The hairs prickled on my neck suddenly. This wasn’t Mrs Candy talking; the voice, as well as the words, were different. The nasal Yankee twang had disappeared.
“… a night when I was happier than I had ever been, because the man I loved had promised to take me out of slavery, and I was hastening to him, with joy in my heart, in a garden in Santa Fe …”
For several heart-beats it meant nothing, and then it hit me like a blow. But whereas I’d have acted instantly at a physical assault (probably by flight), the implication of what she said, when I grasped it, so shocked my mind that I stood numb, incapable of movement even when she lifted the scarf abruptly and I saw that she was looking beyond me, and heard the rush of running feet suddenly upon me, and knew that here was terrible, deadly danger. By then it was too late.
Sinewy hands were at my throat and wrists, rank greased bodies were all about me, nightmare painted faces glared in the moonlight, and as I stretched my mouth to scream a handful of cloth was thrust into it and a binder whipped round my face. I heaved in panic, choking on my buried scream, as rawhide bit into my wrists; it was done in a twinkling and I was helpless, held by a half-naked brave on either side while two others, steel in their hands, hovered alert – my eyes rolled in terror back to her, not believing this monstrous, impossible thing, because it was … impossible.
She had not moved. She stood tall and straight in the moonlight, the scarf at her side; then she reached up and took the patch from her face, and I saw that the eye beneath it was sound and bright. She cupped it a moment with her hand, and then she shook her head and came a step closer, her face almost against mine.
“Yes, look well,” she said. “Cleonie.”
She was lying, she must be; it could not be true. Cleonie was … where, after twenty-five years? And she had been middling tall, and slender, while this woman was near six feet and statuesque, and had a bold, full face with heavy lips and chin – and Cleonie had been a negress! I stared, refusing to believe, while the bright dark eyes bored into mine, and then I caught beneath the full flesh of middle age a fleeting glimpse of the sweet nun-like face of long ago; saw how the dusky high colour might be no more than cosmetic covering on a skin that time had darkened from the pale cream of the octoroon; how that damnable patch had disguised the shape of her face … but the voice, the manner, the whole being of the woman was so utterly unlike the girl I had … had … And as the memory of what I had done rushed back, she whispered softly: “En passant par la Lorraine, avec mes sabots …”, and the bile of terror came up behind my gag.
“You recognise me now? The girl you were going to take to Mexico? I probably had no need of this—” and she held up the patch. “After all, what should a woman look like who has endured twenty-five years of slavery in the hands of the Navajo? She should be dead – unless she’s unlucky enough to be alive, when she should be a wrinkled, withered hag, a verminous shell of a living thing—” her voice was choking “—a poor mad ghost crippled by beatings and starvation and terror of the hell she has been through!” Her eyes were blazing like coals, and her hand came up, nails crooked as though to rake my face; there were tears running down her cheeks again, tears of rage and hate. “You bastard! You filthy, degraded, cowardly, evil, cruel, cruel … cruel … cruel …!” It wailed away in a shuddering gasp, and her clawed hand went over her own face to stifle the great sobs that shook her. The fit passed, and she wiped her cheeks and lifted her face again. “That is what she should look like,” she whispered. “An old, miserable skeleton. Not at all like the splendid Mrs Candy! No, if you ever gave a thought to what Cleonie must have become, you couldn’t have imagined anything like Mrs Candy. And you would hardly recognise in her the child of eighteen you sold for two thousand dollars to the priest of Santa Fe.”
So he’d blabbed, the lousy little Judas! I might have known – but no, it was impossible, it was a nightmare. This could not be … must not be, Cleonie …
“But I had to be sure. Oh, I had to be sure! So …” She slipped the eyepatch on again. “Mrs Candy, you see. And Mr Comber – that was the name was it not? How often I wondered – waited and hated, and wondered – what had become of him. And after twenty-five years I learned that he was Sir Harry Flashman, English gentleman. I didn’t believe it … until I came to New York to see for myself. Then I knew … for you haven’t changed, no, no! Still the same handsome, arrogant, swaggering foulness who used me and lied to me and betrayed me … You haven’t changed. But then, you haven’t been a prisoner of savages, a tortured, degraded slave. Not yet.”
