What so many religious fundamentalists in the East viewed as a slow disintegration of moral and religious coherence was really just the logical corollary to the unresolved imbroglio of the border with the Empire of Nuevo España, and the hiving off of between twenty and thirty percent of all the land of their own colonies into huge ghettos or tribal lands where the white man’s writ no longer ran, and the ever-quickening pace of change in the far west.
Abe had no illusion that as he and Kate packed up their camp early that morning that he was about to become anything other than a fugitive voluntarily exiled from the society into which he had been born; and that among his own people in the twin-colony there would be little or no Christian sympathy for his decision.
To the Getrennte Entwicklung crowd, he was a moral and racial degenerate ‘going native’; to the authorities he would be a runaway shirking his responsibilities to his Colony, a draft-dodging good for nothing who had cheated the Commonwealth of New York-Long Island of his period of medical indenture. If he ever returned he might be arrested and if he failed to recant and to fulfil his servitude to the Colony, face imprisonment. The shame would live with him forever.
Kate was subdued.
“I know what it is that you do for me,” she said eventually as they carried their bags through the trees to where they had hidden the two canoes. Invisibly through the foliage they heard her father and cousins breaking camp; the group would travel together deeper into the Iroquois Nation before the husband and wife finally went their own way. “I know what you are giving away.”
Abe halted, put down his load and turned to face Kate.
“I am giving away nothing that is of any worth in the world and gaining everything that is,” he shrugged, “priceless, Rone.”
She threw her arms around his neck and he wrapped her in a bear hug that lifted her feet off the ground as they kissed.
“Tekonwenaharake,” he whispered in her ear, “she whose voice travels through the wind,” he cooed, “without you I am like dust in that wind.”
Kate sniffed, kissed him again.
Stepped back, and with a giggle, frowned.
“Men are so full of shit!” She murmured in Kanien'keháka, with a limpid-eyed fondness.
“This is true,” he confessed.
Chapter 21
HMS Cassandra, Upper Bay, New York
The sleek fleet destroyer had come alongside HMS Lion during the night. The King, the Queen and their entourage had gone onboard while it was still dark and stepped off the Cassandra onto Gravesend Pier literally at the crack of dawn for the short drive – about four miles – inland to the Royal Military Hospital located on the outskirts of the town of Flatbush. The Lieutenant Governor of Long Island had sent his Rolls-Royce to collect the King and Queen, and other members of the party were accommodated in one or other of the dozen or so Land Rovers and cars waiting ‘in convoy’, which was to be led and trailed by armoured cars of the 16th Lancers.
To assert that security for this hastily scheduled ‘visit’ was ‘heavy’ would be to recklessly understate the case. The road from the coast to Flatbush had been cleared with military vehicles blocking every side turn, and infantrymen in full battle order patrolling everywhere. Belying this visible demonstration of armed might the hospital itself had had less than an hour’s notice of the visitation, and other than lending his official car, the Lord Lieutenant had been asked to not alter his personal Empire Day diary so as to avoid drawing too much attention to Flatbush ahead of the King and Queen’s arrival.
King George was hugely impressed, as he invariably was, by the efficiency with which his own Household, his advisors, colonial administrators and the armed services facilitated, and obediently carried out his commands.
If only we ran the rest of the Empire the same way…
In his unscheduled absence from the flagship the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England had been left ‘holding the fort’ and acting as the King’s Chief of Staff. Something always came up at the worst possible moment in the run up to great state ceremonial demonstrations and whatever came up the King implicitly trusted Philip De L’Isle to ‘sort it out’.
The visit to the hospital had been harrowing.
These things often were in his experience.
Without Eleanor he would have been lost, a useless stuffed shirt in a ridiculous antique uniform!
The old fuddy-duddies in his father’s court still tut-tutted but trying to stop Eleanor hugging a sick child or comforting a grieving mother, father, daughter, brother or sister was like Canute trying to hold back the tide.
The Queen simply was not made that way.
George was proud of her.
Of course, he was always proud of her but that morning, especially so after the trauma of yesterday. Because she was so naturally tactile it suddenly became a hundred times easier for him to forget that he was the King Emperor and behave like a normal human being. The old King had never picked up a child in his life; not even one of his own. The very thought would have horrified the old curmudgeon and given half his doddering old courtiers a nervous breakdown!
As for King George’s mother. Goodness, once she had squeezed out sufficient ‘spares’ to preserve the royal line she had washed her hands of her offspring until they were toileted, well-mannered, presentable in public and more or less educated.
Tactile had been a swear word in the Royal palaces of England for a generation until Eleanor had come upon the scene, first as HRH, the Duchess of Windsor in a small way, and then as Queen Consort, in a way that had made her the nation’s and the Empire’s Queen Mother almost overnight.
The King had taken the son of a maimed dockyard worker in his arms, Eleanor had embraced the boy’s mother, sat awhile with her holding her hand.
How on earth could people be so solicitous about us at such a dreadful time?
There were still people in England, within the Royal Household, the establishment and the Government, who disapproved of his and Eleanor’s ‘way of monarchy’. The diehards still imagined that in this modern, technological age when the globe was connected by radio and television, in which the gathering cry for self-determination and a loosening of the shackles of empires was daily shaping social and political changes unimagined only twenty years ago, that the Monarchy could somehow remain the unchanging, rigid monolith that it had been for centuries.
An enormous crowd had gathered on Gravesend Pier by the time the Royal Party returned to board the Cassandra.
“Don’t let go of my hand, my dear,” Eleanor murmured as they stepped out of the Rolls-Royce. She had dried up her tears on the short ride from the hospital. “I must look red-eyed and blotchy,” she sighed.
“Not a bit of it, my love!”
They went straight to the barrier where behind a line of infantrymen – regulars not militiamen – a throng of cheering men, women and children had awaited, patiently for a glimpse of the royal couple, possibly for many hours.