Flashman and the Angel of the Lord

Three times in my life I’ve been shanghaied, and each time there was a woman in the case – Miranda Spring, Phoebe Carpenter, and Fanny Duberly, although I acquit pretty little Fan of any ill intent, and the occasion in which she was concerned saw me trepanned with my eyes open; on the two others it was Flashy outward bound with a bellyful of puggle from which I didn’t awake until we were well out to sea, and there’s no worse place to come to than below deck on a windjammer when the skipper’s in a hurry.

This one was an American with a broken nose and a beard like a scarf beneath his rock of a chin; my heart sank at the sight of him, for he had Down-easter12 written all over him. I’d hoped, when I crawled out of the stuffy hole in which I found myself and puked my heart out on a deck that seemed to be near perpendicular, that I’d find a good corruptible Frog or Dago on the poop, but Spring had chosen his man well, damn him. This one had eyes like flint and whined through his nose.

‘Spew over the side, cain’t ye!’ was his greeting as I staggered up out of the scuppers and held on for my life; he stood braced without support in a gale that was bringing green sea over the rail in icy showers, soaking me in an instant, but at least it washed my tiffin and supper away. ‘Do that in a calm an’ ye’ll swab it up yourself, mister! Now, git back below till ye can stand straight, an’ keep out o’ the way, d’ye hear?’

It’s not easy to conduct negotiations on a spray-lashed deck during a howling tempest, but I was wasting no time.

‘A hundred pounds if you’ll take me to Port Nolloth or Walfish Bay!’ I’d no notion where we were in the South Atlantic, but I doubted if we were far out as yet, and any port would do so long as it wasn’t Baltimore – or the Cape, with Spring infesting the place. ‘Five hundred if you’ll carry me to England!’

‘Got it on ye?’ shouts he. I hadn’t; I’d been stripped clean of cash, papers, even my cheroot-case.

‘You’ll have it the moment we drop anchor! Look, a thousand if you set me down anywhere between Brest and London – it don’t have to be English waters, even!’

That was when he knocked me down, grabbed me by the belt, and heaved me aft; I’m over thirteen stone, but I might have been his gunny-sack. He threw me into his cabin, kicked the door to, and watched me crawl to my feet.

‘That’s the short way of tellin’ you I ain’t for sale,’ says he. ‘Least of all to a lousy Limey slave-stealer.’

Even in my distempered state, that sounded damned odd. ‘You ain’t a Southerner! You’re a Yankee, dammit!’

‘That I am,’ says he. ‘An’ I make my livin’ ’tween Benin an’ Brazil, mostly – that satisfy ye?’ A slaver, in other words, if not this voyage. Trust Spring. So I tried another tack.

‘You’ll hang for this, d’ye know that? You’re a kidnapper, and I’m Sir Harry Flashman, colonel in the British Army, and –’

‘Spring told me that’s what ye’d say, but you’re a liar an’ he ain’t. Your name’s Comber, an’ in the States they’ve got warrants out for you for everythin’ ’cept pissin’ in the street – Spring told me that, too! So any hangin’ there is, you’ll do it.’

‘You’re wrong, you fool! I’m telling the truth, you Yankee idiot – don’t hit me –’

He stood over me, rubbing his knuckles. ‘Now, you listen, mister, ’cos I’m runnin’ out o’ patience. John C. Spring is my friend. An’ when he pays an’ trusts me for a job, I do it. An’ you’re goin’ to Baltimore. An’ we’ll lay off Sparrow’s Point a couple o’ days while the letters he give me goes ashore, to let the traps know you’re comin’. An’ then you go. An’ till then you’ll work your passage, an’ I don’t give two cents’ worth of a Port Mahon sea-horse’s droppings if you’re Comber or Lord Harry Flasher or President Buchanan! Savvy? Now you git up, and walk along easy to the focsle – it’s that way – an’ give your callin’ card to Mr Fitzgibbon, who’s the mate, an’ he’ll show you to your state-room. Now – skat!’

