“Yes,” says he at last. “Yes, that would be best, I think. Yes … I could see Lord Lyons myself … yes, I shall! In the meantime, you should remain here.” He gave a convulsive grimace that was meant to be a reassuring smile. “Yes, indeed, Mr Comber, you will be safer from prying eyes here – you may trust the Railroad, sir! And you lose nothing, you see, for I shall wait upon his lordship in the morning – first thing, sir, I assure you!” He forced a broader smile, half-pleading, half-cunning. “That’s settled, then, eh? You’ll stay, my boy, won’t you?”
He was lying in his teeth, and I wondered why. Did he think that by detaining me he could somehow dragoon me into John Brown’s hare-brained war? Possibly, for when you’re as besotted a fanatic as Crixus you can believe anything, but more probably he was playing for time. One thing he was sure of: if he let me go, he’d have to find his hero another lieutenant, so he’d hold me, by force if necessary, and hope for the best.
For a moment I toyed with the idea of telling him who I truly was, and threatening diplomatic reprisals – but it wouldn’t have served for a moment. Sir Harry Flashman would mean nothing to him, and God knew how he’d react when he learned that I wasn’t Comber after all. And since I couldn’t hope to tackle Joe and Moody together, I must pretend to submit, gracefully – and take the first opportunity to slide. If they thought they could hold Flashy for long, they were in for a surprise.
I sighed, spreading my hands, and gave him my rueful, affectionate smile. “Oh, Mr Crixus, you’re too much for me! I believe you could wheedle a duck from a pond. Well, I guess the minister wouldn’t thank me for waking him at this hour, anyway, and truth to tell, I’m too tired to think … But you’ll see him yourself, sir, first thing?”
“Yes, yes!” cries the old liar eagerly, and after that it was good fellowship all round, and he must embrace me again with more of his babble about God having sent me, and from that he passed to praying, while we stood with bowed heads, and then Joe sang “Hark, the song of jubilee” in a rolling bass that billowed the curtains, after which Moody conducted me aloft to bed, not before time.
I kept my eyes open, noting that the stairs were uncarpeted, and the upper floors, so far as I could make out by candlelight, were bare as a crypt; evidently this was a station the Underground Railroad used only on occasion. My room, under the eaves, held only a bed, a chair, and a washing bowl and jug; there were bars on the window and the door bolted on both sides. At my request Moody brought me a clean shirt and shaving tackle, waiting while I scraped my chin and then carefully pocketing the razor. He hesitated before handing me the shirt, clearing his throat uneasily.
“This here shirt … you’re a pretty big feller, an’, well, the only one to fit you is this ’un … of Joe’s. D’ye mind?”
I asked him what he meant, why should I mind, and he avoided my eye. “Well, Joe … I mean, he ain’t white.”
I’ll be damned, thinks I, and on the Underground Railroad, too.
“He needn’t worry,” says I. “You can tell him I’m not lousy.”
“What?” He stared bewildered. “No, no, you don’t get it … Joe didn’t say … what I mean,” he stammered, “is him bein’ … well, some folks wouldn’t … I mean, I just thought I’d mention it … but if you don’t mind …”
I gave him my most innocent smile, while he fumbled the shirt and then handed it to me, looking confused. He said if I needed anything I should stamp on the floor and holler, bade me a rather puzzled good-night, and left, shooting the outer bolt. I do love to twist tails, especially liberal ones; I wondered if his delicacy extended to black women.
I was so tuckered that I supposed I’d fall fast asleep as soon as I lay down, but my mind was in such a whirl that I lay waking, trying to make sense of it all. It seemed an age since I’d woken beside that awful whore in Baltimore, and so much had happened that it was difficult to order my thoughts. One thing, though, was paramount: thanks to Spring’s informations, “Comber’s” presence was known; it didn’t surprise me, on reflection, that the Railroad had sniffed me out, for they were sharp men, but I wondered what other eyes might be on the look-out for me? I couldn’t begin to imagine that, and once I’d escaped from my present hosts and reached the ministry, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
From that my thoughts turned to what Crixus had told me, not only about the lunatic Brown, but about the state of play in the States generally, which had been absolute news to me. To hear him, the place seemed to be on the brink of civil war, and that was hard to take, I can tell you: such wars and revolutions were for foreigners – heaven knew, we’d seen that in ’48 – but not for us or our American cousins. I didn’t understand, then, that America was two countries – but then, most Americans didn’t, either.
