Flashman in the Great Game. George Fraser MacDonald
had tumbled to me – but Ellenborough wasn’t even listening. He was just full of indignation at Ignatieff’s murderous impudence – not on my account, you’ll note, but because it might have led to a scandal involving the Queen. (Admittedly, you can’t have it getting about that her guests have been trying to slaughter each other; the poor woman probably had enough trouble getting people to visit, with Albert about the place.)
So, of course, we kept mum, and as Hutton had foreseen, it was put about and accepted that Ignatieff’s loader had had an accident with a gun, and everyone wagged their heads in sympathy, and the Queen sent the poor unfortunate fellow some shortbread and a tot of whisky. Ignatieff even had the crust to thank her after dinner, and I could feel Ellenborough at my elbow fairly bubbling with suppressed outrage. And to cap it all, the brute had the effrontery to challenge me to a game of billiards – and beat me hollow, too, in the presence of Albert and half a dozen others: I had to be certain there was a good crowd on hand, for God knows what he’d have tried if we’d gone to the pool-room alone. I’ll say it for Nicholas Ignatieff – he was a bear-cat for nerve. He’d have been ready to brain me and claim afterwards that it was a mis-cue.
So now – having heard the prelude to my Indian Mutiny adventure, you will understand why I don’t care much for Balmoral. And if what happened there that September was trivial by comparison with what followed – well, I couldn’t foresee that. Indeed, as I soothed my bruised nerves with brandy fomentations that night, I reflected that there were worse places than India; there was Aberdeenshire, with Ignatieff loose in the bracken, hoping to hang my head on his gunroom wall. I hadn’t been able to avoid him here, but if we met again on the coral strand, it wasn’t going to be my fault.
I’ve never been stag-shooting from that day to this, either. Ellenborough was right: the company’s too damned mixed.
I remember young Fred Roberts (who’s a Field-Marshal now, which shows you what pull these Addiscombe wallahs have got) once saying that everyone hated India for a month and then loved it forever. I wouldn’t altogether agree, but I’ll allow that it had its attractions in the old days; you lived like a lord without having to work, waited on hand and foot, made money if you set your mind to it, and hardly exerted yourself at all except to hunt the beasts, thrash the men, and bull the women. You had to look sharp to avoid active service, of course, of which there was a lot about; I never fell very lucky that way. But even so, it wasn’t a half-bad station, most of the time.
Personally, I put that down to the fact that in my young days India was a middle-class place for the British, where society people didn’t serve if they could help it. (Cardigan, for example, took one look and fled.) It’s different now, of course; since it became a safe place many of our best and most highly connected people have let the light of their countenances shine on India, with the results you might expect – prices have gone up, service has gone down, and the women have got clap. So they tell me.
Mind you, I could see things were changing even in ’56, when I landed at Bombay. My first voyage to India, sixteen years before, had lasted four months on a creaking East Indiaman; this time, in natty little government steam sloops, it had taken just about half that time, even with a vile journey by camel across the Suez isthmus in between. And even from Bombay you could get the smell of civilisation; they’d started the telegraph, and were pushing ahead with the first railways, there were more white faces and businesses to be seen, and people weren’t talking, as they’d used to, of India as though it were a wild jungle with John Company strongholds here and there. In my early days, a journey from Calcutta to Peshawar had seemed half round the world, but no longer. It was as though the Company was at last seeing India as one vast country – and realising that now the wars with the Sikhs and Maharattas and Afghans were things of the past, it was an empire that had to be ruled and run, quite apart from fighting and showing a nice profit in Leadenhall Street.
It was far busier than I remembered it, and somehow the civilians seemed more to the fore nowadays than the military. Once the gossip on the verandahs had all been about war in the north, or the Thugs, or the bandit chiefs of the Ghats who’d have to be looked up some day; now it was as often as not about new mills or factories, and even schools, and how there would be a railroad clear over to Madras in the next five years, and you’d be able to journey from Mrs Blackwell’s in Bombay to the Auckland in Calcutta without once putting on your boots.
‘All sounds very peaceful and prosperous,’ says I, over a peg and a whore at Mother Sousa’s – like a good little political, you see, I was conducting my first researches in the best gossip-mart I could find (fine mixed clientele, Mother Sousa’s, with nothing blacker than quarter-caste and exhibition dances that would have made a Paris gendarme blench – well, if it’s scuttle-butt you want, you don’t go to a cathedral, do you?). The chap who’d bought me the peg laughed and said:
‘Prosperous? I should just think so – my firm’s divvy is up forty per cent, and we’ll have new factories at Lahore and Allahabad working before Easter. Building churches – and when the universities come there’ll be contracts to last out my service, I can tell you.’
‘Universities?’ says I. ‘Not for the niggers, surely?’
‘The native peoples,’ says he primly – and the little snirp hadn’t been out long enough to get his nose peeled – ‘will soon be advanced beyond those of any country on earth. Heathen countries, that is. Lie still, you black bitch, can’t you see I’m fagged out? Yes, Lord Canning is very strong on education, I believe, and spreading the gospel, too. Well, that’s bricks and mortar, ain’t it? – that’s where to put your money, my boy.’
‘Dear me,’ says I, ‘at this rate I’ll be out of a job, I can see.’
‘Military, are you? Well, don’t fret, old fellow; you can always apply to be sent to the frontiers.’
‘Quiet as that, is it? Even round Jhansi?’
‘Wherever’s that, my dear chap?’
He was just a pipsqueak, of course, and knew nothing; the little yellow piece I was exercising hadn’t heard of Jhansi either, and when I asked her at a venture what chapattis were good for except eating, she didn’t bat an eye, but giggled and said I was a verree fonnee maan, and must buy her meringues, not chapattis, yaas? You may think I was wasting my time, sniffing about in Bombay, but it’s my experience that if there’s anything untoward in a country – even one as big as India – you can sometimes get a scent in the most unexpected places, just from the way the natives look and answer. But it was the same whoever I talked to, merchant or military, whore or missionary; no ripples at all. After a couple of days, when I’d got the old Urdu bat rolling familiarly off my palate again, I even browned up and put on a puggareefn1 and coat and pyjamys, and loafed about the Bund bazaar, letting on I was a Mekran coast trader, and listening to the clack. I came out rotten with fleas, stinking of nautch-oil and cheap perfume and cooking ghee, with my ears full of beggars’ whines and hawkers’ jabbering and the clang of the booths – but that was all. Still, it helped to get India back under my hide again, and that’s important, if you intend to do anything as a political.
Hullo, says you, what’s this? – not Flashy taking his duty seriously for once, surely. Well, I was, and for a good reason. I didn’t take Pam’s forebodings seriously, but I knew I was bound to go to Jhansi and make some sort of showing in the task he’d given me – the thing was to do it quickly. If I could have a couple of official chats with this Rani woman, look into the business of the sepoys’ cakes, and conclude that Skene, the Jhansi political, was a nervous old woman, I could fire off a report to Calcutta and withdraw gracefully. What I must not do was linger – because if there was any bottom to Pam’s anxieties, Jhansi might be full of Ignatieff and his jackals before long, and I wanted to be well away before that happened.
So I didn’t linger in Bombay. On the third day I took the road north-east towards Jhansi, travelling in good style by bullock-hackery, which is just a great wooden room on wheels, in which you have your bed and eat your meals, and your groom and cook and bearer squat on the roof. They’ve gone out now, of course, with the railway, but they were a