Flash for Freedom!
George MacDonald Fraser
Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.When Flashman was inveigled into a game of pontoon with Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck, he was making an unconscious choice about his own future – would it lie in the House of Commons or the West African slave trade? Was there, for that matter, very much difference?Once again Flashman’s charm, cowardice, treachery, lechery and fleetness of foot see the lovable rogue triumph by the skin of his chattering teeth.
Copyright (#u1dd4d6d8-e4c4-570f-a13d-8f1df1b16358)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Barrie & Jenkins Ltd 1971
Reissued by Collins 1981
Reprinted by Collins Harvill 1988
Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1971
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015
Map © John Gilkes 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille
George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
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Source ISBN: 9780006511274
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007325672
Version: 2015-07-21
The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? (#u1dd4d6d8-e4c4-570f-a13d-8f1df1b16358)
‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.
To the question, how did I get the idea, I simply reply that I don’t know. Who ever knows? Anthony Hope conceived The Prisoner of Zenda on a walk from Westminster to the Temple, but I doubt if he could have said, after the calendar month it took him to write the book, what triggered the idea. In my case, Flashman came thundering out of the mists of forty years living and dreaming, and while I can list the ingredients that went to his making, heaven only knows how and when they combined.
One thing is sure: the Flashman Papers would never have been written if my fellow clansman Hugh Fraser, Lord Allander, had confirmed me as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1966. But he didn’t, the canny little bandit, and I won’t say he was wrong. I wouldn’t have lasted in the job, for I’d been trained in a journalistic school where editors were gods, and in three months as acting chief my attitude to management, front office, and directors had been that of a seigneur to his serfs – I had even put Fraser’s entry to the House of Lords on an inside page, assuring him that it was not for the Herald, his own paper, to flaunt his elevation, and that a two-column picture of him was quite big enough. How cavalier can you get?
And doubtless I had other editorial shortcomings. In any event, faced with twenty years as deputy editor (which means doing all the work without getting to the big dinners), I promised my wife I would ‘write us out of it’. In a few weeks of thrashing the typewriter at the kitchen table in the small hours, Flashman was half-finished, and likely to stay that way, for I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm, and lost interest – until my wife asked to read what I had written. Her reaction galvanised me into finishing it, one draft, no revisions, and for the next two years it rebounded from publisher after publisher, British and American.
I can’t blame them: the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully, and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story is a pretty eccentric subject. By 1968 I was ready to call it a day, but thanks to my wife’s insistence and George Greenfield’s matchless knowledge of the publishing scene, it found a home at last with Herbert Jenkins, the manuscript looking, to quote Christopher MacLehose, as though it had been round the world twice. It dam’ nearly had.
They published it as it stood, with (to me) bewildering results. It wasn’t a bestseller in the blockbuster sense, but the reviewers were enthusiastic, foreign rights (starting with Finland) were sold, and when it appeared in the U.S.A. one-third of forty-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir, to the undisguised glee of the New York Times, which wickedly assembled their reviews. ‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of.
You see, while I had written a straightforward introduction describing the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Papers’ in a saleroom in Ashby-de-la-Zouche (that ought to have warned them), and larded it with editorial ‘foot-notes’, there had been no intent to deceive; for one thing, while I’d done my best to write, first-person, in Victorian style, I’d never imagined that it would fool anybody. Nor did Herbert Jenkins. And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit. (The only one who was half-doubtful was my old chief sub on the Herald; called on to review it for another paper, he demanded of the Herald’s literary editor: ‘This book o’ Geordie’s isnae true, is it?’ and on being assured that it wasn’t, exclaimed: ‘The conniving bastard!’, which I still regard as a high compliment.)
With the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad who, despite his cowardice, depravity and deceit, had managed to emerge from fearful ordeals and perils an acclaimed hero, his only redeeming qualities being his humour and shameless honesty as a memorialist. I was gratified, if slightly puzzled to learn that the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, had said of the book: ‘I haven’t heard this voice in fifty years’, and that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was recommending it to his subordinates. My interest increased as I wrote more Flashman books, and noted the reactions.
I was, several critics agreed, a satirist. Taking revenge on the nineteenth century on behalf of the twentieth, said one. Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy, said another. Plainly under the influence of Conrad, said yet another. A full-page review in a German paper took me flat aback when my eye fell on the word ‘Proust’ in the middle of it. I don’t read German, so for all I know the review may have been maintaining that Proust was a better stand-off half than I was, or used more semi-colons. But there it was, and it makes you think. And a few years ago a highly respected religious journal said that the Flashman Papers deserved recognition as the work of a sensitive moralist, and spoke of service not only to literature and history, but to the study of ethics.
My instant reaction to this was to paraphrase Poins: ‘God send me no worse fortune, but I never said so!’ while feeling delighted that someone else had said it, and then reflecting solemnly that this was a far cry from long nights with cold tea and cigarettes, scheming to get Flashman into the passionate embrace of the Empress of China, or out of the toils of a demented dwarf on the edge of a snake-pit. But now, beyond remarking that the anti-imperial left-winger was sadly off the mark, that the Victorians were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation, and that I hadn’t read a word of Conrad by 1966 (and my interest in him since has been confined to Under WesternEyes, in the hope that I might persuade Dick Lester to film it as only he could), I have no comments to offer on opinions of my work. I know what I’m doing – at least, I think I do – and the aim is to entertain (myself, for a start) while being true to history, to let Flashman comment on human and inhuman nature, and devil take the romantics and the politically correct revisionists both. But my job is writing, not explaining what I’ve written, and I’m well content and grateful to have others find in Flashy whatever they will (I’ve even had letters psychoanalysing the brute), and return to the question with which I began this article.
A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tupenny bloods, the Wolf of Kabul and Lionheart Logan (where are they now?), the Barrack-Room Ballads, films like Lives of aBengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s; the discovery, through Scott and Sabatini and Macaulay, that history is one tremendous adventure story; soldiering in Burma, and seeing the twilight of the Raj in all its splendour; a newspaper-trained lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion; being a Highlander from a family that would rather spin yarns than eat … I suppose Flashman was born out of all these things, and from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a child – and having a wayward cast of mind.
Thanks to that contrary streak (I always half-hoped that Rathbone would kill Flynn, confounding convention and turning the story upside down – Basil gets Olivia, Claude Rains triumphs, wow!), I recognised Flashman on sight as the star of Hughes’ book. Fag-roasting rotter and poltroon he might be, he was nevertheless plainly box-office, for he had the looks, swagger and style (‘big and strong’, ‘a bluff, offhand manner’, and ‘considerable powers of being pleasant’, according to his creator) which never fail to cast a glamour on villainy. I suspect Hughes knew it, too, and got rid of him before he could take over the book – which loses all its spirit and zest once Flashy has made his disgraced and drunken exit.
[He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]
What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending … just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.
In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).
Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.
One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.
I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.
When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.
And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.
George MacDonald Fraser
Dedication (#u1dd4d6d8-e4c4-570f-a13d-8f1df1b16358)
For Kath,
a memento of the long Sunday
Contents
Cover (#u25a71791-fdf7-5b6d-a16c-5826f2880ab8)
Title Page (#u931ede15-d552-5fa9-a275-ac4617e72519)
Copyright
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?
Dedication
Explanatory Note
Map (#u0ad678e6-5132-5eef-ab55-f07dd49488bd)
Chapter 1 (#u6c054d12-5348-5bbb-9f44-ff83aeabd401)
Chapter 2 (#uf481081b-33bd-5a57-a1e6-4364034696e0)
Chapter 3 (#uc95ea1dc-2d81-576c-9807-6571dabcbec2)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes
About the Author
The FLASHMAN Papers: In chronological order
The FLASHMAN Papers: In order of publication
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
About the Publisher
EXPLANATORY NOTE (#u1dd4d6d8-e4c4-570f-a13d-8f1df1b16358)
When the first two packets of the Flashman Papers were published, in 1969 and 1970, there was some controversy over their authenticity. It was asked whether the papers were, in fact, the true personal memoirs of Harry Flashman, the notorious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and later an eminent British soldier, or were simply an impudent fake.
This was not a controversy in which either Mr Paget Morrison, the owner of the papers, or I, his editor, thought fit to join. The matter was thoroughly discussed in various journals, and also on television, and if any doubters remain they are recommended to study the authoritative article which appeared in the New York Times of July 29, 1969, and which surely settles the question once and for all.
The first two packets of the papers contained Flashman’s personal narrative of his expulsion from Rugby School by Dr Thomas Arnold, his early service in the British Army (1839–42), his decoration by Queen Victoria after the First Afghan War, and his involvement in the Schleswig-Holstein Question, in which he found himself pitted against the young Otto von Bismarck and the celebrated Countess of Landsfeld. The third packet, which is now presented to the public, continues his story in the year 1848 and the early months of 1849. It is remarkable as a first-hand account of an important social phenomenon of the early Victorian years – the Afro-American slave trade – and in its illumination of the characters of two of the most eminent statesmen of the century, one a future British Prime Minister and the other a future American President. Flashman’s recollections cast interesting light on what may be called their formative years.
When the Flashman Papers were brought to light at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965, it was noted that while the great volume of manuscript had obviously been examined and re-arranged round about 1915, no alteration or amendment had been made to the text as set down by Flashman himself in 1903–1905. Closer examination of the third packet reveals, however, that an editorial hand has been lightly at work. I suspect that it belonged to Grizel de Rothschild, the youngest of Flashman’s sisters-in-law, who with a fine Victorian delicacy has modified those blasphemies and improprieties with which the old soldier occasionally emphasised his narrative. She was by no means consistent in this, for while she paid close attention to oaths, she left untouched those passages in which Flashman retails his amorous adventures; possibly she did not understand what he was talking about. In any event, she gave up the task approximately half way through the manuscript, but I have left her earlier editing as it stands, since it adds a certain period charm to the narrative.
For the rest, I have as usual inserted occasional explanatory notes.
G.M.F.
I believe it was that sight of that old fool Gladstone, standing in the pouring rain holding his special constable’s truncheon as though it were a bunch of lilies, and looking even more like an unemployed undertaker’s mute than usual, that made me think seriously about going into politics. God knows I’m no Tory, and I never set eyes on a Whig yet without feeling the need of a bath, but I remember thinking as I looked at Gladstone that day: ‘Well, if that’s one of the bright particular stars of English public life, Flashy my boy, you ought to be at Westminster yourself.’
You wouldn’t blame me; you must have thought the same, often. After all, they’re a contemptible lot, and you’ll agree that I had my full share of the qualities of character necessary in political life. I could lie and dissemble with the best, give short change with a hearty clap on the shoulder, slip out from under long before the blow fell, talk, toady, and turn tail as fast as a Yankee fakir selling patent pills. Mark you, I’ve never been given to interfering in other folks’ affairs if I could help it, so I suppose that would have disqualified me. But for a little while I did think hard about bribing my way to a seat – and the result of it was that I came within an ace of being publicly disgraced, shanghaied, sold as a slave, and God knows what besides. I’ve never seriously considered politics since.
It was when I came home from Germany in the spring of ’48, after my skirmish with Otto Bismarck and Lola Montez. I was in d----d bad shape, with a shaven skull, a couple of wounds, and the guts scared half out of me, and all I wanted was to go to ground in London until I was my own man once more. One thing I was sure of: nothing was going to drag me out of England again – which was ironic, when you consider that I’ve spent more than half of the last fifty years at the ends of the earth, in uniform as often as not, and doing most of my walking backwards.
Anyway, I came home across the Channel one jump ahead of half the monarchs and statesmen in Europe. The popular rebellion I’d seen in Munich was only one of a dozen that broke out that spring, and all the fellows who’d lost their thrones and chancellorships seemed to have decided, like me, that old England was the safest place. So it proved, but the joke was that for a few weeks after I came home it looked touch and go whether England didn’t have a revolution of her own, which would have sold the fleeing monarchs properly, and serve ’em right.
Mind you, I thought it was all gammon myself; I’d just seen a real rebellion, with mobs chanting and smashing and looting, and I couldn’t imagine it happening in St James’s. But that crabbed old Scotch miser, Morrison, my abominable father-in-law, thought different, and poured out his fears to me on my first evening at home.
‘It’s thae bluidy Chartists,’ cries he, with his head in his hands. ‘The d----d mob is loose aboot the toon, or soon will be. It’s no’ enough, their Ten Hoors Bill, they want tae slake their vengeance on honest fowk as well. Burn them a’, the wicked rascals! And whit does the Government do, will ye tell me? Naethin’! Wi’ rebellion in oor midst, an’ the French chappin’ at oor doors!’
‘The French have too much on hand with their own rebels to mind about us,’ said I. ‘As to the Chartists, I recall you expressing the same fears, years ago, in Paisley, and nothing came of it. If you remember –’
‘Naethin’ came o’t, d’ye say?’ cries he, with his chops quivering. ‘I ken whit came o’t! You, that should hae been at your post, were loupin’ intae the bushes wi’ my Elspeth. Oh, Goad,’ says he, groaning, ‘as if we hadnae tribulation enough. Wee Elspeth, in her … her condeetion.’
That was another thing, of course. My beautiful Elspeth, after eight years of wedded bliss, had now conceived at last, and to hear her father, mother, and sisters you would have thought it was Judgement Day. Myself, I believe she’d done it just to be topsides with the Queen, who had recently produced yet another of her innumerable litter. But what concerned me most was the identity of the father; I knew my darling feather-head, you see, for the trollop she was – you would never have thought it, to look at her beguiling innocence, but it had long been an unspoken bargain between us that we let each other’s private lives alone, and I could guess she had been in the woodshed with half a dozen during my absence. Mind you, I might have pupped her myself before I went to Germany, but who could tell? And if she gave birth to something with red hair and a pug nose there was liable to be talk, and God knows what might come of that.
You see, we were an odd family. Old Morrison was as rich as an Amsterdam Jew, and when my guv’nor went smash over railway stock, Morrison had paid the bills for Elspeth’s sake. He had been paying ever since, keeping me and my guv’nor on a pittance while he used our house, and got what credit he could out of being related to the Flashman family. Not that that was much, in my opinion, but since we were half way into Society, and Morrison had daughters to marry off, he was prepared to tolerate us. He had to tolerate me, anyway, since I was married to his daughter. But it was, a d----d tricky business, all round, for he could kick me out if he chose, and would do like a shot the moment Elspeth decided she’d had enough of me. As it was, we dealt well enough with each other, but with a child on the way things might, I suspected, be different. I’d no wish to be out in the street trying to scrape by on a captain’s half pay.
So what with Elspeth pregnant and old Morrison expecting the Communist rabble at the door at any moment, it was a fairly cheerless homecoming. Elspeth seemed pleased enough to see me, all right, but when I tried to bundle her into bed she would have none of it, in case the child was harmed. So instead of bouncing her about that evening I had to listen fondly to her drivelling about what name we should give our Little Hero – for she was sure it must be a boy.
‘He shall be Harry Albert Victor,’ says she, holding my hand and gazing at me with those imbecile blue eyes which never lost their power, somehow, to make my heart squeeze up inside me, God knows why. ‘After you, my dearest love, and our dear, dear Queen and her dearest love. Would you approve, my darling?’
‘Capital choice,’ says I. ‘Couldn’t be better.’ Not unless, I thought to myself, you called him Tom, or Dick, or William, or whatever the fellow’s name was who was in the hay with you. (After all, we’d been married a long while and made the springs creak time without number, and devil a sign of our seed multiplying. It seemed odd, now. Still, there it was.)
‘You make me so happy, Harry,’ says she, and do you know, I believed it. She was like that, you see; as immoral as I was, but without my intelligence. No conscience whatever, and a blissful habit of forgetting her own transgressions – or probably she never thought she had any to forget.
