Copyright

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by Barrie & Jenkins 1975

Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1975

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015

Map © John Gilkes 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille

George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007217199

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007449514

Version: 2015-07-14

The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.

To the question, how did I get the idea, I simply reply that I don’t know. Who ever knows? Anthony Hope conceived The Prisoner of Zenda on a walk from Westminster to the Temple, but I doubt if he could have said, after the calendar month it took him to write the book, what triggered the idea. In my case, Flashman came thundering out of the mists of forty years living and dreaming, and while I can list the ingredients that went to his making, heaven only knows how and when they combined.

One thing is sure: the Flashman Papers would never have been written if my fellow clansman Hugh Fraser, Lord Allander, had confirmed me as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1966. But he didn’t, the canny little bandit, and I won’t say he was wrong. I wouldn’t have lasted in the job, for I’d been trained in a journalistic school where editors were gods, and in three months as acting chief my attitude to management, front office, and directors had been that of a seigneur to his serfs – I had even put Fraser’s entry to the House of Lords on an inside page, assuring him that it was not for the Herald, his own paper, to flaunt his elevation, and that a two-column picture of him was quite big enough. How cavalier can you get?

And doubtless I had other editorial shortcomings. In any event, faced with twenty years as deputy editor (which means doing all the work without getting to the big dinners), I promised my wife I would ‘write us out of it’. In a few weeks of thrashing the typewriter at the kitchen table in the small hours, Flashman was half-finished, and likely to stay that way, for I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm, and lost interest – until my wife asked to read what I had written. Her reaction galvanised me into finishing it, one draft, no revisions, and for the next two years it rebounded from publisher after publisher, British and American.

I can’t blame them: the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully, and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story is a pretty eccentric subject. By 1968 I was ready to call it a day, but thanks to my wife’s insistence and George Greenfield’s matchless knowledge of the publishing scene, it found a home at last with Herbert Jenkins, the manuscript looking, to quote Christopher MacLehose, as though it had been round the world twice. It dam’ nearly had.

They published it as it stood, with (to me) bewildering results. It wasn’t a bestseller in the blockbuster sense, but the reviewers were enthusiastic, foreign rights (starting with Finland) were sold, and when it appeared in the U.S.A. one-third of forty-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir, to the undisguised glee of the New York Times, which wickedly assembled their reviews. ‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of.

You see, while I had written a straightforward introduction describing the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Papers’ in a saleroom in Ashby-de-la-Zouche (that ought to have warned them), and larded it with editorial ‘foot-notes’, there had been no intent to deceive; for one thing, while I’d done my best to write, first-person, in Victorian style, I’d never imagined that it would fool anybody. Nor did Herbert Jenkins. And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit. (The only one who was half-doubtful was my old chief sub on the Herald; called on to review it for another paper, he demanded of the Herald’s literary editor: ‘This book o’ Geordie’s isnae true, is it?’ and on being assured that it wasn’t, exclaimed: ‘The conniving bastard!’, which I still regard as a high compliment.)

With the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad who, despite his cowardice, depravity and deceit, had managed to emerge from fearful ordeals and perils an acclaimed hero, his only redeeming qualities being his humour and shameless honesty as a memorialist. I was gratified, if slightly puzzled to learn that the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, had said of the book: ‘I haven’t heard this voice in fifty years’, and that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was recommending it to his subordinates. My interest increased as I wrote more Flashman books, and noted the reactions.

I was, several critics agreed, a satirist. Taking revenge on the nineteenth century on behalf of the twentieth, said one. Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy, said another. Plainly under the influence of Conrad, said yet another. A full-page review in a German paper took me flat aback when my eye fell on the word ‘Proust’ in the middle of it. I don’t read German, so for all I know the review may have been maintaining that Proust was a better stand-off half than I was, or used more semi-colons. But there it was, and it makes you think. And a few years ago a highly respected religious journal said that the Flashman Papers deserved recognition as the work of a sensitive moralist, and spoke of service not only to literature and history, but to the study of ethics.

My instant reaction to this was to paraphrase Poins: ‘God send me no worse fortune, but I never said so!’ while feeling delighted that someone else had said it, and then reflecting solemnly that this was a far cry from long nights with cold tea and cigarettes, scheming to get Flashman into the passionate embrace of the Empress of China, or out of the toils of a demented dwarf on the edge of a snake-pit. But now, beyond remarking that the anti-imperial left-winger was sadly off the mark, that the Victorians were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation, and that I hadn’t read a word of Conrad by 1966 (and my interest in him since has been confined to Under Western Eyes, in the hope that I might persuade Dick Lester to film it as only he could), I have no comments to offer on opinions of my work. I know what I’m doing – at least, I think I do – and the aim is to entertain (myself, for a start) while being true to history, to let Flashman comment on human and inhuman nature, and devil take the romantics and the politically correct revisionists both. But my job is writing, not explaining what I’ve written, and I’m well content and grateful to have others find in Flashy whatever they will (I’ve even had letters psychoanalysing the brute), and return to the question with which I began this article.

A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tupenny bloods, the Wolf of Kabul and Lionheart Logan (where are they now?), the Barrack-Room Ballads, films like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s; the discovery, through Scott and Sabatini and Macaulay, that history is one tremendous adventure story; soldiering in Burma, and seeing the twilight of the Raj in all its splendour; a newspaper-trained lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion; being a Highlander from a family that would rather spin yarns than eat … I suppose Flashman was born out of all these things, and from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a child – and having a wayward cast of mind.

Thanks to that contrary streak (I always half-hoped that Rathbone would kill Flynn, confounding convention and turning the story upside down – Basil gets Olivia, Claude Rains triumphs, wow!), I recognised Flashman on sight as the star of Hughes’ book. Fag-roasting rotter and poltroon he might be, he was nevertheless plainly box-office, for he had the looks, swagger and style (‘big and strong’, ‘a bluff, offhand manner’, and ‘considerable powers of being pleasant’, according to this creator) which never fail to cast a glamour on villainy. I suspect Hughes knew it, too, and got rid of him before he could take over the book – which loses all its spirit and zest once Flashy has made his disgraced and drunken exit.

[He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]

What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending… just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.

In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).

Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.

I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.

When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.

And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.

George MacDonald Fraser

Dedication

For the Mad White Woman of Papar River

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

Dedication

Explanatory Note

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Appendix I

Appendix II

Footnotes

Notes

About the Author

The FLASHMAN Papers: In chronological order

The FLASHMAN Papers: In order of publication

Also by George MacDonald Fraser

About the Publisher

EXPLANATORY NOTE

One of the most encouraging things about editing the first four volumes of the Flashman Papers has been the generous response from readers and students of history in many parts of the world. Since the discovery of Flashman’s remarkable manuscript in a Leicestershire saleroom in 1965, when it was realised that it was the hitherto-unsuspected autobiographical memoir of the notorious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, letters have reached the editor from such diverse places as Ascension Island, a G.I. rest camp in Vietnam, university faculties and campuses in Britain and America, a modern caravanserai on the Khyber Pass road, a police-station cell in southern Australia, and many others.

What has been especially gratifying has been not only the interest in Flashman himself, but the close historical knowledge which correspondents have shown of the periods and incidents with which his memoirs have dealt so far – the first Afghan War, the solution of the Schleswig-Holstein Question (involving as it did Count Bismarck and Lola Montez), the Afro-American slave trade, and the Crimean War. Many have contributed interesting observations, and one or two have detected curious discrepancies in Flashman’s recollections which, regrettably, escaped his editor. A lady in Athens and a gentleman in Flint, Michigan, have pointed out that Flashman apparently saw the Duchess of Wellington at a London theatre some years after her death, and a letter on Foreign Office notepaper has remarked on his careless reference to a ‘British Ambassador’ in Washington in 1848, when in fact Her Majesty’s representative in the American capital held a less exalted diplomatic title. Such lapses are understandable, if not excusable, in a hard-living octogenarian.

Equally interesting have been such communications as those from a gentleman in New Orleans who claims to be Flashman’s illegitimate great-grandson (as the result of a liaison in a military hospital at Richmond, Va., during the U.S. Civil War), and from a British serving officer who asserts that his grandfather lent fifty dollars and a horse to Flashman during the same campaign; neither, apparently, was returned.

It is possible that these and other matters of interest will be resolved when the later papers are edited. The present volume deals with Flashman’s adventures in the Indian Mutiny, where he witnessed many of the dramatic moments of that terrible struggle, and encountered numerous Victorian celebrities – monarchs, statesmen, and generals among them. As in previous volumes, his narrative tallies closely with accepted historical fact, as well as furnishing much new information, and there has been little for his editor to do except correct his spelling, deplore his conduct, and provide the usual notes and appendices.

G.M.F.

They don’t often invite me to Balmoral nowadays, which is a blessing; those damned tartan carpets always put me off my food, to say nothing of the endless pictures of German royalty and that unspeakable statue of the Prince Consort standing knock-kneed in a kilt. King Teddy’s company is something I’d sooner avoid than not, anyway, for he’s no better than an upper-class hooligan. Of course, he’s been pretty leery of me for forty-odd years (ever since I misguided his youthful footsteps into an actress’s bed, in fact, and brought Papa Albert’s divine wrath down on his fat head) and when he finally wheezed his way on to the throne I gather he thought of dropping me altogether – said something about my being Falstaff to his Prince Hal. Falstaff, mark you – from a man with piggy eyes and a belly like a Conestoga wagon cover. Vile taste in cigars he has, too.

In the old Queen’s time, of course, I was at Balmoral a great deal. She always fancied me, from when she was a chit of a girl and pinned the Afghan medal on my manly breast, and after I had ridden herd on that same precious Teddy through the Tranby Croft affair and saved him from the worst consequences of his own folly, she couldn’t do enough for me. Each September after that, regular as clockwork, there would come a command for ‘dear General Flashman’ to take the train north to Kailyard Castle, and there would be my own room, with a bowl of late roses on the window-sill, and a bottle of brandy on the side-table with a discreet napkin over it – they knew my style. So I put up with it; she was all right, little Vicky, as long as you gave her your arm to lean on, and let her prattle on endlessly, and the rations were adequate. But even then, I never cottoned to the place. Not only, as I’ve said, was it furnished in a taste that would have offended the sensibilities of a nigger costermonger, it had the most awful Highland gloom about it – all drizzle and mist and draughts under the door and holy melancholy: even the billiard-room had a print on the wall of a dreadful ancient Scotch couple glowering devoutly. Praying, I don’t doubt, for me to be snookered.

But I think what really turns me against Balmoral in my old age is its memories. It was there that the Great Mutiny began for me, and on my rare excursions north nowadays there’s a point on the line where the rhythm of the wheels changes, and in my imagination they begin to sing: ‘Mera-Jhansi-denge-nay, mera-Jhansi-denge-nay’, over and over, and in a moment the years have dropped away, and I’m remembering how I first came to Balmoral half a century ago; aye, and what it led to – the stifling heat of the parade ground at Meerut with the fettering-hammers clanging; the bite of the muzzle of the nine-pounder jammed into my body and my own blood steaming on the sun-scorched iron; old Wheeler bawling hoarsely as the black cavalry sabres come thundering across the maidan towards our flimsy rampart (‘No surrender! One last volley, damn ’em, and aim at the horses!’); the burning bungalows, a skeleton hand in the dust, Colin Campbell scratching his grizzled head, the crimson stain spreading in the filthy water below Suttee Ghat, a huge glittering pile of silver and gold and jewels and ivory bigger than anything you’ve ever seen – and two great brown liquid eyes shadowed with kohl, a single pearl resting on the satin skin above them, open red lips trembling … and, blast him, here’s the station-master, beaming and knuckling his hat and starting me out of the only delightful part of that waking nightmare, with his cry of ‘Welcome back tae Deeside, Sir Harry! Here we are again, then!’

And as he hands me down to the platform, you may be sure the local folk are all on hand, bringing their brats to stare and giggle at the big old buffer in his tweed cape and monstrous white whiskers (‘There he is! The V.C. man, Sir Harry Flashman – aye, auld Flashy, him that charged wi’ the Light Brigade and killed a’ the niggers at Kau-bool – Goad, but isnae he the auld yin? – hip, hooray!’). So I acknowledge the cheers with a wave, bluff and hearty, as I step into the dog-cart, stepping briskly to escape the inevitable bemedalled veteran who comes shuffling after me, hoping I’ll slip him sixpence for a dram when he assures me that we once stood together in the Highlanders’ line at Balaclava. Lying old bastard, he was probably skulking in bed.

Not that I’d blame him if he was, mark you; given the chance I’d have skulked in mine – and not just at Balaclava, neither, but at every battle and skirmish I’ve sweated and scampered through during fifty inglorious years of unwilling soldiering. (Leastways, I know they were inglorious, but the country don’t, thank heaven, which is why they’ve rewarded me with general rank and the knighthood and a double row of medals on my left tit. Which shows you what cowardice and roguery can do, given a stalwart appearance, long legs, and a thumping slice of luck. Aye, well whip up, driver, we mustn’t keep royalty waiting.)

But to return to the point, which is the Mutiny, and that terrible, incredible journey that began at Balmoral – well, it was as ghastly a road as any living man travelled in my time. I’ve seen a deal of war, and agree with Sherman that it’s hell, but the Mutiny was the Seventh Circle under the Pit. Of course, it had its compensations: for one, I came through it, pretty whole, which is more than Havelock and Harry East and Johnny Nicholson did, enterprising lads that they were. (What’s the use of a campaign if you don’t survive it?) I did, and it brought me my greatest honour (totally undeserved, I needn’t tell you), and a tidy enough slab of loot which bought and maintains my present place in Leicestershire – I reckon the plunder’s better employed keeping me and my tenants in drink, than it was decorating a nigger temple for the edification of a gang of blood-sucking priests. And along the Mutiny road I met and loved that gorgeous, wicked witch Lakshmibai – there were others, too, naturally, but she was the prime piece.

One other thing about the Mutiny, before I get down to cases – I reckon it must be about the only one of my campaigns that I was pitched into through no fault of mine. On other occasions, I’ll own, I’ve been to blame; for a man with a white liver a yard wide I’ve had a most unhappy knack of landing myself neck-deep in the slaughter through my various follies – to wit, talking too much (that got me into the Afghan débâcle of ’41); playing the fool in pool-rooms (the Crimea); believing everything Abraham Lincoln told me (American Civil War); inviting a half-breed Hunkpapa whore to a regimental ball (the Sioux Rising of ’76), and so on; the list’s as long as my arm. But my involvement in the Mutiny was all Palmerston’s doing (what disaster of the ’fifties wasn’t?).

It came out of as clear and untroubled a sky as you could wish, a few months after my return from the Crimea, where, as you may know, I’d won fresh laurels through my terrified inability to avoid the most gruelling actions. I had stood petrified in the Thin Red Streak, charged with the Heavies and Lights, been taken prisoner by the Russians, and after a most deplorable series of adventures (in which I was employed as chief stud to a nobleman’s daughter, was pursued by hordes of wolves and Cossacks, and finally was caught up in a private war between Asian bandits and a Ruski army bound for India – it’s all in my memoirs somewhere) had emerged breathless and lousy at Peshawar.fn1

There, as if I hadn’t had trouble enough, I was restoring my powers by squandering them on one of those stately, hungry Afghan Amazons, and she must have been a long sight better at coupling than cooking, for something on her menu gave me the cholera. I was on the broad of my back for months, and it took a slow, restful voyage home before I was my own man again, in prime fettle for the reunion with my loving Elspeth and to enjoy the role of a returned hero about town. And, I may add, a retired hero; oxen and wainropes weren’t going to drag Flashy back to the Front again. (I’ve made the same resolve a score of times, and by God I’ve meant it, but you can’t fight fate, especially when he’s called Palmerston.)

