George Washington's Ghost

“If the pumps stop, she’ll sink onto the bottom, sir,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh grunted, resignedly. He leaned towards von Schaffhausen. “I must ask you again, sir,” he apologised tersely, “what communications you have received from your side as to the arrangements for the repatriation of my men?”

Von Schaffhausen grimaced.

“I have received no reply to my request for matters to be clarified, Commander.”

The other man thought about this.

Slowly, he rose to his feet.

“In that case, I am serving no useful purpose here, sir. I will return to the Weser

…”

“Commander, I was hoping we might have a more constructive conversation…”

“About what, sir?” The Royal Navy man retorted, quietly indignant. “About how the Kaiserliche Marine attacked Achilles and murdered hundreds of my men? Or about how it was left to Captain Weitzman, on his own initiative, to attempt to do the decent thing for the small number of survivors of that war crime? Or about how the great German Empire is powerless to do anything to clean up the mess your lords and masters at the Wilhemstrasse have made of things?”

The others had risen to their feet, also.

Von Schaffhausen groaned.

“Things are more complicated than you realise, Commander Cowdrey-Singh. There have been further battles at sea. The Indomitable

has been sunk and one of your new aircraft carriers has been badly damaged. Your Navy has withdrawn from the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean; on land the army of New Spain has routed Colonial forces in the mountains and deserts of the South West. Consequently, the governments of the Triple Alliance are in a triumphal, unreasoning mood.” He hesitated. “Moreover, the sad death of the Kaiser has left,” he hesitated again, “a vacuum of power in Berlin. Nobody is making any decisions until the new Emperor is elected. Until then, please, I ask you to be patient. I have given you my word of honour that I and the forces under my command will defend the German Concession, and all those under its protection.”

“Herr Minister,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh replied, brusquely. “You have sixty Marines and an ad hoc German civilian militia of seventy or eighty men and boys to defend a community of what, three hundred expatriates and civil servants. If those maniacs across the bay cut up rough there is absolutely nothing you, or anybody else can do about it!”

The trouble was, von Schaffhausen knew, was that the battered and rightly, embittered Royal Navy man, was right.

At the moment the only thing that was stopping the Inquisitors dragging his English ‘guests’ and the Weser’s German ‘criminals’ to the Inquisition’s torture cells, was a lingering – possibly fast-evaporating – fear of the wrath of the German Empire.

Sooner or later somebody in the Dominican regime was going to realise, that with the demise of the old Kaiser the German Empire was temporarily, in a state of near paralysis.

Chapter 10

Thursday 27th April

Big Springs, Unincorporated Crown Territory of West Texas

William Lincoln ‘Bill’ Fielding had not known what to do with himself when he got out of prison last year. By then he was pretty much alienated from his brothers, and his old Getrennte Entwicklung Congregation had cast him out – in retrospect, not such a big problem because he had lost his faith – and he was broke. Worse, there were still people out there looking to recoup the gambling debts he owed them.

Playing cards and betting on horse and dog-racing were other things he had got out of the habit of, or simply dumped, like his belief in a merciful God, while he was in prison in Albany. Finally getting to confront his Pa had been a cathartic, transforming moment. It was weird the way he still felt guilty sometimes about punching out his Pa that way; even though he knew he would likely have killed the old fool if his brothers had not grabbed him.

Initially, he had not thought it was a very good idea talking to Albert Stanton; but the others, Abe and Alex, had pretty much opened their hearts to him and he had turned out to be a reasonably straight arrow kind of guy. For a newspaper man, leastways.

‘You’re a qualified mechanical engineer, right?’ Stanton had said to him afterwards. The Manhattan Globe man had picked him up at the hostel in Brooklyn Heights where he was dossing down most nights, taken him down to Brighton Beach for a beer and fish and chips.

Despite Bill’s suspicion the two men had got on okay.

‘Yeah,’ he had conceded.

‘With a lot of hours tuning and repairing high-performance speed boat engines?’

This too, was true, Bill could hardly deny it. It had been his work, for, among others the Long Island Speedboat Company at Gowanus Cove – on several of the boats which were driven at high speed into the sides of the battleships in the Upper Bay – which had originally got him into so much trouble after the Empire Day atrocities.

‘Yeah,’ he had agreed, again.