She leaned up and kissed me, and the smell and feel of her blonde plumpness set me off, and I made a grab at her tits, but she pushed me away again.
‘We must be patient, my own,’ says she, composing herself. ‘We must think only of dear Harry Albert Victor.’
(That, by the way, is what he is called. The bastard’s a bishop, too. I can’t believe he’s mine.)
She cooed and maundered a little longer, and then said she must rest, so I left her sipping her white-wine whey and spent the rest of the evening listening to old Morrison groaning and snarling. It was the same old tune, more or less, that I’d grown used to on the rare occasions when we had shared each other’s company over the past eight years – the villainy of the workers, the weakness of government, the rising cost of everything, my own folly and extravagance (although heaven knows he never gave me enough to be extravagant with), the vanity of his wife and daughters, and all the rest of it. It was pathetic, and monstrous, too, when you considered how much the old skinflint had raked together by sweating his mill-workers and cheating his associates. But I observed that the richer he got, the more he whined and raged, and if there was one thing I’ll say for him, he got richer quicker than the only sober man in a poker game.
The truth was that, coward and skinflint though he was, he had a shrewd business head, no error. From being a prosperous Scotch mill owner when I married his daughter he had blossomed since coming south, and had his finger in a score of pies – all d----d dirty ones, no doubt. He had become known in the City, and in Tory circles too, for if he was a provincial nobody he had the golden passport, and it was getting fatter all the time. He was already angling for his title, although he didn’t get it until some little time later, when Russell sold it to him – a Whig minister ennobling a Tory miser, which just goes to show. But with all these glittering prizes in front of him, the little swine was getting greedier by the hour, and the thought of it all dissolving in revolution had him nearly puking with fear.
‘It’s time tae tak’ a stand,’ says he, goggling at me. ‘We have to defend our rights and our property’ – and I almost burst out laughing as I remembered the time in Paisley when his mill-workers got out of hand, and he cringed behind his door, bawling for me to lead my troops against them. But this time he was really frightened; I gathered from his vapourings that there had been recent riots in Glasgow, and even in Trafalgar Square, and that in a few days there was to be a great rally of Chartists – ‘spawn of Beelzebub’ he called them – on Kennington Common, and that it was feared they would invade London itself.
To my astonishment, when I went out next day to take my bearings, I discovered there was something in it. At Horse Guards there were rumours that regiments were being brought secretly to town, the homes of Ministers were to be guarded, and supplies of cutlasses and firearms were being got ready. Special constables were being recruited to oppose the mob, and the Royal Family were leaving town. It all sounded d----d serious, but my Uncle Bindley, who was on the staff, told me that the Duke was confident nothing would come of it.
‘So you’ll win no more medals this time,’ says he, sniffing. ‘I take it, now that you have consented to honour us with your presence again, that you are looking to your family’ (he meant the Pagets, my mother’s tribe) ‘to find you employment again.’
‘I’m in no hurry, thank’ee,’ says I. ‘I’m sure you’d agree that in a time of civil peril a gentleman’s place is in his home, defending his dear ones.’
‘If you mean the Morrisons,’ says he, ‘I cannot agree with you. Their rightful place is with the mob, from which they came.’
‘Careful, uncle,’ says I. ‘You never know – you might be in need of a Scotch pension yourself some day.’ And with that I left him, and sauntered home.
The place was in a ferment. Old Morrison, carried away by terror for his strong-boxes, had actually plucked up courage to go to Marlborough Street and ’test as a special constable, and when I came home he was standing in the drawing-room looking at his truncheon as though it was a snake. Mrs Morrison, my Medusa-in-law, was lying on the sofa, with a maid dabbing her temples with eau-de-cologne, Elspeth’s two sisters were weeping in a corner, and Elspeth herself was sitting, cool as you please, with a shawl round her shoulders, eating chocolates and looking beautiful. As always, she was the one member of the family who was quite unruffled.
Old Morrison looked at me and groaned, and looked at the truncheon again.
‘It’s a terrible thing to tak’ human life,’ says he.
‘Don’t take it, then,’ says I. ‘Strike only to wound. Get your back against a brick wall and smash ’em across the knees and elbows.’
The females set up a great howl at this, and old Morrison looked ready to faint.
‘D’ye think … it’ll come tae … tae bloodshed?’
‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ says I, very cool.
‘Ye’ll come with me,’ he yammered. ‘You’re a soldier – a man of action – aye, ye’ve the Queen’s Medal an’ a’. Ye’ve seen service – aye – against the country’s enemies! Ye’re the very man tae stand up to this … this trash. Ye’ll come wi’ me – or maybe tak’ my place!’
Solemnly I informed him that the Duke had given it out that on no account were the military to be involved in any disturbance that might take place when the Chartists assembled. I was too well known; I should be recognised.
‘I’m afraid it is for you civilians to do your duty,’ says I. ‘But I shall be here, at home, so you need have no fear. And if the worst befalls, you may be sure that my comrades and I shall take stern vengeance.’
I left that drawing-room sounding like the Wailing Wall, but it was nothing to the scenes which ensued on the morning of the great Chartist meeting at Kennington. Old Morrison set off, amidst the lamentations of the womenfolk, truncheon in hand, to join the other specials, but was back in ten minutes having sprained his ankle, he said, and had to be helped to bed. I was sorry, because I’d been hoping he might get his head stove in, but it wouldn’t have happened anyway. The Chartists did assemble, and the specials were mustered in force to guard the bridges – it was then that I saw Gladstone with the other specials, with his nose dripping, preparing to sell his life dearly for the sake of constitutional liberty and his own investments. But it poured down, everyone was soaked, the foreign agitators who were on hand got nowhere, and all the inflamed mob did was to send a monstrous petition across to the House of Commons. It had five million signatures, they said; I know it had four of mine, one in the name of Obadiah Snooks, and three others in the shape of X’s beside which I wrote, ‘John Morrison, Arthur Wellesley, Henry John Temple Palmerston, their marks’.
But the whole thing was a frost, and when one of the Frog agitators in Trafalgar Square got up and d----d the whole lot of the Chartists for English cowards, a butcher’s boy tore off his coat, squared up to the Frenchy, and gave the snail-chewing scoundrel the finest thrashing you could wish for. Then, of course, the whole crowd carried the butcher’s boy shoulder high, and finished up singing ‘God Save the Queen’ with tremendous gusto. A thoroughly English revolution, I daresay.
You may wonder what all this had to do with my thinking about entering politics. Well, as I’ve said, it had lowered my opinion of asses like Gladstone still further, and caused me to speculate that if I were an M.P. I couldn’t be any worse than that sorry pack of fellows, but this was just an idle thought. However, if my chief feeling about the demonstration was disappointment that so little mischief had been done, it had a great effect on my father-in-law, crouched at home with the bed-clothes over his head, waiting to be guillotined.
You’d hardly credit it, but in a way he’d had much the same thought as myself, although I don’t claim to know by what amazing distortions of logic he arrived at it. But the upshot of his panic-stricken meditations on that day and the following night, when he was still expecting the mob to reassemble and run him out of town on a rail, was the amazing notion that I ought to go into Parliament.
‘It’s your duty,’ cries he, sitting there in his night-cap with his ankle all bandaged up, while the family chittered round him, offering gruel. He waved his spoon at me. ‘Ye should hiv a seat i’ the Hoose.’
I’m well aware that when a man has been terrified out of his wits, the most lunatic notions occur to him as sane and reasonable, but I couldn’t follow this.
‘Me, in Parliament?’ I loosed a huge guffaw. ‘What the devil would I do there? D’ye think that would keep the Chartists at bay?’
At this he let loose a great tirade about the parlous state of the country, and the impending dissolution of constitutional government, and how it was everyone’s duty to rally to the flag. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the kind of claptrap I’d heard from Bismarck – strong government, and lashing the workers – but I couldn’t see how Flashy, M.P., was going to bring that about.
‘If yesterday’s nonsense has convinced you that we need a change at Westminster,’ says I, ‘– and I’d not disagree with you there – why don’t you stand yourself?’
He glowered at me over his gruel-bowl. ‘I’m no’ the Hero of Kabul,’ says he. ‘Forbye, I’ve business enough to attend to. But you – ye’ve nothing to hinder ye. Ye’re never tired o’ tellin’ us whit a favourite ye are wi’ the public. Here’s your chance to make somethin’ o’t.’
‘You’re out of your senses,’ says I. ‘Who would elect me?’
‘Anybody,’ snaps he. ‘A pug ape frae the zoological gardens could win a seat in this country, if it was managed right.’ Buttering me up, I could see.
‘But I’m not a politician,’ says I. ‘I know nothing about it, and care even less.’
‘Then ye’re the very man, and ye’ll find plenty o’ kindred spirits at Westminster,’ says he, and when I hooted at him he flew into a tremendous passion that drove the females weeping from the room. I left him raging.
But when I came to think about it, do you know, it didn’t seem quite so foolish after all. He was a sharp man, old Morrison, and he could see it would do no harm to have a Member in the family, what with his business interests and so on. Not that I’d be much use to him that I could see – I didn’t know, then, that he had been maturing some notion of buying as many as a dozen seats. I’d no idea, you see, of just how wealthy the old rascal was, and how he was scheming to use that wealth for political ends. You won’t find much in the history books about John Morrison, Lord Paisley, but you can take my word for it that it was men like him who pulled the strings in the old Queen’s time, while the political puppets danced. They still do, and always will.
And from my side of the field, it didn’t look a half bad idea. Flashy, M.P. Sir Harry Flashman, M.P., perhaps. Lord Flash of Lightning, Paymaster of the Forces, with a seat in the Cabinet, d--n your eyes. God knows I could do that job as well as Thomas Babbling Macaulay. Even in my day-dreaming I stopped short of Flashy, Prime Minister, but for the rest, the more I thought of it the better I liked it. Light work, plenty of spare time for as much depraved diversion as I could manage in safety, and the chance to ram my opinions down the public’s throat whenever I felt inclined. I need never go out of London if I didn’t want to – I would resign from the army, of course, and rest on my considerable if ill-gotten laurels – and old Morrison would be happy to foot the bills, no doubt, in return for slight services rendered.
The main thing was, it would be a quiet life. As you know, in spite of the published catalogue of my career – Victoria Cross, general rank, eleven campaigns, and all that mummery – I’ve always been an arrant coward and a peaceable soul. Bullying underlings and whipping trollops always excepted, I’m a gentle fellow – which means I’ll never do harm to anyone if there’s a chance he may harm me in return. The trouble is, no one would believe it to look at me; I’ve always been big and hearty and looked the kind of chap who’d go three rounds with the town rough if he so much as stepped on my shadow, and from what Tom Hughes has written of me you might imagine I was always ready for devilment. Aye, but as I’ve grown older I’ve learned that devilment usually has to be paid for. God knows I’ve done my share of paying, and even in ’48, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, I’d seen enough sorrow, from the Khyber to German dungeons by way of the Borneo jungles and the torture-pits of Madagascar, to convince me that I must never go looking for trouble again.
Who’d have thought that old Morrison’s plans to seat me at Westminster could have led to … well, ne’er mind. All in good time.
As to getting a suitable seat, that would be easy enough, with Morrison’s gelt greasing the way. Which prompted the thought that I ought to have a word with him about issues of political importance.
‘Two thousand a year at least,’ says I.
‘Five hundred and no’ a penny more,’ says he.
‘Dammit, I’ve appearances to keep up,’ says I. ‘Elspeth’s notions ain’t cheap.’
‘I’ll attend to that,’ says he. ‘As I always have done.’ The cunning old bastard wouldn’t even let me have the administration of my own wife’s household; he knew better.
‘A thousand, then. Good God, my clothes’ll cost that.’
‘Elspeth can see tae your wardrobe,’ says he, smirking. ‘Five hundred, my buckie; it’s mair than your worth.’
‘I’ll not do it, then,’ says I. ‘And that’s flat.’
‘Aye, weel,’ says he, ‘that’s a peety. I’ll just have to get one that will. Ye’ll find it a wee bit lean on your army half-pay, I’m thinkin’.’
‘Damn you,’ says I. ‘Seven-fifty.’
And eventually I got it, but only because Elspeth told her father I should have it. She, of course, was delighted at the thought of my having a political career. ‘We shall have soirées, attended by Lord John and the Marquis of Lansdowne,’
she exclaimed. ‘People with titles, and their ladies, and –’
‘They’re Whigs,’ says I. ‘I’ve an idea your papa will expect me to be a Tory.’
‘It doesn’t signify in the least,’ says she. ‘The Tories are a better class of people altogether, I believe. Why, the Duke is a Tory, is he not?’
‘So the rumour runs,’ says I. ‘But political secrets of that kind must be kept quiet, you know.’
‘Oh, it is all quite wonderful,’ says she, paying me no heed at all. ‘You will be famous again, Harry – you are so clever, you are sure to be a success, and I – I will need at least four page boys with buttons, and footmen in proper uniform.’ She clapped her hands, her eyes sparkling, and pirouetted. ‘Why, Harry! We shall need a new house! I must have clothes – oh, but Papa will see to it, he is so kind!’
It occurred to me that Papa might decide he had bitten off more than he could chew, listening to her, although personally I thought her ideas were excellent. She was in tremendous spirits, and I took the opportunity to make another assault on her; she was so excited that I had her half out of her dress before she realised what I was about, and then the wicked little b---h teased me along until I was thoroughly randified, only to stop me in the very act of boarding her, because of her concern for dear little Harry Albert Victor, blast his impudence.
‘To think,’ says she, ‘that he will have a great statesman for a father!’ She had me in the Cabinet already, you see. ‘Oh, Harry, how proud we shall be!’
Which was small consolation to me just then, having to button myself up and restrain my carnal appetites. To be sure I eased them considerably in the next week or two, for I looked out some of the Haymarket tarts of my acquaintance, and although they were a poor substitute for Elspeth they helped me to settle in again to London life and regular whoring. So I was soon enjoying myself, speculating pleasantly about the future, taking my ease with the boys about the town, forgetting the recent horrors of Jotunberg and Rudi Starnberg’s gang of assassins, and waiting for old Morrison to start the wheels of my political career turning.
He was helped, of course, by my own celebrity and the fact that my father – who was now happily settled down with his delirium tremens at a place in the country – had been an M.P. in his time, and a damned fine hand at the hustings; he had got in on a popular majority after horse-whipping his opponent on the eve of the poll and offering to fight bare-knuckle with any man the Whigs could put up, from Brougham down. He had a good deal more bottom than I, but they did for him at Reform, and if I didn’t have his ardour I was certain I had a greater talent for survival, political and otherwise.
Anyway, it was some weeks before Morrison announced that I was to meet some ‘men in the know’ as he called them, and that we were to go down to Wiltshire for a few days, to the house of a local bigwig, where some politicos would be among the guests. It sounded damned dull, and no doubt would have been, had it not been for my own lechery and vanity and the shockingest turn of ill luck. Apart from anything else, I missed the Derby.
We left Elspeth at home, working contentedly at her Berlins,
and took the train for Bristol, Morrison and I. He was the damnedest travelling companion you ever saw, for apart from being a thundering bore he carped at everything, from the literature at the station book-stalls, which he pronounced trash, to the new practice of having to pay a bob ‘attendance money’ to railway servants.
I was glad to get to Devizes, I can tell you, whence we drove to Seend, a pretty little place where our host lived in a fairish establishment called Cleeve House.
He was the kind of friend you’d expect Morrison to have – a middle-aged moneybags of a banker called Locke, with reach-me-down whiskers and a face like a three-day corpse. He was warm enough, evidently, but as soon as I saw the females sitting about in chairs on the gravel with their bonnets on, reading improving books, I could see this was the kind of house-party that wasn’t Flashy’s style at all. I was used to hunting weeks where you dined any old how, with lots of brandy and singing, and chaps p-----g in the corner and keeping all hours, and no females except the local bareback riders, as old Jack Mitton used to call them. But by ’48 they were going out, you see and it was as much as you dare do, at some of the houses, to produce the cards before midnight after the ladies had retired. I remember Speed telling me, round about this time, of one place he’d been to where they got him up at eight for morning prayers, and gave him a book of sermons to read after luncheon.
