Thande
Donor
(Part #250.3)
Howick, Northumberland, Kingdom of the Britons
February 8th 1900
Charles Grey had woken that morning in a sweat.
It was a common occurrence, and Cheung Amoy, his Chinese fiancée whom he affectionately called ‘Amy’, was used to it by now. She had almost automatically woken along with him, and instantly reached out to hold and comfort him without words, her hands gripping him tightly to her bosom. Charles had stared at one of those perfect little hands before his bleary vision as the nightmarish images faded, remembering when it had been fitted with fake lacquered nails for Amy’s disguise as ‘Lady Dragon Lotus’ for the flight from Belgium. Or when it had lain upon his brow when he had slumbered in a coma in the hospital in the city now called Henei. He did not deserve this woman, said a guilty voice in the back of his mind.
As though she could hear it, Amy had hugged him ever more tightly and whispered in his ear: “I am with you, Caajisi. Now and forever.” She kissed him, and the touch of her lips on his skin was like the first gleam of light from the rising sun on the cherry blossoms at home. They would not arrive in Hanjing for another month or two, he realised belatedly. It felt as though everything had moved so fast that it was hard to believe it was only February.
“What was it this time, Caajisi?” Amy asked softly, cautious of disturbing him with the memories. “The jungle?”
Charles shook his head slowly. “Not this time, dear heart. London.”
Amy paused as she massaged his tense shoulders, staring at him. “But xingan, nothing happened in London.”
Charles winced. “Maybe that’s what was so disturbing, my love. I expected…”
What had he expected?
He was an exile. He had been raised by his father from a young age to think of himself that way. He was a relic of a Britain that was long vanished, destroyed by the bloody ravages of Blandford and the blunt, indiscriminate purges of Llewelyn Thomas. His father had seen which way the wind was blowing and left the country early on, before the Populists could steal his house and his land out from under him as they had cancelled his title, the title he had inherited from his own grandfather for gallant service in the Second Platinean War.[9] He had taken what wealth he could to start a new life in the East, but had always been filled with bitter resentment at what he had lost.The Greys might only be relatively recent recipients of an earldom by the standards of many British aristocrats, but they had been important men in Northumberland for far longer than that.
Northumberland. Charles sat up, twitched aside the red canvas of the tent, and peered outside. Northumberland, in February. His father had told him of it so many times, sometimes of the idealised childhood memories he possessed, sometimes of the imagined devastation that the Populists had inflicted upon it. Charles had tried to create those images in his own head, but on arriving here he realised that his imagination had left out a few key things. Like the cold. And the wet.
Charles had served in many places in Feng China and the East in general, but the parts of China with a climate like this had mostly been in Beiqing hands—until now, that is, with Little Weili having vanished and the Russians having given up and annexed the scraps of Manchuria they had managed to hang on to in the face of the Feng offensive. That war was supposedly spinning down to a de facto peace now. Charles supposed he shouldn’t care. After all, now he was home.
Home. Home was a place he had never been, a place he had never known. Blood should out, he supposed, but the soil beneath his feet felt alien. Field rations of salt beef and biscuit or lamb and potatoes tasted wrong in his mouth, crying out for beansprouts or soy sauce. Even the fish tasted wrong. The locals spoke with a rougher version of the accent his father and his retainers—back when they had been together as a grop of exiles—had used, and Charles sometimes had to ask them to repeat what they had said.
Amy, wonderful, beautiful Amy, seemed to sense his mood. She knelt beside him and kneaded his shoulders once again. She had started to get dressed. Again, a far cry from the cute but gutsy modern Hanjingese girl in her keipo and riding her zihangce, and just as far from the arrogant Beiqing princess with her elaborate coiffure and her ornate robes. Amy’s hair was stuffed imperfectly beneath a French military beret with a red cockade, the sort of thing that made some greybeards talk about Lisieux’s Jacobins. Red had been an odd choice in that sense, Charles reflected, but it had seemed to make sense when The Man—the Duke—had been looking to buy uniforms. Red-dyed coats evoked a vanished, glorious past—and the dye was cheap. Amy wore a modified and much-patched version of one of those red uniforms, no makeup on her face but a pistol in her holster. To say she had never fought before this campaign, she had taken to it like a natural, Charles reluctantly admitted (he hated the idea of her risking her life). She had just laughed and said that shooting combat was nothing compared to the fight over the one free place on the fence to tie your zihangce to, or the struggle over the last of the Hao Yufeng silk fans at the market stall.