As you know, it was slavery that drew the line and led to the war, but not quite in the way that you might think. It wasn’t only a fine moral crusade, although fanatics like Crixus and John Brown viewed it as such and no more; the fact is that America rubbed along with slavery comfortably enough while the country was still young and growing (and getting over the shock of cutting loose from the mother country); it was only when the free North and the slave South discovered that they had quite different views about what kind of country the U.S.A. ought to be on that distant day when all the blank spaces on the map had been filled in, that the trouble started. Each saw the future in its own image; the North wanted a free society of farms and factories devoted to money and Yankee “know-how” and all the hot air in their ghastly Constitution, while the South dreamed, foolishly, of a massa paradise where they could make comfortable profits from inefficient cultivation, drinking juleps and lashing Sambo while the Yankees did what they dam’ well pleased north of the 36′ 30″ line.
They couldn’t both happen, not with Northern money and morality racing forward in tandem while the South stood still, sniffing the magnolias. Slavery was plainly going to go, sooner or later – unless the South cut adrift and set up shop on their own. There had been talk of this for years, and some Southerners had the amazing notion that left to themselves they could expand south and west (for cotton needs land, by the millions of acres), embracing Mexico and the Dago countries in a vast slave empire where the white boss would lord it forever. But their wiser heads saw no need for this so long as the South controlled the Congress (and the Army), which they did because their states were united, while the Northerners were forever bickering amongst themselves.
The situation was confused by a thousand and one political and social factors (but, believe me, you don’t want to know about the Missouri Compromise or the “doughfaces” or the Taney ruling or the Western railroad or the Democratic split or the Know-Nothings or the Kansas – Nebraska Bill or the emergence of the Republican Party or the Little Giant or gradual emancipation, you really don’t). It’s worth noting, though, that there were folk in the South who wanted an end to slavery, and many in the North who didn’t mind its continuing so long as peace was kept and the Union preserved. Congressman Lincoln, for example, loathed slavery and believed it would wither away, but said that in the meantime, if the South wanted it, let ’em have it; if slavery was the price of American unity, he was ready to pay it. Being a politician, of course, he had a fine forked tongue; on the one hand he spouted a lot of fustian about all men being equal (which he didn’t believe for a moment), while on t’other he was against blacks having the vote or holding office or marrying whites, and said that if the two were to live together, whites must have the upper hand.
But over all, the anti-slavery feeling grew ever stronger in the North, which naturally made the South dig its heels in harder than ever. The Fugitive Slave law for recovering runaways was passed in ’50, to the rage of the abolitionists; Uncle Tom’s Cabin added fuel to the fire; and Crixus wasn’t far out when he said that it only needed a spark to the powder-train to set off the explosion. I didn’t pay him too much heed, though; what I’ve just been telling you was unknown to me then, and I figured Crixus’s talk of ga
thering storms and trials by combat was just the kind of stuff that he, being a crazed abolitionist, wanted to believe.
Well, he was right, and I, in my excusable ignorance, was wrong; the storm was gathering in ’59 – but what astonishes me today is that all the wiseacres who discuss its origins and inevitability, never give a thought to where it really began, back in 1776, with their idiotic Declaration of Independence. If they’d had the wit to stay in the Empire then, instead of getting drunk on humbug about “freedom” and letting a pack of firebrands (who had a fine eye to their own advantage) drag ’em into pointless rebellion, there would never have been an American Civil War, and that’s as sure as any “if” can be. How so? Well, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery in 1833, and the South would have been bound to go along with that, grumbling, to be sure, but helpless against the will of Britain and her northern American colonies. It would all have happened quietly, no doubt with compensation, and there’d have been nothing for North and South to fight about. Q.E.D.
