Kitabı oxu: «Flashman and the Redskins»
Copyright
Harper
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First published in Great Britain by Collins 1982
Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1982
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015
Map © John Gilkes 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille
George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
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Source ISBN: 9780007217175
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007325726
Version: 2015-07-23
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
Icimanipi-Wihopawin
‘Travels-Beautiful-Woman’
from Bent’s and the Santa Fe Trail
to the Black Hills
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?
Dedication
Explanatory Note
Maps
Introduction
The Forty-Niner
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
The Seventy-Sixer
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Appendix I
Appendix II
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
A singular feature of the Flashman Papers, the memoirs of the notorious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which were discovered in a Leicestershire saleroom in 1966, is that their author wrote them in self-contained instalments, describing his background and setting the scene anew each time. This has been of great assistance to me in editing the Papers entrusted to me by Mr Paget Morrison of Durban, Flashman’s closest legitimate relative; it has meant that as I opened each new packet of manuscript I could expect the contents to be a complete and self-explanatory book, needing only a brief preface and foot-notes. Six volumes have followed this pattern.
The seventh volume has proved to be an exception; it follows chronologically (to the very minute) on to the third packet,fn1 with only the briefest preamble by its aged author. I have therefore felt it necessary to append a résumé of the third packet at the end of this note, so that new readers will understand the events leading up to Flashman’s seventh adventure.
It was obvious from the early Papers that Flashman, in the intervals of his distinguished and scandalous service in the British Army, visited America more than once; this seventh volume is his Western odyssey. I believe it is unique. Others may have taken part in both the ’49 gold rush and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but they have not left records of these events, nor did they have Flashman’s close, if reluctant, acquaintance with three of the most famous Indian chiefs, as well as with leading American soldiers, frontiersmen, and statesmen of the time, of whom he has left vivid and, it may be, revealing portraits.
As with his previous memoirs, I believe his truthfulness is not in question. As students of those volumes will be aware, his personal character was deplorable, his conduct abandoned, and his talent for mischief apparently inexhaustible; indeed, his one redeeming feature was his unblushing veracity as a memorialist. As I hope the footnotes and appendices will show, I have been at pains to check his statements wherever possible, and I am indebted to librarians, custodians, and many members of the great and kindly American public at Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Fort Laramie, the Custer battlefield, the Yellowstone and Arkansas rivers, and Bent’s Fort.
G.M.F.
INTRODUCTION
In May, 1848, Flashman was forced to flee England after a card scandal, and sailed for Africa on the Balliol College, a ship owned by his father-in-law, John Morrison of Paisley, and commanded by Captain John Charity Spring, MA, late Fellow of Oriel College. Only too late did Flashman discover that the ship was an illegal slave-trader and her captain, despite his academic antecedents, a homicidal eccentric. After taking aboard a cargo of slaves in Dahomey, the Balliol College crossed the Atlantic, but was captured by the American Navy; Flashman managed to escape in New Orleans, and took temporary refuge in a bawdy-house whose proprietress, a susceptible English matron named Susan Willinck, was captivated by his picaresque charm.
Thereafter Flashman spent several eventful months in the Mississippi valley, frequently in headlong flight. For a time he impersonated (among many other figures) a Royal Navy officer; he was also a reluctant agent of the Underground Railroad which smuggled escaped slaves to Canada, but unfortunately the fugitive entrusted to his care was recognised by a vindictive planter named Omohundro, and Flashman abandoned his charge and beat a hasty retreat over the rail of a steamboat. He next obtained employment as a plantation slave-driver, but lost his position on being found in compromising circumstances with his master’s wife. He subsequently stole a beautiful octoroon slave, Cassy, sold her under a false name, assisted her subsequent evasion, and with the proceeds of the sale fled with her across the ice-floes of the Ohio River, pursued by slave-catchers who shot him in the buttock; however, he succeeded in effecting his escape, and Cassy’s, with the timely assistance of the then Congressman Abraham Lincoln.