Having felt his fist twice, I skatted, and so began several weeks of vile hard work and viler food, but if you’ve been a slave to the Malagassies, or lain in a bottle-dungeon in India, or been toasted on a gridiron, or fagged for Bully Dawson – well, you know things could be worse. I’d been a deckhand before, but I didn’t let on, so I was never sent aloft; Fitzgibbon, and the skipper, whose name was Lynch, were first-rate seamen, so far as I’m a judge, and the last thing they wanted was some handless farmer hindering work, so I was tailing on and hauling and holystoning and greasing and painting and tarring and doing any of the countless unskilled menial tasks of shipboard – oh, I cleaned the heads, too – and because I knew better than to shirk, I rubbed along well enough, bar sea-sickness which wore off after a week, and inedible tack, and being played out with fatigue, and driven half-crazy by that hellish creaking and groaning din that never ceases on a sailing packet; you get used to that, too, though. The focsle gang were a hard-bitten crowd, Scowegians and Germans, mostly, but I was big and strong enough to be let alone, and I didn’t encourage conversation.

You may think I make light of it – being kidnapped and pressed into sea-slavery, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that when you have no choice, you must just buckle down to misfortune … and wait. It was all sufficiently beastly, to be sure, but d’ye know, I reckon Spring was cheated of that part of his vengeance; as I’ve said, I’d been through hell and back before in my chequered life, far worse than Spring had, and being a packet rat was that much less of an ordeal to me than it must have been to him. He thought he was Godalmighty, you see, lording it over riff-raff by virtue of his ‘eminence’ as he’d called it, by which I guess he meant his master’s ticket and his M.A. and simply being the great John Charity Spring, classical don and Fellow of Oriel, damn your eyes. Now, I am riff-raff, when I have to be, and so long as I can see a glimmer at the end of the passage, well, dum spiro spero,fn1 as we scholars say. Having his high-table arse kicked must have had Spring gnawing the rigging; I took care not to be kicked. His haughty spirit rebelled; I ain’t got one.

Another thing that cheered me up was my belief that Spring, being mad as a weaver to start with, had let his harboured spite get the better of his few remaining wits; if he thought he was dooming me to death or the chain-gang by packing me off to the States, he was well out of reckoning. What he had said about my American embarrassments was true enough, but that had been a long time ago; it’s a painful story, but in case you haven’t read it in my earlier memoirs, I’ll give you the heads of it here.

Ten years back, when Spring’s slaver, the Balliol College, with Flashy aboard as reluctant supercargo, had been captured off Cuba by an American patrol, I’d deemed it prudent to assume the identity of Beauchamp Millward Comber (don’t laugh, it was his name), our late third mate, who’d told me on his deathbed that he was an Admiralty agent who was only sailing with Spring to spy on his slaving activities. If you think I’m stretching, the U.S. Navy didn’t; Comber’s papers saw me through, but it was touch and go, so I’d slipped my cable and looked for a way home. I thought I’d found one when the Underground Railroad, a clandestine troupe of lunatics who ran escaped slaves to Canada, got their hands on me – they had ears everywhere, even in the U.S. Navy Department – and offered to help me North if I’d take an important runaway nigger with me to freedom.

That enterprise had ended with me going over one rail of a Mississippi steamboat while the darkie, with a slave-catcher’s bullet in him, had gone over t’other. Subsequently I’d been overseer on a plantation, lost my situation for rogering the lady of the house, escaped North with a female octoroon slave who’d killed two men en route, been shot in the backside by pursuers while crossing the Ohio River, found refuge with Congressman Abraham Lincoln who’d dragooned me into testifying at the adjudication on Spring’s slave-ship in New Orleans, been unwillingly reunited with my dear old commander who had then murdered one Omohundro in a pub, fled with him to seek shelter with a whore of my acquaintance who’d obligingly had old J.C. shanghaied … and had at last won back to England, home, and beauty via the Great Plains, an Apache village, and San Francisco, slightly out of breath. Honestly, I’d have been better going into the Church, or banking, or politics, even.

In any event, that’s how the sparks flew upward on my first visit to America – and you can see Spring’s point. In my brief sojourn I’d been an impostor and perjurer (as Comber), stolen slaves (under the names of Prescott, Arnold, and, I rather think, Fitzroy Howard or something like that), and was wanted for murders I hadn’t committed in Mississippi, or it may have been Tennessee for all I know, as well as for aiding and abetting (which I hadn’t done, either) Spring’s stabbing of Omohundro. An impressive tally, I concede, and none the better for being all entirely against my will.