Cleeve House wasn’t quite as raw as that, but it would have been damned dreary going if one of the girls present hadn’t been quite out of the ordinary run. I fixed on her from the start – a willowy blonde piece with a swinging hip and a knowing eye. Strange, I met her at Cleeve, and didn’t see her again till I came on her cooking breakfast for a picket of Campbell’s Highlanders outside Balaclava six years later, the very morning of Cardigan’s charge. Fanny Locke her name was;
she was the young sister of our host, a damned handsome eighteen with the shape of a well-developed matron. Like so many young girls whose body outgrows their years, she didn’t know what to do with it – well, I could give her guidance there. As soon as I saw her swaying down the staircase at Cleeve, ho-ho, thinks I, hark forrard. You may be sure I was soon in attendance, and when I found she was a friendly little thing, and a keen horsewoman, I laid my plans accordingly, and engaged to go riding with her next day, when she would show me the local country – it was the long grass I had in mind, of course.
In the meantime, the first evening at Cleeve was quite as much fun as a Methodist service. Of course, all Tory gatherings are the same, and Locke had assembled as choice a collection of know-all prigs as you could look for. Bentinck I didn’t mind, because he had some game in him and knew more about the turf than anyone I ever met, but he had in tow the cocky little sheeny D’Israeli, whom I never could stomach. He was pathetic, really, trying to behave like the Young Idea when he was well into greasy middle age, with his lovelock and fancy vest, like a Punjabi whoremaster. They were saying then that he had spent longer ‘arriving’ at Westminster than a one-legged Irish peer with the gout; well, he ‘arrived’ in the end, as we know, and if I’d been able to read the future I might have toadied him a good deal more, I daresay.
Locke, our host, introduced us as we were going in to dinner, and I made political small talk, as old Morrison had told me I should.
‘Bad work for your lot in the Lords, hey?’ says I, and he lowered his lids at me in that smart-affected way he had. ‘You know,’ says I, ‘the Jewish Bill getting thrown out. Bellows to mend in Whitechapel, what? Bad luck all round,’ I went on, ‘what with Shylock running second at Epsom, too. I had twenty quid on him myself.’
I heard Locke mutter ‘Good God’, but friend Codlingsby just put back his head and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,’ says he. ‘How remarkable. And you aspire to politics, Mr Flashman?’
‘That’s my ticket,’ says I.
‘Truly remarkable,’ says he. ‘Do you know, I shall watch your career with bated breath.’ And then Locke mumbled him away, and I pounced on Miss Fanny and took her in to dinner.
Of course, it was all politics at table, but I was too engaged with Fanny to pay much heed. When the ladies had gone and we’d all moved up, I heard more, but it didn’t stick. I remember they were berating Russell’s idleness, and the government’s extravagance, on which D’Israeli made one of those sallies which you could see had been well polished beforehand.
‘Lord John must not be underestimated,’ says he. ‘He understands the first principle, that the great strength of the British Constitution lies in the money it costs us. Make government cheap and you make it contemptible.’
Everyone laughed except old Morrison, who glared over his glass. ‘That’ll look well in one o’ your nov-elles, sir, I don’t doubt. But let me tell you, running a country is like running a mill, and waste’ll ruin the baith o’ them.’
D’Israeli, being smart, affected to misunderstand. ‘I know nothing of running mills,’ says he. ‘Pugilism is not among my interests,’ which of course turned the laugh against old Morrison.
You may judge from this the kind of rare wit to be found at political gatherings; I was out of all patience after an hour of it, and by the time we joined the ladies Miss Fanny, to my disgust, had gone to bed.
Next day, however, she and I were off on our expedition soon after breakfast, with sandwiches and a bottle in my saddlebag, for we intended to ride as far as Roundway Down, a place which she was sure must interest me, since there had been a battle fought there long ago. On the way she showed me the house where she had once lived, and then we cantered on across the excellent riding country that lies north of Salisbury Plain. It was the jolliest day, with a blue sky, fleecy clouds, and a gentle breeze, and Fanny was in excellent trim. She looked mighty fetching in a plum-coloured habit with a tricorne hat and feather, and little black boots, and I never saw a female better in the saddle. She could keep up with me at a gallop, her fair hair flying and her pretty little lips parted as she scudded along, so to impress her I had to show her some of the riding tricks I’d picked up in Afghanistan, like running alongside my beast full tilt, with a hand on the mane, and swinging over the rump to land and run on t’other side. D----d showy stuff, and she clapped her hands and cried bravo, while the bumpkins we passed along the way hallooed and waved their hats.
All this put me in capital form, of course, and by the time we got to Roundway I was nicely primed to lure Miss Fanny into a thicket and get down to business. She was such a jolly little thing, with such easy chatter and a saucy glint in her blue eye, that I anticipated no difficulty. We dismounted near the hill, and we led our beasts while she told me about the battle, in which it seemed the Cavaliers had thoroughly chased the Roundheads.
‘The people hereabouts call it Runaway Down,’ says she, laughing, ‘because the Roundheads fled so fast.’
It was the best thing I’d ever heard about Cromwell’s fellows; gave me a fellow-feeling for ’em, and I made some light remark to this effect.
‘Oh, you may say so,’ says she. ‘You who have never run away.’ She gave me an odd little look. ‘Sometimes I wish I were a man, with the strength to be brave, like you.’
Flashy knows a cue when he hears it. ‘I’m not always brave, Fanny,’ says I, pretty solemn, and stepping close. ‘Sometimes – I’m the veriest coward.’ By G-d, I never spoke a truer word.
‘I can’t believe –’ says she, and got no further, for I kissed her hard on the lips; for a moment she bore it, and then to my delight she began teasing me with her tongue, but before I could press home my advantage she suddenly slipped away, laughing.
‘No, no,’ cries she, very merry, ‘this is Runaway Down, remember,’ and like a fool I didn’t pursue on the instant. If I had done, I don’t doubt she’d have yielded, but I was content to play her game for the moment, and so we walked on, chatting and laughing.
You may think this trivial; the point is that if I’d mounted Miss Fanny that day I daresay I’d have lost interest in her – at all events I’d have been less concerned to please her later, and would have avoided a great deal of sorrow, and being chased and bullyragged half way round the world.
As it was, it was the most d---ably bothersome day I remember. Half a dozen times I got to grips with her – over the luncheon sandwiches, during our walk down from the hill, even in the saddle on the way home – and each time she kissed like a novice French whore and then broke off, teasing. And either because we met people on the way, or because she was as nimble as a flyweight, I never had a chance to go to work properly. Of course, I’d known chits like this before, and experience told me it would come all right on the night, as the theatricals say, but by the time we were cantering up to Cleeve again I was as horny as the town bull, and not liking it overmuch.
And there was a nasty shock waiting, in the shape of two chaps who came out of the front door, both in Hussar rig, the first one hallo-ing and waving to Fanny and helping her down from her mare. She made him known to me, with a mischievous twinkle, as her fiancé, one Duberly, which would have been bad news at any other time, but all my attention was taken by his companion, who stood back eyeing me with a cool smile, very knowing: my heart checked for a second at the sight of him. It was Bryant.
If you know my memoirs, you know him. He and I had been subalterns in Cardigan’s regiment, nine years before; on the occasion when I fought a memorable duel, he had agreed, for a consideration, to ensure that my opponent’s pistol was loaded only with blank, so that I had survived the meeting with credit. I had cheated him out of his payment, to be sure, and there had been nothing he could do except make empty threats of vengeance. After that our ways had parted, and I’d forgotten him; and now here he was, like corpse at a christening. Of course, he still couldn’t harm me, but it was a nasty turn to see him, just the same.
‘Hollo, Flash,’ says he, sauntering up. ‘Still campaigning, I see.’ And he made his bow to Miss Fanny, while Duberly presented him.
‘Most honoured to know you, sir,’ says this Duberly, shaking my hand as I dismounted. He was a fattish, whiskered creature, with muff written all over him. ‘Heard so much – distinguished officer – delighted to see you here, eh, Fan?’ And she, cool piece that she was, having sensed in an instant that Bryant and I were at odds, chattered gaily about what a jolly picnic we had made, while Duberly humphed and grinned and was all over her. Presently he led her indoors, leaving Bryant and me by the horses.
‘Spoiled the chase for you has he, Flash?’ says he, with his spiteful little grin. ‘D---lish nuisance, these fiancés; sometimes as inconvenient as husbands, I daresay.’
‘I can’t imagine you’d know about that,’ says I, looking him up and down. ‘When did Cardigan kick you out, then?’ For he wasn’t wearing Cherrypicker rig. He flushed at that, and I could see I’d touched him on the raw.
‘I transferred to the Eighth Irish,’ says he. ‘We don’t all leave regiments as you do, with our tails between our legs.’
‘My, my, it still rankles, Tommy, don’t it?’ says I, grinning at him. ‘Feeling the pinch, were we? I always thought the Eleventh was too expensive for you; well, if you can’t come up to snuff in the Eighth you can always take up pimping again, you know.’
That made his mouth work, all right; in the old days in Canterbury, when he was toadying me, I’d thrown a few guineas his way in return for his services as whoremonger and general creature. He fell back a step.
‘D--n you, Flashman,’ says he, ‘I’ll bring you down yet!’
‘Not to your own level, if you please,’ says I, and left him swearing under his breath.
Now, if I’d been as wise then as I am now, I’d have remembered that even as slimy a snake as Bryant still has fangs, but he was such a contemptible squirt, and I’d handled him so easily in the past, that I put him out of my mind. I was more concerned with the inconvenience of this fat fool Duberly, whose presence would make it all the more difficult for me to cock a leg athwart Miss Fanny – I was sure she was game for it, after that day’s sparring, but of course Duberly quite cut me out now that he was here, squiring her at tea, and fetching her fan, clucking round her in the drawing-room, and taking her arm in to dinner. Locke and the rest of her family were all for him, I could see, so I couldn’t put him down as I’d have done anywhere else. It was d----d vexing, but where’s the fun if it’s all too easy, I told myself, and set to scheme how I might bring the lady to the sticking point, as we Shakespeare scholars say.
I was much distracted from these fine thoughts by old Morrison, who berated me privately for what he called ‘godless gallivanting after yon hussy’; it seemed I should have spent the day hanging on the lips of Bentinck and D’Israeli and Locke, who had been deep in affairs. I soothed him with a promise that I’d attend them after dinner, which I did, and steep work it was. Ireland was very much exciting them, I recall, and the sentencing and transportation of some rebel called Mitchel; old Morrison was positive he should have been hanged, and got into a great passion because when they shipped him off to the Indies they didn’t send him in chains with a bread-and-water diet.
‘If the d---d rascal had sailed on any vessel o’ mine, it would hae been sawdust he got tae eat, and d----d little o’ that,’ says dear kind Papa, and the rest of them cried ‘hear, hear,’ and agreed that it was this kind of soft treatment that encouraged sedition; they expected the Paddies to rise at any time, and there was talk of Dublin being besieged. All humbug, of course; you can’t mount a rebellion on rotten potatoes.
After that there was fierce debate over whether the working class wanted reform, and one Hume was damned for a scoundrel, and D’Israeli discoursed on the folly of some measure to exclude M.P.s who couldn’t pay their debts – no doubt he had a personal interest there – and I sat and listened, bored to death, until Bentinck suggested we join the ladies. Not that there was much sport there either, for Mrs Locke was reading aloud from the great new novel, Jane Eyre, and from the expression on the faces of Fanny and the other young misses, I guessed they’d have been happier with Vamey the Vampire or Sweeney Todd.
In another corner the older folk were looking at picture books – German churches, probably – another pack of females were sewing and mumbling to each other, and in an adjoining salon some hysterical bitch was singing ‘Who will o’er the downs with me?’ with a governess thrashing away at the pianoforte. A couple of wild old rakes were playing backgammon, and Duberly was explaining to whoever would listen that he would have been glad to serve in India, but his health wouldn’t allow, don’t ye know. I asked myself how long I could bear it.
I believe it was Bentinck who suggested cards – Locke looked like the kind who wouldn’t have permitted such devices of the devil under his roof, but Bentinck was the lion, you see, and couldn’t be gainsaid; besides, there was still a little leeway in those days which you’d never have got in the 'sixties or 'seventies. I wasn’t in at the beginning of the game, having been ambushed by an old dragon in a lace cap who told me how her niece Priscilla had written to her with an envelope, instead of waxing her letter, and what did I think of that? I despaired of getting away, until who should appear but Fanny herself, sparkling and full of nonsense, to insist that I should come and show her how to make her wagers.
‘I am quite at sea,’ says she, ‘and Henry’ – this was Duberly – ‘vows that counting makes his head ache.
You will assist me, Captain Flashman, won’t you, and Aunt Selina will not mind, will you, auntie dear?’
I should have told her to go straight to h--l, and clung to Aunt Selina like a shipwrecked lascar – but you can’t read the future. Ain’t it odd to think, if I’d declined her invitation, I might have been in the Lords today – and a certain American might never have become President? Mind you, even now, if a fresh piece like Fanny Locke stooped in front of me, with those saucy eyes and silken hair, and pushed those pouting lips and white shoulders at me – ah, dry your whiskers, old Flash – you could keep your coronet for me, and I’d take her hand and hobble off to my ruin, whatever it was.
Aunt Selina sniffed, and told her she must not wager more than a pair of gloves – ‘and not your Houbigants, mind, you foolish little girl. Indeed, I don’t know what the world is coming to, or Henry Duberly thinking of, to permit you wagering at cards. No doubt he will be one of these husbands who will allow you to waltz, and drink porter in company. It would not have done in my day. What are the stakes?’
‘Oh, ever so little, aunt,’ says Fanny, tugging at my sleeve. ‘Farthings and sweets – and Lord George has the bank, and is ever such fun!’
‘Is he, indeed?’ says Aunt Selina, gathering up her reticule. ‘Then I shall come myself, to see you are not excessively silly.’
There was quite a crowd round the table in the salon, where Bentinck was presiding over vingt-et-un, amid great merriment. He was playing the chef to perfection, calling the stakes and whipping round the pasteboards like a riverboat dude. Even Locke and Morrison were present, watching and being not too sour about it; Mrs Abigail Locke was among the players, with Bryant advising, toady-like, at her elbow; D’Israeli was making a great show of playing indulgently, like a great man who don’t mind stooping to trivialities if it will amuse lesser minds, and half a dozen others, old and young, were putting up their counters and laughing with delight at Bentinck’s sallies.
As Fanny and Aunt Selina took their seats, an old fellow with white whiskers leans across to me. ‘I must warn you,’ says he, ‘that Lord George has us playing very deep – plunging recklessly, you know.’ He held up some counters. ‘The green ones are – a farthing; the blue – a ha’penny; and the yellow – you must take care – are a penny! It is desperate work, you see!’
‘I’m coming for you, Sir Michael!’ cries Bentinck, slapping the pack. ‘Now, ladies are you ready? Then, one for all, and all for the lucky winner!’ And he flicked the cards round to the players.
It was silly harmless stuff, you see, all good nature and playfulness – and as desperate a card game as I ever sat in on in my life. Not that you’d have guessed it at first, with Bentinck making everyone merry, and one of the players – a sulky-looking youth of about fourteen, of the kind whose arse I delighted to kick in happier days – protesting that he was cleaned out, and Bentinck solemnly offering to take his note of hand for two-pence. Fanny was all excitement, holding her card up close for me to see and asking how much she should go, which gave me the opportunity to huddle in and stroke her bare shoulders as I whispered in her ear. Next to her, old Aunt Selina was buying cards like a St James’s shark, very precise and slow; she took four and paused at 17; Bentinck was watching her, his handsome face very intent, his thumb poised on the next card; she took it, and it was a trey, which meant that she had a five-card hand, at which there was great applause, and Bentinck laughed and cried ‘Well done, ma’am,’ as he paid her counters over.
