Flashmans' Lady

"Bismillah! J.B.!" he whispered. "Listen!"

Brooke nodded, and I strained my ears, staring fearfully across that limpid water at the fog blanket creeping towards us. Then I heard something - at first I thought it was my heart, but gradually it resolved itself into a faint, regular, throbbing boom, coming faintly out of the mist, growing gradually louder. It was melodious but horrible, a deep metallic drumming that raised the hairs on my neck; Paitingi whispered behind me:

"War-gong. Bide you; don't even breathe!"

Brooke gestured for silence, and we lay hidden beneath the mangrove fronds, waiting breathlessly, while that h--ish booming grew to a slow thunder, and it seemed to me that behind it I could hear a rushing, as of some great thing flying along; my mouth was dry as I stared at the fog, waiting for some horror to appear - and then suddenly it was upon us, like a train rushing from a tunnel, a huge, scarlet shape bursting out of the mist. I only had a glimpse as it swept by, but the image is stamped on my memory of that long, gleaming red hull with its towering forecastle and stern; the platform over its bulwark crowded with men - flat yellow faces with scarves round their brows, lank hair flowing down over their sleeveless tunics; the glitter of swords and spear-heads, the ghastly line of white bobbing globes hanging like a horrible fringe from stem to stern beneath the platform - skulls, hundreds of them; the great sweeps churning the water; the guttering torches on the poop; the long silken pennants on the upper works writhing in the foggy air like coloured snakes; the figure of a half-naked giant beating the oar-stroke on a huge bronze gong - and then it was gone as swiftly as it had come, the booming receding into the mist as it drove up the Batang Lupar.²⁶

The sweat was starting out on me as we waited, while two more praus like the first emerged and vanished in its wake; then Brooke looked past me at Paitingi.

"That's inconvenient," says he. "I made 'em Lanun, the first two; the third one Maluku. What d'ye think?"

"Lagoon pirates from Mindanao," says Paitingi, "but what the helI are they doin' here?" He spat into the water. "There's an end tae our expedition, J.B. - there's a thousand men on each o' those devil-craft, more than we muster all told, and—"

"—and they've gone to join Usman," says Brooke. He whistled softly to himself, scratching his head beneath the pilot-cap. "Tell you what, Paitingi - he's taking us seriously, ain't he just?"

"Aye, so let's pay him the same compliment. If we beat back tae Kuching in the mornin', we can put oursel's in a state o' defence, at least, because, by God's beard, we're goin' tae have such a swarm roond oor ears—"

"Not us," says Brooke. "Them." His teeth showed white in the gathering dark; he was quivering with excitement. "D'ye know what, old 'un? I think this is just what we wanted - now I know what we can expect! I've got it all plain now - just you watch!"

"Aye, weel, if we get home wi' all speed-—"

"Home nothing!" says Brooke. "We're going in tonight! Give way, there!"

For a moment I thought Paitingi was going to have the boat over; he exploded in a torrent of disbelief and dismay, and expostulations concerning Scottish Old Testament fiends and the hundred names of Allah flew over my head; Brooke just laughed, fidgeting with impatience, and Paitingi was still cursing and arguing when our spy-boat reached Phlegethon again. A hasty summons brought the commanders from the other vessels, and Brooke, who looked to me as though he was in the grip of some stimulating drug, held a conference on the platform by the light of a single storm lantern.

"Now's the time - I know it!" says he. "Those three lagoon praus will be making for Linga - they've been butchering and looting on the coast all day, and they'll never go farther tonight. We'll find 'em tied up at Linga tomorrow dawn. Keppel, you'll take the rocket-praus - burn those pirates at their anchorage, land the blue jackets to storm the fort, and boom the Linga river to stop anything coming down. You'll find precious little fight in Jaffir's people, or I'm much mistaken.

"Meanwhile, the rest of us will sweep past upriver, making for Patusan. That's where we'll find the real thieves' kitchen; we'll strike it as soon as Keppel's boats have caught us up—"

"You'll leave no one at Linga?" says Keppel. "Suppose more praus arrive from Mindanao?"

"They won't," says Brooke confidently. "And if they do, we'll turn in our tracks and blow them all the way back to Sulu!" His laugh sent shivers down my spine. "Mind, Keppel, I want those three praus destroyed utterly, and every one of their crews killed or scattered! Drive 'em into the jungle; if they have slaves or captives, bring 'em along. Paitingi, you'll take the lead to Linga, with one spy-boat; we don't need more while the river's still wide. Now then, what time is it?"

It may have been my army training, or my experience in Afghanistan, where no one even relieved himself without a staff conference's approval, but this haphazard, neck-or-nothing style appalled me. We were to go careering upriver in the dark, after those three horrors that I'd seen streaking out of the mist - I shuddered at the memory of the evil yellow faces and that hideous skull fringe - and tackle them and whatever other cut-throat horde happened to be waiting at this Linga fort. He was crazy, whipped into a drunken enthusiasm by his own schoolboy notions of death or glory; why the devil didn't Keppel and the other sane men take him in hand, or drop him overboard, before he wrecked us all? But there they were, setting their watches, hardly asking a question even, suggesting improvisations in an offhand way that made your hair curl, no one so much as hinting at a written order - and Brooke laughing and slapping Keppel on the back as he went down into his longboat.

"And mind now, Paitingi," he cries cheerily, "don't go skedaddling off on your own. As soon as those praus are well alight, I want to see your ugly old mug heading back to Phlegethon, d'you hear? Look after him, Stuart - he's a poor old soul, but I'm used to him!"

The spy-boat vanished into the dark, and we heard the creak of the longboats' oars as they dispersed. Brooke rubbed his hands and winked at me. "Now's the day and now's the hour," says he. "Charlie Johnson, pass my compliments to the engineer, and tell him I want steam up. We'll have Fort Linga for our chota hazri!"*(* Early morning tea.)

It sounded like madman's babble at the time, but as I look back, it seems reasonable enough - for, being J.B., he got what he wanted. He spent all night in the Phlegethon's wheel-house, poring over maps and sipping Batavia arrack, issuing orders to Johnson or Crimble from time to time, and as we thrashed on into the gloom the spy-boats would come lancing out of the misty darkness, hooking on, and then gliding away again with messages for the fleet strung out behind us; one of them kept scuttling to and fro between Phlegethon and the rocket-praus, which were somewhere up ahead. How the deuce they kept order I couldn't fathom, for each ship had only one dark lantern gleaming faintly at its stern, and the mist seemed thick all round. There was no sign, in that clammy murk, of the river-banks, a mile either side of us, and no sound except the steady thumping of Phlegethon's engines; the night was both chill and sweating at once, and I sat huddled in wakeful apprehension in the lee of the wheel-house, drawing what consolation I could from the knowledge that Phlegethon would be clear of the morning's action.

She had a grandstand seat, though; when dawn came pale and sudden, we were thrashing full tilt up the oily river, a hare half-mile from the jungle-covered bank to starboard, and nothing ahead of us but one spy-boat, loitering on the river bend. Even as we watched here, there was a distant crackle of musketry from up ahead, and from the spy-boat a blue light shot into the foggy air, barely visible against the pale grey sky; "Keppel's there!" yells Brooke. "Full ahead, Charlie!" and right on the heels of his words came a thunderous explosion that seemed to send a tremor across the swirling water.

Phlegethon tore down on the spy-boat, and then as we rounded the bend, I saw a sight I'll never forget. A mile away, on the right-hand shore, was a great clearing, with a big native village sprawling down to the shore, and behind it, on the fringe of the forest, a stockaded fort on a slight rise, with a green banner waving above its walls. There were twists of smoke, early cooking-fires, rising above the village, but down on the river-bank itself there was a great pall of sooty cloud rising from the glittering red war-prau which I recognized as one of those we had seen the previous evening; there was orange flame creeping up her steep side. Beyond her lay the two other praus, tied up to the bank and swinging gently in the current.

Keppel's praus were standing in towards them, in line ahead, like ghost ships floating on the morning mist which swirled above the river's surface. There was white smoke wreathing up from Keppel's own prau, and now the prau behind rocked and shuddered as fire blinked on her main-deck, and the white trails of the Congreves went streaking out from her side; you could see the rockets weaving in the air before they smashed into the sides of the anchored vessels at point-blank range; orange balls of fire exploded into torrents of smoke, with debris, broken sweeps, and spars flying high into the air, and then across the water came the thunder of the explosions, seconds later.

There were human figures swarming like ants on the stricken pirate vessels, dropping into the river or scattering up the shore; another salvo of rockets streaked across the smoking water, and as the reek of the explosions cleared we could see that all three targets were burning fiercely, the nearest one, a flaming wreck, already sinking in the shallows. From each of Keppel's craft a longboat was pulling off for the shore, and even without the glass I could make out the canvas shirts and straw hats of our salts. As the boats pulled past the blazing wrecks and touched shore, Keppel's rockets began firing at higher elevation, towards the stockaded fort, but at that range the rockets weaved and trailed all over the place, most of them plunging down somewhere in the jungle beyond. Brooke handed me his glass.

"That's cost the Sultan of Sulu a penny or two," says he. "He'll think twice before he sends his skull-fanciers this way again.

I was watching our seamen landing through the glass: there was Wade's burly figure leading them at a fast trot through the village towards the fort, the cutlasses glittering in the early light. Behind, the boat crews were hauling their bow-chasers ashore, manhandling them on to wheeled sledges to run them forward so that they could be brought to play against the fort. Others were trailing bamboo ladders, and from one of the boats there were landing a group of Malay archers, with firepots - it was beginning to dawn on me that for all his bull-at-a-gate style, Brooke - or someone - knew his business; they had all the right gear, and were moving like clockwork. Keppel's praus must have rounded the bend and come in sight of the town at the precise minute when there was light enough to shoot by; any later and their approach might have been seen, and the pirates been on the q.v. .

"Wonder if Sharif Jaffir's awake yet, what?" Brooke was striding about the platform, grinning like a schoolboy. "What d'you bet, Charlie, he'll be scampering out of the fort this minute, taking to the jungle? We can leave it to Keppel, now, I think - full ahead!"

While we had been watching, the rest of our fleet had passed by, and was surging upriver, the sweeps going like billy-oh, and the square sails of the praus set to catch the light sea-breeze. A spy-boat was scooting out towards us from Keppel's prau, the burly figure of Paitingi in the bow; beyond him the village was half-hidden by the smoke from the pirate praus, which were burning down to the waterline, and the rockets were firing again, this time against the smaller praus which were assembled farther up, near the Linga river mouth. I watched until my eye ached, and just before the Phlegethon rounded the next bend, a couple of miles upstream, cheering broke out from the vessels around us - I turned my glass, and saw that the green flag on the distant fort was coming down, and the Union Jack was running up in its place.

Well, I was thinking, if it's as easy as this, we don't need to break much sweat; with any luck you'll have a quiet passage, Flash, my boy - and at that very moment Brooke was at my elbow.

"Tame work for you?" says he. "Don't you fret, old fellow, you'll get a swipe at them presently, when we come to Patusan! There'll be some capital fun there, you'll see!" And just to give me the idea, he took me below and offered me the choice of some Jersey revolvers with barrels as long as my leg.²⁷ "And a cutlass, of course," says he, "you'll feel naked without that."

He little knew that I could feel naked in a suit of armour in the bowels of a dreadnought being attacked by an angry bumboat-woman. But one has to show willing, so I accepted his weapons with a dark scowl, and tried a cut or two with the cutlass for display, muttering professionally and praying to God I'd never have the chance to use it. He nodded approvingly, and then laid a hand on my shoulder.

"That's the spirit!" says he, "but, I say, Flashman - I know you feel you've got a lot to repay, and the thought of that dear, sweet creature of yours - well, I can see from your face the rage that is in you - and I don't blame you, mind. But, d'you know what? - whenever I go to battle, I try to remember that Our Saviour, when He had laid out those money-changing chaps in the temple, felt remorse, didn't He, for having got in such a bait? So I try to restrain my anger, and temper justice with mercy - not a bad mixture, what? God bless you, old chap." And off he went, no doubt for another gloat over the burning praus.

He baffled me, but then so many good Christians do, probably because I'm such a d----d bad one myself. And not having much of a conscience, I'm in no position to judge those that are apparently made of indiarubber - not that I gave a rap how many pirates he'd roasted before giving me his cautionary pi jaw. As it turned out, not many - when Keppel caught us up he reported that the fort had fallen without a shot, Sharif Jaffir having legged it for the jungle with most of the Lanun pirates in tow; those remaining had thrown in their hand when they saw their vessels destroyed and the size of our fleet. So that was all good business, and what pleased Brooke most was that Keppel had brought along three hundred women whom the Lanuns had been carrying off as slaves; he visited them on Keppel's prau, patting their heads and promising them they'd soon be safe home again; I'd have consoled some of 'em more warmly than that, myself- good taste, those Lanun pirates had - but of course there was none of that, under our peckerless leader.

Thereafter he had a quick look at the pirates and slavers who'd been taken prisoner, and ordered the execution of two of them on the spot. One of them was the renegade Makota, I think; at any rate he and Brooke conversed earnestly for about five minutes, while the squat little villain grinned and shuffled his bare feet, looking bashful - according to Stuart, he was confessing to indescribable tortures which he and his pal had inflicted on some of the women prisoners the previous evening - Keppel's party had found the grisly evidence in the village. Finally, when Brooke told him his course was run, the horrid fellow nodded cheerfully, touched hands, and cries "Salaam, tuan besar", the hovering Jingo slipped a mosquito net and a rope over his head, and pfft! - one quick jerk and that was Makota off to the happy head-hunting grounds.²⁸

The other condemned chap kicked up a frightful row at this, exclaiming "Krees, krees!" and eyeing the rope and mosquito net as though they were port being passed to the right. What his objection to strangulation was, I'm not certain, but they humoured him, taking him ashore so as not to make a mess. I watched from the rail; he stood up straight, his toad-like face impassive, while Jingo laid his krees point delicately inside the clavicle on the left side, and thrust down hard. The fellow never even twitched.

"A sorry business," says Brooke, "but before such atrocities I find it hard to remain composed."

After that it was all aboard the Skylark again, bound for Patusan, which lay about twenty miles farther upstream. "They'll stand and fight there, where the river narrows," says Keppel. "Two hundred praus, I dare say, and their jungle-men peppering us with blow-pipes from the trees."

"That don't matter," says Brooke. "It'll be a case of bursting the booms, and then run up and board, hand-to-hand. It's the forts that count - five of 'em, and you may be sure there'll be a thousand men in each-we must smoke 'em out with rockets and cannon and then charge home, in the old style. That'll be your innings, Charles, as usual," says he to Wade, and to my horror he added: "We'll take Flashman with us - make use of your special talents, what?" And he grinned at me as though it were my birthday.

"Couldn't be better!" cries Wade, slapping me on the back. "Sure an' we'll show you some pretty mixed scrappin', old son. Better than Afghanistan, and you may lay to that. I'll wager ye didn't see many praus rammed in the Khyber Pass, or have obligin' Paythans droppin' tree-trunks on you! What the devil, though - as long as ye can run, swim, scale a bamboo wall, an' keep your sword-arm swingin', yell soon get the hang of it. Like Trafalgar an' Waterloo rolled into one, with a row in a Silver Street pub thrown in!"

They all crowed at this delightful prospect, and Stuart says:

"Remember Seribas last year, when they dropped the booms behind us? My stars, that was a go! Our Ibans had to shoot 'em out of the trees with sumpitans!"

"An' Buster Anderson got shot in the leg when he boarded that bankong - the one that was sinkin'," cries Wade, "an' Buster had to swim for it, wi' the pirates one side of him an' crocodiles on t'other - an' he comes rollin' ashore, plastered wi' mud an' gore, yellin': `Anyone seen me baccy pouch? - it's got me initials on it!' "

They roared again, and said Buster was a rare card, and Wade recalled how he'd gone ploughing through the battle, performing prodigies in search of his pouch. "The best of it was," says he, spluttering, "Buster didn't smoke!"

This tickled them immensely of course, and Keppel asked where old Buster was these days.

"Alas, we lost him at Murdu," says Brooke. "Same cutting-out party I got this"— he tapped his scar —"and a slug in the bicep. Balagnini jumped on him as he was scrambling up their stern-cable - Buster's pistol misfired - he was the most confounded careless chap imaginable with firearms, you know - and the Balagnini took the dear old chap's head almost clean off with his parang. Bad business."

