Flashman In The Great Game fp-5

by George MacDonald Fraser

  It takes a good deal to stir me out of petrified fear, but that did it. I rolled on my side, trying to sweep my gun round to cover the sound; it caught in the bracken, and I hauled frantically at it to get it clear. God, what a din I must be making — and then the damned lock must have caught on a stem, for one barrel went off like a thunderclap, and I was on my feet with a yell, tearing downhill through the bracken. I fairly flung myself through the high fronds, there was the crack of a shot behind me, and a ball buzzed overhead like a hornet. I went bounding through, came out in a clearing with firs on either side, sprang over a bank of ferns and plunged straight down into a peat cutting. I landed belly first in the stinking ooze, but I was up and struggling over the far side in an instant, for I could hear crashing in the bracken above me, and knew that if I lost an instant he'd get a second shot. I was plastered with muck like a tar-and-feather merchant, but I still had my gun, and then I must have trod on a loose stone, for I pitched headlong, and went rolling and bumping down the slope, hit a rock, and finished up winded and battered in a burn, trying frantically to scramble up, and slithering on the slimy gravel underfoot.

  There was a thumping of boots on the bank, I started round, and there was the moujik, not ten yards away. I didn't even have time to look for my gun; I was sprawling half out of the burn, and the bastard had his piece at his shoulder, the muzzle looking me straight in the face. I yelled and grabbed for a stone, there was the crash of a gunshot — and the moujik dropped his piece, shrieking, and clutched at his arm as he toppled backwards among the rocks.

  "Careful, colonel," says a voice behind me. "He's only winged." And there, standing not five yards off, with a smoking revolver in his hand, was a tall fellow in tweeds; he just gave me a nod, and then jumped lightly over the rocks and stood over the moujik, who was groaning and clutching his bleeding arm.

  "Murderous swine, ain't you?" says the newcomer conversationally, and kicked him in the face. "It's the only punishment he'll get, I'm afraid," he added, over his shoulder. "No diplomatic scandals, you see." And as he turned towards me, I saw to my amazement who it was — Hutton, the tall chap with the long jaw who'd taken me to Palmerston only a few nights before. He put his pistol back in his arm-pit and came over to me.

  "No bones broken? Bless me, but you're a sight." He pulled me to my feet. "I'll say this, colonel — you're the fastest man over rough country I ever hope to follow. I lost you in five minutes, but I kept track of our friends, all right. Nice pair, ain't they, though? I wish to God it had been the other one I pulled trigger on — oh, we won't see him again, never fret. Not until everyone's down the hill, and he'll turn up cool as you like, never having been near you all day, what?"

  "But — but … you mean, you expected this?"

  "No-o — not exactly, anyway. But I've been pretty much on hand since the Russian brotherhood arrived, you know. We don't believe in taking chances, eh? Not with customers like Master Ignatieff — enterprising chap, that. So when I heard he'd decided to join the shoot today, I thought I'd look along — just as well I did, I think," says this astonishing fellow. "Now, if you've got your wind back, I suggest we make our way down. Never mind our little wounded bird yonder — if he don't bleed to death he'll find his way back to his master. Pity he shot himself by accident, ain't it? That'll be their story, I dare say — and we won't contradict it — here, what are you about, sir?"

  I was lunging for my fallen gun, full of murderous rage now that the danger was past. "I'm going to blow that bloody peasant's head off!" I roared, fumbling with the lock. "I'll teach —"

  "Hold on!" cries he, catching my arm, and he was positively grinning. "Capital idea, I agree — but we mustn't, you see. One bullet in him can be explained away by his own clumsiness — but not two, eh? We mustn't have any scandal, colonel — not involving her majesty's guests. Come along now — let's be moving down, so that Count Ignatieff, who I've no doubt is watching us this minute, can come to his stricken servant's assistance. After you, sir."

  He was right, of course; the irony of it was that although Ignatieff and his brute had tried to murder me, we daren't say so, for diplomacy's sake. God knows what international complications there might have been. This didn't sink in with me at once — but his reminder that Ignatieff was still prowling about was enough to lend me wings down the hill. Not that even he'd have tried another shot, with Hutton about, but I wasn't taking chances.

  I'll say this for the secret service — which is what Hutton was, of course — they're damned efficient. He had a gig waiting on the road, one of his assistants was dispatched to the help of my ghillie, and within a half-hour I was back in Balmoral through the servants' entrance, being cleaned up and instructed by Hutton to put it about that I'd abandoned the shoot with a strained muscle.

