Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald
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