Copyright

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by Harvill 1994

Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1994

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007217205

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007325696

Version: 2015-07-14

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?

‘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 Western Eyes, 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 a Bengal 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

For Kath, ten times over

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

Dedication

Explanatory Note

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Footnotes

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

Of all the roles played by Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., in the course of his distinguished and deplorable career, that of crusader must seem the least likely. The nine volumes of his Papers which have been presented to the public since their discovery in a Midlands saleroom in 1966 make a scandalous catalogue in which there is little trace of decent feeling, let alone altruism. From the day of his expulsion from Rugby School in the late 1830s (memorably described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), Flashman the man fulfilled the disgraceful promise of Flashman the boy; the toadying bounder and bully matured into the cowardly profligate and scoundrel who, by chance and shameless opportunism, became one of the most renowned heroes of the Victorian age, unwilling leader of the Light Brigade, fleeing survivor of Afghanistan and Little Big Horn, tarnished paladin of Crimea and the Mutiny, and cringing chronicler of many another conflict, disaster, and intrigue in which he bore an inglorious but seldom unprofitable part.

So it is with initial disbelief that one finds him, in this tenth volume of his memoirs, not only involved but taking a lead in an enterprise which, if hopeless and misguided, still shines with the lustre of heroic self-sacrifice and occupies an honoured niche in the pantheon of freedom. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was a dreadful folly which ended in bloody and inevitable failure and helped to bring on the most catastrophic of all civil wars, yet its aim was a great and worthy one; the road to hell was never paved with nobler intentions. Needless to say, they were not Flashman’s. He came to Harper’s Ferry with the utmost reluctance, through the malice of old enemies and the delusions of old friends, and behaved with characteristic perfidy in every way but one: his eye for events and people was as clear and scrupulous as ever, and it may be that his narrative casts a new and unexpected light on a critical moment in American history, and on notable figures of the ante-bellum years – among them the President Who Never Was, a legendary detective and secret agent, and the strange, terrible, simple visionary, known to the world only by a name and a song, who set out to destroy slavery with twenty men and forty rounds apiece.

It is an amazing story, even for Flashman, but my confidence in that honesty which he brought to his writing (if to nothing else) seems to be justified by the exactness with which his account fits the known facts. As with previous packets of the Papers, I have observed the wishes of their custodian, Mr Paget Morrison, and confined myself to amending the author’s spelling and providing footnotes and appendices.

G.M.F.

As I sat by the lake at Gandamack t’other day, sipping my late afternoon brandy in the sun, damning the great-grandchildren for pestering the ducks, and reflecting on the wigging I’d get from Elspeth when I took them in to tea covered in dirt and toffee, there was a brass band playing on a gramophone up at the house, a distant drowsy thumping that drifted down the lawn and under the trees. I guess I must have hummed along or waved my flask to the old familiar march, for presently the villain Augustus (a frightful handle to fix on a decent enough urchin, but no work of mine) detached himself from the waterweed and came to stand snottering before me with his head on one side, thoughtful-like.

‘I say, Great-gran’papa,’ says he, ‘that’s Gory Halooyah.’

‘So it is, young gallows,’ says I, ‘and Gory Halooyah is what you’ll catch when Great-grandmama sees the state of you. Where the devil’s your other shoe?’

‘Sunk,’ says he, and gave tongue: ‘“Jombrown’s body lies a-moulderin’ inna grave, Jombrown’s body lies –”’

‘Oh! Gweat-gwampapa said a wicked word!’ squeals virtuous Jemima, a true Flashman, as beautiful as she is obnoxious. ‘I heard him! He said “d—l”!’ She pronounced it ‘d’l’. ‘Gweat-gwanmama says people who say such fings go to the bad fire!’ Bad fire, indeed – my genteel Elspeth has never forgotten the more nauseating euphemisms of her native Paisley.

‘He shan’t, so there!’ cries my loyal little Alice, another twig off the old tree, being both flirt and toady. She jumped on the bench and clung to my arm. ‘’Cos I shan’t let him go to bad fires, shall I, Great-grampapa?’ Yearning at me with those great forget-me-not eyes, four years old and innocent as Cleopatra.

‘’Fraid you won’t have a vote on the matter, m’dear.’

‘“Devil” ain’t a bad word, anyway,’ says John, rising seven and leader of the pack. ‘The Dean said it in his sermon last Sunday – devil! He said it twice – devil!’ he repeated, with satisfaction. ‘So bad scran to you, Jemima!’ Hear, hear. Stout lad, John.

‘That was in church!’ retorts Jemima, who has the makings of a fine sea-lawyer, bar her habit of sticking out her tongue. ‘It’s all wight in church, but if you say it outside it’s vewwy dweadful, an’ God will punish you!’ Little Baptist.

‘What’s moulderin’ mean, Great-gran’papa?’ asks Augustus.

‘All rotten an’ stinkin’,’ says John. ‘It’s what happens when you get buried. You go all squelchy, an’ the worms eat you –’

‘Eeesh!’ Words cannot describe the ecstasy of Alice’s exclamation. ‘Was Jombrown like that, Great-grampapa, all rottish –’

‘Not as I recall, no. His toes stuck out of the ends of his boots sometimes, though.’

This produced hysterics of mirth, as I’d known it would, except in John, who’s a serious infant, given to searching cross-examination.

‘I say! Did you know him, Great-grandpapa – John Brown in the song?’

‘Why, yes, John, I knew him … long time ago, though. Who told you about him?’

‘Miss Prentice, in Sunday School,’ says he, idly striking his cousin, who was trying to detach Alice from me by biting her leg. ‘She says he was the Angel of the Lord who got hung for freeing all the niggers in America.’

‘You oughtn’t to say “niggers”.’ Jemima again, absolutely, removing her teeth from Alice and climbing across to possess my other arm. ‘It’s not nice. You should say “negwoes”, shouldn’t you, Gweat-gwampapa? I always say “negwoes”,’ she added, oozing piety.

‘What should you call them, Great-grandpapa?’ asks John.

‘Call ’em what you like, my son. It’s nothing to what they’ll call you.’

‘I always say “negwoes” –’

‘Great-gran’papa says “niggers”,’ observes confounded Augustus. ‘Lots an’ lots of times.’ He pointed a filthy accusing finger. ‘You said that dam’ nigger, Jonkins, the boxer-man –’

‘Johnson, child, Jack Johnson.’

‘– you said he wanted takin’ down a peg or two.’

‘Did I, though? Yes, Jemima dearest, I know Gus has said another wicked word, but ladies shouldn’t notice, you know –’

‘What’s a peggatoo?’ asks Alice, twining my whiskers.

‘A measure of diminution of self-esteem, precious … yes, Jemima, I’ve no doubt you’re going to peach to Great-grandmama about Gus saying “damn”, but if you do you’ll be saying it yourself, mind … What, Gus? Yes, very well, if I said that about the boxer-man, you may be sure I meant it. But you know, old fellow, when you call people names, it depends who you’re talking about …’ It does, too. Flash coons like Johnson¹ and the riff-raff of the levees and most of our Aryan brethren are one thing – but if you’ve seen Ketshwayo’s Nokenke regiment stamping up the dust and the assegais drumming on the ox-hide shields, ‘’Suthu, ’suthu! ’s-jee, ’s-jee!’ as they sweep up the slope to Little Hand … well, that’s black of a different colour, and you find another word for those fellows. And God forbid I should offend Miss Prentice, so …

‘I think it best you should say “negroes”, children. That’s the polite word, you see –’

‘What about nigger minstrels?’ asks Alice, excavating my collar.

‘That’s all right ’cos they’re white underneath,’ says John impatiently. ‘Shut your potato-trap, Alice – I want to hear about John Brown, and how he freed all the … the negro slaves in America, didn’t he, Great-grandpapa?’

‘Well, now, John … no, not exactly …’ And then I stopped, and took a pull at my flask, and thought about it. After all, who am I to say he didn’t? It was coming anyway, but if it hadn’t been for old J.B. and his crack-brained dreams, who can tell how things might have panned out? Little nails hold the hinge of history, as Bismarck remarked (he would!) the night we set out for Tarlenheim … and didn’t Lincoln himself say that Mrs Stowe was the little lady who started the great war, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Well, Ossawatomie Brown, mad and murderous old horse-thief that he was, played just as big a part in setting the darkies free as she did – aye, or Lincoln or Garrison or any of them, I reckon. I did my bit myself – not willingly, you may be sure, and cursing Seward and Pinkerton every step of the way that ghastly night … and as I pondered it, staring across the lake to the big oak casting its first evening shadow, the shrill voices of the grandlings seemed to fade away, and in their place came the harsh yells and crash of gunshots in the dark, and instead of the scent of roses there was the reek of black powder smoke filling the engine-house, the militia’s shots shattering timber and whining about our ears … young Oliver bleeding his life out on the straw … the gaunt scarecrow with his grizzled beard and burning eyes, thumbing back the hammer of his carbine … ‘Stand firm, men! Sell your lives dearly! Don’t give in now!’ … and Jeb Stuart’s eyes on mine, willing me (I’ll swear) to pull the trigger …

‘Wake up, Great-grandpapa – do!’ ‘Tell us about Jombrown!’ ‘Yes, wiv his toes stickin’ out, all stinky!’ ‘Tell us, tell us …!’

I came back from the dark storm of Harper’s Ferry to the peaceful sunshine of Leicestershire, and the four small faces regarding me with that affectionate impatience that is the crowning reward of great-grandfatherhood: John, handsome and grave and listening; Jemima a year younger, prim ivory perfection with her long raven hair and lashes designed for sweeping hearts (Selina’s inevitable daughter); little golden Alice, Elspeth all over again; and the babe Augustus bursting with sin beneath the mud, a Border Ruffian in a sodden sailor suit … and the only pang is that at ninety-one² you can’t hope to see ’em grown …

‘John Brown, eh? Well, it’s a long story, you know – and Great-grandmama will be calling us for tea presently … no, Alice, he didn’t have wings, although Miss Prentice is quite right, they did call him the Angel of the Lord … and the Avenging Angel, too …’

‘What’s ’venging?’

‘Getting your own back … no, John, he was quite an ordinary chap, really, rather thin and bony and shabby, with a straggly beard and very bright grey eyes that lit up when he was angry, ever so fierce and grim! But he was quite a kindly old gentleman, too –’

‘Was he as old as you?’

‘Heavens, child, no one’s that old! He was oldish, but pretty spry and full of beans … let’s see, what else? He was a capital cook, why, he could make ham and eggs, and brown fried potatoes to make your mouth water –’

‘Did he make kedgewee? I hate howwid old kedgewee, ugh!’

‘What about the slaves, and him killing lots of people, and getting hung?’ John shook my knee in his impatience.

‘Well, John, I suppose he did kill quite a few people … How, Gus? Why, with his pistols – he had two, just like the cowboys, and he could pull them in a twinkling, ever so quickly.’ And dam’ near blew your Great-grandpapa’s head off, one second asleep and the next blasting lead all over the shop, curse him. ‘And with his sword … although that was before I knew him. Mind you, he had another sword, in our last fight – and you’ll never guess who it had once belonged to. Frederick the Great! What d’you think of that?’

‘Who’s Frederick the Great?’

‘German king, John. Bit of a tick, I believe; used scent and played the flute.’

‘I think Jombrown was howwid!’ announced Jemima. ‘Killing people is wrong!’

‘Not always, dearest. Sometimes you have to, or they’ll kill you.’

‘Great-gran’papa used to kill people, lots of times,’ protests sturdy Augustus. ‘Great-gran’mama told me, when he was a soldier, weren’t you? Choppin’ ’em up, heaps of –’

‘That’s quite diffewent,’ says Jemima, with an approving smile which may well lead me to revise my will in her favour. ‘It’s pwoper for soldiers to kill people.’ And pat on her words came an echo from half a century ago, the deep level voice of J.B. himself, recalling the slaughter of Pottawatomie … ‘They had a right to be killed.’ It was a warm afternoon, but I found myself shivering.

‘Great-grandpapa’s tired,’ whispers John. ‘Let’s go in for tea.’

‘What – tired? Not a bit of it!’ You can’t have grandlings taking pity on you, even at ninety-one. ‘But tea, what? Capital idea! Who’s for a bellyful of gingerbread, eh? Tell you what, pups – you make yourselves decent, straighten your hair, find Gus’s other shoe, put your socks on, Alice – yes, Jemima, you look positively queenly – and we’ll march up to tea, shall we? At least, you lot will, while I call the step and look after remounts. Won’t that be jolly? And we’ll sing his song as we go –’

‘Jombrown’s body? Gory Halooyah?’

‘The very same, Gus! Now, then, fall in, tallest on the right, shortest on the left – heels together, John, eyes front, Jemima, pull in your guts, Augustus, stop giggling, Alice – and I’ll teach you some capital verses you never heard before! Ready?’

I don’t suppose there’s a soul speaks English in the world who couldn’t sing the chorus today, but of course it hadn’t been written when we went down to Harper’s Ferry – J.B.’s army of ragamuffins, adventurers, escaped slaves, rustlers and lunatics. ‘God’s crusaders’, some enthusiast called us – but then again, I’ve read that we were ‘swaggering, swearing bullies and infidels’ (well, thank’ee, sir). We were twenty-one strong, fifteen white (one with pure terror, I can tell you), six black, and all set to conquer Dixie, if you please! We didn’t make it at the time, quite – but we did in the end, by God, didn’t we just, with Sherman’s bugles blowing thirty miles in latitude three hundred to the main …

Not that I gave a two-cent dam for that, you understand, and still don’t. They could have kept their idiotic Civil War for me, for (my own skin’s safety apart) it was the foulest, most useless conflict in history, the mass suicide of the flower of the British-American race – and for what? Black freedom, which would have come in a few years anyway, as sure as sunrise. And all those boys could have been sitting in the twilight, watching their Johns and Jemimas.

Still, I’ve got a soft spot for the old song – and for J.B., for that matter. Aye, that song which, the historian says, was sung by every Union regiment because ‘it dealt not with John Brown’s feeble sword, but with his soul.’ His soul, my eye – as often as not the poor old maniac wasn’t even mentioned, and it would be:

Wild Bill Sherman’s got a rope around his neck,

An’ we’ll all catch hold an’ give-it-one-hell-of-a-pull!

Glory, glory, hallelujah, etc …

Or it might be ‘our sergeant-major’, or Jeff Davis hanging from a sour apple tree, or any of the unprintable choruses that inspired the pious Mrs Howe to write ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory’.³ But all that’s another story, for another day … in the meantime, I taught my small descendants some versions which were entirely to their liking, and we trooped up to the house, the infants in column of twos and the venerable patriarch hobbling painfully behind, flask at the high port, and all waking the echoes with:

John Brown’s donkey’s got an india-rubber tail,

An’ he rubbed it with camphorated oil!

followed by:

Our Great-grandpa saved the Viceroy

In the – good – old – Khyber – Pass!

and concluding with:

Flashy had an army of a hundred Bashi-bazouks

An’ the whole dam’ lot got shot!

Glory, glory, hallelujah …

Spirited stuff, and it was just sheer bad luck that the Bishop and other visiting Pecksniffs should already be taking tea with Elspeth and Miss Prentice when we rolled in through the french windows, the damp and dirty grandlings in full voice and myself measuring my ancient length across the threshold, flask and all. Very well, the grandlings were raucous and dishevelled, and I ain’t at my best sprawled supine on the carpet leaking brandy, but to judge from his lordship’s, disgusted aspect and Miss Prentice’s frozen pince-nez you’d have thought I’d been teaching them to smoke opium and sing ‘One-eyed Riley’.

The upshot was that the infants were packed off in disgrace to a defaulters’ tea of dry bread and milk, Gus was sent to bed early – oh, aye, Jemima ratted on him – and when the guests had departed in an odour of sanctity, withdrawing the hems of their garments from me and making commiserating murmurs to Elspeth, she loosed her wrath on me for an Evil Influence, corrupting young innocence with my barrack-room ribaldry, letting them get their feet wet, and did I know what shoes cost nowadays, and she was Black Affronted, and how was she ever going to look the Bishop in the face again, would I tell her?

Contrition not being my style, and useless anyway, I let the storm blow itself out, and later, having ensured that La Prentice was snug in her lair – polishing her knout and supping gin on the sly, I daresay – I raided the pantry and smuggled gingerbread and lemonade to the grandlings’ bedroom, where at their insistence I regaled them with the story of John Brown (suitably edited for tender ears). They fell asleep in the middle of it, and so did I, among the broken meats on John’s coverlet, and woke at last to the touch of soft lips on my aged brow to find Elspeth shaking her head in fond despair.

Well, the old girl knows I’m past reforming now, and that Jemima’s right: I’ll certainly go to the bad fire. I know one who won’t though, and that’s old Ossawatomie John Brown, ‘that new saint, than whom nothing purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death’, and who made ‘the gallows glorious like the Cross’. That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson on J.B. ‘A saint, noble, brave, trusting in God’, ‘honest, truthful, conscientious’, comparable with William Wallace, Washington, and William Tell – those are the words of Parker and Garrison, who knew him, and they ain’t the half of his worshippers; talk about a mixture of Jesus, Apollo, Goliath and Julius Caesar! On the other hand … ‘a faker, shifty, crafty, vain, selfish, intolerant, brutal’, ‘an unscrupulous soldier of fortune, a horse-thief, a hypocrite’ who didn’t care about freeing slaves and would have been happy to use slave labour himself, a liar, a criminal, and a murderer – that’s his most recent biographer talking. Interesting chap, Brown, wouldn’t you say?

