Flashman and the Redskins. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ … ‘Make my bells ring again …’ oh, yes indeed, ma’am … and the nightmare – the screams and shots and war-whoops as Gall’s Hunkpapa horde came surging through the dust, and George Custer squatting on his heels, his cropped head in his hands as he coughed out his life, and the red-and-yellow devil’s face screaming at me from beneath the buffalo-scalp helmet as the hatchet drove down at my brow …

      ‘Well, boys, they killed me,’ as Wild Bill used to say – only it wasn’t permanent, and today I sit at home in Berkeley Square staring out at the trees beyond the railings in the rain, damning the cramp in my penhand and remembering where it all began, on a street in New Orleans in 1849, with your humble obedient trotting anxiously at the heels of John Charity Spring, MA, Oriel man, slaver, and homicidal lunatic, who was stamping his way down to the quay in a fury, jacket buttoned tight and hat jammed down, alternately blaspheming and quoting Horace …

      ‘I should have dropped you overboard off Finisterre!’ snarls he. ‘It would have been the price of you, by God! Aye, well, I missed my chance – quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.’^fn3 He wheeled on me suddenly, and those dreadful pale eyes would have frozen brandy. ‘But Homer won’t nod again, Mister Flashman, and you can lay to that. One false step out of you this trip, and you’ll wish the Amazons had got you!’

      ‘Captain,’ says I earnestly, ‘I’m as anxious to get out of this as you are – and you’ve said it yourself, how can I play you false?’

      ‘If I knew that I’d be as dirty a little Judas as you are.’ He considered me balefully. ‘The more I think of it, the more I like the notion of having those papers of Comber’s before we go a step farther.’

      Now, those papers – which implicated both Spring himself and my miserly Scotch father-in-law up to their necks in the illegal slave trade – were the only card in my hand. Once Spring had them, he could drop me overboard indeed. Terrified as I was, I shook my head, and he showed his teeth in a sneering grin.

      ‘What are you scared of, you worm? I’ve said I’ll carry you home, and I keep my word. By God,’ he growled, and the scar on his brow started to swell crimson, a sure sign that he was preparing to howl at the moon, ‘will you dare say I don’t, you quaking offal? Will you? No, you’d better not! Why, you fool – I’ll have ’em within five minutes of your setting foot on my deck, in any event. Because you’re carrying them, aren’t you? You wouldn’t dare leave ’em out of your sight. I know you.’ He grinned again, nastily. ‘Omnia mea mecum porto^fn4 is your style. Where are they – in your coat-lining or under your boot-sole?’

      It was no consolation that they were in neither, but sewn in the waistband of my pants. He had me, and if I didn’t want to be abandoned there and then to the mercy of the Yankee law – which was after me for murder, slave-stealing, impersonating a Naval officer, false pretences, theft of a wagon and horses, perjury, and issuing false bills of sale (Christ, just about everything except bigamy) – I had no choice but to fork out and hope to heaven he’d keep faith with me. He saw it in my face and sneered.

      ‘As I thought. You’re as easy to read as an open book – and a vile publication, too. We’ll have them now, if you please.’ He jerked his thumb at a tavern across the street. ‘Come on!’

      ‘Captain – for God’s sake let it wait till we’re aboard! The Yankee Navy traps’ll be scouring the town for me by now … please, Captain, I swear you’ll have ’em—’

      ‘Do as you’re damned well told!’ he rasped, and seizing my arm in an iron hand he almost ran me into the pub, and thrust me into a corner seat farthest from the bar; it was middling dim, with only one or two swells lounging at the tables, and a few of the merchant and trader sort talking at the bar, but just the kind of respectable ken that my legal and Navy acquaintances might frequent. I pointed this out, whining.

      ‘Five minutes more or less won’t hurt you,’ says Spring, ‘and they’ll satisfy me whether or not you’re breaking the habit of a lifetime by telling the truth for once.’ So while he bawled for juleps and kicked the black waiter for being dilatory – I wished to God he wouldn’t attract attention with his high table manners – I kept my back to the room and began surreptitiously picking stitches out of my flies with a penknife.

      He drummed impatiently, growling, while I got the packet out – that precious sheaf of flimsy, closely written papers that Comber had died for – and he pawed through it, grinding his teeth as he read. ‘That ingrate sanctimonious reptile! He should have lingered for a year! I was like a father to the bastard, and see how he repaid my benevolence, by God – skulking and spying like a rat at a scuttle! But you’re all alike, you shabby-genteel vermin! Aye, Master Comber, Phaedrus limned your epitaph: saepe intereunt aliis meditantes necem,^fn5 and serve the bastard right!’ He stuffed the papers into his pocket, drank, and brooded at me with that crazy glint in his eyes that I remembered so well from the Balliol College. ‘And you – you held on to them – why? To steer me into Execution Dock, you—’

      ‘Never!’ I protested. ‘Why, if I’d wanted to I could have done it back in the court – but I didn’t, did I?’

      ‘And put your own foul neck in a noose? Not you.’ He gave his barking laugh. ‘No … I’ll make a shrewd guess that you were keeping ’em to squeeze an income out of that Scotch miser Morrison – that was it, wasn’t it?’ Mad he might be, but his wits were sharp enough. ‘Filial piety, you leper! Well, if that was your game, you’re out of luck. He’s dead – and certainly damned. I had word from our New York agent three weeks ago. That takes you flat aback, doesn’t it, my bucko?’

      And it did, but only for a moment. For if I couldn’t turn the screw on a corpse – well, I didn’t need to, did I? The little villain’s fortune would descend to his daughters, of whom my lovely simpleton wife Elspeth was the favourite – by George, I was rich! He’d been worth a cool two million, they reckoned, and at least a quarter would come to her, and me … unless the wily old skinflint had cooked up some legal flummery to keep my paws off it, as he’d done these ten years past. But he couldn’t – Elspeth must inherit, and I could twist her round my little finger … couldn’t I? She’d always doted on me, although I had a suspicion that she sampled the marriage mutton elsewhere when my back was turned – I couldn’t be sure, though, and anyway, an occasional unwifely romp was no great matter, while she’d been dependent on Papa. But now, when she was rolling in blunt, she might be off whoring with all hands and the cook, and too much of that might well damp her ardour for an absent husband. Who could say how she would greet the returning Odysseus, now that she was filthy rich and spoiled for choice? That apart, if I knew my fair feather-brain, she’d be spending the dibs – my dibs – like a drunk duke on his birthday. The sooner I was home the better – but Morrison kicking the bucket was capital news, just the same.

      Spring was watching me as he watched the weather, shrewd and sour, and knowing what a stickler he could be for proper form, murderous pirate though he was, I tried to put on a solemn front, and muttered about this unexpected blow, shocking calamity, irreplaceable loss, and all the rest of it.

      ‘I can see that,’ he scoffed. ‘Stricken with grief, I daresay. I know the signs – a face like a Tyneside winter and a damned inheriting gleam in your eye. Bah, why don’t you blubber, you hypocritical pup? Nulli jactantius moerent, quam qui loetantur,^fn6 or to give Tacitus a free translation, you’re reckoning up the bloody dollars already! Well, you haven’t got ’em yet, cully, and if you want to see London Bridge again—’ and he bared his teeth at me ‘—you’ll tread mighty delicate, like Agag, and keep on the weather side of John Charity Spring.’

      ‘What d’you mean? I’ve given you the papers – you’re bound to see СКАЧАТЬ