They shook their heads and agreed it was a damned shame, but cheered up presently when someone recalled that Jack Penty had settled the Balagnini with a lovely backhand cut soon after, and from this they passed to recalling similar happy memories of old pals and enemies, most of 'em deceased in the most grisly circumstances, apparently. Just the kind of thing I like to hear before breakfast - but, d'you know, I learned from Brooke afterwards, that they'd absolutely been trying to raise my spirits.

"Forgive their levity," says he, "it is kindly meant. Charlie Wade sees you are quite down in the dumps, fretting about your lady, and he tries to divert you with his chatter about battles past and brave actions ahead - well, when the warhorse hears the trumpets, he don't think about much else, does he? If you just give your mind to what's to do - and I know you're itching to be at it - you'll feel ever so much better." He muttered something else about my heart being tender enough to suffer, but tough enough not to break, and tooled off to see that we were still headed in the right direction.

By this time I was ready to bolt, but that's the trouble with being afloat - you can only run in circles. There was land not far off, of course, if one could have reached it through water that was no doubt well-stocked with crocodiles, and was prepared to wander in unexplored jungle full of head-hunters. And the prospect got worse through that steaming, fevered day; the river twisted and got narrower, until there was a bare few hundred yards of sluggish water either side of the vessels, with a solid jungle wall hemming us in. Whenever a bird screamed in the undergrowth I almost had a seizure, and we were tormented by mosquito clouds which added their unceasing buzzing to the monotonous throb of Phlegethon's engines and the rhythmic swish of the praus' sweeps.

Worst of all was the stench - the farther we went on, the closer the jungle loomed in on us, the more unbearable became that rotten, musky, choking atmosphere, stifling in its steaming intensity. It conjured up nightmares of corpses decaying in loathsome swamps - I found the sweat which bathed me turning to ice as I watched that hostile green forest wall, conjuring up hideous faces in its shadows, imagining painted horrors lurking in its depths, waiting.

If day was bad, night was ten times worse. Dark found us still a few miles from Patusan, and the mist came with the dusk; as we swung at anchor in midstream there was nothing to be seen but pale white wraiths coming and going in the festering gloom. With all engines stopped you could hear the water gurgling oozily by, even above the devil's chorus of screams and yells from the darkness - I was new to jungle, and had no conception of the appalling din with which it is filled at night. I stayed on deck about ten minutes, in which time I saw at least half a dozen skull-laden praus crammed with savages starting to emerge from the shadows, at which point they dissolved into shadows themselves - after that I decided I might as well turn in, which I did by plumbing the depths of that sweltering iron tub, finding a hole in the corner of the engine-room, and crouching there with my Colt in my fist, listening to the evil whispers of head-hunters congregating on the other side of the half-inch plate.

And barely ten days before I'd been unbuttoning in that Singapore chop-house, bursting with best meat and drink, and running a lascivious eye over Madame Sabba! Now, thanks to Elspeth's wantoning, I was on the eve of death, or worse - if I get out of this, thinks I, I'll divorce the bitch, that's flat. I'd been a fool ever to marry her - and brooding on that I must have dozed, for I could see her in that sunny field by the river, golden hair tumbled in the grass, cheeks moist and pink from the ecstasy of our first acquaintance, smiling at me. That lovely white body - and then like a black shadow came the recollection of the hideous fate of those captive women at Linga - those same bestial savages had Elspeth at their mercy - even now she might be being ravished by some filthy dacoit, or suffering unmentionable agonies … I was awake, gasping, drenched on the cold iron.

"They shan't hurt you, old girl!" I was absolutely croaking in the dark. "They shan't! I'll - I'll—"

What would I do? Rush to her rescue, like Dick Dauntless, against the kind of human ghouls I'd seen on that pirate prau? I wouldn't dare - it wasn't a question I'd even have asked myself, normally, for the great advantage to real true-blue cowardice like mine, you see, was that I'd always been able to take it for granted and no regrets or qualms of conscience; it had served its turn, and I'd never lost a wink over Hudson or old Iqbal or any of the other honoured dead who'd served me as stepping-stones to safety. But Elspeth … and to haunt me in that stinking stokehold came the appalling question: suppose it was my skin or hers - would I turn tail then? I didn't know, but judging by the form-book I could guess, and for once the alternative to suffering and death was as horrible as death itself. I even found myself wondering if there was perhaps a limit to my funk, and that was such a fearful thought that between it and the terrors ahead I was driven to prayer, along the lines of Oh, kind God, forgive all the beastly sins I've committed, and a few that I'll certainly commit if I get out of this, or rather, pay no attention to 'em, Heavenly Father, but turn all Thy Grace on Elspeth and me, and save us both - but if it's got to be one or t'other of us, for Christ's sake don't leave the decision to me. And whatever Thy will, don't let me suffer mutilation or torment - if it'll save her, you can even blot me out suddenly so that I don't know about it - no, hold on, though, better still, take Brooke - the bastard's been asking for it, and he'll adore a martyr's crown, and be a credit to Thy company of saints. But save Elspeth, and me, too, for I'll get no benefit from her salvation if I'm dead …

Which was all wasted piety, if you like, since Elspeth was presumably snug in Solomon's bed aboard the Sulu Queen and a damned sight safer than I was, but there's nothing like the fear of violent death for playing havoc with reason and logic. I dare say if Socrates had been up the Batang Lupar that night he might have put my thoughts in order - not that he'd have had much chance; he'd have had a Colt thrust into his fist and been pushed over the side with instructions to lay on like fury, look out for a blonde female in distress, and give me a shout when the coast was clear. As it was, having no counsel but my own, I went to sleep.

* * *

[Extract from the diary of Mrs Flashman, August -, 1844]

An extremely uncomfortable night - oppressive heat - and much plagued by Insects. The noise of the Natives is too much to be borne. Why should they beat their Gongs after dark? No doubt it has some Religious Purpose; if so, it is trying to a degree. I despair of sleep, even in Nature's Garb, so intense is the heat and drumliness of the air; it is with difficulty that I pen even these few lines; the paper is quite damp, and blots most provokingly.

No sign of Don S. since this morning, when I was allowed briefly on deck for air and exercise. Almost forgot my pitiful condition in the interest of what I saw, of which I have Rough Notes, and a few modest sketches. The colours of the Forest Blooms are most exquisite, but Pale to Nothing before the Extravagance of the Natives themselves. So many Splendid and Barbaric galleys, adorned with streamers and flags, like Corsairs of yore, manned by Swarthy Crews, many of repulsive appearance, but others quite commanding. As I stood in the bows, one such galley swept by on the bosom of the stream, urged on by the oars plied by Dusky Argonauts, and at the back of the boat, plainly its Chief, a Tall and Most Elegantly Shaped Young Barbarian, clad in a saronga of Shimmering Gold, with many ornaments on his exposed arms and legs - really a most Noble Carriage and quite handsome for a Native, who inclined his head to me and smiled pleasantly, very respectfully, yet with a Natural Dignity. Not at all Yellow, but quite pale of skin, as I had imagined an Aztec God. His name, as I discovered by discreet inquiry of Don S., is Sheriff Saheeb, and I suppose from this title that he is at least a Justice of the Peace.

I believe he would have come aboard our vessel, but Don S. spoke to him from the Gangway, which I confess was a Disappointment, for he seemed a Personage of some gentility - if one may use the word of a Heathen - and I should have liked time to sketch him, and try if I could not capture some of that Savage Nobility of his bearing.

However, I have not passed my time in idle staring, but recollecting what Lord Fitzroy Somerset told me at the Guards Ball, have made careful count of all the armaments I have seen, and the disposition of the Enemy's Strength, which I have noted separately, both the number of large guns and ships, or galleys. There seem to be a vast host of these people, on land and water, which fills me with dread - how can I hope to be delivered? - but I shall not waste my pen on that, or other vain repining.

A diverting occurrence, which I should not record, I know - I am a sadly undutiful daughter. Among the animals and birds (of the most beautiful plumage) I have seen, was a most droll Ape on one of the native boats, where I guess he is a pet creature - a most astonishing Pug, for never was anything more like a Human - quite as tall as a small man, and covered with an overcoat of red hair of remarkable Luxuriance. He had such a Melancholy Expression, but with so appealing a "glint tae his e'en", and the aspect of a dour wee old man, that I was greatly amused, and his captors, seeing my interest, made him perform most divertingly, for he had the trick of Perfect Imitation, and even essay'd to kindle a fire as they did, putting together twigs to himself - but poor Pug, they did not take light by themselves, as he expected they would! He was quite cast down, and Annoy'd, and it was when he Mouthed his Discontent and scattered his twigs in Temper, that I saw he was the Speaking Likeness of dear Papa, even to the way he screwed up his eyes! Almost I expected him to express himself with a round "De'il tak' it!" What a preposterous fancy, to see a resemblance in that Brute to one's parent - but he did look exactly like Papa in one of his tantrums! But this awoke such Poignant Memories, that I could not look long.

So to my Prison again, and Forebodings, which I put resolutely from me. I am alive, so I hope - and will not be cast down!!! Don S. continues attentive, though I see little of him; he tells me the name of my Ape is Man of the Forest. I close this day with a Prayer to my Merciful Father in Heaven - oh, let him send my H. soon to me!

[End of extract - and a most malicious libel on a good and honest Parent who, whatever his faults, deserved kinder usage from an Ungrateful Child whom he indulged far too much!! - G. de R.]

I was back in Patusan just a few years ago, and it's changed beyond belief. Now, past the bend of the river, there is a sleepy, warm little village of bamboo huts and booths, hemmed in by towering jungle trees, drowsing in the sunlight; fowls scratching in the dirt, women cooking, and no greater activity than a child tumbling and crying. However much I walked round, and squinted at it from odd angles, I couldn't match it to my memory of bristling stockades along the banks, with five mighty wooden forts fringing the great clearing-the jungle must have been farther back then, and even the river has changed: it is broad and placid now, but I remember it narrow and choppy, and everything more cramped and enclosed; even the sky seems farther away nowadays, and there's a great peace where once there was pandemonium of smoke and gunfire and rending timber and bloody water.

They were waiting for us when we swept round the bend in line abreast, Phlegethon and the rocket-praus leading, with our spy-boats lurking under the counters waiting to strike. Although it was broad dawn you couldn't see the water at all; there was a blanket of mist a yard deep on its surface, cutting off not only sight but sound, so that even the Phlegethon's wheel gave only a muffled thump as it hit the water, and the splash of the sweeps was a dull, continuous churning as we ploughed the fog.

There was a huge log-boom just visible above the mist fifty yards ahead, and beyond it a sight to freeze your blood - from bank to bank, a line of great war-praus, swarming with armed men, pennants hanging from their masts, skull-fringes bobbing, and as we came into view, a hideous yell going up from every deck, the war-gongs booming, and that devil's horde shaking their fists and brandishing their weapons. It was taken up from the manned stockades on the right bank, and the wooden forts behind - and then the fort guns and the praus' bow-chasers belched smoke, and the air was thick with screaming shot, whining overhead, driving up jets of water from the misty surface or crashing home into the timbers of our craft. The rocket-praus fired back, and in a moment the still air was criss-crossed with the smoky vapour trails, and the pirate battle-line shuddered under the pounding of the Congreves; shattering explosions on their decks, bursts of flame and smoke, men diving from their upper works, and then their cannon roaring back again, turning the narrow river into an inferno of noise and destruction.

"Spy-boats away!" bawls Brooke from the Phlegethon's rail, and out from under the counters raced half a dozen of Paitingi's shells, darting in towards the boom, only the rowers visible above the mist, so that each crew was just a line of heads and shoulders cleaving through that woolly blanket. Just beyond the boom the foggy water was thick with enemy canoes, their musketeers firing raggedly at our spy-boats. I saw heads vanish here and there as the shots took effect, but the spy-boats forged on, and now the pirates were closing on the boom itself, scrambling on to the huge logs, swords and parangs in hand, to deny our men a foot-hold. And above both sides the great gun duel continued, between our praus and theirs, in one continuous h-lish din of explosion and crashing timber, punctuated by screams of wounded men and bellowed commands.

You couldn't hear yourself think, but at such times it's best not to, anyway. I was at Brooke's elbow, straining every nerve to keep his body between mine and the enemy's fire without being too obvious about it. Now he was directing our musketeers' fire from the Phlegethon's bow, to cover our spy-boatmen, who were fighting furiously to drive the pirates from the boom so that the great binding-ropes could be cut and the boom broken to give our vessels passage; I flung myself down, yelling nonsense, between two of our riflemen, seizing a piece myself and making great play at loading it. Brooke, on his feet, was walking from man to man, pointing out targets.

"That one in the yellow scarf - lively, now! Got him! The big fellow with the spear - the Malay beyond Paitingi - there, now, the fat one in the stern of yon canoe. Blaze away, boys! They're failing - go on, Stuart, get the axes going on those cables! Come on, Flashman, off we go!"

He slapped me on the shoulder - just when I'd got myself nice and snug behind the sandbags, too - and perforce I had to tumble after him over the Phlegethon's side into the Jolly Bachelor, which was bobbing alongside, packed with Dido's men. I heard a shot clang on the Phlegethon's plates just above my head as I went sprawling into the sloop, and then hands were hauling me upright, and a bearded tar was grinning and yelling: " 'Ere we go, sir! Twice round the light'ouse for a penny!" I plunged after Brooke, stumbling over the cursing, cheering men who squatted on the deck, and fetched up beside him near the bow-chaser, where he was trying to make himself heard above the din, and pointing ahead.

We were driving in towards the boom, under a canopy of rocket-smoke, and now the gunfire was dispersing the mist, and you could see the oily water, already littered with broken timbers, and even a body here and there, rolling limp. On the boom it was a hand-to-hand melée between the pirate canoes and our spy-boatmen, a slippering, slashing dog-fight of glittering parangs and thrusting spears, with crashing musketry at point-blank range over the logs. I saw Paitingi, erect on the boom, laying about him with a broken oar; Stuart, holding off a naked pirate with his cutlass, shielding two Chinese who were swinging their axes at the great rattan cables securing the boom. Even as I watched, the cables parted, and the logs rolled, sending friend and foe headlong into the water; the Jolly Bachelor gave a great yell of triumph, and we were heading for the gap, into the smoke, while from our bow a blue light went up to signal the praus.

There was a frantic five minutes while we backed water in the space between the broken sides of the boom, Brooke and the bow-chaser crew spraying grape ahead of us, and the rest of us banging away at anything that looked like a hostile shape, either on the boom itself or in the canoes beyond. I used my Colt sparingly, crouched down by the bulwark, and keeping as well snuggled into the mob of tars as possible; once, when a canoe came surging out of the smoke, with a great yellow devil in a quilted tunic and spiked helmet in the prow, brandishing a barbed lance, I took a steady sight and missed him twice, but my third shot got him clean amidships as he was preparing to leap for our rail, and he tumbled into the water.

"Bravo, Flashman!" cries Brooke. "Here, come up beside me!" And there I was again, red in the face with panic, stumbling up beside him as he leaned over the side, helping to haul Stuart out of the water - he'd swum from the broken boom, and was gasping on the deck, sodden wet, with a trickle of blood running from his left sleeve.

"Steady all!" roars Brooke. "Ready, oarsmen! Every musket primed? Right, hold on, there! Wait for the praus!"

Beyond the tangle of wreckage and foundering canoes, beyond the struggling swimmers and floating bodies, the two ends of the boom were now a good fifty yards apart, drifting slowly behind us on the current. The spy-boats had done their work, and our praus were moving ahead under their sweeps, coming up into line, half a dozen on either side, while the rocket-praus, farther back, were still cannonading away at the pirate line, perhaps two cables' lengths ahead. Three or four of them were burning furiously, and a great reek of black smoke was surging down river towards us, but their line was still solid, and their bow guns fired steadily, sending up clouds of water round our praus and battering their upper works. Between them and us their canoes were in retreat, scurrying for the safety of the larger craft; Brooke nodded with satisfaction.

"So far, so good!" cries he, and standing up in the bows, he waved his hat. "Now then, you fellows, put your backs into it! Two blue lights, there - signal the advance! Cutlasses and small arms, everyone - tally-ho!"