But try telling that to a smart New Yorker, or an Arkansas chawbacon, or a pot-bellied Virginia Senator; point out that Canada and Australia managed their way to peaceful independence without any tomfool Declarations or Bunker Hills or Shilohs or Gettysburgs, and are every bit as much “the land of the free” as Kentucky or Oregon, and all you’ll get is a great harangue about “liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, damn your Limey impudence, from the first; a derisive haw-haw and a stream of tobacco juice across your boots from the second; and a deal of pious fustian about a new nation forged in blood emerging into the sunlight under Freedom’s flag, from the third. You might as well be listening to an intoxicated Frog.
It’s understandable, to be sure: they have to live with their ancestors’ folly and pretend that it was all for the best, and that the monstrous collection of platitudes which they call a Constitution, which is worse than useless because it can be twisted to mean anything you please by crooked lawyers and grafting politicos, is the ultimate human wisdom. Well, it ain’t, and it wasn’t worth one life, American or British, in the War of Independence, let alone the vile slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celtic race in the Civil War. But perhaps you had to stand on Cemetery Ridge after Pickett’s charge to understand that.
I put these thoughts to Lincoln, you know, after the war, and he sat back, cracking his knuckles and eyeing me slantendicular.
“Flashman the non-Founding Father is a wondrous thought,” says he. “Come, now, do I detect a mite of imperial resentment? You know, paternal jealousy because the mutinous son didn’t turn out prodigal after all?”
“You can’t get much more prodigal than Gettysburg, Mr President,” says I. “And I ain’t jealous one little bit. I just wish our ancestors had been wiser. I’d be happy to see the Queen reigning in Washington, with yourself as Prime Minister of the British-American Empire.” Toady, if you like, but true.
“Lord Lincoln … of Kaintuck’?” laughs he. “Doesn’t sound half bad. D’you suppose they’d make me a Duke? No, better not – the boys would never let me in the store at New Salem again!”
He was the only American, by the way, who ever gave me a straight answer to a question I’ve asked occasionally, out of pure mischief: why was it right for the thirteen colonies to secede from the British Empire, but wrong for the Southern States to secede from the Union?
“Setting aside the Constitution, of which you think so poorly – and which I’d abandon gladly in order to preserve the Union, if you’ll pardon the paradox – I’m astonished that a man of your worldly experience can even ask such a question,” says he. “What has ‘right’ got to do with it? The Revolution of ’76 succeeded, the recent rebellion did not, and there, as the darkie said when he’d et the melon, is an end of it.”
And a few hours after that he was dead, the last but not the least casualty of that rotten war. It’s fitting that my digression (which has some bearing on my present tale, though what it treats of was mostly hidden from me in ’59) has brought me back to dear devious old Abraham, because he was in my thoughts as I lay waking in Crixus’s attic; I was remembering how he’d got me out of another tight spot, when the slave-hunters came to Judge Payne’s house, and if now my door had swung suddenly open to reveal his ugly, lanky figure, I’d not have minded a bit. He’d been a junior Congressman when I’d last seen him, but I’d heard nothing of him since …
The faint click of the bolt being slipped broke in on my thoughts, and as I sat up the door opened noiselessly, and someone slipped quickly in – it wasn’t Congressman Lincoln, though, it was Joe the negro, the whites of his eyes glinting in the candleshine as he set his back to the door and raised a finger to his lips. To my astonishment he was in stockinged feet; he listened for a moment and then sped silently to the window, raising it slowly to make no sound before beckoning me to join him. Wondering and suddenly alive with hope, I watched as he stooped to examine the bars; he gave a little chuckle, motioned me to stand clear, and bracing his sole against one bar he laid hold on its neighbour and pulled. He was a huge fellow, as tall as I and a foot broader, and I heard his muscles crack as he heaved to wake the dead, twice and then again, and the bar suddenly bent like a bow, snapping free with a sharp report at its lower end.