A good deal of it’s true, both sides, and you may take my word for it; scoundrel I may be, but I’ve no axe to grind about J.B.’s reputation. I helped to make it, though, by not shooting him in the back when I had the chance. Didn’t want to, and wouldn’t have had the nerve, anyway.

You might even say that I, all unwitting, launched him on the path to immortal glory. Aye, if there’s a company of saints up yonder, they’ll be dressing by the right on J.B., for when the Recording Angel has racked up all his crimes and lies and thefts and follies and deceits and cold-blooded killings, he’ll still be saved when better men are damned. Why? ’Cos if he wasn’t, there’d be such an almighty roar of indignation from the Heavenly Host it would bust the firmament; God would never live it down. That’s the beauty of a martyr’s crown, you see; it outshines everything, and they don’t come any brighter than old J.B.’s. I’m not saying he deserves it; I only know, perhaps better than anyone, how he came by it.

You will wonder, if you’re familiar with my inglorious record, how I came to take part with John Brown at all. Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady – bearing Freedom’s banner aloft in the noblest cause of all, the liberation of the enslaved and downtrodden? Striking off the shackles at the risk of death and dishonour? Gad, I wish Arnold could have seen me. That’s the irony of it – if I’d bitten the dust at the Ferry, I’d have had a martyr’s crown, too, on top of all the honours and glory I’d already won in Her Majesty’s service (by turning tail and lying and posturing and pinching other chaps’ credit, but nobody knew that, not even wily old Colin Campbell who’d pinned the V.C. on my coat only a few months before). Oh, the Ferry fiasco could have been my finest hour, with the Queen in mourning, Yankee politicos declaiming three-hour tributes full of ten-dollar words and Latin misquotations (not Lincoln, though; he knew me too well), a memorial service in the Rugby chapel, the Haymarket brothels closed in respect, old comrades looking stern and noble … ‘Can’t believe he’s gone … dear old Flash … height of his fame … glorious career before him … goes off to free the niggers … not for gold or guerdon … aye, so like him … quixotic, chivalrous, helpin’ lame dogs … ah, one in ten thousand … I say, seen his widow, have you? Gad, look at ’em bounce! Rich as Croesus, too, they tell me …’

There’d have been no talk of roasted fags or expulsion for sottish behaviour, either. Die in a good cause and they’ll forgive you anything.

But I didn’t, thank God, and as any of you who have read my other memoirs will have guessed, I’d not have been within three thousand miles of Harper’s Ferry, or blasted Brown, but for the ghastliest series of mischances: three hellish coincidences – three, mark you! – that even Dickens wouldn’t have used for fear of being hooted at in the street. But they happened, with that damned Nemesis logic that has haunted me all my life, and landed me in more horrors than I can count. Mustn’t complain, though; I’m still here, cash in hand, the grandlings upstairs asleep, and Elspeth in her boudoir reading the Countess of Cardigan’s Recollections (in which, little does my dear one suspect, I appear under the name of ‘Baldwin’, and a wild night that was, but no mention, thank heaven, of the time I was locked in the frenzied embrace of Fanny Paget, Cardigan himself knocked on the door, I dived trouserless beneath the sofa, found a private detective already in situ, and had to lie beside the brute while Cardigan and Fanny galloped the night away two feet above our heads. Dammit, we were still there when her husband came home and blacked her eye. Serve her right; Cardigan, I ask you! Some women have no taste).

However, that’s a far cry from the Shenandoah, but before I tell you about J.B. I must make one thing clear, for my own credit and good name’s sake, and it’s this: I care not one tuppenny hoot about slavery, and never did. I can’t say it’s none of my biznai, because it was once: in my time, I’ve raided blacks from the Dahomey Coast, shipped ’em across the Middle Passage, driven them on a plantation – and run them to freedom on the Underground Railroad and across the Ohio ice-floes with a bullet in my rump, to say nothing of abetting J.B.’s lunatic scheme of establishing a black republic – in Virginia, of all places. Set up an Orange Lodge in the Vatican, why don’t you?

The point is that I was forced into all these things against my will – by gad, you could say I was ‘enslaved’ into them. For that matter, I’ve been a slave in earnest – at least, they put me up for sale in Madagascar, and ’twasn’t my fault nobody bid; Queen Ranavalona got me without paying a penny, and piling into that lust-maddened monster was slavery, if you like, with the prospect of being flayed alive if I failed to give satisfaction.fn1 I’ve been a fag at Rugby, too.

So when I say I don’t mind about slavery, I mean I’m easy about the institution, so long as it don’t affect me; whenever it did, I was agin it. Selfish, callous, and immoral, says you, and I agree; unprincipled, too – unlike the Holy Joe abolitionist who used to beat his breast about his black brother while drawing his dividend from the mill that was killing his white sister – aye, and in such squalor as no Dixie planter would have tolerated for his slaves. (Don’t mistake me; I hold no rank in the Salvation Army, and I’ve never lifted a finger for our working poor except to flip ’em a tip, and employ them as necessary. I just know there’s more than one kind of slavery.)

Anyway, if life has taught me anything, it’s that the wealth and comfort of the fortunate few (who include our contented middle classes as well as the nobility) will always depend on the sweat and poverty of the unfortunate many, whether they’re toiling on plantations or licking labels in sweatshops at a penny a thousand. It’s the way of the world, and until Utopia comes, which it shows no sign of doing, thank God, I’ll just rub along with the few, minding my own business.

So you understand, I hope, that they could have kept every nigger in Dixie in bondage for all I cared – or freed them. I was indifferent, spiritually, and only wish I could have been so, corporally. And before you start thundering at me from your pulpit, just remember the chap who said that if the union of the United States could only be preserved by maintaining slavery, that was all right with him. What’s his name again? Ah, yes – Abraham Lincoln.

And now for old John Brown and the Path to Glory, not the worst of my many adventures, but just about the unlikeliest. It had no right to happen, truly, or so it strikes me when I look back. God knows I haven’t led a tranquil life, but in review there seems to have been some form and order to it – Afghanistan, Borneo, Madagascar, Punjab, Germany, Slave Coast and Mississippi, Russia and the back o’ beyond, India in the Mutiny, China, American war, Mexico … and there, you see, I’ve missed out J.B. altogether, because he don’t fit the pattern, somehow. He’s there, though, whiskers, six-guns, texts, and all, between India and China – and nought to do with either, right out o’ the mainstream, as though some malevolent djinn had plucked me from my course, dipped me into Harper’s Ferry, and then whisked me back to the Army again.

It began (it usually does) with a wanton nymph in Calcutta at the back-end of ’58. But for her, it would never have happened. Plunkett, her name was, the sporty young wife of an elderly pantaloon who was a High Court judge or something of that order. I was homeward bound from the Mutiny, into which I’d been thrust by the evil offices of my Lord Palmerston, who’d despatched me to India on secret work two years before;fn2 thanks to dear old Pam, I’d been through the thick of that hellish rebellion, from the Meerut massacre to the battle of Gwalior, fleeing for my life from Thugs and pandies, spending months as a sowar of native cavalry, blazing away at the Cawnpore barricade, sneaking disguised out of Lucknow with a demented Irishman in tow, and coming within an ace of being eaten by crocodiles, torn asunder on the rack, and blown from a gun as a condemned mutineer – oh, aye, the diplomatic’s the life for a lad of metal, I can tell you. True, there had been compensations in the delectable shape of Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, and a Victoria Cross and knighthood at the end of the day, and the only fly in the ointment as I rolled down to Calcutta had been the discovery that during my absence from England some scribbling swine had published his reminiscences of Rugby School, with me as the villain of the piece. A vile volume entitled Tom Brown’s Schooldays, on every page of which the disgusting Flashy was to be found torturing fags, shirking, toadying, lying, whining for mercy, and boozing himself to disgraceful expulsion – every word of it true, and all the worse for that.

It was with relief that I learned, by eavesdropping in Calcutta’s messes and hotels, that no one seemed to have heard of the damned book, or weren’t letting on if they had. It’s been the same ever since, I’m happy to say; not a word of reproach or a covert snigger, even, although the thing must have been read in every corner of the civilised world by now. Why, when President Grant discovered that I was the Flashman of Tom Brown he just looked baffled and had another drink.

The fact is, some truths don’t matter. I’ve been seventy years an admired hero, the Hector of Afghanistan, the chap who led the Light Brigade, daredevil survivor of countless stricken fields, honoured by Queen and Country, V.C. and Medal of Honour – folk simply don’t want to know that such a paladin was a rotter and bully in childhood, and if he was, they don’t care. They put it from their minds, never suspecting that boy and man are one, and that all my fame and glory has been earned by accident, false pretence, cowardice, doing the dirty, and blind luck. Only I know that. So my shining reputation’s safe, which is how the public want it, bless ’em.

It’s always been the same. Suppose some learned scholar were to discover a Fifth Gospel which proved beyond doubt that Our Lord survived the Cross and became a bandit or a slave-trader, or a politician, even – d’you think it would disturb the Christian faith one little bit? Of course not; ’twouldn’t even be denied, likely, just ignored. Hang it, I’ve seen the evidence, in black and white in our secret files, that Benjamin Franklin was a British spy right through the American Revolution, selling out the patriots for all he was worth – but would any Yankee believe that, if ’twas published? Never, because it’s not what they want to believe.⁴

I reached Calcutta, then, to find myself feted on all sides – and there was no shortage of heroes to be worshipped after the Mutiny, you may be sure. But no other had the V.C. and a knighthood (for word of the latter had leaked out, thanks to Billy Russell, I daresay), or stood six feet two with black whiskers and Handsome Harry’s style. I’d had my fill of fame in the past, of course, and was all for it, but I knew how to carry it off, modest and manly, not too bluff, and with a pinch of salt.

I’d supposed it would be straight aboard and hey for Merry England, but I was wrong. P. and O. hadn’t a berth for months, for the furloughs had started, and every civilian in India seemed to be leaving for home, to say nothing of ten thousand troops to be shipped out; John Company was hauling down his flag at last, India was passing under the rule of the Crown, everything was topsy-turvy, and even heroes had to wait their turn for a passage to Suez and the overland route – at a pinch you could get a ship to the Cape, but that was a deuce of a long haul. So I made myself pleasant around the P. and O. office, squeezed the buttocks of a Bengali charmer who wrote letters for the head clerk and had her dainty hands on his booking lists, tempted her with costly trinkets, and sealed the bargain by rattling her across his desk while he was out at tiffin (‘Oh, sair, you are ay naughtee mann!’). And, lo, ben Flashy’s name led all the rest on a vessel sailing two weeks hence.

I was dripping with blunt, having disposed of my Lucknow loot and banked the proceeds, but there wasn’t a bed to be had at the Auckland. Outram pressed me to stay with him – nothing too good for the man who’d smuggled his message through the pandy lines to Campbell – but I shied; only the fast set stayed up after ten in ‘Cal’ in those days, and I guessed that chez Outram it would be prayers at nine and gunfire and a cold tub at six, and I didn’t fancy above half scrambling out in the dark to seek vicious diversion. I played it modest, saying I knew his place would be full of Army and wives, and I’d rather keep out o’ the way, don’t you know, sir, and he looked noble and patted my shoulder, saying he understood, my boy, but I’d dine at least?

I put up at Spence’s, a ‘furnished apartment’ shop with a table d’hôte but no bearers even to clean your room, so bring your own servant or live like a pig. It served, though, and I could haunt the Auckland of an evening, seeking what I might devour.

I’d been two years without Elspeth, you see, and while they hadn’t been celibate quite, what with Lakshmi and various dusky houris here and there, and only the buxom Mrs Leslie at Meerut by way of variety, I was beginning to itch for something English again, blonde and milky for preference, and not reeking of musk and garlic. So the moment I saw Lady Plunkett (for her husband had a title) on the Auckland verandah, I knew I’d struck gold, which was the colour of her hair, with complexion to match. Beside Elspeth you’d not have noticed her, but she was tall and plump enough, with a pudding face and a big mouth, drooping with boredom, and once I’d caught her eye it was plain sailing. Believe it or not as you like, she dropped her handkerchief by my chair as she sailed out of the dining-room that evening (a thing I thought they did only in comic skits on the halls), so I told a bearer to take it after the mem-sahib, satisfied myself that her husband was improving his gout with port in company with other dodderers, and sauntered up to her rooms on the first floor.

To cut a long story short, we got along splendidly, and I had slipped her gown to her hips and was warming her up, so to speak, when the door opened at my back, her eager whimpers ended in a terrified squeak, and I glanced round to see her lord and master, who shouldn’t have been up for hours, tottering across the threshold, apparently on the verge of apoplexy. Well, I’d been there before, but seldom in more fortunate circumstances, for I was still fully clad, we were both standing up, and she was half-hidden from his gooseberry gaze. I hastily surrendered her tits, and glared at him.

‘What the devil d’ye mean by this intrusion, sir?’ cries I. ‘Begone this instant!’ And to my paralysed beauty I continued: ‘There is only the slightest congestion, marm, I’m happy to say; nothing to occasion alarm. You may resume your clothing now. I shall have a prescription sent round directly … Sir, did you not hear me? How dare you interrupt my examination? Upon my word, sir, have you no delicacy – out, I say, at once!’

He could only gobble in purple outrage while I chivvied her behind a screen. ‘That’s my wife!’ he bawls.

‘Then you should take better care of her,’ says I, whipping out a dhobi-list and scribbling professionally. ‘Fortunately my room is close at hand, and when I was summoned your lady was suffering an acute palpitation. Not uncommon – close city climate – nothing serious, but unpleasant enough … h’m, three grains should do it, I think … Has she had these fits before?’

‘I … I don’t know!’ cries he, wattling. ‘What? What? Maud, what does this mean? Who – why – are you a doctor, sir?’

‘MacNab, surgeon, 92nd,’ says I, mighty brisk, ignoring the mewlings from behind the screen and his own choking noises. ‘Complete rest for a day or two, you understand; no undue exertion. I shall send this note to the apothecary.’ I pocketed my paper, and sniffed, looking stern. ‘Port, sir? Well, it’s no concern of mine if you choose to drink yourself under ground, but I’d say one invalid in the family is enough, hey?’ I addressed the screen. ‘To bed at once, marm! Two teaspoonfuls when the boy brings the medicine, mind. I shall call in the morning and look to find you much improved. Good night – and to you, sir.’

Never let ’em get a word in, you see. I was out and downstairs before he knew it, reflecting virtuously that that was another marriage I’d saved by quick thinking – if he believed her, which I’d not have done myself. But, stay … even if he did, he’d find out soon enough that there was no Dr MacNab of the 92nd, and start baying for the blood of the strapping chap with black whiskers, and Calcutta society being as small as it was, he was sure to run me down – and then, scandal, which would certainly tarnish my newly won laurels … my God, if Plunkett roared loud enough it might even reach the Queen’s ears, and where would my promised knighthood be then? But if I could slide out now, undetected – well, you can’t identify a man who ain’t there, can you?

All of a sudden, Westward ho! without delay seemed the ticket – and scandal wasn’t the only reason. Some of these ancients with young high-stepping consorts can be vicious bastards, as witness the old roué who’d sicked his bullies after me for romping Letty Lade in the cricket season of ’45 – and he hadn’t even been married to her.

So now you see Flashy at the Howrah docks in the misty morning, with his dunnage on a hand-cart, dickering for a passage to the Cape with a Down-east skinflint in a tile hat who should have been flying the Jolly Roger, the price he demanded for putting into Table Bay. But he was sailing that day, and since tea for New York was his cargo it would be a fast run, so I stumped up with a fair grace; after all, I hadn’t put cash down for the passage arranged by the Bengali bint, and I didn’t grudge her the trinkets; my one regret was that I hadn’t boarded the Plunkett wench … I hope he believed her.

It was about a month to the Cape, with the taffrail under most of the way, but not too bad until we neared Algoa Bay, when it began to blow fit to sicken Magellan. I’ve never seen so much green water; even less cheering was the sight of a big steamer lying wrecked on a reef off Port Elizabeth,⁵ and I was a happy man when we’d rounded the Cape and opened up that glorious prospect which is one of the wonders of the seas – the great bay glittering in the sunlight with a score or more of windjammers and coasters and a few steamers at anchor, and beyond them the ‘table-cloth’ of cloud rolling down the flank of the Mountain to Signal Hill, and guns booming from the Castle to salute a man-of-war putting out, with crowds fluttering hats and scarves from Green Point.

Once ashore I engaged a berth on the Union mail steamer sailing the following week, put up at the Masonic, and took a slant at the town. It was busy enough, for the Australian gold rush of a few years back, and the Mutiny, had set the port booming, but the town itself was a damned Dutch-looking place with its stoeps and stolid stucco houses, most of which are gone now, I believe, and the great church clock tower which looks as though it should have an Oom Paul beard round its face. It had been a wild place in the earlies, the ‘tavern of the seas’, but now it was respectable and dull, and the high jinks were to be had at Grahamstown, far away up the coast, where the more sensible Britons lived and the Army was quartered – what there was of them, for the Governor, George Grey, had stripped the colony of men, guns, and stores for the Mutiny, and the old Africa hands in the hotel were full of foreboding over their pipes and stingo, with the country arse-naked, as one of them put it, and the usual trouble brewing to the north.