One of the Sioux grunted, pointing – there, through the trees were the steamboat lights, and a distant voice, and I couldn’t utter a sound! She spoke again, in fluent Siouxan.
“No danger. No one saw us. No one will see me go back.”
I writhed in their grip, trying to plead with my eyes, to beg her to remove that beastly gag so that I could explain … Christ, I’d swear truth out of America, if only she’d let me – she must! I bulged my eyes in dumb entreaty, and she shook her head.
“No. I have the truth, you see. And nothing you could say could alter it. We both know how you betrayed and sold a girl who loved and trusted you – oh, yes, she loved you! If she had not –” her eye was fierce with angry tears again, and her voice trembled “—it would not have hurt … so much. And I could never have hated as I do now, if I had not … loved, once, you see.” She steadied and went on:
“I could have had you killed in New York, for fifty dollars. But it would have been too easy. Yep.” The vibrant Creole voice which had whispered like velvet and shaken with passion, was gone, and in its place the nasal Yankee of Mrs Candy, cold and flat as a mortuary slab, and all the more frightening because it was without emotion. She might have been discussing some new sexual activity, or the Bismarck project – Jesus, Bismarck and the letter and the corporation … my brain whirled with it all, and her voice cut through it like a knife.
“I’m not going to waste time. Just enough to let you know how I come to be here – so that when I go back to the boat, and you go … where you’re going, you’ll be able to appreciate the justice of it. Oh-kay.” She broke abruptly into Siouxan. “Set his back against that tree. The light on his face.”
They threw me brutally against the tree and held me. She came in front of me, and I began to blubber in panic, for in that merciless beautiful face I could see Narreeman in the dungeon, Ranavalona staring down from her balcony, the Amazon women when they caught that poor bastard on the Dahomey creek … oh, God, was she going to set about me? I couldn’t bear it, I’d go mad …
“You needn’t cry yet,” said the passionless voice. “Later. Listen. You sold me to a Navajo animal. I’ll not describe what he did to me. I’ll just say you’re the only man I’ve hated more. For two years I belonged to him, and if I hadn’t been a trained whore, knowing how degraded men can be, I’d have gone mad or killed myself. Then he died, and I was sold to Ute slavers,70 who took me north – and amused themselves with me on the way – and sold me among the Blackfeet. There I went through another hell, until the Cheyenne raided our village, and I was taken as part of the loot, and sold to the Sioux in the Black Hills country, Oh-kay.”
I was in such a drench of fear that I couldn’t think of much, but it did occur to me that she hadn’t had a much worse time of it than in Susie’s brothel, surely. It wasn’t as if she’d been kidnapped from a convent. She leaned closer.
“Do you know what I found among the Sioux? No, how should you? I found kindness. I don’t say they’re any better than Navajo or Ute or Blackfeet – only that the man who bought me was a man, who was good to me, and cared for me, and treated me as an honourable woman. Even you may understand what that means. I was twenty-one, and had been used and abused and beaten and raped by hundreds of men – white, Spanish, Mexican, Indian – and a Sioux savage who lived in a filthy tent and could eat raw meat – he treated me like an honourable woman. He wouldn’t have understood the word, and I doubt if
you do, but to him I was a lady. Yep. His name was Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone. I was his faithful wife for two years, although I didn’t love him. And when I asked him to let me go back to what I called ‘my own people’, he agreed. That was the kind of man he was: he knew I wasn’t happy, so he took me to Fort Laramie, and sold some robes for fifty dollars – and gave it all to me. All he said was: “If you come back some day, Walking Willow, my tipi and my heart will both be open.” I never went back as his wife, but I visited some, till he died. And, as you see, I have good friends among the Sioux.” So these smelly swine gripping me were presumably her bloody cousins-in-law.
“Oh-kay. Then I started in where I’d have started in Mexico if you hadn’t betrayed me. I whored – and as no one knows better than you, I’m good at it. I had my own stable before I was thirty, and by the time the war ended I owned the biggest brothel in Denver. Yep, I still do, and have shares in several other businesses, some of them respectable. But they don’t include the Upper Missouri Corporation – that was invented for your benefit. Oh, there’s a genuine Bismarck scheme, yep, but I have no part in it. But I knew that this …” She placed her hands on her hips and swayed her body slightly “… would be the real bait to get Mr Comber where I’ve been wanting him for the past twenty-five years.”