We waited, ears pricked, but there wasn’t a sound, and Joe swiftly unwound a slender rope from his waist and passed one end to me.
“Ketch holt, an’ I’ll set tight while you slide down the roof,” whispers he. “When you hit the gutter, it ain’t but a little ten-fut drop to the groun’. Go out the side-gate, turn lef’ up the alley, an’ you’s on the street. Turn lef’ again, an’ keep goin’ till you meets a carriage comin’ by – they’s allus one aroun’ this time o’ night.” His teeth glittered in a huge grin in the black face. “Then tell ’em where you wants to go. Git slidin’, brother!”
You don’t wait to ask questions. I shook his hand, whipped the cord round my wrist, and squeezed out on to the sill, scuffing his fine borrowed shirt in the process and tearing my jacket. The roof sloped sharply down for about fifteen feet from the window, but with Joe paying out the cord I slithered gently across the tiles and eased myself over the gutter. It was black as sin beneath, but I lowered my feet into the void, tugged on the gutter to test its weight, hung for an instant by both hands, and let go, landing on grass and measuring my length in what felt like a flowerbed. In a second I was afoot, listening, but there was no sound save that of the window being closed overhead. I waited until my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, saw the gate, and a moment later was striding up the alley and then left on the street to which the growler had brought me hours earlier.
What it meant I couldn’t fathom at all. Why the devil should Joe turn me loose? Was it some wild ploy of Crixus’s? No, that made no sense – but then, nothing did any longer. What mattered was that I was free, and once I’d found a hack to convey me to the ministry, or Willard’s Hotel, I was home and dry. I had no notion what time it was, somewhere in the small hours, probably, but I hadn’t even had time to start doubting Joe’s assurance that cabs were to be found in Washington suburbs at this o’clock when I heard the squeak of wheels ahead, and round the corner comes a one-horse buggy, its lamps shining dimly through the gloom.
I took a quick glance back at Crixus’s house, no more than forty yards away, but it looked dead to the world, so I called softly and waved as I hurried towards the carriage. The driver reined in as I came up, and I was preparing to give him direction when I saw that he already had a fare, a vague figure barely visible in the faint glow of the side-lamps. I was about to wave him on when it struck me that the whole neighbourhood was about as lively as Herne Bay in November, with not a light in a house or a soul on the street, and no prospect of another conveyance; there was a warm drizzle improving the mud no end, so I approached the window in my best Hyde Park style.
“Your pardon, but I’m looking for a cab, and there seems to be none about – would it inconvenience you if I shared
yours until we meet one?”
“Why, honey,” says a soft feminine voice from the interior, “’twill be mah pleasure to take yuh wheah-evah yuh wanna go,” and a slender hand gloved in lace was extended through the window. “Why’nt yuh-all jump right in, now? It’s real cosy in heah.”
A cruiser, bigod, of all the luck! – though what custom she expected in this deserted backwater I couldn’t imagine. I was inside in a bound, expressing my thanks to the neatest little cracker you ever saw, who rustled her skirts aside with a flurry of petticoats and slim fish-netted ankles to make room for me and made no effort to disengage her hand from mine. It was too dim to see much, but I could make out blonde curls and a small, rather childlike face behind the veil of her saucy bonnet; she was decidedly on the petite side, in a fashionably low-cut gown that felt like silk, and her scent was subtle enough to be expensive – but then, she was one who could afford to ply her trade on wheels.
“An’ what is yore destination, suh?” cries she pertly, showing neat little teeth and bright eyes behind the veil. “Or would yuh-all prefeh to leave that to me?” She transferred her hand to my thigh. “Ah know the most elegant li’l place.”
I’d been about to say the British ministry, but paused – she’d probably never heard of it, anyway. Besides, I was in no mood to decline her invitation: I’d been two months at sea, remember, and celibacy’s a double trial when your last rattle has been someone as delectable as Miranda. Her perfume was reviving all sorts of jolly memories, the touch of her fingers was distracting … and the ministry would be fast asleep. I hadn’t a dollar to my name, but we’d fret about that later.
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