‘We’ll have the Kaffirs at our throats again ere long, see if we don’t,’ says one pessimist. ‘Know how many wars they’ve given us, colonel, thanks to the damned missionaries? Eight – or is it nine? Blessed if you don’t lose count! To say nothin’ o’ the Dutch – not that they haven’t got their hands full, by all accounts, an’ serve the miserable beggars right! They’ll be howlin’ for you redcoats presently, mark my words!’

‘You never saw a Boer ask help from a Briton yet!’ scoffs another. ‘Nor they needn’t – they’ll give the Basutos the same pepper they gave John Zulu, if Moshesh don’t mind his manners.’

‘You never know,’ laughs a third, ‘maybe the dear Basutos’ll do the decent thing an’ starve themselves to death, what?’

‘Not old Moshesh – that’s a Bantu who’s too smart by half, as we’ll find out to our cost one o’ these days.’

‘Oh, Grey’ll see to him, never fear – an’ the Boers, if only London will let him alone. Any more word of his goin’?’

‘You may bet on it – if the Colonial Office don’t ship him home, the doctor will. I don’t like his colour; the man’s played out.’

‘Well, he can go for me. We bade good riddance to Brother Boer years ago – why should we want him back?’

These are just scraps of talk that I remember, and no doubt they’re as Greek to you as they were to me, but being a curious child I listened, and learned a little, for these fellows – English civilians and merchants mostly, a Cape Rifleman or two, and a couple of trader-hunters down from the frontiers – knew their country, which was a closed book to me, then, bar my brief visit to the Slave Coast, and that was years ago and a world away from the Cape. Truth to tell, Africa’s never been my patch, much; I’ve soldiered on veldt and desert, and seen more of its jungle than I cared for, but like our statesmen I’ve always thought it a dam’ nuisance. Perhaps Dahomey inoculated me against the African bug which has bitten so many, to their cost, for it breeds grand dreams which often as not turn into nightmares.

It was biting hard at this time, not least on Grey, the Governor, and since he was to play a small but crucial part in my present story, I must tell you something of him – but I can’t do that without first telling you about South Africa, as briefly as may be. It won’t explain the place to you (God Himself couldn’t do that), but it may lead you to wonder if two damned dirty and costly wars mightn’t have been avoided (and who knows what hellish work in the future?) if only those Reform Club buffoons hadn’t thought they knew better than the man on the spot.

You have to understand that in ’59 Africa was the last great prize and mystery, an unmapped hinterland twice the size of Europe where anything was possible: lost civilisations, hidden cities, strange white tribes – they were no joke then. Real exploration of the dark heart of the continent had just begun; Livingstone had blazed his trails up and down it and across, farther north Dick Burton was making an ass of himself by not finding the source of the Nile, but the broad steady inroad was from the south, where we’d established ourselves. The Dutch settlers, not caring for us much, had trekked north to found their own Boer republics in lands where they met hordes of persevering black gentlemen coming t’other way; they fought the Zulus and Basutos (and each other) while we fought the Kaffirs to the east, and everything was dam’ confused, chiefly because our rulers at home couldn’t make up their minds, annexing territories and then letting ’em go, interfering with the Boers one minute and recognising their independence the next, trying to hold the ring between black and white and whining at the expense, and then sending out Grey, who brought the first touch of common sense – and, if you ask me, the last.

His great gift, I was told, was that he got on splendidly with savages – even the Boers. He’d been a soldier, explored in Australia, governed there and in New Zealand, and saw at once that the only hope for southern Africa was to reunite Briton and Boer and civilise the blacks within our borders, which he’d begun to do with schools and hospitals and teaching them trades. In this he’d been helped by one of those lunatic starts which happen among primitive folk: in ’57 a troublesome warrior tribe, the ’Zozas, had got the notion that if they destroyed all their crops and cattle, the gods would send them bumper harvests and even fatter herds, and all the white men in Africa would obligingly drown themselves; accordingly, the demented blighters starved themselves to death, which left more space for white settlement, and the surviving ’Zozas were in a fit state to be civilised.⁶ Meanwhile Grey was using his persuasive arts to charm the Boers back under the Union Jack, and since our Dutch friends were beginning to feel the pinch of independence – isolated up yonder, cut off from the sea, worn out with their own internal feuding, and fighting a running war against the Basutos (whose wily chief, Moshesh, had egged on the ’Zozas’s suicide for his own ends) – they were only too ready to return to Britannia’s fold.

That was the stuff of Grey’s dream, as I gathered from my fellow-guests at the hotel – a united South Africa of Briton, Boer, and black. Most of my informants were all for it, but one or two were dead against the Boers, which put one grizzled old hunter out of all patience.

‘I don’t like the Hollanders any better’n you do,’ says he, ‘but if whites won’t stand together, they’ll fall separately. Besides, if we don’t have the Boers under our wing, they’ll go on practisin’ their creed that the only good Bantu’s a dead one – or a slave, an’ we know where that leads – bloody strife till Kingdom Come.’

‘And what’s Grey’s style?’ asks a fat civilian. ‘Teach ’em ploughing and the Lord’s Prayer and make ’em wear trowsers? Try that with the Matabele, why don’t you? Or the Zulu, or the Masai.’

‘You’ve never seen the Masai!’ snaps the old chap. ‘Anyway, sufficient unto the day. I’m talkin’ about settlin’ the Bantu inside our own borders –’

‘We should never ha’ given ’em the vote,’ says a Cape Rifleman. ‘What happens when they outnumber us, tell me that?’ This was an eye-opener to me, I can tell you, but it’s true – every man-jack born on Cape soil had the vote then, whatever his colour; more than could be said for Old England.⁷

‘Oh, by then all the Zulu and Mashona will be in tight collars, talking political economy,’ sneers the fat chap. He jabbed his pipe at the hunter. ‘You know it’s humbug! They ain’t like us, they don’t like us, and they’ll pay us out when they can. Hang it all, you were at Blood River, weren’t you? Well, then!’

‘Aye, an’ I back Grey ’cos I don’t want Blood River o’er again!’ cries the hunter. ‘An’ that’s what you’ll get, my boy, if the Boers ain’t reined up tight inside our laager! As for the tribes … look here, I don’t say you can civilise a Masai Elmoran now … but they’re a long way off. Given time, an’ peaceful persuasion when we come to ’em – oh, backed up by a few field pieces, if you like – things can be settled with good will. So I reckon Grey’s way is worth a try. It’s that or fight ’em to the death – an’ there’s a hell of a lot o’ black men in Africa.’

There were murmurs of agreement, but my sympathies were all with the fat chap. I don’t trust enlightened proconsuls, I’d heard no good of the Boers, and fresh from India as I was, the notion of voting niggers was too rich for me. Can’t say my views have changed, either – still, when I look back on the bloody turmoil of southern Africa in my lifetime, which has left Boer and Briton more at loggerheads than ever, the blacks hating us both, and their precious Union fifty years too late, I reckon the old hunter was right: Grey’s scheme was worth a try; God knows it couldn’t have made things worse.

But of course it never got a try, because the home government had the conniptions at the thought of another vast territory being added to the Empire, which they figured was too big already – odd, ain’t it, that the world should be one-fifth British today, when back in the ’fifties our statesmen were dead set against expansion – Palmerston, Derby, Carnarvon, Gladstone, aye, even D’Israeli, who called South Africa a millstone.

While I was at the Cape, though, the ball was still in the air; they hadn’t yet scotched Grey’s scheme of union and called him home, and he was fighting tooth and nail to get his way. Which was why, believe it or not, I found myself bidden to dine with his excellency a few days later – and that led to the first coincidence that set me on the road to Harper’s Ferry.

When I got the summons, aha, thinks I, he wants to trot the Mutiny hero up and down before Cape society, to raise their spirits and remind ’em how well the Army’s been doing lately. Sure enough, he had invited the local quality to meet me at a reception after dinner, but that wasn’t his reason, just his excuse.

We dined at the Castle, which had been the Governor’s residence in the days of the old Dutch East India Company, and was still used occasionally for social assemblies, since it had a fine hall overlooked at one end by a curious balcony called the Kat, from which I gather his Dutch excellency had been wont to address the burghers. I duly admired it before we went to dinner in an ante-room; it was a small party at table, Flashy in full Lancer fig with V.C. and assorted tinware, two young aides pop-eyed with worship, and Grey himself. He was a slim, poetic-looking chap with saintly eyes, not yet fifty, and might have been a muff if you hadn’t known that he’d walked over half Australia, dying of thirst most of the time, and his slight limp was a legacy of an Aborigine’s spear in his leg. The first thing that struck you was that he was far from well: the skin of his handsome face was tight and pallid, and you felt sometimes that he was straining to keep hold, and be pleasant and easy. The second thing, which came out later, was his cocksure confidence in G. Grey; I’ve seldom known the like – and I’ve been in a room with Wellington and Macaulay together, remember.

He was quiet enough at dinner, though, being content to watch me thoughtful-like while his aides pumped me about my Mutiny exploits, which I treated pretty offhand, for if I’m to be bongeredfn3 let it be by seniors or adoring females. I found Grey’s silent scrutiny unsettling, too, and tried to turn the talk to home topics, but the lads didn’t care for the great crusade against smoking, or the state of the Thames, or the Jews in Parliament;⁸ they wanted the blood of Cawnpore and the thunder of Lucknow, and it was a relief when Grey sent them packing, and suggested we take our cigars on the verandah.

‘Forgive my young men,’ says he. ‘They see few heroes at the Cape.’ The sort of remark that is a sniff as often as not, but his wasn’t; he went on to speak in complimentary terms of my Indian service, about which he seemed to know a great deal, and then led the way down into the garden, walking slowly along in the twilight, breathing in the air with deep content, saying even New Zealand had nothing to touch it, and had I ever known anything to compare? Well, it was balmy enough with the scent of some blossom or other, and just the spot to stroll with one of the crinolines I could see driving in under the belfry arch and descending at the Castle doorway beyond the trees, but it was evidently heady incense to Grey, for he suddenly launched into the most infernal prose about Africa, and how he was just the chap to set it in order.

You may guess the gist of it from what I’ve told you already, and you know what these lyrical buggers are like when they get on their hobby-horses, on and on like the never-wearied rook. He didn’t so much talk as preach, with the quiet intensity of your true fanatic, and what with the wine at dinner and the languorous warmth of the garden, it’s as well there wasn’t a hammock handy. But he was the Governor, and had just fed me, so I nodded attentively and said ‘I never knew that, sir,’ and ‘Ye don’t say!’, though I might as well have hollered ‘Whelks for sale!’ for all he heard. It was the most fearful missionary dross, too, about the brotherhood of the races, and how a mighty empire must be built in harmony, for there was no other way, save to chaos, and now the golden key was in his hand, ready to be turned.⁹

‘You’ve heard that the Orange Volksraad has voted for union with us?’ says he, taking me unawares, for until then he’d apparently been talking to the nearest tree. Not knowing what the Orange Volksraad was, I cried yes, and not before time, and he said this was the moment, and brooded a bit, à la Byron, stern but gleaming, before turning on me and demanding:

‘How well do you know Lord Palmerston?’

Too dam’ well, was the answer to that, but I said I’d met him twice in the line of duty, no more.

‘He sent you to India on secret political work,’ says he, and now he was all business, no visionary nonsense. ‘He must think highly of you – and so he should. Afghanistan, Punjab, Central Asia, Jhansi … oh, yes, Flashman, news travels, and we diplomatics take more note of work in the intelligence line than we do of …’ He indicated my Cross, with a little smile. ‘I have no doubt that his lordship values your opinion more than that of many general officers. Much more.’ He was looking keen, and my innards froze, for I’d heard this kind of talk before. You ain’t getting me up yonder disguised as a Zulu, you bastard, thinks I, but his next words quieted my fears.

‘I am not persona grata at home, colonel. To be blunt, they think me a dangerous dreamer, and there is talk of my recall – you’ve heard it bruited in the town, I don’t doubt. Well, sir,’ and he raised his chin, eye to eye, ‘I hope I have convinced you that I must not be recalled, for the sake of our country’s service – and for the sake of Africa. Now, Lord Palmerston will not be out of office long, I believe.¹⁰ Will you do me the signal favour, when you reach home, of seeking him out and impressing on him the necessity – the imperative necessity – of my remaining here to do the work that only I can do?’

I’ve had some astonishing requests in my time – from women, mostly – but this beat all. If he thought the unsought opinion of a lowly cavalry colonel, however supposedly heroic and versed in political ruffianing, would weigh a jot with Pam, he was in the wrong street altogether. Why, the thought of my buttonholing that paint-whiskered old fox with ‘Hold on, my lord, while I set you right about Africa’ was stuff for Punch. I said so, politely, and he fixed me with that steely gazelle eye and sighed.

‘I am well aware that a word from you may carry little weight – all I ask is that … little. His lordship has not inclined to accept my advice in the past, and I must use every means to persuade him now, do you not see?’ He stared hard at me, impatient; there was a bead of sweat on his brow – and suddenly it came to me that the man was desperate, ready to snatch at anything, even me. He was furious at having to plead with a mutton-headed soldier (he, Sir George Grey, who alone could save Africa!), but he was in that state where he’d have tried to come round Palmerston’s cook. He tried to smile, but it was a wry grimace on the pale, strained face. ‘Decisions, you know, are not always swayed by senators; a word from the slave in the conqueror’s chariot may turn the scale.’ Gad, he could pay a compliment, though. ‘Well, Colonel Flashman, may I count on you? Believe me, you will be doing a service to your country quite as great as any you may have done in the past.’

I should have spat in his eye and told him I didn’t run errands for civil servants, but it’s not every day you’re toadied by a lofty proconsul, patronising jackanapes though he may be. So I accepted his hand-clasp, which was hard (but damp, I noted with amusement), marvelling at the spectacle of a proud man humbling himself for the sake of his pride, and ambition. All wasted, too, for they did recall him – and then Pam reinstated him, not at my prompting, you may be sure. But his great African dream came to nothing.

That’s by the way, and if I’ve told you of Grey and Africa at some length, well, I’m bound to record these things, and it was a queer start altogether, and he was an odd bird – but the point is that if he hadn’t thought he could use me, he’d never have dined me that night, or shown me off to Cape society … and I’d never have heard of Harper’s Ferry.

The last carriages had arrived while we talked, so now it was Flashy on parade in the hall before society assembled. Grey made me known from the Kat balcony, to polite applause, and led me down the little staircase to be admired and gushed over; there must have been thirty or forty under the chandeliers, and Grey steered me among them; I gave my bluff manly smile, with a click of the heels or an elegant inclination, depending on their sex, but when we came to a group by the piano, I thought, hollo, this is far enough.

She was seated at the keyboard, playing the last bars of a waltz, tra-la-ing gaily and swaying her shoulders to the music; they were the colour of old ivory, flaunting themselves from a silvery-white dress which clung to her top hamper in desperation. She laughed as she struck the final flourish, and as those nearest patted their palms she bowed and turned swiftly on the stool, smiling boldly up at me and extending a slim gloved hand as though she had timed the action precisely to Grey’s introduction. I didn’t hear the name, being intent on taking stock: bright black eyes alight with mischief, that dark cream complexion (touch o’ the tar brush, I fancied), glossy black hair that swung behind her in a great fan – a shade too wide in the mouth for true beauty, and with heavy brows that almost met above a slim aquiline nose, but she was young and gay and full of sauce, and in that pale, staid assembly she was as exotic as an orchid in a bed of lettuce, with a shape to rival Montez as she sat erect, sweeping her skirt clear of the piano stool.

‘Oah, I should have played a march in your honour, Sir Harree – nott a waltz!’ cries she. Chi-chi, beyond doubt, with that shrill lilt to her voice, and mighty pert for a colonial miss. I said gallantly ’twas all one, since in her presence I was bound to look, not listen – and I knew from the way she fluttered her lids, smiling, and then raised them, wide and insolent, that we were two of a mind. Her hand tightened, too, when I pressed it, nor did she withdraw it as Grey made another introduction, and I saw she was glancing with amusement at the chap who’d been turning her music, whom I hadn’t noticed. ‘My father,’ says she, and as I faced him I realised with an icy shock where I’d seen her dark brows and arched nose before, for I was staring into the pale terrible eyes of John Charity Spring.

It’s a shame those books on etiquette don’t have a chapter to cover encounters with murderous lunatics whom you’d hoped never to meet again. I could have used one then, and if you’ve met J. C. Spring, M.A., in my memoirs, you’ll know why. This was the mad villain who’d kidnapped me to the Slave Coast on his hell-ship in ’48 (on my own father-in-law’s orders, too), and perforce I’d run black ivory with him, and fled from she-devil Amazons, and been hunted the length of the Mississippi, and lied truth out of Louisiana to keep both our necks out of a noose.fn1 The last time I’d seen him he’d been face down in a bowl of trifle in a New Orleans brothel, drugged senseless so that he could be hauled away and shanghaied – to Cape Town, bigod! Had he been here ever since – how long was it? Ten years almost, and here he was, brooding malevolently at me from those soulless eyes, while I gaped dumbstruck. The trim beard and hair were white now, but he was as burly as ever, the same homicidal pirate whom I’d loathed and dreaded; the weal on his forehead, which darkened whenever he was preparing to spill blood or talk about Oriel College, was glowing pink, and he spoke in the old familiar growl.

