Chapter 7

England’s power had faded. It was no longer the great British Empire, although it still pretended it was. It was hardly even a United Kingdom anymore, just a few dank North Sea islands under centralized control and a smattering of minuscule colonial remnants.

Sir James Wylings was a man out of time. He was an English gentleman in the strict eighteenth-century sense. Not for him the shattered empire of today, the age of homosexuality, the century of British obeisance to the European Union it had once lorded over and the time of rampant disdain for royalty and all it represented.

He was a throwback immersed in a world of throwbacks. His life was a carefully limited series of private clubs, foxhunts and social engagements with the dismally small clique of old, titled money that still survived in the twenty-first century. Sir James Wylings and his peers spoke of the modern world in abstract terms, and always with disdain. In this company, the discussion of current events was deemed to be in poor taste.

But etiquette be dashed when a greater need arose, and today the need was vital. There was one thing England would not tolerate and that was the further diminishing of what was left of its empire. Take, for example, the islands off of South America. When the Falklands attempted to steal themselves away from the Crown, the Crown went and took them back. Taught those miserable bastards a thing or two.

Still, they were just the bleeding Falklands. Who gave a rat’s bloody ass about the bleeding Falklands?

Now the crisis was real. This time it wasn’t some insignificant island that nobody had ever heard of.

This time it was Scotland.

Not since the days of Wallace had there been a serious threat of Scottish independence. Sure, there was always a small underground knot of freedom fighters at work, but they were at best halfhearted terrorists. The Scottish people never paid them much attention, and the British government paid them even less.

Until now.

Overnight, a grass-roots independence movement had sprung up in Scotland, and it was just one of hundreds of independence movements all around the world that had gone from obscurity to vitality. It was as if there was something in the air, spurring on the egoists. The Sicilians declared their independence from Rome, while the Basque separatists were running amok. Moscow was having a time just keeping straight who was trying to secede from Russia and take which plots of land with them. It was all rather amusing—until it hit home.

Rowdy protests erupted in London and Glasgow. Protesters demanded London grant immediate independence to Scotland. They demanded reparations for years of “occupation” and the surrender of all British holdings inside 1766 Scottish territorial claims.

The last part was what galled men like Wylings.

“There was a time when ownership meant something,” he opined while sipping a Scotch at the club. His audience included Dolan and Sykes, both excellent chaps, both members of Parliament.

There were murmurs of agreement.

“Every time we turn our backs we’re getting more of our property taken away,” Wylings complained. “I’ve bloody well had enough of whining ingrates claiming ownership over sovereign British territory.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“Quite right.”

“Well, of course it used to belong to someone else. You go back far enough and everything belonged to somebody else, right? But it doesn’t belong to somebody else now, because it belongs to the Crown, because we had the gumption to go and take it.”

“Yes.”

“Naturally.”

“Only in the twenty-first century could that count for nothing,” Wylings concluded.

“Hmm.”

“Yes.”

“Unless we make it count for something.”

Dolan nodded as if he understood perfectly. “What do you have in mind, Wylings?”

“Listen,” Wylings said with uncharacteristic fervor, “we need to show these Scots gits who’s boss. If we let them push us around, there’ll be radicals from every scrap of land we have left trying to give the Queen the boot. We need to make an example of the Scots.”

Dolan and Sykes looked expectant.

“Let’s neuter the bastards. They want to be more Scottish, well, we’ll just take away whatever Scottishness they’ve got left. Once they start getting the opposite of what they’re fighting for—well, they’ll back down in a big hurry.”

As Dolan and Sykes listened to Wylings’s plan, they were all smiles.

“You’ve got a real head for the political game, Wylings,” Dolan said. “I predict you’ll sit in Parliament some day.”

Wylings had a drained look on his face, but it was just an act. “God forbid! Besides, why should I bother when I have a couple of excellent chaps like you willing to listen to my suggestions?”

Later, Wylings sipped his Scotch alone. His excellent chaps had scampered off to do his bidding like the good little lapdogs they were. Wylings had cultivated his friendships with Dolan and Sykes when they were just lads, knowing even then that they were bound for positions of power by virtue of their intelligence and breeding.

Over the years Wylings had played with them to amuse himself in different ways, and occasionally obliged them to throw some government contracts to the family concerns. It kept Wylings wealthy without requiring him to actually get involved in the business of business; he wouldn’t allow his noble hands to become sullied with corporate ink.

When he was in his thirties, his friends in government helped him engineer a little public awareness. An American shipment of food supplies was lost while en route to Africa to aid starving victims of intertribal war. Wylings had one of his companies reroute a shipment of foodstuffs from its intended destination in Rio de Janeiro to Africa. Included in the shipment were seed corn and tents, and the small, displaced Nairobi tribe loudly proclaimed that Wylings had single-handedly ended their famine and saved their people from extinction.

For this well-publicized act of selflessness, Wylings received his knighthood at an exceptionally young age. No one ever bothered to really investigate the loss of the original American food shipment Likewise, there were no questions asked about the shipment of food, tents and seed corn that Wylings’s scrap-steel-hauling division just happened to have on hand at the fortuitous moment.

Wylings always played his cards well. He knew how to make the system work. Without any real effort on his own part, he had become one of the most respected and influential back-room players in the British government.

All at once, the jitters came and bit him. His brow broke out with a sudden sweat, and Wylings lowered the crystal glass to the surface of the bar, where it rattled noisily for a moment. Wylings mopped his brow with a linen handkerchief, monogrammed in gold thread. His eyes darted around, but there was no one around. No barman on duty at this time of the night. Members served themselves after 2:00 a.m. Nobody else in residence.

Wylings breathed a sigh of relief. Sometimes, when he wasn’t careful, the little rodent of nervousness darted out of its hole and crawled into the open before he could give it a good swift kick. Wylings prayed that no one would ever see his jitters.

Two hundred years ago, his great-great-grandsire was exactly the same kind of man, but the nature of those times meant that he could make great contributions to society and to the good of England. Now, such a man was only an outcast and a throwback.

It all came to a head far earlier than Wylings had even dreamed of. In fact, he had to cut short his next afternoon of tennis when he got the news of the brewing altercation in London.

“This is the scene on Downing Street where angry Scotsmen are gathering by the hundreds to protest the new law that was rammed through Parliament this afternoon. The law prohibits the wearing of kilts or tartan colors anywhere within the United Kingdom and is effective immediately. This was the scene in Parliament today.”

The television in the locker room showed a Scottish member of Parliament attempting to speak. He was red-faced with anger, shouting to be heard, and still the heckling drowned him out. All Wylings heard was something about the new law being “patently illegal.”

“Put on some trousers, you bleeding fairy!” responded someone in the crowd.

By evening the protests in London came to a head. After issuing a warning and giving all kilt wearers within London city limits a three-hour grace period to change their attire in accord with the new laws, they began making arrests.

Wylings watched with Dolan, Sykes and a close- knit group of like-minded patriots at the club.

The BBC anchor followed the protest coverage from locale to locale. At one point, he announced, “We’re getting reports of violent resistance being offered by the kilt-wearing criminals …”

That nearly brought the house down. Wylings and his mates had their heartiest laugh in many a day.

“Whoever heard of a violent Scotsman!”

“Outside of thrashing the beer girl at the football match, you mean!”

They sobered up when the BBC mobile camera began broadcasting evidence of the Scots fighting back.