However, there I was in the summer of ’56, safely content on half pay as a staff colonel, with not so much as a sniff of war in sight, except the Persian farce, and that didn’t matter. I was comfortably settled with Elspeth and little Havvy (the first fruit of our union, a guzzling lout of seven) in a fine house off Berkeley Square which Elspeth’s inheritance maintained in lavish style, dropping by occasionally at Horse Guards, leading the social life, clubbing and turfing, whoring here and there as an occasional change from my lawful brainless beauty, and being lionised by all London – well, I’d stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord (ostensibly) hadn’t I, and enough had leaked out about my subsequent secret exploits in Central Asia (though government was damned cagey about them, on account of our delicate peace negotiations with Russia) to suggest that Flashy had surpassed all his former heroics. So with the country in a patriotic fever about its returning braves, I was ace-high in popular esteem – there was even talk that I’d get one of the new Victoria Crosses (for what that was worth) but it’s my belief that Airey and Cardigan scotched it between them. Jealous bastards.

I suspect that Airey, who’d been chief of staff to Raglan in Crimea, hadn’t forgotten my minor dereliction of duty at the Alma, when the Queen’s randy little cousin Willy got his fool head blown off while under my care. And Cardigan loathed me, not least because I’d once emerged drunk, in the nick of time, from a wardrobe to prevent him cocking his lustful leg over my loving Elspeth. (She was no better than I was, you know.) And since coming home, I hadn’t given him cause to love me any better.

You see, there was a deal of fine malicious tittle-tattle going about that summer, over Cardigan’s part in the Light Brigade fiasco – not so much about his responsibility for the disaster, which was debatable, if you ask me, but for his personal behaviour at the guns. He’d been at the head of the charge, right enough, with me alongside on a bolting horse, farting my fearful soul out, but after we’d reached the battery he’d barely paused to exchange a cut or two with the Ruski gunners before heading for home and safety again. Shocking bad form in a commander, says I, who was trying to hide under a gun limber at the time – not that I think for a moment that he was funking it; he hadn’t the brains to be frightened, our Lord Haw-Haw. But he had retreated without undue delay, and since he was never short of enemies eager to believe the worst, the gossips were having a field day now. There were angry letters in the press, and even a law-suit,¹ and since I’d been in the thick of the action, it was natural that I should be asked about it.

In fact, it was George Paget, who’d commanded the 4th Lights in the charge, who put the thing to me point-blank in the card-room at White’s (can’t imagine what I was doing there; must have been somebody’s guest) in front of a number of people, civilians mostly, but I know Spottswood was there, and old Scarlett of the Heavies, I think.

‘You were neck and neck with Cardigan,’ says Paget, ‘and in the battery before anyone else. Now, God knows he’s not my soul-mate, but all this talk’s getting a shade raw. Did you see him in the battery or not?’

Well, I had, but I wasn’t saying so – far be it from me to clear his lordship’s reputation when there was a chance of damaging it. So I said offhand:

‘Don’t ask me, George; I was too busy hunting for your cigars,’ which caused a guffaw.

‘No gammon, Flash,’ says he, looking grim, and asked again, in his tactful way: ‘Did Cardigan cut out, or not?’

There were one or two shocked murmurs, and I shuffled a pack, frowning, before I answered. There are more ways than one of damning a man’s credit, and I wanted to give Cardigan of my best. So I looked uncomfortable, and then growled, slapped the pack down as I rose, looked Paget in the eye, and said:

‘It’s all by and done with now, ain’t it? Let’s drop it, George, shall we?’ And I went out then and there, leaving behind the impression that bluff, gallant Flashy didn’t want to talk about it – which convinced them all that Cardigan had shirked, better than if I’d said so straight out, or called him a coward to his face. I had a chance to do that, too, a bare two hours later, when the man himself came raging up to me with a couple of his toadies in tow, just as Spottswood and I were coming out of the Guards Club. The hall was full of fellows, goggling at the sensation.

‘Fwashman! You there, sir!’ he croaked – they were absolutely the first words between us since the Charge, nearly two years before. He was breathing frantically, like a man who has been running, his beaky face all mottled and his grey whiskers quaking with fury. ‘Fwashman – this is intolewable! My honour is impugned – scandalous lies, sir! And they tell me that you don’t deny them! Well, sir? Well? Haw-haw?’

I tilted back my tile with a forefinger and looked him up and down, from his bald head and pop eyes to his stamping foot. He looked on the edge of apoplexy; a delightful sight.

‘What lies are these, my lord?’ says I, very steady.

‘You know vewy well!’ he cried. ‘Bawacwava, sir – the storming of the battewy! Word George Paget has asked you, in pubwic, whether you saw me at the guns – and you have the effwontewy to tell him you don’t know! Damnation, sir! And one of my own officers, too—’

‘A former member of your regiment, my lord – I admit the fact.’

‘Blast your impudence!’ he roared, frothing at me. ‘Will you give me the lie? Will you say I was not at the guns?’

I settled my hat and pulled on my gloves while he mouthed.

‘My lord,’ says I, speaking deliberately clear, ‘I saw you in the advance. In the battery itself – I was otherwise engaged, and had no leisure nor inclination to look about me to see who was where. For that matter, I did not see Lord George himself until he pulled me to my feet. I assumed –’ and I bore on the word ever so slightly ‘– that you were on hand, at the head of your command. But I do not know, and frankly I do not care. Good day to you, my lord.’ And with a little nod I turned to the door.

His voice pursued me, cracking with rage.

‘Colonel Fwashman!’ he cried. ‘You are a viper!’

I turned at that, making myself go red in the face in righteous wrath, but I knew what I was about; he was getting no blow or challenge from me – he shot too damned straight for that.

‘Indeed, my lord,’ says I. ‘Yet I don’t wriggle and turn.’ And I left him gargling, well pleased with myself. But, as I say, it probably cost me the V.C. at the time; for all the rumours, he was still a power at Horse Guards, and well insinuated at Court, too.

However, our little exchange did nothing to diminish my popularity at large; a few nights later I got a tremendous cheer at the Guards Dinner at Surrey Gardens, with chaps standing on the table shouting ‘Huzza for Flash Harry!’ and singing ‘Garryowen’ and tumbling down drunk – how they did it on a third of a bottle of bubbly beat me.² Cardigan wasn’t there, sensible fellow; they’d have hooted him out of the kingdom. As it was, Punch carried a nasty little dig about his absence, and wondered that he hadn’t sent along his spurs, since he’d made such good use of them in retiring from the battery.

Of course, Lord Haw-Haw wasn’t the only general to come under the public lash that summer; the rest of ’em, like Lucan and Airey, got it too for the way they’d botched the campaign. So while we gallant underlings enjoyed roses and laurels all the way, our idiot commanders were gainfully employed exchanging recriminations, writing furious letters to the papers saying ’twasn’t their fault, but some other fellow’s, and there had even been a commission set up to investigate their misconduct of the war.

Unfortunately, government picked the wrong men to do the investigating – MacNeill and Tulloch – for they turned out to be honest, and reported that indeed our high command hadn’t been fit to dig latrines, or words to that effect. Well, that plainly wouldn’t do, so another commission had to be hurriedly formed to investigate afresh, and this time get the right answer, and no nonsense about it. Well, they did, and exonerated everybody, hip-hip-hurrah and Rule, Britannia. Which was what you’d have expected any half-competent government to stage-manage in the first place, but Palmerston was in the saddle by then, and he wasn’t really good at politics, you know.

To crown it all, in the middle of the scandal the Queen herself had words about it with Hardinge, the Commander-in-Chief, at the Aldershot Review, and poor old Hardinge fell down paralysed and never smiled again. It’s true; I was there myself, getting soaked through, and Hardinge went down like a shanghaied sailor, with all his faculties gone, not that he had many to start with. Some said it was a judgement on the Army and government corruption, so there.

All of which mattered rather less to me than the width of Elspeth’s crinolines, but if I’ve digressed it is merely to show you how things were in England then, and also because I can never resist the temptation to blackguard Cardigan as he deserves. Meanwhile, I was going happily about my business, helping my dear wife spend her cash – which she did like a clipper-hand in port, I’m bound to say – and you would have said we were a blissful young couple, turning a blind eye to each other’s infidelities and galloping in harness when we felt like it, which was frequent, for if anything she got more beddable with the passing years.

And then came the invitation to Balmoral, which reduced Elspeth to a state of nervous exultation close to hysterics, and took me clean aback. I’d have imagined that if the Royal family ever thought of me at all, it was as the chap who’d been remiss enough to lose one of the Queen’s cousins – but mind you, she had so many of ’em she probably didn’t notice, or if she did, hadn’t heard that I was to blame for it. No, I’ve puzzled over it sometimes, and can only conclude that the reason we were bidden to Balmoral that September was that Russia was still very much the topic of the day, what with the new Tsar’s coronation and the recent peace, and I was one of the most senior men to have been a prisoner in Russia’s hands.

I didn’t have leisure to speculate at the time, though, for Elspeth’s frenzy at the thought of being ‘in attendance’, as she chose to call it, claimed everyone’s attention within a mile of Berkeley Square. Being a Scotch tradesman’s daughter, my darling was one degree more snobbish than a penniless Spanish duke, and in the days before we went north her condescension to her middle-class friends would have turned your stomach. Between gloating, and babbling about how she and the Queen would discuss dressmaking while Albert and I boozed in the gunroom (she had a marvellous notion of court life, you see), she went into declines at the thought that she would come out in spots, or have her drawers fall down when being presented. You must have endured the sort of thing yourself.

‘Oh, Harry, Jane Speedicut will be green! You and I – guests of Her Majesty! It will be the finest thing – and I have my new French dresses – the ivory, the beige silk, the lilac satin, and the lovely, lovely green which old Admiral Lawson so admired – if you think it is not a leetle low for the Queen? And my barrege for Sunday – will there be members of the nobility staying also? – will there be ladies whose husbands are of lower rank than you? Ellen Parkin – Lady Parkin, indeed! – was consumed with spite when I told her – oh, and I must have another maid who can manage my hair, for Sarah is too maladroit for words, although she is very passable with dresses – what shall I wear to picnics? – for we shall be bound to walk in the lovely Highland countryside – oh, Harry, what do you suppose the Queen reads? – and shall I call the Prince “highness” or “sir”?’

I was glad, I can tell you, when we finally reached Abergeldie, where we had rooms in the castle where guests were put up – for Balmoral was very new then, and Albert was still busy having the finishing touches put to it. Elspeth by this time was too nervous even to talk, but her first glimpse of our royal hosts reduced her awe a trifle, I think. We took a stroll the first afternoon, in the direction of Balmoral, and on the road encountered what seemed to be a family of tinkers led by a small washerwoman and an usher who had evidently pinched his headmaster’s clothes. Fortunately, I recognised them as Victoria and Albert out with their brood, and knew enough simply to raise my hat as we passed, for they loathed to be treated as royalty when they were playing at being commoners. Elspeth didn’t even suspect who it was until we were past, and when I told her she swooned by the roadside. I revived her by threatening to carry her into the bushes and molest her, and on the way back she observed that really Her Majesty had looked quite royal, but in a common sort of way.

By the time we were presented at Balmoral, though, the next day, she was high up the scale again, and the fact that we shared the waiting-room beforehand with some lord or other and his beak-nosed lady, who looked at us as though we were riff-raff, reduced my poor little scatterbrain to quaking terror. I’d met the royals before, of course, and tried to reassure her, whispering that she looked a stunner (which was true) and not to be put out by Lord and Lady Puffbuttock, who were now ignoring us with that icy incivility which is the stamp of our lower-class aristocracy. (I know; I’m one myself nowadays.)

It was quite handy that our companions kept their noses in the air, though, for it gave me the chance to loop a ribbon from the lady’s enormous crinoline on to an occasional table without her knowing, and when the doors to the royal drawing-room were opened she set off and brought the whole thing crashing down, crockery and all, in full view of the little court circle. I kept Elspeth in an iron grip, and steered her round the wreckage, and so Colonel and Mrs Flashman made their bows while the doors were hurriedly closed behind us, and the muffled sounds of the Puffbuttocks being extricated by flunkeys was music to my ears, even if it did make the Queen look more pop-eyed than usual. The moral is: don’t put on airs with Flashy, and if you do, keep your crinolines out of harm’s way.

And, as it turned out, to Elspeth’s lifelong delight and my immense satisfaction, she and the Queen got on like port and nuts from the first. Elspeth, you see, was one of those females who are so beautiful that even other women can’t help liking ’em, and in her idiot way she was a lively and engaging soul. The fact that she was Scotch helped, too, for the Queen was in one of her Jacobite moods just then, and by the grace of God someone had read Waverley to Elspeth when she was a child, and taught her to recite ‘The Lady of the Lake’.

I had been dreading meeting Albert again, in case he mentioned his whoremongering Nephew Willy, now deceased, but all he did was say:

‘Ah, Colonel Flash-mann – haff you read Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime?’

I said I hadn’t, yet, but I’d be at the railway library first thing in the morning, and he looked doleful and went on:

‘It warns us that bureaucratic central government, far from curing the ills of revolution, can actually arouse them.’

I said I’d often thought that, now that he mentioned it, and he nodded and said: ‘Italy is very unsatisfactory,’ which brought our conversation to a close. Fortunately old Ellenborough, who’d been chief in India at the time of my Kabul heroics, was among those present, and he buttonholed me, which was a profound relief. And then the Queen addressed me, in that high sing-song of hers:

‘Your dear wife, Colonel Flashman, tells me that you are quite recovered from the rigours of your Russian adventures, which you shall tell us of presently. They seem to be a quite extraordinary people; Lord Granville writes from Petersburg that Lady Wodehouse’s Russian maid was found eating the contents of one of her ladyship’s dressing-table pots – it was castor oil pomatum for the hair! What a remarkable extravagance, was it not?’

That was my cue, of course, to regale them with a few domestic anecdotes of Russia, and its primitive ways, which went down well, with the Queen nodding approval and saying: ‘How barbarous! How strange!’ while Elspeth glowed to see her hero holding the floor. Albert joined in in his rib-tickling way to observe that no European state offered such fertile soil for the seeds of socialism as Russia did, and that he feared that the new Tsar had little intellect or character.

‘So Lord Granville says,’ was the Queen’s prim rejoinder, ‘but I do not think it is quite his place to make such observations on a royal personage. Do you not agree, Mrs Flashman?’

Old Ellenborough, who was a cheery, boozy buffer, said to me that he hoped I had tried to civilise the Russians a little by teaching them cricket, and Albert, who had no more humour than the parish trough, looked stuffy and says:

‘I am sure Colonel Flash-mann would do no such thing. I cannot unner-stend this passion for cricket; it seems to me a great waste of time. What is the proff-it to a younk boy in crouching motionless in a field for hours on end? Em I nott right, Colonel?’

‘Well, sir,’ says I, ‘I’ve looked out in the deep field myself long enough to sympathise with you; it’s a great fag, to be sure. But perhaps, when the boy’s a man, his life may depend on crouching motionless, behind a Khyber rock or a Burmese bush – so a bit of practice may not come amiss, when he’s young.’

Which was sauce, if you like, but I could never resist the temptation, in grovelling to Albert, to put a pinch of pepper down his shirt. It was in my character of bluff, no-nonsense Harry, too, and a nice reminder of the daring deeds I’d done. Ellenborough said ‘Hear, hear’, and even Albert looked only half-sulky, and said all diss-cipline was admirable, but there must be better ways of instilling it; the Prince of Wales, he said, should nott play cricket, but some more constructiff game.

After that we had tea, very informal, and Elspeth distinguished herself by actually prevailing on Albert to eat a cucumber sandwich; she’ll have him in the bushes in a minute, thinks I, and on that happy note our first visit concluded, with Elspeth going home on a cloud to Abergeldie.