With charges of slave-trading, slave-stealing, false pretences, and even murder hanging over his head, Flashman was now anxious to return to England. Instead, mischance brought him again to New Orleans, and he was driven in desperation to seek the help of his former commander, Captain Spring, who had been cleared of slave-trading by a corrupt American court and was about to sail. Flashman, who throughout his misfortunes had clung tenaciously to certain documents from the Balliol College – documents proving the ship’s slaving activities with which Flashman had hoped to blackmail his detested father-in-law – now offered them as the price of his passage home; Captain Spring, his habitual malevolence tempered by his eagerness to secure papers so dangerous to himself, agreed.
At this point, with our exhausted narrator quaking between the Scylla of United States justice and Charybdis in the person of the diabolic Spring, the third packet of the Flashman Papers ended – and the next chapter of his American adventure begins.
THE FORTY-NINER
I never did learn to speak Apache properly. Mind you, it ain’t easy, mainly because the red brutes seldom stand still long enough – and if you’ve any sense, you don’t either, or you’re liable to find yourself studying their system of vowel pronunciation (which is unique, by the way) while hanging head-down over a slow fire or riding for dear life across the Jornada del Muerto with them howling at your heels and trying to stick lances in your liver. Both of which predicaments I’ve experienced in my time, and you may keep ’em.
Still, it’s odd that I never got my tongue round it, for apart from fleeing and fornication, slinging the batfn1 is my strongest suit; well, I speak nine languages better than the natives, and can rub along in another dozen or so. And I knew the ’Paches well enough. God help me; I was even married to one for a spell, banns, beads, buffalo-dance and all, and a spanking little wild beast she was, too, with her peach-brown satin skin and hot black eyes, and those white doeskin leggings up to her thighs with the tiny silver bells all down the sides … I can close my eyes and hear them tinkling yet, sixty years after, and feel the pine-needles under my knees, and smell the woodsmoke mingling with the musky perfume of her hair and the scent of the wild flowers outside her bower … the soft lips teasing my ear, murmuring ‘Make my bells ring again, pinda-lickoyeefn2 …’ Aye, me, it’s a long time ago. But that’s the way to learn a language, if you like, in between the sighs and squeals, and if it didn’t happen in this case the reason is that my buxom savage was not only a great chief’s daughter but Mexican hidalga on her mother’s side, and inclined to put on airs something peculiar, such as speaking only Spanish in preference to the tribal dialect of the common herd. They can be just as pert and hoity-toity in a Mimbreno wickiup as they can in a Belgravia drawing-room, believe me. Fortunately, there’s a cure. But that’s beside the point for the moment. Even if my Apache never progressed far beyond ‘Nuetsche-shee, eetzan’, which may be loosely translated as ‘Come here, girl’, and is all you need to know (apart from a few fawning protestations of friendship and whines for mercy, and much good they’ll do you), I still recognise the diabolical lingo when I hear it. That guttural, hissing mumble, with all its ‘Tz’ and ‘zl’ and ‘rr’ noises, like a drunk Scotch-Jew having trouble with his false teeth, is something you don’t forget in a hurry. So when I heard it in the Travellers’ a few weeks ago, and had mastered an instinctive impulse to dive for the door bawling ‘’Pash! Ride for it, you fellows, and save your hair!’, I took stock, and saw that it was coming in a great spate from a pasty-looking specimen with a lordly academic voice and some three-ha’penny order on his shirt front, who was enthralling a group of toadies in a corner of the smoking-room. I demanded to know what the devil he meant by it, and he turned out to be some distinguished anthropologist or other who had been lecturing to the Royal Geographic on North American Indians.
