If you think I’m stretching, the U.S. Navy didn’t; Comber’s papers saw me through, but it was touch and go, so I’d slipped my cable and looked for a way home. I thought I’d found one when the Underground Railroad, a clandestine troupe of lunatics who ran escaped slaves to Canada, got their hands on me – they had ears everywhere, even in the U.S. Navy Department – and offered to help me North if I’d take an important runaway nigger with me to freedom.
That enterprise had ended with me going over one rail of a Mississippi steamboat while the darkie, with a slave-catcher’s bullet in him, had gone over t’other. Subsequently I’d been overseer on a plantation, lost my situation for rogering the lady of the house, escaped North with a female octoroon slave who’d killed two men en route, been shot in the backside by pursuers while crossing the Ohio River, found refuge with Congressman Abraham Lincoln who’d dragooned me into testifying at the adjudication on Spring’s slave-ship in New Orleans, been unwillingly reunited with my dear old commander who had then murdered one Omohundro in a pub, fled with him to seek shelter with a whore of my acquaintance who’d obligingly had old J.C. shanghaied … and had at last won back to England, home, and beauty via the Great Plains, an Apache village, and San Francisco, slightly out of breath. Honestly, I’d have been better going into the Church, or banking, or politics, even.
In any event, that’s how the sparks flew upward on my first visit to America – and you can see Spring’s point. In my brief sojourn I’d been an impostor and perjurer (as Comber), stolen slaves (under the names of Prescott, Arnold, and, I rather think, Fitzroy Howard or something like that), and was wanted for murders I hadn’t committed in Mississippi, or it may have been Tennessee for all I know, as well as for aiding and abetting (which I hadn’t done, either) Spring’s stabbing of Omohundro. An impressive tally, I concede, and none the better for being all entirely against my will.
However, I doubted if the U.S. Navy was much concerned with the fugitive Comber at this late date, and I’d no intention of going near the Mississippi. I wasn’t wanted in Maryland, where Baltimore is; let me present myself to a British consul there, or in Washington, which was only forty miles away, and I was on easy street. The great thing, you see, was that I wasn’t Comber (or Prescott or those other chaps), but I was Sir Harry Flashman, not unknown by name and fame, and once I was under our embassy’s13 wing, warrants from far-flung states for the arrest of non-existent Combers, etc. would matter not at all. Not in Washington or the North, at least; if I were fool enough to venture South, where there might be witnesses to identify me, that would be a different and damned unpleasant kettle of fish; as Spring had pointed out, my rank and heroic stature at home wouldn’t weigh much with a Louisiana jury.
So you can see why I wasn’t over-troubled about what lay ahead; indeed, my preoccupation was how to pay Spring out when I was safe home in England. The evil-eyed bastard had terrified, drugged, and kidnapped me, subjected me to the gruelling misery of packet-ratting, and done his damnedest to deliver me to an American gallows; well, he was going to rue the day. Straight prosecution was out of the question: it would take too long, likely uncover past history which I’d rather keep dark, and almost certainly fail in the end – the whole business was too wild, and the thought of returning to testify at the Cape, with Spring frothing at me across the court … no, I’d prefer not. Especially since the most artistic revenge had already occurred to me: a detailed account, to the address of J. C. Spring, M.A., of the contortions which his saintly Miranda and I had performed aboard dear Papa’s yacht – that would bring a blush to his cheek. It would destroy him, wound him to the depths of his rotten soul, probably drive him crazy altogether. He might even murder her, and swing for it – well, the bitch deserved it. No … she’d swear blind that I was lying out of spite, and he’d believe her, or pretend to … but in his heart he’d always know it was the truth. Aye, that would teach him that Flashy’s a critter best left alone because, as Thomas Hughes pointed out, he can find ways of striking home that you ain’t even thought of.