But if it was socially useful, it wasn’t much of a holiday, although Elspeth revelled in it. She went for walks with the Queen, twice (calling themselves Mrs Fitzjames and Mrs Marmion, if you please), and even made Albert laugh when charades were played in the evening, by impersonating Helen of Troy with a Scotch accent. I couldn’t even get a grin out of him; we went shooting with the other gentlemen, and it was purgatory having to stalk at his pace. He was keen as mustard, though, and slaughtered stags like a Ghazi on hashish – you’ll hardly credit it, but his notion of sport was that a huge long trench should be dug so that we could sneak up on the deer unobserved; he’d have done it, too, but the local ghillies showed so much disgust at the idea that he dropped it. He couldn’t understand their objections, though; to him all that mattered was killing the beasts.

For the rest, he prosed interminably and played German music on the piano, with me applauding like hell. Things weren’t made easier by the fact that he and Victoria weren’t getting on too well just then; she had just discovered (and confided to Elspeth) that she was in foal for the ninth time, and she took her temper out on dear Albert – the trouble was, he was so bloody patient with her, which can drive a woman to fury faster than anything I know. And he was always right, which was worse. So they weren’t dealing at all well, and he spent most of the daylight hours tramping up Glen Bollocks, or whatever they call it, roaring ‘Ze gunn!’ and butchering every animal in view.

The only thing that seemed to cheer up the Queen was that she was marrying off her oldest daughter, Princess Vicky – the best of the whole family, in my view, a really pretty, green-eyed little mischief. She was to wed Frederick William of Prussia, who was due at Balmoral in a few weeks, and the Queen was full of it, Elspeth told me.

However, enough of the court gossip; it will give you some notion of the trivial way in which I was being forced to pass my time – toadying Albert, and telling the Queen how many acute accents there were on ‘déterminés’. The trouble with this kind of thing is that it dulls your wits, and your proper instinct for self-preservation, so that if a blow falls you’re caught clean offside, as I was on the night of September 22, 1856: I recollect the date absolutely because it was the day after Florence Nightingale came to the castle.³

I’d never met her, but as the leading Crimean on the premises I was summoned to join in the tête-à-tête she had with the Queen in the afternoon. It was a frost, if you like; pious platitudes from the two of ’em, with Flashy passing the muffins and joining in when called on to agree that what our wars needed was more sanitation and texts on the wall of every dressing-station. There was one near-facer for me, and that was when Miss Nightingale (a cool piece, that) asked me calm as you like what regimental officers could do to prevent their men from contracting certain indelicate social infections from – hem-hem – female camp-followers of a certain sort; I near as dammit put my teacup in the Queen’s lap, but recovered to say that I’d never heard of any such thing, not in the Light Cavalry, anyway – French troops another matter, of course. Would you believe it, I actually made her blush, but I doubt if the Queen even knew what we were talking about. For the rest, I thought La Nightingale a waste of good womanhood; handsome face, well set up and titted out, but with that cold don’t-lay-a-lecherous-limb-on-me-my-lad look in her eye – the kind, in short, that can be all right if you’re prepared to spend time and trouble making ’em cry ‘Roger!’, but I seldom have the patience. Anywhere else I might have taken a squeeze at her, just by way of research, but a queen’s drawing-room cramps your style. (Perhaps it’s a pity I didn’t; being locked up for indecent assault on a national heroine couldn’t have been worse than the ordeal that was to begin a few hours later.)

Elspeth and I spent the following evening at a birthday party at one of the big houses in the neighbourhood; it was a cheery affair, and we didn’t leave till close on midnight to drive back to Abergeldie. It was a close, thundery night, with big rain-drops starting to fall, but we didn’t mind; I had taken enough drink on board to be monstrously horny, and if the drive had been longer and Elspeth’s crinoline less of a hindrance I’d have had at her on the carriage-seat. She got out at the lodge giggling and squeaking, and I chased her through the front door – and there was the messenger of doom, waiting in the hall. A tall chap, almost a swell, but with a jaw too long and an eye too sharp; very respectable, with a hard hat under his arm and a billy in his hip-pocket, I’ll wager. I know a genteel strong man from a government office when I see one.

He asked could he speak to me, so I took my arm from Elspeth’s waist, patted her towards the stairs with a whispered promise that I’d be up directly to sound the charge, and told him to state his business. He did that smart enough.

‘I am from the Treasury, Colonel Flashman,’ says he. ‘My name is Hutton. Lord Palmerston wishes to speak with you.’

It took me flat aback, slightly foxed that I was. My first thought was that he must want me to go back to London, but then he said: ‘His lordship is at Balmoral, sir. If you will be good enough to come with me – I have a coach.’

‘But, but … you said Lord Palmerston? The Prime … what the deuce? Palmerston wants me?’

‘At once, sir, if you please. The matter is urgent.’

Well, I couldn’t make anything of it. I never doubted it was genuine – as I’ve said, the man in front of me had authority written all over him. But it’s a fair start when you come rolling innocently home and are told that the first statesman of Europe is round the corner and wants you at the double – and now the fellow was positively ushering me towards the door.

‘Hold on,’ says I. ‘Give me a moment to change my shoes’ – what I wanted was a moment to put my head in the wash-bowl and think, and despite his insistence I snapped at him to wait, and hurried upstairs.

What the devil was Pam doing here – and what could he want with me? I’d only met him once, for a moment, before I went to the Crimea; I’d leered at him ingratiatingly at parties, too, but never spoken. And now he wanted me urgently – me, a mere colonel on half pay. I’d nothing on my conscience, either – leastways, not to interest him. I couldn’t see it, but there was nothing but to obey, so I went to my dressing-room, fretting, donned my hat and topcoat against the worsening weather, and remembered that Elspeth, poor child, must even now be waiting for her cross-buttocking lesson. Well, it was hard lines on her, but duty called, so I just popped my head round her door to call a chaste farewell – and there she was, dammit, reclining languorously on the coverlet like one of those randy classical goddesses, wearing nothing but the big ostrich-plume fan I’d brought her from Egypt, and her sniggering maid turning the lamp down low. Elspeth clothed could stop a monk in his tracks; naked and pouting expectantly over a handful of red feathers, she’d have made the Grand Inquisitor burn his books. I hesitated between love and duty for a full second, and then ‘The hell with Palmerston, let him wait!’ cries I, and was plunging for the bed before the abigail was fairly out of the room. Never miss the chance, as the Duke used to say.

‘Lord Palmerston? Oooo-ah! Harry – what do you mean?’

‘Ne’er mind!’ cries I, taking hold and bouncing away.

‘But Harry – such impatience, my love! And, dearest – you’re wearing your hat!’

‘The next one’s going to be a boy, dammit!’ And for a few glorious stolen moments I forgot Palmerston and minions in the hall, and marvelled at the way that superb idiot woman of mine could keep up a stream of questions while performing like a harem houri – we were locked in an astonishing embrace on her dressing-table stool, I recall, when there was a knock on the door, and the maid’s giggling voice piped through to say the gentleman downstairs was getting impatient, and would I be long.

‘Tell him I’m just packing my baggage,’ says I. ‘I’ll be down directly,’ and presently, keeping my mouth on hers to stem her babble of questions, I carried my darling tenderly back to the bed. Always leave things as you would wish to find them.

‘I cannot stay longer, my love,’ I told her. ‘The Prime Minister is waiting.’ And with bewildered entreaties pursuing me I skipped out, trousers in hand, made a hasty toilet on the landing, panted briefly against the wall, and then stepped briskly down. It’s a great satisfaction, looking back, that I kept the government waiting in such a good cause, and I set it down here as a deserved tribute to the woman who was the only real love of my life and as the last pleasant memory I was to have for a long time ahead.

It’s true enough, too, as Ko Dali’s daughter taught me, that there’s nothing like a good rattle for perking up an edgy chap like me. It had shaken me for a moment, and it still looked rum, that Palmerston should want to see me, but as we bowled through the driving rain to Balmoral I was telling myself that there was probably nothing in it after all; considering the good odour I stood in just then, hob-nobbing with royalty and being admired for my Russian heroics, it was far more likely to be fair news than foul. And it wasn’t like being bidden to the presence of one of your true ogres, like the old Duke or Bismarck or Dr Wrath-of-God Arnold (I’ve knocked tremulously on some fearsome doors in my time, I can tell you).

No, Pam might be an impatient old tyrant when it came to bullying foreigners and sending warships to deal with the dagoes, but everyone knew he was a decent, kindly old sport at bottom, who put folk at their ease and told a good story. Why, it was notorious that the reason he wouldn’t live at Downing Street, but on Piccadilly, was that he liked to ogle the good-lookers from his window, and wave to the cads and crossing-sweepers, who loved him because he talked plain English, and would stump up a handsome subscription for an old beaten prize-pug like Tom Sayers. That was Pam – and if anyone ever tells you that he was a politically unprincipled old scoundrel, who carried things with a high and reckless hand, I can only say that it didn’t seem to work a whit worse than the policies of more high-minded statesmen. The only difference I ever saw between them and Pam was that he did his dirty work bare-faced (when he wasn’t being deeper than damnation) and grinned about it.

So I was feeling pretty easy as we covered the three miles to Balmoral – and even pleasantly excited – which shows you how damned soft and optimistic I must have grown; I should have known that it’s never safe to get within range of princes or prime ministers. When we got to the castle I followed Hutton smartly through a side door, up some back-stairs, and along to heavy double doors where a burly civilian was standing guard; I gave my whiskers a martial twitch as he opened the door, and stepped briskly in.

You know how it can be when you enter a strange room – everything can look as safe and merry as ninepence, and yet there’s something in the air that touches you like an electric shock. It was here now, a sort of bristling excitement that put my nerves on edge in an instant. And yet there was nothing out of the ordinary to see – just a big, cheerful panelled room with a huge fire roaring under the mantel, a great table littered with papers, and two sober chaps bustling about it under the direction of a slim young fellow – Barrington, Palmerston’s secretary. And over by the fire were three other men – Ellenborough, with his great flushed face and his belly stuck out; a slim, keen-looking old file whom I recognised as Wood, of the Admiralty; and with his back to the blaze and his coat-tails up, the man himself, peering at Ellenborough with his bright, short-sighted eyes and looking as though his dyed hair and whiskers had just been rubbed with a towel – old Squire Pam as ever was. As I came in, his brisk, sharp voice was ringing out (he never gave a damn who heard him):

‘… so if he’s to be Prince Consort, it don’t make a ha’porth of difference, you see. Not to the country – or me. However, as long as Her Majesty thinks it does – that’s what matters, what? Haven’t you found that telegraph of Quilter’s yet, Barrington? – well, look in the Persian packet, then.’

And then he caught sight of me, and frowned, sticking out his long lip. ‘Ha, that’s the man!’ cries he. ‘Come in, sir, come in!’

What with the drink I’d taken, and my sudden nervousness, I tripped over the mat – which was an omen, if you like – and came as near as a toucher to oversetting a chair.

‘By George,’ says Pam, ‘is he drunk? All these young fellows are, nowadays. Here, Barrington, see him to a chair, before he breaks a window. There, at the table.’ Barrington pulled out a chair for me, and the three at the fireplace seemed to be staring ominously at me while I apologised and took it, especially Pam in the middle, with those bright steady eyes taking in every inch of me as he nursed his port glass and stuck a thumb into his fob – for all the world like the marshal of a Kansas trail-town surveying the street. (Which is what he was, of course, on a rather grand scale.)

He was very old at this time, with the gout and his false teeth forever slipping out, but he was evidently full of ginger tonight, and not in one of his easygoing moods. He didn’t beat about, either.

‘Young Flashman,’ growls he. ‘Very good. Staff colonel, on half pay at present, what? Well, from this moment you’re back on the full list, an’ what you hear in this room tonight is to go no further, understand? Not to anyone – not even in this castle. You follow?’

I followed, sure enough – what he meant was that the Queen wasn’t to know: it was notorious that he never told her anything. But that was nothing; it was his tone, and the solemn urgency of his warning, that put the hairs up on my neck.

‘Very good,’ says he again. ‘Now then, before I talk to you, Lord Ellenborough has somethin’ to show you – want your opinion of it. All right, Barrington, I’ll take that Persian stuff now, while Colonel Flashman looks at the damned buns.’

I thought I’d misheard him, as he limped past me and took his seat at the table-head, pawing impatiently among his papers. But sure enough, Barrington passed over to me a little lead biscuit-box, and Ellenborough, seating himself beside me, indicated that I should open it. I pushed back the lid, mystified, and there, in a rice-paper wrapping, were three or four greyish, stale-looking little scones, no bigger than captain’s biscuits.

‘There,’ says Pam, not looking up from his papers. ‘Don’t eat ’em. Tell his lordship what you make of those.’

I knew, right off; that faint eastern smell was unmistakable, but I touched one of them to make sure.

‘They’re chapattis, my lord,’ says I, astonished. ‘Indian chapattis.’

Ellenborough nodded. ‘Ordinary cakes of native food. You attach no signal significance to them, though?’

‘Why … no, sir.’

Wood took a seat opposite me. ‘And you can conjecture no situation, colonel,’ says he, in his dry, quiet voice, ‘in which the sight of such cakes might occasion you … alarm?’

Obviously Ministers of the Crown don’t ask damnfool questions for nothing, but I could only stare at him. Pam, apparently deep in his papers at the table-head, wheezing and sucking his teeth and muttering to Barrington, paused to grunt: ‘Serve the dam’ things at dinner an’ they’d alarm me,’ and Ellenborough tapped the biscuit box.

‘These chapattis came last week from India, by fast steam sloop. Sent by our political agent at a place called Jhansi. Know it? It’s down below the Jumna, in Maharatta country. For weeks now, scores of such cakes have been turning up among the sepoys of our native Indian garrison at Jhansi – not as food, though. It seems the sepoys pass them from hand to hand as tokens—’

‘Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ Wood interrupted.

I hadn’t, so I just shook my head and looked attentive, wondering what the devil this was all about, while Ellenborough went on:

‘Our political knows where they come from, all right. The native village constables – you know, the chowkidars – bake them in batches of ten, and send one apiece to ten different sepoys – and each sepoy is bound to make ten more, and pass them on, to his comrades, and so on, ad infinitum. It’s not new, of course; ritual cake-passing is very old in India. But there are three remarkable things about it: firstly, it happens only rarely; second, even the natives themselves don’t know why it happens, only that the cakes must be baked and passed; and third –’ he tapped the box again ‘– they believe that the appearance of the cakes foreshadows terrible catastrophe.’

He paused, and I tried to look impressed. For there was nothing out of the way in all this – straight from Alice in Wonderland, if you like, but when you know India and the amazing tricks the niggers can get up to (usually in the name of religion) you cease to be surprised. It seemed an interesting superstition – but what was more interesting was that two Ministers of the Government, and a former Governor-General of India, were discussing it behind closed doors – and had decided to let Flashy into the secret.

‘But there’s something more,’ Ellenborough went on, ‘which is why Skene, our political man at Jhansi, is treating the matter as one of urgency. Cakes like these have circulated among native troops, quite apart from civilians, on only three occasions in the past fifty years – at Vellore in ’06, at Buxar, and at Barrackpore. You don’t recall the names? Well, at each place, when the cakes appeared, the same reaction followed among the sepoys.’ He put on his House of Lords face and said impressively, ‘Mutiny.’

Looking back, I suppose I ought to have thrilled with horror at the mention of the dread word – but in fact all that occurred to me was the facetious thought that perhaps they ought to have varied the sepoys’ rations. I didn’t think much of the political man Skene’s judgement, either; I’d been a political myself, and it’s part of the job to scream at your own shadow, but if he – or Ellenborough, who knew India outside in – was smelling a sepoy revolt in a few mouldy biscuits – well, it was ludicrous. I knew John Sepoy (we all did, didn’t we?) for the most loyal ass who ever put on uniform – and so he should have been, the way the Company treated him. However, it wasn’t for me to venture an opinion in such august company, particularly with the Prime Minister listening: he’d pushed his papers aside and risen, and was pouring himself some more port.

