Flashman and the Cobra

by Robert Brightwell

  I only spent a few hours in that cell but I truly believe I would have gone mad that night if my stay had not been interrupted. With the terrors I have been through in my life, it is a miracle I have not ended up in the blue devil factory like one of my brothers.

  I had been pacing around, desperately trying to take my mind off the rockets and listening for any sound of rescue. Surely James Skinner would attempt something, I reasoned, but all I heard was the sound of the odd owl screeching or the dying squeal from its prey. I was not even sure if James Skinner was still at liberty. He could have been arrested as well, to ensure that he was there to light the fuses in the morning. Then suddenly I heard more noises in the corridor outside my cell. There was a slight scuffling sound and I wondered if the men from earlier were back or if I should call out this time. Before I could make up my mind a voice whispered urgently, “Flashman, are you here?”

  I could, and probably did, weep with relief. It was rescue. “Yes, I am here,” I whispered back, knocking on the cell door.

  In novels the cell door always swings open at this point, but in reality there was a delay of what seemed an eternity but which was probably just a couple of minutes while they found the right key. It gave me time to cuff any tears of relief from my eyes and then get stressed again worrying that the key would not be there and it was not rescue after all. Finally, after muttered cursing on both sides of the door, they found a key that worked and the door swung open. There were the familiar Skinner features but a strange uniform and it was only when my rescuer stepped into the patch of moonlight in my cell that I realised that it was Robert Skinner and not his brother James.

  “Surprised to see me?” asked Robert, grinning. “Had to get you out or my foolish brother would have refused to light your rockets and you would both have been blasted to the heavens.”

  I stood there gaping at him, for I had only met Robert once when he visited his brother for a few days when I first arrived in Meerut and now here he was saving my life. Little did I know that the surprises of that night were only just beginning.

  “Well, let’s get a move on,” he added. “Unless you want to stay for the fireworks after all?”

  That sparked me into action and I was through the cell door and down the passage, which was lit by flickering torches. I could see a couple of Scindia’s guards lying tied up at the far end with another of Robert’s men guarding the entrance. But before I reached them there was a big black patch on the stone which I realised was pooled, sticky blood and there, thrown against the wall, was another body. It was a white man and it took me a second to realise that the face, frozen in a contorted look of terror, was that of Lieutenant Harvey.

  Robert must have seen where I was looking for he murmured, “It wasn’t us. Scindia evidently felt he had outlived his usefulness.”

  I couldn’t feel sorry for him, the bastard had got what he deserved, but it brought home the treachery of Scindia and his father-in-law. Rather than pay him, they had just arranged for him to be taken down in the dungeons where a couple of villains had cut his throat. His body had been dropped in a corner like rubbish, to be buried in the morning.

  We emerged out of the corridor into a small courtyard. Robert’s men led the way silently around the shadowed sides until we reached a small door in a larger main gate that led onto the street. I stepped through to find two of Scindia’s men tied up and gagged and watching me, white-eyed, with more of Robert’s men standing over them. In the street was an opulent-looking palanquin, one of the two-seater affairs with eight bearers, all dressed in some sort of uniform with two on each pole.

  “Your means of escape,” said Robert, gesturing to it.

  It would only take minutes for Scindia’s guards to discover I had been broken out and this looked the worst vehicle possible for a fast and discreet escape. Christ, a rickshaw pulled by blind beggars with bells could not attract more attention.

  “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but wouldn’t something a little less ostentatious and faster, like a single horse, be better?”

  Robert grinned at me. “Don’t worry, it is the begum’s personal palanquin. No one will dare stop it and there are enough of her bodyguard around if they try. It will take you to the city gates where horses waiting for you.”

  I looked again and now I noticed that the palanquin bearers had swords and there were more armed men loitering in doorways and at either end of the street.

  “Go quickly. We don’t want to hang around,” urged Robert.

  Well, no one has ever accused me of being slow to run away from danger and that wasn’t going to change now. I bounded across and climbed in through the curtains of the palanquin and dropped into the forward-facing seat and immediately it started moving. I peered out of the curtained window. Soldiers were moving out from doorways to run alongside; there must have been twenty visible down the side I was looking. I was ducking back into the dark interior of the palanquin to look out of the other side when a woman’s voice just beyond my knees said, “You need not worry. We will not be stopped.”

  How my heart has survived the shocks it has experienced in my life I will never know, but it must be at least as strong as the fabric on top of the palanquin, which my head slammed into as I jumped in alarm.

  The woman chuckled in amusement. “You seem a little jumpy, Mr Flashman,” she said in perfect English.

  “Is it any wonder after the last day I have been through.” I squinted into the other side of the palanquin but could not make out the figure I was sharing the compartment with as thick curtains blocked out the light. “Who are you? Are you one of the begum’s servants?”

  A curtain on the other side of the palanquin was pushed back and moonlight flooded in. Two twinkling black eyes stared at me from a face that I had last seen beside Scindia’s the day before. There in front of me was the diminutive figure of the begum of Samru.