‘Colonel and sir, now, eh? You’ve risen in rank since I saw you last – and in distinction, too, it seems.’ He glowered at my medals. ‘Bravely earned, I daresay. Ha!’

Grey wasn’t a diplomat for nothing. ‘You are acquainted?’ says he, and Spring bared his fangs in his notion of a smile.

‘Old shipmates, sir!’ barks he, glaring as though I were a focsle rat. ‘Reunited after many years, eh, Flashman? Aye, gratis superveniet quae non sperabitur hora!’fn2 He wheeled on his daughter – Spring with a daughter, my God! – and I dropped her hand like a hot rivet. ‘My dear, will you not play your new Scarlatti piece for his excellency, while the Colonel and I renew old acquaintance – charming, sir, I assure you! Such delicacy of touch!’ And in an aside to me: ‘Outside, you!’

He had my arm in a grip like a steel trap, and I knew better than to argue. Maniacs like Spring don’t stand on ceremony for mere governors – four quick strides and he had me on the verandah, and as he almost threw me down the steps to the shadowy garden my one thought was that he was going to set about me in one of his berserk rages – I could guess why, too, so I wrenched clear, babbling.

‘I’d nothing to do with your being shanghaied! It was Susie Willinck – I didn’t even know she was going to –’

‘Shut your gob!’ Oriel manners still, I could see. He shoved me against a tree and planted himself four-square, hands thrust into pockets, quarter-deck style. ‘You needn’t protest innocence to me! You’d never have the spine to slip me a queer draught – aye, but you’d sit by and see it done, you mangy tyke! Well, nulla pallescere culpa,fn3 my decorated hero, for it doesn’t matter a dam, d’ye see? Fuit Ilium,fn4 if you know your Virgil, which you never did, blast you!’

So he was still larding his conversation with Latin tags – he’d been a mighty scholar, you see, before they rode him out of Oxford on a rail, for garrotting the Vice-chancellor or running guns into Wadham, likely, tho’ he always claimed it was academic jealousy.

‘Well, what the devil are you blackguarding a chap for, then?’ The horror of meeting him, and being rushed out headlong, had quite unmanned me – but this was civilisation, dammit, and even he daren’t offer violence, much. ‘By God, Spring!’ cries I, courage returning, ‘you’d best mind your manners! This ain’t Dahomey, or your bloody slave-deck, and I’m not your supercargo, either –’

‘Hold your infernal tongue!’ He thrust his face into mine, pale eyes glittering, and his scar pulsing like a snake. ‘Take that tone with me and, by God, you’ll wish you hadn’t! Bah! Think you’re safe, don’t you, because mortuo leoni et lepores insultant,fn5 is that it?’

‘How the hell do I know? Can’t you speak English?’

‘Well, the lion may be old, mister, but he ain’t dead, and he can still take you by your dirty neck and scrag you like the rat you are!’ He gripped my collar, leaning closer and speaking soft. ‘I don’t know what ill wind blew you here, nor I don’t care, and I’ve no quarrel with you – yet – because you’re not worth it, d’ye see?’ He began to shake me, gritting his teeth. ‘But I’m telling you, for the good o’ your health, that while you continue to foul the Cape with your scabrous presence – you’ll steer clear of my daughter, d’ye hear me? Oh, I saw you leering yonder, like the rutting hog you are! I know you –’

‘Damn your eyes, I only said “How-de-do” –’

‘And I’m saying “How-de-don’t”! I know it means nothing to vermin like you that she’s seventeen and convent-reared and pure!’ That was what he thought; I’d seen the look in her eye. ‘So you can spare me your indignant vapourings, ye hear? Aye, fronti nulla fidesfn6 might ha’ been coined for you, you lecherous offal! Didn’t I see you tup your way from Whydah to the Gulf?’ His scar was warming up again, and his voice rising to its customary bawl. ‘And that fat slut in Orleans – did you have the gall to marry her?’

‘Hush, can’t you? Certainly not!’ In fact, I had; my second bigamy – but he’d opposed the match, being a Bible-thumper like so many blackguards, and I knew if I admitted it I’d have his teeth in my throat.

‘I’ll wager! Bah, who’s to believe you – lie by nature, don’t you!’ He stepped back, snarling. ‘So … you’re warned! Steer clear of my girl, because if you don’t … by the Holy, I’ll kill you!’

I believed him. I remembered Omohundro with two feet of steel through his innards – and Spring had only just met him. Now, my carnal thoughts had vanished like the morning dew before the warmth of the fond father’s admonition, and it was with relief and true sincerity that I drew myself up, straightened my tunic, and spoke with quiet dignity.

‘Captain Spring, I assure you that my regard for your daughter is merely that of a gentleman for a charming lady.’ Hearing his jaws grate at what he took for sarcasm, I added hastily: ‘By the way, how is Mrs Spring – in excellent health, I trust?’

‘Mrs Spring is dead!’ snaps he – and, d’ye know, I was quite put out, for she’d been a harmless old biddy, played the harmonium at sea-burials, used to chivvy her diabolic spouse to wear his muffler when he went a-slaving, mad as a hatter. ‘And that is not her daughter. Miranda’s mother was a Coast Arab.’ His glare dared me to so much as blink. I’d been right, though: half-caste.

‘Miranda, eh? Delightful name … from a play, ain’t it?’

‘Jesus wept!’ says he softly. ‘Arnold must ha’ been proud of you!’ He considered me, cocking his white head. ‘Aye … perhaps he would’ve been, at that … you’ve done well – by appearances, anyway.’ His voice was almost mild – but he was like that, raging storm and then flat calm, and both terrifying. I’d seen him lash a man almost to death, and then go down to afternoon tea and a prose about Ovid, with the victim’s blood on his sleeve. The hairy heel was never absent long, though. ‘Aye,’ says he sourly, looking me up and down, ‘I wish I’d a guinea for every poor bastard whose bones must ha’ gone to the making of your glorious pedestal. Gaudetque viam fecisse ruina,fn7 I’ll lay!’

Seeing he was out to charm, I said that he seemed to have done pretty well himself – for he was looking mighty prosperous, suitings of the finest and diamonds on his daughter, and I was curious. He scratched his beard, sneering.

‘Well enough. That fat strumpet of yours did me a good turn, trepanning me to profit and position, ’though she didn’t know it. Yes, my bucko, I’m warm – and I draw enough water in this colony, as you’ll find if you cross me. Felicitas habet multos amicos,fn8 you know!’

I didn’t, but couldn’t resist a gibe of my own. ‘Not in black ivory these days, though, I’ll bet!’ For a second the wild spark flickered in the empty eyes, and I prepared to dodge.

‘You’ll open that trap o’ yours once too often!’ growls he. ‘You’re sailing on the next mail, I take it? You’d better – and until then, keep your distance, d’ye hear? Good night, and be damned to you!’

Shipmate o’ mine, thinks I, as he stamped back to the house; I was wet with sweat, and it was with profound relief that I saw his carriage leave a few moments later, my half-caste charmer trilling with laughter and the Scourge of the Seas with his hat jammed down and snarling at the coachee. I ventured in again, but it was a half-hearted hero who acknowledged the compliments of the assembly, I can tell you; the coming of Spring is something you don’t get over quickly, and Grey eyed me curiously when I took my leave.

‘Interesting man – I had no notion you knew him in his trading days. Oh, he farms now, owns great acres about Grahamstown, and is quite the nabob – must be one of the wealthiest men in the Colony, I daresay, has his own yacht to bring him down from Port Elizabeth. His daughter is charming, is she not?’ An instant’s hesitation, then: ‘Captain Spring is a considerable classic, too; his lectures on the latifundia were widely attended last year. He is on the board of public examiners, you know, and is forever pressing us to found a university here.’

I decided to do J.C. a bit of good, in return for the scare he’d given me. ‘Ah, he misses the cloisters I suppose – you know they unfrocked him, or whatever they do, at Oxford? Never got over it, poor old chap, named his ship the Balliol College – slaver, she was, and a pirate, they say. He’s wanted for murder in Louisiana, too.’

He didn’t even stir a patrician brow. ‘Indeed … ah, well. A very good night to you, colonel … and my warmest regards to Lord Palmerston.’

That was how much I shocked him. The fact was, you see, that so many chaps who’d been little better than brigands in the earlies – fellows like Brooke and the Taipans and the South Sea crowd – had become upstanding pillars of society in their mellow years, that no one would care a fig if Spring had founded his fortune shipping niggers – not if he was going to apply it to good works like a new university, and went to morning service regular. As old Peacock says, respectable means rich – look at that slippery diamond-slinger Rhodes. What price the Spring Chair of Practical Philosophy? I’d give the inaugural lecture myself, on how he tried to drop blacks overboard before the patrollers boarded him.

That he was filthy rich was confirmed by gossip in the town. ‘He could write a draft for a million,’ I was told, and ‘I’d hate to be the man that bilked him of a fiver, though,’ says another, from which I gathered that my beloved old commander’s belaying-pin reputation still stuck to him, however loud he hollered in church. So it was a relief when I heard he’d gone back to Grahamstown, out of harm’s way, leaving the lovely Miranda to queen it at his fine house by the sea, where she was wont to entertain the younger set – of whom I was not going to be one, I may tell you. Delectable she might be, but even Helen of Troy would lose her allure if the price of her favours was liable to be a dip in the bay with a bag of coal on your feet. No, I was not tempted … until the day before I was due to sail, when a note was delivered at the hotel. It read:

My dear Sir Harry – altho’ I believe I should not style you so just yet, still everyone knows, and I have not so many Gallant Knights of my acquaintance that I can forgo the pleasure of addressing you again as – Dear Sir Harry!

Our meeting was cut so short by Papa that I shall feel myself altogether neglected if you do not call before you leave for Home, which I believe you do on tomorrow’s mail. We intend a ‘Sea-picnic’ today, and ’twill not be complete without the handsomest colonel in the Army! There! I have no shame at all, you see! Do come, and gratify your admirer, and soon to be, I hope, your friend,

Miranda Spring

P.S. Papa continues at Grahamstown, but we have the Ariel for our picnic. I shall send a carriage at noon – please, let it not return empty!

Well, this was a free and easy miss, if you like, for no Mama of Simla or Belgravia would have permitted a billet as warm as this one; she might as well have added ‘P.P.S. Bed at ten sharp’. But then, she had no Mama – and Papa was seven hundred miles away, bless his black heart … he’d warned her off, that was plain, but this was a filly who’d delight in defiance, from what I’d seen of her … and she wanted the ‘handsomest colonel in the Army’ to ‘gratify’ her, the saucy little spanker, and who could blame her? I tingled at the thought of those soft shoulders and the wanton glint in the black eyes – aye, but what about the bale-fire glint in dear Papa’s? For a second I quailed … but no, I couldn’t let this one slip by.

Don’t mistake me – I’m not one of those who count danger an added spice, least of all in houghmagandie, as Elspeth used to call it whenever I got her tipsy. But here, while there was no risk at all, there would be a special zest to romping Spring’s daughter – the pity was that he’d never know … unless I wrote him a line when I was safe in England … ‘Dear Prospero, have rogered Miranda. O, brave new world! The weather continues fine. Yours ever, Caliban.’ He’d absolutely die of rage. Better still, she might present him with a little supercargo nine months hence … gad, that would be an interesting infant, Flash-Spring with a dash of fellaheen. Oh, merry thoughts!

I made my packages then and there, whistling, and settled up, for the best plan would be to outstay the other guests, gallop the night away, kiss her a tearful farewell, and tool straight down to the mail tender. I’d be half way home before the swine was back from Grahamstown – oh, I must let him know, somehow! He’d never dare come back to England to seek revenge … would he? I had another qualm at the memory of those glaring eyes and murderous fury … well, we’d see.

The carriage was there sharp on twelve, Malay coachman and all, and I was in prime fettle as we bowled through the suburbs, which were a great contrast to the shabby port, being very grand even in those days, with shady avenues of oak and clumps of silver-trees, and fine houses among the green; it was Cape summer, and the whole countryside was ablaze with garden blossoms and the famous wild flowers. Chateau Spring, which stood by the sea, was even more splendid than I’d imagined, a lofty white colonial mansion in wide grounds fit to rival Kew, with a marble bathing pool¹¹ secluded among rhododendrons, and as I waited in the airy hall, admiring the circular sweep of the double staircase and inhaling the blissful aroma of money, I reflected that there’s no gain like the ill-gotten; it beats honest accumulation hands down.

I’d expected the place to be alive with company, but there wasn’t a soul except the ancient black butler who’d gone to announce me – and I found myself wondering about that capital ‘H’ she’d put on ‘home’ in her note. She was half-caste, you see, and they put far more stock in being ‘English’ than we who take it for granted … so she’d spelled it ‘Home’ – where she’d never been, and likely never would be. Not that being ‘coloured’, as they call it down yonder, mattered much in those days, not with a white father who could have bought Natal and would have kicked the life out of anyone who didn’t treat his daughter like a duchess … still, I wondered how many Mamas with eligible sons regretted previous engagements. And I was just concluding hornily that I was probably the only guest, when:

‘Sir Harree!’ Here she was, sailing down the staircase, and I took in breath at the sight of her. She was wearing a dress of pale muslin, sari-style, that clung like a gauzy skin but flounced out below the knee above thonged sandals; one ivory shoulder and both arms were bare, and as she swept towards me with a swift graceful stride the flimsy material outlined her figure – gad, it was all there. She carried a long scarf of black silk over one arm – and then to my astonishment I saw it was her hair, gathered in from behind.

‘Sir Harree!’ again, with a glowing smile and her free hand extended, and since we were alone and I was bursting with buck I pressed my lips to her fingers – and nuzzled swiftly up her naked arm in Flashy’s flank attack, across shoulder and neck to her cheek and fastened on her full red lips. She didn’t even gasp; after a second her mouth opened wide, and when I drew her in with a hand on her rump she clung like a good ’un while I kneaded avidly and breathed in her heavy perfume … and then the blasted butler’s step sounded at the stairhead, and she broke away, flushed and laughing, and quickly drew herself up, mock demure.

‘How-de-do, Sir Harree?’ says she, bobbing a curtsey. ‘So kind of you to coll! May I offer you some … refreshment?’

‘Another o’ the same, marm, if you please,’ says I, and she burst out laughing and drew me out on to a shady verandah commanding a splendid view of the sunlit Bay. There was a low table with liquor and tidbits (for two, I noticed), and cushioned rattan swing-chairs, and when the butler had poured us iced slings and tottered away, she made pretty work of seating herself, shrugging this way and that to display her shape, and sweeping that wondrously long hair over the back of her seat – I’d known at first sight that she was a great show-off, and now she raised her glass with a flourish in smiling salute.

‘Thatt is iced brandy and orange, Sir Harree! Your favourite in New Orleans, so Papa told me … among other things, oah yess!’

‘Did he, now? Observant chap, Papa.’ How the blazes had he come to tell her that? ‘But you mustn’t believe all he tells you, you know.’

‘Oah, but I want to!’ cries she, quite the rogue. ‘Such a shocking character he gave you, you can nott imagine!’ She sat erect, counting on slim fingers. ‘Lett me see … oll your naughtee ways, drinking, and smoking and … that you are a verree shameless rake – but he would give no particulars, was that nott mean of him? … oah, and that you were a scoundrel, and told stretchers – and he said you were most cowardlee – which I did nott believe, you are so famous –’

‘But you believed the rest, eh?’

‘Butt of carse, Sir Harree!’ Her voice had the native sing-song that can be delightful in a woman, but in her excitement the chi-chi vowels slipped out hot and strong, and for an instant the ivory skin seemed a shade darker, and the sharp nose and heavy brows more pronounced, as she gestured and prattled – and I admired the stirring curves of breast and hip under the flimsy muslin: never mind the pasture it comes from, it’s the meat that matters.

‘Papa said, of oll the bad men he had known, you were quite the worst!’ She shook her head, wide-eyed. ‘So of carse I must see for myself, you knoaw? Are you so verree wicked … Harree?’

‘Here, I’ll show you!’ says I, and lunged at her, but she drew back, with a pretty little comical flutter towards the hall, where I supposed the butler was lurking, and pressed me to try the tidbits, especially a great sticky bowl of creamed chocolate – in summer! – which she spooned into herself with gluttonous delicacy, between sips at her sling, teasing me with sidelong smiles and assuring me that the mixture was ‘quite heavenlee’.

Well, women flirt all ways to bed: there are the kittens who like to be tickled, and the cats who must be coaxed while they pretend to claw, and the tigresses who have only one end in mind, so to speak. I’d marked Miranda Spring as a novice tigress at our first meeting, and our grapple in the hall had shown her a willing one; if it amused her to play the wanton puss, well, she was seventeen, and a chi-chi, and they’re a theatrical breed, so I didn’t mind – so long as she didn’t prove a mouse, as some of these brazen chits do at the first pop of a button. She seemed nervous and randy together – yet was there a gleam of triumph in the eager smile? Aye, probably couldn’t believe her luck.

‘So Papa warned you off, did he? And did he tell you he’d sworn to kill me if I came near you?’

