Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ Brown, eh? Well, it’s a long story, you know – and Great-grandmama will be calling us for tea presently … no, Alice, he didn’t have wings, although Miss Prentice is quite right, they did call him the Angel of the Lord … and the Avenging Angel, too …’

      ‘What’s ’venging?’

      ‘Getting your own back … no, John, he was quite an ordinary chap, really, rather thin and bony and shabby, with a straggly beard and very bright grey eyes that lit up when he was angry, ever so fierce and grim! But he was quite a kindly old gentleman, too –’

      ‘Was he as old as you?’

      ‘Heavens, child, no one’s that old! He was oldish, but pretty spry and full of beans … let’s see, what else? He was a capital cook, why, he could make ham and eggs, and brown fried potatoes to make your mouth water –’

      ‘Did he make kedgewee? I hate howwid old kedgewee, ugh!’

      ‘What about the slaves, and him killing lots of people, and getting hung?’ John shook my knee in his impatience.

      ‘Well, John, I suppose he did kill quite a few people … How, Gus? Why, with his pistols – he had two, just like the cowboys, and he could pull them in a twinkling, ever so quickly.’ And dam’ near blew your Great-grandpapa’s head off, one second asleep and the next blasting lead all over the shop, curse him. ‘And with his sword … although that was before I knew him. Mind you, he had another sword, in our last fight – and you’ll never guess who it had once belonged to. Frederick the Great! What d’you think of that?’

      ‘Who’s Frederick the Great?’

      ‘German king, John. Bit of a tick, I believe; used scent and played the flute.’

      ‘I think Jombrown was howwid!’ announced Jemima. ‘Killing people is wrong!’

      ‘Not always, dearest. Sometimes you have to, or they’ll kill you.’

      ‘Great-gran’papa used to kill people, lots of times,’ protests sturdy Augustus. ‘Great-gran’mama told me, when he was a soldier, weren’t you? Choppin’ ’em up, heaps of –’

      ‘That’s quite diffewent,’ says Jemima, with an approving smile which may well lead me to revise my will in her favour. ‘It’s pwoper for soldiers to kill people.’ And pat on her words came an echo from half a century ago, the deep level voice of J.B. himself, recalling the slaughter of Pottawatomie … ‘They had a right to be killed.’ It was a warm afternoon, but I found myself shivering.

      ‘Great-grandpapa’s tired,’ whispers John. ‘Let’s go in for tea.’

      ‘What – tired? Not a bit of it!’ You can’t have grandlings taking pity on you, even at ninety-one. ‘But tea, what? Capital idea! Who’s for a bellyful of gingerbread, eh? Tell you what, pups – you make yourselves decent, straighten your hair, find Gus’s other shoe, put your socks on, Alice – yes, Jemima, you look positively queenly – and we’ll march up to tea, shall we? At least, you lot will, while I call the step and look after remounts. Won’t that be jolly? And we’ll sing his song as we go –’

      ‘Jombrown’s body? Gory Halooyah?’

      ‘The very same, Gus! Now, then, fall in, tallest on the right, shortest on the left – heels together, John, eyes front, Jemima, pull in your guts, Augustus, stop giggling, Alice – and I’ll teach you some capital verses you never heard before! Ready?’

      I don’t suppose there’s a soul speaks English in the world who couldn’t sing the chorus today, but of course it hadn’t been written when we went down to Harper’s Ferry – J.B.’s army of ragamuffins, adventurers, escaped slaves, rustlers and lunatics. ‘God’s crusaders’, some enthusiast called us – but then again, I’ve read that we were ‘swaggering, swearing bullies and infidels’ (well, thank’ee, sir). We were twenty-one strong, fifteen white (one with pure terror, I can tell you), six black, and all set to conquer Dixie, if you please! We didn’t make it at the time, quite – but we did in the end, by God, didn’t we just, with Sherman’s bugles blowing thirty miles in latitude three hundred to the main …

      Not that I gave a two-cent dam for that, you understand, and still don’t. They could have kept their idiotic Civil War for me, for (my own skin’s safety apart) it was the foulest, most useless conflict in history, the mass suicide of the flower of the British-American race – and for what? Black freedom, which would have come in a few years anyway, as sure as sunrise. And all those boys could have been sitting in the twilight, watching their Johns and Jemimas.

      Still, I’ve got a soft spot for the old song – and for J.B., for that matter. Aye, that song which, the historian says, was sung by every Union regiment because ‘it dealt not with John Brown’s feeble sword, but with his soul.’ His soul, my eye – as often as not the poor old maniac wasn’t even mentioned, and it would be:

      Wild Bill Sherman’s got a rope around his neck,

      An’ we’ll all catch hold an’ give-it-one-hell-of-a-pull!

      Glory, glory, hallelujah, etc …

      Or it might be ‘our sergeant-major’, or Jeff Davis hanging from a sour apple tree, or any of the unprintable choruses that inspired the pious Mrs Howe to write ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory’.³ But all that’s another story, for another day … in the meantime, I taught my small descendants some versions which were entirely to their liking, and we trooped up to the house, the infants in column of twos and the venerable patriarch hobbling painfully behind, flask at the high port, and all waking the echoes with:

      John Brown’s donkey’s got an india-rubber tail,

      An’ he rubbed it with camphorated oil!

      followed by:

      Our Great-grandpa saved the Viceroy

      In the – good – old – Khyber – Pass!

      and concluding with:

      Flashy had an army of a hundred Bashi-bazouks

      An’ the whole dam’ lot got shot!

      Glory, glory, hallelujah …

      Spirited stuff, and it was just sheer bad luck that the Bishop and other visiting Pecksniffs should already be taking tea with Elspeth and Miss Prentice when we rolled in through the french windows, the damp and dirty grandlings in full voice and myself measuring my ancient length across the threshold, flask and all. Very well, the grandlings were raucous and dishevelled, and I ain’t at my best sprawled supine on the carpet leaking brandy, but to judge from his lordship’s, disgusted aspect and Miss Prentice’s frozen pince-nez you’d have thought I’d been teaching them to smoke opium and sing ‘One-eyed Riley’.

      The upshot was that the infants were packed off in disgrace to a defaulters’ tea of dry bread and milk, Gus was sent to bed early – oh, aye, Jemima ratted on him – and when the guests had departed in an odour of sanctity, withdrawing the hems of their garments from me and making commiserating murmurs to Elspeth, she loosed her wrath on me for an Evil Influence, corrupting young innocence with my barrack-room ribaldry, letting them get their feet wet, and did I know what shoes cost nowadays, and she was Black Affronted, and how was she ever going to look the Bishop СКАЧАТЬ