‘And what d’you know about them, apart from that beastly chatter?’ says I, pretty warm, for he had given me quite a start, and I could see at a glance that he was one of these snoopopathic meddlers who strut about with a fly-whisk and notebook, prodding lies out of the niggers and over-tipping the dragoman on college funds. He looked taken aback, until they told him who I was, and that I had a fair acquaintance with North American Indians myself, to say nothing of other various aborigines; at that he gave me a distant flabby hand, and condescended to ask me an uneasy question or two about my American travels. I told him I’d been out with Terry and Custer in ’76 – and that was as far as I got before he said: ‘Oh, indeed?’ down his nose, damned chilly, showed me his shoulder, and began the most infernal prose you ever heard to the rest of the company, all about the Yankees’ barbarous treatment of the Plains tribes after the Uprising, and their iniquitous Indian policy in general, the abominations of the reservation system, and the cruelties practised in the name of civilisation on helpless nomads who desired only to be left alone to pursue their traditional way of life as peaceful herdsmen, fostering their simple culture, honouring their ancient gods, and generally prancing about like fauns in Arcady. Mercifully, I hadn’t had dinner.
‘Noble savages, eh?’ says I, when he’d paused for breath, and he gave me a look full of sentimental spite.
‘I might call them that,’ snaps he. ‘Do I take it that you would disagree?’
‘Depends which ones you’re talking about,’ says I. ‘Now, Spotted Tail was a gentleman. Chico Velasquez, on the other hand, was an evil vicious brute. But you probably never met either of ’em. Care for a brandy, then?’
He went pink. ‘I thank you, no. By gentleman, I suppose,’ he went on, bristling, ‘you mean one who has despaired to the point of submission, while brute would no doubt describe any sturdy independent patriot who resisted the injustice of an alien rule, or revolted against broken treaties—’
‘If sturdy independence consists of cutting off women’s fingers and fringing your buckskins with them, then Chico was a patriot, no error,’ says I. ‘Mind you, that was the soft end of his behaviour. Hey, waiter, another one, and keep your thumb out of it, d’ye hear?’
My new acquaintance was going still pinker, and taking in breath; he wasn’t used to the argumentum ad Chico Velasquez, and it was plainly getting his goat, as I intended it should.
‘Barbarism is to be expected from a barbarian – especially when he has been provoked beyond endurance!’ He snorted and sneered. ‘Really, sir – will you seriously compare errant brutality committed by this … this Velasquez, as you call him – who by his name I take it sprang from that unhappy Pueblo stock who had been brutalised by centuries of Spanish atrocity – will you compare it, I say, with a calculated policy of suppression – nay, extermination – devised by a modern, Christian government? You talk of an Indian’s savagery? Yet you boast acquaintance with General Custer, and doubtless you have heard of Chivington? Sand Creek, sir! Wounded Knee! Washita! Ah, you see,’ cries he in triumph, ‘I can quote your own lexicon to you! In face of that, will you dare condone Washington’s treatment of the American Indian?’
‘I don’t condone it,’ says I, holding my temper. ‘And I don’t condemn it, either. It happened, just as the tide comes in, and since I saw it happen, I know better than to jump to the damnfool sentimental conclusions that are fashionable in college cloisters, let me tell you—’
There were cries of protest, and my anthropologist began to gobble. ‘Fashionable indeed! Have you read Mrs Jackson,1 sir? Are you ignorant of the miserable condition to which a proud and worthy people have been reduced? Since you served in the Sioux campaign, you cannot be unaware of the callous and vindictive zeal with which it and subsequent expeditions were conducted! Against a resistless foe! Can you defend the extirpation of the Modocs, or the Apaches, or a dozen others I could mention? For shame, sir!’ He was getting the bit between his teeth now, and I was warming just a trifle myself. ‘And all this at a time when the resources of a vast modern state might have been employed in a policy of humanity, restraint, and enlightenment! But no – all the dark old prejudices and hatreds must be given full and fearful rein, and the despised “hostile” annihilated or reduced to virtual serfdom.’ He gestured contemptuously. ‘And all you can say is that “it happened”. Tush, sir! So might Pilate have said: “It happened”.’ He was pleased with that, so he enlarged on it. ‘The Procurator of Judea would have made a fit aide-de-camp to your General Terry, I daresay. I wish you a very good night, General Flashman.’
Which would have enabled him to stalk off with the honours, but I don’t abandon an argument when reasoned persuasion may prevail.
