The Governor shook his head and sat down.
King George groaned. It had already been a long day and it was not over yet!
There was a knock at the bulkhead door.
“Lady Henrietta has arrived aboard, Your Majesty,” an immaculately uniformed Lieutenant reported bowing.
The King shook his head.
Bloody precedence and protocol!
“Wheel her in directly please.”
Eleanor was proud of her husband’s life-long implacable disinclination to vent his impatience upon a subordinate. His father had been a positive tartar and everybody around him had felt like they were walking on thin ice, or sometimes barefoot on broken glass.
Everybody got to their feet when the Governor’s twenty-three-year-old youngest daughter made her entrance.
Henrietta De L’Isle halted briefly and bowed respectfully to the King.
“Your Majesty,” she murmured, and: “Ma’am,” to Eleanor before hands were being held and pecking kisses on cheeks exchanged. From earliest girlhood the newcomer had only known the King and Queen as her parents’ close friends and even now it was very hard for her to think of King George and Queen Eleanor as anything other than Uncle Bertie and Aunt Ellie. The King and Queen both still entertained hopes that their third son, twenty-five-year old James – Prince James, Duke of Cumberland – would do the sensible thing and propose to Henrietta. Problematically, he was having such fun pursuing his career in the Army, with the Blues and Royals, that it was probably far too optimistic to expect him to settle down just yet. And besides, Henrietta had a full-time job in New England at the moment.
“Every time I see you,” Eleanor beamed, “you remind me more and more of your dear mother when she was your age, my dear.”
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
“Your Uncle and Aunt won’t hear of cancelling any of tomorrow’s engagements, Hen,” the young woman’s father complained.
“I’ve had Colonel Harrison of the CSS bending my ear again,” Henrietta reported, her tone indicating she was a little dubious about what she had been told. “He says he has evidence of a conspiracy organised by a group called the Sons of Liberty to mount a series of what he calls ‘outrages’ tomorrow. I asked him if he knew all this why he hadn’t done something about it already? He went red in the face and started treating me like a naughty schoolgirl after that.” She smiled tight-lipped and glanced to her father. “Sorry about that, Daddy; he’ll probably be writing another letter of complaint to you…”
The Governor of New England rolled his eyes.
“The blasted man ought to go through channels like everybody else. These bloody Security Service people cry wolf so often you can’t take a thing they say at face value!”
The King was thoughtful.
“Somebody sabotaged the launch of the Polyphemus today, Philip,” he remarked sombrely.
A steward entered and began dispensing pre-dinner sherries.
“We didn’t know if you were going to be able to join us for dinner, my dear,” Eleanor apologised to Henrietta De L’Isle.
The young woman pulled a face, blushed. She tended to make a point of dressing ‘as the people dressed’ because it gave her a certain anonymity within her father’s entourage that enable her to get things done and to ‘not be so intimidating’. She was therefore, wearing a stylish but plain blue day dress and her hair was tumbling unrestrained on her shoulders.
“I’m not dressed for…”
“Tom Packenham,” the King assured her, “will understand. After today we won’t be standing on ceremony at dinner. More to the point your Aunt and I would much rather catch up on your news over dinner than endlessly rehash ‘official’ business with your misery guts father!”
The Governor chuckled and put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders.
“I think that constitutes a royal command, Hen.”
In the event it was just Rear Admiral Packenham, his Flag Lieutenant and the four of them in the Squadron Commander’s stateroom for dinner.
“We will change tomorrow’s schedule,” the King decided. That afternoon and evening’s engagements had been cancelled pending a reassessment of the security situation. However, tomorrow was Empire Day and he was the bloody King Emperor and nobody was going to tell him what to do in his Empire!
He looked to De L’Isle.
“I want to visit the injured in hospital. Can that be accommodated without completely messing up everything else, Philip?”
The Governor of New England thought about this for some moments before turning to his daughter.
The main Empire Day events centred around the Fleet Review and a late afternoon parade at Battery Field. If the weather permitted there was to be a grand reception to be held on the quarterdeck of the Lion for as many as a thousand colonial civil servants and worthies in the evening.
“Most of the injured will have been taken to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn,” Henrietta explained, her brow furrowing, “or to the new Army and Navy Hospital at Flatbush. That’s the more modern of the two, I think that’s where the most seriously hurt will have been taken. Security wouldn’t be such a headache there, either. Daddy’s Staff will already be finalising things for tomorrow, if we want to do this we need to get working on it now, sir,” she put to the King. “The easiest thing would be to arrange an early morning visit. Literally, at the crack of dawn. Assuming the visit was over and done with by about ten in the morning the rest of the day’s events could kick off as planned at eleven o’clock, sir,” she reported to the King, her manner that of a practical, very respectful staffer-courtier rather than a favourite honorary niece.
“Philip?” The King asked, looking to his old friend.
The Governor of New England had accepted that his recommendation to drastically cut back, or better still, cancel the Empire Day celebrations had been rejected. Now, it was his job, not to mention the small matter of his duty, simply to ‘get on with it’.
“If satisfactory arrangements can be made I have no objection, sir.”
“That’s settled then. The Queen and I shall visit the Royal Military Hospital at Flatbush first thing in the morning before the Fleet Review,” the King declared.
ACT II – EMPIRE DAY
Sunday 4th July 1976
Chapter 17
Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyard, Wallabout Bay, King’s County
The Colonel had been sitting in John Watson’s office when he got back from St Mary’s Hospital at one o’clock that morning. Nobody really knew if Matthew Harrison of the Colonial Security Service was actually a colonel, or even how rank structure of the CSS was organised. Everything about the CSS was smoke and mirrors, myths, rumours, legends. The only thing an honest citizen really needed to know about the CSS was that he, or she, never wanted to have anything to do with it.
By then John Watson was so far beyond the end of this tether that not even finding the most secretive man in New England chain-smoking in his office gave him additional pause for thought.
Three hours after the event he had discovered that his wife had collapsed around the time of the afternoon’s disaster and been rushed to hospital with the first badly injured survivors. Something had happened with the baby and by the time she was wheeled into the overwhelmed operating theatres it was too late. An emergency caesarean section had been carried out but the baby – a boy – was already dead and when Watson had finally got to her side Vicky was unconscious, comatose and fighting for her life.