‘I never buy beyond 16, you know,’ Aunt Selina confided to Fanny, ‘unless it is for a five-card hand. I find it a very good rule.’
So the game went round, and I found myself thinking that it doesn’t take high stakes to show up who the real gamesters are. You could sense the rapport there was between Bentinck and Aunt Selina – two folk with not a jot in common, mark you. He was one of the sportsmen of the day, used to playing for thousands, a grandee of the turf and the tables who could watch a fortune slip away in five seconds at Epsom and never bat an eyelid, and here he was, watching like a hawk as some dowager hesitated over a farthing stake, or frowning as the sullen Master Jerry lost his two-penny I.O.U. and promptly demanded further credit. Wasn’t it Greville who said that the money Lord George Bentinck won was just so many paper counters to him – it was the game that mattered? And Aunt Selina was another of the same; she duelled with him like a good ’un, and won as often as not, and he liked her for it.
And then the bank passed round to Fanny, and I had to deal the cards for her. Bryant, who had raised a great laugh by coming round to touch Aunt Selina’s mittened hand for luck, said we should have a fair deal at last, since I had been notoriously the worst vingt-et-un player in the whole Light Cavalry – there was more polite mirth at this, and I gave him a hard look as he went back to Mrs Locke, and wondered to myself just what he had meant by that. Then Fanny, all twittering as she handled the stakes, claimed my attention, and I dealt the cards.
If you know vingt-et-un – or poor man’s baccarat, or blackjack, or pontoon, whichever you like to call it – you know that the object is not to go above 21 with the cards dealt to you. It’s a gambler’s game, in which you must decide whether to stay pat at 16 or 17, or risk another card which may break you or, if it’s a small one, may give you a winning score of 20 or 21. I’ve played it from Sydney to Sacramento, and learned to stick at 17, like Aunt Selina. The odds are with the bank, since when the scores are level the banker takes the stakes.
Fanny and I had a good bank. I dealt her 19 the first round, which sank everyone except D’Israeli, who had two court cards for 20. The next time I gave Fanny an ace and a knave for vingt-et-un, which swamped the whole board, and she clapped her hands and squealed with delight. Then we ran two five-card hands in succession, and the punters groaned aloud and protested at our luck, and Bentinck jestingly asked Aunt Selina if she would stand good for him, and she cried ‘With you, Lord George!’ and made great play of changing his silver for her coppers.
I was interested in the game by this time – it’s a fact, Greville was right, it don’t matter a d--n how small the stakes are – and Fanny was full of excitement and admiration for my luck. She shot me an adoring look over her shoulder, and I glanced down at her quivering bosoms and thought to myself, you’ll be in rare trim for another kind of game later. Get ’em excited – a fight is best, with the claret flowing, but any kind of sport will do, if there’s a hint of savagery in it – and they’ll couple like monkeys. And then, as I pulled my eyes away and dealt the first cards of another hand, looking to see that all the stakes were placed, I saw that on Mrs Locke’s card there was a pile of yellow counters – about two bob’s worth. That meant they had an ace, for certain. And they had, but it did ’em no good; they drew a seven with it, bought a five, and then went broke with a king. But next time round they staked an even bigger pile of yellows, lost again, and came back with a still larger wager for the following hand.
I paused in the act of dealing the second cards. ‘You’re playing double or quits, ma’am,’ says I to Mrs Locke. ‘Road to ruin.’
But before she could speak, Bryant cut in: ‘Stakes too high for you, are they? Why, if you can’t afford …’
‘Not a bit,’ says I. ‘If my principal’s content,’ and I looked down at Fanny, who was sitting with a splendid pile of counters before her.
‘Oh, do go on, please!’ cries she. ‘It is the greatest fun!’ So I put round the second cards; if Bryant thought he was going to rattle me over a few shillings’ worth of stake he was a bigger fool than I thought. But I knew he wasn’t a fool, and that he was a d---d sharp hand at card tricks, so I kept my eye on Mrs Locke’s place.
They lost again, and next time Mrs Locke would only put up a single yellow, on which they won. There was a good deal of heavy jesting at this, and I saw Bryant whispering busily in her ear. When I dealt the first card he pounced on it, they consulted together, and then they put their whole pile – yellows, blues, everything, on top of the card, and Bryant gave me a nasty grin and stood back waiting.
I couldn’t follow this; it couldn’t be better than an ace, and it was just a kindergarten game, anyway. Did he think he could score off me by breaking Miss Fanny’s bank? I noticed Bentinck was smiling, in a half-puzzled way, and D’Israeli was fingering his card thoughtfully and shifting his lidded glance from Bryant to me. They were wondering, too, and suddenly I felt that cold touch at the nape of my neck that is the warning signal of danger.
It was ridiculous, of course; a ha’penny game in a country house, but I could sense Bryant was as worked up as if there’d been a thousand guineas riding on his partner’s card. It wasn’t healthy, and I wanted to be out of that game then and there, but I’d have looked a fool, and Aunt Selina was tapping for a second card and looking at me severely.
I put them round, and perhaps because I had that tiny unease I fumbled Master Jerry’s second card, so that it fell face up. I should have taken it back, by rights, but it was an ace, and the little scoundrel, who should have been in his bed long before, insisted on keeping it. Bryant snapped up Mrs Locke’s second card and showed it to her with a grin; D’Israeli displayed vingt-et-un by laying his second card, a queen, face up across the first one. The rest bought a third or stood pat.
I faced our cards – a knave and a three, which was bad. I faced a third, an ace, which gave us 14; nothing for it but to go on, and I turned up a four. We were at 18, and at least three players were sitting pat on three cards, which meant probably they had 18 or 19 or better. I whispered to Fanny, did she want to try for a five-card trick, which would beat everyone except Codlingsby’s vingt-et-un.
‘Oh, yes, please!’ cries she. ‘We are in luck, I feel sure of it!’
I put my thumb on the top card, and stopped. Something was d---d far wrong, somewhere, and I knew it. Bentinck knew it, too, and Aunt Selina, who was staring over her spectacles at the pack in my hand. Others in the room sensed something; Locke and Morrison had broken off their conversation to watch. Bryant was smirking across at me.
I flicked over the top card. It was a deuce, giving us 20 and victory, Bentinck cried ‘Ha!’, Aunt Selina muttered something under her breath, and Fanny gave an ecstatic squeal and began to rake in the stakes. I gathered in the cards while everyone chattered and laughed – Mrs Locke had an ace and a nine, I noticed, and I commiserated her on her bad luck. Bryant pipes up at once:
‘Very bad luck indeed, I should say.’
But I ignored him, and told Fanny we must now pass the bank to D’Israeli, since he had scored vingt-et-un.
‘Oh, must we?’ cries she, pouting. ‘And we were doing so well! What a shame it is!’
Aunt Selina exclaimed at her greed, there was more laughter, and D’Israeli took out his eye-glass and bowed to Fanny.
‘I would not dream,’ says he, ‘of claiming the cards from such a fair banker,’ a pun which was greeted with polite applause.
‘Oh, I daresay her partner is quite happy to pass the cards,’ cries Bryant. ‘The killing’s made, eh, Flashy?’
Now, I daresay we must have won thirty shillings on that bank, most of it from Mrs Locke, and you could take what he’d said as a joke, but the jarring note in his voice, and the grin on his flushed face told me it wasn’t. I stared at him, and Bentinck’s head whipped round, and suddenly there was a silence, broken only by Miss Fanny’s tinkling laughter as she exclaimed to Aunt Selina about her own good luck.
‘I think it is your bank, Dizzy,’ says Bentinck quietly, at last, his eyes on Bryant. ‘Unless the ladies feel we have played enough.’
The ladies protested against this, and then Bryant cut in again:
‘I’ve played quite enough, thank’ee, and I daresay my partner has, too.’ Mrs Locke looked startled, and Bryant went on:
‘I never thought to see – ah, but let it go!’
And he turned from the table, like a man trying to control himself.
There was a second’s silence, and then they were babbling, ‘What did he say?’ ‘What did he mean?’ and Bentinck was flushed with anger and demanding to know what Bryant was implying. At this Bryant pointed to me, and says:
‘It is really too bad! In a pleasant game, for the ladies, this fellow … I beg your pardon, Lord George, but it is too much! Ask him,’ cries he, ‘to turn out his pockets – his coat pockets!’
It hit me like a dash of icy water. In the shocked hush, I found my hand going to my left-hand coat pocket, while everyone gaped at me, Bentinck took a pace towards me saying, ‘No, stop. Not before the ladies …’ and then my hand came out, and there were three playing cards in it. I was too horrified and bewildered to speak, there was a shriek from one of the females, and a general gasp, and someone muttered: ‘Cheat … oh!’ I could only stare from the cards to Bentinck’s horrified face, to Bryant’s, flushed and exultant, and to Dizzy’s, white with disbelief. Miss Fanny jumped up with a shriek, starting away from me, and then someone was shepherding the females from the room in a terrible silence, leaving me with the stern, disgusted faces and the exclamations of incredulity and amazement. They crowded forward while I stood there, gazing at the cards in my hand – I can see them yet: the king of clubs, the deuce of hearts, and the ace of diamonds.
Bentinck was speaking, and I forced myself to look round at him, with Bryant, D’Israeli, old Morrison, Locke and the others crowding at his back.
‘Gentlemen,’ my voice was hoarse. ‘I … I can’t imagine. I swear to God …’
‘I thought I hadn’t seen the ace of diamonds,’ says someone.
‘I saw his hand go to his pocket, at the last deal.’ This was Bryant.
‘Oh, my Goad, the shame o’t … Ye wicked, deceitful …’
‘The fellow’s a damned sharp!’
‘A cheat! In this house …’
‘Remarkable,’ says D’Israeli, with an odd note in his voice. ‘For a few pence? You know, George, it’s d----d unlikely.’
‘The amount never matters,’ says Bentinck, with a voice like steel. ‘It’s winning. Now, sir, what have you to say?’
I was gathering my wits before this monstrous thing, trying to understand it. God knew I hadn’t cheated – when I cheat, it’s for something that matters, not sweets and ha’pence. And suddenly it hit me like a lightning flash – Bryant coming round to touch Aunt Selina’s hand, standing shoulder to shoulder with me. So this was how he was taking his revenge!
Put me in that situation today, and I’d reason my way out of it, talking calmly. But I was twenty-six then, and panicked – d--n it, if I had been cheating I’d have been ready for them, with my story cut and dried, but for once I was innocent, and couldn’t think what to say. I dashed the cards down and faced them.
‘It’s a b----y lie!’ I shouted. ‘I didn’t cheat, I swear it! My God, why should I? Lord George, can you believe it? Mr D’Israeli, I appeal to you! Would I cheat for a few coppers?’
‘How came the cards in your pocket, then?’ demands Bentinck.
‘That little viper!’ I shouted, pointing at Bryant. ‘The jealous little b-----d placed them there, to disgrace me!’
That set up a tremendous uproar, and Bryant, blast his eyes, played it like a master. He took a step back, gritted his teeth, bowed to the company, and says:
‘Lord George, I leave it to you to determine the worth of a foul slander from a proven cheat.’
And then he turned, and strode from the room. I could only stand raging, and then as I saw how he had foxed me – my God, ruined me, and before the best in the land, I lost control altogether. I sprang for the door, bawling after him, someone caught my sleeve, but I threw him off, and then I had the door open and was plunging through in pursuit.
There was a hubbub behind me, and a sudden squeal of alarm ahead, for there were ladies at the head of the stairs, their white faces turned towards me. Bryant made off at the sight of me, and in blind passion I hurled myself after him. I had only one thought: to catch the undersized little squirt and pound him to death – sense, decency and the rest were forgotten. I got my hand on his collar at the top of the stairs, while the females screamed and shrank back; I wrenched him round, his face grey with fear, and shook him like a rat.
‘You foul vermin!’ I roared. ‘Try to dishonour me, would you, you scum of … of the Eighth Hussars!’ And as I swung him left-handed before me, I drew back my right fist and with all my strength, smashed it into his face.
Nowadays, when I’m day-dreaming over the better moments of my misspent life – galloping Lola Montez and Elspeth and Queen Ranavalona and little Renee the creole and the fat dancing-wench I bought in India whose name escapes me, and having old Colin Campbell pinning the V.C. to my unworthy breast, and receiving my knighthood from Queen Victoria (and she in tears, maudlin little woman), and breaking into the Ranee’s treasure-cellar and seeing all that splendid loot laid out for the taking – when I think back on these fine things, the recollection of hitting Tommy Bryant invariably comes back to me. God knows it was a nightmare at the time, but in retrospect I can’t think of inflicting a hurt that I enjoyed more. My fist caught him full on the mouth and nose so hard that his collar was jerked clean out of my hand, and he went hurtling head foremost down the staircase like an arrow, bouncing once before crashing to rest in the hall, his limbs all a-sprawl.
There were shrieks of hysterical females in my ears, and hands seizing my coat, and men scampering down to lift him up, but all I remember is seeing Fanny’s face turned towards me in terror, and Bentinck’s voice drifting up the staircase:
‘My God, I believe he’s killed him!’
As it turned out, Bentinck was wrong, thank God; the little louse didn’t die, but it was a near-run thing. Apart from a broken nose, his skull was fractured in the fall, and for a couple of days he hung on the edge, with a Bristol horse-leech working like fury to save him from going over. Once he regained consciousness, and had the impertinence to say, ‘Tell Flashman I forgive him with all my heart,’ which cheered me up, because it indicated he was going to live, and wanted to appear a forgiving Christian; if he’d thought he was dying he’d have d----d me to hell and beyond.
But after that he lost consciousness again, and I went through the tortures of the pit. They had confined me to my room – Locke was a justice of the peace – and kept me there with the muff Duberly sitting outside the door like a blasted water-bailiff. I was in a fearful sweat, for if Bryant kicked the bucket it would be a hanging matter, no error, and at the thought of it I could only lie on my bed and quake. I’d seen men swing, and thought it excellent fun, but the thought of the rope rasping on my neck, and the blind being pulled over my brows, and the fearful plunge and sickening snap and blackness – my God, it had me vomiting in the corner. Well, I’ve had the noose under my chin since then, and waited blubbering for them to launch me off, and even the real thing seems no worse, looking back, than those few days of waiting in that bedroom, with the yellow primroses on the wallpaper, and the blue and red carpet on the floor with little green tigers woven into it, and the print of Harlaxton Manor, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, the seat of one John Longden, Esq., which hung above the bed – I can still recite the whole caption.
With the thought of the gallows driving everything else from my mind, it was small consolation to learn from Duberly – who seemed to be in a mortal funk himself over the whole business – that there was by no means complete agreement that I had been caught cheating. D’Israeli – he was clever, I’ll say that for him – had sensibly pointed out that a detected cheat wouldn’t have hauled the evidence out of his pocket publicly as soon as he was challenged. He maintained I would have protested, and refused to be searched – he was quite right, of course, but most of the other pious hypocrites disagreed with him, and the general feeling was that I was a fraud and a dangerous maniac who would be well served if I finished up in the prison lime-pit. Whatever happened, it was a hideous scandal; the house had emptied as if by magic next day, Mrs Locke was in a decline, and her husband was apparently only waiting to see how Bryant fared before turning me over to the police.
