"Always glad to visit with someone from the old stand." Stafford meant that. To him, New Hastings was another world. People here didn't see things with the same simple certainties they used down in Cosquer. They had their own convictions. Those often struck Stafford as lunatic if not wicked, but the locals clung to them all the same.
The Consul left the Ministry of War: an impressive neoclassical marble pile with an even more impressive statue of Mars (done by a Frenchman who'd ended up quarreling about his fee) in front of it. In the streets around the Ministry stood a number of eateries and other shops that catered to the soldiers and civilian employees who worked there. If Stafford ever needed a cavalry saber or a waterproof oilskin cape, he knew where to get one.
A gray-uniformed sentry came to attention as Stafford loosed his horse's reins from the hitching rail and swung up onto the animal. Then, gravely nodding in return, he rode back toward the center of town. As the horse walked along, Stafford felt the weight of history pressing down on him. Despite the New in its name, New Hastings was the oldest town in Atlantis-four centuries old now. Everyone learned the jingle "In fourteen hundred and fifty-two, Ed Radcliffe sailed the ocean blue."
Not everyone remembered that Francois Kersauzon, a Breton fisherman, showed Edward Radcliffe the way to Atlantis. Cosquer, Consul Stafford's hometown, was a Breton foundation. But it dated from after New Hastings. The Radcliffes and Radcliffs always seemed to be half a step ahead of the Kersauzons-always when it mattered most, anyhow.
And, while Cosquer grew, it never thrived the way New Hastings did. Only a few years after the first settlement, people from New Hastings had founded Bredestown, miles up the river from the coast. They'd kept pushing west ever since, too.
The great redwood church still dominated the center of New Hastings. Built before the Reformation, it had begun as a Catholic cathedral. It stayed Catholic for some years after England went Protestant but eventually conformed to the Anglican rite. The Atlantean Assembly had met there to plan the war against England… till the redcoats ran the Conscript Fathers out, after which they carried on as best they could from the hamlet of Honker's Mill. Once victory was won-rather to the Atlantean Assembly's surprise, unless Stafford missed his guess-the country's leading lights returned to hammer out the Charter that bedeviled Atlantis to this day.
Stafford muttered under his breath. Maybe things would have gone differently, gone better, had the Senate chosen to build a new capital away from everything instead of settling down in a northern city already opposed to slavery. There was talk of it, but it had seemed too expensive to a country bedeviled by debt from the war for liberty.
He muttered again. The black grandson of Victor Radcliff demanding liberty for bondsmen? Jeremiah Stafford knew it was possible. The First Consul would have been no more immune to the lusts of the flesh than any other man. Possible or not, though, it had to be denied. If true-no, if believed true-it gave the rising too much prestige.
A constable held up a white-gloved hand. Stafford halted his horse. So did the other riders and drivers on his street. The constable turned and waved, letting cross traffic through. After a while, he held up his hand to stop it, and Stafford's forward progress resumed. Not all of New Hastings' notions were ancient. The Consul quite liked the traffic-control scheme.
By contrast, he could have lived without the railroad station. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous, soot-stained brick barn. The rumble from arriving and departing trains frightened horses, and the smoke their engines belched fouled the air. Yes, they made travel much faster than it had ever been before. Yes, they could haul far more people and goods than horse-drawn coaches and wagons. But they were filthy. That was the only word that fit.
He wasn't sure he liked gas lamps, either. They threw more light than candles and lanterns, true. But they were also more dangerous. When a gas line broke and caught fire… Several square blocks had burned in Hanover two years before, or was it three now?
Telegraph wires crowded the sky. They had their uses. News that would have needed days, maybe weeks, to cross the country now raced at the speed of lightning. The government could have taken advantage of that to help put down this insurrection quickly. It could have, but it hadn't. That made the wires seem even uglier to Consul Stafford than they would have otherwise. His lips moved as he silently damned Leland Newton.
Well, no matter what the other Consul thought, there were ways around things even if there weren't ways straight through them. He'd started using some of those ways. Now he had to hope his machinations would let the local whites do the job that needed doing.
A moment later, he found his own way straight through to the Senate House and adjoining Consular residences blocked. A wagon had lost a wheel, spilling barrels and clogging the street. The pungent smell of beer hung in the air. A teamster cursed in a sonorous brogue. People milled about, trying to escape the jam.
The way around, Jeremiah Stafford thought. He turned his own horse back the way he'd come. First to find the way out. Then to find the side streets that would, eventually, get him where he wanted to go.
Consul Stafford gave a newsboy a cent for a copy of the new day's New Hastings Strand. "Here you are, sir," the boy said, handing him the paper.
"Thank you kindly." Newton held it out almost at arm's length. The print was small, and his eyes seemed to have more trouble with it every month. He had a pair of reading glasses, but didn't like them. They turned the more distant world to a fuzzy blur.
By wire from New Marseille, a story boasted. It told of people fleeing to the West Coast city from plantations and smaller towns to the east. The rampage of the colored desperadoes only continues and intensifies! the reporter in New Marseille wrote. Local authorities seem powerless to quell their depredations, while the national government does nothing.
Anyone could guess where his affiliations on the question of slavery lay. But the Strand wasn't a pro-slavery paper. There weren't many of those north of the Stour. Maybe it printed this story because the choice lay between printing it and going without news. Or maybe the Strand had decided the uprising needed quashing even if mistreated slaves-a redundancy if ever there was one-had finally had more than they could stand.
The governor of New Marseille had proclaimed a state of emergency, the piece went on. He was drafting all able-bodied men into the state militia. He wasn't quite begging the Atlantean soldiers in New Marseille to desert and sign up with the militia, but he was quoted as saying, "We're looking for men experienced in handling weapons."
Governor Donovan was also appealing for aid from other states "that share our institutions and our dangers." Reading the rest of the front page, Consul Newton doubted whether Donovan would get as much help as he wanted. Insurrections were breaking out in the states of Cosquer and Gernika and Nouveau Redon: like forest fires in a lightning storm after a long drought. The slaveholding states east of the Green Ridge Mountains might be too busy closer to home to send men or guns off to the west.
A man in a plug hat came up to Newton and demanded, "What are you going to do about the niggers, Consul?"
No one would have spoken to Queen Victoria that way. No one would have addressed her Prime Minister like that, either. Atlanteans were convinced they were as good-and as smart-as their magistrates. The United States of Atlantis rested on that presumption of equality… for white men. The idea that men of other breeds might crave the same presumption hadn't sunk in, not south of the Stour it hadn't.