Flash for Freedom!. George Fraser MacDonald
‘It’s thae bluidy Chartists,’ cries he, with his head in his hands. ‘The d----d mob is loose aboot the toon, or soon will be. It’s no’ enough, their Ten Hoors Bill, they want tae slake their vengeance on honest fowk as well. Burn them a’, the wicked rascals! And whit does the Government do, will ye tell me? Naethin’! Wi’ rebellion in oor midst, an’ the French chappin’ at oor doors!’
‘The French have too much on hand with their own rebels to mind about us,’ said I. ‘As to the Chartists, I recall you expressing the same fears, years ago, in Paisley, and nothing came of it. If you remember –’
‘Naethin’ came o’t, d’ye say?’ cries he, with his chops quivering. ‘I ken whit came o’t! You, that should hae been at your post, were loupin’ intae the bushes wi’ my Elspeth. Oh, Goad,’ says he, groaning, ‘as if we hadnae tribulation enough. Wee Elspeth, in her … her condeetion.’
That was another thing, of course. My beautiful Elspeth, after eight years of wedded bliss, had now conceived at last, and to hear her father, mother, and sisters you would have thought it was Judgement Day. Myself, I believe she’d done it just to be topsides with the Queen, who had recently produced yet another of her innumerable litter. But what concerned me most was the identity of the father; I knew my darling feather-head, you see, for the trollop she was – you would never have thought it, to look at her beguiling innocence, but it had long been an unspoken bargain between us that we let each other’s private lives alone, and I could guess she had been in the woodshed with half a dozen during my absence. Mind you, I might have pupped her myself before I went to Germany, but who could tell? And if she gave birth to something with red hair and a pug nose there was liable to be talk, and God knows what might come of that.
You see, we were an odd family. Old Morrison was as rich as an Amsterdam Jew, and when my guv’nor went smash over railway stock, Morrison had paid the bills for Elspeth’s sake. He had been paying ever since, keeping me and my guv’nor on a pittance while he used our house, and got what credit he could out of being related to the Flashman family. Not that that was much, in my opinion, but since we were half way into Society, and Morrison had daughters to marry off, he was prepared to tolerate us. He had to tolerate me, anyway, since I was married to his daughter. But it was, a d----d tricky business, all round, for he could kick me out if he chose, and would do like a shot the moment Elspeth decided she’d had enough of me. As it was, we dealt well enough with each other, but with a child on the way things might, I suspected, be different. I’d no wish to be out in the street trying to scrape by on a captain’s half pay.
So what with Elspeth pregnant and old Morrison expecting the Communist rabble at the door at any moment, it was a fairly cheerless homecoming. Elspeth seemed pleased enough to see me, all right, but when I tried to bundle her into bed she would have none of it, in case the child was harmed. So instead of bouncing her about that evening I had to listen fondly to her drivelling about what name we should give our Little Hero – for she was sure it must be a boy.
‘He shall be Harry Albert Victor,’ says she, holding my hand and gazing at me with those imbecile blue eyes which never lost their power, somehow, to make my heart squeeze up inside me, God knows why. ‘After you, my dearest love, and our dear, dear Queen and her dearest love. Would you approve, my darling?’
‘Capital choice,’ says I. ‘Couldn’t be better.’ Not unless, I thought to myself, you called him Tom, or Dick, or William, or whatever the fellow’s name was who was in the hay with you. (After all, we’d been married a long while and made the springs creak time without number, and devil a sign of our seed multiplying. It seemed odd, now. Still, there it was.)
‘You make me so happy, Harry,’ says she, and do you know, I believed it. She was like that, you see; as immoral as I was, but without my intelligence. No conscience whatever, and a blissful habit of forgetting her own transgressions – or probably she never thought she had any to forget.
She leaned up and kissed me, and the smell and feel of her blonde plumpness set me off, and I made a grab at her tits, but she pushed me away again.
‘We must be patient, my own,’ says she, composing herself. ‘We must think only of dear Harry Albert Victor.’
(That, by the way, is what he is called. The bastard’s a bishop, too. I can’t believe he’s mine.)
She cooed and maundered a little longer, and then said she must rest, so I left her sipping her white-wine whey and spent the rest of the evening listening to old Morrison groaning and snarling. It was the same old tune, more or less, that I’d grown used to on the rare occasions when we had shared each other’s company over the past eight years – the villainy of the workers, the weakness of government, the rising cost of everything, my own folly and extravagance (although heaven knows he never gave me enough to be extravagant with), the vanity of his wife and daughters, and all the rest of it. It was pathetic, and monstrous, too, when you considered how much the old skinflint had raked together by sweating his mill-workers and cheating his associates. But I observed that the richer he got, the more he whined and raged, and if there was one thing I’ll say for him, he got richer quicker than the only sober man in a poker game.
The truth was that, coward and skinflint though he was, he had a shrewd business head, no error. From being a prosperous Scotch mill owner when I married his daughter he had blossomed since coming south, and had his finger in a score of pies – all d----d dirty ones, no doubt. He had become known in the City, and in Tory circles too, for if he was a provincial nobody he had the golden passport, and it was getting fatter all the time. He was already angling for his title, although he didn’t get it until some little time later, when Russell sold it to him – a Whig minister ennobling a Tory miser, which just goes to show. But with all these glittering prizes in front of him, the little swine was getting greedier by the hour, and the thought of it all dissolving in revolution had him nearly puking with fear.
‘It’s time tae tak’ a stand,’ says he, goggling at me. ‘We have to defend our rights and our property’ – and I almost burst out laughing as I remembered the time in Paisley when his mill-workers got out of hand, and he cringed behind his door, bawling for me to lead my troops against them. But this time he was really frightened; I gathered from his vapourings that there had been recent riots in Glasgow, and even in Trafalgar Square, and that in a few days there was to be a great rally of Chartists – ‘spawn of Beelzebub’ he called them – on Kennington Common, and that it was feared they would invade London itself.
To my astonishment, when I went out next day to take my bearings, I discovered there was something in it. At Horse Guards there were rumours that regiments were being brought secretly to town, the homes of Ministers were to be guarded, and supplies of cutlasses and firearms were being got ready. Special constables were being recruited to oppose the mob, and the Royal Family were leaving town. It all sounded d----d serious, but my Uncle Bindley, who was on the staff, told me that the Duke was confident nothing would come of it.
‘So you’ll win no more medals this time,’ says he, sniffing. ‘I take it, now that you have consented to honour us with your presence again, that you are looking to your family’ (he meant the Pagets, my mother’s tribe) ‘to find you employment again.’
‘I’m in no hurry, thank’ee,’ says I. ‘I’m sure you’d agree that in a time of civil peril a gentleman’s place is in his home, defending his dear ones.’
‘If you mean the Morrisons,’ says he, ‘I cannot agree with you. Their rightful place is with the mob, from which they came.’
‘Careful, uncle,’ says I. ‘You never know – you might be in need of a Scotch pension yourself some day.’ And with that I left him, and sauntered home.
The place was in a ferment. Old Morrison, carried away by terror for his strong-boxes, had actually plucked up courage to go to Marlborough Street and ’test as a special constable, and when I came home he was standing in the drawing-room looking at his truncheon as though it was a snake. Mrs Morrison, my Medusa-in-law, was lying on the sofa, with a maid dabbing her temples with eau-de-cologne, Elspeth’s two sisters were weeping in a corner, and Elspeth