The United States of Atlantis Read online

“Have I your leave to take ship?” Cornwallis asked formally.

  “You know you do,” Victor said. “This is not your first visit to Atlantis. I hope one day you may come back here in peacetime, the better to see how this new experiment in liberty progresses.”

  “I should like that, though I can make no promises,” Cornwallis said. “As a soldier, I remain at his Majesty’s beck and call—provided he cares to call on a soldier proved unlucky in war.”

  “Well, I am similarly at the service of the Atlantean Assembly,” Victor said.

  “True.” Cornwallis’ nod was glum. “But you are not similarly defeated.”

  He sketched a salute. Victor held out his hand. Cornwallis clasped it. Then, slinging a duffel bag over his shoulder, the English general strode toward the pier and marched down it with his men. Boarding the closest English ship, he made his way back to the poop. He would have a cabin there, probably next to the captain’s. And, aboard ship, he would no longer get his nose rubbed in Atlantean egalitarianism. He was a good fellow, but Victor doubted he would miss it.

  A horseman trotted up. “General Radcliff, sir?”

  “Yes?” Victor nodded. “What is it?”

  “Letter for you, sir.” The courier handed it to him and rode away.

  Victor eyed the letter as if it were a mortar shell with the fuse hissing and about to explode. He kept waiting for orders from the Atlantean Assembly, and kept dreading the kind of orders the Assembly might give.

  He would go on waiting a while longer. The letter was not addressed in the preternaturally neat hand of the Assembly’s secretary. Nor was it bedizened with the red-crested eagle the Assembly had taken to using on its seal.

  That did not mean the missive bore good news. It also did not mean he failed to recognize the script in which it was addressed. He had his doubts about whether he wanted to hear from the Atlantean Assembly. If only he could forget he’d ever heard from Marcel Freycinet, he would have been the happiest man in the newly freed, ecstatically independent United States of Atlantis. So he told himself, anyhow.

  Which didn’t mean he hadn’t heard from Freycinet. He flipped the seal off the letter with his thumb. It lay not far from his feet. As he unfolded the paper, a little brown sparrow hopped over and pecked at the wax. Finding it indigestible, the bird fluttered off.

  Victor feared he would find the letter’s contents just as indigestible. Freycinet wasted no time beating around the bush. I congratulate you, he wrote. You are the father of a large, squalling baby boy. Louise is also doing well. She has asked that he be named Nicholas, to which I am pleased to assent. I pray God will allow him to remain healthy, and that he will continue to be an adornment for my household. I remain, sir, your most obedient servant in all regards. . . . His scribbled signature followed.

  “A son,” Victor muttered, refolding the sheet of paper. A son somewhere between mulatto and quadroon, born into slavery! Not the offspring he’d had in mind, which was putting it mildly. And if Marcel Freycinet chose, or needed, to sell the boy (to sell Nicholas Radcliff, only surviving son of Victor Radcliff—hailed as Liberator of Atlantis but unable to liberate his own offspring) . . . well, he would be within his rights.

  Suddenly and agonizingly, Victor understood the Seventh Commandment in a way he never had before. God knew what He was doing when He thundered against adultery, all right. And why? Not least, surely, because adultery complicated men’s lives, and women’s, in ways nothing else could.

  A bird called. It was only one of the robins whose Atlantean name General Cornwallis and other Englishmen so disdained. All the same, to Victor’s ear it might have been a cuckoo. He’d hatched an egg in a nest not his own, and now he had to hope other birds would feed and care for the fledgling as it deserved.

  Someone’s soles scuffed on the dirt beside him. He looked up. There stood Blaise. The Negro pointed at the letter. “Is it from the Assembly?”

  “No.” Victor quickly tucked the folded sheet of paper into a breeches pocket. “Merely an admirer.”

  Blaise raised an eyebrow. “An admirer, you say? Have you met her? Is she pretty?”

  “Not that sort of admirer.” At the moment—especially at this moment—that was the last sort Victor wanted.