God, I love that woman.
He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain: he offered it as a prayer of thanks.
Now, it was later. Slowly, they walked past the modern signs reading HOWICK—500 MILE-HUNDREDTHS, above the old decayed milestones that instead described the distance as half a mile. Howick was not a large village, sitting almost on the coastline of Northumberland, off the beaten track of the Great North Road (or ‘Route One’ as the signs named it) miles inland. Indeed the village itself only felt like an ancillary to Howick Hall. Charles and Amy slowly walked up the path to that Hall, which in its current form had been built by Charles’ grandfather in the 1780s.[10] As they neared it, as though to suppress the thoughts percolating through his mind, Charles thought back to Amy’s words. Nothing had happened in London, she had said.
She meant no violence. Charles had expected to have to fight his way up the Thames alongside the others of the legion which had been dubbed the Ten Thousand Men, though he privately suspected the number was rather lower than that. After all, the Duke of York had no realistic claim to the throne. He was acting as a usurper to his brother, reluctantly and with bitterness on his face every time he confronted the fact. He had confided in Charles that he felt that, despite everything, he had been manipulated into the one thing he had never wanted to do: to openly stand against George IV. But in the end, he had had no choice. Not if Britain was to be saved from the oppressive regime ruling it in his brother’s name. Not if his brother refused to acknowledge that the Lectels the Duke sent were from him.
Still, Charles had worried. Would not the Britons fight for their home and their true King, the Emperor over the sea? The Duke was even being forced to rely on French support for his landing, and historically nothing could more swiftly turn British opinion against a ruler than alignment with the ancestral enemy. The image was terrible, evoking Hoche’s invasion of almost a century before. He had expected fire and blood.
He had got anticlimax. A few wisps of smoke rising over London, a few rattles of gunfire. Mostly, nothing. The damage he did see failed to reach his heart. He had thought he knew London, in a way, from the prints his father had owned. He had failed to realise that those prints depicted the city before Hoche’s invasion and the Second Great Fire, for his father had tried to call back to that vanished era so idolised by Regressives, even though he himself had not lived through it. All the iconic buildings Charles had expected had gone long before his own birth, and the anonymous mix of Marleburgensian RCTFI Utilitarian industrial and Classical Revival structures and the Populist masses of detached houses failed to attract him. The Duke had gone to the marble structure that men still called New Westminster, he knew, and rather shamefacedly mumbled his claim to the throne on the grounds that his brother had abdicated responsibility. If he had expected opposition, he received little. All the MPs, the burgesses and knights, were keen to assure him that they all been on his side all the time, really. Everyone in Britain fondly remembered his two periods as Lord Deputy (as his office had amounted to) and his resigning gesture of protest when his brother had stolen the Lionheart for America. Really, Britain had long since paid all her debts to the ENA for helping out in both the Great American War and now this new one, and the slaughter of British soldiers in the Plate to an ungodly weapon, that was the final straw. It was time for an amicable divorce, don’t you agree?
Charles had just nodded along with all this, like the rest of the Duke’s supporters, because the alternative was punching one of those smug bastards in the face. What had been that blackguard’s name—Montague Vincent-Ponsonby? All assurances that he had worked to undermine the system from within as a true aristocrat, always hoping for the day when the corrupt regime, tainted by its Populist midwife, would be overthrown. Charles was sure that if the Duke went out and was defeated in battle at (say) Slough tomorrow, Vincent-Ponsonby would slimily assure the other side that he had been working to undermine the Duke’s supporters from within.