  "I'll inform my chiefs in London that Colonel Flashman had a fortunate escape from an unexpected danger, arising from a chance encounter with an old Russian friend," says he, "and that he is now fit and well to proceed on the important task ahead of him. And that, in the meantime, I'm keeping an eye on him. No, sir, I'm sorry — I can't answer any of your questions, and I wouldn't if I could."

  Which left me in a fine state of consternation and bewilderment, wondering what to make of it all. My immediate thought was that Palmerston had somehow arranged the whole thing, in the hope that I'd kill Ignatieff, but even in my excited condition that didn't make sense. A likelier explanation was that Ignatieff, coming innocently to Balmoral and finding me on the premises, had decided to take advantage of the chance to murder me, in revenge for the way I'd sold him the previous year. That, knowing the man and his ice-cold recklessness, was perfectly sound reasoning — but there was also the horrid possibility that he had found out about the job Palmerston had given me (God alone knew how — but he'd at least discovered from the idiot Elspeth that I was going to India) and had been out to dispose of me in the way of business.

  "A preposterous notion," was Ellenborough's answer when I voiced my fears to him that night. "He could not know — why, the Board decision was highly secret, and imparted only to the Prime Minister's most intimate circle. No, this is merely another example of the naked savagery of the Russian bear!" He was full of port, and wattling furiously. "And virtually in her majesty's presence, too! Damnable! But, of course, we can say nothing, Flashman. It only remains," says he, booming sternly, "for you to mete out conclusive justice to this villain, if you chance to encounter him in India. In the meantime, I'll see that the Lord Chamberlain excludes him from any diplomatic invitations which may be extended to St Petersburg in future. By gad, I will!"

  I ventured the cautious suggestion that it might be better, after what had happened, to send someone else to Jhansi — just in case Ignatieff 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 fore-seen, 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 puggaree*(*Turban.) 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 nice leisurely way of travelling, and I stopped off at messes along the road, and kept my ears open. None of the talk chimed with what I'd heard at Balmoral, and the general feeling was that the country had never been so quiet. Which was heartening, even if it was what you'd expect, down-country.

  I purposely kept clear of any politicals, because I wanted to form my own judgements without getting any uncomfortable news that I didn't want to hear. However, up towards Mhow, who should I run into but Johnny Nicholson, whom I hadn't seen since Afghanistan, fifteen years before, trotting along on a Persian pony and dressed like a Baluchi robber with a beard down to his belly, and a couple of Sikh lancers in tow. We fell on each other like old chums — he didn't know me well, you see, but mostly by my fearsome reputation; he was one of your play-up-and-fear-God paladins, full of zeal and athirst for glory, was John, and said his prayers and didn't drink and thought women were either nuns or mothers. He was very big by now, I discovered, and just coming down for leave before he took up as resident at Peshawar.

  By rights I shouldn't have mentioned my mission to anyone, but this was too good a chance to miss. There wasn't a downier bird in all India than Nicholson, or one who knew the country better, and you could have trusted him with anything
, money even. So I told him I was bound for Jhansi, and why — the chapattis, the Rani, and the Russians. He listened, fingering his beard and squinting into the distance, while we squatted by the road drinking coffee.

  "Jhansi, eh?" says he. "Pindari robber country — Thugs, too. Trust you to pick the toughest nut south of the Khyber. Maharatta chieftains — wouldn't turn my back on any of 'em, and if you tell me there have been Russian agitators at work, I'm not surprised. Any number of ugly-looking copers and traders have been sliding south with the caravans up our way this year past, but not many guns, you see — that's what we keep our accounts by. But I don't like this news about chapattis passing among the sepoys."

  "You don't think it amounts to anything, surely?" I found all his cheerful references to Thugs and Pindaris damned disconcerting; he was making Jhansi sound as bad as Afghanistan.

  "I don't know," says he, very thoughtful. "But I do know that this whole country's getting warm. Don't ask me how I know — Irish instinct if you like. Oh, I know it looks fine from Bombay or Calcutta, but sometimes I look around and ask myself what we're sitting on, out here. Look at it — we're holding a northern frontier against the toughest villains on earth: Pathans, Sikhs, Baluchis, and Afghanistan thrown in, with Russia sitting on the touchline waiting their chance. In addition, down-country, we're nominal masters of a collection of native states, half of them wild as Barbary, ruled by princes who'd cut our throats for three-pence. Why? Because we've tried to civilise 'em — we've clipped the tyrants' wings, abolished abominations like suttee and thugee, cancelled their worst laws and instituted fair ones. We've reformed 'em until they're sick — and started the telegraph, the railroad, schools, hospitals, all the rest of it."