Vicky had not exactly made a beeline, or any kind of overt ‘play’ for John Watson. He was twenty-three years her senior, dapper without being especially handsome. However, once she had got to know him a little better she had discovered he was the most sensible man she had ever met and although he could be a hard task master in the Yard, underneath he was kindly, and very lonely.
She had made it very clear to him that she was not going to sleep with him until or unless they were married and he had greeted this with a smile.
He had kissed her brow: ‘of course not, my dear.’
They had moved into his apartment at Fort Hamilton – which had had a marvellous view across the narrows of Hell’s Gate which protected the Upper Bay to Staten Island – but the place had had too many lingering memories of John’s late wife and after a year they had moved to a big house at Whitestone, a part of the Clintonville community set back about fifty yards from one of the estuarine tributaries of the East River shortly after Vicky produced their first offspring, Caroline Fielding Watson. They had since had a second daughter, Mary and they both hoped junior, who was kicking with excitement right then, would be a boy to complete their little family ‘triumvirate’. Mary’s birth had not been entirely straightforward so husband and wife had agreed that ‘three’ children would be a good place to stop.
Vicky had left the girls with Noma, their middle-aged Algonquian nanny and driven to Brooklyn with her husband where she had spent the morning mixing and gossiping with the other wives before trooping up into their grandstand seats to enjoy the ‘main event’.
Of late the majority of the other women had finally accepted her, sort of, as a kind of ‘little sister’, treating her respectfully at least to her face. Vicky regarded most of the other ‘senior wives’ as sad old harridans but she had got used to keeping thoughts of that kind to herself. It might well be that in a few years’ time, or sooner, that John would be ruling the roost, then all the old women would have to pay court to her!
In any event, Job Number 309 sat poised on Slip 3 awaiting her first introduction to the cold waters of the iron grey East River. Vicky’s husband, having been introduced to King George and Queen Eleanor – my oh my she looked so elegant! – had slipped away to supervise what he liked to call ‘the mechanics of the launching’ from ground level.
The dear man invariably returned home from a launching with grime on his best suit, spots of oil on his tie and a shirt smeared with and reeking of slipway grease.
From Vicky’s vantage point above and behind the launch platform she could see all the way down the port flank of the new ship. It was really still just an empty steel carcass. Although her fire and turbine rooms had been fitted out otherwise she was a shell waiting to be filled. A temporary mast had been raised amidships between where her two raked-back smoke stacks would eventually stand, from whence a giant Royal Standard flew proudly in the breeze.
John had told her that the ship was the first of a new class. Originally laid down as an eight-gun light cruiser – a scaled down version of the ‘heavies’, the Ajax and Naiad anchored out in the Upper Bay – she was to be completed as a so-called ‘hybrid anti-aircraft platform’. This meant that she would be equipped with four 55 calibre BL 6-inch Mark XXX guns mounted in two twin turrets – identical to those which made up the Lion class battleships’ secondary batteries – forward of the superstructure. The aft third of the ship had been modified to mount twin twenty-feet high launch rails for the new, still experimental XB-293 two-stage long-range Seafire guided missile.
Everything to do with the Seafire system was highly classified, so secret that once the new ship was fitted out she was scheduled to sail to Scotland where the first prototypes would be loaded and tested. Today the launch ‘rails’ on the cruiser’s stern were plywood, for show. However, now that Vicky had seen the scale of those ‘rails’ it was obvious that the Seafire must be a monster of a rocket!
Work elsewhere in the Dockyard had ceased at mid-day ahead of the arrival of HMS Cassandra bearing the Royal couple. Normally, at this hour the shadow of the towering King Edward VI Manhattan Bridge – carrying the road from Long Island on its top level, and the two railway tracks across the East River – began to encroach on the western edge of the Wallabout complex but the sun had gone behind gathering clouds.
With the murmuring of the crowd stilling Vicky heard the clatter of a train rolling high over the river. The great structure – the original, by modern standards, ridiculously over-engineered wrought iron construction was nearly a hundred years old, the roadway having been added only five years ago – had been designed to allow the tallest sailing ship free access to the East River. Even now, the great ELDAR masts and aerials of one of the Lions could easily pass beneath the central span. In the last century there had been plans to span the Hudson River also; it had never happened. The money had run out and people had been complaining ever since about how it would have been much more rational, and certainly a better investment, to bridge the Hudson first.
The past is indeed a strange country!
What might have become of a quiet, out of the way little port city like Manhattan if it had been linked to the mainland via a second King Edward VI bridge?
Instead, the business and financial centre of affairs had moved north to Albany and Buffalo, leaving quaint little ‘New York’, effectively Manhattan-Brooklyn as a cargo depot and shipyard, and Long Island as the place tens of thousands of well to do colonists came to spend their summers and to sail their boats. Not that Vicky was complaining; the unfortunate souls condemned to live in the sprawling urban wildernesses of Albany and Buffalo were welcome to their ‘city life’, at least down here in the south the roads were not constantly gridlocked, and crime was virtually unknown outside the tenements crowding around the Dockyard district. Personally, she had no time for those who constantly wanted to churchify Long Island; the village where she lived, Whitestone, was perfectly all right the way it was and if those blasted Puritans had their way the summer vacation business – the only thing keeping many isolated rural and coastal communities economically viable – would go elsewhere. That apart, she honestly believed that she lived in the best place in the colonies to raise a family.
The Lord-Lieutenant of King’s County had stepped up to the microphone sited beneath the bow of the new ship.
The launching ceremony was about to begin.
There were spits of rain in the air.
Chapter 13
East Islip, Suffolk County, Long Island
From the stench I concluded that I had probably been sick on myself and pissed myself for good measure.
It was several more seconds before I worked out that I must have been revived by the frigid contents of a bucket of cold water. Initially, my head hurt so much I guessed I might have been hit by the bucket as well as its freezing contents.
My hands were cuffed behind my back, the chain looped through the back of the chair I was sitting in. Or rather, that I was slumped and generally lolling about in. I desperately tried to focus my eyes on something to make the nausea go away.
I am definitely getting too old for this shit!
SLAP!
I did not see it coming.
SLAP!
I felt my nose running.
Blood?
Or just the water still draining off my head?
“I’ve been wanting to do that for months!”
I blinked dazedly at my wife.