However, I doubted if the U.S. Navy was much concerned with the fugitive Comber at this late date, and I’d no intention of going near the Mississippi. I wasn’t wanted in Maryland, where Baltimore is; let me present myself to a British consul there, or in Washington, which was only forty miles away, and I was on easy street. The great thing, you see, was that I wasn’t Comber (or Prescott or those other chaps), but I was Sir Harry Flashman, not unknown by name and fame, and once I was under our embassy’s13 wing, warrants from far-flung states for the arrest of non-existent Combers, etc. would matter not at all. Not in Washington or the North, at least; if I were fool enough to venture South, where there might be witnesses to identify me, that would be a different and damned unpleasant kettle of fish; as Spring had pointed out, my rank and heroic stature at home wouldn’t weigh much with a Louisiana jury.

So you can see why I wasn’t over-troubled about what lay ahead; indeed, my preoccupation was how to pay Spring out when I was safe home in England. The evil-eyed bastard had terrified, drugged, and kidnapped me, subjected me to the gruelling misery of packet-ratting, and done his damnedest to deliver me to an American gallows; well, he was going to rue the day. Straight prosecution was out of the question: it would take too long, likely uncover past history which I’d rather keep dark, and almost certainly fail in the end – the whole business was too wild, and the thought of returning to testify at the Cape, with Spring frothing at me across the court … no, I’d prefer not. Especially since the most artistic revenge had already occurred to me: a detailed account, to the address of J. C. Spring, M.A., of the contortions which his saintly Miranda and I had performed aboard dear Papa’s yacht – that would bring a blush to his cheek. It would destroy him, wound him to the depths of his rotten soul, probably drive him crazy altogether. He might even murder her, and swing for it – well, the bitch deserved it. No … she’d swear blind that I was lying out of spite, and he’d believe her, or pretend to … but in his heart he’d always know it was the truth. Aye, that would teach him that Flashy’s a critter best left alone because, as Thomas Hughes pointed out, he can find ways of striking home that you ain’t even thought of.

Now I’ll not weary you with any further relation of Life at Sea when Uncle Harry was a Lad, but hasten on to Chesapeake Bay, which I reckon we reached in about eight weeks, but it may have been more.14 I made two further attempts to suborn Captain Lynch, promising him Golconda if he would put me down at New York or Boston, but I might as well have talked to the mast; I believe my speech and bearing, and my conduct aboard, had sown some doubt in his mind, for he didn’t hit me on either occasion, but perhaps because he was a man of his word, as some of these half-wit shellbacks are, or more likely because Spring had a hold on him, he wasn’t to be budged. ‘You’re goin’ to Baltimore even if the Chesapeake’s afire, so ye can save your wind!’ says he, and that was that.

We lay two days in the bay, and I didn’t doubt that Spring’s letters had gone ashore with the pilot. Now that the grip had come, all my assurance had melted like snow off a dyke, and I was in a fine funk again, dreaming hideous nightmares in which I was swimming slowly towards a misty jetty on which stood Yankee peelers brandishing warrants made out for ‘the handsomest man in the Army’ and jangling their handcuffs, and all my American ill-willers were there, singing jubilee – Omohundro, and the squirt Mandeville who’d caught me galloping his wife, and Buck the slave-catcher and his gang, and the poker-faced Navy man whose name I’d forgotten, and blasted George Randolph, the runaway nigger I’d abandoned, and vague figures I couldn’t make out, but I knew they were the Cumanches of Bent’s Fort and Iron Eyes who’d chased me clear across the Jornada, and then somehow I was in the adjudication court at Orleans, but instead of the wizened little adjudicator it was Spring on the bench, in gown and mortar board waving a birch and shouting: ‘Aye, there he is, the great toad who ravishes daughters and can’t construe Horace to save his soul, Flashmanum monstrum informe ingens et horrendum,fn2 mark him well, ladies and harlots, for Juvenal never spoke a truer word, omne in præcipitio vitium stetit,fn3 by thunder!’ and when I looked at the jury, they were all the American women I’d betrayed or discarded – fat Susie weeping, Sonsee-Array sulking, the French nigger Cleonie whom I’d sold to the priest at Santa Fe, willowy Cassy looking down her fine nose, coal-black Aphrodite and the slave-women at Greystones, but their faces were all turned to the bench, and now it wasn’t Spring who sat there, but Arnold in a pilot cap glowering at me, and then Miranda was tripping up beside him, swirling her hair about her like a cloak, giggling as she stooped to whisper in his ear, but it wasn’t his ear, it was Congressman Lincoln’s, and I saw his ugly face scowl as he listened, nodding, and heard his drawl as he said that reminded him of a story he’d heard once from an English naval officer who didn’t know what club-hauling meant …

