Dream Thing

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.