Who even were the other side? Some MPs had fled, it was true. There was talk of the ‘Clack Regime’ hanging on in Lancashire, in Manchester and Liverpool where ties to America and Ireland had always been tightest and where economic dependence on the Hanoverian System was deepest. Charles wasn’t even sure what the ‘Clack Regime’ was. Nobody even seemed to have seen Lee Clack, the alleged Populist figurehead of the regime, for months before the Duke arrived. Whoever was in the shadows was playing a long game. But Clack’s association with the…well, the enemy had led to some choices of symbolism. The Duke’s supporters had taken to flying pre-Inglorious Revolution Union Jacks, without the Asterisk of Liberty, and avoiding the purple symbolism that had become associated with Britain since the rise of Populism.
Unfortunately, symbols seemed more important than reality. Charles gave the men a dirty look as he and Amy approached. There were six of them, allegedly guarding the gates to Howick House. They were native Britons, but unlike too many of the skinny, dirty folk he had seen in London, they looked well-fed and muscled and arrogant. They wore unusual uniforms which, he was told, had until the Duke’s arrival been purple. They had been called mauvecoats, and been associated with all the shadowy, hinted excesses of the old regime. Now they had hastily bleached them and re-dyed them red and called themselves military police. The Duc de Choiseul, the commander of the French expeditionary force supporting and transporting the Duke’s men, had described them as a gendarmerie. Gendarmery in English, he supported. Hadn’t the Populists been about getting rid of Blandford’s browncoat bullyboys? For that matter, hadn’t the Duke been about getting rid of the old regime here? Yet the bullet-headed thagis just changed their uniforms and carried on beating up innocents.[11] It was a depressing thought. Why did he have to be born an Englishman, couldn’t he have come from some more stable country, less prone to revolution.
Amy linked her arm with his as the smirking Gendarmes peeled away and the Hall lay before them. There stood Frederick, Duke of York, and with him a man who looked to be an elderly local dignitary, looking rather overawed. “Charles,” the Duke called. “Amy. Thank God you’re here. I need you to come and take possession of the place.” He looked meaningfully at the local dignitary.
The latter, to Charles’ shock, went down on one knee. “Thank you, my lord,” he said. “Thank you for coming back to us, after all this time.”
Charles shook his head. “Rise, please. And you don’t say my lord anym—”
The old man waved away his objection as he rose. “All the old People’s Rules are gone now, my lord. Things can go back to how they used to be.” He sounded happy.
Charles had seen in China what happened when people dreamed that they could turn back the clock to the vanished golden age of their youth. His father had been obsessed with the idea, too. It never ended well. But he decided now was not the time. He shook the man’s hand. “It’s good to be back.”
He felt Amy’s hand on his. “And you will have to show me everything,” she breathed. “The swimming pool carved from the rock…the church in which we shall be married.”
Charles grinned at her, and saw the old man’s eyes widen. Oh, dear. “Really, my lord,” he said creakily, “a bride from Cathay—”
Colour rose in Charles’ cheeks as he turned on the man. “Now listen here—”
“Her father owns a tea plantation,” the Duke of York interjected.
The old man’s expression cleared. “Oh, well that’s different,” he said warmly. “I do like a good cup of tea.” To Amy’s surprise, he took her hand and kissed it.
Before Charles could say anything more, the sound of hoofbeats could be heard in the distance. Before long, a grey gelding and a bay stallion cantered to a halt before them, scattering the scarlet-coated Gendarmes behind it. It looked as though the riders had half intended to run them down. From what Charles knew of what men like those had done, he couldn’t blame them.
There were no servants, which was not surprising: such offices had seldom existed except unofficially under the People’s Kingdom. Indeed, Howick Hall had lain dormant for years, escaping demolition or conversion to a public building due to its isolation and a clerical error. Charles helped hand down the rider on the gelding and grinned as he recognised him, though they had only met twice before, by candlelight around a planning table in a tavern in France. “John.”
John Gray of the Clan Gray—who would, but for Populism, have been the 18th Lord Gray—grinned back at him. The Greys and the Grays were only very distantly related, having ended up on opposite sides of the once-fluxional Anglo-Scottish border during the time of the Border Reivers. But they had kept up their ties, and back in the sixteenth century those ties had helped with the secret negotiations that had seen James VI of Scotland succeed Elizabeth of England, as his father had told Charles long ago. Now, they met again, in the same place as that meeting three hundred years earlier, to discuss similar matters.