I don’t know, even now, what was determined, or who determined it, in those few days, except that old Morrison was obviously up to the neck in it. Whatever happened to Bryant, my political career was obviously over before it had begun; at best I was probably disgraced as a cheat, and liable to sentence for assault – that was if Bryant lived. In any event, I was a liability to Morrison henceforth, and whether he decided to try to get rid of me permanently, or planned simply to get me out of harm’s way for a time, is something on which I’ve never made up my mind. In fact, I don’t suppose he cared above half whether I lived or died, so long as his own interests weren’t harmed.
He came to see me on the fifth day, and told me that Bryant was out of danger, and I was so relieved that I was almost happy as I listened to him denouncing me for a wastrel, a fornicator, a cheat, a liar, a brute, and all the rest of it – I couldn’t fault a word of it, anyway. When he was done, he plumped down, breathing like a bellows, and says:
‘My certie, but ye’re easier oot o’ this than ye deserve. It’s no’ your fault the mark o’ Cain isnae on yer broo this day – a beast, that’s whit ye are, Flashman, a ragin’, evil beast!’ And he mopped his face. ‘Weel, Locke isnae goin’ tae press charges – ye have me tae thank for that – and this fellow Bryant’ll keep mum. Huh! A few hundred’ll tak’ care of him – he’s anither “officer and gentleman” like yersel’. I could buy the lot o’ ye! Jist trash.’ He snarled away under his breath, and shot me a look. ‘But we’ll no’ hush up the scandal, for a’ that. Ye cannae come home – ye’re aware o’ that, I suppose?’
I didn’t argue; I couldn’t, but I was ill-advised enough to mutter something about Elspeth, and for a moment I thought he would strike me. His face went purple, and his teeth chattered.
‘Mention her name tae me again – jist once again, and as Goad’s my witness I’ll see ye transported for this week’s work! Ye’ll rue the day ye ever set eyes on her – aye, as I have done, most bitterly. Goad alone knows what I and mine have done tae be punished by … you!’
Well, at least he didn’t pray over me, like Arnold; he was a different kind of hypocrite, was Morrison, and as a man of business he didn’t waste overmuch holy vituperation before getting down to cases.
‘Ye’ll be best oot o’ England for a spell, until this d---able business has blown by – if it ever does. Your fine relatives can mak’ your peace wi’ the Horse Guards – this kind o’ scandal’ll be naethin’ new there, I daresay. For the rest, I’ve been at work tae arrange matters – and whether ye like it or not, my buckie, ye’ll jump as I whistle. D’ye see?’
‘I suppose I’ve no choice,’ says I, and then, deciding it would be politic to grovel to the old b-----d, I added: ‘Believe me, sir, I feel nothing but gratitude for what you are doing, and –’
‘Hold your tongue,’ says he. ‘Ye’re a liar. There’s no more tae be said. Now, ye’ll pack yer valise, and go at once tae Poole, and there take a room at the “Admiral” and wait until ye hear from me. Not a word to a soul, and never stir out – or ye’ll find my protection and Locke’s is withdrawn, and that’ll be a felon’s cell for ye, and beggary tae follow. There’s money,’ says he, and dropping a purse on the table he turned on his heel and stamped out.
I made no protest; he had me by the neck, and I didn’t waste time reflecting on the eagerness with which my relatives and friends have always striven to banish me from England whenever opportunity offered – my own father, Lord Cardigan, and now old Morrison. They could never get shot of me fast enough. And, as on previous occasions, there was no room for argument; I would just have to go, and see what the Lord and John Morrison provided.
I slipped away from the house at noon, and was in Poole by nightfall. And there I waited a whole week, fretting at first, but gradually getting my spirits back. At least I was free, when I might have been going to the condemned hold; whatever lay in front of me, I’d come back to England eventually – it might be no more than a year, and by that time the trouble would be half-forgotten. Curiously enough, the assault on Bryant would be far less to live down than the business over the cards, but the more I thought about that, the more it seemed that no sensible men would take Bryant’s word against mine – he was known for a toady and a dirty little hound, whereas I, quite aside from my popular fame, was bluff, honest Harry to everyone who thought they knew me. Indeed, I even toyed with the notion of going back to town and brazening the thing then and there, but I hadn’t the gall for that. It was all too fresh, and Morrison would have thrown me into the gutter for certain. No, I would just have to take my medicine, whatever it was; I’ve learned that there’s no sense in kicking against the prick – a phrase which fits old Morrison like a glove. I would just have to make the best of whatever he had in store for me.
What that was I discovered on the eighth day, when a man called to see me just as I was finishing breakfast. In fact, I had finished, and was just chivvying after the servant lass who had come to clear away the dishes from my room; I had chased her into a corner, and she was bleating that she was a good girl, which I’ll swear she wasn’t, when the knock sounded; she took advantage of it to escape, admitting the visitor while she straightened her cap and snapped her indignation at me.
‘Sauce!’ says she. ‘I never –’
‘Get out,’ says the newcomer, and she took one look at him and fled.
He kicked the door to with his heel and stood looking at me, and there was something in that look that made me bite back the d--n-your-eyes I’d been going to give him for issuing orders in my room. At first glance he was ordinary-looking enough; square built, middle height, plain trousers and tight-buttoned jacket with his hands thrust into the pockets, low-crowned round hat which he didn’t trouble to remove, and stiff-trimmed beard and moustache which gave him a powerful, business-like air. But it wasn’t that that stopped me: it was the man’s eyes. They were as pale as water in a china dish, bright and yet empty, and as cold as an ice floe. They were wide set in his brown, hook-nosed face, and they looked at you with a blind fathomless stare that told you here was a terrible man. Above them, on his brow, there was a puckered scar that ran from side and side and sometimes jerked as he talked; when he was enraged, as he often was, it turned red. Hollo, thinks I, here’s another in my gallery of happy acquaintances.
‘Mr Flashman?’ says he. He had an odd, husky voice with what sounded like a trace of North Country. ‘My name is John Charity Spring.’
It seemed d----d inappropriate to me, but he was evidently well enough pleased with it, for he sat himself down in a chair and nodded me to another. ‘We’ll waste no time, if you please,’ says he. ‘I’m under instructions from my owner to take you aboard my vessel as supercargo. You don’t know what that means, I daresay, and it’s not necessary that you should. I know why you’re shipping with me; you’ll perform such duties as I suppose to be within your power. Am I clear?’
‘Well,’ says I, ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t think I care for your tone, Mr Spring, and –’
‘Captain Spring,’ says he, and sat forward. ‘Now see here, Mr Flashman, I don’t beat about. You’re nothing to me; I gather you’ve half-killed someone and that you’re a short leap ahead of the law. I’m to give you passage out, on the instructions of Mr Morrison.’ Suddenly his voice rose to a shout, and he crashed his hand on the table. ‘Well, I don’t give a d--n! You can stay or run, d’ye see? It’s all one to me! But you don’t waste my time!’ The scar on his head was crimson, and then it faded and his voice dropped. ‘Well?’
I didn’t like the look of this one, I can tell you. But what could I do?
‘Well,’ says I, ‘you say Mr Morrison is your ship’s owner – I didn’t know he had ships.’
‘Part owner,’ says he. ‘One of my directors.’
‘I see. And where is your ship bound, Captain Spring, and where are you to take me?’
The pale eyes flickered. ‘We’re going foreign,’ says he. ‘America, and home again. The voyage may last six months, so by Christmas you’ll be back in England. As supercargo you take a share of profit – a small share – so your voyage won’t be wasted.’
‘What’s the cargo?’ says I, interested, because I remembered hearing that these short-haul traders on the Atlantic run did quite well.
‘General stuffs on the way out – Brummagem, cloths, some machinery. Cotton, sugar, molasses and so forth on the trip home.’ He snapped the words out. ‘You ask too d----d many questions, Mr Flashman, for a runner.’
‘I’m not all that much of a runner,’ says I. It didn’t sound too bad a way of putting by the time till the Bryant business was past. ‘Well, in that case, I suppose –’
‘Good,’ says he. ‘Now then: I know you’re an Army officer, and it’s in deference to that I’m making you supercargo, which means you mess aft. You’ve been in India, for what that’s worth – what d’you know of the sea?’
‘Little enough,’ says I. ‘I’ve voyaged out and home, but I sailed in Borneo waters with Rajah Brooke, and can handle a small boat.’
‘Did you now?’ The pale eyes gleamed. ‘That means you’ve been part-pirate, I daresay. You look like it – hold your tongue, sir, it doesn’t matter to me! I’ll only tell you this: on my ship there is no free-and-easy sky-larking! I saw that slut in here just now – well, henceforth you’ll fornicate when I give you leave! By God, I’ll not have it otherwise!’ He was shouting again; this fellow’s half-mad, thinks I. Then he was quiet. ‘You have languages, I understand?’
‘Why, yes. French and German, Hindoostani, Pushtu – which is a tongue …’
‘… of Northern India,’ says he impatiently. ‘I know. Get on.’
‘Well, a little Malay, a little Danish. I learn languages easily.’
‘Aye. You were educated at Rugby – you have the classics?’
‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ve forgotten a good deal …’
‘Hah! Hiatus maxime deflendus,’
says this amazing fellow. ‘Or if you prefer it, Hiatus valde deflendus.’ He glared at me. ‘Well?’
I gaped at the man. ‘You mean? – oh, let’s see. Great – er, letting down? Great –’
‘Christ’s salvation!’ says he. ‘No wonder Arnold died young. The priceless gift of education, thrown away on brute minds! You speak living languages without difficulty, it seems – had you not the grace to pay heed, d--n your skin, to the only languages that matter?’ He jumped up and strode about.
I was getting tired of Mr Charity Spring. ‘They may matter to you,’ says I, ‘but in my experience it’s precious little good quoting Virgil to a head-hunter. And what the d---l has this to do with anything?’
He stood lowering at me, and then sneered: ‘There’s your educated Englishman, right enough. Gentlemen! Bah! Why do I waste breath on you? Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis,
by God! Well, if you’ll pack your precious traps, Mr Flashman, we’ll be off. There’s a tide to catch.’ And he was away, bawling for my account at the stairhead.
It was obvious to me that I had fallen in with a lunatic, and possibly a dangerous one, but since in my experience a great many seamen are wanting in the head I wasn’t over-concerned. He paid not the slightest heed to anything I said as we made our way down to the jetty with my valise behind on a hand-cart, but occasionally he would bark a question at me, and it was this that eventually prodded me into recollecting one of the few Latin tags which has stuck in my mind – mainly because it was flogged into me at school as a punishment for talking in class. He had been demanding information about my Indian service, mighty offensively, too, so I snapped at him:
‘Percunctatorem fugitus nam garrulus idem est’,
which I thought was pretty fair, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Horace, by G-d!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll make something of you yet. But it is fugito, d’ye see, not fugitus. Come on, man, make haste.’
He got little opportunity to catechise me after this, for the first stage of our journey was in a cockly little fishing boat that took us out into the Channel, and since it was h--lish rough I was in no condition for conversation. I’m an experienced sailor, which is to say I’ve heaved my guts over the rail into all the Seven Seas, and before we were ten minutes out I was sprawled in the scuppers wishing to God I’d gone back to London and faced the music. This spewing empty misery continued, as it always does, for hours, and I was still green and wobbly-kneed when at evening we came into a bay on the French coast, and sighted Mr Spring’s vessel riding at anchor. Gazing blearily at it as we approached, I was astonished at its size; it was long and lean and black, with three masts, not unlike the clippers of later years. As we came under her counter, I saw the lettering on her side: it read Balliol College.
‘Ah,’ says I to Spring, who was by me just then. ‘You were at Balliol, were you?’
‘No,’ says he, mighty short. ‘I am an Oriel man myself.’
‘Then why is your ship called Balliol College?’
I saw his teeth clench and his scar darkened up. ‘Because I hate the b----y place!’ he cried in passion. He took a turn about and came back to me. ‘My father and brothers were Balliol men, d’you see? Does that answer you, Mr Flashman?’
Well, it didn’t, but at that moment my belly revolted again, and when we came aboard I had to be helped up the ladder, retching and groaning and falling a-sprawl on the deck. I heard a voice say, ‘Christ, it’s Nelson’, and then I was half-carried away, and dropped on a bunk somewhere, alone in my misery while in the distance I heard the hateful voice of John Charity Spring bawling orders. I vowed then, as I’ve vowed fifty times since, that this was the last time I’d ever permit myself to be lured aboard a ship, but my mind must still have been working a little, because as I dropped off to sleep I remember wondering: why does a British ship have to sail from the French coast? But I was too tired and ill to worry just then.
Sometime later someone brought me broth, and having spewed it on to the floor I felt well enough to get up and stagger on deck. It was half-dark, but the stars were out, and to port there were lights twinkling on the French coast. I looked north, towards England, but there was nothing to be seen but grey sea, and suddenly I thought, my G-d, what am I doing here? Where the deuce am I going? Who is this man Spring? Here I was, who only a couple of weeks before had been rolling down to Wiltshire like a lord, with the intention of going into politics, and now I was shivering with sea-sickness on an ocean-going barque commanded by some kind of mad Oxford don – it was too much, and I found I was babbling to myself by the rail.
It’s always the way, of course. You’re coasting along and then the current grips you, and you’re swept into events and places that you couldn’t even have dreamed about. It seemed to have happened so quickly, but as I looked miserably back over the past fortnight there wasn’t, that I could see, anything I could have done that would have prevented what was now happening to me. I couldn’t have resisted Morrison, or refused Spring – I’d had to do what I was told, and here I was. I found myself blubbering as I gazed over the rail at the empty waste of sea – if only I hadn’t got lusty after that little b---h Fanny, and played cards with her, and hit that swine Bryant – ah, but what was the use? It was done, and I was going God knew where, and leaving Elspeth and my life of ease and drinking and guzzling and mounting women behind. But it was too bad, and I was full of self-pity and rage as I watched the water slipping past.
Of course, if I’d been like Jack Merry or Dick Champion, or any of the other plucky little prigs that Tom Brown and his cronies used to read about, setting off to seek my fortune on the bounding wave, I’d have brushed aside a manly tear and faced the future with the stout heart of youth, while old Bosun McHearty clapped me on the shoulder and held me enthralled with tales of the South Seas, and I would have gone to bed at last thinking of my mother and resolving to prove worthy of my resolute and Christian commander, Captain Freeman. (God knows how many young idiots have gone to sea after being fed that kind of lying pap in their nursery books.) Perhaps at twenty-six I was too old and hard-used, for instead of a manly tear I did another manly vomit, and in place of Bosun McHearty there came a rush of seamen tailing on a rope across the deck, hurling me aside with a cry of ‘Stand from under, you --- farmer!’, while from the dark above me my Christian commander bellowed at me to get below and not hinder work. So I went, and fell asleep thinking not of my mother, or of the credit I’d bring my family, but of the chance I’d missed in not rogering Fanny Locke that afternoon at Roundway Down. Aye, the vain regrets of youth.
You will judge from this that I wasn’t cut out for the life on the ocean wave. I can’t deny it; if Captain Marryat had had to write about me he’d have burned his pen, signed on a Cardiff tramp, and been buried at sea. For one thing, in my first few days aboard I did not thrash the ship’s bully, make friends with the nigger cook, or learn how to gammon a bosprit from a leathery old salt who called me a likely lad. No, I spent those days in my bunk feeling d----d ill, and only crawling on deck occasionally to take the air and quickly scurry below again to my berth. I was a sea-green and corruptible Flashy in those days.
Nor did I make friends, for I saw only four people and disliked all of them. The first was the ship’s doctor, a big-bellied lout of an Irishman who looked as though he’d be more at home with a bottle than a lancet, and had cold, clammy hands. He gave me a draught for my sea-sickness which made it worse, and then staggered away to be ill himself. He was followed by a queer, old-young creature with wispy hair who shuffled in carrying a bowl from which he slopped some evil-looking muck; when I asked him who the d---l he was he jerked his head in a nervous tic and stammered:
‘Please, sir, I’m Sammy.’