Now I’ll not weary you with any further relation of Life at Sea when Uncle Harry was a Lad, but hasten on to Chesapeake Bay, which I reckon we reached in about eight weeks, but it may have been more.14 I made two further attempts to suborn Captain Lynch, promising him Golconda if he would put me down at New York or Boston, but I might as well have talked to the mast; I believe my speech and bearing, and my conduct aboard, had sown some doubt in his mind, for he didn’t hit me on either occasion, but perhaps because he was a man of his word, as some of these half-wit shellbacks are, or more likely because Spring had a hold on him, he wasn’t to be budged. ‘You’re goin’ to Baltimore even if the Chesapeake’s afire, so ye can save your wind!’ says he, and that was that.
We lay two days in the bay, and I didn’t doubt that Spring’s letters had gone ashore with the pilot. Now that the grip had come, all my assurance had melted like snow off a dyke, and I was in a fine funk again, dreaming hideous nightmares in which I was swimming slowly towards a misty jetty on which stood Yankee peelers brandishing warrants made out for ‘the handsomest man in the Army’ and jangling their handcuffs, and all my American ill-willers were there, singing jubilee – Omohundro, and the squirt Mandeville who’d caught me galloping his wife, and Buck the slave-catcher and his gang, and the poker-faced Navy man whose name I’d forgotten, and blasted George Randolph, the runaway nigger I’d abandoned, and vague figures I couldn’t make out, but I knew they were the Cumanches of Bent’s Fort and Iron Eyes who’d chased me clear across the Jornada, and then somehow I was in the adjudication court at Orleans, but instead of the wizened little adjudicator it was Spring on the bench, in gown and mortar board waving a birch and shouting: ‘Aye, there he is, the great toad who ravishes daughters and can’t construe Horace to save his soul, Flashmanum monstrum informe ingens et horrendum,fn2 mark him well, ladies and harlots, for Juvenal never spoke a truer word, omne in præcipitio vitium stetit,fn3 by thunder!’ and when I looked at the jury, they were all the American women I’d betrayed or discarded – fat Susie weeping, Sonsee-Array sulking, the French nigger Cleonie whom I’d sold to the priest at Santa Fe, willowy Cassy looking down her fine nose, coal-black Aphrodite and the slave-women at Greystones, but their faces were all turned to the bench, and now it wasn’t Spring who sat there, but Arnold in a pilot cap glowering at me, and then Miranda was tripping up beside him, swirling her hair about her like a cloak, giggling as she stooped to whisper in his ear, but it wasn’t his ear, it was Congressman Lincoln’s, and I saw his ugly face scowl as he listened, nodding, and heard his drawl as he said that reminded him of a story he’d heard once from an English naval officer who didn’t know what club-hauling meant …
I came back to waking very slowly, with sense stealing over me like a sunrise, almost imperceptibly, growing gradually conscious of a throbbing ache in my temples and a dryness in my mouth and throat that was truly painful. There was someone beside me, for I could feel the warmth of a body, and I thought ‘Elspeth’ until I remembered that I was in a ship at sea, bound for Baltimore and that awful nightmare which thank God was only a dream after all, conjured up out of my fears. But there was no motion about the place on which I lay, no gentle rocking as there should have been as we lay at anchor in the Chesapeake; I opened eyelids that seemed to have been glued together, expecting to see the knot-hole in the floor of the bunk above me, as I’d seen it with every awakening for the past many weeks. It wasn’t there, and no bunk either; instead there was a dingy white ceiling, and when I turned my head there was a bare wall with a grimy window.
I was ashore, then … but how, and for how long? I tried to conjure up my last memory of shipboard, but couldn’t with the ache in my head, and to this day I don’t know how I left the ship, drunk, drugged, or sandbagged. At the time, it didn’t signify anyway, and even as I reached that conclusion a woman’s voice said:
‘Hollo, dearie! Awake, are ye? Say, didn’t you have a skinful, though!’
An American cackle, piercing my ear, and I shuddered away by instinct, which was sound judgment, for if I felt dreadful, she looked worse, a raddled slattern grinning her stinking breath into my face, reaching out a fat hand across my chest. I almost catted on the spot, one thought uppermost.
‘Did I …? Have we …?’ It came out in a faint croak, and she leered and heaved herself half across me. The paint on her face