The Duke himself helped hand down the rider on the bay. Charles had seen pictures of him before, but still struggled to recognise him. In the pictures, he hadn’t had an eyepatch.
Alistair Black managed a wan smile. “Well met, Your Grace,” he said lightly. “Or should I say, Your Britannic Majesty.”
The Duke had never looked more uncomfortable. “I suppose I should try to get used to hearing that,” he muttered. “I wish it hadn’t come—”
“It has,” Black told him. “It’s time for wrongs to be righted.”
He pulled a cigar from his pocket and looked as though he was about to light it, but instead split it in half and extracted a piece of paper, which he handed to the Duke. “Update. The Covenanters—” the historically resonant name of the Scottish Army the exiles had raised in the Highlands, at first, “—have taken Carlisle and killed General Ramsden.” He shook his head. “And not a moment too soon. The bastard who killed my brother, I wish I’d got hold of him myself!” Flame blazed in his eyes for a moment, then cooled like a banked fire. “And he probably killed Herriott, too,” he conceded. “The idiot thought he could control them…”
The Duke had taken half a step back. “I trust the town wasn’t…damaged,” he murmured.
“Not greatly,” Black said dismissively. “Regardless, we now have the Clackists surrounded. They’re just left with Lancashire and Cheshire, and—with our help—this revolution will be complete shortly.”
The Duke nodded disconsolately. “I suppose I should be glad it didn’t become a bloodbath,” he said, unconsciously echoing Charles’ thoughts. “I thought I was leading another Inglorious Revolution…”
“More like a Third Glorious Revolution, Your Majesty,” the old man said faithfully, startling Charles who had forgotten he was there. “Like your namesake, good old King Fred. Come up out of the water to overthrow a bad set of advisors. A new golden age.”
The Duke stared at him, opened his mouth, and then turned away. Oddly, Charles noted, he was also avoiding Black’s gaze.
“And then,” Black added deliberately, “it will come time—Your Majesty—to finalise the…arrangements we discussed.”
As he spoke, Charles noticed, his hand significantly brushed the patch on his shoulder. It was a flag, a Union Jack, lacking the Asterisk of Liberty just like most of the ones used by the Duke of York’s supporters. But there was something subtly off about it nonetheless—
The St Andrew’s Cross was in front of the St George’s Cross.
“Yes,” the Duke said reluctantly, “we will.”
Charles opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, the meeting was over and Amy was confidently steering him away. “I don’t know what’ll happen now,” he murmured to her. “I don’t know what sort of country we’ve come back to…where are we going?”
Amy raised herself up on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Whatever happens, Caajisi my sweet,” she said, “you are not allowed to worry about it for the rest of today.” She stamped her booted foot on the damp green grass, spread her hand out towards the sea. “This is your home. You’ve got it back. Just like I always said you would.”
Charles looked around him as though for the first time. The morning sun sparkling over the chill waves of the German Sea. The beaches, white-golden sands true and pure, with no concern over who ruled them and under what name. The rolling countryside and the dry-stone walls and the birds singing in the trees. The landscape that, his father had told him, had played host to St Aidan and St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede, all those centuries ago, whose simple faith had set the land alight. Here, in Northumberland, was peace.
He shook his head, slowly. “You’re right. This is home. And I couldn’t have got it back without you,” he murmured, returning the kiss.
He decided to wait until they had found the carved swimming pool his father had told him of before he went down on one knee and proposed. This took embarrassingly longer than he had expected and the sun was high in the sky before he found it. Then, as soon as he began to kneel, he slipped on an unseen patch of moss and slid straight into the pool with a splash, much to Amy’s delight. He had to wait fully twenty minutes for her to stop laughing before he could finally pull out the ring he had bought in London. Not an amethyst stone, thank God!
None of it mattered. The moment was still perfect.
And there was peace.
[9] This is Charles Grey, 1st Earl Grey (born 1729, not long after the POD) who in OTL instead achieved fame fighting in the American Revolutionary War.
[10] As was the OTL building named Howick Hall, though obviously not to the exact same design.
[11] The word ‘thug’ or ‘thuggee’ has entered English via French in TTL due to the different colonisation patterns in India.