‘Sammy what?’
‘Nossir, please sir, Sammy Snivels, cap’n calls me. But they calls me Looney, mostly.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Please sir, it’s gruel. The doctor sez for you to eat it, please, sir,’ and he lumbered forward and spilled half of it over my cot.
‘D--n you!’ cries I, and weak and all as I was I caught him a back-handed swipe on the face that sent him half across the cabin. ‘Take your filth and get out!’
He mowed at me, and tried to scrape some of the stuff off the floor back into the bowl. ‘Doctor’ll thump me if you don’t take it, please, sir,’ says he, pushing it at me again. ‘Please, sir, it’s nice tack, an’ all – please, sir,’ and then he squealed as I lunged out at him, dropped the bowl, and fairly ran for it. I was too weak to do more than curse after him, but I promised myself that when I was better I would put myself in a better frame of mind by giving the blundering half-wit a thumping on my own account, to keep the doctor’s company.
Next man in was no half-wit, but a nimble little ferret of a ship’s boy with a loose lip and a cast in one eye. He gave me a shifty grin and sniffed at the spilled gruel.
‘Looney didn’t ’ave no luck, did ’e?’ says he. ‘I told ’em gruel wouldn’t go down, no’ow.’
I told him to go to blazes and leave me alone.
‘Feelin’ groggy, eh?’ says he, moving towards the bunk. ‘Grub’s no good ter you, mate. Tell yer wot; I’ll get in bed wiv yer for a shillin’.’
‘Get out, you dirty little b-----d,’ says I, for I knew his kind; Rugby had been crawling with ’em. ‘I’d sooner have your great-grandmother.’
‘Snooks!’ says he, putting out his tongue. ‘You’ll sing a different tune after three months at sea an’ not a wench in sight. It’ll be two bob then!’
I flung a pot at him, but missed, and he let fly a stream of the richest filth I’ve ever listened to. ‘I’ll get Mister Comber ter you, yer big black swine!’ he finished up. ‘’E’ll give you what for! Ta-ta!’ And with that he slipped out, thumbing his nose.
Mr Comber was the fourth of my new acquaintances. He was third mate, and shared the cabin with me, and I couldn’t make him out. He was civil, although he said little enough, but the odd thing was, he was a gentleman, and had obviously been to a good school. What a playing-field beauty like this was doing on a merchantman I couldn’t see, but I held my tongue and watched him. He was about my age, tall and fair-haired, and too sure of himself for me to get on the wrong side of. I guessed he was as puzzled about me as I was about him, but I was feeling too poorly at first to give much heed to him. He didn’t champion the cabin boy, by the way, so that worthy’s threat had obviously been bluff.
It was four or five days before I got my sea legs, and by then I was heartily sick of the Balliol College. Nowadays you have no notion of what a sailing-ship was like in the ’forties; people who travel P.O.S.H. in a steam packet can’t imagine, for one thing, the h---ish continual din of a wooden vessel – the incessant creaking and groaning of timber and cordage, like a fiend’s orchestra playing the same discordant notes, regular as clockwork, each time she rolled. And, by G-d, they rolled, far worse than iron boats, bucketing up and down, and stinking too, with the musty stale smell of a floating cathedral, and the bilges plashing like a giant’s innards. Oh, it was the life for a roaring boy, all right, and that was only the start of it. I didn’t know it, but I was seeing the Balliol College at her best.
One morning, when I was sufficiently recovered to hold down the gruel that Looney brought me, and strong enough to kick his backside into the bargain, comes Captain Spring to tell me I’d lain long enough, and it was time for me to learn my duties.
‘You’ll stand your watch like everyone else,’ says he, ‘and in the meantime you can start on the work you’re paid for – which is to go through every scrap of that cargo, privatim et seriatim, and see that those longshore thieves haven’t bilked me. So get up, and come along with me.’
I followed him out on deck; we were scudding along like a flying duck with great billows of canvas spread, and a wind on the quarter deck fit to lift your hair off. There was plenty of shipping in sight, but no land, and I knew we must be well out of the Channel by now. Looking forward from the poop rail along the narrow flush deck, it seemed to me the Balliol College didn’t carry much of a crew, for all her size, but I didn’t have time to stop and stare, with Spring barking at me. He led me down the poop ladder, and then dropped through a scuttle by the mizzen mast.
‘There you are,’ says he. ‘Take a good look.’
Although I’ve done a deal more sailing than I care to remember, I’m no canvas-back, and while I know enough not to call the deck the floor, I’m no hand at nautical terms. We were in what seemed to be an enormous room stretching away forward to the foremast, where there was a bulkhead; this room ran obviously the full breadth of the ship, and was well lighted by gratings in the deck about fifteen feet above our heads. But it was unlike the interior of any ship I’d ever seen, it was so big and roomy; on either side, about four feet above the deck on which we stood, there was a kind of half-deck, perhaps seven feet deep, like a gigantic shelf, and above that yet another shelf of the same size. The space down the centre of the deck, between the shelves, was piled high with cargo in a great mound – it must have been a good seventy feet long by twelve high.
‘I’ll send my clerk to you with the manifest,’ says Spring, ‘and a couple of hands to help shift and stow.’ I became aware that the pale eyes were watching me closely. ‘Well?’
‘Is this the hold?’ says I. ‘It’s an odd-looking place for cargo.’
‘Aye,’ says he. ‘Ain’t it, though?’
Something in his voice, and in the dank feel of that great, half-empty deck, set the worms stirring inside me. I moved forward with the great heap of cargo, bales and boxes, on one side of me, and the starboard shelves on the other. It was all clean and holystoned, but there was a strange, heavy smell about it that I couldn’t place. Looking about, I noticed something in the shadows at the back of the lower shelf – I reached in, and drew out a long length of light chain, garnished here and there with large bracelets. I stood staring at them, and then dropped them with a clatter as the truth rushed in on me. Now I saw why the Balliol College had sailed from France, why her deck was this strange shape, why she was only half-full of cargo.
‘My G-d!’ cries I. ‘You’re a slaver!’
‘Good for you, Mr Flashman!’ says Spring. ‘And what then?’
‘What then?’ says I. ‘Well, you can turn your b-----d boat about, this minute, and let me ashore from her! By G-d, if I’d guessed what you were, I’d have seen you d----d, and old Morrison with you, before I set foot on your lousy packet!’
‘Dear me,’ says he softly. ‘You’re not an abolitionist, surely?’
‘D--n abolition, and you too!’ cries I. ‘I know that slaving’s piracy, and for that they stretch your neck below high-water mark! You – you tricked me into this – you and that old swine! But I won’t have it, d’ye hear? You’ll set me ashore, and –’
I was striding past him towards the ladder, as he stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, eyeing me under the brim of his hat. Suddenly he shot out a hand, and with surprising strength swung me round in front of him. The pale eyes gazed into mine, and then his fist drove into my belly, doubling me up with pain; I reeled back, and he came after me, smashing me left and right to the head and sending me sprawling against the cargo.
‘D--n you!’ I shouted, and tried to crawl away, but he pinned me with his foot, glaring down at me.
‘Now, see here, Mister Flashman,’ says he. ‘I didn’t want you, but I’ve got you, and you’ll understand, here and now, that while you’re on this ship, you’re mine, d’ye see? You’re not going ashore until this voyage is finished – Middle Passage, Indies, homeward run and all. If you don’t like slaving – well, that’s too bad, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have signed aboard, should you?’
‘I didn’t sign! I never –’
‘Your signature will be on the articles that are in my cabin this minute,’ says he. ‘Oh, it’ll be there, sure enough – you’ll put it there.’
‘You’re kidnapping me!’ I yelled. ‘My G-d, you can’t do it! Captain Spring, I beg you – set me ashore, let me get off – I’ll pay you – I’ll –’
‘What, and lose my new supercargo?’ says the devil, grinning at me. ‘No, no. John Charity Spring obeys his owner’s orders – and mine are crystal clear, Mister Flashman. And he sees to it that those aboard his ship obey his orders, too, ye hear me?’ He stirred me with his foot. ‘Now, get up. You’re wasting my time again. You’re here; you’ll do your duty. I won’t tell you twice.’ And those terrible pale eyes looked into mine again. ‘D’ye understand me?’
‘I understand you,’ I muttered.
‘Sir,’ says he.
‘Sir.’
‘Come,’ says he, ‘that’s better. Now, cheer up, man; I won’t have sulks, by G-d. This is a happy ship, d’ye hear? It should be, the wages we pay. There’s a thought for you Flashman – you’ll be a d----d sight richer by the end of this voyage than you would be on a merchantman. What d’ye say to that?’
My mind was in a maze over all this, and real terror at what the consequences might be. Again I pleaded with him to be set ashore, and he slapped me across the mouth.
‘Shut your trap,’ says he. ‘You’re like an old woman. Scared are you? What of?’
‘It’s a capital crime,’ I whimpered.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ says he. ‘Britain doesn’t hang slavers, nor do the Yankees, for all their laws say. Look about you – this ship’s built for slaving, ain’t she? Slavers who run the risk of getting caught aren’t built so, with chains in view and slave decks and all. No indeed, qui male agit odit lucem
– they pose as honest merchantmen, so if the patrols nab ’em they won’t be impounded under the equipment regulations. The Balliol College needs no disguises – for the simple reason we’re too fast and handy for any d----d patrol ship, English or American. What I’m telling you, Mister Flashman, is that we don’t get caught, so you won’t either. Does that set your mind at rest?’
It didn’t, of course, but I knew better than to protest again. All I could think of was how the h--l I was going to get out of this. He took my silence for assent.
‘Well enough,’ growls he. ‘You’ll begin on this lot, then’ – and he jerked a thumb at the cargo. ‘And for Christ’s sake, liven up, man! I’ll not have you glooming up this ship with a long face, d’ye see? At eight bells you’ll leave off and come to my cabin – Mrs Spring will be serving tea for the officers, and will wish to meet you.’
I didn’t believe my ears. ‘Mrs Spring?’
‘My wife,’ he snapped, and seeing my bewilderment: ‘Who the d---l else would Mrs Spring be? You don’t think I’d ship my mother aboard a slaver, do you?’
And with that he strode off, leaving me in a fine sweat. Thanks to an instant’s folly, and the evil of that rotten little toad, my father-in-law, I was a member of the crew of a pirate ship, and nothing to be done about it. It took some digesting, but there it was; I suppose that after all the shocks I’d had in my young life this should have been nothing out of the way, but I found myself shuddering at the thought. Not that I’d any qualms about slaving, mark you, from the holy-holy point of view; they could have transported every nigger in Africa to the moon in chains for all I cared, but I knew it was a d----d chancy business – aye, and old Morrison had known that, too. So the old swine had his fingers in the blackbird pie – and I’ll lay my life that was a well concealed ledger in his countinghouse – and had taken advantage of the Bryant affair to shanghai me into this. He had wanted me out of the way, and here was a golden chance of making sure that I would be away for good; no doubt Spring was right, and the Balliol College would come through her voyage safe, as most slavers did, but there was always the chance of being caught, and rotting your life away in jail, even if they didn’t top you. And there was the risk of getting killed by niggers on the Slave Coast, or catching yellow jack or some foul native disease, as so many slaving crews did – oh, it was the perfect ocean cruise for an unwanted son-in-law. And Elspeth would be a widow, I would never see her, or England, again, for even if I survived the trip, word of it might get home, and I’d be an outlaw, a felon …
I sat down on the cargo with my head in my hands, and wept, and raged inwardly against that little Scotch scoundrel. G-d, if ever I had the chance to pay him back – but what was the use of thinking that way in my present plight? In the end, as usual, one thought came uppermost in my mind – survive, Flashy, and let the rest wait. But I resolved to keep my spite warm in the meantime.
In the circumstances it was as well that I had work to do; going through that cargo, as I did when a couple of hands and the ship’s clerk came down presently, at least occupied part of my thoughts, and kept me from working myself into a terror about the future. After all, thinks I, men like these didn’t sign on in the expectation of dying; they seemed handy, sober fellows who knew their business – very different from the usual tarry-john. One of them, an oldish man named Kirk, had been a slaver all his days, and had served on the notorious Black Joke;
he wouldn’t have shipped on any other kind of vessel.
‘What,’ says he, ‘at £15 a month? I’d be a fool. D’ye know, I’ve four thousand quid put by, in Liverpool and Charleston banks – how many sailormen have the tenth of that? Risk? I’ve been impounded once, on the Joke, shipwrecked once, and seen two cargoes of black ivory slung overside – which meant a dead loss for the owners, but I drew me pay, didn’t I? Oh, aye, I’ve been chased a score o’ times, and been yard-arm to yard-arm in running fights wi’ Limey an’ Yankee patter-rollers, but no harm done. An’ for sickness, ye’ve more chance of that from some poxed-up yellow tart in Havana than on the coast these days. You’ve been east – well, you know to keep yourself clean an’ boil your water, then.’
He made it sound not half bad, apart from the stuff about fighting the patrols, but I understood that this was a rare event – the Balliol College had never been touched in five trips that he knew of, although she had been sighted and chased times without number.
‘She’s built light, see, like all the Baltimore brigs an’ clippers,’ says Kirk. ‘Save a patch o’ calm, she’ll show her heels to anything, even steam-ships. West o’ Saint Tommy, even wi’ a full load o’ black cattle, she could snap her fingers at the whole Navy, and wi’ the fair winds coming south, like we are now, she’s gone before they see her. Only risky time is on the coast itself, afore we load up. If they was to catch us there, wi’ the Government wind pinning us on the coast, they could impound us, empty an’ all, ’cos o’ the law as lays down that if you’re rigged and fitted for slavin’, like we are, they can pinch you even wi’out a black aboard. Used to be that even then they couldn’t touch ye, if ye had the right papers – Greek, say, or Braziliano.’ He laughed. ‘Why, I’ve sailed on a ship that had Yankee, Gyppo, Portugee, an’ even Rooshian papers all ready for inspection, as might serve. But it’s different now – ye don’t talk, ye run.’
He and the clerk and the other man – I think he was a Norwegian – harked back a good deal to the old days, when the slave ships had waited in turn at the great African barracoons to ship their cargoes, and how the Navy had spoiled the trade by bribing the native chiefs not to deal with slavers, so that all the best stretches of coast nowadays were out of court, and no niggers to be had.
‘Mind you,’ says Kirk, winking, ‘show ’em the kind o’ goods we got here, an’ they’ll spring you a likely cargo o’ Yorubas or Mandingos, treaty or not – an’ if sometimes you have to fight for ’em, as we did two trips back, well, it comes cheaper, don’t it? An’ Cap’n Spring, he’s got a grand nose for a tribal war, or a chief that’s got too many young bucks of his own people on his hands. He’s a caution, he is, an’ worth every penny the owners pay him. Like to guess ’ow much?’
I said I had no idea.
‘Twenty thousand pounds a trip,’ says Kirk. ‘There now! An’ you wonder I ship on a slaver!’
I knew slavers made huge profits, of course, but this staggered me. No wonder old Morrison had an interest in the trade – and no doubt paid a subscription to the Anti-Slavery Society and thought it well worthwhile. And he wasn’t laying out overmuch in trade goods, by the look of this cargo – you never saw so much junk, although just the kind of stuff to make a nigger chief happy, no doubt. There were old Brown Bess muskets that probably hadn’t been fired in fifty years, sackfuls of condemned powder and shot, rusty bayonets and cheap cutlasses and knives, mirrors and looking glasses by the dozen, feathered hats and check trousers, iron pots and plates and cauldrons, and most amazing of all, a gross of Army red coats, 34th Foot; one of ’em had a bullet-hole and a rusty stain on the right breast, and I remember thinking, bad luck for someone. There was a packet of letters in the pocket, which I meant to keep, but didn’t.
