New York - The Novel

declared. “I think we’ve just proved that. As for the lesser breeds …”
    “The lesser breeds, Colonel?” she queried. He smiled.
    “I was out in Forty-five, you know.”
    The Forty-five. It was not fifteen years since Bonnie Prince Charlie had landed in Scotland and tried to take back the old kingdom from the Hanoverian rulers in London. It had been a wild, romantic business. And utterly tragic. The redcoats had moved against the ill-equipped and untrained Scotsmen and smashed them.
    “Untrained men can’t stand against a regular army, Mrs. Master,” the colonel continued calmly. “It can’t be done. As for the Highland Scots …” He smiled. “They’re little more than savages, you know.”
    Mercy had seen plenty of Scots arriving in Philadelphia and New York. They didn’t seem like savages to her, but it was clear that the colonel believed what he said, and this didn’t seem the time and place to argue with him.
    A little later on, however, the conversation turned to Irish affairs.
    “The native Irish,” the colonel said emphatically, “is little better than an animal.” And though she knew that this was not to be taken too literally, the Quaker in her found such judgments arrogant and unseemly. But no one at the table disagreed with him, she noticed.
    “Ireland has to be ruled firmly,” Lord Riverdale said quietly. “I’m sure we all agree.”
    “They’re certainly not capable of governing themselves,” the colonel remarked, “not even the Protestant Irish.”
    “Yet they have an Irish Parliament, surely?” Mercy asked.
    “You are quite right, Mrs. Master,” Lord Riverdale said with a smile. “But the truth is, we make quite sure that the Irish Parliament has no power.”
    Mercy said no more. She smiled politely, and the evening continued pleasantly. But this she knew: she had seen the heart of the empire, and she did not like it.

    Young James Master didn’t know what to do. He loved his parents. As the new year began, he had talked to his father, but not his mother.
    Since coming to London, he’d grown in confidence, and also in height. For he was already an inch and a half taller than when he arrived, and the fine new coat his father had bought him was in full retreat up his arms.
    “I believe you’ll be taller than I am,” his father laughed.
    It was not surprising that James had fallen in love with London. It was, indisputably, the capital of the English-speaking world. The city was so full of activity that, as the great Doctor Johnson was to say: “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.” In his tutor, James had gained a guide; in young Grey Albion, an admiring younger brother. The English fellows of his age accepted him as one of themselves. What more could a boy of rising fifteen want?
    One thing. He wanted to go to Oxford. He was still too young. But under the clever handling of his tutor, he was making huge strides in his studies. “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be ready to go to Oxford in a few years,” his tutor told his father. And truth to tell, John Master had been delighted by the idea. “You’d be doing far better than I did,” he confessed very frankly to James. Indeed, when he remembered the humiliation he’d felt at the hands of his Boston cousins, he couldn’t restrain a smile. Harvard and Yale were fine places; but to have a son who’d been to Oxford—that would be one in the eye for the Masters of Boston!
    There was also another consideration. He knew the men in the provincial Assembly, and the New Yorkers close to the governor; and a surprising number of these fellows had been educated in England. An Oxford degree might be a useful asset for the family in the future.
    Master talked to Albion about it, and the London man agreed.
    “If James goes to Oxford,” Albion told him, “he should live with us in London during the vacations. We already think of him as one of the family.”
    There was only one problem.
    It was New Year’s Day when Mercy gave John the unexpected news.
    “John, I’m with child.”
    After so many years it had come as quite a surprise, but it seemed there was no doubt. And with the news had come one other request.
    “John, I want to return to New York. I want my child born in my home, not in England.”
    He waited a day before he brought up the subject of James and Oxford. He was prepared for her not to like the idea, but not for her dismay.
    “Let him go to Harvard, John, but do not leave him