‘Oah, yess! Jollee exciting! He is so jealous, you know, it is a great bore, for he has kept away oll sarts of boys – men, I mean – ollways thee ones I like best, too! Nott saying he would kill them, you understand,’ she giggled, ‘but you know how he can be.’

‘M’mh … just an inkling. Cramps your style, does he?’

She tossed her head and dabbed cream from her lips with a fold of her dress. ‘Nott when he is in Grahamstown!’

‘When the cat’s away, eh? Finished your pudding, have you? Very good, let’s play!’ I made another lunge, and got home this time, seizing her bosom and stopping her mouth, and the lustful slut lay there revelling in it, thrusting her tongue between my teeth, with never a thought for the butler, and I was wondering how we were going to perform the capital act on a cane swing only four feet long, when she purred in my ear: ‘Once upon a time, the cat came home …’

Fortunately the swing was anchored, or we’d have been over.

‘What! D’you mean –’

‘Oah, not from Grahamstown, sillee! Papa was here, in town, but not expected. It was two years ago, when I was onlee fifteen, and quite stupid, you knoaw – and there was a French gentleman from Mauritius, much older, but whom I liked ever so … And Papa flew into a great rage, and forbade him to see me – but then Papa was absent, and Michel came to the house … to my room, quite late … and Papa came home from the club, quite early …’

‘Jesus! What then?’

‘Nothing, then … Papa looked at him, in that way he has, and said “You’re receipted and filed, mister”, and Michel laughed at him, and went away.’ You’re a better man than I am, Michel, thinks I. ‘And a little time after, they found poor Michel on Robben Island. He had been flogged to death with a sjambok.’

Just what a fellow needs to hear when he’s coming to the boil, you’ll agree – but I’m the lad who bulled a Malay charmer in the midst of a battle on the Batang Lupar, regardless of shot and steel – and now the wicked bitch was half way down my throat, and rummaging below-stairs with an expert hand. And while I didn’t doubt her story, knowing her fiend of a father, I knew she’d told it only to plague me. And Spring was in Grahamstown – I’d inquired.

‘I’ll give you sjambok, my lady!’ growls I, and lifted her bodily out of the swing, but even as I cast about for galloping room, she left off gnawing at me and panted: ‘Wait … let me show you!’ I set her down, and she seized my hand, hurrying me down to the garden and through a screen of shrubs to a small stone jetty beyond, and there was the smartest little steam yacht moored, all brass and varnish shining in the sun, and not a soul aboard that I could see.

‘For our picnic,’ says she, and her voice was shrill with excitement. She led the way up the swaying plank, and I followed, slavering at the plump stern bobbing under the muslin, and down into the cool shadows of a spacious cabin. I seized her, fore and aft, but she slipped from my lustful grasp, whispering ‘A moment!’ and slammed a door in my face.

While I tore off my clobber, I had time to look about me, and note that J. C. Spring, M.A., did himself as well afloat as he did ashore. There was polished walnut and brocade, velvet curtains on the ports, fine carpet and leather furniture, and even a fireplace with a painting of some Greek idiots in beards – it was a bigger craft than I’d realised, and rivalled the one in which Suleiman Usman had carried us to Singapore; through an open door I could see a lavatory in marble and glass, with a patent showerbath, which for some reason made me randier than ever, and I pounded on her door, roaring endearments; it swung open under my fist, and there she was, on t’other side of the bed, posed with her back to the bulkhead. For a moment I stood staring, and Spring and old Arnold would have been proud of me, for my first thought was ‘Andromeda on her rock, awaiting the monster, ha-ha!’ which proves the benefit of a grounding in the classics.

She was stark naked – and yet entirely clad, for she had cinched in her long hair with a white ribbon round her neck, so that it framed her face like a cowl, while beneath the ribbon it hung in a shimmering black curtain that covered her almost to her ankles. Her arms were spread out, desperate-like, on the panelling, and as I goggled she pushed one knee through the silky tresses and pouted at me.

We never went near the bed, for it would have been a shame to disturb her tableau vivant, much; I just heaved her up and piled in against the panels, grunting for joy, and I’ll swear the boat rocked at its moorings, for she teased no longer when it came to serious work, and I wasn’t for lingering myself. It was splendid fun while it lasted, which was until she began to shudder and scream and tried to throttle me with her hair, so I romped her up and down all the way to the lavatory, where we finished the business under the patent showerbath, once I’d got the knack of the dam’ thing, which ain’t easy with a mad nymph clinging to your manly chest. Most refreshing it was, though, and brought back memories of Sonsee-Array, my Apache princess, who was partial to coupling under waterfalls – which is deuced cold, by the way, and the pebbles don’t help.

Miranda Spring knew a trick worth two of that, for when we’d come to our senses and towelled each other dry, with much coy snickering on her part, she showed me to a little alcove off the main cabin where an excellent collation was laid out under covers, with bubbly in a bucket. We recruited our energies with lobster and chicken, but when I proposed that we finish off the wine on deck, she came all over languid and said we would be ‘ever so comfee’ on the bed – and if you’d seen that exquisite young body artfully swathed in her hair, with those fine ivory poonts thrusting impudently through it, you’d have agreed.

But she must finish her dessert, too – like all chi-chis she had a passion for sugary confections – so she brought it to bed, if you please, and gorged herself on eclairs and cream slices while I fondled her, well content to play restfully for a change. Not so madam; being a greedy little animal, she must satisfy both her appetites at once, and call me conservative if you will, I hold that a woman who gallops you while consuming a bowl of blancmange is wanting in respect. I left off nibbling her tits to rebuke her bad form, but the saucy little gannet stuck out her tongue and went on eating and cantering in a most leisurely fashion. Right, my lass, thinks I, and waited until she’d downed the last cherry and licked the spoon, settled herself for a rousing finish, and was beginning to moan and squeal in ecstatic frenzy – at which point I gave an elaborate yawn, hoisted her gently from the saddle, and announced that I was going on deck for a swim.

She squawked like a staggered hen, eyes still rolling. ‘Sweem? Wha’ … now? But … but … oah, no, no, nott yett –’

‘Why not? Better than all this boring frowsting in bed, what? Come along, a dip’ll do you no end of good.’ I gave them a playful flip. ‘Keep you in trim, you know.’

‘Boreeng?’ If you can imagine Andersen’s Mermaid moved from dazed bewilderment to screaming passion in an instant, you have Miranda. ‘Boreeng? Me? Aieee, you … you –’ But even as I prepared to parry a clawing attack, to my amazement her rage gave way to sudden consternation, and then her arms were round my neck and she was pleading frantically with me to stay, kissing and fondling and exerting her small strength to pull me down.

‘Oah, no, no, please, Harree, please don’t go – please, I am ever so sorree! Oah, I was wicked to tease – you mustn’t go up, nott yett! Please, stay … love me, Harree, oah please, don’t go!’

‘Changeable chit, ain’t you? No, no, miss, I’m going topsides for a swim, and some sunshine –’

‘No, no!’ It was a squeal of real alarm. ‘Please, please, you must stay here!’ She fairly writhed on to me, gasping. Well, I’ve known ’em eager, but this was flattery of the most persuasive kind. ‘Please, please, Harree … love me now, oah do!’

‘Wel-ll … no, later! If you’re a good little girl, after my swim –’

‘No, now! Oah, I shall be a badd big girl!’ She gave a whimper of entreaty. ‘Stay with me, and I will be verree badd! Don’ go, and I will …’ She put her lips to my ear, giggling, and whispered. I was so taken aback I may well have blushed.

‘Good God, I never heard the like! Why, you abandoned brat! Where on earth did you hear of such …? At school! I don’t believe it!’ She nodded gleefully, eyes shining, and I was speechless. Depraved women I’ve known, thank heaven, but this one was barely out of dancing class, and here she was, proposing debauchery that would have scandalised a Cairo pimp. Heavens, it was new to me, even, and I told her so. She smiled and bared her teeth.

‘Oah, then you will certainlee not go on deck just yett!’ whispers she. ‘You will stay with wicked Miranda, yess?’

Well, a gentleman should always indulge the whims of the frail sex, even if it does mean forgoing a refreshing swim, but I confess that if I hadn’t been a degenerate swine myself, her behaviour thereafter would have shocked me. I’d have thought, at thirty-six and having enjoyed the attentions of Lola Montez, Susie Willinck, my darling Elspeth, and other inventive amorists too numerous to mention, that I’d nothing to learn about dalliance, but by the time young Miranda (seventeen, I mean to say!) had had her girlish will of me, and I was lying more dead than alive in the showerbath, I could barely gasp one of Spring’s Latin tags: ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi,fn9 by gum!’

I must have managed to crawl back to the bed, for when I woke it was growing dusk, and Miranda was dressed and wearing an apron, humming merrily as she cooked omelettes in the galley for our supper, while I lay reflecting on the lack of supervision in colonial finishing schools, and wondering if I’d be fit for more jollity before the mail tender left in the morning. I ate my omelette with a trembling hand, but when she teased me into sharing asparagus with her, nibbling towards each other along the spear until our mouths met, I began to revive, and was all for it when she said we should spend the night aboard, and her butler would see my traps taken down to the wharf in good time.

‘But I shall be quite desolate at parting, for I have never knoawn anyone as jollee as you, Harree!’ cries she, stroking my whiskers. ‘You are ever so excessivelee wicked – far worse than Papa said!’

‘Then we’re a pair. Tell you what – let’s take a turn on deck, and then we’ll play picquet – and if you cheat, I’ll tie you up in that Rapunzel hair of yours, and show you what wickedness is.’

‘But I am thee greatest cheat!’ laughs she, so we went on deck, and I had to tell her the story of Raphunzel, which she’d never heard, while she nestled against me by the rail in the warm darkness, with the water chuckling against the hull and the last amber glow dying above the western rim. It was the place to linger with a girl, but presently it grew chilly, so we went down to our hand of picquet. She was no cheat at all, though, so I had to teach her, but once or twice I wondered if her mind was on the game at all, for she kept glancing at the clock, and when it struck she started, and fumbled her cards, and apologised, laughing like a schoolgirl – ‘clumsee Clara!’

The nursery exclamation reminded me what a child she was – Lord love us, I’d been married before she was born. Aye, and a damned odd child, behind the vivacious chatter and mischievous smile, with her Babylonian bedroom manners. Peculiar lusts are supposed to be a male prerogative (well, look at me), but the truth is we ain’t in it with the likes of the Empress Tzu-hsi or Lola of the Hair-brush or that Russian aunt I knew who went in for flogging in steambaths … or Miranda Spring, not yet of age, smiling brightly to cover a little yawn. Jaded from her mattress exertions, no doubt; we’ll brisk you up presently, thinks I, with a few of those Hindu gymnastics that Mrs Leslie of Meerut was so partial to …

There was a vague sound from somewhere outside, and then a heavy footfall on the deck over our heads. The butler from the house, was my first thought – and Miranda dropped a card in shuffling, retrieved it, and offered me the pack to cut.

‘Who is it?’ says I, and she glanced at the clock. Suddenly I realised she was trembling, but it was excitement, not fear, and the smile in the black eyes was one of pure triumph.

‘That will be Papa at last,’ says she.

There is, as that sound chap Ecclesiastes says, a time to get, and if I’ve reached the age of ninety-one it’s because I’ve always been able to recognise it. I was afoot on the word ‘Papa’ and streaking for the bed-cabin, where I knew there was a window; I wrenched the door open and raced through – into the bloody lavatory, and by the time I was out again it was too late: the biggest Malay I’ve ever seen, a huge yellow villain clad only in duck trowsers and with arms like hawsers, was at the foot of the companion, making way for John Charity Spring in full war-paint – reefer jacket, pilot cap, and a face like an Old Testament prophet. He took in the scene, hands thrust into pockets, and growled to the Malay.

‘On deck, Jumbo, and if he sticks his neck out, break it!’ He turned his glare on Miranda, who was still seated, the pack in her hands, and barked at her: ‘Did this thing molest you?’

She riffled the cards, cool as you like, while my bowels dissolved. ‘No, Papa. He did nott.’

‘He tried though, I’ll lay! I know the villain!’ His voice rose to its accustomed roar. ‘Did he lay his vile hands on you? Answer me!’

Oh, Christ, I thought, it’s the finish – but she simply glanced at me with infinite scorn, shrugged her slim shoulders, and made an inelegant spitting noise. Spring stood breathing like a bellows, his wild eyes moving from one to other of us; I knew better than to utter a denial – and I didn’t laugh, either, like rash Michel.

‘Aye, I’ll swear he did, though! Didn’t you, you lousy lecher!’ He strode to confront me, jerking his fists from his pockets, his jaw working in fury. ‘Didn’t you? By God –’

‘Oh, Papa! Of course he tried to kiss mee! Do you think he is the first? I am nearly eighteen, you knoaw!’ If ever a voice stamped its foot, hers did; she sounded like an impatient governess. ‘I am nott a child! What were you expecting, after oll?’ She tossed her head. ‘But he is just a great bullee … and a great coward, as you said.’

His breath was rasping on my face, and his eyes were like a mad dog’s, but suddenly he wheeled about, stared at her, and then strode to a cupboard on the bulkhead and dragged out a large volume which I recognised in amazement as a Bible. He slammed it down on the table beside her.

‘Miranda,’ says he, and his voice was hoarse, either with rage or fatherly concern. ‘My child, it grieves me to do this, but I must! Swear to me on this Book that no … no unworthiness, no impropriety, passed between you and this creature –’

‘Oh, Papa, what a fuss! Oll about notheeng! This is so sillee –’

‘Silly be damned!’ bawls paterfamilias. ‘Put your hand on the blasted Book, girl!’ He seized her wrist and slapped her palm on the Bible. ‘Now, make your oath – and take care … aye, quid de quoque viro, et cui dicas, saepe caveto,fn1 mind – even with a rat like him! Swear!’

I braced myself to leap for the ladder, resolved to kick the appalling Jumbo in the crotch, God willing, for while the dear child had lied splendidly thus far, I knew she was convent-reared on all that hellfire and mortal sin bilge, and wouldn’t dare perjure – and I stopped in the nick of time, for she was giving an angry little shrug, looking Papa sulkily in the eye, and swearing by Almightee Godd that she had repelled my clumsy advances with ease and it would take a better man than Flashy to drag her into the long grass, or words to that effect. Spring ground his teeth in relief, and then spoke two words I’ll wager he’d never uttered in his life before.

‘Forgive me, my child. I never doubted you – but I know this scoundrel, d’ye see …?’ He turned his dreadful face to me, and if hair and claws had sprouted from his hands, I’d not have wondered. ‘It would break my heart,’ snarls he, ‘if I thought … but there! God bless you, child.’ He bussed her resoundingly on the forehead, and the little trollop gave him a smile of radiant purity. ‘You are the bravest of girls and the dearest of daughters, quem te Deus esse jussit.fn2 Now, go along to bed, and give thanks to Him who has guarded you this day.’

‘Good night, dear Papa,’ says she, and kissed the brute. She walked to the companion – and God help us, as she passed me she pursed her lips in a silent kiss, and winked. Then she was gone, and Spring hurled the Bible into its cupboard and glared at me.

‘And you, if you ever pray, which I’m damned sure you don’t, can give thanks for the innocence of a good woman! A novelty in your filthy experience, is she not?’ Well, novelty was the word for Miranda, no error, if not innocence. ‘Aye, she’s as pure as you are vile, as straight as you are warped, as brave as you are … bah! And she don’t lie, either!’ He gave his barking laugh. ‘So you needn’t stand quaking, my hero! Sit down!’

Now, I’d stood mum and paralysed through the astonishing scene I’ve just described, because that’s what you do when J. C. Spring is on the rampage. Why the devil he wasn’t in Grahamstown hadn’t crossed my mind – I’d been too busy thanking God that his daughter was a complete hand, and that the old monster had swallowed her tale whole – but since he had, why, all was well, surely, and I could depart without a stain on my character. I recalled my wits and met his eye, two damned difficult things to do, I can tell you.

‘Thank’ee, but I think I’ll take my leave, if –’

‘You’ll do no such thing!’ bawls he. ‘Now that you’re here, you’ll stay awhile, and give me the pleasure of your blasted company! Sit, damn you!’

I sat, believe me, and he gave a great white-whiskered grin, chuckling, and poured two stiff tots from the decanter on the buffet. ‘No orange this time, I think,’ sneers he. ‘Ye’ll want it straight, if I’m a judge. Cigar? Or cheroot? You Far Easters like ’em black, I believe … go on, man – utrum horum mavis accipe,fn3 and take your ease! Your health – while you’ve got it!’

I downed the brandy as if it was water, for I’d seen Spring jovial before, and knew what could come of it. He seated himself opposite me at the table, sipped and wiped his whiskers, and eyed me with genial malevolence. I’d as soon be smiled at by a cobra.

‘So ye didn’t heed me,’ says he. ‘Well, ye’ve more bottom than ever I gave you credit for. And if you were half the man you look, instead of the toad I know you to be … I’d not blame you. Miranda is a maid to bewitch any man. I’m proud o’ that girl, Flashman, with good cause … and if I thought ye’d laid a finger on her …’ suddenly the hellish glare was back in his eyes, and his scar was pulsing ‘– I’d serve you as I served another reptile that tried to defile her, by God, I would!’ He smashed his fist on the table. ‘I found her fighting for her chastity – aye, in her own chamber, by heaven – with a foul seducing frog-eating son-of-a-bitch who sought to have his vile way with her when my back was turned! My daughter, the bastard!’ There was spittle on his beard. ‘What d’ye say to that, hey?’