Howick, Northumberland, Kingdom of the Britons
February 8th 1900
Charles Grey had woken that morning in a sweat.
It was a common occurrence, and Cheung Amoy, his Chinese fiancée whom he affectionately called ‘Amy’, was used to it by now. She had almost automatically woken along with him, and instantly reached out to hold and comfort him without words, her hands gripping him tightly to her bosom. Charles had stared at one of those perfect little hands before his bleary vision as the nightmarish images faded, remembering when it had been fitted with fake lacquered nails for Amy’s disguise as ‘Lady Dragon Lotus’ for the flight from Belgium. Or when it had lain upon his brow when he had slumbered in a coma in the hospital in the city now called Henei. He did not deserve this woman, said a guilty voice in the back of his mind.
As though she could hear it, Amy had hugged him ever more tightly and whispered in his ear: “I am with you, Caajisi. Now and forever.” She kissed him, and the touch of her lips on his skin was like the first gleam of light from the rising sun on the cherry blossoms at home. They would not arrive in Hanjing for another month or two, he realised belatedly. It felt as though everything had moved so fast that it was hard to believe it was only February.
“What was it this time, Caajisi?” Amy asked softly, cautious of disturbing him with the memories. “The jungle?”
Charles shook his head slowly. “Not this time, dear heart. London.”
Amy paused as she massaged his tense shoulders, staring at him. “But xingan, nothing happened in London.”
Charles winced. “Maybe that’s what was so disturbing, my love. I expected…”
What had he expected?
He was an exile. He had been raised by his father from a young age to think of himself that way. He was a relic of a Britain that was long vanished, destroyed by the bloody ravages of Blandford and the blunt, indiscriminate purges of Llewelyn Thomas. His father had seen which way the wind was blowing and left the country early on, before the Populists could steal his house and his land out from under him as they had cancelled his title, the title he had inherited from his own grandfather for gallant service in the Second Platinean War.[9] He had taken what wealth he could to start a new life in the East, but had always been filled with bitter resentment at what he had lost.The Greys might only be relatively recent recipients of an earldom by the standards of many British aristocrats, but they had been important men in Northumberland for far longer than that.
Northumberland. Charles sat up, twitched aside the red canvas of the tent, and peered outside. Northumberland, in February. His father had told him of it so many times, sometimes of the idealised childhood memories he possessed, sometimes of the imagined devastation that the Populists had inflicted upon it. Charles had tried to create those images in his own head, but on arriving here he realised that his imagination had left out a few key things. Like the cold. And the wet.
Charles had served in many places in Feng China and the East in general, but the parts of China with a climate like this had mostly been in Beiqing hands—until now, that is, with Little Weili having vanished and the Russians having given up and annexed the scraps of Manchuria they had managed to hang on to in the face of the Feng offensive. That war was supposedly spinning down to a de facto peace now. Charles supposed he shouldn’t care. After all, now he was home.
Home. Home was a place he had never been, a place he had never known. Blood should out, he supposed, but the soil beneath his feet felt alien. Field rations of salt beef and biscuit or lamb and potatoes tasted wrong in his mouth, crying out for beansprouts or soy sauce. Even the fish tasted wrong. The locals spoke with a rougher version of the accent his father and his retainers—back when they had been together as a grop of exiles—had used, and Charles sometimes had to ask them to repeat what they had said.
Amy, wonderful, beautiful Amy, seemed to sense his mood. She knelt beside him and kneaded his shoulders once again. She had started to get dressed. Again, a far cry from the cute but gutsy modern Hanjingese girl in her keipo and riding her zihangce, and just as far from the arrogant Beiqing princess with her elaborate coiffure and her ornate robes. Amy’s hair was stuffed imperfectly beneath a French military beret with a red cockade, the sort of thing that made some greybeards talk about Lisieux’s Jacobins. Red had been an odd choice in that sense, Charles reflected, but it had seemed to make sense when The Man—the Duke—had been looking to buy uniforms. Red-dyed coats evoked a vanished, glorious past—and the dye was cheap. Amy wore a modified and much-patched version of one of those red uniforms, no makeup on her face but a pistol in her holster. To say she had never fought before this campaign, she had taken to it like a natural, Charles reluctantly admitted (he hated the idea of her risking her life). She had just laughed and said that shooting combat was nothing compared to the fight over the one free place on the fence to tie your zihangce to, or the struggle over the last of the Hao Yufeng silk fans at the market stall.