‘Well, now,’ says he briskly, taking a hearty swig and rolling it round his teeth, ‘you’ve admired his lordship’s cakes, what? Damned unappetisin’ they look, too. All right, Barrington, your assistants can go – our special leaves at four, does it? Very well.’ He waited till the junior secretaries had gone, muttered something about ungodly hours and the Queen’s perversity in choosing a country retreat at the North Pole, and paced stiffly over to the fire, where he set his back to the mantel and glowered at me from beneath his gorse-bush brows, which was enough to set my dinner circulating in the old accustomed style.

‘Tokens of revolution in an Indian garrison,’ says he. ‘Very good. Been readin’ that report of yours again, Flashman – the one you made to Dalhousie last year, in which you described the discovery you made while you were a prisoner in Russia – about their scheme for invadin’ India, while we were busy in Crimea. Course, we say nothin’ about that these days – peace signed with Russia, all good fellowship an’ be damned, et cetera – don’t have to tell you. But somethin’ in your report came to mind when this cake business began.’ He pushed out his big lip at me. ‘You wrote that the Russian march across the Indus was to be accompanied by a native risin’ in India, fomented by Tsarist agents. Our politicals have been chasin’ that fox ever since – pickin’ up some interestin’ scents, of which these infernal buns are the latest. Now, then,’ he settled himself, eyes half-shut, but watching me, ‘tell me precisely what you heard in Russia, touchin’ on an Indian rebellion. Every word of it.’

So I told him, exactly as I remembered it – how Scud East and I had lain quaking in our nightshirts in the gallery at Starotorsk, and overheard about ‘Item Seven’, which was the Russian plan for an invasion of India. They’d have done it, too, but Yakub Beg’s riders scuppered their army up on the Syr Daria, with Flashy running about roaring with a bellyful of bhang, performing unconscious prodigies of valour. I’d set it all out in my report to Dalhousie, leaving out the discreditable bits (you can find those in my earlier memoirs, along with the licentious details). It was a report of nicely judged modesty, that official one, calculated to convince Dalhousie that I was the nearest thing to Hereward the Wake he was ever likely to meet – and why not? I’d suffered for my credit.

But the information about an Indian rebellion had been slight. All we’d discovered was that when the Russian army reached the Khyber, their agents in India would rouse the natives – and particularly John Company’s sepoys – to rise against the British. I didn’t doubt it was true, at the time; it seemed an obvious ploy. But that was more than a year ago, and Russia was no threat to India any longer, I supposed.

They heard me out, in a silence that lasted a full minute after I’d finished, and then Wood says quietly:

‘It fits, my lord.’

‘Too dam’ well,’ says Pam, and came hobbling back to his chair again. ‘It’s all pat. You see, Flashman, Russia may be spent as an armed power, for the present – but that don’t mean she’ll leave us at peace in India, what? This scheme for a rebellion – by George, if I were a Russian political, invasion or no invasion, I fancy I could achieve somethin’ in India, given the right agents. Couldn’t I just, though!’ He growled in his throat, heaving restlessly and cursing his gouty foot. ‘Did you know, there’s an Indian superstition that the British Raj will come to an end exactly a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey?’ He picked up one of the chapattis and peered at it. ‘Dam’ thing isn’t even sugared. Well, the hundredth anniversary of Plassey falls next June the twenty-third. Interestin’. Now then, tell me – what d’you know about a Russian nobleman called Count Nicholas Ignatieff?’

He shot it at me so abruptly that I must have started a good six inches. There’s a choice collection of ruffians whose names you can mention if you want to ruin my digestion for an hour or two – Charity Spring and Bismarck, Rudi Starnberg and Wesley Hardin, for example – but I’d put N. P. Ignatieff up with the leaders any time. He was the brute who’d nearly put paid to me in Russia – a gotch-eyed, freezing ghoul of a man who’d dragged me half way to China in chains, and threatened me with exposure in a cage and knouting to death, and like pleasantries. I hadn’t cared above half for the conversation thus far, with its bloody mutiny cakes and the sinister way they kept dragging in my report to Dalhousie – but at the introduction of Ignatieff’s name my bowels began to play the Hallelujah Chorus in earnest. It took me all my time to keep a straight face and tell Pam what I knew – that Ignatieff had been one of the late Tsar’s closest advisers, and that he was a political agent of immense skill and utter ruthlessness; I ended with a reminiscence of the last time I’d seen him, under that hideous row of gallows at Fort Raim. Ellenborough exclaimed in disgust, Wood shuddered delicately, and Pam sipped his port.

‘Interestin’ life you’ve led,’ says he. ‘Thought I remembered his name from your report – he was one of the prime movers behind the Russian plan for invasion an’ Indian rebellion, as I recall. Capable chap, what?’

‘My lord,’ says I, ‘he’s the devil, and that’s a fact.’

‘Just so,’ says Pam. ‘An’ the devil will find mischief.’ He nodded to Ellenborough. ‘Tell him, my lord. Pay close heed to this, Flashman.’

Ellenborough cleared his throat and fixed his boozy spaniel eyes on me. ‘Count Ignatieff,’ says he, ‘has made two clandestine visits to India in the past year. Our politicals first had word of him last autumn at Ghuznee; he came over the Khyber disguised as an Afridi horse-coper, to Peshawar. There we lost him – as you might expect, one disguised man among so many natives—’

‘But my lord, that can’t be!’ I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘You can’t lose Ignatieff, if you know what to look for. However he’s disguised, there’s one thing he can’t hide – his eyes! One of em’s half-brown, half-blue!’

‘He can if he puts a patch over it,’ says Ellenborough. ‘India’s full of one-eyed men. In any event, we picked up his trail again – and on both occasions it led to the same place – Jhansi. He spent two months there, all told, usually out of sight, and our people were never able to lay a hand on him. What he was doing, they couldn’t discover – except that it was mischief. Now, we see what the mischief was –’ and he pointed to the chapattis. ‘Brewing insurrection, beyond a doubt. And having done his infernal work – back over the hills to Afghanistan. This summer he was in St Petersburg – but from what our politicals did learn, he’s expected back in Jhansi again. We don’t know when.’

No doubt it was the subject under discussion, but there didn’t seem to be an ounce of heat coming from the blazing fire behind me; the room felt suddenly cold, and I was aware of the rain slashing at the panes and the wind moaning in the dark outside. I was looking at Ellenborough, but in his face I could see Ignatieff’s hideous parti-coloured eye, and hear that soft icy voice hissing past the long cigarette between his teeth.

‘Plain enough, what?’ says Pam. ‘The mine’s laid, in Jhansi – an’ if it explodes … God knows what might follow. India looks tranquil enough – but how many other Jhansis, how many other Ignatieffs, are there?’ He shrugged. ‘We don’t know, but we can be certain there’s no more sensitive spot than this one. The Russians have picked Jhansi with care – we only annexed it four years ago, on the old Raja’s death, an’ we’ve still barely more than a foothold there. Thug country, it used to be, an’ still pretty wild, for all it’s one of the richest thrones in India. Worst of all, it’s ruled by a woman – the Rani, the Raja’s widow. She was old when she married him, I gather, an’ there was no legitimate heir, so we took it under our wing – an’ she didn’t like it. She rules under our tutelage these days – but she remains as implacable an enemy as we have in India. Fertile soil for Master Ignatieff to sow his plots.’

He paused, and then looked straight at me. ‘Aye – the mine’s laid in Jhansi. But precisely when an’ where they’ll try to fire it, an’ whether it’ll go off or not … this we must know – an’ prevent at all costs.’

The way he said it went through me like an icicle. I’d been sure all along that I wasn’t being lectured for fun, but now, looking at their heavy faces, I knew that unless my poltroon instinct was sadly at fault, some truly hellish proposal was about to emerge. I waited quaking for the axe to fall, while Pam stirred his false teeth with his tongue – which was a damned unnerving sight, I may tell you – and then delivered sentence.

‘Last week, the Board of Control decided to send an extraordinary agent to Jhansi. His task will be to discover what the Russians have been doing there, how serious is the unrest in the sepoy garrison, and to deal with this hostile beldam of a Rani by persuadin’ her, if possible, that loyalty to the British Raj is in her best interest.’ He struck his finger on the table. ‘An’ if an’ when this man Ignatieff returns to Jhansi again – to deal with him, too. Not a task for an ordinary political, you’ll agree.’

No, but I was realising, with mounting horror, who they did think it was a task for. But I could only sit, with my spine dissolving and my face set in an expression of attentive idiocy, while he went inexorably on.

‘The Board of Control chose you without hesitation, Flashman. I approved the choice myself. You don’t know it, but I’ve been watchin’ you since my time as Foreign Secretary. You’ve been a political – an’ a deuced successful one. I daresay you think that the work you did in Middle Asia last year has gone unrecognised, but that’s not so.’ He rumbled at me impressively, wagging his great fat head. ‘You’ve the highest name as an active officer, you’ve proved your resource – you know India – fluent in languages – includin’ Russian, which could be of the first importance, what? You know this man Ignatieff, by sight, an’ you’ve bested him before. You see, I know all about you, Flashman,’ you old fool, I wanted to shout, you don’t know anything of the bloody sort; you ain’t fit to be Prime Minister, if that’s what you think, ‘and I know of no one else so fitted to this work. How old are you? Thirty-four – young enough to go a long way yet – for your country and yourself.’ And the old buffoon tried to look sternly inspiring, with his teeth gurgling.

It was appalling. God knows I’ve had my crosses to bear, but this beat all. As so often in the past, I was the victim of my own glorious and entirely unearned reputation – Flashy, the hero of Jallalabad, the last man out of the Kabul retreat and the first man into the Balaclava battery, the beau sabreur of the Light Cavalry, Queen’s Medal, Thanks of Parliament, darling of the mob, with a liver as yellow as yesterday’s custard, if they’d only known it. And there was nothing, with Pam’s eye on me, and Ellenborough and Wood looking solemnly on, that I could do about it. Oh, if I’d followed my best instincts, I could have fled wailing from the room, or fallen blubbering at some convenient foot – but of course I didn’t. With sick fear mounting in my throat, I knew that I’d have to go, and that was that – back to India, with its heat and filth and flies and dangers and poxy niggers, to undertake the damnedest mission since Bismarck put me on the throne of Strackenz.

But this was infinitely worse – Bismarck’s crew had been as choice a collection of villains as ever jumped bail or slit a throat, but they were civilised by comparison with Ignatieff. The thought of dealing with that devil, as Pam so nicely put it, was enough to send me into a decline. And if that wasn’t enough, I was to sneak about some savage Indian kingdom (Thug country, for a bonus), spying on some withered old bitch of an Indian princess and trying to wheedle her to British interest against her will – and she probably the kind of hag whose idea of fun would be to chain malefactors to a rogue elephant’s foot. (Most Indian rulers are mad, you know, and capable of anything.) But there wasn’t the slightest chance to wriggle; all I could do was put on my muscular Christian expression, look Palmerston fearlessly in the eye, like Dick Champion when the headmaster gives him the job of teaching the fags not to swear, and say I’d do my best.

‘Well enough,’ says he. ‘I know you will. Who knows – perhaps the signs are false, what? Tokens of mutiny, in a place where Russia’s been stirrin’ the pot, an’ the local ruler’s chafin’ under our authority – it’s happened before, an’ it may amount to nothin’ in the end. But if the signs are true, make no mistake –’ and he gave me his steady stare ‘– it’s the gravest peril our country has faced since Bonaparte. It’s no light commission we’re placin’ in your hands, sir – but they’re the safest hands in England, I believe.’

So help me God, it’s absolutely what he said; it makes you wonder how these fellows ever get elected. I believe I made some manly sounds, and as usual my sick terror must have been manifesting itself by making me red in the face, which in a fellow of my size is often mistaken for noble resolution. It must have satisfied Pam, anyway, for suddenly he was smiling at me, and sitting back in his chair.

‘Now you know why you’re sittin’ here talkin’ to the Prime Minister, what? Been sittin’ on eggshells, haven’t you? Ne’er mind – I’m glad to have had the opportunity of instructin’ you myself – of course, you’ll be more fully informed, before you sail, of all the intelligence you’ll need – his lordship here, an’ Mangles at the Board in London, will be talkin’ to you. When d’you take leave of Her Majesty? Another week? Come, that’s too long. When does the India sloop sail, Barrington? Monday – you’d best be off to Town on Friday, then. Leave pretty little Mrs Flashman to take care of royalty, what? Stunnin’ gal, that – never see her from my window on Piccadilly but it sets me in humour – must make her acquaintance when you come home. Bring her along to Number 96 some evenin’ – dinner, an’ so forth, what?’

He sat there, beaming like Pickwick. It turned my stomach at the time, and small wonder, considering the stew he was launching me into – and yet, when I think back on Pam nowadays, that’s how I see him, painted whiskers, sloppy false teeth and all, grinning like a happy urchin. You never saw such young peepers in a tired old face. I can say it now, from the safety of my declining years: in spite of the hellish pickle he landed me in, I’d swap any politician I ever met for old Pam – damn him.⁴

However, now that he’d put the doom on me, he couldn’t get rid of me fast enough; before I’d been properly shooed out of the room he was snapping at Barrington to find some American telegraph or other, and chivvying at Wood that they must soon be off to catch their special train at Aberdeen. It must have been about three in the morning, but he was still full of bounce, and the last I saw of him he was dictating a letter even as they helped him into his coat and muffler, with people bustling around him, and he was breaking off to peer again at the chapattis on the table and ask Ellenborough did the Hindoos eat ’em with meat, or any kind of relish.

‘Blasted buns,’ says he. ‘Might do with jam, d’you think, what? No … better not … crumble an’ get under my confounded teeth, probably …’ He glanced up and caught sight of me bowing my farewell from the doorway. ‘Good night to you, Flashman,’ he sings out, ‘an’ good huntin’. You look out sharp for yourself, mind.’

So that was how I got my marching orders – in a snap of the fingers almost. Two hours earlier I’d been rogering happily away, with not a care in the world, and now I was bound for India on the most dangerous lunatic mission I’d ever heard of – by God, I cursed the day I’d written that report to Dalhousie, glorifying myself into the soup. And fine soup it promised to be – rumours of mutiny, mad old Indian princesses, Thugs, and Ignatieff and his jackals lurking in the undergrowth.

You can imagine I didn’t get much rest in what was left of the night. Elspeth was fast asleep, looking glorious with the candlelight on her blonde hair tumbled over the pillow, and her rosebud lips half open, snoring like the town band. I was too fretful to rouse her in her favourite way, so I just shook her awake, and I must say she bore the news of our impending parting with remarkable composure. At least, she wept inconsolably for five minutes at the thought of being bereft while her Hector (that’s me) was Braving the Dangers of India, fondled my whiskers and said she and little Havvy would be quite desolate, whimpered sadly while she teased me, in an absent-minded way, into mounting her, and then remembered she had left her best silk gloves behind at the evening’s party and that she had a spot on her left shoulder which no amount of cream would send away. It’s nice to know you’re going to be missed.

I had three days still left at Balmoral, and the first of them was spent closeted with Ellenborough and a sharp little creature from the Board of Control, who lectured me in maddening detail about my mission to Jhansi, and conditions in India – I won’t weary you with it here, for you’ll learn about Jhansi and its attendant horrors and delights in due course. Sufficient to say it did nothing but deepen my misgivings – and then, on the Wednesday morning, something happened which drove everything else clean out of my mind It was such a shock, such an unbelievable coincidence in view of what had gone before (or so it seemed at the time) that I can still think back to it with disbelief – aye, and start sweating at the thought.

I’d had a thoroughly drunken night at Abergeldie, to take my mind off the future, and when I woke cloth-headed and surly on the Wednesday morning, Elspeth suggested that instead of breakfast I’d be better going for a canter. I damned her advice and sent for a horse, left her weeping sulkily into her boiled egg, and ten minutes later was galloping the fumes away along the Balmoral road. I reached the castle, and trotted up as far as the carriage entrance; beyond it, on the far side of the gravel sweep, one of the big castle coaches that brought quality visitors from Aberdeen station was drawn up, and flunkeys were handing down the arrivals and bowing them towards the steps leading to the side door.