When a maniac inquires – answer. ‘Damnable! French, was he? Well, there you are –’

‘D’ye know what I did to him?’ His voice was soft now, but the empty eyes weren’t. ‘I stripped him stark, and cut the life out of him – sixty-one strokes, and you wouldn’t have known he was human. Murder, you’ll say –’

‘No, no, not at all – quite the –’

‘– but the fact is, Flashman, I was beside myself!’ cries this raving ogre. ‘Aye, homo extra est corpus suum cum irascitur,fn4 you remember …’

‘Absolutely! May I trouble you for the brandy, captain –’

‘There were those suspected me – d’ye think I gave a damn? It was just, I tell you! Condign punishment, as the articles say … and that lass of mine, that young heroine – I’ll never forget it, never! Fighting like a tigress against that beast’s base passion … but not a tear or a tremor … thank God I came in time!’

You should have seen her base passion a few hours ago, thinks I, and quailed at the memory … God, if ever he found out! He sipped brandy, growling, came out of his reverie of Miranda-worship, and realised he’d been confiding in the scum of the earth.

‘But you were no threat to her!’ He curled his lip. ‘No, not you – ye see, Flashman, I could trust her virtue to be stronger even than your depravity, else I’d never ha’ let you within a mile of her, let alone permit her to beguile you here! Aye, that jars you! Oh, you’ve been had, my son!’ For an instant the pale eyes were alight with triumph, then he was scowling again. ‘But I’ve been through hell this day, knowing she was within your reach; my skin crawls yet at the thought of it … but she’s my daughter, steel true, blade straight, and too much for you or a dozen like you!’

It hit me like a blow. I’d known there was something horribly amiss when he’d arrived unexpected, but then Miranda had quieted him, and he’d been civil (for him), and only now was it plain that I’d been trapped, most artfully and damnably, by this murderous pirate and his slut of a daughter – but why? It made no sense; he had no quarrel with me – he’d said so, in those very words.

‘What d’ye mean? What d’ye want of me? I’ve done nothing, you heard her –’

‘Nothing, you say? Oh, you’ve done nothing today, I know that – or you’d not be alive this moment! But think back ten years, Flashman, to the night when you and your conniving whore Willinck crimped me out of Orleans –’

‘I’d no hand in that, I swear! And you told me –’

‘– that I bore no grudge?’ His laugh was a jeering snarl. ‘More fool you for believing me – but your wit’s all in your loins and belly, isn’t it? You can’t conceive what it meant for a man of my breeding – my eminence, damn your eyes! – a scholar, a philosopher, honoured and respected, a man of refinement, a master and commander even in the degraded depths of a slave-ship – a man born to have rule – aye, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!’ roars he, spraying me with his incoherent rage, so consumed by it that for once Latin quotation failed him. ‘To be hounded before the mast by scum who wouldn’t have pulley-hauled on my ship, herded with filthy packet rats, fed on slop and glad to get it, threatened with the cat, by Jesus – aye, stare, rot you! I, John Charity Spring, Fellow of Oriel … damn them all to hell, thieves, trimmers and academic vermin …’ His voice sank to a hoarse whisper, for he was back on the Oxford tack again, contemplating his ruined career, his berserk fit over, thank God, for I’d never seen him worse. He took a huge breath, filled his glass, and brooded at me.

‘I cleaned the heads on that ship, Flashman – all the way to the Cape.’ His tone was almost normal now. ‘Thanks to you. And d’ye think a day has passed in ten years when I haven’t remembered what I owe you? And now … here you are, at last. We may agree with Horace, I think – Raro antecedentem scelestum deseruit pede poena claudo. I see from your vacant gape that you’re no better acquainted with his works than you were on the College, damn your ignorance! – so I’ll tell you it means that Justice, though moving slowly, seldom fails to overhaul the fleeing villain.’ He shoved the bottle at me. ‘Have some more brandy, why don’t you? Your flight’s over, bucko!’

This was desperate – but terrified as I was, I could see something that he had overlooked, and it spurred me now to unwonted defiance, though I came to my feet and backed away before I voiced it.

‘Keep your bloody brandy – and your threats, ’cos they don’t scare me, Spring! I don’t know what your game is, but you’d best take care – because you’ve forgotten something! I’m not a friendless nobody nowadays – and I ain’t some poor French pimp, neither! You think you draw water? Well, you ain’t the only one!’ A heaven-sent thought struck me. ‘Your governor, Grey, has charged me – Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., K.B., and be damned to you! – with a personal message to Lord Palmerston, d’ye hear? So you can come off your blasted quarter-deck, because you daren’t touch me!’ I cast a quick glance at the companion, ready to run like hell.

The pale hypnotic eyes never blinked, but his mouth twisted in a grin. ‘My, what a dunghill rooster we’ve grown, to be sure! Vox et præterea nihil!fn5 But you’ve forgotten something, too. No one saw you come aboard here. It was a hired rig that brought you to my house – and my servants are safe folk. So if the distinguished Flashman, with all his trumpery titles, were to disappear … why, he sailed on the mail for home! And if, by chance, word came months from now that you never boarded the mail … a mystery! And who more baffled than your old shipmate, John Charity Spring? What, silent, are we? Stricken speechless?’

He pushed back his chair and reached a flask from the buffet. ‘You’d better try some schnapps, I think. There … don’t bite the glass, you fool! Drink it! Christ, what a craven thing you are! Sit down, man, before you fall – vitiant artus ægræ contagia mentis,fn6 as Ovid would say if he could see you. And rest easy – I’m not going to harm a hair of your precious head!’

That was no comfort at all, from him; I knew that diseased mind too well – he meant me some hideous mischief, but I could only wait shuddering until he told me what it was, which he was preparing to do with sadistic relish, brimming my glass and resuming his seat before he spoke.

‘When I heard you’d landed, it was a prayer answered. But I couldn’t see how to come at you, until Miranda showed the way – oh, she has all my confidence, the only creature on earth in whom I put trust. “Let me beckon him,” says she – and didn’t she just, on that first night at Government House! It was gall to my soul to see it – my girl … and you, you dirty satyr! A dozen times I would ha’ cried it off, for fear of what harm might come to her, but she laughed away my doubts. “Trust me, Papa!” My girl! D’ye wonder I worship the earth she treads on? Would you believe,’ he leaned forward, gloating, ‘’twas she advised I should warn you off! “He’ll come all the faster, to spite you … if he thinks it safe,” says she. She knew you, d’ye hear – oh, yes, Flashman, she knows all my story, from Oxford to the Middle Passage – and she’s as bent on settling her father’s scores as he is himself! We have no secrets, you see, my girl and I.’

I could think of one. Oh, she’d tricked me into his clutches, right enough – but she’d humbugged him, too, whoring away like a demented succubus while he was biting his nails over her supposed virtue. And the doting old lunatic believed her. God knew how many she’d been in the bushes with, his stainless virgin … if only I’d dared to tell him! Suddenly I felt sick, and not only with fear; something was wrong with my innards …

‘And you came to the bait, like the lustful swine you are,’ says Spring. ‘And it’s time to cast our accounts and pay, eh, Flashman?’

You know me. With any other of the monsters I’d known, I’d have pleaded and whined and tried to buy off – but he was mad, and my mind seemed to be growing numb. Another wave of nausea came over me, my head swam, and I took a stiff gulp of schnapps to steady myself.

‘Belay that!’ growls Spring, and snatched the glass from me. ‘I don’t want you dead to the world before I’ve done.’ He seized my wrist. ‘Sit still, damn you … ha! pulse sluggish. Very good.’ He dropped my hand and sat back, and as the sick fit shook me again, I saw that he was smiling.

‘Now you know what a crimped sailorman feels like,’ says he. ‘Yes, the schnapps is loaded – just like the mixture that fat tart slipped to me in Orleans. I believe in eye for eye, you see – no more, no less. You shipped me out, drugged and helpless, and now you’re going the same way – you can live on skilly and hard-tack, you can try your V.C. and K.B. on a bucko mate, you can have your arse kicked from here to Baltimore, and see how you like it, damn your blood!’ His voice was rising again, but he checked himself and leaned forward to thumb up my eyelid – and I couldn’t raise a hand to stop him.

‘That’s right,’ says he. ‘Baltimore, with a skipper of my acquaintance. If I were a vindictive man, it would ha’ been Orleans, but I’m giving you an even chance, d’ye see? Baltimore’s about right, I reckon. You’ve been there before – so you know what’s waiting for you, eh?’

He stood up, and I tried to follow, but my legs wouldn’t answer. I heaved – and couldn’t move a muscle, but the horror of it was that I could see and hear and feel the sweat pouring over my skin. God knows what poison he’d fed me, but it had gripped me all in an instant; I tried to speak, but only a croak came out. Spring laughed aloud, and stooped to me, the demonic pale eyes gleaming, and began to shout at me.

‘Hear this, damn you! You’ll go ashore, derelict and penniless – as I did! And word will go ahead of you, to the police, and the federal people, not only in Baltimore, but in Washington and Orleans! You’ll find they have fine long memories, Flashman – they’ll remember Beauchamp Millward Comber! The U.S. Navy have their file on him, I daresay – perjury, impersonation, and slave-trading … but that’s nothing, is it? You’re wanted for slave-stealing, too, as I recall, which is a capital offence – and they’re a dam’ sight hotter on it now than they were ten years ago, even! And then there’s the small matter of complicity in the murder of one Peter Omohundro – oh, it’s quite a score, and I don’t doubt there’s more that I don’t know about!’

He stood straight, and now he seemed to have swollen into a ghastly giant, white-bearded and hideous, who struck at me, but I couldn’t feel the slaps, although they were jarring my head right and left.

‘See how much good your medals and honours and the brave name of Sir Harry Flashman does you when the Yankee law has you by the neck! Aye, olim meminisse juvabit, rot you …!’ His bellowings were growing fainter. ‘Crawl or run or worm your way out of that! If you can – good luck to you! Bon voyage, you son-of-a-bitch …!’

The pounding in my ears blotted out all other sounds, and my sight was going, for I could no longer make out his form, and the cabin lights were dwindling to pin-points. The nausea had passed, my senses were going – but I remember clear as day my last thought before I went under, and ’twasn’t about Spring or Miranda or the hellish pickle awaiting me. No; for once I’d recognised his quotation – it had been framed on the wall of the hospital at Rugby, where I’d sobered up on that distant day when Arnold kicked me out … ‘Olim meminisse juvabit’,fn7 and dooced appropriate, too. Seneca, if memory serves.

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?’

I was about to say no, but one look at the loungers stopped me: too many ferret eyes and ugly mugs for my liking, and I’d no wish to be crimped a second time. I said I had a ship, and a greasy disease in a billycock hat and brass watch-chain asked:

‘What ship would that be, sailor?’

‘The Sea Witch, and I’m Bully Waterman,¹⁵ so get the hell out of my way!’ says I. Being over six feet and heavy set has its uses, and I was out in the street and round the corner before he’d had time to offer me a drink and a billy behind the ear. You didn’t linger in establishments like the Knitting Swede’s, not unless you fancied a free holiday in a whaler for the next couple of years. I walked on quickly, reflecting that it had been considerate of Lynch to pay my lodging; but then, it may have been a club rule that insensible members had to be settled for in advance.

I walked for two minutes, and felt so groggy that I had to sit down on a barrel at the mouth of an alley, where I took stock. I knew I was in sailortown, Baltimore, but that was all. The growth on my chin told me I hadn’t been ashore above twenty-four hours. Whatever information Spring had sent to the authorities must have been in their hands for two days by now, and no doubt it would contain an excellent description, even down to my clothes. These consisted of a shirt and trousers, boots, and a canvas jacket, the crease not improved by a night in that verminous hole I’d just escaped from. (I’ve since learned, by the way, that it was quite celebrated among the less discriminating seafarers; if you’d stopped at the Knitting Swede’s you could dine out on it in every shebeen from Glasgow to Sydney.)¹⁶

Now, I doubted if the authorities would be scouring the streets for Beauchamp Millward Comber, but the sooner I was under the protection of my country’s flag, the better. A port the size of Baltimore must surely have a British consul, or some kind of commercial representative at least, who shouldn’t be too difficult to find; he might look askance at my appearance, but it would have to do, since Captain Lynch’s generosity hadn’t run the length of leaving a single damned penny, or anything else, in my pockets. It wouldn’t make my bona fides any easier to establish, but I’d meet that trouble when I came to it.

Although I’d been in Baltimore before, with the U.S. Navy folk, I’d no notion of how the town lay, so I took a slant along the street, which was bustling with business round the chandlers’ shops and warehouses, and approached a prosperous-looking old gent to inquire the way to the centre of town. I’d barely got a word out when he rounded on me.

‘You goddam leeches, can’t you work for a change!’ cries he. ‘I declare you’re stout enough!’ He slapped ten cents into my hand and strode on, leaving me wondering if it would buy me a shave … and now that my head was clearing, I found I was almighty hungry …

D’you know, within an hour I was richer by four dollars, and a splendid new vocabulary – the first time I ever heard the word ‘bum’ mean anything but backside was on that morning. The beauty of it was, I didn’t have to beg, even: my dishevelled clothing, unshaven chin, and most charming smile, with a courteous finger raised to the brow, marked me as a mendicant, apparently, and for every nine who brushed past, a tenth would drop a few coppers in my palm. Damned interesting, I found it. Women were altogether more generous than men, especially as I moved up-town; when I approached two fashionable young misses with ‘Pardon me, marm’ and a bow, one of them exclaimed ‘Oh, my!’ and gave me fifty cents and a fluttery look before they hurried away tittering. I left off, though, when I became aware that I was being watched by a belted constable with a damned disinheriting moustache, but I’ve calculated since that I could have cleared ten thousand dollars a year on the streets of Baltimore, easy, which is two thousand quid, sufficient to buy you a lieutenancy in the Guards in those days – and from the look of some of them, I’d not be surprised.

I was still no nearer finding the consul, and the constable had given me a scare, so after a shave and brush-up and a hearty steak and eggs at a chop-house, I looked for a fellow-countryman – and the sure way to do that in America in those days was to find a Catholic church. I spotted one, noted that the name of its priest displayed on the gilt board was Rafferty, made my way through the musty wax-and-image interior, and found the man himself delving like a navigator in the garden behind the church, whistling ‘The Young May Moon’ in his shirt-sleeves. He greeted me with a cry of ‘Hollo, me son, and what can I be doin’ for ye on this parky day?’ a jaunty little leprechaun with a merry eye.

I asked my question and he pulled a face. ‘Faith, now, an’ I don’t know there’s any such crater in Baltimore,’ says he. ‘Jist off the boat, are ye?’ The shrewd blue eyes took me in. ‘Well, if ’tis diplomatic assistance ye’re seekin’, Washington’ll be the place for you, where our minister is. He’s new come, an’ all, they tell me – Lyons, his name is, an English feller. He’ll be your man, right enough. And what would ye say, yes or no, to a cup o’ tea?’

Seeing him so affable, and with only two dollars in my pocket, it struck me that if I played smooth I might touch him for the fare to Washington, so I affected the faintest of brogues and introduced myself as Grattan Nugent-Hare (who was rotting safely in a cottonwood grove somewhere south of Socorro) of the Rathfarnham and Trinity College, lately arrived to join my brother Frank, who held a minor position in a Washington bank. Unfortunately, I had been set upon soon after landing the previous night, and was without cash or effects. He opened eyes and mouth wide.

‘D’ye tell me? Dear God, what’s the world comin’ to? An’ you wi’ your foot barely on the ground, and from Dublin, too! Have ye been to the police, man dear? Ye have – an’ got little good o’ them? Aye, well, they’ve a hard row to hoe, wi’ some queer ones in this town, I’ll tell ye! They wouldn’t know of a British consul, neither …? No, no … it’s a wonder they didn’t think to steer you to a feller-countryman, at least – there’s enough of English and ourselves hereabouts, God knows. But they didn’t; ah, well. But come away an’ we’ll have that dish o’ tea while we think what’s best to be done. An’ how’s the Liffey lookin’, eh?’

I sat in his kitchen while he prattled Irishly and made tea. Since I’d never been in Dublin in my life, I found it safest to let him run on, with a cheery agreement from time to time, waiting an opportunity to state my needs, but he didn’t give me one, being content to prose sentimentally about the ‘ould country’, until:

‘An’ ye’re in the banking line yourself, are ye?’ says he at last. ‘Ah, well, ye’re in the right furrow in Ameriky; fine grand opportunities for a gentleman like yourself, so there are; it’s a commercial world, so it is, a commercial world, but none the worse for bein’ that if the trade’s honest an’ the word’s good! An’ ye’re a Trinity man, too!’ He chuckled wistfully. ‘Ah, this is a country of grand prospects, but I wonder could a man do better than sit in the ould College court contemplatin’ the trees on St Stephen’s Green on a summer’s evenin’? You’d be there about ’45, am I right?’

I made a hasty calculation and said, rather earlier, ’43.

‘Then ye would know ould Professor Faylen!’ cries he. ‘A fine man, that, an’ a grand Hebrew scholar, so they said, not that I’m a judge. He would still be about in your day, was he not?’