‘Now see here, you mealy little pimp!’ says I. ‘I’ve had just about a bellyful of your pious hypocritical maundering. Take a look at this!’ And while he gobbled again, and his sycophants uttered shocked cries, I dropped my head and pulled apart my top hair for his inspection. ‘See that bald patch? That, my industrious researcher, was done by a Brulé scalping knife, in the hand of a peaceful herdsman, to a man who’d done his damnedest to see that the Brulés and everyone else in the Dacotah nation got a fair shake.’ Which was a gross exaggeration, but never mind that. ‘So much for humanity and restraint …’
‘Good God!’ cries he, blenching. ‘Very well, sir – you may flaunt a wound. It does not prove your case. Rather, it explains your partiality—’
‘It proves that at least I know what I’m talking about! Which is more than you can say. As to Custer, he’s receipted and filed for the idiot he was, and for Chivington, he was a murderous maniac, and what’s worse, an amateur. But if you think they were a whit more guilty than your darling redskins, you’re an even bigger bloody fool than you look. What bleating breast-beaters like you can’t comprehend,’ I went on at the top of my voice, while the toadies pawed at me and yapped for the porters, ‘is that when selfish frightened men – in other words, any men, red or white, civilised or savage – come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ’em want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker goes under. Policies don’t matter a spent piss – it’s the men in fear and rage and uncertainty watching the woods and skyline, d’you see, you purblind bookworm, you! And you burble about enlightenment, by God—’
‘Catch hold of his other arm, Fred!’ says the porter, heaving away. ‘Come along now, general, if you please.’
‘—try to enlighten a Cumanche war-party, why don’t you? Suggest humanity and restraint to the Jicarillas who carved up Mrs White and her baby on Rock Creek! Have you ever seen a Del Norte rancho after the Mimbrenos have left their calling cards? No, not you, you plush-bottomed bastard, you! All right, steward, I’m going, damn you … but let me tell you,’ I concluded, and I daresay I may have shaken my finger at the academic squirt, who had got behind a chair and was looking ready to bolt, ‘that I’ve a damned sight more use for the Indian than you have – as much as I have for the rest of humanity, at all events – and I don’t make ’em an excuse for parading my own virtue while not caring a fig for them, as you do, so there! I know your sort! Broken treaties, you vain blot – why, Chico Velasquez wouldn’t have recognised a treaty if he’d fallen over it in the dark …’ But by that time I was out in Pall Mall, addressing the vault of heaven.
‘Who the hell ever said the Washington government was Christian, anyway?’ I demanded, but the porter said he really couldn’t say, and did I want a cab?
You may wonder that I got in such a taking over one pompous windbag spouting claptrap; usually I just sit and sneer when the know-alls start prating on behalf of the poor oppressed heathen, sticking a barb in ’em as opportunity serves – why, I’ve absolutely heard ’em lauding the sepoy mutineers as honest patriots, and I haven’t even bothered to break wind by way of dissent. I know the heathen, and their oppressors, pretty well, you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgement years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it. And that’s as true for Crazy Horse as it was for Custer – and they’re both long gone, thank God. But I draw the line at the likes of my anthropological half-truther; oh, there’s a deal in what he says, right enough – but it’s only one side of the tale, and when I hear it puffed out with all that righteous certainty, as though every white man was a villain and every redskin a saint, and the fools swallow it and feel suitably guilty … well, it can get my goat, especially if I’ve got a drink in me and my kidneys are creaking. So I’m slung out of the Travellers’ for ungentlemanly conduct. Much I care; I wasn’t a member, anyway.
A waste of good passion, of course. The thing is, I suppose, that while I spent most of my time in the West skulking and running and praying to God I’d come out with a whole skin, I have a strange sentiment for the place, even now. That may surprise you, if you know my history – old Flashy, the decorated hero and cowardly venal scoundrel who never had a decent feeling in all his scandalous, lecherous life. Aye, but there’s a reason, as you shall see.