Some more poor fools of consequence about to savour the royal hospitality, thinks I, and was just about to turn my horse away when I happened to glance again at the group of gentlemen in travelling capes who were mounting the steps. One of them turned to say something to the flunkeys – and I nearly fell from the saddle, and only saved myself by clutching the mane with both hands. I believe I nearly fainted – for it was something infinitely worse than a ghost; it was real, even if it was utterly impossible. The man on the steps, spruce in the rig of an English country gentleman, and now turning away into the castle, was the man I’d last seen beside the line of carrion gallows at Fort Raim – the man Palmerston was sending me to India to defeat and kill: Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff.

‘You’re sure?’ croaked Ellenborough. ‘No, no, Flashman – it can’t be! Count Ignatieff – whom we were discussing two nights since – here? Impossible!’

‘My lord,’ says I, ‘I’ve good cause to know him better than most, and I tell you he’s in the castle now, gotch-eye and all. Cool as damn-your-eyes, in a tweed cape and deer-stalker hat, so help me! He was there, at the door, not ten minutes ago!’

He plumped down on a chair, mopping at the shaving-soap on his cheeks – I’d practically had to manhandle his valet to be admitted, and I’d left a trail of startled minions on the back-stairs in my haste to get to his room. I was still panting from exertion, to say nothing of shock.

‘I want an explanation of this, my lord,’ says I, ‘for I’ll not believe it’s chance.’

‘What d’ye mean?’ says he, goggling.

‘Two nights ago we talked of precious little else but this Russian monster – how he’d been spying the length and breadth of India, in the very place to which I’m being sent. And now he turns up – the very man? Is that coincidence?’ I was in such a taking I didn’t stand on ceremony. ‘How comes he in the country, even? Will you tell me Lord Palmerston didn’t know?’

‘My God, Flashman!’ His big mottled face looked shocked. ‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘I mean, my lord,’ says I, trying to hold myself in, ‘that there’s precious little that happens anywhere, let alone in England, that Lord Palmerston doesn’t know about – is it possible that he’s unaware that the most dangerous agent in Russia – and one of their leading nobles, to boot – is promenading about as large as life? And never a word the other night, when—’

‘Wait! Wait!’ cries he, wattling. ‘That’s a monstrous suggestion! Contain yourself, sir! Are you positive it’s Ignatieff?’

I was ready to burst, but I didn’t. ‘I’m positive.’

‘Stay here,’ says he, and bustled out, and for ten minutes I chewed my nails until he came back, shutting the door behind him carefully. He had got his normal beetroot colour back, but he looked damned rattled.

‘It’s true,’ says he. ‘Count Ignatieff is here with Lord Aberdeen’s party – as a guest of the Queen. It seems – you know we have Granville in Petersburg just now, for the new Tsar’s coronation? Well, a party of Russian noblemen – the first since the war – have just arrived in Leith yesterday, bringing messages of good will, or God knows what, from the new monarch to the Queen. Someone had written to Aberdeen – I don’t know it all yet – and he brought them with him on his way north – with this fellow among ’em. It’s extraordinary! The damnedest chance!’

‘Chance, my lord?’ says I. ‘I’ll need some convincing of that!’

‘Good God, what else? I’ll allow it’s long odds, but I’m certain if Lord Palmerston had had the least inkling …’ He trailed off, and you could see the sudden doubt of his own precious Prime Minister written on his jowly face. ‘Oh, but the notion’s preposterous … what purpose could it serve not to tell us? No – he would certainly have told me – and you, I’m sure.’

Well, I wasn’t sure – from what I’d heard of Pam’s sense of humour I’d have put nothing past him. And yet it would have been folly, surely, with me on the point of setting off for India, ostensibly to undo Ignatieff’s work, to have let him come face to face with me. And then, the wildest thought – was it possible Ignatieff knew about my mission?

‘Never!’ trumpets Ellenborough. ‘No, that couldn’t be! The decision to send you out was taken a bare two weeks since – it would be to credit the Russian intelligence system with super-human powers – and if he did, what could he accomplish here? – dammit, in the Queen’s own home! This isn’t Middle Asia – it’s a civilised country—’

‘My lord, that’s not a civilised man,’ says I. ‘But what’s to be done? I can’t meet him!’

‘Let me think,’ says he, and strode about, heaving his stomach around. Then he stopped, heavy with decision.

‘I think you must,’ says he. ‘If he has seen you – or finds out that you were here and left before your time … wait, though, it might be put down to tact on your part … still, no!’ He snapped his fingers at me. ‘No, you must stay. Better to behave as though there was nothing untoward – leave no room to excite suspicion – after all, former enemies meet in time of peace, don’t they? And we’ll watch him – by George, we will! Perhaps we’ll learn something ourselves! Hah-ha!’

And this was the port-sodden clown who had once governed India. I’d never heard such an idiot suggestion – but could I shift him? I pleaded, in the name of common sense, that I should leave at once, but he wouldn’t have it – I do believe that at the back of his mind was the suspicion that Pam had known Ignatieff was coming, and Ellenborough was scared to tinker with the Chief’s machinations, whatever they were.

‘You’ll stay,’ he commanded, ‘and that’s flat. What the devil – it’s just a freak of fate – and if it’s not, there’s nothing this Russian rascal can do. I tell you what, though – I’m not going to miss his first sight of you, what? The man he threatened with torture and worse – disgusting brute! Aye, and the man who bested him in the end. Ha-ha!’ And he clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Aye – hope nothing happens to embarrass the Queen, though. You’ll mind out for that, Flashman, won’t you – it wouldn’t do – any unpleasantness, hey?’

I minded out, all right. Strangely enough, by the time I came back to the castle with Elspeth that afternoon, my qualms about coming face to face again with that Russian wolf had somewhat subsided; I’d reminded myself that we weren’t meeting on his ground any more, but on mine, and that the kind of power he’d once had over me was a thing quite past. Still, I won’t pretend I was feeling at ease, and I’d drummed it into Elspeth’s head that not a hint must be let slip about my ensuing departure for India, or Pam’s visit. She took it in wide-eyed and assured me she would not dream of saying a word, but I realised with exasperation that you couldn’t trust any warning to take root in that beautiful empty head: as we approached the drawing-room doors she was prattling away about what wedding present she should suggest to the Queen for Mary Seymour, and I, preoccupied, said offhand, why not a lusty young coachman, and immediately regretted it – you couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t pass it on – and then the doors opened, we were announced, and the heads in the room were all turning towards us.

There was the Queen, in the middle of the sofa, with a lady and gentleman behind; Albert, propping up the mantelpiece, and lecturing to old Aberdeen, who appeared to be asleep on his feet, half a dozen assorted courtiers – and Ellenborough staring across the room. As we made our bows, and the Queen says: ‘Ah Mrs Flashman, you are come just in time to help with the service of tea,’ I was following Ellenborough’s glance, and there was Ignatieff, with another Russian-looking grandee and a couple of our own gentry. He was staring at me, and by God, he never so much as blinked or twitched a muscle; I made my little bow towards Albert, and as I turned to face Ignatieff again I felt, God knows why, a sudden rush of to-hell-with-it take hold of me.

‘My – dear – Count!’ says I, astonished, and everyone stopped talking; the Queen looked pop-eyed, and even Albert left off prosing to the noble corpse beside him.

‘Surely it’s Count Ignatieff?’ cries I, and then broke off in apology. ‘Your pardon, ma’am,’ says I to Vicky. ‘I was quite startled – I had no notion Count Ignatieff was here! Forgive me,’ but of course by this time she was all curiosity, and I had to explain that Count Ignatieff was an old comrade-in-arms, so to speak, what? And beam in his direction, while she smiled uncertainly, but not displeased, and Ellenborough played up well, and told Albert that he’d heard me speak of being Ignatieff’s prisoner during the late war, but had had no idea this was the same gentleman, and Albert looked disconcerted, and said that was most remarkable.

‘Indeed, highness, I had that honour,’ says Ignatieff, clicking his heels, and the sound of that chilly voice made my spine tingle. But there was nothing he could do but take the hand I stretched out to him.

‘This is splendid, old fellow!’ says I, gripping him as though he were my long-lost brother. ‘Wherever have you been keeping yourself?’ One or two of them smiled, to see bluff Flash Harry so delighted at meeting an old enemy – just what they’d have expected, of course. And when the Queen had been made quite au fait with the situation, she said it was exactly like Fitzjames and Roderick Dhu.

So after that it was quite jolly, and Albert made a group with Ignatieff and Ellenborough and me, and questioned me about our acquaintance, and I made light of my captivity and escape, and said what a charming jailer Ignatieff had been, and the brute just stood impassive, with his tawny head bowed over his cup, and looking me over with that amazing half-blue, half-brown eye. He was still the same handsome, broken-nosed young iceberg I remembered – if I’d closed my eyes I could have heard the lash whistling and cracking in Arabat courtyard, with the Cossacks’ grip on my arms.

Albert, of course, was much struck by the coincidence of our meeting again, and preached a short sermon about the brotherhood of men-at-arms, to which Ignatieff smiled politely and I cried ‘Hear, hear!’ It was difficult to guess, but I judged my Muscovite monster wasn’t enjoying this too much; he must have been wondering why I pretended to be so glad to see him. But I was all affability; I even presented him to Elspeth, and he bowed and kissed her hand; she was very demure and cool, so I knew she fancied him, the little trollop.

The truth is, my natural insolence was just asserting itself, as it always does when I feel it’s safe; when a moment came when Ignatieff and I were left alone together, I thought I’d stick a pin in him, just for sport, so I asked, quietly:

‘Brought your knout with you, Count?’

He looked at me a moment before replying. ‘It is in Russia,’ says he. ‘Waiting. So, I have no doubt, is Count Pencherjevsky’s daughter.’

‘Oh, yes,’ says I. ‘Little Valla. Is she well, d’you know?’

‘I have no idea. But if she is, it is no fault of yours.’ He glanced away, towards Elspeth and the others. ‘Is it?’

‘She never complained to me,’ says I, grinning at him. ‘On that tack – if I’m well, it’s no fault of yours, either.’

‘That is true,’ says he, and the eye was like a sword-point. ‘However, may I suggest that the less we say about our previous acquaintance, the better? I gather from your … charade, a little while ago – designed, no doubt, to impress your Queen – that you are understandably reluctant that the truth of your behaviour there should be made public.’

‘Oh, come now,’ says I. ‘’Twasn’t a patch on yours, old boy. What would the Court of Balmoral think if they knew that the charming Russian nobleman with the funny eye was a murderous animal who flogs innocent men to death and tortures prisoners of war? Thought about that?’

‘If you think you were tortured, Colonel Flashman,’ says he, poker-faced, ‘then I congratulate you on your ignorance.’ He put down his cup. ‘I find this conversation tedious. If you will excuse me,’ and he turned away.

‘Oh, sorry if you’re bored,’ says I. ‘I was forgetting – you probably haven’t cut a throat or burned a peasant in a week.’

It was downright stupid of me, no doubt – two hours earlier I’d been quaking at the thought of meeting him again, and here I was sassing him to my heart’s content. But I can never resist a jibe and a gloat when the enemy’s hands are tied, as Thomas Hughes would tell you. Ignatieff didn’t seem nearly as fearsome here, among the teacups, with chaps toadying the royals, and cress sandwiches being handed round, and Ellenborough flirting ponderously with Elspeth while the Queen complained to old Aberdeen that it was the press which had killed Lord Hardinge, in her Uncle Leopold’s opinion. No, not fearsome at all – without his chains and gallows and dungeons and power of life and death, and never so much as a Cossack thug to bless himself with. I should have remembered that men like Nicholas Ignatieff are dangerous anywhere – usually when you least expect it.

And I was far from expecting anything the next day, the last full one I was to spend at Balmoral. It was a miserable, freezing morning, I remember, with flurries of sleet among the rain, and low clouds rolling down off Lochnagar; the kind of day when you put your nose out once and then settle down to punch and billiards with the boys, and build the fire up high. But not Prince Albert; there were roe deer reported in great numbers at Balloch Buie, and nothing would do but we must be drummed out, cursing, for a stalk.

I’d have slid back to Abergeldie if I could, but he nailed me in the hall with Ellenborough. ‘Why, Colonel Flash-mann, where are your gaiters? Haff you nott called for your loader yet? Come, gentlemen, in this weather we haff only a few hours – let us be off!’

And he strutted about in his ridiculous Alpine hat and tartan cloak, while the loaders were called and the brakes made ready, and the ghillies loafed about grinning on the terrace with the guns and pouches – they knew I loathed it, and that Ellenborough couldn’t carry his guts more than ten yards without a rest, and the brutes enjoyed our discomfiture. There were four or five other guns in the party, and presently we drove off into the rain, huddling under the tarpaulin covers as we jolted away from the castle on the unmade road.

The country round Balmoral is primitive at the best of times; on a dank autumn day it’s like an illustration from Bunyan’s Holy War, especially near our destination, which was an eerie, dreary forest of firs among the mountains, with great patches of bog, and gullies full of broken rocks, and heather waist-deep on the valley sides. The road petered out there, and we clambered out of the brakes and stood in the pouring wet while Albert, full of energy and blood-lust, planned the campaign. We were to spread out singly, with our loaders, and drive ahead up to the high ground, because the mist was hanging fairly thick by this time, and if we kept together we might miss the stags altogether.

We were just about to start on our squelching climb, when another brake came rolling up the road, and who should pile out but the Russian visitors, with one of the local bigwigs, all dressed for the hill. Albert of course was delighted.

‘Come, gentlemen,’ cries he, ‘this is capital! What? There are no bearss in our Scottish mountains, but we can show you fine sport among the deer. General Menshikof, will you accompany me? Count Ignatieff – ah, where iss Flash-mann?’ I was having a quick swig from Ellenborough’s flask, and as the Prince turned towards me, and I saw Ignatieff at his elbow, very trim in tweeds and top boots, with a fur cap on his head and a heavy piece under his arm, I suddenly felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach. In that second I had a vision of those lonely, gully-crossed crags above us, with their great reaches of forest in which you could get lost for days, and mist blotting out sight and sound of all companions – and myself, alone, with Ignatieff down-wind of me, armed, and with that split eye of his raking the trees and heather for a sight of me. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he might be in the shooting party, but here he came, strolling across, and behind him a great burly unmistakable moujik, in smock and boots, carrying his pouches.

Ellenborough stiffened and shot a glance at me. For myself, I was wondering frantically if I could plead indisposition at the last minute. I opened my mouth to say something, and then Albert was summoning Ellenborough to take the left flank, and Ignatieff was standing watching me coolly, with the rain beating down between us.

‘I have my own loader,’ says he, indicating the moujik. ‘He is used to heavy game – bears, as his royal highness says, and wolves. However, he has experience of lesser animals, and vermin, even.’

‘I … I …’ It had all happened so quickly that I couldn’t think of what to say, or do. Albert was despatching the others to their various starting-points; the first of them were already moving off into the mist. As I stood, dithering, Ignatieff stepped closer, glanced at my own ghillie, who was a few yards away, and said quietly in French:

‘I did not know you were going to India, Colonel. My congratulations on your … appointment? A regimental command, perhaps?’

‘Eh? What d’you mean?’ I started in astonishment.

‘Surely nothing less,’ says he, ‘for such a distinguished campaigner as yourself.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I croaked.

‘Have I been misinformed? Or have I misunderstood your charming wife? When I had the happiness to pay my respects to her this morning, I understood her to say – but there, I may have been mistaken. When one encounters a lady of such exceptional beauty, I fear one tends to look rather than to listen.’ He smiled – something I’d never seen him do before: it reminded me of a frozen river breaking up. ‘But I think his royal highness is calling you, Colonel.’