  “I suppose I should be grateful that you did not sit on me when you jumped into my palanquin,” she said. “What are you doing? There is no need to climb out again. If I wanted to harm you, I would not have just saved you from certain death, would I? Just sit down and stop rocking us about.”

  My first reaction had been to bolt from the vehicle and I had got one leg out before the import of her words got through the fresh burst of panic. She was right: if she wanted me dead, she had only to wait. But for the life of me I could not understand why she would want to rescue me, and I must have said so.

  “Really, Mr Flashman, you must learn not to take things at face value, especially with the Mahratta. We are much more complicated than that.” She settled herself back in the centre of her seat and regarded with me with a look of mild amusement. She may have been only four feet tall but in that confined space she did not seem small at all. “Just because I was at Scindia’s durbar, you should not assume I am just in Scindia’s party. As a ruler of a small province I need to balance many friends to maintain my independence.”

  “So why were you at Scindia’s durbar?” I asked, still trying to work out what was going on.

  “Why, to see what would happen, of course.” She gave another little chuckle. “Who do you think warned Perron what Scindia had planned? I even suggested what he should do about it.” She paused, shaking her head at the memory. “Mind you, even I did not think Scindia would be stupid enough to consider letting the Pathans attack all his officers. That would have torn his army apart.”

  I was sitting back and watching her carefully. I remembered what Robert had told me before about how she adopted different personas to give people the impression she wanted them to see. I was just twenty-one then but I was already learning that people do you favours for a reason. This was a very canny woman who had ruled for over twenty years because she was cunning and ruthless when she needed to be. She had not rescued me just out of goodwill, and now she was telling me how she manipulated the Mahratta rulers and generals. There would be a price to pay for my rescue.

  “Wouldn’t the destruction
of Scindia’s army be beneficial for you? Surely it would drive up the price of your own troops?” I asked.

  “No, it is a matter of balance. If Scindia’s army was destroyed or broken up then Holkar, the other leading Mahratta ruler, would attack and win and then he would be all-powerful. The Holkar and Scindia families have been battling each other for generations; they hate each other. They both think I favour them, but in reality I and other smaller princes work to keep them balanced. That is in our best interest as then they both look to us for support.”

  “Rescuing me will not help maintain the balance, so I have to wonder why you have done it.”

  “Can’t a humble Catholic woman do a favour purely out of Christian charity?” She gave me an innocent smile and I grinned back.

  “From what I have heard about you, lady, there is usually at least one good reason for anything that you do. You did not rescue me as an act of human kindness.”

  She laughed again. “Maybe I have my reasons,” she admitted. “Holkar is the enemy Scindia is really focused on. Scindia’s troops have beaten the British before and he is confident that they will do so again. They vastly outnumber the British and now that they are trained in European ways they are a formidable force. But I am not so sure of their victory. The tiger-loving Tippoo Sultan of Mysore was a powerful ruler with a strong army and the British beat him. Scindia is also doing a great job of destroying the morale of his own troops. So I am thinking that it might be wise to have someone to help negotiate with the British if they do beat the Mahratta.”

  “You mean me?”

  “Precisely. Of course Robert Skinner believes I am doing it to save his brother. James was set to refuse to light your rockets and would have been killed as well in the morning. James Skinner is far too principled a man to fight for a ruler like Scindia, who does not understand the concept of honour.”

  “But won’t Skinner be punished when Scindia finds out I have escaped?”

  “No, that is why I collected you with my uniformed men and left the guards alive to see them. Scindia will learn it was me who broke you out and he may guess it was to save James, but he won’t do anything about it. Right now he needs my army too much to risk losing it to kill a British spy.”

  “What happens if Scindia does beat the British?”

  She looked me in the eye as she replied. “Well, then it will be difficult for me to refuse him if he asks for you back, and to be frank, you will be of little use to me then.” Perhaps ‘straight talking’ was another one of her qualities that she wanted me to report to the British if the time came, but right then I would have welcomed the ‘reluctance to cause offence’ approach more typical to Indian culture.

  So there it was: I was relatively safe with the begum while the British remained a threat to the Mahratta, but that issue would take months if not years to resolve. This was a lot better than my explosive prospects back in the cell.

  Before I could consider the matter further, the palanquin came to a rest at the city gates and there waiting for us were around fifty fast horses. The begum had evidently planned ahead for my rescue, sending her carriage and baggage on ahead late that afternoon, and had just stayed behind with her bodyguard. The palanquin was now abandoned and we all mounted and set off down the road to her province of Sardhana. For all her talk of ‘Scindia needs my army and so would not dare challenge me’ I noticed that we went off at a fair gallop. She was a good horsewoman and her tiny frame sat like a jockey on a powerful horse which she handled with ease.

