘No, well, sort of, mostly it’s very windy and noisy!’
He burned to tell her how much fun it was to be in the air; and how bad he felt about lying to his brother about his – their – plans. Alex said he was a ‘natural pilot’ and had promised to ‘get you properly qualified this summer’.
But all that would have to wait.
Kate laughed and for a moment, buried her face in the man’s chest. There followed a short debate about why one of the two bags would be too heavy for her to carry on her own.
‘Rone,’ she declared, impatiently.
Spouse…
In the end he slung one bag over his shoulder and grabbed unavailingly at the end of the second bag as she hefted it effortlessly onto her back.
The Mohawk River had been in a somnolent mood as they had ferried the tools and bedding Kate had brought and the bags, the one containing a tent, the other clothes, tinned food, a small stove and two gas bottles, across to the island. Deep inside the trees they had spent most of the afternoon setting up their camp.
He had sat his final exams a fortnight ago. He knew he had breezed through the week of examinations after successfully completing that spring’s trial practice term at the three-year old Queen Eleanor General Hospital Medical School.
He still felt a little guilty about going through the motions applying for – and being provisionally accepted for – a two–year post-doctoral degree course in the QE’s already world-renowned Infectious Disease Control Centre facility at Churchill College. If things were other than they were in his colony, the world ought to be his and Kate’s oyster. But things were what they were and there was no future for them together in the twin-colony.
They awakened that morning to birdsong and the rustling of leaves in the breeze, warm in each other’s arms. There were still a few bears, wolves and no doubt wolverines in the forests of the Iroquois Nation. Not so many as in olden times although populations of species hunted almost to extinction by the white man had recently showed signs of recovery. Some of the older warriors spoke of mountain lions roaming the banks of the Mohawk but a few pug marks in the mud apart that was wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Kate had brought an ancient Lee Enfield rifle, one of those old pieces so popular in movies about the last Indian wars which fired a forty-five slug with middling accuracy up to about fifty or sixty yards.
Yesterday afternoon they had walked the island for about half-an-hour, satisfying themselves that nothing likely to eat or attack them was lurking, or had been in the vicinity lately. Prosaically, they were really only concerned in case draft dodgers or illicit hunters had holed up on their hideaway.
After they had coupled nakedly they had talked. They always talked in bed together, made love again, and talked some more. They had a lot of catching up to do, and stroking, kissing, tickling and just plain enjoying each other’s bodies.
“Alex tried to talk me into flying down to Jamaica Bay to take a look-see at the fleet,” Abe confessed. He had never worried about being a Lincoln until his mother had died, afterwards he had always written his name Abraham Lincoln Fielding.
Lincoln in England was where his mother’s family had come from originally; that was in the post-rebellion influx of ‘common folk’ from the old country offered free passage and a share of the ‘free land’ expropriated from the families of the traitors of 1776.
His mother had attempted to bring up her children as non-conformists. She had had no truck with the Puritan wing of Lutheran Church and believed that Getrennte Entwicklung was an abomination. What little faith Abe had ever had in a Christian God had died with her; for no merciful omnipresent, all-powerful saviour could possibly have allowed his gentle, clever, funny, patient mother to die that way after months of agony, the victim of an incurable, bone-eating cancer.
No, if there was a God and he was to be found in anything then it was in the natural world, in the forests and lakes of the virgin ancestral lands of the Iroquois Nation. Only the native peoples still retained their connection to and wonder for the marvels of the land in which they lived.
“I think my arm’s gone dead,” Abe murmured.
Kate rolled onto his chest, giggled and snuggled close as the pins and needles danced and burned up and down his right arm.
“Rone,” she whispered fondly.
Under tribal law – by rite and custom – they had been by Kate’s father’s consent man and wife these last three years.
“Wife,” he sighed, holding her tight.
“I wish we could stay here like this forever…”
Chapter 8
East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island
I am not quite sure when it dawned on me that I was being strung along – taken for an idiot, basically – by the good cop-bad cop, old-young, uncle-niece, ruthless-sanguine double act. I was not any kind of expert in Police or Colonial Security Service interrogation or prisoner handling protocols – I assumed I was thirty years out of date – but ‘Lieutenant Adams’ and ‘Detective Inspector Danson’ literally had no idea what they were doing.
I had not been cautioned.
Thinking about it, the desk sergeant had been going through the motions last night rather than nailing down every dot and crossing every ‘t’. The whole thing had a staged feel about it. Okay, my door had been knocked down in the middle of the night, I was not sure how I was going to explain how that fitted in with the ‘being strung along’ theory that was forming in my mind; but that apart, things just felt wrong.
I remembered Sarah screaming and cussing, then breaking down in floods of tears; she had never struck me as that kind of woman. I could imagine her squaring up to a cop and giving as good as she got, kicking and spitting as she was being dragged away. Just not going to pieces like that. Heck, she had been the one who had always worn the trousers in our ‘marriage’. Well, when she was around; when you worked for the Colony School Inspection Board you travelled a lot…