I can smell a false lead as fast as anyone, but he was such a happy simpleton that I decided it was safe to say I hadn’t studied under Faylen myself, but knew of him. He nodded amiably, and sighed.

‘Ah, well, here am I blatherin’ on, an’ you itchin’ to take your way to Washington. Aye, but with your pockets all to let. Well, man dear, I was after thinkin’ yonder that I’d be makin’ ye a small loan for your train ticket, but d’ye know, I’d be party to an awful sin if I did that, so I would. Ye see,’ says he, shaking his pawky old head, ‘the day ye find a priest sittin’ in the court at Trinity is a day ye’ll be able to skate over Dublin Bay from Bray to Balbriggan – an’ as for seein’ St Stephen’s Green from the court, well, I doubt if even ould Faylen could see that far from heaven, where he’s been this five-and-thirty years, God rest his soul. An’ tellin’ me ye were a banker,’ he added sorrowfully, ‘an’ you wid spurs an’ brass buttons stickin’ out all over ye! Now, will ye take another drop o’ tea … soldier, an’ tell me all about it?’

‘You wouldn’t believe it if I did,’ says I, rising. ‘Thank’ee for the tea, padre, and I’ll bid you a very good day.’

‘Stop, stop!’ cries he. ‘Sit down, man dear, an’ don’t be takin’ offence at an ould man jist because he knows Phoenix Park shoulders when he sees them! Come, now, be easy, an’ drink your tea. Can ye not see I’m burstin’ to know the truth of it?’

His smile was so eager and friendly that I found myself smiling in turn. ‘What makes you think I’ll tell truth this time?’

‘Why shouldn’t ye? Ye’ll come to no harm from me if ye do. An’ if ye don’t – well, am I to have no diversion at all? Now then – whut’s this I wouldn’t believe? Jist you try me!’

‘Very well … I’m a British Army officer, I was on my way home from India, I was waylaid at Cape Town and crimped aboard a packet which arrived here yesterday, I’m destitute – but thanks to you I know where to find British authorities who’ll help me back to England. And if you believe that –’

‘And why would I not? It fits ye better than all that moonshine about bankin’ an’ Trinity, I’ll say that for it! What’s your name, my son?’

There was no earthly reason why I shouldn’t tell him – so I shook my head. Least said.

‘An’ why didn’t ye ask direction from the first policeman ye saw?’ I still said nothing, and he nodded, no longer smiling. I rose again to go, for the sooner I was out of this, the better, but he stayed me with a hand on my sleeve. ‘Ye’ll tell me no more? Well, now, just bide a minute while I think about … no, don’t go! Ye want the fare to Washington, don’t ye?’

I waited, while he cogitated, chin in hand, eyes bright as a bird’s.

‘Tell ye whut I think. Ye’re an officer, an’ a bit of a gentleman – I know the look. An’ ye’re a runner – now, now, don’t be addin’ to your sins by denyin’ it, for I had a parish in Leix in the Great Trouble, an’ I know that look, too – aye, twice as long in the leg as ye would be if I put a fut-rule on ye! An’, man dear, ye’re a desperate liar … but who’s not, will ye tell me? But ye’re civil, at least – an’ ye’re Army, an’ didn’t me own father an’ two uncles an’ that other good Irishman Arthur Wellesley follow the flag across Spain togither – they did!’ He paused, and sighed. ‘Now, ye’re a Protestant, so I can’t penance ye for tellin’ lies. But since I’m dreadful afflicted wid the rheumatics, and can’t abide diggin’ at all, at all … well, if ye can sink your gentlemanly pride an’ finish them two rows for me, why, t’will be for the good o’ your soul an’ my body. An’ there’ll be ten dollars to take ye to Washington – nine an’ a half in loan, to be repaid at your convenience, an’ fifty cents for your labour. Well … what say ye, my son?’

Well, I needed that ten dollars … but who’d have thought, when Campbell pinned my Cross on me, that seven months later I’d be digging a bog-trotter’s garden in Maryland? Father Rafferty watched me as I turned the last sods, observing drily that it was plain to see I was English from the way I handled a spade. Then he gave me a mug of beer, and counted ten dollars carefully into my palm.

‘I’ll walk ye to the station,’ says he. ‘No one’ll look twice at ye when ye’re keepin’ step wid the Church. An’ I can see ye don’t get on the wrong train, or lose your money, or go astray anyways, ye know?’

He put me on the right train, sure enough, but the rest of his statement proved as wrong as could be. Someone did look at us, but I didn’t notice at the time, possibly because I was busy parrying Rafferty’s artful questions about the Army and India – at least I could satisfy him I was telling the truth about those.

‘Ask at the Washington station where the British minister’s to be found,’ he advised me, ‘an’ if they don’t know, make your way to Willard’s Hotel on Fourteenth Street, an’ they’ll set ye right. It’s the great place, an’ if they turn up their noses at your togs, jist give ’em your Hyde Park swagger, eh?

‘But mind how ye go, now!’ cries he, as I mounted the step to the coach. ‘T’will be dark by the time ye get in, an’ ’tis a desperate place for garotters an’ scallywags an’ the like! We wouldn’t want ye waylaid a second time, would we?’

Gratitude ain’t my long suit, as you know, but he’d seen me right, and he was a cheery wee soul; looking down at the smiling pixie face under the round hat, I couldn’t help liking the little murphy, and wondering why he’d been at such pains on my behalf. It’s a priest’s business, of course, to succour the distressed sinner, but I knew there was more in it than that. He was a lonely old man, far from home, and he was Irish, and had guessed I was on the run, and I was Army, like his father and uncles. And he had taken to me, as folk do, even when they know I’m not straight.

‘I wish ye’d tell me your name, though!’ says he, when I thanked him. I said I’d send him my card when I repaid the ten dollars.

‘That ye will!’ cries he heartily. ‘In the meantime, though – your Christian name, eh?’

‘Harry.’

‘I believe ye – ye look like a Harry. God knows ye didn’t look like – what was’t? – Grattan? Grattan the banker from the Rathfarnham – the impidence of it!’ He laughed, and looked wistful. ‘Aye, me – sometimes I could wish I’d been a rascal meself.’

‘It’s never too late,’ says I, and he spluttered in delight.

‘Git away wid ye, spalpeen!’ cries he, and stood waving as the train pulled out, a little black figure vanishing into the hissing steam.

I reckon Father Rafferty was one of those good fools who are put into the world to grease the axles for people like me. They charm so easy, if you play ’em right, and the bigger a scoundrel you are the more they’ll put themselves out for you, no doubt in the hope that if you do reform, they’ll get that much more treasure in heaven for it. You may be astonished to know that I did repay the loan, later on, but in no spirit of gratitude or obligation, or because I’d quite liked the little ass. No, I paid because I could easily afford it, and there’s one rule, as a practising pagan, that I don’t break if I can help it – never offend the local tribal gods; it ain’t lucky.

It was dark when we pulled into Washington, and the conductor had never heard of the British ministry; oh, sure, he knew Willard’s Hotel, but plainly wondered what business this rumpled traveller without a hat could have at such a select establishment. He was starting to give me reluctant directions when a chap who’d alighted from the train directly behind me said if it was Willard’s I wanted, why, he was going that way himself. He was a sober-looking young fellow, neatly dressed, so I thanked him and we went out of the crowded station into a dark and dirty Washington evening.

‘It’s close enough to walk if you don’t mind the rain,’ says my companion, and since it seemed only prudent to save my cash, I agreed, and we set off. It wasn’t too damp, but Washington didn’t seem to have improved much in ten years; they were still building the place, and making heavy weather of it, for the street we followed was ankle-deep in mud, and so poor was the lighting that you couldn’t see where you were putting your feet. We jostled along the sidewalk, blundering into people, and presently my guide pulled up with a mild oath, glanced about him, and said we’d be quicker taking a side-street. It didn’t look much better than an alley, but he led the way confidently, so I ploughed on behind, thinking no evil – and suddenly he lengthened his stride, wheeled round to face me, and whistled sharply.

I’m too old a hand to stand with my mouth open. I turned to flee for the main street, cursing myself for having been so easily duped, and after Rafferty’s warning about footpads too – and stopped dead in my tracks. Two dark figures were blocking my way, and before I had time to turn again to rush on my single ambusher, the larger one stepped forward, but when he raised his hands it wasn’t to strike; he held them palms towards me in a restraining gesture, and his voice when he spoke was quiet, even friendly.

‘Good evening, Mr Comber. Welcome back, sir – why, you mayn’t believe it, but this is just like old times!’

For a split second I was paralysed in mind and body, and then came the icy stab of terror as I thought: police! … Spring’s letters, my description, the alarm going out for Comber – but then why had the young man not clapped his hand on my shoulder at the station …?

‘Guess you don’t remember me,’ says the big shadow. ‘It’s been a whiles – N’awlins, ten years ago, in back of Willinck’s place. You thought I was Navy, then. I took you to Crixus, remember?’

It was so incredible that it took me a moment to recall who ‘Crixus’ was – the Underground Railroad boss whose identity I never knew because he hid it under the name of some Roman slave who’d been a famous rebel. Crixus was the little steely-eyed bugger who’d dragooned me into running that uppity nigger Randolph up the river, and dam’ near got me shot – but it wasn’t possible that he could know of my presence now, within a day of my landing …

‘He’s waitin’ to see you,’ says the big fellow, ‘an’ the sooner we get you off the streets, the better. We’ve got a closed cab –’

‘I don’t understand! You’re quite mistaken, sir – I know of nobody called … Cricket, did you say?’ I was babbling with shock, and he absolutely laughed.

‘Say, I wish I could think as quick as you do! Ten years ago, Billy,’ says he to his companion, ‘when we jumped this fellow, he started talkin’ Dutch! Now, come along, Mr Comber – ’cos I’d know you anywhere, an’ we’re wastin’ time and safety.’ His voice hardened, and he took my arm. ‘We mean you no harm – like I once told you, you’re the last man I’d want to hurt!’

Sometimes you feel you’re living your life over again. It was so now, and for an uncanny moment I was back in the alley behind Susie’s brothel, with the three figures materialising out of the darkness … ‘Hold it right there, mister! You’re covered, front and rear!’ I knew now it was no use bluffing or running; for good or ill, they had me.

‘It wasn’t Dutch, it was German,’ says I. ‘Very well, I’m the man you call Comber, and I’ll be happy to take your cab – but not to Mr Crixus! Not until I’ve been to the British ministry!’

‘No, sir!’ snaps he. ‘We got our orders. An’ believe me, you’ll be a sight safer with us than in the British ministry, not if your whole Queen’s Navy was guarding it! So come on, mister!’

God knew what that meant, but it settled it. Whatever Crixus wanted – and I still couldn’t take in that he’d got word of me (dammit, he should have been in Orleans, anyway) or that these fellows were real – he’d been a friend, after his fashion, and was evidently still well disposed. And with the three pressing about me, and my arm in a strong hand, I had no choice.

‘Very good,’ says I. ‘But you don’t put a sack over my head this time!’

He laughed, and said I was a card, and then they were bustling me out of the alley and into a closed growler – mighty practised, with one in front, one gripping me, the third behind. The big man shouted to the driver, and we were lurching along, back towards the station, as near as I could judge, and then we swung right across a broad quagmire of a street, and through the left-hand window I caught a glimpse in the distance of what I recognised as the Capitol without its dome – they still hadn’t got its bloody lid on, would you believe it, in 1859? – and knew we must be crossing the Avenue, going south. The big man saw me looking, and whipped down the blinds, and we bowled along in the stuffy darkness in silence, while I strove to calm my quivering nerves and think out what it all meant. How they’d found me, I couldn’t fathom, and it mattered less than what lay ahead … what the devil could Crixus want with me? A horrid thought – did he know I’d left Randolph to his fate on that steamboat? Well, I’d thought the bastard was dead, and he’d turned up later in Canada, anyway, so I’d heard, so it wasn’t likely to be that. He couldn’t want me to run niggers again, surely? No, it defied all explanation, so I sat fretting in the cab with the big man at my side and his two mates opposite, for what must have been a good half-hour, and then the cab stopped and we descended on what looked like a suburban street, with big detached houses in gloomy gardens either side, and underfoot nothing but Washington macadam: two feet of gumbo.

They led me through a gate and up a path to a great front door. The big fellow knocked a signal, and we were in a dim hall with a couple of hard-looking citizens, one of ’em a black with shoulders like a prize-fighter. ‘Here he is,’ says my big escort, and a moment later I was blinking in the brightness of a well-furnished drawing-room, only half-believing the sight of the bird-like figure crying welcome from a great chair by the fireplace. He was thinner than I remembered, and terribly frail, but there was no mistaking the bald dome of head and the glinting spectacles beneath brows like white hedgerows. He had a rug over his knees, and from his wasted look I guessed he was crippled now, but he was fairly whimpering in rapture, stretching out his arms towards me.

‘It is he! My prayers are answered! God has sent you back to us! Oh, my boy, my brave boy, come to my arms – let me embrace you!’ He was absolutely weeping for joy, which ain’t usually how I’m greeted, but I deemed it best to submit; it was like being clutched by a weak skeleton smelling of camphor. ‘Oh, my boy!’ sobs he. ‘Ave, Spartacus! Oh, stand there a moment that I may look on you! Oh, Moody, do you remember that night – that blessed night when we set George Randolph on the golden road to freedom? And here he is again, that Mr Standfast who led him through the Valley of the Shadow to the Enchanted Ground!’

With one or two stops at Vanity Fair, if he’d only known, but now he broke down altogether, blubbering, while my big guardian, Moody, sucked his teeth, and the black, who’d come into the room with him, glowered at me as though it were my fault that the old fool was having hysterics. He calmed down in a moment, mopping himself and repeating over and over that God had sent me, which I didn’t like the sound of – I mean to say, what had he sent me for? It might be that Crixus, having heard of my arrival, God knew how, was merely intent on a glad reunion and prose over good old slave-stealing times, but I doubted it, knowing him. He might have one foot in the grave and t’other hopping on the brink, but the grey eyes behind his glasses were as fierce as ever, and if his frame was feeble, his spirit plainly wasn’t.

‘God has sent you!’ cries he again. ‘In the very hour! For I see His hand in this!’ He turned to Moody. ‘How did you find him?’

‘Cormack telegraphed when he boarded the train at the Baltimore depot. Wilkerson and I were waiting when the train came in. He didn’t give any trouble.’

‘Why should he?’ cries Crixus, and beamed at me. ‘He knows he has no truer, more devoted friends on earth than we, who owe him so much! But sit down, sit down, Mr Comber – Joe, a glass of wine for our friend … no, stay, it was brandy, was it not? I remember, you see!’ he chuckled. ‘Brandy for heroes, as the good doctor said! And for ourselves, Joe! Gentlemen, I give you a toast: “George Randolph, on free soil! And his deliverer!”’

It was plain he didn’t know the truth of how dear George and I had parted company, and I was not about to enlighten him. I looked manly as he and Moody and Black Joe raised their glasses, wondering what the deuce was coming next, and decided to get my oar in first. I didn’t need to pitch him a tale, much less the truth; you see, to him, Comber was the British Admiralty’s beau sabreur in the war against the slave trade; that was how he’d thought of me ten years ago, as a man of intrigue and mystery, and he’d not expect explanation from me now. So, once I’d responded with a toady toast of my own (‘The Underground Railroad, and its illustrious station master!’, which almost had him piping his modest eye again), I put it to him plain, with that earnest courtesy which I knew Comber himself would have used, if he hadn’t been feeding the fish off Guinea since ’48.

‘My dear sir,’ says I, ‘I can find no words to express the joy it gives me to see you again – why, as Mr Moody said just now, it is like old times, though how you knew I was in Baltimore I cannot think –’

‘Come, come, Mr Comber!’ cries he. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten? “An ear to every wall, and an eye at every window”, you know. Not a word passes, not a line is written, from the Congress to the taproom, that the Railroad does not hear and see.’ He looked solemn. ‘It needs not me to tell you that you have enemies – but they may be closer than you think! Two days ago the police, here and in Baltimore, had word of your presence – aye, and of those brave deeds which our vicious and unjust laws call crimes!’ His voice rose in shrill anger, while I thought, well, thank’ee Spring. ‘We have watched every road and depot since – and thank God, here you are!’

‘And you’re right, sir!’ cries I heartily. ‘He has sent me to you indeed, for I need your help – I must reach the British ministry tonight at all costs –’

He jerked up a hand to check me, and even then I couldn’t help noticing how thin and wasted it was; I’ll swear I could see the lamplight through it.

‘Not a word! Say no more, sir! Whatever message you wish to send shall reach your minister, never fear – but what it is, I have no wish to know, nor what brings you to our country again, for I know your lips must be sealed. I can be sure,’ says he, looking holy, ‘that you are engaged on that noble work dear to your heart and mine – the great crusade against slavery to which we have dedicated our lives! In this our countries are at one – for make no mistake, sir, we in America are purging the poison from our nation’s veins at last, the battle is fully joined against those traitors within our gates, those traffickers in human flesh, those betrayers of our glorious Constitution, those gentlemen of Dixie –’ he spat out the word as if it had been vinegar ‘– who build their blood-smeared fortunes with the shackle and the lash –’

At this point he ran short of air, and sank back in his chair, panting, while Moody helped him to brandy and Joe gave me another glower, as though I’d set the senile idiot off. He’d always been liable to cut loose like a Kilkenny electioneer whenever slavery was mentioned, and here he was, doddering towards the knackers’ yard, still at it. I waited until he’d recovered, thanked him warmly, and said I’d be obliged if Moody could convoy me to the ministry without delay. At this Crixus blinked, looking uncertain.