The blue-jackets yelled and stamped, and as the blue lights went up the cheering spread along our line, and on either side the praus drove forward, bow-chasers blazing away, musketeers firing from the platforms, the crews crowding forward to the bows. As our line steadied the gunfire rose to a new crescendo; we were crouching down as the shot whined above us, and suddenly there was an appalling smash, a chorus of shrieks, and I found myself sodden with blood, staring in horror at two legs and half a body thrashing feebly on the deck in front of me, where an instant before a seaman had been ramming shot into the bow-chaser. I sat down heavily, pawing at the disgusting mess, and then Brooke had me on my feet again, yelling to know if I was all right, and I was yelling back that the corn on my big toe was giving me hell - God knows why one says these things, but he gave a wild laugh and pushed me forward to the bow rail. I crouched down, shuddering and ready to vomit, helpless with fear - but who would have recognized it then?

Suddenly the cannonading died, and for a few seconds there was a silence in which you could hear the water chuckling under the Jolly Bachelor's forefoot as she went gliding forward. Then the musketry crashed out again, as our sharpshooters on the praus poured their fire into the pirate line, and the pirates gave us back volley for volley. Thank God the Jolly Bachelor was too low and too close now for them to get at us with cannon, but as we drove in towards them the water either side was boiling with their small shot, and behind me there were cries and oaths of men hit; our whole line was charging across the water, praus on the flanks, Jolly Bachelor in the centre, towards the pirate vessels; they were barely fifty yards off, and I could only stare in horror at the nearest one, dead ahead, the platform which jutted out from her rails crowded with savage howling faces, brandished steel, and smoking barrels —"They'll shoot us to pieces! We'll founder-Jesus loves me!" someone was shouting, but nobody heard me in that fearful din. A seaman at my elbow screamed and stood up, tearing at a sumpitan dart in his arm; as I dived for the cover of the rail another stood quivering in a cable a foot from my face; Brooke leaned over, grinning, snapped it off, tossed it away, and then did an unbelievable thing. I didn't credit it then, and scarcely do now, but it's a fact.

He stood up, full height in the bows, one foot on the rail, threw away his straw hat, and folded his arms, staring straight ahead at that yelling, grimacing Death that was launching shot, steel, and poisoned arrows at us in clouds. He was smiling serenely, and seemed to be saying some-thing. "Get down, you mad bugger!" I shouted, but he never even heard, and then I realized that he wasn't speaking - he was singing. Above the crash of musketry, the whistle and thump of those horrid darts, the screams and the yells, you could hear it:

"Come, cheer up, my lads, 'Tis to glory we steer,

To add something new To this wonderful year—"

He was turning now, one hand on a stay for balance, thumping the time with his other fist, his face alight with laughter, roaring to us to sing - and from the mob behind it came thundering out:

"Heart of oak are our ships,

Jolly tars are our men, We always are ready, Steady, boys, steady,

We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again!"

The Jolly Bachelor shuddered in the water as we scraped under the platform of the pirate prau, and then shrieking, slashing figures were dropping among us; I went sprawling on the deck, with someone treading on my head, and came up to find myself staring into a contorted, screaming yellow face; I had an instant's glimpse of a jade earring carved like a half-moon, and a scarlet turban, and then he had gone over the side with a cutlass jammed to the hilt in his stomach; I fired at him as he fell, slipped in the blood on the deck, and finishing up in the scuppers, glaring about me in panic. The deck was in turmoil, resolving itself into knots of blue-jackets, each killing a struggling pirate in their midst and heaving the bodies overside; the prau we had scraped was behind us now, and Brooke was yelling:

"Steady, oarsmen! Pull with a will! There's our quarry, you chaps! Straight ahead!"

He was pointing to the right bank, where the stockade, hit by rocket fire, was collapsed in smouldering ruin; beyond it lay one of the forts, its stockade blazing fiercely, with figures scattering away, and a gallant few trying to douse the flames. Behind us was an unbelievable carnage; our praus and the pirates' locked together in a bloody hand-to-hand struggle, and through the gaps our longboats surging in the wake of the Jolly Bachelor, loaded with Malay swordsmen and Dyaks. The water was littered with smoking wreckage and struggling forms; men were falling from the platforms, and our boats were picking them up when they were friends, or butchering them in the bloody current if they were pirates. Smoke from the burning praus was swirling in a great pall above the infernal scene; I remembered that line about "a death-shade round the ships"— and then someone was shaking my arm, and Brooke was shouting at me, pointing ahead to the nearing shore and the smoking breach in the stockade.

"Take that fort!" he was yelling. "Lead the blue-jackets! Charge in, d'ye hear, no covering, no halting! Just tear in with the cutlass - watch out for women and kids, and prisoners! Chase 'em, Flashy! Good luck to you!"

I inquired tactfully if he was bloody mad, but he was ten yards away by then, plunging through the shallows as our boat scraped into the shelving bank; he scrambled up the shore, waving to the other longboats to close on him; they were turning at his signal - and there was I, revolver in shaking fist, staring horrified over the bows at the charred ruins of the stockade, and beyond it, a good hundred yards of hard-beaten earth, already littered with cannon casual-ties, and beyond that again, the blazing barrier of the fort's outer wall. Christ knew how many slashing fiends were waiting in there, ready to blast us with musketry and then rip us up at close quarters - if we ever got that far. I looked round at the Jolly Bachelor, crammed with yelling sailors, straw hats, bearded faces, white smocks, glaring eyes, cutlasses at the ready, waiting for the word. And the word, no doubt about it, was with old Flash.

Well, whatever you may say of me, I know my duty, and if there was one thing Afghanistan had taught me, it was the art of leadership. In a trice I had seized a cutlass, thrust it aloft, and turned to the maddened crew behind me. "Ha, ha, you fellows!" I bellowed. "Here we go, then! Who'll be first after me into yonder fort?" I sprang to the bank, waved my cutlass again, and bawled, "Follow me!"

They came tumbling out of the boat on my heels, yelling and cheering, brandishing their weapons, and as I stood shouting, "On! On! Rule, Britannia!" they went pouring up the shore, scattering the embers of the stockade. I advanced with them, of course, pausing only to encourage those in the rear with manly cries, until I reckoned there were about a score in front of me; then I lit out in pursuit of the vanguard, not leading from behind, exactly - more from the middle, really, which is the safest place to be unless you're up against civilized artillery.

We charged across the open space, howling like hounds; as we ran, I saw that on our right flank Brooke was directing the Malay swordsmen towards another fort; they were drawing those dreadful kampilans with the hair-tufts on their hilts, and behind them came a second wave from the boats, of half-naked Iban, carrying their sumpitan spears and screeching "Dyak! Dyak!" as they ran. But none of 'em matched the speed and fury of my tars, who were now almost up to the blazing fort stockade; just as they reached it the whole thing, by great good luck, fell inwards with a great whooshing of sparks and smoke, and as the foremost leaped through the burning rubbish I was able to see how wise I'd been in not leading the charge myself- there, in a ragged double line, was a troop of pirate musketeers presenting their pieces. Out crashed their volley, knocking over one or two of our first fellows, and then the rest were into them, cutlasses swinging, with old Flash arriving full of noble noise at the point where our chaps were thickest.

It seemed to me that I could employ my best efforts picking off the enemy with my Colt, and this gave me the opportunity to watch something which is worth going a long way to see, provided you can find a safe vantage - the terrible cut-and-thrust, shoulder to shoulder, of British blue jackets in a body. I daresay the Navy has been teaching it since Blake's day, and Mr Gilbert, who never dreamed what it was like, makes great fun of it nowadays, but I've seen it - and I know now why we've been ruling the oceans for centuries. There must have been a hundred pirates to our first line of twenty, but the tars just charged them in a solid wedge, cutlasses raised for the backhand cut - stamp and slash, then thrust, stamp and slash, then thrust, stamp-slash-thrust, and that pirate line melted into a fallen tangle of gashed faces and shoulders, through which the sailors ploughed roaring. Those pirates who still stood, turned tail and fairly pelted for the fort gates, with our chaps chasing and damning 'em for cowardly swabs - made me quite proud to be British, I can tell you.

I was fairly close up with the front rank, by now, bellowing the odds and taking a juicy swipe at any wounded who happened to be looking t'other way. The defenders had obviously hoped their musketeers would hold us beyond the gate, but we were in before they knew it. There was a party of pirates trying to swing a great gun round to blast us at the entrance; one of 'em was snatching at a linstock, but before he could touch it off there were half a dozen thrown sheath-knives in his body, and he sprawled over the gun while the others turned and fled. We were in, and all that remained was to ferret out every pirate for the place to be ours.

This presented no difficulty, since there weren't any - for the simple reason that the cunning b--ds had all sneaked out the back way, and were even now scurrying round to take us in the rear at the gate. I didn't know this, of course, at the time; I was too busy despatching armed parties under petty officers to overrun the interior, which was like no fort I'd ever seen. In fact, it was Sharif Sahib's personal bamboo palace and headquarters, a great labyrinth of houses, some of 'em even three storeys high, with outside staircases, connecting walkways, verandahs, and screened passages everywhere. We had just begun to ransack and loot, and had discovered the Sharif's private wardrobe an astonishing collection which included such varying garments as cloth-of-gold turbans, jewelled tiaras, toppers, and morning dress - when all hell broke out from the direction of the main gate, and there was a general move in that direction. General, but not particular - while the loyal tars surged off in search of further blood, I was skipping nimbly out of Sharif Sahib's wardrobe in the opposite direction. I didn't know where it would lead, but it was at least away from the firing - I'd seen enough gore and horror for one day, and I sped quickly across a bamboo bridge into the adjoining house, which appeared to be deserted. There was a long passage, with doors on one side, and I was hesitating over which would be the safest bolt-hole, when one of them shot open and out rushed the biggest man I've ever seen in my life.

He was at least seven feet tall, and as hideous as he was big - a great yellow, globular face set on massive shoulders, with a tasselled cap on top, staring pop-eyes, and a great sword clutched in his pudgy hands. He screamed at the sight of me, backing down the passage in a strange, waddling run, and then he swung his sword back over his head, squealing like a steam-whistle, overbalanced, and vanished with a rending crash down a steep flight of stairs. By the sound of it he must have carried away two floors with him, but I wasn't waiting about for any more like him - I leaped through the nearest door, and stopped dead in my tracks, unable to believe my eyes. I was in a great room full of women.

I closed my eyes, and opened them, wondering if I was dreaming, or having hallucinations after my trying day. It was still there, like something out of Burton's "Arabian Nights"— the illustrated one that you can only get on the Continent. Silken hangings, couches, carpets, cushions, a stink of perfume coming at you in waves - and the ladies, a round score of them - beautifully round, I realized, and evidently proud of it, for there wasn't clothing enough among the lot of 'ern to cover one body respectably. A few sarongs, wisps of silk, bangles, satin trousers, a turban or two, but not worth a damn when it came to concealing those splendid limbs, shapely hips, plump buttocks, and pouting tits. I could only gape, disbelieving, and tear my eyes from the bodies to the faces - every shade from coffee and beige to honey and white, and all beautiful; red lips parted and trembling, dark, kohl-fringed eyes wide with terror.

I wondered for a moment if I'd been killed in the fight and transported to some delightful paradise; but celestial or earthly, I couldn't pass up a chance like this, and the thought must have shown in my expression, for with one accord the whole gorgeous assembly screamed in unison, and turned to flee - mind, I don't blame 'em, for Flashy leering in your doorway, covered in blood and grime, pistol in one hand and bloody cutlass in t'other, ain't quite the vicar dropping in to tea. They ran pell-mell, falling over cushions, blundering into each other, scrambling for the other doors in the room, and it seemed only common sense to grab for the nearest, a voluptuous little thing whose entire wardrobe was a necklace and gauzy trousers; it may have been my hand on her ankle, or her top-heavy bosom, that made her overbalance; either way, she fell through a curtained alcove and slithered headlong down a narrow stairway, scrambling and shrieking with Flashy in hot pursuit. She fetched up against a screen wall at the bottom, I seized her joyfully - and in that moment I was recalled to a sense of my true position by a sound that drove all carnal thoughts from my mind: a deafening volley of musketry crashed in the street just outside the flimsy house-wall, there was a clash of steel, a jabber of native voices - pirates, for certain - and in the distance an English voice bawling orders to take cover.

It seemed a capital notion; I pinned the wriggling wench to the floor, brandished my pistol, and mouthed at her to be silent. She lay shuddering in my grip, her face working with terror - lovely little face it was, part Chink-Indian-Malay, probably, great eyes filled with tears, short nose, plump little lips - and, by George, she was handsomely built, too; more by instinct than a-purpose, I found myself taking an appraising fondle, and she trembled under my hand, but had sense enough to keep her mouth shut.

I listened fearfully; the pirates were moving just beyond our screen wall, and then suddenly they were blazing away again, yelling and cursing or crying out in agony, feet running and shots whining horribly near - I clapped a hand over her mouth and gripped her close, terrified that she would scream and bring some bestial savage cleaving through the flimsy wall to fillet me; we lay there, in the stuffy dimness of the stair-foot, with the noise of battle pounding by not six feet away, and once, during a second's lull in the tumult, I heard the sounds of squealing and wailing somewhere overhead - the other young ladies of the Patusan finishing school waiting to be ravished and murdered, presumably. I found I was hissing hysterically in her ear: "Quiet, quiet, quiet, for God's sake!" and to my astonishment she was whimpering tearfully back, "Amiga sua, amiga sua!" stroking my sweating face with her hand, a look of terrified entreaty in her eyes - she was even trying to smile, too, a pathetic little grimace, straining to bring her slobbering lips up to mine, making little moaning noises.

Well, I've seen women in the grip of terror often enough, but I couldn't account for this passionate frenzy - until I realized that my shuddering was of a curiously rhythmic nature, that I had a quivering tit in one hand and a plump thigh in the other, that our nether garments seemed to have come adrift somehow, and that my innards were convulsing with another sensation besides fear. I was so startled I nearly broke stride - I'd never have believed that I could gallop a female without realizing I was doing it, yet here we were, thundering away like King Hal on honeymoon, after all I'd been through that day, and with battle, murder, and sudden death raging around us. It just shows how your better instinct will prevail in a crisis - some fall to prayer, others cry upon Queen and Country, but here's one, I'm proud to say, who instinctively fornicated in the jaws of death, gibbering with fright and reckless lust, but giving of his best, for when you realize it may be your last ride you make the most of it. And, d'you know, it may well be true that perfect love casteth out fear, as Dr Arnold used to say; leastways, I doubt if I can ever have been in finer tupping trim, for in the last ecstatic moment my partner fainted clean away, and you can't do better by 'em than that.

They were still going at it hammer and tongs outside, but after a while the action seemed to move along, and when presently I heard in the distance the unmistakable sound of a British cheer, I judged it was safe to venture forth again. My wench had come to, and was lying limp and blubbering, too scared to stir; I had to lay the flat of my sword across her rump to drive her up the stairs, and then, after a cautious prowl, I sallied out.

It was all over by then. My blue jackets, who didn't seem to have missed me, had driven off the pirate attack, and were busy emptying the fort of its valuables before it was burned, for Brooke was determined to destroy the pirate nests utterly. I told 'em that during the fighting I'd heard the cries of women in one of the buildings, and that the poor creatures must be sought out and treated with all consideration - I was very stern about that, but when they went to look it appeared that the whole gaggle had decamped into the jungle; there wasn't a living soul left in the place, so I went off to find Brooke and report.²⁹

Outside the fort it was a nightmare. The open space down to the river was littered with enemy corpses - most of them headless, for the victorious Dyaks had been busy at their ghastly work of collecting trophies, and the river itself was just a mess of smoking wreckage. The pirate praus had either been burned in the battle or had fled upriver; fewer than a quarter of them had escaped, scores of their crews had been killed or driven into the jungle, and great numbers of wounded and prisoners had been herded into one of the captured forts. All five of them had been taken, and two of them were already alight; when night came down on Patusan it was still as bright as day from the orange flare of the burning buildings, the heat was so intense that for a time we had to retire to our boats, but all through the night the work had to go on - prisoners to be guarded and fed, our own wounded to be cared for, the loot of the forts assessed and shipped, our vessels repaired, stores replenished, fresh weapons and ammunition issued, dead counted, and the whole sickening confusion restored to some sort of order.

I've seen the aftermath of battle fifty times if I've seen it once, and it's heIl, but through all the foulness and exhaustion there's always one cheery thought - I'm here. Sick and sore and weary, perhaps, but at least alive and sound with a place to lie down - and I'd had a good if somewhat alarming rattle into the bargain. The one snag was that there'd been no sign of the Sulu Queen, so the whole filthy business would have to be gone through again, which was not to be contemplated.