I came back to waking very slowly, with sense stealing over me like a sunrise, almost imperceptibly, growing gradually conscious of a throbbing ache in my temples and a dryness in my mouth and throat that was truly painful. There was someone beside me, for I could feel the warmth of a body, and I thought ‘Elspeth’ until I remembered that I was in a ship at sea, bound for Baltimore and that awful nightmare which thank God was only a dream after all, conjured up out of my fears. But there was no motion about the place on which I lay, no gentle rocking as there should have been as we lay at anchor in the Chesapeake; I opened eyelids that seemed to have been glued together, expecting to see the knot-hole in the floor of the bunk above me, as I’d seen it with every awakening for the past many weeks. It wasn’t there, and no bunk either; instead there was a dingy white ceiling, and when I turned my head there was a bare wall with a grimy window.

I was ashore, then … but how, and for how long? I tried to conjure up my last memory of shipboard, but couldn’t with the ache in my head, and to this day I don’t know how I left the ship, drunk, drugged, or sandbagged. At the time, it didn’t signify anyway, and even as I reached that conclusion a woman’s voice said:

‘Hollo, dearie! Awake, are ye? Say, didn’t you have a skinful, though!’

An American cackle, piercing my ear, and I shuddered away by instinct, which was sound judgment, for if I felt dreadful, she looked worse, a raddled slattern grinning her stinking breath into my face, reaching out a fat hand across my chest. I almost catted on the spot, one thought uppermost.

‘Did I …? Have we …?’ It came out in a faint croak, and she leered and heaved herself half across me. The paint on her face looked about a week old, and her awful bulk was clothed only in a grubby shift.

‘Ye mean … did you and me …?’ She loosed another braying laugh, displaying bad teeth. ‘No, dearie, we didn’t … yet. You’ve bin snorin’ your big head off all night. But you’re awake now … so how ’bout my present …?’

‘Get away from me, you pox-ridden slut!’ Another hoarse whisper, but I had strength enough to thrust her away, and tumbled over her to the floor. I scrambled up, dizzy, and almost fell again, staring about me at a big, unbelievably foul whitewashed room, in which there were about a dozen beds containing various beings, male and female, in squalid undress. The stench of stale tobacco and unwashed humanity took me by the throat, and I blundered for the door, falling over a frantically courting couple on the floor, and followed by shrill obscenities from my bedmate. I found myself on a bare landing, confronting a goggling darkie with a bucket in his hand.

‘Where the hell am I?’ I inquired, and had to repeat myself and take him by the collar before he stammered, rolling his eyes:

‘Why, boss, you’ in de Knittin’ Swede’s!’

Only later did I know what he’d said; at the time it sounded like gibberish.

‘What town is this?’

‘Why … why, dis Baltimo’, boss! Yassuh, dis Baltimo’, honnist!’

I let him go and stumbled down two flights of stairs, with no notion but to get out of this beastly place without delay. There were other doors, some of them open on to sties like the one I’d left, and various creatures on the landings, but I didn’t pause until I bore up unsteadily by a big wooden counter on the ground floor, and I think there was a taproom, too, but what mattered was that there was a street door ahead of me, and open air.

There were a number of seamen lounging at the counter, and behind it, sitting on a high stool, was a figure so unlikely that I thought, I’m still drunk or dreaming. He was big and ugly, with a nose that had been spread half across his face, probably by a club, there wasn’t a hair on his phiz or gleaming skull, the huge arms protruding from his vest were covered with tattoos, but what took the eye was that he was clicking away with knitting needles at a piece of woollen work – not a common sight in a waterfront dosshouse. He purled, or cast off, or whatever it is that knitters do when they want to take a breather, and nodded to a fellow in a striped shirt who was laying some coins on the counter. Then he looked at me, and I realised that the loungers were doing the same, in a most disconcerting way.

I had got some sense back now, and saw that this was plainly the receipt of custom, where guests settled their accounts and ordered up their carriages. Equally plainly, I’d spent the night on the premises, but when I put a hand to my pocket, the bald head shook emphatically.

‘You paid for, Yonny,’ says the Knitting Swede. ‘You wan’ some grub yust now?’

I declined, with thanks, and he nodded again. ‘You got a ship, maybe?’