Besides, when you’ve seen the West almost from the beginning, as I did – trader, wagon-captain, bounty-hunter, irregular soldier, whoremaster, gambler, scout, Indian fighter (well, being armed in the presence of the enemy qualifies you, even if you don’t tarry long), and reluctant deputy marshal to J. B. Hickok, Esq., no less – you’re bound to retain an interest, even in your eighty-ninth year.2 And it takes just a little thing – a drift of woodsmoke, a certain sunset, the taste of maple syrup on a pancake, or a few words of Apache spoken unexpected – and I can see the wagons creaking down to the Arkansas crossing, and the piano stuck fast on a mudbank, with everyone laughing while Susie played ‘Banjo on my knee’ … Old Glory fluttering above the gate at Bent’s … the hideous zeep of Navajo war-arrows through canvas … the great bison herds in the distance spreading like oil on the yellow plain … the crash and stamp of fandango with the poblanas’ heels clicking and their silk skirts whirling above their knees … the bearded faces of Gallantin’s riders in the fire glow … the air like nectar when we rode in the spring from the high glory of Eagle Nest, up under the towering white peaks to Fort St Vrain and Laramie … the incredible stink of those dark dripping forms in the Apache sweatbath at Santa Rita … the great scarred Cheyenne braves with their slanting feathers, riding stately, like kings to council … the round firm flesh beneath my hands in the Gila forest, the sweet sullen lips whispering … ‘Make my bells ring again …’ oh, yes indeed, ma’am … and the nightmare – the screams and shots and war-whoops as Gall’s Hunkpapa horde came surging through the dust, and George Custer squatting on his heels, his cropped head in his hands as he coughed out his life, and the red-and-yellow devil’s face screaming at me from beneath the buffalo-scalp helmet as the hatchet drove down at my brow …
‘Well, boys, they killed me,’ as Wild Bill used to say – only it wasn’t permanent, and today I sit at home in Berkeley Square staring out at the trees beyond the railings in the rain, damning the cramp in my penhand and remembering where it all began, on a street in New Orleans in 1849, with your humble obedient trotting anxiously at the heels of John Charity Spring, MA, Oriel man, slaver, and homicidal lunatic, who was stamping his way down to the quay in a fury, jacket buttoned tight and hat jammed down, alternately blaspheming and quoting Horace …
‘I should have dropped you overboard off Finisterre!’ snarls he. ‘It would have been the price of you, by God! Aye, well, I missed my chance – quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.’fn3 He wheeled on me suddenly, and those dreadful pale eyes would have frozen brandy. ‘But Homer won’t nod again, Mister Flashman, and you can lay to that. One false step out of you this trip, and you’ll wish the Amazons had got you!’
‘Captain,’ says I earnestly, ‘I’m as anxious to get out of this as you are – and you’ve said it yourself, how can I play you false?’
‘If I knew that I’d be as dirty a little Judas as you are.’ He considered me balefully. ‘The more I think of it, the more I like the notion of having those papers of Comber’s before we go a step farther.’
Now, those papers – which implicated both Spring himself and my miserly Scotch father-in-law up to their necks in the illegal slave trade – were the only card in my hand. Once Spring had them, he could drop me overboard indeed. Terrified as I was, I shook my head, and he showed his teeth in a sneering grin.
‘What are you scared of, you worm? I’ve said I’ll carry you home, and I keep my word. By God,’ he growled, and the scar on his brow started to swell crimson, a sure sign that he was preparing to howl at the moon, ‘will you dare say I don’t, you quaking offal? Will you? No, you’d better not! Why, you fool – I’ll have ’em within five minutes of your setting foot on my deck, in any event. Because you’re carrying them, aren’t you? You wouldn’t dare leave ’em out of your sight. I know you.’ He grinned again, nastily. ‘Omnia mea mecum portofn4 is your style. Where are they – in your coat-lining or under your boot-sole?’