And there was case after case of liquor, in brown glass bottles; gin, I suppose you’ld call it, but even to sniff the stuff shrivelled the hairs off your arse. The blacks wouldn’t know the difference, of course.
We were searching through all this trash, I counting and calling out to the clerk, who ticked the manifest, and Kirk and his fellow stowing back, when Looney, the idiot steward, came down to gape at us. He squatted down, dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, making stupid observations, till Kirk, who was bundling the red coats, sings out to him to come over. Kirk had taken two of the brass gorgets off the officers’ coats – they must have been d----d old uniforms – and winking at us he laid the gorgets on the deck, and says:
‘Now, Looney, you’re a sharp ’un. Which is the biggest? If you can tell, I’ll give you my spirits tomorrow. If you can’t you give me yours, see?’
I saw what he was after: the gorgets were shaped like half-moons, and whichever was laid uppermost looked bigger – children amuse themselves with such things, cut out of paper. Looney squinted at them, giggling, and pointing to the top gorget, says:
‘That ’un.’
‘Ye’re sure?’ says Kirk, and taking the gorget which Looney had indicated, placed it beneath the other one – which now looked bigger, of course. Looney stared at it, and then said:
‘That un’s bigger now.’
Kirk changed them again, while his mates laughed, and Looney was bewildered. He gaped round helplessly, and then kicking the gorgets aside, he shouted:
‘You make ’em bigger an’ – an’ littler!’
And he started to cry, calling Kirk a dirty b-----d, which made us laugh all the more, so he shouted obscenities at us and stamped, and then ran over to a pile of bags stowed beyond the cargo and began to urinate on them, still swearing at us over his shoulder.
‘Hold on!’ cries Kirk, when he could contain his mirth. ‘That’s the niggers’ gruel you’re p-----g on!’
I was holding my sides, guffawing, and the clerk cries out:
‘That’ll make the dish all the tastier for ’em! Oh, my stars!’
Looney, seeing us amused, began to laugh himself, as such idiots will and p-----d all the harder, and then suddenly I heard the others’ laughter cut off, and there was a step on the ladder, and there stood John Charity Spring, staring at us with a face like the demon king. Those pale eyes were blazing, and Looney gave a little whimper and fumbled with his britches, while the piddle ran across the tilting deck towards Spring’s feet.
Spring stood there in a silence you could feel, while we scrambled up. His hands clenched and unclenched, and the scar on his head was blazing crimson. His mouth worked, and then he leaped at Looney and knocked the cowering wretch down with one smashing blow. For a moment I thought he would set about the half-wit with his boots, but he mastered himself, and wheeled on us.
‘Bring that – that vermin on deck!’ he bawled, and stamped up the ladder, and I was well ahead of the seamen in rushing to Looney and dragging him to the scuttle. He yelled and struggled, but we forced him up on deck, where Spring was stamping about in a spitting rage, and the hands were doubling aft in response to the roars of the Yankee first mate.
‘Seize him up there,’ orders Spring, and with me holding Looney’s thrashing legs, Kirk very deftly tied his wrists up to the port shrouds and ripped his shirt off. Spring was calling for the cat, but someone says there wasn’t one.
‘Then make one, d--n you!’ he shouted, and paced up and down, casting dreadful glances at the imploring Looney, who was babbling in his bonds.
‘Don’t hit us, cap’n! Please don’t hit us! It was them other b-----ds, changin’ things!’
‘Silence!’ says Spring, and Looney’s cries subsided to a whisper, while the crew crowded about to see the sport. I kept back, but made sure I had a good view.
They gave Spring a hastily made cat, and he buttoned his jacket tight and pulled his hat down.
‘Now, you b----r, I’ll make you dance!’ cries he, and laid in for all he was worth. Looney screamed and struggled; each time the lashes hit him he shrieked, and between each stroke Spring cursed him for all he was worth.
‘Foul my ship, will you?’ Whack! ‘Ruin the food for my cargo, by G-d!’ Whack! ‘Spread pestilence with your filth, will you?’ Whack! ‘Yes, pray, you wharfside son-of-a-b---h, I’m listening!’ Whack! ‘I’ll cut your b----y soul out, if you have one!’ Whack! If it had been a regulation Army cat, I think he’d have killed him; as it was, the hastily spliced yarn cut the idiot’s back to bits and the blood ran over his ragged trousers. His screams became moans, and then silence, and then Spring flung the cat overboard.
‘Souse him and let him hang there to dry!’ says he, and then he addressed the unconscious victim. ‘And let me catch you at your filthy tricks again, you scum, so help me G-d I’ll hang you – d’ye hear!’
He glared at us with his madman’s eyes, and my heart was in my mouth for a moment. Then his scar faded, and he said in his normal bark:
‘Dismiss the hands, Mr Comber. Mr Sullivan, and you, supercargo, come aft. Mrs Spring is serving tea.’
There were a few curious glances at me as I followed Spring and the Yankee mate – I was new to the crew, of course – and as we went down the ladder to his cabin, Spring looked me over. ‘Go and put on a jacket,’ he growled. ‘G-d d--n you, don’t you know anything?’ so I scudded off smartly, and when I came back they were still waiting. He examined me – and in a flash of memory I thought of waiting with Wellington to see the Queen, and being fussed over by flunkeys – and then he threw open the door.
‘I trust we don’t intrude, my dear,’ says he. ‘I have brought Mr Sullivan to tea, and our new supercargo, Mr Flashman.’
I don’t know what I expected – the Queen of Sheba wouldn’t have surprised me, aboard the Balliol College – but it wasn’t the mild-looking, middle-aged woman sitting behind a table, picking at a sampler, who turned to beam at us pleasantly, murmured something in greeting, and then set to pouring tea. Presently Comber came in, smoothing his hair, and the grizzled old second mate, Kinnie, who ducked his head to me when Spring made us known to each other. Mrs Spring handed over cups, and we stood round sipping, and nibbling at her biscuits, while she beamed and Spring talked – she had little to say for herself, but he paid her as much respect as though it had been a London drawing-room. I had to pinch myself to believe it was real: a tea party aboard a slaver, with this comfortable woman adding hot water to the pot while a flogged man was bleeding all over the deck above our heads, and Spring, his cuff specked with the victim’s gore, was laying it off about Thucydides and Horace.
‘Mr Flashman has had the beginning of an education, my dear,’ says he. ‘He was with Dr Arnold at Rugby School.’
She turned a placid face in my direction. ‘Mr Spring is a classical scholar,’ says she. ‘His father was a Senior Fellow.’
‘Senior Tutor, if you please, my dear,’ says Spring. ‘And it’s my belief he achieved that position by stealing the work of better men. Scholarship is merely a means to an end these days, and paucis carior est fides quam pecunia.
You remember Sallust, Mr Comber? No? There seems to be little to choose between the ignorance of Rugby and that of Winchester College.’ (Oho, thinks I, Winchester, that accounts for a lot.) ‘However, if we have some leisure on this voyage, we may repair these things, may we not, Mr Flashman?’
I mumbled something about being always eager to learn.
‘Aye,’ says he, ‘pars sanitatis velle sanari fuit,
we may hope. But I imagine Seneca is yet another among the many authors with whom you are not acquainted.’ He munched on a biscuit, the pale blue eyes considering me. ‘Tell me, sir, what do you know?’
I stole a glance at the others; Kinnie had his head down over his cup, and Sullivan, the big, raw-boned Yankee, was gazing bleakly before him. Comber was looking nervous.
‘Well, sir,’ says I, ‘not very much …’ And then, like a fool, I added, toady-like: ‘Not as much as a Fellow of Oriel College, I’m sure.’
Comber’s cup clattered suddenly. Spring says, very soft: ‘I am not a Fellow, Mr Flashman. I was dismissed.’
Well, it didn’t surprise me. ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ says I.
‘You well may be,’ says he. ‘You well may be. You may come to wish that I was in my rightful place, sir, instead of here!’ His voice was rising, and his scar going crimson. He set his cup down with a force that rattled the table. ‘Herding with the carrion of the sea, sir, instead of … of … d--n your eyes, man, look at me! You think it a matter for contempt, don’t you, that a man of my intellect should be brought to this! You think it a jest that I was flung into the gutter by jealous liars! You do! I see it in your …’
‘No, no indeed, sir!’ cries I, quaking. ‘I was expelled myself … I don’t …’
‘Hold your confounded tongue!’ he bawled. ‘You can’t do right for doing wrong, can you? No, by G-d! Well, I warn you, Mister Flashman – I’ll remind you of another text from Seneca, whom you don’t b----y well read, d--n your ignorance! Gravis ira regum semper.
Mr Comber will construe it for you – he’s heard it before, and digested it! He’ll tell you that a captain is to be feared as much as a king!’ He thumped the table. ‘Mrs Spring, you’ll excuse me!’ And he burst past me, slamming the door behind him.
He left me shaking, and then we heard his voice on deck, bawling at the man at the wheel, and his feet stamping overhead. I felt the sweat starting on my forehead.
‘May I give you some more tea, Mr Sullivan?’ says Mrs Spring. ‘Mr Comber, a little more?’ She poured for them in silence. ‘Have you been to sea before, Mr Flashman?’
God knows what I said; it was too much for me, and it’s quite likely I answered nothing at all. I know we stood about a little longer, and then Sullivan said we must be about our duties, and we thanked Mrs Spring, and she inclined her head gravely, and we filed out.
Outside, Sullivan turned to me, glanced up the ladder, sighed, and rubbed his jaw. He was a youngish, hard-case sailor, this one, with a New England figurehead and a slantendicular way of looking at you. At last he says:
‘He’s mad. So’s she.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It don’t matter, though. Much. Sane or silly, drunk or dry, he’s the best d----d skipper on this coast, or any other. You follow me?’
I stood there, nodding.
‘Well and good,’ says he. ‘You’ll be in Mr Comber’s watch – just tail on to the rope and keep your eyes open. And when the skipper starts talkin’ Latin, or whatever it is, just shut up, d’ye hear?’
That was one piece of advice which I didn’t need. If I’d learned one thing about the Balliol College, it was that I had no wish to bandy scholarship with John Charity Spring – or anything else, for that matter.
By now you will have some idea of what life at sea was like when Uncle Harry was a boy. I don’t claim that it was typical – I’ve sailed on many ships since the Balliol College, and never struck one like it, thank G-d – but although it was often like cruising in an asylum, I’ll say one thing: that ship and crew were d---d good at their work, which was kidnapping niggers and selling them in the Americas.
I can say this now, looking back; I was hardly in a position to appreciate their qualities after that first day of flogging and tea parties. All I could think of then was that I was at the mercy of a dangerous maniac who was h--l bent on a dangerous criminal expedition, and I didn’t know which to be more scared of – him and his Latin lectures or the business ahead. But as usual, after a day or two I settled down, and if I didn’t enjoy the first weeks of that voyage, well, I’ve known worse.
At least I had an idea of what I was in for – or thought I had – and could hope to see the end of it. For the moment I must take care, and so I studied to do my duties well – which was easy enough – and to avoid awakening the wrath of Captain J. C. Spring. This last wasn’t too difficult, as it proved: all I had to do in his presence was listen to his interminable prosing about Thucydides and Lucan, and Seneca, whom he particularly admired, for he dearly loved to display his learning. (In fact, I heard later that he had been a considerable scholar in his youth, and would have gone far had he not assaulted some dignitary at Oxford and been kicked out. Who knows? he might have become something like Head at Rugby – which prompts the thought that Arnold would have made a handy skipper for an Ivory Coast pirate.)
At any rate, he lost no opportunity of airing his Latinity to Comber and me, usually at tea in his cabin, with the placid Mrs Spring sitting by, nodding. Sullivan was right, of course; they were both mad. You had only to see them at the divine service which Spring insisted on holding on Sundays, with the whole ship’s company drawn up, and Mrs Spring pumping away at her German accordion while we sang ‘Hark! the wild billow’, and afterwards Spring would blast up prayers to the Almighty, demanding his blessing on our voyage, and guidance in the tasks which our hands should find to do, world without end, amen. I don’t know what Wilberforce would have made of that, or my old friend John Brown, but the ship’s company took it straight-faced – mind you, they knew better than to do anything else.
They were as steady a crowd as I’ve ever seen afloat – hard men, and sober, who didn’t say much but did their work with a speed and efficiency that would have shamed an Indiaman. They were professionals, of course, and a good cut above your ordinary shellback. They respected Spring, and he them – although when one of them, a huge Dago, talked back to him, Spring smashed him senseless with his bare fists inside a minute – a man twice his size and weight. And another, who stole spirits, he flogged nearly to death, blaspheming at every stroke – yet a couple of hours later he was reading aloud to us from the Aeneid.
Mind you, if it was a tolerable life, it was damned dull, and I found my thoughts turning increasingly to Elspeth – and other women – as the days grew longer. But it was Elspeth, mostly; I found myself dreaming about her soft nakedness, and that silky golden hair spilling down over my face, and the perfume of her breath – it was rough work, I tell you, knowing there wasn’t a wench in a hundred miles, nor likely to be. And from that my thoughts would turn to Morrison, and how I might get my own back when the time came: that at least was a more profitable field of speculation.
So we ran south, and then south by east, day after day, and the weather got warmer, and I shed my coat for a red striped jersey and white duck trousers, with a big belt and a sheath knife, as like Ralph Rover as ever was, and the galley stopped serving duff and the cask-water got staler by the day, and then one morning the wind had a new smell – a heavy, rotten air that comes from centuries of mangrove growing and decaying – and that afternoon we sighted the low green bank far away to port that is the coast of Africa.
We sighted sails, too, every now and then, but never for long. The Balliol College, as Kirk told me, drew wind like no other ship on the ocean – the best fun was to stand up in her forechains as she lay over, one gunwale just above the crests, thrashing along like billy-be-damned, with mountains of canvas billowing above you – Dick Dauntless would have loved it, I’ll be bound, and I enjoyed it myself – or at night, when you could lean over and watch the green fire round her bows, and look up at that African sky that is purple and soft like no other in the world, with the stars twinkling. G-d knows I’m no romantic adventurer, but sometimes I remember – and I’d like to run south again down Africa with a fair wind. In a private yacht, with my youth, half a dozen assorted Parisian whores, the finest of food and drink, and perhaps a German band. Aye, it’s a man’s life.
That land we had sighted was the Guinea Coast, which was of no interest to us, because as Kirk assured me it was played out for slaving. The growing sentiment for abolition at home, the increasing number of nations who joined with England in fighting the trade, the close blockade of the coast by British and Yankee patrol ships, who burned the slave stations and pounced on the ships – all these things were making life more difficult in the blackbird trade in the ’forties. In the old days, the slavers had been able to put in openly, and pick up their cargoes, which had been collected by the native chiefs and herded into the great pens, or barracoons, at the river mouths. Now it wasn’t so easy, and speed and secrecy were the thing, which was why fast ships like the Balliol College were at an advantage.
And of course clever slavers like Spring knew exactly where to go for the best blacks and which chiefs to deal with – this was the great thing. Your slaver might easily dodge the patrols on the way in and out – for it was a huge coast, and the Navy couldn’t hope to watch it all – but unless he had a good agent ashore, and a native king who could keep up a supply of prime nigs, he was sunk. It’s always amused me to listen to the psalm-smiting hypocrisy of nigger-lovers at home and in the States who talk about white savages raping the Coast and carrying poor black innocents into bondage – why, without the help of the blacks themselves we’d not have been able to lift a single slave out of Africa. But I saw the Coast with my own eyes, you see, which the Holy Henriettas didn’t, and I know that this old wives’ tale of a handful of white pirates mastering the country and kidnapping as they chose, is all my eye. We couldn’t have stayed there five minutes if the nigger kings and warrior tribes hadn’t been all for it, and traded their captured enemies – aye, and their own folk, too – for guns and booze and Brummagem rubbish.