‘Must you go … in person? Can he not take a note … papers?’ He gave a feeble little wave, forcing a smile. ‘Can you not stay … there is so much to say … so much that I would tell you –’

‘And I long to hear it, sir!’ cries I. ‘But I must see the minister tonight.’

He didn’t like it, and hesitated, glancing at Moody and Joe, and in that moment I felt the first cold touch of dread – the old bastard was up to something, but didn’t know how to spring it; while all sense and logic told me that he could have no business with me, at such short notice, my coward’s nose was scenting mischief breast-high – well, by God, he’d flung me into the soup once, and he wasn’t doing it again. I rose, ready to go, and he gave a whimper.

‘Mr Comber, sir, a moment! Half an hour will make no difference, surely? Spare me that time, sir – nay, I insist, you must! You shall not regret it, I assure you! Indeed, if I know you,’ and he gave me a smile whose radiance chilled my blood, ‘you will bless the chance that brought you here!’

I doubted that, but I couldn’t well refuse. He had that implacable light in his eye, smile or no, and Moody and Joe seemed to be standing just an inch taller than a moment since. I gave in with good grace and sat down again, and Joe filled my glass.

Crixus studied a moment, as though unsure how to begin, and then said he supposed I knew how things stood in America at present. I said I didn’t, since my work had taken me east, not west, and I’d lost sight of colonial affairs, so to speak. He frowned, as though I’d no business to be messing with foreign parts, and I thought to impress him by adding that I’d been in Russia and India.

‘Russia?’ wonders he, as though it were the Isle of Wight. ‘Ah, to be sure, that unhappy country, which forges its own chains.’ I tried to look as though I’d been freeing serfs right and left. ‘But … India? There is no slavery question there, surely?’

I said, no, but there had been a recent disturbance of which he might have heard, and I must go where my chiefs sent me. He didn’t seem to think much of India, or my irresponsible chiefs, and returned to matters of importance.

‘Then you may not know that the storm is gathering over our beloved country, and soon must break. Yes, sir,’ cries he, getting into his stride, ‘the night is almost past, but the dawn will come in a tempest that will scour the land to its roots, cleansing it of the foulness that disfigures it, so that it may emerge into the golden sunlight of universal freedom! It will be a time of sore trial, of blood and lamentation, but when the crisis is past, Mr Comber, victory will be ours, for slavery will be dead!’ Now he was at full gallop, eyes bright with zeal. ‘Yes, sir, the sands of pleading and persuasion are running out; the time has come to unsheathe the sword! What has patience earned us? Our enemies harden their hearts and mock our entreaties; they stamp their foot with even grosser cruelty upon the helpless bodies of our black brethren!’ I stole a look at our black brother Joe, to see how he was taking this; he was listening, rapt, and I’d not have stamped on him for a pension. ‘But the nation is waking at last – oh, its leaders shuffle and compromise and placate the butchers, but among the people, sir, the belief is growing that it is time to arm, that the cancer can be cut out only by the sword! America is a powder-keg, sir, and it needs but a spark to fire the train!’

He paused for breath, and since the real Comber would have raised a cheer, I resisted the temptation to cry ‘Hear! hear!’ and ventured a fervent ‘Amen!’ Crixus nodded, dabbing his lips with a handkerchief, and sat forward, laying his skinny hand on mine.

‘Yet still the people hesitate, for it is a fearful prospect, Mr Comber! Not for four score years have we faced such peril. “It would destroy us!” cry the fainthearts. “Let it be!” cry the thoughtless. Still they hope that conflict may be avoided – but given a lead, they will cast away their doubts! It needs a man to give that lead, sir – to fire that train!’ He was staring at me, his talons tightening. ‘And God, in His infinite wisdom, has sent us such a man!’

For one horrible instant I thought he meant me. I’ve heard worse, you know, and I knew what this little fanatic was capable of when he had the bit between his teeth. I stared back, stricken, and he asked:

‘What do you know of John Brown?’

That he’s a hairy impertinent lout who can hold more hard liquor than a distillery, was my immediate thought, for the only John Brown I knew was a young ghillie who’d had to be carried home on a hurdle the day I’d gone on that ghastly deer-stalk with Prince Albert at Balmoral, when Ignatieff had come within an ace of filling me with buckshot. But Crixus could never have heard of him, for this, you see, was years before Balmoral Brown had become famous as our gracious Queen’s attendant (and some said, more than that, but it’s all rot, in my opinion, for little Vicky had excellent taste in men, bar Albert; she always fancied me).

I confessed I’d never heard of an American called John Brown, and Crixus said ‘Ah!’ with the satisfied gleam of one who is bursting with great news to tell, which he did, and that was the first I ever heard of Old Ossawatomie, the Angel of the Lord – or the murderous rustler, whichever you like. To Crixus he was God’s own prophet, a kind of Christ with six-guns, but if I give you his version, unvarnished, you’ll start off with a lop-sided view, so I’ll interpolate what I learned later, from Brown himself, and from friends and foes alike, all of it true, so far as I know – which ain’t to say that Crixus wasn’t truthful, too.

‘Picture a Connecticut Yankee, a child of the Mayflower Pilgrims, as American as the soil from which he sprang!’ says he. ‘Born of poor and humble folk, raised in honest poverty, with little schooling save from the Bible, accustomed as a lad to go barefoot alone a hundred miles driving his father’s herd. See him growing to vigorous manhood, strong, independent, and devout, imbued with the love of liberty, not only for himself, but for all men, hating slavery with a deep, burning detestation, yet in his nature kind, benevolent, and wise, though less shrewd in business, in which he had but indifferent success.’

[Flashy: True, for his childhood, but omits that when he was four he stole some brass pins from a little girl, was whipped by his mother, lost a yellow marble given him by an Indian boy, had a pet squirrel, and a lamb which died. On his own admission, J.B. was a ready liar, rough but not quarrelsome, knew great swathes of the Scriptures, and grew up expecting life to be tough. As a man, his business career could indeed be called indifferent, since he made a hash of farming, tanning, sheep-herding, and surveying, accumulated little except a heap of debts, law-suits, and twenty children, and went bankrupt.]

‘Then, sir, about twenty years ago, he conceived a plan – nay, a wondrous vision, whereby slavery in the United States might be destroyed at a stroke. It was revolutionary, it was inspired, but his genius told him it was premature, and wisely he kept it in his heart, shared only with a few whom he trusted. These comprehended his sons, on whom he laid, by sacred oaths, the duty to fight against slavery until it was slain utterly! That duty,’ says Crixus, ‘they began to fulfil when, grown to manhood, they sought their fortunes in Kansas, on whose blood-drenched soil was fought the first great battle between Abolitionist and Slaver, between Freedom and Tyranny, between Mansoul and Diabolus – and there, Mr Comber, in the scorching heat of that furnace of conflict, was tempered the soul and resolution of him whom we are proud to call Captain John Brown!’

[Flashy: We’ll leave the ‘wondrous vision’ for the moment, if you don’t mind, and deal with ‘Bleeding Kansas’, which like everything to do with American politics is difficult, dull, and damned dirty, but you need to know about it if you’re to understand John Brown. The great question was: should Kansas be a free state or a slave one, and since it was up to the residents to decide, and America being devoted to democracy, both factions rushed in ‘voters’ from the free North and the slave South (Missouri, mostly), elections were rigged, ballot-boxes were stuffed, and before you knew it fighting and raiding had broken out between the Free Staters and the ‘Border Ruffians’ of the slavery party. Brown and his sons had joined in on the free side, and taken to strife like ducks to water. It was the first real armed clash between North and South, and you get the flavour of the thing from the Missouri orator who advised: ‘Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow ’em to hell with a chunk of cold lead!’]¹⁷

‘Nor was it long,’ says Crixus, ‘before Captain Brown’s fame as a champion of freedom was heard throughout the land. Too late to prevent the wanton destruction of the town of Lawrence by Border Ruffians, he was moved to wrath by the news that the conflict had spread to the halls of Congress, where the brave Senator Sumner raised his voice against the despoilers of Lawrence, and was clubbed almost to death in his very seat by a coward from South Carolina! In the very Senate, Mr Comber! Conceive if you can, sir, the emotions stirred in the honest bosom of John Brown – and ask yourself, is it matter for wonder that when, a few hours later, he came on Southern bullies threatening violence to a Free State man, he should smite them with the sword? Yet there are those who would call this just chastisement murder, and clamour for the law to be invoked against him!’

[Flashy: Well, Crixus was only saying what he and most of the North believed, but the truth of the matter was that Brown and his boys had gone to the homes of five pro-slave men who weren’t threatening anybody, ordered them outside, and sliced ’em up like so much beef with sabres; the men were unarmed, and it was done in cold blood. J.B. himself never denied the deed, though he claimed not to have killed anyone himself. That was the Pottawatomie Massacre, the first real reprisal by the Free Staters, and the most notorious act of J.B.’s life, bar Harper’s Ferry three years later, and even his worshippers have never been able to explain it away; most of ’em just ignore it.]

‘So now,’ says Crixus, ‘he was a hunted outlaw, he and his brave band. They must live like beasts in the wild, while the full fury of the Border Ruffians was turned on the unhappy land. Men were slaughtered, homes and farms burned – two hundred men, Mr Comber, died in the fighting of that terrible summer of ’56, property valued at thousands of dollars destroyed – but John Brown held the banner of freedom aloft, and his name was a terror to the tyrants. At last the Border Ruffians descended in overwhelming force on his home at Ossawatomie, put it to the torch, slew his son Frederick, and drove the heroic father from the territory – too late! John Brown’s work in Kansas was done! It is free soil today, and shall so remain, but more, far more than this, he had lighted Liberty’s beacon for all America to see, and shown that there can be but one end to this struggle – war to the bitter end against slavery!’

[Flashy: On the whole, I agree. J.B. hadn’t ensured Kansas’s freedom – the will of the majority, and the fact that its climate was no good for slave crops like cotton and sugar and baccy saw to that. But Crixus was right: he had lit the beacon, for while he and his boys were only one of many gangs of marauders and killers who fought in ‘Bleeding Kansas’, his was the name that was remembered; he was the symbol of the fight against slavery. The legend of the Avenging Angel grew out of the Pottawatomie Massacre and the battle at Black Jack, where he licked the militia and took them prisoner. To the abolitionists back east he was the embodiment of freedom, smiting the slavery men hip and thigh, and the tale lost nothing in the telling by the Yankee press. You may guess what the South thought of him: murderer, brigand, fiend in human shape, and arch-robber – and I’m bound to say, just from what he later told me himself, that he did his share of plundering, especially of horses, for which he had a good eye. But whatever else he did in Kansas, John Brown accomplished one thing: he turned the anti-slavery crusade into an armed struggle, and made North and South weigh each other as enemies. He put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America sniffed it in – and didn’t find the odour displeasing.]¹⁸

Crixus had paused for breath and another sip of brandy, but now he leaned forward and gripped my hands in his excitement.

‘Do you know what he said, Mr Comber, this good and great old man, as he gazed back at his burning home, his revolvers smoking in his hands, his eyes brimmed with tears for his murdered child? Can you guess, sir, what were those words that have rung like a trumpet blast in the ears of his countrymen?’

I said I couldn’t imagine, and he gulped and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘He said: “God sees it. I have only one death to die, and I will die fighting in this cause. There will be no peace in the land until slavery is done for. I will carry the war into Africa!”’

‘I say! Why Africa? I mean, it’s the dooce of a long way, and what about transport and –’

‘No, no!’ cries he impatiently. ‘By Africa he meant the South – the land of darkness and savage oppression. For now he knew that the time was come to realise his dream – that vision of which I spoke!’ He was spraying slightly, and I could see that the great news was coming at last. ‘The invasion of Virginia – that, sir, was his plan, and the hour is nigh for its fulfilment, after years of maturing and preparation. He purposes an armed raid to seize a federal arsenal, and with the captured munitions and supplies, to equip the slaves who will cast off their bonds and rush to join his standard! They will withdraw into the mountain fastnesses, and there wage guerrilla war against their former masters – oh, he has studied the ancient wars, sir, and Lord Wellington’s campaign in Spain! Formerly it was his design to found an independent black republic, but now his vision has soared beyond, for can it be doubted that once his army is in the hills, every slave in the South will rise up in arms? There will be such a rebellion as was never seen, and whatever its outcome, the greater battle will be joined! Free men everywhere will rally to the standard that John Brown has raised, and slavery will be whelmed forever in the irresistible tide of liberty!’

He was almost falling out of his chair with enthusiasm, and Moody had to settle him while Joe refilled his glass and helped him take a refreshing swig; neither of them said anything, but Crixus was staring at me with the eager expectancy of a drawing-room tenor who has just finished butchering ‘The Flowers on Mother’s Grave’, and awaits applause. Plainly this fellow Brown was a raving loose screw, and I knew Crixus was no better, but it behoved me to respond as Comber would have responded, and then take my leave for the British ministry. So …

‘Hallelujah!’ says I. ‘What a splendid stroke! Why, it will give these … these slavers the rightabout altogether! A capital notion, and will be well received … er, everywhere, I’ll be bound! I suppose it’s a well-kept secret at the moment, what? Just so, that’s prudent – I’ll not breathe a word, of course. Well, it’s getting late, so –’

‘It is no secret, Mr Comber,’ says he solemnly. ‘The where and when John Brown has yet to determine, but the intent is known, if not to the public at large, certainly to all who labour secretly for liberty – aye, even in Congress it is known, thanks to the treachery of Captain Brown’s most trusted lieutenant. You stare, Mr Comber? Well you may, for the traitor was a countryman of your own, a rascal named Forbes, enlisted for his military experience, gained in Italy with Garibaldi. He it was who babbled the secret, abusing Brown’s name because, he claimed, his pay was in arrears! Fortunately, those Senators in whom he confided were no friends to slavery, so no great harm was done, and Brown at least became aware what a viper he had nourished in his bosom.¹⁹ Nor has he himself sought to conceal his design. Since leaving Kansas he has been about the North, preaching, exhorting, raising the funds necessary for his great enterprise, purchasing arms, rifles and revolvers and pikes –’

‘Pikes, did you say?’

‘Indeed, to arm the slaves when the hour strikes! Wherever he has gone, men have fallen under his spell, seeing in him another Cromwell, another Washington, destined to bring his country liberty! Everywhere he rallies support. Alas,’ he shook his head, glooming, ‘more have promised than performed; his treasury is low, his army stout of heart but few in number, and even those devoted leaders of opinion who wholeheartedly approve his end, shrink timidly at the mention of his means. Oh, blind! Do they think pious words can prevail against the shackle and the lash and the guns of the Border Ruffians? The dam’ fools!’ cries he, in unwonted passion. ‘Oh, they are sincere – Parker and Gerrit Smith, Sanborn and Higginson, members of the Secret Six who are heart and soul in the cause, yet fearful of the storm that John Brown’s scheme would unloose! The North is with him in sympathy, Mr Comber, aye, many even in the halls of Congress, but when his hand goes to his pistol butt, they quake like women, dreading lest he destroys the Union – as if that mattered, so it is made whole again when slavery is dead –’

‘But hold on – a moment, sir, if you please!’ I tried to calm him before he did himself a mischief. ‘You say they know in Congress – in the government? And he goes about, er, preaching and so forth … well, how does he escape arrest, I mean to say?’

‘Arrest John Brown?’ He gave a bitter cackle. ‘Why, then, sir, we should have a storm indeed! The North would not abide it, Mr Comber! He is our hero! And he goes silently, without fanfare, appearing only in those public places where his enemies would not dare raise their voices, let alone their hands! Oh, Missouri has set a bounty of $3,000 on his head, and that pusillanimous wretch who calls himself our President, and whose cowardice has rent the Democratic Party in twain, has sunk so low as to offer $250 – why not thirty, in silver, false Buchanan? – for his apprehension! But who in the North would try to claim such rewards?’

That’s America for you: a maniac at large, threatening to stir up war and slave rebellion, and nothing done about it. Not that I gave a damn; what with brandy and sitting down I was feeling easier than I’d done all day, and was becoming most infernally bored with Captain Brown and his madcap plans for setting the darkies against their owners (with pikes, I ask you!), and anxious to be gone. So I shook my head in wonder, expressed admiration for Brown and his splendid activities, didn’t doubt that he’d win a brilliant triumph, and hinted that I’d like to get to the British ministry this year, if possible. D’ye know, Crixus didn’t seem even to hear me? He was sitting back in his chair, brooding on me with an intense stare which I found rather unnerving. Suddenly he asked me if I’d had food lately, and it came as a shock to realise that my last meal had been in Baltimore that morning … my God, it had been turmoil since then, with no time to think of eating. I was famished, but said I could wait until I reached the ministry; he wouldn’t hear of it, reproaching himself for his thoughtlessness, bidding Joe rustle up sandwiches and drumsticks, waving me back to my chair, while Moody filled my glass and set a restraining hand on my shoulder, with a warning nod to me to humour the old buffoon.

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