It was no consolation that they were in neither, but sewn in the waistband of my pants. He had me, and if I didn’t want to be abandoned there and then to the mercy of the Yankee law – which was after me for murder, slave-stealing, impersonating a Naval officer, false pretences, theft of a wagon and horses, perjury, and issuing false bills of sale (Christ, just about everything except bigamy) – I had no choice but to fork out and hope to heaven he’d keep faith with me. He saw it in my face and sneered.
‘As I thought. You’re as easy to read as an open book – and a vile publication, too. We’ll have them now, if you please.’ He jerked his thumb at a tavern across the street. ‘Come on!’
‘Captain – for God’s sake let it wait till we’re aboard! The Yankee Navy traps’ll be scouring the town for me by now … please, Captain, I swear you’ll have ’em—’
‘Do as you’re damned well told!’ he rasped, and seizing my arm in an iron hand he almost ran me into the pub, and thrust me into a corner seat farthest from the bar; it was middling dim, with only one or two swells lounging at the tables, and a few of the merchant and trader sort talking at the bar, but just the kind of respectable ken that my legal and Navy acquaintances might frequent. I pointed this out, whining.
‘Five minutes more or less won’t hurt you,’ says Spring, ‘and they’ll satisfy me whether or not you’re breaking the habit of a lifetime by telling the truth for once.’ So while he bawled for juleps and kicked the black waiter for being dilatory – I wished to God he wouldn’t attract attention with his high table manners – I kept my back to the room and began surreptitiously picking stitches out of my flies with a penknife.
He drummed impatiently, growling, while I got the packet out – that precious sheaf of flimsy, closely written papers that Comber had died for – and he pawed through it, grinding his teeth as he read. ‘That ingrate sanctimonious reptile! He should have lingered for a year! I was like a father to the bastard, and see how he repaid my benevolence, by God – skulking and spying like a rat at a scuttle! But you’re all alike, you shabby-genteel vermin! Aye, Master Comber, Phaedrus limned your epitaph: saepe intereunt aliis meditantes necem,fn5 and serve the bastard right!’ He stuffed the papers into his pocket, drank, and brooded at me with that crazy glint in his eyes that I remembered so well from the Balliol College. ‘And you – you held on to them – why? To steer me into Execution Dock, you—’
‘Never!’ I protested. ‘Why, if I’d wanted to I could have done it back in the court – but I didn’t, did I?’
‘And put your own foul neck in a noose? Not you.’ He gave his barking laugh. ‘No … I’ll make a shrewd guess that you were keeping ’em to squeeze an income out of that Scotch miser Morrison – that was it, wasn’t it?’ Mad he might be, but his wits were sharp enough. ‘Filial piety, you leper! Well, if that was your game, you’re out of luck. He’s dead – and certainly damned. I had word from our New York agent three weeks ago. That takes you flat aback, doesn’t it, my bucko?’
And it did, but only for a moment. For if I couldn’t turn the screw on a corpse – well, I didn’t need to, did I? The little villain’s fortune would descend to his daughters, of whom my lovely simpleton wife Elspeth was the favourite – by George, I was rich! He’d been worth a cool two million, they reckoned, and at least a quarter would come to her, and me … unless the wily old skinflint had cooked up some legal flummery to keep my paws off it, as he’d done these ten years past. But he couldn’t – Elspeth must inherit, and I could twist her round my little finger … couldn’t I? She’d always doted on me, although I had a suspicion that she sampled the marriage mutton elsewhere when my back was turned – I couldn’t be sure, though, and anyway, an occasional unwifely romp was no great matter, while she’d been dependent on Papa. But now, when she was rolling in blunt, she might be off whoring with all hands and the cook, and too much of that might well damp her ardour for an absent husband. Who could say how she would greet the returning Odysseus, now that she was filthy rich and spoiled for choice? That apart, if I knew my fair feather-brain, she’d be spending the dibs – my dibs – like a drunk duke on his birthday. The sooner I was home the better – but Morrison kicking the bucket was capital news, just the same.
Spring was watching me as he watched the weather, shrewd and sour, and knowing what a stickler he could be for proper form, murderous pirate though he was, I tried to put on a solemn front, and muttered about this unexpected blow, shocking calamity, irreplaceable loss, and all the rest of it.