‘Flash-mann!’ I tore myself away from the hypnotic stare of that split eye; there was Albert waving at me impatiently. ‘Will you take the lead on the right flank? Come, sir, we are losing time – it will be dark before we can come up to the beasts!’

If I’d had any sense I’d have bolted, or gone into a swoon, or claimed a sprained ankle – but I didn’t have time to think. The royal nincompoop was gesticulating at me to be off, my loader was already ploughing into the trees just ahead, one or two of the others had turned to look, and Ignatieff was smiling coldly at my evident confusion. I hesitated, and then started after the loader; as I entered the trees, I took one quick glance back; Ignatieff was standing beside the brake, lighting a cigarette, waiting for Albert to set him on his way. I gulped, and plunged into the trees.

The ghillie was waiting for me under the branches; he was one of your grinning, freckled, red-haired Highlanders, called MacLehose, or something equally unpronounceable. I’d had him before, and he was a damned good shikari – they all are, of course. Well, I was going to stick to him like glue this trip, I told myself, and the farther we got away from our Russian sportsmen in quick time, the better. As I strode through the fir wood, ducking to avoid the whippy branches, I heard Albert’s voice faintly behind us, and pressed on even harder.

At the far side of the wood I paused, staring up at the hillside ahead of us. What the devil was I getting in such a stew for? – my heart racing like a trip-hammer, and the sweat running down me, in spite of the chill. This wasn’t Russia; it was a civilised shooting-party in Scotland. Ignatieff wouldn’t dare to try any devilment here – it had just been the surprise of his sudden appearance at the last minute that had unmanned me … wouldn’t he, though? By God, he’d try anything, that one – and he knew about my going to India, thanks to that blathering idiot I’d married in an evil hour. Shooters had been hit before, up on the crags, in bad light … it could be made to look like an accident … mistaken for a stag … heavy mist … tragic error … never forgive himself …

‘Come on!’ I yammered, and stumbled over the rocks for a gully that opened to our left – there was another one straight ahead, but I wasn’t having that. The ghillie protested that if we went left we might run into the nearest shooters; that was all right with me, and I ignored him and clambered over the rubble at the gully foot, plunging up to the knee in a boggy patch and almost dropping my gun. I stole a glance back, but there was no sign of anyone emerging from the wood; I sprang into the gully and scrambled upwards.

It was a gruelling climb, through the huge heather-bushes that flanked the stream, and then it was bracken, six feet high, with a beaten rabbit-path that I went up at a run. At the top the gully opened out into another great mass of firs, and not until we were well underneath them did I pause, heaving like a bellows, and the ghillie padded up beside me, not even breathing hard, and grinning surprise on his face.

‘Crackey good gracious,’ says he, ‘you’re eager to be at the peasties the day. What’s the great running, whatever?’

‘Is this piece loaded?’ says I, and held it out.

‘What for would it be?’ says the clown. ‘We’ll no’ be near a deer for half an hour yet. There’s no occasion.’

‘Load the dam’ thing,’ says I.

‘And have you plowing your pluidy head off, the haste you’re in? She’ll look well then, right enuff.’

‘Damn you, do as you’re told!’ says I, so he shrugged and spat and looked his disgust as he put in the charge.

‘Mind, there’s two great pullets in there now,’ says he as he handed it back. ‘If you’ve as much sense as a whaup’s neb you’ll keep the caps in your pooch until we sight the deer.’ They’ve no respect, those people.

I snatched it from him and made off through the wood, and for ten minutes we pushed on, always upwards, through another long gully, and along a rocky ledge over a deep stream, where the mist hung in swirls among the rowan trees, and the foam drifted slowly by on the brown pools. It was as dark as dusk, although it was still early afternoon; there was no sound of another living soul, and nothing moving on the low cliffs above us.

By this time I was asking myself again if I hadn’t been over-anxious – and at the same time wondering if it wouldn’t be safest to lie up here till dark, and buy the ghillie’s silence with a sovereign, or keep moving to our left to reach the other guns. And then he gave a sudden exclamation and stopped, frowning, and putting a hand on his belly. He gave a little barking cough, and his ruddy face was pale as he turned to me.

‘Oh!’ says he. ‘What’s this? All of a sudden, my pudden’s is pad.’

‘What is it?’ says I, impatiently, and he sat down on a rock, holding himself and making strained noises.

‘I – I don’t know. It’s my belly – there’s some mischief in herself – owf!’

‘Are you ill?’

‘Oh, goad – I don’t know.’ His face was green. ‘What do these foreign puggers tak’ to drink? It’s – it must be the spirits yon great hairy fella gave me before we cam’ up – oh, mither, isn’t it hellish? Oh, stop you, till I vomit!’

But he couldn’t, try as he would, but leaned against the rock, in obvious pain, rubbing at himself and groaning. And I watched him, in horror, for there was no doubt what had happened – Ignatieff’s man had drugged or poisoned him, so that I’d be alone on the hill. The sheer ruthlessness of it, the hellish calculation, had me trembling to my boots – they would come on me alone, and – but wait, whatever he’d been given, it couldn’t be fatal: two corpses on one shoot would be too much to explain away, and one of them poisoned, at that. No, it must just be a drug, to render him helpless, and of course I would turn back down the hill to get help, and they’d be there …

‘Stay where you are – I’ll get help,’ says I, and lit out along the ledge, but not in the direction we’d come; it was up and over the hills for Flashy, and my groaning ghillie could be taken care of when time served. I scudded round the corner of rock at the ledge’s end, and through a forest of bracken, out into a clear space, and then into another fir wood, where I paused to get my bearings. If I bore off left – but which way was left? We’d taken so many turnings, among the confounded bogs and gullies, I couldn’t be sure, and there was no sun to help. Suppose I went the wrong way, and ran into them? God knows, in this maze of hills and heather it would be easy enough. Should I go back to the stricken ghillie, and wait with him? I’d be safer, in his company – but they might be up with him by now, lurking on the gully-side, waiting. I stood clutching my gun, sweating.

It was silent as death under the fir-trees, close as a tomb, and dim. I could see out one side, where there was bracken – that would be the place to lie up, so I stole forward on tiptoe, making no noise on the carpet of mould and needles. Near the wood’s edge I waited, listening: no sound, except my own breathing. I turned to enter the bracken – and stood frozen, biting back a yelp of fear. Behind me, on the far side of the wood, a twig had snapped.

For an instant I was paralysed, and then I was across the open space of turf and burrowing into the bracken for dear life. I went a few yards, and then writhed round to look back; through the stems and fronds I could see the trees I’d just left, gloomy and silent. But I was deep in cover; if I lay still, not to shake the bracken above me, no one could hope to spot me unless he trod on me. I burrowed down in the sodden grass, panting, and waited, with my ears straining.

For five minutes nothing happened; there was only the dripping of the fronds, and my own heart thumping. What made the suspense so hellish was the sheer unfairness of my predicament – I’d been in more tight corners before than I care to count, but always in some godless, savage part of the world like Afghanistan or Madagascar or Russia or St Louis – it was damnable that I should be lurking in fear of my life in England – or Scotland, even. I hadn’t been in this kind of terror on British soil since I’d been a miserable fag at Rugby, carrying Bully Dawson’s game bag for him, and we’d had to hide from keepers at Brownsover. They’d caught me, too, and I’d only got off by peaching on Dawson and his pals, and showing the keepers where … and suddenly, where there had been nothing a moment ago, a shadow moved in the gloom beneath the trees, stopped, and took on form in the half-light. Ignatieff was standing just inside the edge of the fir wood.

I stopped breathing, while he turned his head this way and that, searching the thickets; he had his gun cocked, and by God he wasn’t looking for stags. Then he snapped his fingers, and the moujik came padding out of the dimness of the wood; he was heeled and ready as well, his eyes glaring above his furze of beard. Ignatieff nodded to the left, and the great brute went prowling off that way, his piece presented in front of him; Ignatieff waited a few seconds and then took the way to the right. They both disappeared, noiselessly, and I was left fumbling feverishly for my caps. I slipped them under the hammers with trembling fingers, wondering whether to stay where I was or try to wriggle farther back into the undergrowth. They would be on either side of me shortly, and if they turned into the bracken they might easily … and with the thought came a steady rustling to my left, deep in the green; it stopped, and then started again, and it sounded closer. No doubt of it, someone was moving stealthily and steadily towards my hiding place.

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 daresay – 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 despatched 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 foreseen, 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 puggareefn1 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.’

This sounded to me like a man riding his pet hobby; I couldn’t see why any of this should do anything but please the people.

‘The people don’t count! They never do. It’s the rulers that matter, the rajas and the nabobs – like this rani of yours in Jhansi. They’ve squeezed this country for centuries, and Dalhousie put a stop to it. Of course it’s for the benefit of the poor folk, but they don’t know that – they believe what their princes tell ’em. And what they tell ’em is that the British Sirkar is their enemy, because it stops them burning their widows, and murdering each other in the name of Kali, and will abolish their religion and force Christianity on them if it can.’

‘Oh, come, John,’ says I, ‘they’ve been saying that for years.’

‘Well, there’s something in it.’ He looked troubled, in a stuffy religious way. ‘I’m a Christian, I hope, or try to be, and I pray I shall see the day when the Gospel is the daily bread of every poor benighted soul on this continent, and His praise is sung in a thousand churches. But I could wish our people went more carefully about it. These are a devout people, Flashman, and their beliefs, misguided though they are, must not be taken lightly. What do they think, when they hear Christianity taught in the schools – in the jails, even – and when colonels preach to their regiments?⁵ Let the prince, or the agitator, whisper in their ears “See how the British will trample on thy holy things, which they respect not. See how they will make Christians of you.” They will believe him. And they are such simple folk, and their eyes are closed. D’you know,’ he went on, ‘there’s a sect in Kashmir that even worships me?’

‘Good for you,’ says I. ‘D’ye take up a collection?’

‘I try to reason with them – but it does no good. I tell you, India won’t be converted in a day, or in years. It must come slowly, if surely. But our missionaries – good, worthy men – press on apace, and cannot see the harm they may do.’ He sighed. ‘Yet can one find it in one’s heart to blame them, old fellow, when one considers the blessings that God’s grace would bring to this darkened continent? It is very hard.’ And he looked stern and nobly anguished; Arnold would have loved him. Then he frowned and growled, and suddenly burst out:

‘It wouldn’t be so bad, if we weren’t so confounded soft! If we would only carry things with a high hand – the reforms, and the missionary work, even. Either let well alone, or do the thing properly. But we don’t, you see; we take half-measures, and are too gentle by a mile. If we are going to pull down their false gods, and reform their old and corrupt states and amend their laws, and make ’em worthy men and women – then let us do it with strength! Dalhousie was strong, but I don’t know about Canning. I know if I were he, I’d bring these oily, smirking, treacherous princes under my heel—’ his eyes flashed as he ground his boot in the dust. ‘I’d give ’em government, firm and fair. I’d be less soft with the sepoys, too – and with some of our own people. That’s half the trouble – you haven’t been back long enough, but depend upon it, we send some poor specimens out to the army nowadays, and to the Company offices. “Broken-down tapsters and serving men’s sons”, eh? Well, you’ll see ’em – ignorant, slothful fellows of poor class, and we put ’em to officer high-caste Hindoos of ten years’ service. They don’t know their men, and treat ’em like children or animals, and think of nothing but drinking and hunting, and – and …’ he reddened to the roots of his enormous beard and looked aside. ‘Some of them consort with … with the worst type of native women.’ He cleared his throat and patted my arm. ‘There, I’m sorry, old fellow; I know it’s distasteful to talk of such things, but it’s true, alas.’

I shook my head and said it was heart-breaking.

‘Now you see why your news concerns me so? These omens at Jhansi – they may be the spark to the tinder, and I’ve shown you, I hope, that the tinder exists in India, because of our own blindness and softness. If we were stronger, and dealt firmly with the princes, and accompanied our enlightenment of the people with proper discipline – why, the spark would be stamped out easily enough. As it is—’ he shook his head again. ‘I don’t like it. Thank God they had the wit to send someone like you to Jhansi – I only wish I could come with you, to share whatever perils may lie ahead. It’s a strange, wild place, from all I’ve heard,’ says this confounded croaker with pious satisfaction, as he shook my hand. ‘Come, old fellow, shall we pray together – for your safety and guidance in whatever dangers you may find yourself?’

And he plumped down there and then on his knees, with me alongside, and gave God his marching orders in no uncertain fashion, telling him to keep a sharp eye on his servant. I don’t know what it was about me, but holy fellows like Nicholson were forever addressing heaven on my behalf – even those who didn’t know me well seemed to sense that there was a lot of hard graft to be done if Flashy was ever to smell salvation. I can see him yet – his great dark head and long nose against the sunset, his beard quivering with exhortation, and even the freckles on the back of his clasped hands. Poor wild John – he should have canvassed the Lord on his own behalf, perhaps, for while I’m still here after half a century, he was stiff inside the year, shot in the midriff by a pandy sniper in the attack on Delhi, and left to die by inches at the roadside. That’s what his duty earned for him; if he’d taken proper precautions he’d have made viceroy. And Delhi would have fallen just the same.⁶

Whatever his prayers accomplished for my solid flesh, his talk about Jhansi had done nothing for my spirits. ‘A strange wild place,’ he’d said, and talked of the Pindari bandits and Thugs and Maharatta scoundrels – well, I knew it had been hell’s punch-bowl in the old days, but I’d thought since we’d annexed it that it must be quieter now. Mangles, at the Board of Control in London, had described it as ‘tranquil beneath the Company’s benevolent rule’, but he was a pompous ass with a talent for talking complete bosh about subjects on which he was an authority.

As I pushed on into Bandelkand it began to look as though he was wrong and Nicholson was right – it was broken, hilly country, with jungle on the slopes and in the valleys, never a white face to be seen, and the black ones getting uglier by the mile. The roads were so atrocious, and the hackery jolted and rolled so sickeningly, that I was forced to take to my Pegu pony; there was devil a sign of civilisation, but only walled villages and every so often a sinister Maharatta fort squatting on a hilltop to remind you who really held the power in this land. ‘The toughest nut south of the Khyber’ – I was ready to believe it, as I surveyed those unfriendly jungly hills, seeing nothing cheerier than a distant tiger skulking among the waitabit thorn. And this was the country that we were ‘ruling’ – with one battalion of suspect sepoy infantry and a handful of British civilians to collect the taxes.

My first sight of Jhansi city wasn’t uplifting either. We rounded a bend on the hill road, and there it was under a dull evening sky – a massive fort, embattled and towered, on a great steep rock, and the walled city clustered at its foot. It was far bigger than I’d imagined; the walls must have been four miles round at least, and the air over the city was thick with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires. On this side of the city lay the orderly white lines of the British camp and cantonment – God, it looked tiny and feeble, beneath that looming vastness of Jhansi fort. My mind went back to Kabul, and how our camp had seemed dwarfed by the Bala Hissar – and even at Kabul, with an army of ten thousand, only a handful of us had escaped. I told myself that here it was different – that less than a hundred miles ahead of me there were our great garrisons along the Grand Trunk, and that however forbidding Jhansi might look, it was a British state nowadays, and under the Sirkar’s protection. Only there wasn’t much sign of that protection – just our pathetic little village like a flea on the lion’s lip, and somewhere in that great citadel, where our troops never went, that brooding old bitch of a Rani scheming against us, with her thousands of savage subjects waiting for her word. Thus my imagination – as if it hadn’t been full enough already, what with Ignatieff and Thugs and wild Pindaris and dissident sepoys and Nicholson’s forebodings.

My first task was to look up Skene, the political whose reports had started the whole business, so I headed down to the cantonment, which was a neat little compound of perhaps forty bungalows, with decent gardens, and the usual groups already meeting on the verandahs for sundown pegs and cordials; there were a few carriages waiting with their grooms and drivers to take people out for dinner, and one or two officers riding home, but I drove straight through, and got a chowkidar’s direction to the little Star Fort, where Skene had his office – he’d still be there, the chowkidar said, which argued a very conscientious political indeed.