I said as much to Brooke, in the faint hope that I might get him to give up - of course, I played it full of manly anguish, torn between love of Elspeth and concern at what her rescue had already cost. "T'ain't right, raja," says I, looking piously constipated. "I can't ask this kind of … of sacrifice from you and your people. God knows how many lives will be lost - how many noble fellows … no, it won't do. She's my wife, and - well, it's up to me, don't you see …

It was dreadful humbug, hinting I'd take on the job single-handed, in some unspecified fashion - given the chance I'd have legged it for Singapore that instant, sent out reward notices, and sat back out of harm's way. From which you may gather that a busy day among the Borneo pirates had quite dissipated the conscientious lunacy which had temporarily come over me in the stokehold the previous night. But I was wasting my time, of course; he just gripped my hand with tears in his eyes and cried:

"Do you truly think there's a man of us who would fail you now? We'll win her back at any cost! Besides," and he gritted his teeth, "there are these pirate rascals to stamp out still - we've won the decisive battle, thanks to valour such as yours, but we must give 'em the coup de grace! So you see, I'd be bound to go on, even if your loved one were not in their foul hands." He gripped my shoulder. "You're a white man, Flashman - and I know you'd go on alone if you had to; well, you can count on J.B. to blazes and beyond, so there!" That was what I'd been afraid of.

We were another two days at Patusan, waiting for news from Brooke's spies and keeping to windward of the Dyaks' funeral pyres on the river-bank, before word came that the Sulu Queen had been sighted twenty miles farther upstream, with a force of enemy praus, but when we cruised up there on the 10th the birds had flown to Sharif Muller's fort on the Undup river, so for two more days we must toil after them, plagued by boiling heat and mosquitoes, the stream running stronger all the time and our pace reduced to a struggling crawl. The Phlegethon had to be left behind because of the current and snags, to which the pirates had added traps of tree-trunks and sunken rattan nets to trammel our sweeps; every few minutes there would have to be a halt while we cut our way loose, hacking at the creeper ropes, and then hauling on, drenched with sweat and oily water, panting for breath, eyes forever turning to that steaming olive wall that hemmed us in either side, waiting for the whistle of a sumpitan dart that every now and then would come winging out of the jungle to strike a paddler or quiver in the gunwales. Beith, Keppel's surgeon, was up and down the fleet constantly, digging the beastly things out of limbs and cauterizing wounds; fortunately they were seldom fatal, but I reckoned we were suffering a casualty every half-hour.

It wouldn't have been too bad if I'd still had the Phlegethon's iron sheets to skulk behind, but I had been assigned to Paitingi's spy-boat, which was as often as not in the lead; only at night did I go back aboard the Jolly Bachelor with Brooke, and that wasn't much comfort - huddled up for sleep at the foot of her ladder after the tintacks had been scattered on her deck against night attack, sweating in the cramped dark, filthy and unkempt, listening to the screaming noise of the jungle and the occasional distant throb of a war-gong - doom, doom, doom, out of the misty dark.

"Drum away, Muller," Brooke - would say, "we'll be playing you a livelier tune presently, just you wait. We'll see some fun then - eh, Flashy?"

By his lights, I suppose that what happened on the third day along the Undup was fun - a dawn attack on Muller's fort, which was a great stockaded bamboo castle on a steep hill. The rocket-praus pounded it, and the remnants of the pirate fleet in their anchorage, and then Dido's men and the Dyaks swarmed ashore, the latter war-dancing on the landing-ground before the assault, leaping, shaking their sumpitans and yelling "Dyak!" ("that's aye their way," says Paitingi to me as we watched from the spy-boat, "they'd sooner yelp than fight"— which I thought pretty hard). Poor Charlie Wade was killed storming the fort; I heard later he'd been shot while carrying a Malay child to shelter, which shows what Christian charity gets you.

The only part I took in the fight, though, was when a prau broke free from the pirate anchorage and made off upriver, sweeps going like blazes and war-gong thundering. Paitingi danced up and down, roaring in Scotch and Arabic that he could see Muller's personal banner on her, so our spy set off in pursuit. The prau foundered, burning from rocket-fire, but Muller, a persevering big villain in quilted armour and black turban, took to a sampan; we overhauled it, banging away, and I was having the horrors at the thought of boarding when the sensible chap dived overboard with his gang at his heels and swam for it. We lost him near the jungle-edge, and Paitingi tore his beard, cussing as only an Arab can.

"Come back and fight, ye son-of-a-Malay-bitch!" .cries he, shaking his fist. "Istagfurallah! Is it thus that pirates prove their courage? Aye, run to the jungle, ye Port Said pimp, you! By the Seven Heroes, I shall give thy head to my Lingas yet, thou uncircumcised carrion! Ach! Burn his grandmither - he's awa' wi' it, so he is!"

By this time the fort was taken,³⁰ and we left it burning, and the dead unburied, for it had been discovered from a prisoner that our principal quarry, Suleiman Usman, with the Sulu Queen - and presumably my errant wife- had taken refuge up the Skrang river with a force of praus. So it was back down the Undup again, a good deal faster than we had come up, to the mainstream, where Phlegethon was guarding the junction.

"You can't run much farther now, Usman, my son," says Brooke. "Skrang's navigable for a few miles at most; if he takes Sulu Queen any distance up he'll ground her. He's bound to stand and fight - why, he's still got more men and keels than we have, and while we've been chasing Muller he's had time to put 'em in order. He must know we're pretty used up and thinned out, too."

That was no lie, either. The faces round the table in Phlegethon's tiny ward-room were puffy and hollow-eyed with fatigue; Keppel, the spruce naval officer of a week ago, looked like a scarecrow with his unshaven cheeks and matted hair, his uniform coat cut and torn and the epaulette burned away; Charlie Johnson, with his arm in a blood-stained sling, was dozing and waking like a clockwork doll; even Stuart, normally the liveliest of fellows, was sitting tuckered out, with his head in his hands, his half-cleaned revolver on the table before him. (I can see it now, with the little brass ram-rod sticking out of the barrel, and a big black moth perched on the foresight, rubbing its feelers.) Only Brooke was still as offensively chipper as ever, clean-shaven and alert, for all that his eyes looked like streaky bacon; he glanced round at us, and I could guess that he was thinking: this pack can't follow much longer.

"However," says he, grinning slyly, "we ain't as used up as all that, are we? I reckon there's three days' energy left in every man here - and four in me. I tell you what … " he squared his elbows on the table " … I'm going to give a dinner-party tomorrow night - full dress for everyone, of course - on the eve of what is going to be our last fight against these rascals—"

"Bismillah! I'd like tae believe that," says Paitingi.

"Well, our last on this expedition, anyway," cries Brooke. "It's bound to be - either we wipe them up or they finish us - but that ain't going to happen, not after the drubbings we've given 'em already. I've got a dozen of champagne down below, and we'll crack 'em to our crowning success, eh?"

"Wouldn't it be better to keep 'em for afterwards?" says Keppel, but at this Stuart raised his head and shook it, smiling wearily.

"Might not all be here by then. This way, everyone's sure of a share beforehand - that's what you said the night before we went in against the Lingas in the old Royalist, ain't it, J.B.? Remember - the nineteen of us, five years ago? 'There's no drinking after death.' By Jove, though - there ain't many of the nineteen left …

"Plenty of new chums, though," says Brooke quickly, "and they're going to sing for their supper, just the way we did then, and have done ever since." He shoved Charlie Johnson's nodding head to and fro. "Wake up, Charlie! It's singing night, if you want your dinner tomorrow! Come on, or I'll shove a wet sponge down your back! Sing, laddie, sing! George has given you the lead!"

Johnson blinked and stammered, but Brooke gave tongue with "Here's a health to the King, and a lasting peace", thumping the table, and Charlie came in, croaking, on the lines "So let us drink while we have breath For there's no drinking after death" and carried on solo to the end, goggling like an owl, while Brooke beat the table and cried, good boy, Charlie, sick 'em, pup. The others looked embarrassed, but Brooke rounded on Keppel, badgering him to sing; Keppel didn't want to, at first, and sat looking annoyed and sheepish, but Brooke worked away at him, full of high spirits, and what else was the chap to do? So he sang "Spanish Ladies"— he sang well, I'm bound to say, in a rolling bass - and by this time even the tiredest round the table were grinning and joining in the chorus, with Brooke encouraging and keeping time, and watching us like a hawk. He sang "The Arethusa" himself, and even coaxed Paitingi, who gave us a psalm, at which Charlie giggled hysterically, but Keppel joined in like thunder, and then Brooke glanced at me, nodding quietly, so I found myself giving 'em "Drink, puppy, drink", and they stamped and thumped to make the cabin shiver.

It was a shameful performance - so forced and false it was disgusting, this jolly lunatic putting heart into his men by making 'em sing, and everyone hating it. But they sang, you'll notice, and me along with 'em, and at the finish Brooke jumps up and cries:

"Come, that's none so bad! We'll have a choir yet. Spy-boats will lead tomorrow - 5 a.m. sharp, then Dido's pinnace, the two cutters, gig, Jolly Bachelor, then the small boats. Dinner at seven, prompt. Good night, gentlemen!"

And off he went, leaving us gawking at each other; then Keppel shook his head, smiling, and sighed, and we dispersed, feeling pretty foolish, I dare say. I found myself wondering why they tolerated Brooke and his schoolboy antics, which were patently pathetic; why did they humour him? - for that is what it was. It wasn't fear, or love, or even respect; I suspect they felt it would somehow be mean to disappoint him, and so they fell in with every folly, whether it was charging a pirate prau in a jolly-boat or singing shanties when they ought to have been nursing their wounds or crawling away to sink into an exhausted sleep. Yes, they did humour him - God only knows why. Mind you, mad and dangerous as he was, I'm bound to say he was difficult to refuse, in anything.

I managed it later that night, though, admittedly not to his face. I was snug under the Jolly Bachelor's ladder when the pirates came sneaking silently out of the mist in sampans and tried to take us by surprise. They were on the deck and murdering our lookouts before we were any the wiser, and if it hadn't been that the deck was littered with tacks to catch their bare feet, that would have been the end of the ship, and everyone aboard, including me. As it was, there was the deuce of a scrap in the dark, with Brooke yelling for everyone to pitch in - I burrowed closer into cover myself, clutching my pistol, until the hurroosh had died down, when I scuttled up quickly and blundered about, glaring and letting on that I'd been there all the time. I did yeoman work helping to heave dead pirates overside, and then we stood to until daylight, but they didn't trouble us again.

Next day it began to rain like fury, and we set off up the Skrang into a perfect sheet of water which cut visibility almost to nothing and pitted the river like small-shot. All day we toiled slowly into the murk, with the river narrowing until it was a bare furlong wide, and devil an enemy did we see. I sat sodden in Paitingi's spy-boat, reduced to the nadir of misery, baling constantly until my whole body cried out with one great ache; by dark I was dropping with fatigue - and then, when we anchored, damn my skin if we didn't have to shave and wash and dig out clean duds for Brooke's dinner-party on the Jolly Bachelor. Looking back, I can't imagine why I put up with it - I don't attempt to fathom the minds of the others; they all dressed in their best, soaking wet, and I couldn't show unwilling, could I? We assembled in the Jolly Bachelor's cabin, steaming and dripping, and there was the table laid for dinner, silver, glass, and all, with Brooke in his blue swallow-tail and brass buttons, welcoming us like a bloody governor-general, taking wine with Keppel, waving us to our seats, and frowning because the turtle soup was cold.

I don't believe this is happening, thinks I; it's all a terrible nightmare, and Stuart isn't sitting opposite me in his black broadcloth with his string-cravat tied in a fancy bow, and this ain't real champagne I'm drinking by the light of reeking slush-lamps, with everyone crowded round the board in the tiny cabin, and they're not listening breathlessly while I tell 'em about getting Alfred Mynn leg-before at Lord's. There aren't any pirates, really, and we're not miles up some stinking creek in Borneo, drinking the loyal toast with the thunder bellowing outside and the rain gushing down the companion, and Brooke clipping cigars and passing them round while the Malay steward puts the port on the table. I couldn't bring myself to believe that all round us was a fleet of sampans and spy-boats, loaded with Dyaks and blue jackets and other assorted savages, and that tomorrow we would be reliving the horror of Patusan all over again; it was all too wild and confused and unreal, and although I must have accounted for a bottle of warm champagne, and about a pint of port, I got up from that table as sober as I sat down.

It was real enough in the morning, though - the morning of that last dreadful day on the Skrang river. The weather had cleared like magic just before dawn, and the narrow waterway ahead was gleaming brown and oily in the sunlight between its olive walls of jungle. It was deathly hot, and for once the forest was comparatively silent, but there was an excitement through the fleet that you could almost feel beating in waves through the muggy air; it wasn't only that Brooke had predicted that this would be the last battle - I believe there was a realization too that if we didn't reach conclusions with the pirates lurking some-where ahead, our expedition would come to a halt through sheer exhaustion, and there would be nothing for it but to turn downriver again. It bred a kind of wild desperation in the others; Stuart was shivering with impatience as he dropped beside me into Paitingi's spy-boat, drawing his pistol and shoving it back in his belt, then doing the same thing over again; even Paitingi, in the bow, was taut as a fiddle-string, snapping at the Lingas and twitching at his red beard. My own condition I leave you to guess.

Our boy hero, of course, was his usual jaunty self. He was perched in the Jolly Bachelor's bows as our spy-boat shoved off, straw hat on head, issuing his orders and cracking jokes fit to sicken you.

"They're there, old 'un," cries he to Paitingi. "All right, I dare say you can't smell 'em, but I can. We'll fetch up with them by afternoon at latest, probably sooner. So keep a sharp lookout, and don't get more than a pistol-shot ahead of the second spy, d'you hear?"

"Aye, aye," says Paitingi. "I don't like it, J.B. It's gey quiet. Suppose they've taken to the side-creeks - scattered and hid?"

"Sulu Queen can't hide," calls Brooke. "She's bound to hold to the mainstream, and that's going to shoal on her before long. She's the quarry, mind - take her, and the snake's head is cut clean off. Here, have a mango." He threw the fruit to Paitingi. "Never you mind the side-creeks; the instant you sight that steam-brig, up with a blue light and hold your station. We'll do the rest."

Paitingi muttered something about ambush in the narrow water, and Brooke laughed and told him to stop croaking. "Remember the first chap you ever fought against?" cries he. "Well, what's a parcel of pirates compared to him? Off you go, old lad - and good luck."

He waved as we shot away, the paddles skimming us into midstream and up to the first bend, with the other spies lining out in our wake and the Dido's pinnace and Jolly Bachelor leading the heavier craft behind. I asked Stuart what Brooke had meant about the first chap Paitingi had fought, and he laughed.

"That was Napoleon. Didn't you know? Paitingi was in the Turkish army at the Battle of the Pyramids³¹ - weren't you, gaffer?"

"Aye," growls Paitingi. "And got weel beat for my pains. But I tell ye, Stuart, I felt easier that day than I do this." He fidgeted in the bow, leaning on the carronade to stare upriver under his hand. "There's something no' canny; I can feel it. Listen."

We strained our ears above the swish of the paddles, but except for the cries of birds in the forest, and the hum of the insect clouds close inshore, there was nothing. The river was empty, and by the sound of it the surrounding jungle was, too.

"Don't hear anything out o' the way," says Stuart. "Precisely," says Paitingi. "No war-gongs - yet we've heard them every day for this week past. What ails them?" "Dunno," says Stuart. "But ain't that a good sign?" "Ask me this evening," says Paitingi. "I hope I'll be able to tell ye then."

His uneasiness infected me like the plague, for I knew he had as good a nose as any fighting-man I'd ever struck, and when such a one starts to twitch, look out. I had lively recollections of Sergeant Hudson sniffing trouble in the bleak emptiness of the Jallalabad road - by God, he'd been right, against all the signs, and here was Paitingi on the same tack, cocking his head, frowning, standing up from time to time to scan the impenetrable green, glancing at the sky, tugging his whiskers - it got on my nerves, and Stuart's, too, yet there wasn't sight nor smell of trouble as we glided up the silent river in the bright sunshine, slow mile after slow mile, through the brilliant bends and reaches, and always the stream brown and empty as far as we could see ahead. The air was empty and still; the sound of a mugger slipping with its heavy splash off a sandbank had us jumping up, reaching for our pistols; then a bird would screech on the other shore, and we would start round again, sweating cold in that steamy loneliness - I don't know any place where you feel as naked and exposed as an empty jungle river, with that vast, hostile age-old forest all about you. Just like Lord's, but no pavilion to run to.