‘I can see that,’ he scoffed. ‘Stricken with grief, I daresay. I know the signs – a face like a Tyneside winter and a damned inheriting gleam in your eye. Bah, why don’t you blubber, you hypocritical pup? Nulli jactantius moerent, quam qui loetantur,fn6 or to give Tacitus a free translation, you’re reckoning up the bloody dollars already! Well, you haven’t got ’em yet, cully, and if you want to see London Bridge again—’ and he bared his teeth at me ‘—you’ll tread mighty delicate, like Agag, and keep on the weather side of John Charity Spring.’
‘What d’you mean? I’ve given you the papers – you’re bound to see me safe –’
‘Oh, I’ll do that, never fear.’ There was a cunning shift in those awful empty eyes. ‘Me duce tutus eris,fn7 and d’ye know why? Because when you reach England, and you and the rest of Morrison’s carrion brood have got your claws on his fortune, you’ll discover that you need an experienced director for his extensive maritime concerns – lawful and otherwise.’ He grinned at me triumphantly. ‘You’ll pay through the nose for him, too, but you’ll be getting a safe, scholarly man of affairs, who’ll not only manage a fleet, but can be trusted to see that no indiscreet inquiries are ever directed at your recent American activities, or the fact that your signature as supercargo is to be found on the articles of a slave trader—’
‘Christ, look who’s talking!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was shanghaied, kidnapped – and what about you—’
‘Damn your eyes, will you take that tone with me?’ he roared, and a few heads at the nearest table turned, so he dropped his voice to its normal snarl. ‘English law holds no terrors for me; I’ll be in Brest or Calais, taking my money in francs and guilders. Thanks to those misbegotten scum of ushers at Oxford, who cast me into the gutter out of spite, who robbed me of dignity and the fruits of scholarship …’ His scar was crimsoning again, as it always did when Oxford was mentioned; Oriel had kicked him out, you see, no doubt for purloining the College plate or strangling the Dean, but he always claimed it was academic jealousy. He writhed and growled and settled down. ‘England holds nothing for me now. But your whole future lies there – and there’ll be damned little future if the truth about this past year comes out. The Army? Disgrace. Your newfound fortune? Ruin. You might even swing,’ says he, smacking his lips. ‘And your lady wife would certainly find the social entrée more difficult to come by. On which score,’ he added malevolently, ‘I wonder how she would take the news that her husband is a whoremongering rake who covered everything that moved aboard the Balliol College. By and large, mutual discretion will be in both our interests, don’t you think?’
And the evil lunatic grinned at me sardonically and drained his glass. ‘We’ll have leisure to discuss business on the voyage home – and to resume your classical education, whose interruption by those meddling Yankee Navy bastards I’m sure you deplore as much as I do. Hiatus valde deflendus,fn8 as I seem to remember telling you before. Now get that drink into you and we’ll be off.’
As I’ve said, he was really mad. If he thought he could blackmail me with his ridiculous threats – and him a discredited don turned pirate who’d be clapped into Bedlam as soon as he opened his mouth in civilised company – he was well out of court. But I knew better than to say so, just then; raving or not, he was my one hope of getting out of that beastly country. And if I had to endure his interminable proses about Horace and Ovid all across the Atlantic, so be it; I drank up meekly, pushed back my chair, turned to the room – and walked slap into a nightmare.
It was the most ordinary, trivial thing, and it changed the course of my life, as such things do. Perhaps it killed Custer; I don’t know. As I took my first step from the table a tall man standing at the bar roared with laughter, and stepped back, just catching me with his shoulder. Another instant and I’d have been past him, unseen – but he jostled me, and turned to apologise.
‘Your pardon, suh,’ says he, and then his eyes met mine, and stared, and for full three seconds we stood frozen in mutual recognition. For I knew that face: the coarse whiskers, the scarred cheek, the prominent nose and chin, and the close-set eyes. I knew it before I remembered his name: Peter Omohundro.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