Frankly, I hoped to find him scared or stupid; he wasn’t either. He was one of these fair, intent young fellows who fall over themselves to help, and will work all the hours God sends. He hopped from one leg to another when I presented myself, and seemed fairly overwhelmed to meet the great Flashy, but the steady grey eye told you at once that here was a boy who didn’t take alarm at trifles. He had clerks and bearers running in all directions to take my gear to quarters, saw to it that I was given a bath, and then bore me off for dinner at his own bungalow, where he lost no time in getting down to business.

‘No one knows why you’re here, sir, except me,’ says he. ‘I believe Carshore, the Collector, suspects, but he’s a sound man, and will say nothing. Of course, Erskine, the Commissioner at Saugor, knows all about it, but no one else.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m not quite clear myself, sir, why they sent you out, and not someone from Calcutta.’

‘Well, they wanted an assassin, you see,’ says I, easily, just for bounce. ‘It so happens I’m acquainted with the Russian gentleman who’s been active in these parts – and dealing with him ain’t a job for an ordinary political, what?’ It was true, after all; Pam himself had said it. ‘Also, it seems Calcutta and yourself and Commissioner Erskine – with all respect – haven’t been too successful with this titled lady up in the city palace. Then there are these cakes; all told, it seemed better to Lord Palmerston to send me.’

‘Lord Palmerston?’ says he, his eyes wide open. ‘I didn’t know it had gone that far.’

I assured him he’d been the cause of the Prime Minister’s losing a night’s sleep, and he whistled and reached for the decanter.

‘That’s neither here nor there, anyway,’ says I. ‘You cost me a night’s sleep, too, for that matter. The first thing is: have any of these Russian fellows been back this way?’

To my surprise, he looked confused. ‘Truth is, sir – I never knew they’d been near. That came to me from Calcutta – our frontier people traced them down this way, three times, I believe, and I was kept informed. But if they hadn’t told me, I’d never have known.’

That rattled me, if you like. ‘You mean, if they do come back – or if they’re loose in your bailiwick now – you won’t know of it until Calcutta sees fit to tell you?’

‘Oh, our frontier politicals will send me word as soon as any suspected person crosses over,’ says he. ‘And I have my own native agents on the look-out now – some pretty sharp men, sir.’

‘They know especially to look out for a one-eyed man?’

‘Yes, sir – he has a curious deformity which he hides with a patch, you know – one of his eyes is half-blue, half-brown.’

‘You don’t say,’ says I. By George, I hadn’t realised our political arrangements were as ramshackle as this. ‘That, Captain Skene, is the man I’m here to kill – so if any of your … sharp men have the chance to save me the trouble, they may do it with my blessing.’

‘Oh, of course, sir. Oh, they will, you know. Some of them,’ says he, impressively, ‘are Pindari bandits – or used to be, that is. But we’ll know in good time, sir, before any of these Ruski fellows get within distance.’

I wished I could share his confidence. ‘Calcutta has no notion what the Russian spies were up to down here?’ I asked him, but he shook his head.

‘Nothing definite at all – only that they’d been here. We were sure it must be connected with the chapattis going round, but those have dried up lately. None have passed since October, and the sepoys of the 12th N.I. – that’s the regiment here, you know – seem perfectly quiet. Their colonel swears they’re loyal – has done from the first, and was quite offended that I reported the cakes to Calcutta. Perhaps he’s right; I’ve had some of my men scouting the sepoy lines, and they haven’t heard so much as a murmur. And Calcutta was to inform me if cakes passed at any other place, but none have, apparently.’

Come, thinks I, this is decidedly better; Pam’s been up a gum-tree for nothing. All I had to do was make a show of brief activity here, and then loaf over to Calcutta after a few weeks and report nothing doing. Give ’em a piece of my mind, too, for causing me so much inconvenience.

‘Well, Skene,’ says I, ‘this is how I see it. There’s nothing to be done about what the Prime Minister calls “those blasted buns” – unless they make a reappearance, what? As to the Russians – well, when we get word of them, I’ll probably drop out of sight, d’you see?’ I would, too – to some convenient haven which the Lord would provide, and emerge when the coast was clear. But I doubted it would even come to that. ‘Yes, you won’t see me – but I’ll be about, never fear, and if our one-eyed friend, or any of his creatures, shows face … well …’

He looked suitably impressed, with a hint of that awe which my fearsome reputation inspires. ‘I understand, sir. You’ll wish to … er, work in your own way, of course.’ He blinked at me, and then exclaimed reverently: ‘By Jove, I don’t envy those Ruski fellows above half – if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.’

‘Skene, old chap,’ says I, and winked at him. ‘Neither do I.’ And believe me, he was my slave for life, from that moment.

‘There’s the other thing,’ I went on. ‘The Rani. I have to try to talk some sense into her. Now, I daresay there isn’t much I can do, since I gather she’s shown you and Erskine that she’s not disposed to be friendly, but I’m bound to try, you see. So I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll arrange an audience for me the day after tomorrow – I’d like to rest and perhaps look around the city first. For the present, you can tell me your own opinion of her.’

He frowned, and filled my glass. ‘You’ll think it’s odd, sir, I daresay, but in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never even seen her. I’ve met her, frequently, at the palace, but she speaks from behind a purdah, you know – and as often as not her chamberlain does the talking for her. She’s a stickler for form, and since government granted her diplomatic immunity after her husband died – as a sop, really, when we assumed suzerainty – well, it makes it difficult to deal with her satisfactorily. She was friendly enough with Erskine at one time – but I’ve had no change out of her at all. She’s damned bitter, you see – when her husband died, old Raja Gangadar, he left no children of his own – well, he was an odd bird, really,’ and Skene blushed furiously and avoided my eye. ‘Used to go about in female dress most of the time, and wore bangles and … and perfume, you see—’

‘No wonder she was bitter,’ says I.

‘No, no, what I mean is, since he left no legitimate heir, but only a boy whom he’d adopted, Dalhousie wouldn’t recognise the infant. The new succession law, you know. So the state was annexed – and the Rani was furious, and petitioned the Queen, and sent agents to London, but it was no go. The adopted son, Damodar, was dispossessed, and the Rani, who’d hoped to be regent, was deprived of her power – officially. Between ourselves, we let her rule pretty well as she pleases – well, we can’t do otherwise, can we? We’ve one battalion of sepoys, and thirty British civilians to run the state administration – but she’s the law, where her people are concerned, absolute as Caesar.’

‘Doesn’t that satisfy her, then?’

‘Not a bit of it. She detests the fact that officially she only holds power by the Sirkar’s leave, you see. And she’s still wild about the late Raja’s will – you’d think that with a quarter of a million in her treasury she’d be content, but there was some jewellery or other that Calcutta confiscated, and she’s never forgiven us.’

‘Interesting lady,’ says I. ‘Dangerous, d’you think?’

He frowned. ‘Politically, yes. Given the chance, she’d pay our score off, double quick – that’s why the chapatti business upset me. She’s got no army, as such – but with every man in Jhansi a born fighter, and robber, she don’t need one, do she? And they’ll jump if she whistles, for they worship the ground she treads on. She’s proud as Lucifer’s sister, and devilish hard, not to say cruel, in her own courts, but she’s uncommon kind to the poor folk, and highly thought of for her piety – spends five hours a day meditating, although she was a wild piece, they say, when she was a girl. They brought her up like a Maharatta prince at the old Peshwa’s court – taught her to ride and shoot and fence with the best of them. They say she still has the fiend’s own temper,’ he added, grinning, ‘but she’s always been civil enough to me – at a distance. But make no mistake, she’s dangerous; if you can sweeten her, sir, we’ll all sleep a deal easier at nights.’

There was that, of course. However withered an old trot she might be, she’d be an odd female if she was altogether impervious to Flashy’s manly bearing and cavalry whiskers – which was probably what Pam had in mind in the first place. Cunning old devil. Still, as I turned in that night I wasn’t absolutely looking forward to poodle-faking her in two days’ time, and as I glanced from my bungalow window and saw Jhansi citadel beetling in the starlight, I thought, we’ll take a nice little escort of lancers with us when we go to take tea with the lady, so we will.

But that was denied me. I had intended to pass the next day looking about the city, perhaps having a discreet word with Carshore the Collector and the colonel of the sepoys, but as the sycefn2 was bringing round my pony to the dak-bungalow, up comes Skene in a flurry. When he’d sent word to the palace that Colonel Flashman, a distinguished soldier of the Sirkar, was seeking an audience for the following day, he’d been told that distinguished visitors were expected to present themselves immediately as a token of proper respect to her highness, and Colonel Flashman could shift his distinguished rump up to the palace forthwith.

‘I … I thought in the circumstances of your visit,’ says Skene, apologetically, ‘that you might think it best to comply.’

‘You did, did you?’ says I. ‘Does every Briton in Jhansi leap to attention when this beldam snaps her fingers, then?’

‘Shall we say, we find it convenient to humour her highness,’ says he – he was more of a political than he looked, this lad, so I blustered a bit, to be in character, and then said he might find me an escort of lancers to convoy me in.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says he. ‘We haven’t any lancers – and if we had, we’ve agreed not to send troop formations inside the city walls. Also, since I was excluded from the, er … invitation, I fear you must go alone.’

‘What?’ says I. ‘Damnation, who governs here – the Sirkar or this harridan?’ I didn’t fancy above half risking my hide unguarded in that unhealthy-looking fortress, but I had to cover it with dignity. ‘You’ve made a rod for your own backs by being too soft with this … this woman. She’s not Queen Bess, you know!’

‘She thinks she is,’ says he cheerfully, so in the end of course I had to lump it. But I changed into my lancer fig first, sabre, revolver and all – for I could guess why she was ensuring that I visited her alone: up-country, on the frontier, they judge a man on his own looks, but down here they go on the amount and richness of your retinue. One mounted officer wasn’t going to impress the natives with the Sirkar’s power – well, then, he’d look his best, and be damned to her. So I figged up, and when I regarded myself in Skene’s cracked mirror – blue tunic and breeches, gold belt and epaulettes, white gauntlets and helmet, well-bristled whiskers, and Flashy’s stalwart fourteen stone inside it all, it wasn’t half bad. I took a couple of packages from my trunk, stowed them in my saddlebag, waved to Skene, and trotted off to meet royalty, with only the syce to show me the way.

Jhansi city lies about a couple of miles from the cantonment, and I had plenty of time to take in the scenery. The road, which was well-lined with temples and smaller buildings, was crowded into the city, with bullock-carts churning up the dust, camels, palankeens, and hordes of travellers both mounted and on foot. Most of them were country folk, on their way to the bazaars, but every now and then would come an elephant with red and gold fringed howdah swaying along, carrying some minor nabob or rich lady, or a portly merchant on his mule with a string of porters behind, and once the syce pointed out a group who he said were members of the Rani’s own bodyguard – a dozen stalwart Khyberie Pathans, of all things, trotting along very military in double file, with mail coats and red silk scarves wound round their spiked helmets. The Rani might not have a army, but she wasn’t short of force, with those fellows about: there was a hundred years’ Company service among them if there was a day.

And her city defences were a sight to see – massive walls twenty feet high, and beyond them a warren of streets stretching for near a mile to the castle rock, with its series of curtain walls and round towers – it would be the deuce of a place to storm, after you’d fought through the city itself; there were guns in the embrasures, and mail-clad spearmen on the walls, all looking like business.

We had to force our horses through a crowded inferno of heat and smells and noise and jostling niggers to get to the palace, which stood apart from the fort near a small lake, with a shady park about it; it was a fine, four-square building, its outer walls beautifully decorated with huge paintings of battles and hunting scenes. I presented myself to another Pathan, very splendid in steel back-and-breast and long-tail puggaree, who commanded the gate guard, and sat sweating in the scorching sun while he sent off a messenger for the chamberlain. And as I chafed impatiently, the Pathan walked slowly round me, eyeing me up and down, and presently stopped, stuck his thumbs in his belt, and spat carefully on my shadow.

Now, close by the gate there happened to be a number of booths and side-shows set up – the usual things, lemonade-sellers, a fakir with a plant growing through his palm, sundry beggars, and a kind of punch-and-judy show, which was being watched by a group of ladies in a palankeen. As a matter of fact, they’d already taken my eye, for they were obviously Maharatta females of quality, and four finer little trotters you never saw. There was a very slim, languid-looking beauty in a gold sari reclining in the palankeen, another plump piece in scarlet trousers and jacket beside her, and a third, very black, but fine-boned as a Swede, with a pearl headdress that must have cost my year’s pay, sitting in a kind of camp-chair alongside – even the ladies’ maid standing beside the palankeen was a looker, with great almond eyes and a figure inside her plain white sari like a Hindoo temple goddess. I was in the act of touching my hat to them when the Pathan started expectorating. At this the maid giggled, the ladies looked, and the Pathan sniffed contemptuously and spat again.

Well, as a rule anyone can insult me and see how much it pays him, especially if he’s large and ugly and carrying a tulwar.fn3 But for the credit of the Sirkar, and my own face in front of the women, I had to do something, so I looked the Pathan up and down, glanced away, and said quietly in Pushtu:

‘You would spit more carefully if you were still in the Guides, hubshi.’fn4

He opened his eyes at that, and swore. ‘Who calls me hubshi? Who says I was in the Guides? And what is it to thee, feringheefn5 pig?’

‘You wear the old coat under your breastplate,’ says I. ‘But belike you stole it from a dead Guide. For no man who had a right to that uniform would spit on Bloody Lance’s shadow.’

That set him back on his heels. ‘Bloody Lance?’ says he. ‘Thou?’ He came closer and stared up at me. ‘Art thou that same Iflass-man who slew the four Gilzais?’

‘At Mogala,’ says I mildly. It had caused a great stir at the time, in the Gilzai country, and won me considerable fame (and my extravagant nickname) along the Kabul road – in fact, old Mohammed Iqbal had killed the four horsemen, while I lit out for the undergrowth, but nobody living knew that.fn6 And obviously the legend endured, for the Pathan gaped and swore again, and then came hastily to attention and threw me a barra salaamfn7 that would have passed at Horse Guards.

‘Sher Khan, havildarfn8 lately of Ismeet Sahib’s company of the Guides,⁷ as your honour says,’ croaks he. ‘Now, shame on me and mine that I put dishonour on Bloody Lance, and knew him not! Think not ill of me, husoor,fn9 for—’

‘Let the ill think ill,’ says I easily. ‘The spittle of a durwanfn10 will not drown a soldier.’ I was watching out of the corner of my eye to see how the ladies were taking this, and noted with satisfaction that they were giggling at the Pathan’s discomfiture. ‘Boast to your children, O Ghazifn11-that-was-a-Guide-and-is-now-a-Rani’s-porter, that you spat on Bloody Lance Iflass-man’s shadow – and lived.’ And I walked my horse past him into the courtyard, well pleased; it would be all round Jhansi inside the hour.

It was a trifling enough incident, and I forgot it with my first glance at the interior of the Rani’s palace. Outside it had been all dust and heat and din, but here was the finest garden courtyard you ever saw – a cool, pleasant enclosure where little antelopes and peacocks strutted on the lawns, parrots and monkeys chattered softly in the surrounding trees, and a dazzling white fountain played; there were shaded archways in the carved walls, where well-dressed folk whom I took to be her courtiers sat and talked, waited on by bearers. One of the richest thrones in India, Pam had said, and I could believe it – there were enough silks and jewellery on view there to stuff an army with loot, the statuary was of the finest, in marble and coloured stones that I took to be jade, and even the pigeons that pecked at the spotless pavements had silver rings on their claws. Until you’ve seen it, of course, you can’t imagine the luxury in which these Indian princes keep themselves – and there are folk at home who’ll tell you that John Company were the robbers!

