The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

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       Chapter 1

      “Now, my dear Sir Harry, I must tell you,” says her majesty, with that stubborn little duck of her head that always made Palmerston think she was going to butt him in the guts, “I am quite determined to learn Hindoostanee.”

      This at the age of sixty-seven, mark you. I almost asked her what the devil for, at her time of life, but fortunately my idiot wife got in first, clapping her hands and exclaiming that it was a most splendid idea, since nothing so Improved the Mind and Broadened the Outlook as acquaintance with a Foreign Tongue, is that not so, my love? (Elspeth, I may tell you, speaks only English – well, Scotch, if you like – and enough nursery French to get her through Customs and bullyrag waiters, but anything the Queen said, however wild, always sent her into transports of approval.) I seconded loyally, of course, saying it was a capital notion, ma’am, bound to come in handy, but I must have looked doubtful, for our sovereign lady refilled my teacup pretty offhand, leaving out the brandy, and said severely that Dr Johnson had learned Dutch at the age of seventy.

      “And I have an excellent ear,” says she. “Why, I still recollect precisely those Indian words you spoke, at my dearest one’s request, so many long years ago.” She sighed, and sipped, and then to my dismay trotted them out. “Hamare ghali ana, achha din. Lord Wellington said it was a Hindoo greeting, I recall.”

      Well, it’s what the Bengali whores used to cry to attract customers, so she wasn’t far wrong. They’d been the only words I could think of, God help me, on that memorable day in ’42 when the Old Duke had taken me to the Palace after my Afghan heroics; I’d stood trembling and half-witted before royalty, and when Albert asked me to say something in Hindi, out they popped. Luckily, Wellington had had the wit not to translate. The Queen had been a pretty slip of a girl then, smiling timidly up as she pinned on the medal I didn’t deserve; now she was a stout little old body, faded and grey, fussing over the teacups at Windsor and punishing the meringues. Her smile was still there, though; aye, cavalry whiskers, even white ones, still fetched little Vicky.

      “It is such a cheerful language,” says she. “I am sure it must have many jokes, does it not, Sir Harry?”

      I could think of a few, but thought it best to give her the old harmless one that begins: “Doh admi joh nashe men the, rail ghari men safar kar raha ta –”

      “But what does it mean, Sir Harry?”

      “Well, ma’am, it means that two fellows were travelling by train, you see, and they were, I regret to say, intoxicated –”

      “Why, Harry!” cries Elspeth, acting shocked, but the Queen just took another tot of whisky in her tea and bade me continue. So I told her that one chap said, where are we, and t’other chap replied, Wednesday, and the first chap said, Heavens, this is where I get out. Needless to say, it convulsed them – and while they recovered and passed the gingerbread, I asked myself for the twentieth time why we were here, just Elspeth and me and the Great White Mother, taking tea together.

      You see, while I was used enough, in those later years, to being bidden to Balmoral each autumn to squire her about on drives, and fetch her shawl, and endure her prattle and those damned pipers of an evening, a summons to Windsor in the spring was something new, and when it included “dear Lady Flashman, our fair Rowena” – the Queen and she both pretended a passion for Scott – I couldn’t think what was up. Elspeth, when she’d recovered from her ecstasy at being “commanded to court”, as she put it, was sure I was to be offered a peerage in the Jubilee Honours (there’s no limit to the woman’s mad optimism); I damped her by observing that the Queen didn’t keep coronets in the closet to hand out to visitors; it was done official, and anyway even Salisbury wasn’t so far gone as to ennoble me; I wasn’t worth bribing. Elspeth said I was a horrid cynic, and if the Queen herself required our attendance it must be something grand, and whatever was she going to wear?

      Well, the grandeur turned out to be Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show¹ – I concluded that I’d been dragged in because I’d been out yonder myself, and was considered an authority on all that was wild and woolly – and we sat in vile discomfort at Earl’s Court among a great gang of Court toadies, while Cody pranced on a white horse, waving his hat and sporting a suit of patent buckskins that would have laid ’em helpless with laughter along the Yellowstone. There was enough paint and feathers to outfit the whole Sioux Nation, the braves whooped and ki-yik-ked and brandished their hatchets, the roughriders curvetted, a stagecoach of terrified virgins was ambushed, the great man arrived in the nick of time blazing away until you couldn’t see for smoke, and the Queen said it was most curious and interesting, and what did the strange designs of the war paint signify, my dear Sir Harry?

      God knows what I told her; the fact is, while everyone else was cheering the spectacle, I was reflecting that only eleven years earlier I’d been running like hell from the real thing at Little Bighorn, and losing my top hair into the bargain – a point which I mentioned to Cody later, after he’d been presented. He cried, yes, by thunder, that was one war-party he’d missed, and didn’t he envy me the trip, though? Lying old humbug. That’s by the way; I realised, when the Queen bore Elspeth and me back to Windsor, and bade us to tea à trois next day, that our presence at the show had been incidental, and the real reason for our invitation was something else altogether. A trifling matter, as it turned out, but it inspired this memoir, so there you are.

      She wanted our opinion, she said, on a matter of the first importance – and if you think it odd that she should confide in the likes of us, the retired imperial roughneck of heroic record but dubious repute, and the Glasgow merchant’s daughter … well, you don’t know our late lamented Queen Empress. Oh, she was a stickler and a tartar, no error, the highest, mightiest monarch that ever was, and didn’t she know it, just – but if you were a friend, well, that was a different palaver. Elspeth and I were well out of Court, and barely half-way into Society, even, but we’d known her since long ago, you see – well, she’d always fancied me (what woman didn’t?), and Elspeth, aside from being such an artless, happy beauty that even her own sex couldn’t help liking her, had the priceless gift of being able to make the Queen laugh. They’d taken to each other as young women, and now, on the rare occasions they met tête-à-tête, they blethered like the grandmothers they were – why, on that very day (when I was safely out of earshot) she told Elspeth that there were some who wanted her to mark her Golden Jubilee by abdicating in favour of her ghastly son, Bertie the Bounder, “but I shall do no such thing, my dear! I intend to outlive him, if I can, for the man is not fit to reign, as none knows better than your own dear husband, who had the thankless task of instructing him.” True, I’d pimped for him occasional, but ’twas wasted effort; he’d have been just as great a cad and whoremaster without my tuition.

      However, it was about the Jubilee she wanted our advice, “and yours especially, Sir Harry, for you alone have the necessary knowledge”. I couldn’t figure that; for one thing, she’d been getting advice and to spare for months on how best to celebrate her fiftieth year on the throne. The whole Empire was in a Jubilee frenzy, with loyal addresses and fêtes and junketings and school holidays and water-trough inaugurations and every sort of extravagance on the rates; the shops were packed with Jubilee mugs and plates and trumpery blazoned with Union Jacks and pictures of her majesty looking damned glum; there were Jubilee songs on the halls, and Jubilee marches for parades, and even Jubilee musical bustles that played “God Save the Queen” when the wearer sat down – I tried to get Elspeth to buy one, but she said it was disrespectful, and besides people might think it was her.

      The Queen, of course, had her nose into everything, to make sure the celebrations were dignified and useful СКАЧАТЬ