Paitingi stood it for a couple of hours and then lost patience. He had been using his glass to rake the mouths of the little, overhung side-creeks that we passed every now and then, dim, silent tunnels into the wild; now he glowered back at the second spy-boat, a hundred yards in our wake, and-snapped an order to the paddlers to increase their stroke. The spy surged ahead, trembling beneath us; Stuart looked back anxiously at the widening gap.

'J B. said not more than a pistol-shot ahead," says he, and Paitingi rounded on him.

"If J.B. has his way, we'll spring the trap wi' our whole fleet! Then where'll he be? D'ye think he kens more about handling a spy-boat than I do?"

"But we're to hold steady till we come up with the Sulu Queen—"

"Shaitan take the Sulu Queen! She's lying up in one o' these creeks, whatever J.B. likes tae think. They're not ahead of us, I tell ye - they're either side! Sit doon, damn ye!" he snaps at me. "Stuart! Pass the word - port paddles be ready to back water at my signal. Keep the stroke going! We'll win him a half-mile of water to manoeuvre in, if we're lucky! Steady - and wait for my word!"

I couldn't make anything of this, but it was plainly dreadful news. By what he said, we were inside the jaws of the trap already, and the woods full of hidden fiends waiting to pounce, and he was forging ahead to spring the ambush before the rest of our boats got well inside. I sat gagging with fear, staring at that silent wall of leaves, at the eddies swirling round the approaching bend, at Paitingi's broad back as he crouched over the prow. The river had narrowed sharply in the last mile, to a bare hundred paces or so; the banks were so close I imagined I could see through the nearest trees, into the dark shadows beyond - was there something stirring there, could I hear some awful presence? - the spy-boat was fairly flying round the bend, and behind us the river was empty for a couple of furlongs, we were alone, far ahead

"Now!" roars Paitingi, dropping to his knees and clutching the gunwales, and as the port paddlers backed water the spy-boat spun crazily on her heel, her bow rearing clear out of the water so that we had to cling like grim death to avoid being hurled out. For an awful instant she hung suspended at a fearful angle, with the water a good six feet beneath my left elbow, then she came smashing down as though she would plunge to the bottom, wallowed with the water washing over her sides - and we were round and driving downriver, with Paitingi yelling to us to bale for our lives.

The water was ankle deep as I scooped at it with my hat, dashing it over the side; the paddlers were gasping like leaky engines, the current helping to scud us along at a frightening pace - and then there was a yell from Paitingi, I raised my head to look, and saw a sight that froze me in my seat.

A hundred yards ahead, downriver, something was moving from the tangle of the bank - a raft, poling slowly out on the bosom of the stream, crowded with men. At the same moment there was a great rending, tearing noise from the jungle on the opposite bank; the forest seemed to be moving slowly outward, and then it detached itself into one huge tree, a mass of tangled green, falling ponderously with a mighty splash to block a third of the stream on our port bow. From the jungle either side came the sudden thunderous boom of war-gongs; behind the first raft another was setting out; there were small canoes sprouting like black fingers from the banks ahead, each loaded with savages - where a moment since the river had been silent and empty it was now vomiting a horde of pirate craft, baying their war-cries, their boats alive with steel and yelling, cruel faces, cutting us off, swarming towards us. There were others on the banks on our beams, archers and blowpipemen; the whist-whist-whist of shafts came lancing towards us.

"There - ye see?" roars Paitingi. "Whaur's your clever J.B. now, Stuart? Sulu Queen, says he! Aye, weel, he's got clear water tae work in - small thanks to himsel'! These sons o' Eblis looked to trap a fleet - they've got one wee spy-boat!" And he stood up, roaring with laughter and defiance. "Drive for the gap, steersman! On, on! Charge!"

There are moments in life which defy description - in my black moods they seem to have occurred about once a week, and I have difficulty distinguishing them. The last minutes at Balaclava, the moment when the Welsh broke at Little Hand Rock and the Zulus came bounding over our position, the breaching of Piper's Fort gate, the neck-ornothing race for Reno's Bluff with the Sioux braves running among the shattered rabble of Custer's Seventh - I've stretched my legs in all of those, knowing I was going to die, and being damned noisy at the prospect. But in Paitingi's spy-boat running was impossible - so, depressingly, was surrender. I observed those flat, evil faces sweeping down on us behind their glittering lance-heads and kampilans, and decided they weren't open to discussion; there was nothing for it but to sit and blaze away in panic - and then a red-hot pain shot through my left ribs, and I looked down bewildered to see a sumpitan shaft in my side. Yellow, it was, with a little black tuft of lint on its butt, and I pawed at it, whimpering, until Stuart reached over and wrenched it clear, to my considerable discomfort. I screamed, twisted, and went over the side.

I dare say it was that that saved me, although I'm blessed if I know how. I took a glance at the official account of the action before I wrote this, and evidently the historian had a similar difficulty in believing that anyone survived our little water-party, for he states flatly that every man jack of Paitingi's crew was slaughtered. He notes that they had got too far ahead, were cut off by a sudden ambush of rafts and praus, and by the time Brooke's fleet had come storming up belatedly to the rescue, Paitingi and his followers had all been killed - there's a graphic account of twenty boats jammed together in a bloody melée, of thousands of pirates yelling on the bank, of the stream running crimson, with headless corpses, wreckage, and capsized craft drifting downstream - but never a word about poor old Flashy struggling half-foundered, dyeing the water with his precious gore, spluttering "Wait, you callous bastards, I'm sinking!" Quite hurtful, being ignored like that, although I was glad enough of it at the time, when I saw how things were shaping.

It was, I've since gathered, touch and go that Brooke's whole fleet wasn't wiped out; indeed, if it hadn't been for Paitingi's racing ahead, sacrificing his spy-boat like the gallant idiot he was, the pirates would have jumped the whole expedition together, but as it was, Brooke had time to dress his boats into line and charge in good order. It was a horrid near-run thing, though; Keppel confessed later that when he saw the fighting horde that was waiting for him, "for a moment I was at a loss what steps to take"— and there was one chap, treading water upstream with a hole in his belly and roaring for succour, who shared his sentiments exactly. I was viewing the action from t'other side, so to speak, but it looked just as confused and interesting to me as it did to Keppel. I was busy, of course, holding my wounded guts with one hand and clutching at a piece of wreckage with the other, trying to avoid being run down by boats full of ill-disposed persons with swords, but as I came up for the tenth time, I saw the last seconds of Paitingi's spy-boat, crashing into the heart of the enemy, its bow-gun exploding to tear a bloody cleft through the crew of a raft.

Then the pirate wave swept over them; I had a glimpse of Stuart, stuck like a pin-cushion with sumpitan darts, toppling into the water; of a Linga swordsman clearing a space with his kampilan swinging in a shining circle round his head; of another in the water, stabbing fiercely up at the foes above him; of the steersman, on hands and knees on the raft, being hacked literally into bits by a screaming crowd of pirates; of Paitingi, a bristling, red giant, his turban gone, roaring "Allah-il-Allah!" with a pirate swung up in his huge arms - and then there was just the shell of the spy-boat, overturned, in the swirling, bloody water, with the pirate boats surging away from it, turning to meet the distant, unseen enemy downstream.

I didn't have time to see any more. The water was roaring in my ears, I could feel my strength ebbing away through the tortured wound in my side, my fingers slipping from their grip on the wreckage, the sky and treetops were spinning slowly overhead, and across the surface of the water something - a boat? a raft? - was racing down on me with a clamour of voices. Air and water were full of the throbbing of war-gongs, and then I was hit a violent blow on the head, something scraped agonizingly over my body, forcing me down, choking with water, my ears pounding, lungs bursting … And then, as old Wild Bill would have said: "Why, boys - I drowned!"³²

For a moment I thought I was back in Jallalabad, in that blissful awakening after the battle. There was a soft bed under me, sheets at my chin, and a cool breeze; I opened my eyes, and saw that it came from a porthole opposite me. That wasn't right, though; no portholes in the Khyber country - I struggled with memory, and then a figure blocked the light, a huge figure in green sarong and sleeveless tunic, with a krees in his girdle, and fingering his earring as he stared down at me, his heavy brown face as hard as a curling-stone.

"You should have died," says Don Solomon Haslam.

Just what an awakening invalid needs, of course, but it brought the nightmare flooding back- the reeking waters of the Skrang, the overwhelmed spy-boat, the dart in my side - I was conscious of a dull ache in my ribs, and of bandages. But where the devil was I? In the Sulu Queen, sure enough, but even in that dizzy moment of waking I was aware that her motion was a slow, steady heave, there were no jungle noises, and the air blowing from the port was salt. I tried to speak, and my voice came in a parched croak.

"What … what am I doing here?"

"Surviving," says he. "For the moment." And then to my amazement he thrust his face into mine and snarled: "But you couldn't die decently, could you? Oh no, not you! Hundreds perished in that river - but you survive! Every man of Paitingi's - good men - Lingas who fought to the last - Paitingi himself, who was worth a thousand. All lost! But not you, blubbering in the water where my men found you! They should have left you to drown. I should have - bah!" He wheeled away, fuming.

Well, I hadn't expected him to be pleased to see me, but even in my confused state so much passion seemed a mite unreasonable. Was I delirious? - but no, I felt not bad, and when I tried to ease myself up on the pillows I found I could do it without much discomfort; one doesn't care to be raved at lying down, you understand. A hundred questions and fears were jumbled in my mind, but the first one was:

"How long have I been here?"

"Two weeks." He eyed me malevolently. "And if you wonder where, the Sulu Queen is approximately ten south seventy east, heading west-sou'-west." Then, bitterly: "What the devil else was I to do, once those fools had hauled you from the water? Let you die of gangrene - treat you as you deserved? Ha! That was the one thing I could not do!"

Being still half-stupid with prolonged unconsciousness, I couldn't make much of this. The last time I'd seen him, we'd been boon-companions, more or less, but since then he'd tried to murder me, kidnapped my wife, and turned out to be the arch-pirate of the Orient, which shed a different light on things. I tried to steady my whirling thoughts, but couldn't. Anyway, he was obviously in a fearful wax because he'd felt obliged, God only knew why, not to let me perish of blow-pipe poison. Difficult to know what to say, so I didn't.

"You can guess why you are alive," says he. "It is because of her - whose husband you were."

For a dreadful second I thought he meant she was dead; then my mind leaped to the conclusion that he meant he had taken her from me, and done the dirty deed on her - and at the very thought of my little Elspeth being abused by this vile nigger pirate, this scum of the East, my confusion and discretion vanished together in rage.

"You bloody liar! I am her husband! She's my wife! You kidnapped her, you filthy pirate, and—"

"Kidnapped? Saved, you mean!" His eyes were blazing. "Rescued her from a man - no, from a brute - who wasn't fit to kiss her feet! Oh, no - it's not kidnapping to take a pearl from a swine, who fouls her with his very touch, who treats her as a mere concubine, who betrays her—" "It's a lie! I—"

"Didn't I see you with my own eyes? Coupling with that slut in my own library—"

"Drawing-room—"

"—that harlot Lade? Isn't your name a byword in London for debauchery and vice, for every kind of lewdness and depravity?"

"Not every kind! I never—"

"A rake, a cheat, a bully and a whoremonger- that's what I rescued that sweet, brave woman from. I took her from the hell of life with you—"

"You're mad!" I croaked. "She never said it was hell! She loves me, curse you - as I love her—"

His hand swept across my face, knocking me back on my pillow, and I had sense enough to stay there, for he was a fearsome sight, shaking with fury, his mouth working.

"What did you ever know of love?" cries he. "Let me hear that word on your lips again, and I'll have them sewn together, with a scorpion in your mouth!"

Well, when he put it like that, I saw there was no point in arguing. I lay there quaking, while he mastered himself and went on, more quietly:

"Love is not for animals like you. Love is what I felt - for the first time - on an afternoon at Lord's, when I saw her. I knew then, as surely as I know there is One God, that there could be no other woman, that I should worship her for life, a life that would be death without her. Yes, I knew then - what love was."

He let out a great breath, and he was trembling. By George, thinks I, we've got a maniac here - he means it. He heaved a minute, and then went on, like a poet on opium.

"She filled my life from that moment; there was nothing el ;e. But it was a pure love - she would have been sacred to n e, had she been married to a husband truly worthy of her. E it when I saw the truth - that she was shackled to the basest kind of brute"— he shot me a withering look —"I asked why my life, and hers (which was infinitely more precious) should be ruined by a stupid convention which, after all, meant nothing to me. Oh, I was a gentleman, trained in the English way, at an English school - but I was also a prince of the House of Magandanu, descended from the Prophet himself- and I was a pirate, as you of the West know the word. Why should I respect your customs; when I could offer her a destiny as high above life with you as the stars are above the slime, why should I hesitate? I could make her a queen, instead of the chattel of a drunken, licentious bully who had only married her at pistol point!"

"That ain't fair! She was damned glad to get me, and if that poxy little varmint Morrison says other - don't hit me! I'm wounded!"

"Not by one word, by one gesture, did she complain! Her loyalty, like everything else about her, is perfect - even to a worm like you! But I knew, and I determined to save her for a love worthy of her. So I worked, carefully, patiently, for both our sakes - it was torture to impose on that sweet innocence, but I knew that in time she would bless me for the subterfuge. I was ready to sacrifice anything - millions, what were they to me? I, who was half of the East, half of the West, was prepared to put myself beyond the law, beyond civilization, for her sake. I would give her a throne, a fortune - and true love. For I still have my kingdom of the East, and she shall share it with me."

Well, you won't want me as British Ambassador, thinks I, but I kept mum, tactfully. He paced about the cabin, looking masterful as he prated on.

"So I took her, and I fought for her - in the face of that vicious madman Brooke! Oh, he'll come too often to Borneo, that one, with his lying piety and promises - he that is the bloodiest pirate of us all! No doubt he made a fine pretext of rescuing her, so that he could come again and harry and burn us, butcher our people—" He was working into a fine froth now, waving his hands. "What's it to him, how we live? What sacred right has he to war on us and our ways? I'd have eaten his fleet alive on the Skrang, but for Paitingi! As it was, I slipped him in the creeks and came downriver, with this one vessel. He thinks he's finished Suleiman Usman, does he? Let him come to Maludu, when I return there!"

He paced some more, chewing over Brooke, and then rounded on me. "But he doesn't matter-not now. You do. You're here, and you're inopportune." He paused, considering me. "Yes … you should have died."

I wished to God he'd stop harping on that - you could see where it was going to lead. This wasn't Don Solomon of Brook Street any longer, not so you'd notice - this was a beastly aborigine who went plundering about in ships festooned with skulls, and I was an inconvenient husband, 'nuff said. In addition, he clearly had more screws loose than a drunk sapper - all that moonshine about worshipping Elspeth, not being able to live without her, making her a queen - well! It would have been laughable if it hadn't been true; after all, when a man kidnaps a married woman and fights a war over her, it ain't just a passing fancy.

But one thing was plain - his wooing hadn't prospered, or I'd have been overside long ago, with a bag of coal round my ankles. Why the hell couldn't he have rattled her in London, and got tired of it, and we'd have been spared all this? But here we were, in a pickle whose delicacy made my flesh crawl. I considered, took a deep breath, and tried not to talk shrill.

"Well, now, Don Solomon," says I, "I take note of what you've said, and - ah - I'm glad we've had this little prose together, you know, and you've told me - um - what you think. Yes - you've put it very fair, and while I can't but deplore what you've done, mind - well, I understand your feelings, as any man of sensibility must - and I'm that,. I hope - and I see you were deeply affected by … well, by my wife - and I know what it's like, of course - I mean, she's a little stunner, we agree - heavens yes," I babbled on, while he gaped in bewilderment, small blame to him.

"But you've got it quite wrong you know; we're a devoted couple, Elspeth - Mrs Flashman - and I, ask anyone - never a cross word - sublimely happy—"

"And that whore Lade?" he snarled. "Is that your devotion?"

"Why, my dear chap! The merest accident - I mean, that I noticed her at all - pure jealousy at seeing my wife flattered by your attentions - a man of your address, I mean, polished manners, charming, stinking rich - no, no, I mean, I found myself quite cut out - and Mrs Lade, well … heat of the moment - you know yourself how one can be carried away—"

It was touch and go that he didn't savage me on the bed, considering the drivel I was talking - but it sometimes works, rubbish with a ring of sincerity, when you're stuck with a hopeless case. It didn't here; he strode to the bed, seized me by the shoulder, and drew back his great fist.