She replaced her scarf round her head, and glanced aside to the distant lights of the Far West – so close, but for me it might as well have been in New Zealand. Couldn’t any of the fools aboard her see, or guess, or intervene to save me from whatever horror was in store? For it was coming now, and I’d have no chance to plead or lie or grovel; she was determined not to give me the chance, the callous, cold-blooded slut.
“You sold me to the Indians,” she said quietly. “You did the foulest, cruellest thing – for two thousand dollars. I’m not getting a cent for you, but I wouldn’t take a million to spare you one instant of what’s going to happen to you. You sent me to death, or a lifetime of suffering, and it wasn’t your fault I survived. So now you go the way I went. These savages are my friends, and they know the wrong you did me. You know what they do to white men prisoners at the best of times, and with your friend General Custer preparing to butcher them, the times couldn’t be much worse. Oh-kay. Your suffering won’t last as long as mine did, but I’m sure it’ll seem a lot longer. I hope so.”
I was struggling frantically, with those painted devils hanging on to me, but she seemed not to notice. She drew her scarf closer about her shoulders, and shivered a little, looking towards the boat. Her voice sounded tired.
“I’m going back to the boat now. They’ll miss you tomorrow, and I’ll insist on a search, but Captain Marsh won’t dare neglect his duty to the expedition for long. And I’ll be able to sleep alone again. When I was a young girl, new in the trade, I sometimes used to cry out against God: ‘Was this what You made me for? Is this what You meant for me, God?’ At its worst it was better than the last few weeks, when I played the whore to get you here.” She glanced at me incuriously. “Strange to think I once did it for love … the only man I ever loved. You shouldn’t have done that to me in Santa Fe.”
She turned and walked away beneath the trees, the tall graceful figure receding quickly into the shadows. The Sioux dragged me away from the tree and ran me into the woods, away from the river.
* * *
a By this word Flashman presumably means an Indian meeting-place. The area is now the site of Miles City, Montana.
Chapter 20
I still say that if it hadn’t been for that damned gag, I’d have been back on the Far West before midnight, rogering her speechless. And she knew it, too, and must have arranged for my abductors to muzzle me first go off, so that I’d never get a word in edgeways to sweetheart her. You see, however much they loathe you, whatever you’ve done, the old spark never quite dies – why, for all her hate, she’d blubbered at the mere recollection of our youthful passion, and for all she said, our weeks on the boat could only have reminded her of what she’d been missing. No, she knew damned well that if once she listened to my blandishments she’d be rolling over with her paws in the air, so like old Queen Bess with the much-maligned Essex chap, she daren’t take the risk. Pity, but there it was.
But I confess these speculations weren’t in my mind just then, as they dragged me through the dark woods, hammering me when I stumbled, and thrust me astride a pony. Then it was off up a gentle slope, with those four monsters round me; I was near suffocating with the gag, which didn’t assist thought as I tried to grapple with the impossibility of what had happened.
Yet I knew it wasn’t impossible. Mrs Candy was Cleonie, come back like Nemesis; once the patch was off, and she’d whispered that snatch of her French riding song, in her old voice, I’d have known her beyond doubt. I couldn’t marvel at not recognising her earlier, even at the closest quarters; she’d grown, for one thing, filled out admirably, and the brash, hard Mrs Candy was as different from the dove-like Creole as could be, in speech and manner – aye, and nature. I suppose that’s what twenty-five years of being bulled by redskins and whoring on the frontier and acquiring bordellos does to you. Not surprising, really. Even so, she’d played it brilliantly, hadn’t she just? Keeping me at arm’s length, the Bismarck nonsense, galloping me westward to the very spot where she could deal me out poetic justice, the spiteful bitch. What simpler than to send word to her Sioux friends (doubtless with a handsome fee) and have them scout the boat along the Yellowstone, ready at her signal to pounce on the unsuspecting victim and shanghai him into the hills to stick burning splinters in his tenderer parts? Neat, but not gaudy – simplicity itself compared to some of the plots that have been hatched all over me by the likes of Lola and Lincoln and Otto Bismarck and Ignatieff and … God, I’ve had some rotten luck.