God, I love that woman.
He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain: he offered it as a prayer of thanks.
Now, it was later. Slowly, they walked past the modern signs reading HOWICK—500 MILE-HUNDREDTHS, above the old decayed milestones that instead described the distance as half a mile. Howick was not a large village, sitting almost on the coastline of Northumberland, off the beaten track of the Great North Road (or ‘Route One’ as the signs named it) miles inland. Indeed the village itself only felt like an ancillary to Howick Hall. Charles and Amy slowly walked up the path to that Hall, which in its current form had been built by Charles’ grandfather in the 1780s.[10] As they neared it, as though to suppress the thoughts percolating through his mind, Charles thought back to Amy’s words. Nothing had happened in London, she had said.
She meant no violence. Charles had expected to have to fight his way up the Thames alongside the others of the legion which had been dubbed the Ten Thousand Men, though he privately suspected the number was rather lower than that. After all, the Duke of York had no realistic claim to the throne. He was acting as a usurper to his brother, reluctantly and with bitterness on his face every time he confronted the fact. He had confided in Charles that he felt that, despite everything, he had been manipulated into the one thing he had never wanted to do: to openly stand against George IV. But in the end, he had had no choice. Not if Britain was to be saved from the oppressive regime ruling it in his brother’s name. Not if his brother refused to acknowledge that the Lectels the Duke sent were from him.
Still, Charles had worried. Would not the Britons fight for their home and their true King, the Emperor over the sea? The Duke was even being forced to rely on French support for his landing, and historically nothing could more swiftly turn British opinion against a ruler than alignment with the ancestral enemy. The image was terrible, evoking Hoche’s invasion of almost a century before. He had expected fire and blood.
He had got anticlimax. A few wisps of smoke rising over London, a few rattles of gunfire. Mostly, nothing. The damage he did see failed to reach his heart. He had thought he knew London, in a way, from the prints his father had owned. He had failed to realise that those prints depicted the city before Hoche’s invasion and the Second Great Fire, for his father had tried to call back to that vanished era so idolised by Regressives, even though he himself had not lived through it. All the iconic buildings Charles had expected had gone long before his own birth, and the anonymous mix of Marleburgensian RCTFI Utilitarian industrial and Classical Revival structures and the Populist masses of detached houses failed to attract him. The Duke had gone to the marble structure that men still called New Westminster, he knew, and rather shamefacedly mumbled his claim to the throne on the grounds that his brother had abdicated responsibility. If he had expected opposition, he received little. All the MPs, the burgesses and knights, were keen to assure him that they all been on his side all the time, really. Everyone in Britain fondly remembered his two periods as Lord Deputy (as his office had amounted to) and his resigning gesture of protest when his brother had stolen the Lionheart for America. Really, Britain had long since paid all her debts to the ENA for helping out in both the Great American War and now this new one, and the slaughter of British soldiers in the Plate to an ungodly weapon, that was the final straw. It was time for an amicable divorce, don’t you agree?
Charles had just nodded along with all this, like the rest of the Duke’s supporters, because the alternative was punching one of those smug bastards in the face. What had been that blackguard’s name—Montague Vincent-Ponsonby? All assurances that he had worked to undermine the system from within as a true aristocrat, always hoping for the day when the corrupt regime, tainted by its Populist midwife, would be overthrown. Charles was sure that if the Duke went out and was defeated in battle at (say) Slough tomorrow, Vincent-Ponsonby would slimily assure the other side that he had been working to undermine the Duke’s supporters from within.
