George Fraser - Flashman on the March

‘Lucky for both of us. So, now that you know all about my guilty past, d’you still feel like trusting me with your half-million? No fears that I might tool along the coast to Monte Carlo and blue the lot at the wheel?’

Put like that, with a wink and a grin, he didn’t care for it above half, but common sense told him I wasn’t going to levant, fn3and he’d no choice, anyway. So a couple of hours after midnight, there I was at the Klutsch mole, watching Speed’s clerk settle up with the skipper of a neat little smack or yawl or whatever they call ’em, while its crew of Antonios chattered and loafed on the hatches – even in those days Trieste was more Italian than Austrian – and here came Speed in haste across the deserted plaza from the station, with a squad of Royal Marines from his Embassy wheeling the goods on a hand-cart: scores of little strong-boxes with the locks sealed with the royal arms. 7There were four of the Bootnecks 8under a sergeant with a jaw like a pike, all very trim with their Sniders slung; Speed’s dollars would be safe from sea pirates and land banditti with this lot on hand.

It may have been my jest about Monte or his natural fear at seeing his precious cargo pass out of his ken, but now that the die was cast Speed had a fit of the doubtfuls; earlier he’d been begging me to come to his rescue, but now he was chewing his lip as they swung the boxes down to the deck with the Eyeties jabbering and the sergeant giving ’em Billingsgate, while I took an easy cheroot at the rail, trying my Italian pidgin on the skipper.

‘This ain’t a joke, Flash!’ says Speed. ‘It’s bloody serious! You’re carryin’ my career along with those dollars – my good name, dammit!’ As if he had one. ‘Jesus, if anything should go wrong! You will take care, old chap, won’t you? I mean, you’ll do nothin’ wild … you know, like … like …’ He broke off, not caring to say ‘like buggering off to Pago Pago with the loot’. Instead he concluded glumly: ‘’Tain’t insured, you know – not a penny of it!’

I assured him that his specie would reach Napier safely in less than four weeks, but he still looked blue and none too eager to hand over the Embassy passport requesting and requiring H.M. servants, civil and military, to speed me on my way, and a letter for Napier, asking him to give me a warrant and funds for my passage home. I shook hands briskly before he could change his mind, and as we shoved off and the skipper spun the wheel and his crew dragged the sail aloft, damned if he wasn’t here again, running along the mole, waving and hollering:

‘I say, Flash, I forgot to ask you for a receipt!’

I told him to forge my signature if it would make him sleep sounder, and his bleating faded on the warm night air as we stood out from the mole, the little vessel heeling over suddenly as the wind cracked in her sail; the skipper bawled commands as the hands scampered barefoot to tail on to the lines, and I looked back at the great brightly lit crescent of the Trieste waterfront and felt a mighty relief, thinking, well, Flashy my boy, that’s another town you’re glad to say goodbye to on short acquaintance, and here’s to a jolly holiday cruise to a new horizon and an old friend, and then hey! for a swift passage home, and Elspeth waiting. Strange, little Gertrude was fading from memory already, but I found myself reflecting that thanks to my tuition her princeling husband would be either delighted or scandalised on his wedding night – possibly both, the lucky fellow.

You gather from this that I was in a tranquil, optimistic mood as I set off on my Abyssinian odyssey, ass that I was. You’d ha’ thought, after all I’d seen and suffered in my time, that I’d have remembered all the occasions when I’d set off carefree and unsuspecting along some seemingly primrose path only to go head first into the pit of damnation at t’other end. But you never can tell.

I couldn’t foresee, as I stood content in the bow, watching the green fire foaming up from the forefoot, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew – I couldn’t foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle-blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonising bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.

No, I foresaw none of those horrors, or that amazing unknown country, Prester John’s fabled land of inaccessible mountain barriers and bottomless chasms, and wild, war-loving beautiful folk, into which Napier was to lead such an expedition as had not been seen since Cortes and Pisarro (so Henty says), through impossible hazards and hopeless odds – and somehow lead it out again. A land of mystery and terror and cruelty, and the loveliest women in all Africa … a smiling golden nymph in her little leather tunic, teasing me as she sat by a woodland stream plaiting her braids … a gaudy barbarian queen lounging on cushions surrounded by her tame lions … a tawny young beauty remarking to my captors: ‘If we feed him into the fire, little by little, he will speak …’

Aye, it’s an interesting country, Abyssinia.

If you’ve read my previous memoirs you’ll know me better than Speedicut did, and won’t share his misgivings about trusting me with a cool half million in silver. Old Flash may be a model of the best vices – lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit, and dereliction of duty, all present and correct, as you know, and they’re not the half of it – but larceny ain’t his style at all. Oh, stern necessity may have led to my lifting this and that on occasion, but nothing on the grand scale – why, you may remember I once had the chance to make away with the great Koh-i-noor diamond, fn1but wasn’t tempted for an instant. If there’s one thing your true-bred coward values, it’s peace of mind, and you can’t have that if you’re a hunted outlaw forever far from home. Also, pocketing a diamond’s one thing, but stacks of strong-boxes weighing God knows what and guarded by five stout lads are a very different palaver.

Speed had spoken lightly of a quick trip to Alexandria, but with that pack of dilatory dagoes tacking to and fro and putting about between the heel of Italy and Crete, we must have covered all of two thousand miles, and half the time allotted me to reach Napier had gone before we sighted Egypt. It’s a sand-blown dunghill at any time, but I was dam’ glad to see it after that dead bore of a voyage – and no dreary haul across the desert in prospect either. The camel journey was a penance I’d endured in the past, but now it was rails all the way from Alex to Suez, by way of Cairo, and what had once taken days of arse-burning discomfort was now a journey of eight hours, thanks to our engineers who’d won the concession in the teeth of frantic French opposition. They were hellish jealous of their great canal, which was then within a year of completion, with gangs of thousands of the unfortunate fellaheen being mercilessly flogged on the last lap, for it was built with slave labour in all but name. 9

We didn’t linger in Alexandria; Egypt’s the last place you want to carry a cargo of valuables, so I made a quick sortie to the Hôtel de l’Europe for a bath and a civilised breakfast while the Marine sergeant drummed up the local donkey drivers to carry the boxes to the station, and then we were rattling away, four hours to Cairo, another four on the express to Suez, and before bed-time I’d presented myself to the port captain and was dining in the Navy mess. Abyssinia was on every lip, and when it was understood that the celebrated Flashy was bringing Napier his war-chest, 10it was heave and ho with a vengeance. A steam sloop commanded by a cheerful infant named Ballantyne with a sun-peeled nose and a shock of fair hair bleached almost white by the sun was placed at my disposal, his tars hoisted the strong-boxes aboard and stowed them below, the Jollies were crammed into the tiny focsle, and as the sun came up next morning we were thrashing down the Gulf of Suez to the Red Sea proper, having been in and out of Egypt in twenty-four hours, which is a day longer than you’d care to spend there.