Why my pious acquaintances won’t believe this, I can’t fathom. They enslaved their own kind, in mills and factories and mines, and made ’em live in kennels that an Alabama planter wouldn’t have dreamed of putting a black into. Aye, and our dear dead St William Wilberforce cheered ’em on, too – weeping his pious old eyes out over niggers he had never seen, and d--ning the soul of anyone who suggested it was a bit hard to make white infants pull coal sledges for twelve hours a day. Of course, he knew where his living came from, I don’t doubt. My point is: if he and his kind did it to their people, why should they suppose the black rulers were any different where their kinsfolk were concerned? They make me sick, with their pious humbug.
But it’s all by the way; the main thing is that Spring had a good black king to work with, a horrible old creature named Gezo, who lorded it over the back country of Dahomey. Now that the Windward Coast wasn’t the place any more, and the slavers were concentrating round the corner in the White Man’s Grave, stretches like Dahomey and Benin and the Oil rivers were where the real high jinks were to be found. The Navy lay in all the time at places like Whydah and Lagos, and your sharp captains like Spring were as likely as not to use the lonelier rivers and lagoons, where they could load up at their leisure, provided no one spotted ’em coming in.
After our first landfall we bore away south, and came eastabout to Cape Palmas, where you could see the palm trees that gave it its name down by the water’s edge, and so along the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast past Three Points to Whydah, where we put into the open roads. Spring had the Stars and Stripes at the masthead, and was safe enough, for there wasn’t a Yankee in port. There were two British naval sloops, but they wouldn’t come near us – this was where the slavers scored, Kirk told me; the Yanks wouldn’t let any but their own navy search an American ship, so our blue-jackets would interfere only with Portuguese and Spaniards and so on.
We lay off, looking at the long yellow beach with the factories and barracoons behind it, and the huge rollers crashing on the sand, and it was as hot as hell’s kitchen. I watched the kites diving and snatching among the hundreds of small craft plying about between ships and shore, and the great Kroo canoes riding the surf, and tried to fan away the stench that rose from all the filth rotting on the oily water. I remembered what Kinnie had said:
‘Oh, sailor, beware of the Bight o’ Benin.
There’s one as comes out for a hundred goes in.’
You could smell the sickness on the wind, and I wondered why Spring, who was talking at the rail with Sullivan and scanning the shore with his glass, had put in here. But presently out comes a big Kroo canoe, with half a dozen niggers on board, who hailed us, and for the first time I heard that queer Coast lingo which passes for a language from Gambia to the Cape.
‘Hollo, Tommy Rot,’ cries Spring, ‘where Pedro Blanco?’
‘Hollo, sah,’ sings out one of the Kroos. ‘He lib for Bonny; no catch two, three week.’
‘Why he no lib for come? Him sabby me make palaver, plenty plenty nigras. Come me plenty good stuff, what can do, him lib Bonny?’
‘Him say Spagnole fella, Sanchez, lib for Dahomey ribber. Him make strong palaver, no goddam bobbery. You take Tommy Rot, sah, catch Rum Punch, Tiny Tim, plenty good fella, all way ribber. Make good nigra palaver wid Spagnole fella, no Inglish Yankee gunboat.’
Spring cursed a bit at all this; it seemed he had been hoping to meet one Pedro Blanco at Whydah, but the Krooboy Tommy Rot was telling him instead he should make for a river where a Spaniard named Sanchez would supply him with slaves. Spring didn’t like it too much.
‘Blanco bobbery b-----d,’ says he. ‘Me want him make palaver King Gezo one time.’
‘Palaver sawa sawa,’ bawls the Kroo. ‘Sanchez lib for Gezo, lib for you, all for true.’
‘He’d better,’ growls Spring. ‘All right, Tommy Rot, come aboard, catch Tiny Tim, ten fella, lib for ship, sabby?’
We took on a dozen of the Kroos, grinning, lively blacks who were great favourites among the Coast skippers. They were prime seamen, but full of tricks, and went by ridiculous names like Rum Punch, Blunderbuss, Jumping Jack, Pot Belly and Mainsail. Each one had his forehead tattooed blue, and his front teeth filed to points; I thought they were cannibals, but it seems they carried these marks so that they would be recognised as Kroos and therefore wouldn’t be taken as slaves.
With them aboard, the Balliol College stood out from Whydah, and after two days sniffing about out of sight of land we put in again farther east, on to a long low rotting coast-line of mangrove crawling out into the sea among the sunken sandbars. It looked d----d unpleasant to me, but Spring at the wheel brought her through into a lagoon, beyond which lay a great delta of jungle-covered islands, and through these we came to what looked like a river mouth. We inched through the shoals, with everyone hauling and sweating at the sweeps, and the Kroos out ahead in canoes, while three men either side swung the lead incessantly, chanting ‘Three fathom, two and a half, two and Jesus saves, two and a half, two and Jesus saves, three fathom!’
And then, round the first bend, was a clearing, and huge stockades between river and jungle, and huts, and presently a fat Dago in a striped shirt with a hankie round his head and rings in his ears comes out in a small boat, all smiles, to meet a great storm of abuse from Spring.
‘You’re Sanchez, are you? And where the h--l’s my cargo? Your barracoons are empty, you infernal scoundrel! Five hundred blacks I signed for with that thieving blackguard, Pedro Blanco, and look yonder!’ He flung out an arm towards the empty stockades, in which the only sign of life was a few figures idling round a cooking-fire. ‘D---l a black hide in sight apart from your own! Well, sir?’
The Dago was full of squealing apologies, waving his arms and sweating. ‘My dear Captain Spring! Your fears are groundless. Within two days there will be a thousand head in the barracoons. Pedro Blanco has taken order. King Gezo himself has come down country – especially on your behalf, my good sir. He is at Dogba, with his people; there has been much fighting, I understand, but all quiet now. And many, many nigras in his slave train – strong young men, hardy young women – all the best, for you, captain!’ He beamed around greasily.
‘You’re sure?’ says Spring. ‘Two days? I want to be out of here in three – and I want to see King Gezo, d’you hear?’
Sanchez spread his sticky hands. ‘There is no difficulty. He will be coming west from Dogba to Apokoto tomorrow.’
‘Well …’ growls Spring, quieting down. ‘We’ll see. What’s he got for us. Sombas?’
‘Sombas, Fulani, Adja, Aiza, Yoruba, Egbo – whatever the captain requires.’
‘Is that so? Well, I’ll have six hundred, then, ’stead of five. And no sickly niggers, see? They’re not going to be auctioned off with their arses stuffed with tar, mind that! I want sound stock.’
Sanchez took his leave, full of good wishes, and the Balliol College was made fast, as close to the bank as she could be warped. Men were sent aloft to hang her topmasts with leaves and creepers, so that no patrol vessel out at sea might spot us, and Sanchez sent men aboard to unload the cargo. This meant work for me, making sure they pinched nothing, and by the time the last bale was out and under the guard of Sanchez’s native soldiers, I was running with sweat. It was a hellish place; green jungle all around, and steam coming off the brown oily surface of the water as though it were a bath; clouds of midges descended as soon as the sun dropped, and the heat pressed in on you like a blanket, so that all you could do was lie stifling, with your chest heaving and the perspiration pouring off you. Three days, Spring had said; it was a wonder to me that we had survived three hours.
That night Spring called a council in his cabin, of all his officers; I was there, as supercargo, but you can be sure I was well out of the running. I don’t suppose I’ve listened to a more interesting discussion in my life, though, unless it was Grant and Lee meeting in the farmhouse, or Lucan and my old pal Cardigan clawing at each other like female cousins at Balaclava. Certainly, for technical knowledge, Spring’s little circle was an eye-opener.
‘Six hundred,’ says Spring. ‘More than I’d bargained for; it’ll mean fifteen inches for the bucks, and I want two bucks for every female, and no d----d calves.’
‘That’s an inch under the old measure, cap’n,’ says Kinnie. ‘Might do for your Guineas, but it’s tight for Dahomeys. Why, they’re near as big as Mandingos, some of ’em, an’ Mandingos take your sixteen inches, easy.’
‘I’ve seen the Portugoosers carry Mande’s in less than that,’ says Sullivan.
‘An’ had twenty in the hundred die on ’em, likely.’
‘No fear. They put bucks in with wenches – reckon they spend all their time on top of each other, an’ save space that way.’
Spring didn’t join in their laughter. ‘I’ll have no mixing of male and female,’ he growled. ‘That’s the surest way to trouble I know. I’m surprised at you, Mr Sullivan.’
‘Just a joke, sir. But I reckon sixteen inches, if we dance ’em regular.’
‘I’m obliged to you for your opinion. Dance or not, they get fifteen inches, and the women twelve.’
Kinnie shook his head. ‘That won’t do, sir. These Dahomey b-----s takes as much as the men, any day. Sideways packin’s no use either, the way they’re shaped.’
‘Put ’em head to toe, they’ll fit,’ says Sullivan.
‘You’ll lose ten, mebbe more, in the hundred,’ says Kinnie. ‘That’s a ten-thousand-dollar loss, easy, these days.’
‘I’ll have no loss!’ cries Spring. ‘I’ll not, by G-d! We’ll ship nothing that’s not A1, and the b-----s will have fresh fruit with their pulse each day, and be danced night and morning, d’ye hear?’
‘Even so, sir,’ insisted Kinnie. ‘Twelve inches won’t …’
Comber spoke up for the first time. He was pale, and sweating heavily – mind you, we all were – but he looked seedier than the others. ‘Perhaps Mr Kinnie is right, sir. Another inch for the women …’
‘When I want your advice, Mr Comber, I’ll seek it,’ snaps Spring. ‘Given your way, you’d give ’em two feet, or fill the b----y ship with pygmies.’
‘I was thinking of the possible cost, sir …’
‘Mr Comber, you lie.’ Spring’s scar was going pink. ‘I know you, sir – you’re tender of black sheep.’
‘I don’t like unnecessary suffering, and death, sir, it’s true …’
‘Then, by G-d, you shouldn’t have shipped on a slaver!’ roars Spring. ‘D--nation, d’you want to give ’em a berth apiece? You think I’m cruising ’em round the b----y lighthouse for a lark? Forty pieces a pound, Mr Comber – that’s what an ordinary buck will fetch in Havana these days – perhaps more. A thousand dollars a head! Now, take note, Mr Comber, of what your extra inch can mean – a forty-thousand-dollar loss for your owner! Have you thought of that, sir?’
‘I know, sir,’ says Comber, sticking to his guns nervously. ‘But forty dead gives you the same loss, and …’
‘D--nation take you, will you dispute with me?’ Spring’s eyes were blazing. ‘I was shipping black pigs while you were hanging at your mother’s teat – where you ought to be this minute! D’ye think I don’t take as much thought to have ’em hale and happy as you, you impudent pup! And for a better reason – I don’t get paid for flinging corpses overboard. It’s dollars I’m saving, not souls, Mr Comber! Heaven help me, I don’t know why you’re in this business – you ought to be in the b----y Board of Trade!’ He sat glaring at Comber, who was silent, and then turned to the others. ‘Fifteen and twelve, gentlemen, is that clear?’
Kinnie sighed. ‘Very good, cap’n. You know my views, and …’
‘I do, Mr Kinnie, and I respect them. They are grounded in experience and commercial sense, not in humanitarian claptrap picked up from scoundrels like Tappan and Garrison. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, eh, Mr Comber?
You’ll be quoting to me in a moment. Genius of Ill-digested Crap! Don’t contradict me, sir; I know your views – which is why I’m at a loss to understand your following this calling, you d---d hypocrite, you!’
Comber sat silent, and Spring went on: ‘You will take personal responsibility for the welfare of the females, Mr Comber. And they won’t die, sir! We shall see to that. No, they won’t die, because like you – and Mr Flashman yonder – they haven’t read Seneca, so they don’t know that qui mori didicit servire dedidicit.
If they did, we’d be out of business in a week.’
I must say it sounded good sense to me, and Comber sat mumchance. He was obviously thankful when the discussion turned to more immediate matters, like the arrival of King Gezo the next day at Apokoto, which lay some miles upriver; Spring wanted to meet him for a palaver, and said that Kinnie and Comber and I should come along, with a dozen of the hands, while Sullivan began packing the first slaves who would be arriving at the barracoons.
I was all in favour of getting off the Balliol College for a few hours, but when we boarded the Kroos’ big canoe at the bank next day, I wasn’t so sure. Kinnie was distributing arms to the hands, a carbine and cutlass for each man, and Spring himself took me aside and presented me with a very long-barrelled pistol.
‘You know these?’ says he, and I told him I did – it was one of the early Colt revolvers, the type you loaded with powder and ball down the muzzle. Very crude they’d look today, but they were the wonder of the world then.
‘I picked up a dozen of these last winter in Baltimore,’ says he. ‘American army guns – Gezo would give his very throne for ’em, and I intend to use them in driving a very special bargain with him. Are you a good shot? Well, then, you can demonstrate them for him. Get Kinnie to give you a needle gun and cutlass as well.’
‘D’you think … we’ll need them?’ says I.
He turned the pale eyes on me. ‘Would you rather go unarmed – into the presence of the most bloodthirsty savage in West Africa?’ says he. ‘No, Mr Flashman – I don’t expect we shall need to use our weapons; not for a moment. But I fear the Greeks even when I’m bearing gifts to ’em, sir, d’you see?’
Well, that was sense, no doubt of it, so I took my needle carbine and bandolier, buckled on the cutlass and stuck the Colt in my belt, and stood forth like Pirate Bill; as we took our places in the canoe, it looked like something from a pantomime, every man with his hankie knotted round his head, armed to the teeth, some of ’em with rings in their ears, and one even with a patch over his eye. It struck me – what would Arnold say if he could look down now from his place at the right hand of God? Why, there, he would say, is that worthy lad, Tom Brown, with his milk-and-water wife in the West Country, giving bread and blankets to needy villagers who knuckle their heads and call him ‘squire’: good for you, Brown. And there, too, that noble boy Scud East, lording it over the sepoys for the glory of God and the profit of John Company – how eminently satisfactory! And young Brooke, too, a fearless lieutenant aboard his uncle’s frigate Unspeakable – what a credit to his old school! Aye, as the twigs are bent so doth the trees grow. But who is this, consorting with pirates and preparing to ship hapless niggers into slavery, with oaths on his lips? I might have known – it is the degraded Flashman! Unhappy youth! But just what I might have expected!
Aye, he would have rejoiced at the sight – if there’s one thing he and his hypocritical kind loved better than seeing virtue rewarded, it was watching a black sheep going to the bad. The worst of it is, I wasn’t there of my own free will – not that you ever get credit for that.
These philosophical musings were disturbed by the tender scene between Mr and Mrs Spring as he prepared to board the canoe. Unlike the rest of us, he was dressed as usual – dark jacket, round hat, neck-cloth all trim – how the devil he stood it, in that steaming heat, I can’t figure. Well, at the last minute, Mrs Spring leans over the ship’s side crying to him to take his comforter ‘against the chill of the night’. This in a country where the nights are boiling hot, mark you.
‘D--nation!’ mutters Spring, but out he climbed, and took the muffler, crying goodbye, my dear, goodbye, while the men in the canoe grinned and looked the other way. He was in a fine temper as we shoved off, kicking the backside of the cabin boy – who had been ordered to come along – and d--ning the eyes of the man at the tiller.
Just as we pushed out into mid-stream came another diversion – from the jungle on the landward side of the stockade came a distant murmuring and confused sound. As it grew nearer you could hear that it was a great shuffling and moaning, with the occasional shout and crack of a whip, and a dull chanting in cadence behind it.
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