  She led our column and I rode alongside. Soon the turban she had been wearing had slipped off her head and her long hair was flying in the breeze. I remember looking across at her then as she rode. Despite her fifty years, I started to see how she had attracted her first husband and his entire army to her control and caused her second husband to kill himself rather than live without her. In the moonlight she looked years younger and the soft lunar glow revealed the beauty that must have enchanted men in her earlier years. She was still full of energy and enjoyed the company of her soldiers, joining in some of their banter. When one of her bodyguards suggested that she ease up as the road was rough and the horses could trip and fall, she cajoled him for being an old woman and rode even faster. The soldiers laughed in delight at her recklessness and you could tell that they adored her. She was a woman who had been getting men to do what she wanted all her life, and while her physical attractions may have faded, she had plenty of other tools in her armoury. She caught me studying her once and, as though reading my mind, she smiled and said, “Don’t try to understand me, Mr Flashman. Many have tried and all have failed.”

  As the sun climbed over the eastern horizon we caught up with the carriage and baggage wagons that she had sent on in advance the previous day. Her ladies fussed around her and she disappeared into the carriage, presumably to conduct her toilette. Her soldiers and I rested outside, watered what few bushes there were and ate a breakfast of boiled rice and a strange green spicy paste. I noticed that guards were posted for any sign of pursuit; they were not taking chances. But none was seen.

  After an hour we prepared to set off again, but as I was about to mount up I was invited by one of the ladies into the begum’s carriage. In daylight she was travelling in a manner more fitting to the ruler of a province. I climbed in and sat opposite her and she gave me a smile of greeting.

  “When we are alone you must call me by my Christian name of Joanna. May I call you Thomas?”

  “Of course. Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “One of the best soldiers I have ever commanded was an Englishman called George Thomas. He helped me learn my craft. He was a great man who went on to rule his own province before Scindia’s men destroyed him.” She paused and looked out of the window and then added thoughtfully, “I owe George a lot. I nearly married him, but when I chose Henri Le Vassoult instead, he came back and helped me regain command of the army and secure my lands again.” She looked back at me. “I take it you have heard the story of my second husband?”

  I nodded as I thought back to the story Robert had told me of the possible suicide pact and the cackling soldier talking about it just the previous day. “Yes, I have heard the story,” I confirmed.

  “It is the only time that my courage has failed,” she said wistfully. “I don’t regret it as I have done much good since, but I do regret what happened to poor Henri. I should never have married him.” She seemed to shake off the memory and her black, glittering eyes bored into mine as she asked, “What other stories have you heard about me?”

  “A soldier told me that you once had two servant girls buried alive. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it is. Are you shocked?” she asked as I must have shown some surprise that the little lady in front of me was capable of such a thing. “It was just after my first husband had died and I was trying to establish my authority. Some soldiers thought I was too weak to rule. These servant girls had soldier lovers and they tried to steal my jewels and burn down a house with soldiers’ families in it to mask their escape and hide their crime. They were caught and I had to make an example of them.”

  Once more she looked out of the window as though recollecting the scene before continuing. “I chose to bury them alive, which was a lot more peaceful death than some wanted. A pit was dug in the courtyard and they were thrown into it. Some planks were wedged against the sides of the pit to form the roof of a space around the girls and then the earth was piled back above them. The pit was never re-opened.”

  She looked back at me. “It sounds cruel but it saved many more lives in the long run. People were more shocked that I had killed women and it gave me a reputation as a ruler not to be crossed. The army was stabilised and peace reigned in Sardhana for many years. I would have had to kill many men to get the same effect. After all, this happened over twenty years ago and the story is still being told.”

  She had a point. This was an age when people were executed by tent mallets, elephants, even blown apar
t by rockets, and yet her reputation for ruthlessness was based on some executions that happened two decades ago, just because she was a woman executing women. I later found out that her first husband had been involved in the massacre of some English prisoners, but there was no evidence that the begum was involved. Not that this little detail stopped some of the old timers amongst the British in India having a very jaundiced view of her. As I subsequently discovered, they would believe any black tale about her and her army, but I am here to report the truth as I saw it.

  What I found at her province of Sardhana when we got there was a well-run country and people who greatly respected their ruler. They appreciated that while there were lots of soldiers to support, these ensured that their lands would not be ravaged by pindaree. The begum sold the services of her soldiers astutely so that the cost of the army was partly covered from this income, although wars requiring mercenary armies did not come with regular frequency. While I was there, though, war with the British, and possibly later with Holkar, was fully expected. All available troops were being drilled and equipped. As well as her veteran regiments, who looked as tough as teak, the new regiment of recruits was being trained so that they would be ready for hire in the coming conflict.

  I spent five months in Sardhana as the guest of the begum. Technically you could say I was a prisoner as I was not able to leave, but as I was given rooms in her palace it was the best incarceration I have ever experienced. I had complete freedom to go where I liked, but if I went to the stables to borrow a horse, a couple of her cavalry sowars were detailed as an escort. There was no real need for an escort as the province was peaceful and so I could only assume that they were there to deter me from trying to make a run for British territory. The fact that we were surrounded by lands controlled by Scindia, where I was still a wanted man, acted as a far greater deterrent.