Who even were the other side? Some MPs had fled, it was true. There was talk of the ‘Clack Regime’ hanging on in Lancashire, in Manchester and Liverpool where ties to America and Ireland had always been tightest and where economic dependence on the Hanoverian System was deepest. Charles wasn’t even sure what the ‘Clack Regime’ was. Nobody even seemed to have seen Lee Clack, the alleged Populist figurehead of the regime, for months before the Duke arrived. Whoever was in the shadows was playing a long game. But Clack’s association with the…well, the enemy had led to some choices of symbolism. The Duke’s supporters had taken to flying pre-Inglorious Revolution Union Jacks, without the Asterisk of Liberty, and avoiding the purple symbolism that had become associated with Britain since the rise of Populism.
Unfortunately, symbols seemed more important than reality. Charles gave the men a dirty look as he and Amy approached. There were six of them, allegedly guarding the gates to Howick House. They were native Britons, but unlike too many of the skinny, dirty folk he had seen in London, they looked well-fed and muscled and arrogant. They wore unusual uniforms which, he was told, had until the Duke’s arrival been purple. They had been called mauvecoats, and been associated with all the shadowy, hinted excesses of the old regime. Now they had hastily bleached them and re-dyed them red and called themselves military police. The Duc de Choiseul, the commander of the French expeditionary force supporting and transporting the Duke’s men, had described them as a gendarmerie. Gendarmery in English, he supported. Hadn’t the Populists been about getting rid of Blandford’s browncoat bullyboys? For that matter, hadn’t the Duke been about getting rid of the old regime here? Yet the bullet-headed thagis just changed their uniforms and carried on beating up innocents.[11] It was a depressing thought. Why did he have to be born an Englishman, couldn’t he have come from some more stable country, less prone to revolution.
Amy linked her arm with his as the smirking Gendarmes peeled away and the Hall lay before them. There stood Frederick, Duke of York, and with him a man who looked to be an elderly local dignitary, looking rather overawed. “Charles,” the Duke called. “Amy. Thank God you’re here. I need you to come and take possession of the place.” He looked meaningfully at the local dignitary.
The latter, to Charles’ shock, went down on one knee. “Thank you, my lord,” he said. “Thank you for coming back to us, after all this time.”
Charles shook his head. “Rise, please. And you don’t say my lord anym—”
The old man waved away his objection as he rose. “All the old People’s Rules are gone now, my lord. Things can go back to how they used to be.” He sounded happy.
Charles had seen in China what happened when people dreamed that they could turn back the clock to the vanished golden age of their youth. His father had been obsessed with the idea, too. It never ended well. But he decided now was not the time. He shook the man’s hand. “It’s good to be back.”
He felt Amy’s hand on his. “And you will have to show me everything,” she breathed. “The swimming pool carved from the rock…the church in which we shall be married.”
Charles grinned at her, and saw the old man’s eyes widen. Oh, dear. “Really, my lord,” he said creakily, “a bride from Cathay—”
Colour rose in Charles’ cheeks as he turned on the man. “Now listen here—”
“Her father owns a tea plantation,” the Duke of York interjected.
The old man’s expression cleared. “Oh, well that’s different,” he said warmly. “I do like a good cup of tea.” To Amy’s surprise, he took her hand and kissed it.
Before Charles could say anything more, the sound of hoofbeats could be heard in the distance. Before long, a grey gelding and a bay stallion cantered to a halt before them, scattering the scarlet-coated Gendarmes behind it. It looked as though the riders had half intended to run them down. From what Charles knew of what men like those had done, he couldn’t blame them.
There were no servants, which was not surprising: such offices had seldom existed except unofficially under the People’s Kingdom. Indeed, Howick Hall had lain dormant for years, escaping demolition or conversion to a public building due to its isolation and a clerical error. Charles helped hand down the rider on the gelding and grinned as he recognised him, though they had only met twice before, by candlelight around a planning table in a tavern in France. “John.”
John Gray of the Clan Gray—who would, but for Populism, have been the 18th Lord Gray—grinned back at him. The Greys and the Grays were only very distantly related, having ended up on opposite sides of the once-fluxional Anglo-Scottish border during the time of the Border Reivers. But they had kept up their ties, and back in the sixteenth century those ties had helped with the secret negotiations that had seen James VI of Scotland succeed Elizabeth of England, as his father had told Charles long ago. Now, they met again, in the same place as that meeting three hundred years earlier, to discuss similar matters.