  “What other kind is worth having?” Blaise asked. When away from Stella, he could still think like that, since he hadn’t got Roxane with child—and since he didn’t know Victor had impregnated Louise.

  “I said nothing of whether this one was worth having,” Victor answered, warming to his theme: “This is a fellow who, having read the reports of our final campaign in the papers in Hanover, is now convinced he could have taken charge of our army and the French and won more easily and quickly and with fewer casualties than we did. If only he wore gilded epaulets, he says, we should have gained our liberty year before last.”

  “Oh. One of those,” Blaise said. The lie convinced him all the more readily because Victor had had several real letters in that vein. A startling number of men who’d never commanded soldiers—and who probably didn’t know how to load a musket, much less clean one—were convinced the art of generalship suffered greatly because circumstance forced them to remain netmakers or potters or solicitors. Victor and Blaise were both convinced such men understood matters military in the same degree as a honker comprehended the calculus.

  “I’m afraid so,” Victor said.

  “Well, if you waste the time and ink on an answer, by all means tell him I think he’s a damn fool, too,” Blaise said, and took himself off.

  “If I do, I shall,” Victor answered—a promise that meant nothing. He reached into his pocket and touched the letter from Freycinet. However much grief he felt, it remained a private grief. And the last thing he wanted—the very last thing—was that it should ever become public.

  Dickering with the English commissioners helped keep Victor from brooding too much over things in his own life he could not help. Richard Oswald was a plain-spoken Scotsman who served as chief negotiator for the English Secretary of State, the Earl of Shelburne. His colleague, David Hartley, was a member of Parliament. He had a high forehead, a dyspeptic expression, and a shoulder-length periwig of the sort that had gone out of fashion when Louis XIV died, more than half a century before.

  Most of the negotiations were straightforward enough. The English duo conceded that King George recognized the United States of Atlantis, separately and collectively, as free, sovereign, and independent states. He abandoned all claims to govern them and to own property in them.

  Settling the borders of the new land was similarly simple. The only land frontier it had was the old one with Spanish Atlantis in the far south, and that remained unchanged. One of these days, Victor suspected, his country would take Spanish Atlantis for its own, either by conquest or by purchase. But that time was not yet here, and did not enter into the present discussions.

  “There’d be more of a to-do over who owned what and who claimed what were you part of the Terranovan mainland,” Oswald remarked in a burr just thick enough to make Victor pay close attention to every word he said. The comment reminded Victor of his byplay with Cornwallis at the surrender ceremony. Oswald went on, “As things are, though, ocean all around keeps us from fashin’ ourselves unduly.”

  “So it does,” Victor said, hoping he grasped what fashin’ meant.

  They disposed without much trouble of fishing rights and of the due rights of creditors on both sides to get the full amount they had been owed. Then they came to the sticky part: the rights remaining to Atlanteans who had stayed loyal to King George. That particularly grated on Victor because Habakkuk Biddiscombe and a handful of his men remained at large.

  At last, David Hartley said, “Let them be outlaws, then. But what of the plight of the thousands of Atlanteans who never bore arms against your government but still groan under expulsions and confiscations? I fear I see no parallel between the two cases.”

  That gave Victor pause. How could he say the Englishman’s co
mplaint held no justice? Slowly, he answered, “If these onetime loyalists are willing to live peacefully in the United States of Atlantis, and to accept the new nation’s independence, something may perhaps be done for them.”

  “Why do you allow no more than that?” Hartley pressed. “Let your Atlantean Assembly pass the proper law, and proclaim it throughout the land, and all will be as it should.”

  “If only it were so simple,” Victor said, not without regret.

  “Wherefore is it not?” Hartley asked.

  “The Assembly chooses war and peace for all Atlantis. It treats with foreign powers. It coins specie. It arranges for the dealings of the Atlantean settlements—ah, states—one with another,” Victor said. “But each state, within its own boundaries, retains its sovereignty. The Assembly has not the authority to command the several states to treat the loyalists within ’em thus and so. Did it make the attempt, the states’ Assemblies and Parliaments and Legislatures would surely rise against it, reckoning its impositions as tyrannous as all Atlantis reckoned King George’s.”

