I had just curled up on the mattress and started to nod off to sleep when Sarah marched into the room. One of her acolytes placed a chair for her and she sat, peering down her nose at me.
“When did you discover I was with the CSS?” She asked without preamble.
“When you walked through the door at Long Island University,” I confessed. “You were too good to be true.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow.
I struggled onto an elbow and eventually sat up, propping my aching frame against the wall at my back.
“I thought you’d play harder to get for longer,” I went on. “Don’t get me wrong, the sex was good.”
This prompted a contemptuous curl of Sarah’s lips.
“Well, I enjoyed it, anyway,” I assured her in all sincerity.
“Everything’s a joke to you, isn’t it?”
“We all get by the best we can.”
“Tell me about the Sons of Liberty?” This Sarah said crossing her left leg over her right knee in front of my now puffy, possibly blackening eyes. The glimpse of stockinged knee and thigh before her skirt fell back into place allied to my hangover-like headache distracted me so badly I forgot what she had asked me. “The Sons of Liberty?”
“Oh, those old rascals…”
“No, I’m talking about their modern-day co-conspirators?”
I tried to look blank.
“The traitors who use your writings as their guiding text!”
“Oh, we’re talking about Two hundred lost years, again” I muttered. Denying that I was the author of the piece was obviously a waste of time. “You know that was all a joke, don’t you? I mean, the sub-title gives the game away. I ask you: What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time! Surely, even the CSS ought to get the joke by now?”
Sarah was unblinking.
“The second half of the book,” she reminded me tersely, “was an essay about how the World might have looked on the two hundredth anniversary of the treasonous Declaration of Independence on the 4th July 1776 had the rebels wrested the New World out of the hands of Mad King George. You describe England as being a ‘tiny little insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe hankering for its lost world-wide empire…”
I chuckled; I could not help myself.
Sarah glowered at me.
She tried again to refresh my memory: “A tiny little insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe hankering for its lost world-wide empire forced to beg for scraps off the table of the New Romans governing the globe from their ivory towers in the Americas!”
I did actually recall writing pretty much that.
“You said that George Washington would be remembered as the patriarch of the World’s greatest empire and King George III as that ‘mad old German loser’!”
“I was writing a satirical polemic. I was a young man and attitudes to these things were, well, different back in the thirties and forties…”
“How do you think King George and Queen Eleanor feel about having their ancestors ridiculed and insulted by people like you?”
“I don’t know. Have they actually read any of my books?”
Sarah stood up, rustling in that way that invariably brings warmth to the cockles of an old man’s private parts. She moved away, still rustling and stood by the door. The cell was possibly six feet by eight and clearly, she wanted to be a lot farther away from me than that!
I took this as a good omen; I was not about to get slapped again any time soon. Leastways, not by her.
“Look,” I said, reasonableness personified or so I thought, “a lot of contemporary historians, here and in England, see the crushing of the rebellion in 1776 as a pivotal point in imperial history. Without the resources of New England at its disposal the British might have had to fight a world war on two fronts – with the rebel colonies at their backs – when the French wars of the 1790s flared up. And later, when the German Empire was at its most aggressively expansionary how could Britain have matched it industrially, or militarily without the factories and manpower of New England. Goodness, had the colonies gained their freedom in the 1770s they might have allied with France and Spain against England at any time in the late eighteenth and throughout most of the nineteenth century. So, absolutely, if the Continental Army had not been destroyed in August 1776 and the one man capable of leading its surviving remnants had not been killed at the battle of Long Island, the World in which we are living today might indeed be a radically different, and perhaps, a better place to live. It is all academic, anyway, just an intriguing thought exercise.”
“Don’t you teach your students that ‘the tongue is mightier than the blade’?”
Actually, I usually misquoted dear old Euripides – who died around 400 BC, so far as I recollected, so, he would not mind – by opining that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.
“Yes, but that was in the context of the Bible, the Koran or the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, or Confucius, not my own humble scribblings, my dear.”
“Nonetheless your followers call you the Father of Liberty?”
“My followers?”
“You started by poisoning your sons’ minds against the Crown then you sowed sedition…”
I thought I was the one who had been drugged!
“I’ve done no such thing!”
That was when a very strange thing happened; possibly the strangest thing yet. Sarah started crying.
I struggled to my feet, would have crumpled to the floor had I not braced myself against the wall for a moment.
“Don’t touch me!”
I had not planned on touching her. I was a sucker for tears, that’s all. I held up my hands.
“How could you do it?” Sarah spat at me.
“Do what?” I asked like an idiot, completely blindsided.
“Blow up that ship and kill all those people?”
I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question.
“What,” I stuttered. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re a monster!” Sarah shuddered with sudden, unmistakable revulsion. “I can’t believe I let you touch me!”
It was a bit late to be crying foul.
However, I refrained from voicing this sentiment.
“You have to give me the names of the people responsible. Now! Or I won’t answer for what will happen to Alex and Abe,” she took a snarling gulp of air, and added, posthumously: “and Bill!”
“They’ve done nothing,” I protested, hoarsely. “None of us have and you know it!”
We were shouting at each other like an old married couple who had hated each other all along.
“I know that you are the leader of the Sons of Liberty…”
“That’s horse manure!”
“Names! I want names, Isaac!”
Sarah and I were toe to toe, breathless with anger.
“For once in your miserable life do the decent thing, man!”
Chapter 19
Jamaica Bay Field, King’s County, Long Island
Alex Fielding had invited his two ‘wingmen’ to join him sampling the delights of nearby St Albans. He had considered – albeit in passing – looking up his father in Gravesend; but decided against it. Dad got preachy every year around the time of the Empire Day holidays and they would almost certainly get into a fight about his shameless ‘profiteering’ flying press men and photographers over the Fleet Review.
So, St Albans it had been!
Neither Paul Hopkins or Rufus McIntyre had wanted to join him on his expedition back to the less than exotic fleshpots of his misspent youth. This was a thing he breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief over as soon as he was a safe distance away from the pair of them.