I was kept waiting there a good hour before a major-domo came, salaaming, to lead me through the inner gate and up a narrow winding stair to the durbar room on the first storey; here again all was richness – splendid silk curtains on the walls, great chandeliers of purple crystal hanging from the carved and gilded ceiling, magnificent carpets on the floor (with good old Axminster there among the Persian, I noticed) and every kind of priceless ornament, gold and ivory, ebony and silverwork, scattered about. It would have been in damned bad taste if it hadn’t all been so bloody expensive, and the dozen or so men and women who lounged about on the couches and cushions were dressed to match; the ones down in the courtyard must have been their poor relations. Handsome as Hebe the women were, too – I was just running my eye over one alabaster beauty in tight scarlet trousers who was reclining on a shawl, playing with a parakeet, when a gong boomed somewhere, everyone stood up, and a fat little chap in a huge turban waddled in and announced that the durbar had begun. At which music began to play, and they all turned and bowed to the wall, which I suddenly realised wasn’t a wall at all, but a colossal ivory screen, fine as lace, that cut the room in two. Through it you could just make out movement in the space beyond, like shadows behind thick gauze; this was the Rani’s purdah screen, to keep out prying heathen eyes like mine.

I seemed to be first man in, for the chamberlain led me to a little gilt stool a few feet from the screen, and there I sat while he stood at one end of the screen and cried out my name, rank, decorations, and (it’s a fact) my London clubs; there was a murmur of voices beyond, and then he asked me what I wanted, or words to that effect. I replied, in Urdu, that I brought greetings from Queen Victoria, and a gift for the Rani from Her Majesty, if she would graciously accept it. (It was a perfectly hellish photograph of Victoria and Albert looking in apparent stupefaction at a book which the Prince of Wales was holding in an attitude of sullen defiance; all in a silver frame, too, and wrapped up in muslin.) I handed it over, the chamberlain passed it through, listened attentively, and then asked me who the fat child in the picture was. I told him, he relayed the glad news, and then announced that her highness was pleased to accept her sister-ruler’s gift – the effect was spoiled a trifle by a clatter from behind the screen which suggested the picture had fallen on the floor (or been thrown), but I just stroked my whiskers while the courtiers tittered behind me. It’s hell in the diplomatic, you know.

There was a further exchange of civilities, through the chamberlain, and then I asked for a private audience with the Rani; he replied that she never gave them. I explained that what I had to say was of mutual but private interest to Jhansi and the British government; he looked behind the screen for instructions, and then said hopefully:

‘Does that mean you have proposals for the restoration of her highness’s throne, the recognition of her adopted son, and the restitution of her property – all of which have been stolen from her by the Sirkar?’

Well, it didn’t, of course. ‘What I have to say is for her highness alone,’ says I, solemnly, and he stuck his head round the screen and conferred, before popping back.

‘There are such proposals?’ says he, and I said I could not talk in open durbar, at which there were sounds of rapid female muttering from behind the screen. The chamberlain asked what I could have to say that could not be said by Captain Skene, and I said politely that I could tell that to the Rani, and no other. He conferred again, and I tried to picture the other side of the screen, with the Rani, sharp-faced and thin in her silk shawl, muttering her instructions to him, and puzzled to myself what the odd persistent noise was that I could hear above the soft pipes of the hidden orchestra – a gentle, rhythmic swishing from beyond the screen, as though a huge fan were being used. And yet the room was cool and airy enough not to need one.

The chamberlain popped out again, looking stern, and said that her highness could see no reason for prolonging the interview; if I had nothing new from the Sirkar to impart to her, I was permitted to withdraw. So I got to my feet, clicked my heels, saluted the screen, picked up the second package which I had brought, thanked him and his mistress for their courtesy, and did a smart about-turn. But I hadn’t gone a yard before he stopped me.

‘The packet you carry,’ says he. ‘What is that?’

I’d been counting on this; I told him it was my own.

‘But it is wrapped as the gift to her highness was wrapped,’ says he. ‘Surely it also is a present.’

‘Yes,’ says I, slowly. ‘It was.’ He stared, was summoned behind the screen, and came out looking anxious.

‘Then you may leave it behind,’ says he.

I hesitated, weighing the packet in my hand, and shook my head. ‘No, sir,’ says I. ‘It was my own personal present, to her highness – but in my country we deliver such gifts face to face, as honouring both giver and receiver. By your leave,’ and I bowed again to the screen and walked away.

‘Wait, wait!’ cries he, so I did; the rhythmic sound from behind the screen had stopped now, and the female voice was talking quietly again. The chamberlain came out, red-faced, and to my astonishment he bustled everyone else from the room, shooing the silken ladies and gentlemen like geese. Then he turned to me, bowed, indicated the screen, and effaced himself through one of the archways, leaving me alone with my present in my hand. I listened a moment; the swishing sound had started again.

I paused to give my whiskers a twirl, stepped up to the end of the screen, and rapped on it with my knuckles. No reply. So I said: ‘Your highness?’, but there was nothing except that damned swishing. Well, here goes, I thought; this is what you came to India for, and you must be civil and adoring, for old Pam’s sake. I stepped round the screen, and halted as though I’d walked into a wall.

It wasn’t the gorgeously carved golden throne, or the splendour of the furniture which outshone even what I’d left, or the unexpected sensation of walking on the shimmering Chinese quilt on the floor. Nor was it the bewildering effect of the mirrored ceiling and walls, with their brilliantly coloured panels. The astonishing thing was that from the ceiling there hung, by silk ropes, a great cushioned swing, and sitting in it, wafting gently to and fro, was a girl – the only soul in the room. And such a girl – my first impression was of great, dark, almond eyes in a skin the colour of milky coffee, with a long straight nose above a firm red mouth and chin, and hair as black as night that hung in a jewelled tail down her back. She was dressed in a white silk bodice and sari which showed off the dusky satin of her bare arms and midriff, and on her head was a little white jewelled cap from which a single pearl swung on her forehead above the caste-mark.

I stood and gaped while she swung to and fro at least three times, and then she put a foot on the carpet and let the swing drag to a halt. She considered me, one smooth dusky arm up on the swing rope – and then I recognised her: she was the ladies’ maid who had been standing by the palankeen at the palace gate. The Rani’s maid? – then the lady of the palankeen must be …

‘Your mistress?’ says I. ‘Where is she?’

‘Mistress? I have no mistress,’ says she, tilting up her chin and looking down her nose at me. ‘I am Lakshmibai, Maharani of Jhansi.’

For a moment I didn’t believe it: I had become so used to picturing her over the past three months as a dried-up old shrew with skinny limbs that I just stood and gaped.⁸ And yet, as I looked at her, there couldn’t be any doubt: the richness of her clothes shouted royalty at you, and the carriage of her head, with its imperious dark eyes, told you as nothing else could that here was a woman who’d never asked permission in her life. There was strength in every line of her, too, for all her femininity – by George, I couldn’t remember when I’d seen bouncers like those, thrusting like pumpkins against the muslin of her blouse, which was open to the jewelled clasp at her breast bone – if it hadn’t been for a couple of discreetly embroidered flowers on either side, there would have been nothing at all concealed. I could only stand speechless before such queenly beauty, wondering what it would be like to tear the muslin aside, thrust your whiskers in between ’em, and go brrrrr!

‘You have a gift to present,’ says she, speaking in a quick, soft voice which had me recollecting myself and clicking my heels as I presented my packet. She took it, weighed it in her hand, still half-reclining in her swing, and asked sharply: ‘Why do you stare at me so?’

‘Forgive me, highness,’ says I. ‘I did not expect to find a queen who looked so …’ I’d been about to say ‘young and lovely’, but changed it hurriedly for a less personal compliment. ‘So like a queen.’

‘Like that queen?’ says she, and indicated the picture of Vicky and Albert, which was lying on a cushion.

‘Each of your majesties,’ says I, with mountainous diplomacy, ‘looks like a queen in her own way.’

She considered me gravely, and then held the packet out to me. ‘You may open it.’

I pulled off the wrapping, opened the little box, and took out the gift. You may smile, but it was a bottle of perfume – you see, Flashy ain’t as green as he looks; it may be coals to Newcastle to take perfume to India, but in my experience, which isn’t inconsiderable, there’s not a woman breathing who isn’t touched by a gift of scent, and it don’t matter what age she is, either. And it was just the gift a blunt, honest soldier would choose, in his simplicity – furthermore, it was from Paris, and had cost the dirty old goat who presented it to Elspeth a cool five sovs. (She’d never miss it.) I handed it over with a little bow, and she touched the stopper daintily on her wrist.

‘French,’ says she. ‘And very costly. Are you a rich man, colonel?’

That took me aback; I muttered something about not calling on a queen every day of my life.

‘And why have you called?’ says she, very cool. ‘What is there that you have to say that can be said only face to face?’ I hesitated, and she suddenly stood up in one lithe movement – by Jove, they jumped like blancmanges in a gale. ‘Come and tell me,’ she went on, and swept off out on to the terrace at that end of the room, with a graceful swaying stride that stirred the seat of her sari in a most disturbing way. She jingled as she walked – like all rich Indian females, she seemed to affect as much jewellery as she could carry, with bangles at wrist and ankle, a diamond collar beneath her chin, and even a tiny pearl cluster at one nostril. I followed, admiring the lines of the tall, full figure, and wondering for the umpteenth time what I should say to her, now that the moment had come.

Pam and Mangles, you see, had given me no proper directions at all: I was supposed to wheedle her into being a loyal little British subject, but I’d no power to make concessions to any of her grievances. And it wasn’t going to be easy; an unexpected stunner she might be, and therefore all the easier for me to talk to, but there was a directness about her that was daunting. This was a queen, and intelligent and experienced (she even knew French perfume when she smelled it); she wasn’t going to be impressed by polite political chat. So what must I say? The devil with it, thinks I, there’s nothing to lose by being as blunt as she is herself.

So when she’d settled herself on a daybed, and I’d forced myself to ignore that silky midriff and the shapely brown ankle peeping out of her sari, I set my helmet on the ground and stood up four-square.

‘Your highness,’ says I, ‘I can’t talk like Mr Erskine, or Captain Skene even. I’m a soldier, not a diplomat, so I won’t mince words.’ And thereafter I minced them for all I was worth, telling her of the distress there was in London about the coolness that existed between Jhansi on the one hand and the Company and Sirkar on the other; how this state of affairs had endured for four years to the disadvantage of all parties; how it was disturbing the Queen, who felt a sisterly concern for the ruler of Jhansi not only as a monarch, but as a woman, and so on – I rehearsed Jhansi’s grievances, the willingness of the Sirkar to repair them so far as was possible, threw in the information that I came direct from Lord Palmerston, and finished on a fine flourish with an appeal to her to open her heart to Flashy, plenipotentiary extraordinary, so that we could all be friends and live happy ever after. It was the greatest gammon, but I gave it my best, with noble compassion in my eye and a touch of ardour in the curl shaken down over my brow. She heard me out, not a muscle moving in that lovely face, and then asked:

‘You have the power to make redress, then? To alter what has been done?’

I said I had the power to report direct to Pam, and she said that so, in effect, had Skene. Her agents in London had spoken direct to the Board of Control, without avail.

‘Well,’ says I, ‘this is a little different, highness, don’t you see? His lordship felt that if I heard from you at first-hand, so to speak, and we talked—’

‘There is nothing to talk about,’ says she. ‘What can I say that has not been said – that the Sirkar does not know? What can you—’

‘I can ask, maharaj’, what actions by the Sirkar, short of removing from Jhansi and recognising your adopted son, would satisfy your grievances – or go some way to satisfying them.’

She came up on one elbow at that, frowning at me with those magnificent eyes. For what I was hinting at – without the least authority, mind you – was concessions, and devil a smell of those she’d had in four years.

‘Why,’ says she, thoughtfully. ‘They know well enough. They have been told my grievances, my just demands, for four years now. And yet they have denied me. How can repetition serve?’

‘A disappointed client may find a new advocate,’ says I, with my most disarming smile, and she gave me a long stare, and then got up and walked over to the balustrade, looking out across the city. ‘If your highness would speak your mind to me, openly—’

‘Wait,’ says she, and stood for a moment, frowning, before she turned back to me. She couldn’t think what to make of this, she was suspicious, and didn’t dare to hope, and yet she was wondering. God, she was a black beauty, sure enough – if I’d been the Sirkar, she could have had Jhansi and a pound of tea with it, just for half an hour on the daybed.

‘If Lord Palmerston,’ says she at last – and old Pam himself would have been tempted to restore her throne just to hear the pretty way she said ‘Lud Pammer-stan’ – ‘wishes me to restate the wrongs that have been done me, it can only be because he has discovered some interest to serve by redressing them – or promising redress. I do not know what that interest is, and you will not tell me. It is no charitable desire to set right injustices done to my Jhansi—’ and she lifted her head proudly. ‘That is certain. But if he wishes my friendship, for whatever purpose of his own, he may give an earnest of his good will by restoring the revenues which should have come to me since my husband’s death, but which the Sirkar has confiscated.’ She stopped there, chin up, challenging, so I said:

‘And after that, highness? What else?’

‘Will he concede as much? Will the Company?’

‘I can’t say,’ says I. ‘But if a strong case can be made – when I report to Lord Palmerston …’

‘And you will put the case, yourself?’

‘That is my mission, maharaj’.’

‘And such other … cases … as I may advance?’ She looked the question, and there was just a hint of a smile on her mouth. ‘So. And I must first put them to you – and no doubt you will suggest to me how they may best be phrased … or modified. You will advise, and … persuade?’

‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ll help your highness as I can …’

To my astonishment she laughed, with a flash of white teeth, her head back, and shaking most delightfully.

‘Oh, the subtlety of the British!’ cries she. ‘Such delicacy, like an elephant in a swamp! Lord Palmerston wishes, for his own mysterious reasons of policy, to placate the Rani of Jhansi. So he invites her to repeat the petition which has been repeatedly denied for years. But does he send a lawyer, or an advocate, or even an official of the Company? No – just a simple soldier, who will discuss the petition with her, and how it may best be presented to his lordship. Could not a lawyer have advised her better?’ She folded her hands and came slowly forward, sauntering round me. ‘But how many lawyers are tall and broad-shouldered and … aye, quite handsome – and persuasive as Flashman bahadur?fn1 Not a doubt but he is best fitted to convince a silly female that a modest claim is most likely to succeed – and she will abate her demands for him, poor foolish girl, and be less inclined to insist on fine points, and stand upon her rights. Is this not so?’

‘Highness, you misunderstand entirely … I assure you—’

‘Do I?’ says she, scornfully, but laughing still. ‘I am not sixteen, colonel; I am an old lady of twenty-nine. And I may not know Lord Palmerston’s purpose, but I understand his methods. Well, well. It may not have occurred to his lordship that even a poor Indian lady may be persuasive in her turn.’ And she eyed me with some amusement, confident in her own beauty, the damned minx, and the effect it was having on me. ‘He paid me a poor compliment, do you not think?’

What could I do but grin back at her? ‘Do his lordship justice, highness,’ says I. ‘He’d never seen you. How many have, since you are purdah-nishin?’fn2

‘Enough to have told him what I am like, I should have hoped. How did he instruct you – humour her, whatever she is, fair or foul, young and silly or old and ugly? Charm her, so that she keeps her demands cheap? Captivate her, as only a hero can.’ She stirred an eyebrow. ‘Who could resist the champion who killed the four Gilzais – where was it?’

‘At Mogala, in Afghanistan – as your highness heard at the gate. Was it to test me that you had the Pathan spit on my shadow?’

‘His insolence needed no instruction,’ says she. ‘He is now being flogged for it.’ She turned away from me and sauntered back into the durbar room. ‘You may have the tongue which insulted you torn out, if you wish,’ she added over her shoulder.

That brought me up sharp, I can tell you. We’d been rallying away famously, and I’d all but forgotten who and what she was – an Indian prince, with all the capricious cruelty of her kind under that lovely hide. Unless she was just mocking me with the reminder – whether or no, I would play my character.

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