"You infernal liar!" cries he. "D'you think you can gammon me with your snivelling?"

"I'm not!" I bawled. "I love Elspeth, and she loves me, and you know it! She don't want you!" I'd done it now, I could see, so I went roaring on: "That's why you wish I'd died - because you know if you harm me now, your last hope of winning her is gone! Don't - I'm an invalid - my wound!"

His fingers bit my shoulder like a vice; suddenly he flung me back and straightened up, with an ugly laugh.

"So that's what you're counting on! Why, you miserable toad, she doesn't even know you're here. I could drop you overboard, and she'd never know. Aye, you go pale at—"

"I don't believe you! If that were true you'd have done me in already - you tried it in Singapore, rot you, with your foul black gangsters!"

He stared at me. "I've no notion what you're talking about," and he sounded sincere, curse him. "I don't expect you to understand it, Flashman, but the reason you're still alive is that I'm a man of honour. When I take her to her throne - and I shall - it will be with a clean hand, not one fouled with a husband's blood - even a husband like you.

That was reassuring enough to banish my immediate terrors; I even recovered sufficiently for a cautious sneer.

"Talk's cheap, Solomon. Honour, says you - but you ain't above wife-stealing, and cheating at cricket - oh, aye, breaking a chap's wicket when you've laid him out foul! If you're such a man of honour," I taunted him, "you'd let Elspeth choose for herself - but you daren't, 'cos you know she'd plump for me, warts and all!"

He stood stock still, just looking at me, without expression, fingering his earring again. Then after a moment, he nodded, slowly.

"Yes," says he quietly. "It must come to that, must it not? Very well."

He threw open the door, and barked an order, glancing oddly at the while we waited. Feet sounded - and I felt my heart begin to thump uncontrollably as I sat up in bed; God knows why, but I was suddenly dizzy - and then she was there in the doorway, and for a moment I thought it was someone else - this was some Eastern nymph, in a clinging sarong of red silk, her skin tanned to the gold of honey, whereas Elspeth's was like milk. Her blonde hair was bleached almost white by the sun - and then I saw those magnificent blue eyes, round with bewilderment like her lips, and I heard a sob coming out of me: "Elspeth!"

She gave a little scream, and stumbled in the doorway, putting her hand to her eyes and then she was running to my arms, crying "Harry! Oh, Harry!" flinging herself at me, her mouth against mine, clutching my head in wild hands, sobbing hysterically, and I forgot Solomon, and the ache of my wound, and fear, and danger, as I pressed that lovely softness against me and kissed and kissed her until she went suddenly limp, and slid from my arms to the floor in a dead faint. It was only then, as I scrambled out, clutching my bandaged side, that I realized the door was closed, and Solomon was gone.

I tried to haul her up to the bed, but I was still weak as a kitten from my wound and confinement, and couldn't manage it. So I had to be content with pawing and fondling until her eyes fluttered open, and then she clung to me, muttering my name, and after we had babbled thankfully for a few minutes and exchanged our news, so to speak, we got down to the reunion in earnest - and in the middle of it, while I was just wondering if my wound was about to come asunder, she suddenly pulled her mouth free of mine and cried:

"Harry - what is Mrs Leo Lade to you?"

"Hey?" I yelped. "What? What d'ye mean? Who's she? I mean—"

"You know her very well! The Duke's … companion, who paid you such singular attention. What is between you?"

"Good God! At a time like this - Elspeth, my dear, what has Mrs Lade to do with anything?"

"That is what I am asking. No, desist - Don Solomon said … hinted … of an attachment. Is this true?"

You wouldn't credit it here she was, on a pirate ship, having been abducted, shanghaied round half the East, through war, ambush, and confounded head-hunters, reunited with her long-lost spouse, and just as he was proving his undying affection at grievous risk to his health, her jealous little pea-brain was off on another tack altogether. Unbelievable - and most unflattering. But I was equal to the occasion.

"Solomon!" cries I. "That viper! Has he been trying to poison your mind against me with his lies? I might have guessed it! Not content with stealing you, the villain traduces me to you - don't you see? He'll stop at nothing to win you away from me."

"Oh." She frowned up at me - God, she was lovely, if half-witted. "You mean he - oh, how could he be so base? Oh, Harry"— and she began to cry, trembling all down her body in a way that almost brought me to the boil —"all the rest I could bear - the fear and shame and … and all of it, but the thought that you might have been untrue … as he suggested - ah, that would have broken my heart! Tell me it wasn't so, my love!"

"Course it wasn't! Good Lord, that raddled pudding Lade! How could you think it? I despise the woman - and as though I could even look at her, or any other, when I have my own perfect, angelic, Aphrodite—" I tried a couple of cautious thrusts as I saw the suspicion dying in her eyes, but since attack's the best form of defence I suddenly stopped, frowning thunderously. "That foul kite Solomon! He will stoop to any depth. Oh, dearest, I have been mad these past weeks - the thought of you in his clutches." I gulped in manly torment. "Tell me - in your ordeal - did he … I mean - well … did he, the scoundrel?"

She was flushed with my attentions anyway, but at this she went crimson, and moaned softly, those innocent eyes brimming with tears.

"Oh, how can you ask? Would I be alive now, if … if … Oh, Harry, I cannot believe it is you, holding me safe! Oh, my love!"

Well, that was that settled (so far as it ever is with Elspeth; I've never been able to read those child-like eyes and butter-melting lips, so the devil with it), and Mrs Lade disposed of, at least until we had finished the business in hand and were lying talking in the growing dusk of the cabin. Naturally, Elspeth's story came flooding out in an excited stream, and I was listening with my mind in a great confusion, what with my weakened state, the crazy shock of our reunion, and the anxiety of our predicament - and suddenly, in the middle of describing the rations they'd fed her during her captivity, she suddenly said:

"Harry - you are sure you have not been astride Mrs Lade?"

I was so amazed she had to say it twice.

"Eh? Good God, girl, what d'you mean?"

"Have you mounted her?"

I can't think how I've kept my sanity, talking to that woman for sixty years. Of course, at this time we'd only been married for five, and I hadn't plumbed the depths of her eccentricity. I could only gargle and exclaim:

"Dammit, I've told you I haven't! And where on earth - it is shocking to use expressions of that kind!"

"Why? You use them - I heard you, at Lady Chalmers', when you were talking to Jack Speedicut, and you were both remarking on Lottie Cavendish, and whatever her husband could see in such a foolish creature, and you said you expected he found her a good mount. I dare say I was not meant to hear."

"I should think not! And I can have said no such thing - and anyway, ladies ain't meant to understand such … such vulgar words."

"The ladies who get mounted must understand them." "They ain't ladies!"

"Why not? Lottie Cavendish is. So am I, and you have mounted me - lots of times." She sighed, and nestled close, God help us.

"Well, I have not … done any such thing with Mrs Lade, so there."

"I'm so glad," says she, and promptly fell asleep.

Now, I've told you this, partly because it's all of the conversation that I remember of that reunion, and also to let you understand what a truly impossible scatterhead Elspeth was - and still is. There's something missing there; always has been, and it makes her senselessly unpredictable. (Heaven knows what idiocy she'll come out with on her deathbed, but I'll lay drunkard's odds it's nothing to do with dying. I only hope I ain't still above ground to hear it, though.) She'd been through an ordeal that would have driven most women out of their wits - not that she had many to start with - but now she was back with me, safe as she supposed, she seemed to have no notion of the peril in which we both stood; why, when Solomon's Malays took her away to her own quarters that first night, she was more concerned about the sunburn she'd taken, and if it would spoil her complexion, than about the fate Solomon might have in store for us. What can you do with a woman like that?

Mind you, there was a dead weight off my heart at having seen her, and knowing she'd come to no bodily harm. At least her captivity hadn't changed her-come to think of it, if she'd wept and raved about her sufferings, or sat numb and shocked, or been terrified of her situation, like a normal woman - she wouldn't have been Elspeth, and that would have been worse than anything, somehow.

For the next two days I was confined to my cabin, and didn't see a living soul except the Chink steward who brought my food, and he was deaf to all my demands and questions. I'd no notion what was happening, or where we were going; I knew from what Solomon had said that we were in the South Indian Ocean, and the sun confirmed that we were westering steadily, but that was all. What did Solomon intend? - the one thing that grew on me was that he wasn't likely to do me in, praise God, not now that Elspeth had seen me, for that would have scuppered any hopes he had of winning her. And that was the nub of it.

You see, lunatic though his behaviour had been, the more I thought about it the more I believed him: the blighter was really mad about her, and not just to board and scuttle her, either, but with all the pure, romantic trimmings, like Shelley or one of those chaps. Astonishing - well, I love her myself, always have, but not to put me off my food.

But Solomon had it to the point of obsession, where he'd been willing to kidnap and kill and give up civilization for her. And he'd believed that, in spite of his behaving like a bloody Barbary corsair, he could eventually woo and win her, given time. But then he'd seen her run to my arms, sobbing, and had realized it was no go; shocking blow it must have been. He'd probably been gnawing his futile passion ever since, realizing that he'd bought outlawry and the gallows for nothing. But what was he to do now? Unless he chopped us both (which seemed far-fetched, pirate and Old Etonian though he was) it seemed to me he had no choice but to set us free with apologies, and sail away, grief-stricken, to join the Foreign Legion, or become a monk, or an American citizen. Why, he'd as good as thrown up the sponge in letting Elspeth and me spend hours together alone; he'd never have done that if he hadn't given up all hope of her, surely?

He was in no hurry to repeat his generosity, however. On the third day a little Chink doctor visited me with the steward, but he didn't have a word of English, and busied himself impassively examining the sumpitan-wound in my guts - which was fairly healed, and barely ached - while remaining deaf to my demands to see Solomon. In the end I lost patience, and made for the door, roaring for attention, but at this two of the Malay crew appeared, all bulging muscles and evil phizzes, and indicated that if I didn't hold my tongue they'd hold it for me. So I did, until they'd gone, and then I set about the door with my boots, bawling for Elspeth, and calling Solomon every name I could think of-indulging my natural insolence, if you like, since I figured it was safe enough. By George, wasn't I young and innocent, though?

The response to that was nil, and an icy finger of fear traced down my back. For the past two days, with my belly still in a sling, it had seemed natural enough to be in the cabin - but now that the doctor had been, and seemed satisfied, why weren't they letting me out - or why, at least, wasn't Solomon coming to see me? Why weren't they letting me see Elspeth? Why weren't they letting me take exercise? It didn't make sense, to keep me cooped here, if he was going to let us go, and - if he was going to let us go. It suddenly rushed in on me that that was pure assumption, probably brought on by my blissful reunion with Elspeth, which had been paradise after the weeks of peril and terror. Suppose I was wrong? .

I don't know anyone who despairs faster than I do - mind you, I've had cause - and the hours that followed found me in the depths. I didn't know what to think or believe, my fears mounted steadily, and by next morning I was my normal self, in a state of abject funk. I was even drawing sinister significance from the fact that this cabin I was in was obviously in the forward part of the vessel, with the engines between me and the civilized quarters where Elspeth - and Solomon - would be. God, was he ravishing her, now that he knew he could never seduce her? Was he bargaining with her for my life, threatening to feed me to the sharks unless she buckled to with him? That was it, for certain - it's what I'd have done in his place - and I tore my hair at the thought that like as not she'd defy him; she was forever reading trashy novels in which proud heroines drew themselves upright and pointed to the door, crying: "Do your worst, sinister man; my husband would die rather than be the price of my dishonour!" Would he, by jingo? - surrender, you stupid bitch, if that's all he wants, I found myself muttering; what's another more or less? Charming husband, ain't I? Well, why not? Honour's all very well, but life matters. Besides, I'd do the same to save Elspeth, if any lustful woman threatened me. They never do, though.

With such happy thoughts, in a torture of uncertainty, I passed the days that followed - how many I'm not sure, but I guess about a week. In all that time, no one came near me except the steward, with a Malay thug to back him up - I was alone, hour after hour, night after night, in that tiny box, alternating between shivering panic and black despair - not knowing. That was the worst of it; I didn't even know what to be afraid of, and by the end of the week I was ready for anything, if it would only end my misery. It's a dangerous state to be in, as I know, now that I'm old and experienced; I didn't realize, then, that things can always get worse.

Then I saw the American ship, by chance, as I paced past my porthole. She was maybe half a mile off, a sleek black Southern Run clipper with Old Glory at her jackstaff; the morning sun was shining like silver on her topsails as they flapped from the reefs and were sheeted home. Now I'm no shellback, but I'd seen that setting a score of times, when a vessel was standing out from port - God, were we near some harbour of civilization, where the big ships ran? I hallooed for all I was worth, but of course they were too far off to hear, and then I was rummaging feverishly for matches to start a fire - anything to attract attention and bring that Yankee to my rescue. But of course I couldn't find any; I nearly broke my neck trying to squint out of the port in search of land, but there was nothing but blue rollers, and the Yankee dwindling towards the eastern horizon.

All day I sat fretting, wondering, and then in mid-afternoon I saw little native craft from my port, and a low green mainland beyond them. Gradually a beach came into view, and a few huts, and then wooden houses with steep roofs - no flags, and nothing but niggers in loin-cloths - no, there was a uniform, an unmistakable navy coat, black with gold braid, and a cocked hat, among a group on a little jetty. But there was the rumble of the Sulu Queen's cable - we were anchoring a good quarter of a mile out. Never mind, that was close enough for me; I was in a fever of excitement as I tried to figure where it might be - we'd been westering, Southern Indian Ocean, and here was a small port, still important enough for a Yankee clipper to touch. It couldn't be the Cape, with that coastline. Port Natal - surely we weren't that far west? I tried to conjure up the map of that huge sea east of Africa - of course, Mauritius! The navy coat, the niggers, the Arabi-looking small craft - they all fitted. And Mauritius was British soil.

I was trembling as I took stock. What the devil was Solomon thinking of, putting into Mauritius? Wood and water - he'd probably had no chance of either since bolting from the Skrang. And with me cooped tight, and Elspeth probably likewise, what had he to fear? But it was my chance - there'd never be another like it. I could swim the distance easily … and the lock scraped in my door at that moment.

There are split seconds when you can't afford to plan. I watched the steward setting down my tray, and without making a conscious decision I turned slowly towards the door where the Malay thug was hovering, beckoned him, and pointed, frowning, to the corner of the cabin. He advanced a pace, squinting up where I was pointing - and the next instant his courting tackle was half-way up inside his torso, impelled by my right boot, he was flying across the cabin, screaming, and Flashy was out and racing - where? There was a ladder, but I ducked past it instinctively, and tore along a short passage, the Chinese steward squealing in my rear. Round the corner - and there was a piece of open deck, Malays coiling rope, and iron doors flung wide to the sunshine and sea. As I ploughed through the startled Malays, scattering them, I had a glimpse of small craft between me and the shore, a distant jetty and palms, and then I was through those doors like a hot rivet, in an enormous dive, hitting the water with an almighty splash, gliding to the surface, and then striking out, head down, for dear life towards the distant land.

I reckon it took about ten seconds from my cabin to the water, and as many minutes before I was alongside the piles of the wharf. I was half-conscious with the exertion of my swim, and had to cling to the slimy wood while curious niggers in small boats drew up to gape at me, chattering like magpies. I looked back at the Sulu Queen, and there she was, riding peacefully, with a few native craft round her. I looked landward - there was the beach, and a fair-sized native town behind it, and a big building with a verandah and a flag-pole - it was a deuced odd-looking flag, striped and blazoned - some shipping line, perhaps. I hauled myself wearily along the piles, found a ladder, dragged myself up it, and lay panting and sodden on the wooden jetty, conscious of a small crowd forming round me. They were all niggers, in loin-cloths or white robes - some pretty Arab-looking, by their noses and head-gear. But there was the navy coat, pushing towards me, and the crowd falling back. I tried to pull myself up, but couldn't, and then the navy trousers stopped beside me, and their owner was bending down towards me. I tried to control my panting.

"I'm … a British … army officer," I wheezed. "Escaped from … that ship … pirate … " I raised my head, and the words died on my lips.

The fellow bending towards me was in full navy rig, right enough, even to the hat and epaulette - the green sash looked strange, though. But that wasn't the half of it. The face beneath the cocked hat was jet black.

