Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald

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      You will wonder, if you’re familiar with my inglorious record, how I came to take part with John Brown at all. Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady – bearing Freedom’s banner aloft in the noblest cause of all, the liberation of the enslaved and downtrodden? Striking off the shackles at the risk of death and dishonour? Gad, I wish Arnold could have seen me. That’s the irony of it – if I’d bitten the dust at the Ferry, I’d have had a martyr’s crown, too, on top of all the honours and glory I’d already won in Her Majesty’s service (by turning tail and lying and posturing and pinching other chaps’ credit, but nobody knew that, not even wily old Colin Campbell who’d pinned the V.C. on my coat only a few months before). Oh, the Ferry fiasco could have been my finest hour, with the Queen in mourning, Yankee politicos declaiming three-hour tributes full of ten-dollar words and Latin misquotations (not Lincoln, though; he knew me too well), a memorial service in the Rugby chapel, the Haymarket brothels closed in respect, old comrades looking stern and noble … ‘Can’t believe he’s gone … dear old Flash … height of his fame … glorious career before him … goes off to free the niggers … not for gold or guerdon … aye, so like him … quixotic, chivalrous, helpin’ lame dogs … ah, one in ten thousand … I say, seen his widow, have you? Gad, look at ’em bounce! Rich as Croesus, too, they tell me …’

      There’d have been no talk of roasted fags or expulsion for sottish behaviour, either. Die in a good cause and they’ll forgive you anything.

      But I didn’t, thank God, and as any of you who have read my other memoirs will have guessed, I’d not have been within three thousand miles of Harper’s Ferry, or blasted Brown, but for the ghastliest series of mischances: three hellish coincidences – three, mark you! – that even Dickens wouldn’t have used for fear of being hooted at in the street. But they happened, with that damned Nemesis logic that has haunted me all my life, and landed me in more horrors than I can count. Mustn’t complain, though; I’m still here, cash in hand, the grandlings upstairs asleep, and Elspeth in her boudoir reading the Countess of Cardigan’s Recollections (in which, little does my dear one suspect, I appear under the name of ‘Baldwin’, and a wild night that was, but no mention, thank heaven, of the time I was locked in the frenzied embrace of Fanny Paget, Cardigan himself knocked on the door, I dived trouserless beneath the sofa, found a private detective already in situ, and had to lie beside the brute while Cardigan and Fanny galloped the night away two feet above our heads. Dammit, we were still there when her husband came home and blacked her eye. Serve her right; Cardigan, I ask you! Some women have no taste).

      However, that’s a far cry from the Shenandoah, but before I tell you about J.B. I must make one thing clear, for my own credit and good name’s sake, and it’s this: I care not one tuppenny hoot about slavery, and never did. I can’t say it’s none of my biznai, because it was once: in my time, I’ve raided blacks from the Dahomey Coast, shipped ’em across the Middle Passage, driven them on a plantation – and run them to freedom on the Underground Railroad and across the Ohio ice-floes with a bullet in my rump, to say nothing of abetting J.B.’s lunatic scheme of establishing a black republic – in Virginia, of all places. Set up an Orange Lodge in the Vatican, why don’t you?

      The point is that I was forced into all these things against my will – by gad, you could say I was ‘enslaved’ into them. For that matter, I’ve been a slave in earnest – at least, they put me up for sale in Madagascar, and ’twasn’t my fault nobody bid; Queen Ranavalona got me without paying a penny, and piling into that lust-maddened monster was slavery, if you like, with the prospect of being flayed alive if I failed to give satisfaction.^fn1 I’ve been a fag at Rugby, too.

      So when I say I don’t mind about slavery, I mean I’m easy about the institution, so long as it don’t affect me; whenever it did, I was agin it. Selfish, callous, and immoral, says you, and I agree; unprincipled, too – unlike the Holy Joe abolitionist who used to beat his breast about his black brother while drawing his dividend from the mill that was killing his white sister – aye, and in such squalor as no Dixie planter would have tolerated for his slaves. (Don’t mistake me; I hold no rank in the Salvation Army, and I’ve never lifted a finger for our working poor except to flip ’em a tip, and employ them as necessary. I just know there’s more than one kind of slavery.)

      Anyway, if life has taught me anything, it’s that the wealth and comfort of the fortunate few (who include our contented middle classes as well as the nobility) will always depend on the sweat and poverty of the unfortunate many, whether they’re toiling on plantations or licking labels in sweatshops at a penny a thousand. It’s the way of the world, and until Utopia comes, which it shows no sign of doing, thank God, I’ll just rub along with the few, minding my own business.

      So you understand, I hope, that they could have kept every nigger in Dixie in bondage for all I cared – or freed them. I was indifferent, spiritually, and only wish I could have been so, corporally. And before you start thundering at me from your pulpit, just remember the chap who said that if the union of the United States could only be preserved by maintaining slavery, that was all right with him. What’s his name again? Ah, yes – Abraham Lincoln.

      And now for old John Brown and the Path to Glory, not the worst of my many adventures, but just about the unlikeliest. It had no right to happen, truly, or so it strikes me when I look back. God knows I haven’t led a tranquil life, but in review there seems to have been some form and order to it – Afghanistan, Borneo, Madagascar, Punjab, Germany, Slave Coast and Mississippi, Russia and the back o’ beyond, India in the Mutiny, China, American war, Mexico … and СКАЧАТЬ