  “This is not government,” Richard Oswald said. “This is lunacy let loose upon the world.”

  Although inclined to agree with him, Victor knew better than to admit as much. He spread his hands. “It is what we have, sir. I do not intend to touch off a civil war on the heels of the foreign war just past.”

  “Lunacy,” Oswald repeated. He seemed more inclined to wash his hands of the United States of Atlantis than to spread them.

  But his colleague said, “Perhaps there is a middle ground.”

  Oswald snorted. “Between madness and sanity? Give me leave to doubt.”

  “How would this be?” David Hartley said. “Let the Atlantean Assembly earnestly recommend to the governing bodies of the respective states that they provide for the restitution of estates, rights, and properties belonging to those who did not take up arms against the United States of Atlantis. This would be consistent not only with justice and equity but also with the spirit of conciliation which on the return of the blessings of peace should universally prevail.”

  Victor Radcliff suspected hotheads in the Atlantean Assembly would damn him for a soft-hearted backslider for making an arrangement like that. He also suspected the states’ governing bodies might not care to heed the Atlantean Assembly’s recommendations, no matter how earnest they were. But a mild occupation of French Atlantis had gone well on the whole, where a harsh one might have sparked festering rebellion. He didn’t nod with any great enthusiasm, but nod he did. “Let it be so.”

  “Capital!” Hartley wrote swiftly. “I believe this conveys the gist of what I said. Is it acceptable to you?”

  Victor read the proposed article. He nodded again. “It is.”

  “By the same token, then, there should be no further confiscations—nor prosecutions, either, for that matter—because of past loyalties,” Richard Oswald said. “Any such proceedings now in train should also be stopped.”

  “I will agree to that, provided it also applies reciprocally,” Victor replied. “England should not prosecute any Atlanteans in her territory for preferring the Assembly to the king.”

  Oswald looked as if he’d bitten into an unripe persimmon. But David Hartley nodded judiciously. “That seems only fair,” he said. With his own countryman willing to yield the point, Oswald grumbled but did not say no.

  Terms for the evacuation of English troops had already been worked out between Victor and General Cornwallis. It remained but to incorporate them into the treaty. The English also undertook not to destroy any archives or records. Quite a few documents had already gone up in flames, the better to protect informers and quiet collaborators. Well, the Atlanteans had burned their share of papers, too. But enough was enough.

  “One other point remains,” Victor said. “Operations of which we here know nothing may yet continue against Avalon, New Marseille, or the smaller towns of the west coast. In case it should happen that any place belonging to Atlantis shall have been conquered by English arms before word of this treaty arrives in those parts, let it be restored without difficulty and without compensation.”

  The English commissioners looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time. “Agreed,” Oswald said. Again, David Hartley wrote down the clause.

  After he finished, he asked, “Is your west coast as savage as the savants say?”

  “It is sparsely settled, though Avalon makes a fair-sized town,” Victor answered. “The truly empty region is the interior between the Green Ridge Mountains and the Hesperian Gulf. Its day will come, I doubt not, but that day is not yet here.”

  “Will it come in our lifetime?” Hartley asked.

  “I can hope so,” Victor said. “I must admit, I don’t particularly expect to see it.”

  “Shall we proceed?” Richard Oswald said. “Does anything more need to go into this treaty?” He waited. When neither his countryman nor Victor said anything, he went on, “Then let it go into effect when it is ratified by Parliament and by the Atlantean Assembly, said ratification to take place within six months unless some matter of surpassing exigency should intervene.”

  “Agreed,” Victor said. He shook hands with both Englishmen.

  “I shall give you a copy of the articles,” David Hartley said.

  “For which I thank you kindly,” Victor replied. Amazing how defeat in the field inclined England toward sweet reason. He barely kept himself from clapping his hands in glee. No one now, not King George and not the Emperor of China, either, could claim the United States of Atlantis had no rightful place among the nations of the world!