I stared at him, and he stared back. Then he said something, in a language I couldn't understand, so I shook my head and repeated that I was an army officer. Where was the commandant? He shrugged, showed his yellow teeth in a grin, and said something, and the crowd giggled.

"Damn your eyes!" cries I, struggling up. "What the hell's going on here? Where's the harbour-master? I'm a British army officer, Captain Flashman, and—" I was stabbing him on the chest with my finger, and now, to my utter amazement, he struck my hand angrily aside and snapped something in his heathen lingo, right in my face! I fell back, appalled at the brute's effrontery - and then there was a commotion behind, and I looked to see a small boat ploughing up at the seaward end of the jetty, and Solomon, of all people, springing from her bows and striding towards us along the planking, a massive figure in his tunic and sarong, with a face like thunder. Right, my hearty, thinks I, this is where you receive your ration allowance, once these people realize you're a bloody pirate, and I flung out a hand to denounce him to my epauletted nigger. But before I could get a word out Solomon had seized me by the shoulder and spun me round.

"You infernal fool!" cries he. "What have you done?"

You can be sure I told him, a trifle incoherently, at the top of my voice, drawing the nigger's attention to the fact that here was the notorious pirate and brigand, Suleiman Usman, delivered into his hands, and would he mind arresting him and his ship and restoring me and my wife to liberty.

"And you can swing till the crows peck you, you kidnapping tyke!" I informed Solomon. "You're done for."

"In God's name, where d'you think you are?" His voice was shrill.

"Mauritius, ain't it?"

"Mauritius?" He suddenly pulled me aside. "You booby, this is Tamitave - Madagascar!"

Well, that startled me, I admit. It explained the nigger in uniform, I supposed, but I couldn't see it made much difference. I was saying so, when the nigger stepped up and addressed Solomon, pretty sharp, and to my amazement the Don shrugged, apologetically, as though it had been a white official, and replied in French! But it was his abject tone as much as the language that bewildered me.

"Your pardon, excellency - a most unfortunate mistake. This man is one of my crew - a little drunk, you understand. With your permission I shall take him—"

"Balderdash!" I roared. "You'll take me nowhere, you lying dago!" I swung to the nigger. "You speak French, do you? Well, so do I, and I'm no more one of his crew than you are. He's a damned pirate, who has abducted me and my wife—"

"Be quiet, you clown!" cries Solomon in English, thrusting me aside. "You'll destroy us! Leave him to me," and he began to patter to the black again, in French, but the other silenced him with a flap of his hand.

"Silence," says he, as if he were the bloody Duke. "The commandant approaches."

Sure enough, there was a file of soldiers coming from the landward end of the jetty, strapping blacks in white loin-cloths and bandoliers, with muskets at the shoulder. And behind them, carried by coolies in an open sedan, came an unbelievable figure. It is solemn truth - he was black as your boot, and he wore a turban on his head, a flowered red and yellow shirt, and a 42nd Highlanders kilt. He had sandals on his feet, a sabre at his hip, white gloves, and a rolled brolly in his hand. I've gone mad, thinks I; it's been the strain, or the sun. That thing can't be real.

Solomon was hissing urgently in my ear. "Don't say a word! Your one chance is to pretend to be one of my crew—"

"Are you mad?" says I. "After what you've done, you—"

"Please!" And unless my ears deceived me he was pleading. "You don't understand - I intend you no harm - you shall both go free - Mauritius, if I can do it safely - I swear—"

"You swear! D'you imagine I'd trust you for an instant?" And then the black's voice, speaking harsh French, cut across his reply.

"You." He was pointing at me. "You say you were a prisoner on that ship. And you are English. Is it so?"

I looked at the commandant, leaning forward from his sedan in that ludicrous Hallowe'en rig, his great ebony head cocked on one side, bloodshot eyes regarding me. As I nodded in reply to the officer's question, the commandant took a peeled mango from one of his minions and began to cram it into his mouth, juice spurting over his gloved hand and over his ridiculous kilt. He tossed the stone away, wiped his hand on his shirt, and said in careful French, in a croaking rasp:

"And your wife, you say, is also a prisoner of this man?"

"Pardon, excellency." Solomon pushed forward. "This is a great misunderstanding, as I have tried to explain. This man is of my ship's company, and is covered by my safe-conduct and trading licence from her majesty. I beg you to allow—"

"He denies it," croaked the commandant. He cleared his throat and spat comprehensively, hitting one of the soldiers on the leg. "He swam ashore. And he is English." He shrugged. "Shipwrecked."

"Oh, Christ," muttered Solomon, licking his lips.

The commandant wagged a finger the size of a black cucumber, peering at Solomon. "He is plainly not covered by your licence or safe-conduct. Nor is his wife. That licence, Monsieur Suleiman, does not exempt you from Malagassy law, as you should know. It is only by special favour that you yourself escape the fanompoana - what you call … corvée?" He gestured at me. "In his case, there is no question."

"What the dooce is he talking about?" says I to Solomon. "Where's the British consul? I've had enough—"

"There's no such thing, you fool!" Solomon was positively wringing his hands; suddenly he was a fat, frightened man. "Excellency, I implore you to make an exception - this man is not a castaway - I can swear he intended no harm in her majesty's dominions—"

"He will do none," says the commandant and jabbered curtly at the officer. "He is lost"— a phrase whose significance escaped me just then. The coolies lifted the sedan, and away it swayed, the officer barked an order, and a file of his soldiers trotted past us, their leader bawling to one of the boatmen, summoning his craft to the jetty.

"No - wait!" Solomon's face was contorted with anguish. "You idiot!" he shrieked at me, and then he started first this way and that, calling to the commandant, and then running down the jetty after the file of soldiers. The black officer laughed, indicated me, and snapped an order to two of his men. It wasn't till they grabbed my arms and began to run me off the jetty that I came to my senses; I roared and struggled, bawling for Solomon, shouting threats of what would happen to them for laying their filthy hands on an Englishman. I lashed out, and a musket-butt sprawled me half-conscious on the planking. Then they dragged me up, and one of them, his great black face blasting foul breath all over me, snapped shackles on my wrists; they seized the chain and hauled me headlong up the street, with the blacks eyeing me curiously and children running alongside, squealing and laughing.

That was how I became a captive in Madagascar.

* * *

As you know - or rather, you don't, but if you're intelligent you'll have guessed - I'm a truthful man, at least where these memoirs are concerned. I've got nothing to lie for any longer, who lied so consistently - and successfully - all my life. But every now and then, in writing, I feel I have to remind you, and myself, that what I tell you is unvarnished fact. There are things that strain belief, you see, and Madagascar was one of them. So I will only say that if, at any point, you doubt what follows, or think old Flash is telling stretchers, just go to your local libraries, and consult the memoirs of my dear old friend Ida Pfeiffer, of the elastic-sided boots, or Messrs Ellis and Oliver, or the letters of my fellow-captives, Laborde of Bombay and Jake Heppick the American shipmaster, or Hastie the missionary.³³ Then you'll realize that the utterly unbelievable things I tell you of that hellish island, straight out of "Gulliver", are simple, sober truth. You couldn't make 'em up.

Now I won't bore you by describing the shock and horror I experienced, either at the beginning, when I realized I had escaped from Solomon's frying-pan into something infinitely worse, or later, as further abominations unfolded. I'll just recount what I saw and experienced, as plain as I can.

My first thoughts, when they threw me chained and battered, into a stuffy go-down at Tamitave, were that this must be some bad dream from which I should soon awake. Then my mind turned to Elspeth; from what had passed on the jetty it had seemed that they'd been going to drag her ashore, too - for what fate I could only guess. You see, I was at a complete nonplus, quite out of my depth; once I'd had my usual little rave and blubber to myself, I tried to remember what Solomon had told me about Madagascar on the voyage out, which hadn't been much, and what I recalled was far from comforting. Wild and savage beyond description, he'd said … weird customs and superstitions … half the population in slavery … a she-monster of a queen who aped European fashions and held ritual executions by the thousand … a poisonous hatred of all foreigners - well, my present experience confirmed that, all right. But could it truly be as awful as Solomon had painted it? I hadn't believed him above half, but when I thought of that frightful nigger commandant in his bumbee tartan kilt and brolly … well.

Fortunately for my immediate peace of mind I didn't know one of the worst things about Madagascar, which was that once you were inside it, you were beyond hope of rescue. Even the most primitive native countries, in my young days, were at least approachable, but not this one; its capital, Antananarivo (Antan', to you), might as well have been on the moon. There was no appeal to outside, or even communication; no question of Pam or the Frogs or Yanks sending a gunboat, or making diplomatic representations, even. You see, no one knew about Madagascar, hardly. Barring a few pirates like Kidd and Avery in the old days, and a handful of British and French missionaries - who'd soon been cleared out or massacred - no one had visited it much except heeled-and-ready traders like Solomon, and they walked damned warily, and did their business from their own decks offshore. We'd had a treaty with an earlier Malagassy king, sending him arms on condition that he stopped slave-trading, but when Queen Ranavalona came to the throne (by murdering all her relatives) in 1828, she'd broken off all traffic with the outside world, forbidden Christianity and tortured all converts to death, revived slavery on a great scale, and set about exterminating all tribes except her own. She was quite mad, of course, and behaved like Messalina and Attila the Hun, either of whom would have taken one look at her and written to The Times, protesting.

To give you some notion of the kind of blood-stained bedlam the country was, she'd already slaughtered one-half of her subjects, say a million or so, and passed decrees providing for a wall round the whole island to keep out foreigners (it would only have had to be three thousand miles long), four gigantic pairs of scissors to be set up on the approaches to her capital, to snip invaders in two, and the building of massive iron plates from which the cannon-shots of European ships would rebound and sink them. Eccentric, what? Of course, all this was unknown to me when I landed; I began to find out about it, painfully, when they hauled me out of the cooler next morning, still - in my innocence - protesting and demanding to see my lawyer.

My French-speaking officer had disappeared, so all my entreaties earned was blows and kicks. I'd had no food or drink for hours, but now they gave me a stinking mess of fish, beans, and rice, and a leaf-spoon to eat it with. I gagged it down with the help of their vile brown rice-water, and then, despite my objections, I and a gang of other unfortunates, all black of course, were herded up through the town, heading inland.

Tamitave's not much of a settlement. It has a fort, and a few hundred wooden houses, some of them quite large, with the high-pitched Malagassy thatches. At first sight it looks harmless enough, like the people: they're black, but not Negro, I'd say, perhaps a touch of Malay or Polynesian, well-built, not bad-looking, lazy, and stupid. The folk I saw at first were poorer-class peasants, slaves, and provincials, both men and women wearing simple loin-cloths or sarongs, but occasionally we encountered one of the better-off, being toted about in a sedan - no rich or aristocratic Malagassy will walk a hundred yards, and there's a multitude of slaves, bearers, and couriers to carry 'em. The nobs wore lambas - robes not unlike Roman togas, although in Antan' itself their clothing was sometimes of the utmost outlandish extravagance, like my commandant. That's the extraordinary thing about Madagascar - it's full of parodies of the European touch gone wrong, and their native culture and customs are bizarre enough to start with, God knows.

For example, they have their markets at a distance from their villages and towns - nobody knows why. They hate goats and pigs, and will lay babies out in the street to see if their births are "fortunate" or not;³⁴ they are unique, I believe, in the whole world in having no kind of organized religion - no priests, no shrines or temples - but they worship a tree or a stone if they feel like it, or personal household gods called sampy, or charms, like the famous idol Rakelimalaza, which consists of three dirty little bits of wood wrapped in silk - I've seen it. Yet they're superstitious beyond belief, even to the extent of dispraising those things they value most, to avert jealous evil spirits, and believing that when a man is dying you must stuff his mouth with food at the last minute - mind you, that may be because they're the most amazing gluttons, and drunkards, too. But, as with so many of their practices, you sometimes feel they are just determined to be different from the rest of the world.

I noticed that the soldiers who escorted our chain-gang were of a different stamp from the rest of the people - tall, narrow-headed fellows who marched in step, to a mixture of English and French words of command. They were brutes, who thrashed us along if we lagged, and treated the populace like dirt. I learned later they were from the Queen's tribe, the Hovas, once the pariahs of the island, but now dominant by reason of their cunning and cruelty.

I've endured some horrible journeys in my time - Kabul to the Khyber, Crimea to Middle Asia, for a couple - but I can't call to mind anything worse than that march from Tamitave to Antan'. It was 140 miles, and it took us eight days of blistered feet and chafing chains, trudging along, at for food; the Hovas just kicked them aside.

To add to the horrors, we passed occasional gallows, on which victims were hung or crucified, or simply tied to die by inches. One abomination I'll never forget - five staggering skeletons yoked together at the neck by a great iron wheel. They put them in it, and turn them loose, wandering together, until they starve or break each other's necks.

The Queen's procession had passed by long before, up the rough, rock-paved furrow of the road which ran straight as a die through forest and over mountain. She had twelve thousand troops with her, I learned later, and since the Malagassy army has no system of supply or rations they had just picked the country clean, so in addition to the slaves, thousands of peasants starved to death as well.

You may wonder why they endured it. Well, they didn't, always. Over the years thousands had fled, in whole tribes and communities, to escape her tyranny, and the jungles were full of these people, living as brigands. She sent regular expeditions against them, as well as against those distant tribes who weren't Hovas; I've heard it reckoned that the slaughter of fugitives, criminals, and those whom her majesty simply disliked, amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand annually, and I believe it. (Far better, of course, than wicked colonial government by Europeans - or so the Liberals would have us believe. God, what I'd have given to get Gladstone and that pimp Asquith on the Tamitave road in the earlies; they'd have learned all they needed to know about "enlightened rule by the indigenous population". Too late now, though; nothing for it but to hire a few roughs to smash windows at the Reform Club - as though I care.)

In the meantime, I'd little sympathy to spare; my own case, as we finally approached Antan' after more than a week of tortured tramping, was deplorable. My shirt and trousers were in rags, my shoes were worn out, I was bearded and foul - but strangely enough, having plumbed the depths, I was beginning to perk up a trifle. I wasn't dead, and they weren't bringing me all this way to kill me - I was even feeling a touch of light-headed recklessness, probably with hunger. I was lifting my head again, and my recollections of the end of the march are clear enough.

We passed a great lake along the road, and the guards made us shout and sing all the way past it; I later heard it was to placate the ghost of a dissolute princess buried nearby - dissolute female royalty being Madagascar's strong suit, evidently. We crossed a great river - the Mangaro - and steaming geysers bubbling out of pools of boiling mud, before we came out on a level grass plain, and beyond it, on a great hill, we beheld Antananarivo.

It took my breath away - of course, I didn't even know what it was, then, but it was like nothing you'd expect in a primitive nigger country. There was this huge city of houses, perhaps two miles across, walled and embattled in wood, and dominated by a hill on the top of which stood an enormous wooden palace, four storeys high, with another building alongside it which seemed to be made of mirrors, for it shimmered bright as a burning-glass in the sunlight. I stared at it until I was almost blinded, but I couldn't make out what it was - and in the meantime there were other wonders closer at hand, for as we approached the city across the plain which was dotted with huts and crowded with village people, I thought I must be dreaming in the distance I could hear a military band playing, horribly flat, but there could be no doubt that the tune was "The Young May Moon"! And here, sure enough, came a regiment in full fig - red tunics, shakos, arms at the shoulder, bayonets fixed, and every man jack of them black as Satan. I stood and fairly gaped; past they went in column, throwing chests, and shaping dooced well - and at their head, God help me, half a dozen officers on horseback, dressed as Arabs and Turks. I was beyond startling now - when a couple of sedans, draped in velvet, passed by bearing black women done up in Empire dresses and feathered hats, I didn't even give 'em a second glance. They, and the rest of the crowds, were moving across the front of the city, and that was the way our guards drove us, so that we skirted the city wall until we came presently to a great natural amphitheatre in the ground, dominated by a huge cliff-Ambohipotsy, they call it, and there can be no more accursed place on earth.

