Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald
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