The Duke himself helped hand down the rider on the bay. Charles had seen pictures of him before, but still struggled to recognise him. In the pictures, he hadn’t had an eyepatch.
Alistair Black managed a wan smile. “Well met, Your Grace,” he said lightly. “Or should I say, Your Britannic Majesty.”
The Duke had never looked more uncomfortable. “I suppose I should try to get used to hearing that,” he muttered. “I wish it hadn’t come—”
“It has,” Black told him. “It’s time for wrongs to be righted.”
He pulled a cigar from his pocket and looked as though he was about to light it, but instead split it in half and extracted a piece of paper, which he handed to the Duke. “Update. The Covenanters—” the historically resonant name of the Scottish Army the exiles had raised in the Highlands, at first, “—have taken Carlisle and killed General Ramsden.” He shook his head. “And not a moment too soon. The bastard who killed my brother, I wish I’d got hold of him myself!” Flame blazed in his eyes for a moment, then cooled like a banked fire. “And he probably killed Herriott, too,” he conceded. “The idiot thought he could control them…”
The Duke had taken half a step back. “I trust the town wasn’t…damaged,” he murmured.
“Not greatly,” Black said dismissively. “Regardless, we now have the Clackists surrounded. They’re just left with Lancashire and Cheshire, and—with our help—this revolution will be complete shortly.”
The Duke nodded disconsolately. “I suppose I should be glad it didn’t become a bloodbath,” he said, unconsciously echoing Charles’ thoughts. “I thought I was leading another Inglorious Revolution…”
“More like a Third Glorious Revolution, Your Majesty,” the old man said faithfully, startling Charles who had forgotten he was there. “Like your namesake, good old King Fred. Come up out of the water to overthrow a bad set of advisors. A new golden age.”
The Duke stared at him, opened his mouth, and then turned away. Oddly, Charles noted, he was also avoiding Black’s gaze.
“And then,” Black added deliberately, “it will come time—Your Majesty—to finalise the…arrangements we discussed.”
As he spoke, Charles noticed, his hand significantly brushed the patch on his shoulder. It was a flag, a Union Jack, lacking the Asterisk of Liberty just like most of the ones used by the Duke of York’s supporters. But there was something subtly off about it nonetheless—
The St Andrew’s Cross was in front of the St George’s Cross.
“Yes,” the Duke said reluctantly, “we will.”
Charles opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, the meeting was over and Amy was confidently steering him away. “I don’t know what’ll happen now,” he murmured to her. “I don’t know what sort of country we’ve come back to…where are we going?”
Amy raised herself up on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Whatever happens, Caajisi my sweet,” she said, “you are not allowed to worry about it for the rest of today.” She stamped her booted foot on the damp green grass, spread her hand out towards the sea. “This is your home. You’ve got it back. Just like I always said you would.”
Charles looked around him as though for the first time. The morning sun sparkling over the chill waves of the German Sea. The beaches, white-golden sands true and pure, with no concern over who ruled them and under what name. The rolling countryside and the dry-stone walls and the birds singing in the trees. The landscape that, his father had told him, had played host to St Aidan and St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede, all those centuries ago, whose simple faith had set the land alight. Here, in Northumberland, was peace.
He shook his head, slowly. “You’re right. This is home. And I couldn’t have got it back without you,” he murmured, returning the kiss.
He decided to wait until they had found the carved swimming pool his father had told him of before he went down on one knee and proposed. This took embarrassingly longer than he had expected and the sun was high in the sky before he found it. Then, as soon as he began to kneel, he slipped on an unseen patch of moss and slid straight into the pool with a splash, much to Amy’s delight. He had to wait fully twenty minutes for her to stop laughing before he could finally pull out the ring he had bought in London. Not an amethyst stone, thank God!
None of it mattered. The moment was still perfect.
And there was peace.
[9] This is Charles Grey, 1st Earl Grey (born 1729, not long after the POD) who in OTL instead achieved fame fighting in the American Revolutionary War.
[10] As was the OTL building named Howick Hall, though obviously not to the exact same design.
[11] The word ‘thug’ or ‘thuggee’ has entered English via French in TTL due to the different colonisation patterns in India.