  Victor was lodged above a public house called the Pleasant Cod. The place had been open for business for upwards of a century; by now, very likely, every possible jest about its name had been made. That didn’t keep new guests from making those same jokes over again. Only the glazed look in the taverner’s eye kept Victor from exercising his wit at the Cod’s expense.

  He—or rather, the Atlantean Assembly—was paying for his lodging. One of the principal grievances Atlantis had against England was the uncouth English practice of quartering troops on the citizenry without so much as a by-your-leave—and without so much as a farthing’s worth of payment. And if the taverner gouged him for the room . . . well, Atlantean paper still wasn’t close to par with sterling.

  Someone pounded on the door in the middle of the night. Victor needed a moment to come back to himself, then another to remember where he was and why he was there. He groped for the fine sword from the Atlantean Assembly. In these days of gunpowder, generals rarely bloodied their blades on the battlefield. But the sword would do fine for letting the air out of a robber or two.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out in the hall really wanted to come in. People in other rooms swore at the racket. Victor had no trouble hearing every angry oath through the thin walls.

  “Who’s there, dammit?” he called, blade in his right hand, the latch in his left. He wasn’t about to open it till he got an answer he liked.

  He made the knocking stop, anyway. “Is that you, Victor?” a voice inquired. A familiar voice?

  “No,” he said harshly. “I am the Grand Vizier of the Shah of Persia.” He would have assumed a Persian accent had he had the faintest notion of what one sounded like.

  Someone else spouted gibberish in the hall. For all Victor knew, it might have been Persian. It was beyond a doubt Custis Cawthorne. Victor threw the door open. “I thought you were still in France!” he exclaimed.

  “His ship put in at Pomphret Landing,” Isaac Fenner said. “We’ve ridden together from there to Croydon to see you.”

  “Perhaps not quite so much of you as this,” Cawthorne added. Victor looked down at himself in the dim light of the hallway lantern. All he had on were a linen undershirt and cotton drawers.

  “I was asleep,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “You might have waited till morning to come to call.”

  “That’s right! You
bloody well might have, you noisy buggers!” someone else yelled from behind a closed door.

  Victor ducked back into his room. After some fumbling, he found the candle stub that had lighted his way up the stairs. He lit it again at the lantern. Then he made a gesture of invitation. “Well, my friends, as long as you are here, by all means come in.”

  “Yes—go in and shut up!” that unhappy man shouted.

  “We should have let it wait till morning,” Cawthorne said as Victor shut the door behind them.

  His little bit of candle wouldn’t last long. Then they could either talk in the dark or go to bed. “Why didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Because what we came for is too important,” Isaac Fenner answered stubbornly. The dim, flickering light only made his ears seem to stick out even more than they would have anyway.

  “And that is . . . ?” Victor prompted.

  “Why, to finish negotiating the treaty with the English commissioners . . . Confound it, what’s so funny?”

  “Only that I reached an accord with them this afternoon,” Victor answered. “If the Atlantean Assembly should decide the said accord is not to its liking, it is welcome to change matters to make them more satisfactory. And, should it choose to do so, I shall retire once for all into private life with the greatest delight and relief imaginable.”

  Custis Cawthorne burst out laughing, too. “All this rushing might have been avoided with a faster start,” he observed. “But then, that proves true more often than any of us commonly cares to contemplate.”

  Fenner, implacable as one of the Three Fates, held out his hand to Victor. “Kindly let me see this so-called agreement.”

  “No,” Victor said.

  Shadows swooped across Fenner’s face as it sagged in surprise. “What?” he sputtered. “You dare refuse?”

  “Too right, I do,” Victor answered. “God may know what miserable hour of the night it is, but, not being inclined to fumble out my pocket watch, I haven’t the faintest notion. I am certain the treaty will keep till daylight. For now, Isaac, shut up and go to bed.”