Julian and I, along with the other survivors of the Goose Bay Campaign, had recuperated for three weeks at the American hospital in St. John’s. Fresh food, clean linen, and boiled water restored us to health as effectively as any medicine could; and Julian’s facial wound, though my stitching of it was inexpert, had nearly healed. Evidence of my inadequacy as a physician would persist in the form of a scar that curved between Julian’s jaw-hinge and his right nostril like a second mouth, primly and permanently shut. But that was little enough, as war wounds go, and Julian had never been vain about his appearance.
His mood had also improved, or at least he had wrestled down his pessimism. Whatever the reason, he had given up his initial resistance and submitted to all the plans the Army of the Laurentians had laid for him. He was willing, he had told me, to assume the Office of the Presidency, at least for a time, if only to undo a fraction of the wickedness his uncle had committed.
The appointment to the Executive was none of his doing, of course. It had come about in his absence, and his name had been put up as a compromise. My early dispatches to the Spark, carried out of Striver on board the Basilisk after the Battle of Goose Bay, may have played a role in these developments. No doubt Deklan Comstock would have preferred to have the news of Julian’s survival suppressed; but the editors of the Spark didn’t know that, and assumed they were doing the President a favor by publicizing his nephew’s heroism and hard times.
Those news items were widely reprinted. The American public, at least in the eastern half of the country, had become enamored of Julian Comstock as a youthful National Hero; and his reputation was equally golden among the forces of the Army of the Laurentians. Meanwhile, in the higher echelons of the military, resentment of Deklan’s war policies had heated up to the boiling point. Deklan had mismanaged so many audacious but ill-designed Campaigns, and jailed so many loyal and spotless Generals, that the Army had resolved to unseat him and replace him with someone more sympathetic to their goals. The publication of my reports helped stoke that smoldering fire to a white-hot intensity. [I did not, in my dispatches, condemn Deklan Conqueror by name, or even mention him; but it was possible to infer from what I wrote that the Lake Melville campaign had been mismanaged from New York. I did record a few cynical comments of Julian’s directed toward “those who cut orders without considering them first, and would make history without having read any.” I thought this barb at the President would be blunted by its obscurity—I may have been mistaken.]
All that stood in the way of a military overthrow of Julian’s uncle was the choice of a plausible successor, always a ticklish business. An acceptable candidate can be difficult to procure. A tyrant’s overthrow by military action doesn’t admit of any formal democratic choice, and important contesting interests—the Eupatridians, the Senate, the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth, even in some sense the general public—have to be addressed and mollified.
The Army of the Laurentians could not meet all these conditions, nor could it readily obtain the consent of its distant partner, the Army of the Californias , which was much more a creature of the Dominion than the Eastern army. But the necessity of replacing Deklan Conqueror was admitted by all. The solution eventually reached was a temporary one. Succession by dynastic inheritance was allowed under the 52nd Amendment to the Constitution; [Not the 53rd—that’s a common mistake. It was the 52nd Amendment that allowed succession by inheritance; the 53rd was the one that abolished the Supreme Court.]and since Deklan was childless, that mantle could be construed as falling to his heroic nephew Julian—who at the time was caught up in the Siege of Striver, and wouldn’t complicate matters either by accepting or by declining. Thus Julian had become a figurehead, almost an abstraction, and acceptable in that form, until the tyrant was hauled out of his throne room by soldiers and clapped into a basement prison.
Now that Julian had survived the siege, however, and since he had been rescued by the single-minded efforts of Admiral Fairfield, the abstract threatened to become uncomfortably real. Had Julian been killed, some other arrangement would have been made, perhaps to everyone’s greater satisfaction. But Julian Conqueror lived—and the public sentiment on his behalf had grown so clamorous that it would have been impossible not to install him in the Presidency, for fear of triggering riots.
For that reason he had been surrounded, both during his recovery and on the voyage back to New York City , by a phalanx of military advisors, civilian consultants, clerical toadies, and a thousand other brands of manipulators and office-seekers. My opportunities to speak to him privately had been few, and when we arrived in Manhattan he was quickly enclosed in a mob of Senators and beribboned soldiers, and borne away toward the Presidential Palace; and I could not even say goodbye, or arrange a time to meet once more.
But that wasn’t a pressing problem—it was Calyxa who was foremost on my mind. I had written her several letters from the hospital in St. John’s , and even telegraphed her once, but she hadn’t responded, and I feared the worst.
* * *
I made my way from the docks to the luxurious brown-stone house of Emily Baines Comstock, where I had left Calyxa in the care of Julian’s mother. It was heartening to see that familiar building, apparently unchanged, bathed in the glow of a Manhattan dusk, as sturdy a habitation as it had ever been, with lantern light glinting sweetly at the curtained windows.
But as I approached the walk a soldier stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. “No admittance, sir,” he said.
That was astonishing; and I was outraged, as soon as I was sure I had understood the man correctly. “Get out of my way. That’s an order,” I added, since my Colonel’s stripes were intact and plainly visible.
The soldier blanched but didn’t stand down. He was a young man, probably a fresh draftee, a lease-boy hauled out of some southern Estate, judging by the accent in his voice. “Sorry, Colonel, but I have my orders—very strict—no one to be admitted without authorization.”
“My wife is in this house, or was, or ought to be—what under heaven are you doing here?”
“Preventing exit or entry, sir.”
“By what authority?”
“Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine.”
“That’s a mouthful! What’s it signify?”
“Don’t precisely know, sir,” the soldier confessed. “I’m new at this.”
“Well, where do these orders emanate from?”
“My superior officer down at the Fifth Avenue headquarters, most directly; but I think it has something to do with the Dominion. ‘Ecclesiastical’ means ‘church,’ don’t it?”
“I expect it does… Who is inside, that you’re guarding so adamantly?”
“Only a couple of women.”
My heart beat twice, but I pretended to keep aloof. “Your dangerous prisoners are women?”
“I deliver food parcels to them now and again… women, sir, yes, sir, a young one and an old one. I don’t know anything about their crimes. They don’t seem hateful, or especially dangerous, though they’re a little short-tempered now and then, especially the younger female—she hardly speaks but it bites.”
“They’re in there now?”
“Yes, sir; but as I said, no admittance.”
I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I shouted Calyxa’s name, at the greatest volume I could muster.
The guard cringed, and I saw his hand stray to the pistol on his hip. “I don’t think that’s allowed, sir!”