What I couldn’t fathom, though, was how the devil she’d discovered that the much-respected Flashy of ’76 was the long-lost B. M. Comber of ’49. She’d heard, she said – but from whom? Who was there still who’d known me as Comber in the earlies, had recognized me now, and tipped her the wink? Spotted Tail – why, he’d never heard the name Comber in his life; I’d been Wind Breaker to him from ’50, and what should he and Mrs Candy know of each other? Susie, Maxwell, Wootton and the like I could dismiss; I hadn’t seen them or they me in quarter of a century, supposing they were still alive. Carson was dead; no one in the Army knew about Comber. Lincoln was dead. But I was a fool to be thinking of folk I remembered – there must be hundreds I’d forgotten who might still remember me, and seeing Flashy promenading down Broadway would exclaim “Comber, bigod!” Old Navy men, perhaps a returned emigrant from the wagon train, a Cincinnati invalid, someone out west, like a Laramie hunter or trader. Susie’s whores, by thunder! They’d know me, and if Cleonie was anything to go by, the graduates of Mrs Willinck’s academy might be running half the knocking-shops in America by now – aye, and corresponding with the other old girls, devil a doubt … “Dearest Cleonie, you’ll never guess who called in for a rattle at our shop the other day! ’Twas such a start! Tall, English, distinguished, fine whiskers … give up?” How many of the bawdy-houses I’d frequented had black madames? Difficult … but that would be it, like as not.
These were random thoughts, you understand, floating up through stupefied terror from time to time. The point was that four damnably hostile Sioux were bearing me into the wilderness with murderous intent, and if there was one thing I’d learned in a lifetime of hellish fixes, it was the need to thrust panic aside and keep cool if there was to be the slimmest chance of winning clear.
Once we had skirted the high bluff and reached the rough upland, they headed south-west by the stars. It might be they’d go a safe distance and then set to roasting me over a slow fire, but I doubted it; they were riding steady, so it looked like a longish trek across the northern Powder country towards the Big Horn Mountains; that was where the Sioux were mostly hanging their hats these days. Somewhere far off to my left, up the Rosebud, Custer would be starting his long s
wing south and west to roughly the same destination. I was pinning no hopes on him, though – the last man you want riding to the rescue is G.A.C., for there’ll be blood on the carpet for certain, and the more I thought, the more my hope grew of emerging from this pickle peaceful-like. After all, Mrs Candy wasn’t the only one with chums among the Sioux – I spoke the lingo, I could cite Spotted Tail as a bosom pal, and even if he was far away there must be hostiles who’d remember me from Camp Robinson and who might think twice about dismembering a U.S. treaty commissioner just to please the former squaw of Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone. Certainly they’d not be well disposed to anyone white just now, and given a prisoner they’re more likely to take a long thoughtful look at his innards than not. But again, I might buy my way clear, or get a chance to play my real trump card – somewhere up ahead, and the nearest thing to God between Canada and the Platte, was Tashunka Witko Crazy Horse, and while I hadn’t seen him since he was six, he wouldn’t let them snip pieces off a man who’d practically dandled him on his knee, surely?
I put these points to my captors at our dawn halt, when they had to remove my gag to let me drink and eat some jerked meat and corn-mush; I suggested that the cleverest thing they could do would be to return me to the fire-canoe on the Yellowstone, where I’d see they got safe-conduct and all the dollars they wanted from Many-Stars-Soldier Terry.
They listened in ominous silence, four grim blanketed figures with the paint smeared and faded on their ugly faces, and not a flicker of expression except pure malice. Then their leader, one Jacket, started to lambast me with his quirt, and the others joined in with sticks and feet, thrashing me until I yelled for mercy, and didn’t get it. When they were tired, and I was black and blue, Jacket stuffed the gag back brutally, kicked me again for luck, and stooped over me, his evil grinning face next to mine.
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