There must have been close on a quarter of a million people thronging the slopes of that great hollow below the cliff - certainly more than I've ever seen in one congregation. This great tide of black humanity was gazing down to the foot of the cliff; our guards brought us up short and pointed, grinning, and looking down that vast slope of people I saw that in a clear space long narrow pits had been dug, and in the pits were scores of human beings, tied to stakes. At the end of each pit huge cauldrons were fixed, above roaring fires, and even as we watched a gong boomed out, the enormous chattering crowd fell silent, and a gang of black fiends tilted the first of the cauldrons, slowly, slowly, while the poor devils in the pits shrieked and writhed; boiling water slopped over the cauldron's lip, first in a small stream, then in a scalding cascade, surging down into the pit with a horrible sizzling cloud of steam that blotted out the view. When it cleared I saw to my horror that it only filled the pit waist deep - the victims were boiling alive by inches, while the onlookers bayed and cheered in a tumult of sound that echoed across that ghastly amphitheatre of death. There were six pits; they filled them one by one.

That was the main performance, you understand. After that, figures appeared at the top of the cliff, which was three hundred feet up, and the luckier condemned were thrown off, the crowd giving a great rising whistle as each struggling body took flight, and a mighty howl when it struck the ground below - there was particular applause if one landed in the water-pits, which were still steaming mistily with the contorted figures hanging from their stakes. They didn't just throw the condemned people down the cliff, by the way - they suspended 'em first by ropes, to let the mob have a good look, and then cut them free to drop.

I make no comment myself - because as I watched this beastly spectacle I seemed to hear the voice of my little Newgate friend in my ear —"Interesting, isn't it?"— and see again the yelling, gloating audience outside the Magpie and Stump; they were much the same, I suppose, as their heathen brethren. And if you tell me indignantly that hanging is a very different thing from boiling alive - or burning, flaying, flogging, sawing, impaling, and live burial, all of which I've seen at Ambohipotsy - I shall only remark that if these spectacles were offered in England it would be a case of "standing room only"— for the first few shows, anyway.

However, if the relation of such atrocities nauseates you,³⁵ I can only say that I swore to tell the truth of what I saw, and any qualms you may suffer were as nothing to poor old Flashy's mental distress as we were herded away from the scene of execution - I'll swear we were only there because our guards didn't want to miss it - and through one of the massive gates into Antan' town proper. Its name, by the way, means "City of a Thousand Towns", and it was as impressive at first hand as it had been from a distance. Wide, clean streets were lined by fine wooden buildings, some of them two and three storeys high (all building must be of wood, by law) and starved and shaken with terror as I was, I could not but marvel at the air of richness there was about the place. Well-stocked booths, shady avenues, neatly-robed folk bustling about their business, expensively-carved and painted sedans swaying through the streets, carrying the better sort, some in half-European clobber, others in splendid sarongs, and lambas of coloured silk. There was no making sense of it - on the one hand, the horrors I had just watched, and on the other this pleasant, airy, civilized-looking city - with Captain Harry Flashman and friends being kicked and flogged through the middle of it, and no one giving us more than a casual glance. Oh, aye - every building had a European lightning conductor.

They locked us in an airy, reasonably clean warehouse for the night, took off our fetters, and gave us our first decent meal for a week - a spicy mutton stew, bread and cheese, and more of their infernal rice-piddle. We scoffed it like wolves - a dozen woolly niggers snuffling over their bowls and one English gentleman dining with refinement, I don't think. But if it did something for my aching, filthy body, it did nothing for my spirits - this nightmare of existence seemed to have endured forever, and it was mad, incredible, out of all reason. But I must hang on - I had played cricket once, and bowled Felix; I had been to Rugby, and Horse Guards, and Buckingham Palace; I had an address in Mayfair; I had dined at White's - as a guest, granted - and strolled on Pall Mall. I wasn't just a lost soul in a lunatic black world, I was Harry Flashman, ex-11th Hussars, four medals and Thanks of Parliament, however undeserved. I must hang on - and surely, in the city I'd seen, there must be some civilized person in authority who spoke French or English, to whom I could state my case and receive the treatment that was my due as a British officer and citizen. After all, they weren't real savages, not with streets and buildings like these - a touch colourful in the way they disposed of malefactors, no doubt, and no poor relief worth a damn, but no society's perfect. I must talk to someone.

The difficulty was - who? When they turned us out next morning, we were taken in charge by a couple of black overseers, who spoke nothing but jabber; they thrust us along a narrow alley, and out into a crowded square in which there was a long platform, railed off to one side, with guards stationed at its corners, to keep the mob back. It looked like a public meeting; there were a couple of black officials on the platform, and two more seated at a small table before it. We were pushed up a flight of steps to the platform, and made to stand in line; I was still blinking from the sunlight, wondering what this might portend, as I looked out over the crowd - blacks in lambas and robes for the most part, a few knots of officers in comic-opera uniforms, plenty of sedans with wealthy Malagassies sitting under striped umbrellas. I scanned the faces of the officers eagerly; those would be the French-speakers, and I was just about to raise a halloo to attract their attention when a face near the front of the crowd caught my eye like a magnet, and my heart leaped with excitement.

He was a tall man, wide-shouldered but lean, wearing a bright embroidered shirt under a blue broadcloth coat, and with a silk scarf tied like a cravat; he and his neighbour, a portly sambo resplendent in sarong and cocked hat, were taking snuff in the local fashion, the lean chap accepting a pinch from the other's box on the palm of his hand and engulfing it with a quick flick of his tongue (it tastes beastly, I can tell you). He grimaced and raised his eyes; they met mine, and stared - they were bright blue eyes, in a face burned brown under a mane of greying hair. But there was no doubt of it - he was a white man.

"You!" I roared. "You, sir! Monsieur! Parlez-vous francais? anglais? Hindi? Latin? Bloody Greek, even? Listen to me - I must talk to you!"

One of the guards was striding forward to thrust me back, but the lean man was pushing his way through the mob, to my unutterable relief, and at a word from him to the officials he was allowed to approach the platform. He looked up at me, frowning, as I knelt down to be close to him.

"Francais?" says he.

"I'm English - a prisoner, from a boat that came in at Tamitave! In God's name, how can I get out of this? No one listens to me - they've been dragging me all over the bloody country for weeks! I must—"

"Gently, gently," says he, and at the sound of the English words I could have wept. Then: "Smile, monsieur. Smile - what is the word - broadly? Laugh, if you can - but converse quietly. It is for your own good. Now, who are you?"

I didn't understand, but I forced a ghastly grin, and told him who I was, what had happened, and my total ignorance of why I'd been brought here. He listened intently, those vivid eyes playing over my face, motioning me to speak softly whenever my voice rose - which, as you can imagine, it tended to do. All the time he was plainly avoiding glancing at my guards or the officials, but he was listening for them. When I had finished he fingered his cravat, nodding, as though I'd been telling him the latest for "Punch", and smiling pleasantly.

"Eh bien," says he. "Now attend, and not interrupt. If my English she is not perfect, I use French, but better not. No? Whatever I say, betray no amaze', do you see? Smile, if you please. Good. I am Jean Laborde, once of the Emperor's cavalry. I have been here thirteen years, I am a citizen. You do not know Madagascar?"

I shook my head, and he put back his head and laughed softly, plainly for the onlookers' benefit.

"They detest all Europe, and English especially. Since you land without permission, they treat you as naufragé - how you call? - shipwreck? Castaway? By their law - please to smile, monsieur, very much - all such persons must be made slaves. This is a slave-market. They make you a slave - forever."

The smiling brown face with its blue eyes swam in front of me; I had to hold on to the edge of the platform. Laborde was speaking again, quickly, and the smile had vanished.

"Say nothing. Wait. Wait. Do not despair. I will make inquiry. I see you again. Only wait, don't despair. Now, my friend - forgive me."

On the heels of the last word he suddenly shouted something in what I took to be Malagassy, gesturing angrily. Heads came round, my guard stooped and wrenched at my shoulder, and Laborde struck me full in the face with his open hand.

"Scelérat!" he cried. "Canaille!" He swung angrily on his heel and pushed his way back into the grinning crowd, while the guard kicked me upright and thrust me back into line. I tried to call to Laborde, but I was choked with horror and my own tears, and then one of the officials mounted a rostrum, shouting an announcement, the chatter of the crowd died away, the first of our coffle was pushed forward, and the bidding began.

No one who has not stood on the block can truly understand the horror of slavery. To be thrust up in public, before a crowd of leering niggers, waiting your turn while your fellow-unfortunates are knocked down, one by one to the highest bidder, and you stand like a beast in a pen, all dignity, manhood, even humanity gone. Aye, it's hell. It's even worse when nobody buys you.

I couldn't credit it - not even an opening bid! Imagine it —"here's Flashy, gentlemen, young and in prime fettle, no previous owners, guaranteed of sound wind, no heelbug, highly recommended by superiors and ladies of quality, well set-up when he's shaved, talks like a book, and a bugger to ride! Who'll say a hundred? Fifty? Twenty? Come, come gentlemen, the hair on his head's worth more than that! Do I hear ten? Five, then? Three? For a capital bargain with years of wear in him? Do I hear one? Not for a fellow who dismissed Felix, Pilch, and Mynn in three deliveries? Oh, well, Ikey, put him back on the shelf, and tell the knackers to come and collect him."

It was downright humiliating, especially with the bid-ding for my black companions as brisk as a morning breeze. Mind you, the thought of being bought by one of those disgusting Malagassies was revolting - still, I couldn't but feel disgruntled when they shoved me back in the ware-house alone, the Selling Plater nobody wanted. It was night before I found out the reason - for night brought Laborde, past bribed officials and guards, with soap, a gourd of water, a razor, and enough bad news CO last a lifetime.

"It is simple," says he, when he had slipped a coin to the sentry and we were locked in alone. He spoke French now, which he'd been afraid to do in public for fear of eavesdrop-pers. "I had no time to tell you. The other slaves were being sold for debt, or crime. You, as a castaway, are in effect crown property; your display on the block was a mere formality, for no one would dare to bid. You belong to the Queen - as I did, when I was shipwrecked years ago."

"But … but you ain't a slave! Can't you get away?"

"No one gets away," says he, flatly, and it was now I learned a good deal of what I've told you already - of the monstrous tyranny of Queen Ranavalona, her hatred of foreigners which had caused Madagascar to be quite cut off from the world, of the diabolical practice of "losing"— which is their word for enslaving - all strangers.

"For five years I served that terrible woman," Laborde concluded. "I am an engineer - you will have seen my lightning rods on the houses. I am also skilled in the making of armaments, and I cast cannon for her. My reward was freedom"— he laughed shortly —"but not freedom to leave. I shall never escape - nor will you, unless—" He broke off, and then hurried on. "But refresh yourself, my friend. Wash and shave, at least, while you tell me more of your own misfortune. We have little time." He glanced towards the door. "The guards are safe for the moment, but safety lasts a short while in Madagascar."

So I told him my tale in full, while I washed and shaved by the flickering light of his lantern, and sponged the filth from the shreds in which I was clothed. While I talked I got a good look at him - he was younger than I'd thought, about fifty, and almost as big as I, a handsome, decent-looking cove, fast and active, but plainly as nervous as a cat; he was forever starting at sounds outside, and when he talked it was in an urgent whisper.

"I shall inquire about your wife," says he when I'd done. "They will have brought her ashore almost certainly - they lose no chance of enslaving foreigners. This man Solomon I know of - he trades in guns and European goods, in exchange for Malagassy spices, balsam, and gums. He is tolerated, but he will have been powerless to protect your lady. I shall find out where she is, and then - we shall see. It may take time, you understand; it is dangerous. They are so suspicious, these people - I run great risk by coming to see you, even."

"Then why d'you do it?" says I, for I'm inclined to be leery of gifts brought at peril to the giver; I was nothing to him, after all. He muttered something about befriending a fellow-European, and the comradeship of men-at-arms, but I wasn't fooled. Kindness might be one of his motives, but there were others, too, that he wasn't telling about, or I was much mistaken. However, that could wait.

"What'll they do with me?" I asked, and he looked me up and down, and then glanced away, uneasily.

"If the Queen is pleased with you, she may give you a favoured position - as she did with me." He hesitated. "It is for this reason I help you to make yourself presentable - you are very large and … personable. Since you are a soldier, and the army is her great passion, it is possible that you will be employed in its instruction - drilling, manoeuvring, that kind of thing. You have seen her soldiers, so you are aware that they have been trained by European methods - there was a British bandmaster here, many years ago, under the old treaty, but nowadays such windfalls are rare. Yes … " he gave me that odd, wary glance again, "your future could be assured - but I beg of you, as you value your life, be careful. She is mad, you see - if you give the least offence, in any way, or if she suspects you - even the fact that I, a fellow-foreigner, have spoken to you, could be sufficient, which is why I struck you publicly today …

He was looking thoroughly scared, although I felt instinctively he wasn't a man who scared easy. "If you displease her - then it will be the perpetual corvée - the forced labour. Perhaps even the pits, which you saw yesterday." He shook his head. "Oh, my friend, you do not even begin to understand. That happens daily here. Rome under Nero - it was nothing!"

"But in God's name! Can nothing be done? Why don't they … make away with her? Haven't you tried to escape, even?"

"You will see," says he. "And please, do not ask such questions - do not even think them. Not yet." He seemed to be on the point of saying more, but decided not to. "I will speak of you to Prince Rakota - he is her son, and as great an angel as his mother is a devil. He will help you if he can - he is young, but he is kind. If only he … but there! Now, what can I tell you? The Queen speaks a little French, a few of her courtiers and advisers also, so when you encounter me hereafter, as you will, remember that. If you have anything secret to say, speak English, but not too much, or they will suspect you. What else? When you approach the Queen, advance and retire right foot first; address her in French as `God' - `ma Dieu', you understand? Or as `great glory', or `great lake supplying all water'. You must give her a gift, or rather, two gifts - they must always be presented in pairs. See, I have brought you these." And he handed me two silver coins - Mexican dollars, of all things. "If, in her presence, you happen to notice a carved boar's tusk, with a piece of red ribbon attached to it - it maybe on a table, or somewhere - fall down prostrate before it."

I was gaping at him, and he stamped, Frog-like, with impatience. "You must do these things - they will please her! That tusk is Rafantanka, her personal fetish, as holy as she is herself. But above all - whatever she commands, do it at once, without an instant's hesitation. Betray no surprise at anything. Do not mention the numbers six or eight, or you are finished. Never, on your life, say of a thing that it is `as big as the palace'. What else?" He struck his forehead. "Oh, so many things! But believe me, in this lunatic asylum, they matter! They may mean the difference between life and - horrible death."

"My God!" says I, sitting down weakly, and he patted me on the shoulder.

"There, my friend. I tell you these things to prepare you, so that you may have a better chance to … to survive.

Now I must go. Try to remember what I've said. Mean-while, I shall find out what I can about your wife - but for God's sake, do not mention her existence to another living soul! That would be fatal to you both. And … do not give up hope." He looked at me, and for a second the apprehension had died out of his face; he was a tough, steady-looking lad when he wanted to be.³⁶ "If I have frightened you - well, it is because there is much to fear, and I would have you on guard so far as may be." He slapped my arm. "Bien. Dieu vous garde."

Then he was at the door, calling softly for the guard, but even as it opened he was back again, cat-footed, whispering.

"One other thing - when you approach the Queen, remember to lick her feet, as a slave should. It will tell in your favour. But not if they are dusted with pink powder. That is poison." He paused. "On second thoughts, if they are so dusted, lick them thoroughly. It will certainly be the quickest way to die. A bientot!"

If I had my head in my hands, do you wonder? It couldn't be true - where I was, what I'd heard, what lay ahead. But it was, and I knew it, which was why I plumped down on my knees, blubbering, and prayed like a drunk Methodist, just on the offchance that there is a God after all, for if He couldn't help me, no one else could. I felt much worse for it; probably Arnold was right, and insincere prayers are just so much blasphemy. So I had a good curse instead, but that didn't serve, either. Whichever way I tried to ease my mind, I still wasn't looking forward to meeting royalty.

At least they didn't keep me in suspense. At the crack of dawn they had me out, a file of soldiers under an officer to whom I tried to suggest that if I was going to be presented, so to speak, I'd be the better for a change of clothes. My shirt was reduced to a wisp, and my trousers no better than a ragged loin-cloth with one leg. But he just sneered at my sign-language, slashed me painfully with his cane, and marched me off up-hill through the streets to the great palace of Antan', which I now saw properly for the first time.

I wouldn't have thought anything could have distracted my attention at such a time, but that palace did. How can I describe the effect of it, except by saying that it's the biggest wooden building in the world? From its towering steepled roof to the ground is a hundred and twenty feet, and in between is a vast spread of arches and balconies and galleries - for all the world like a Venetian palazzo made of the most intricately-carved and coloured wood, its massive pillars consisting of single trunks more than one hundred feet long. The largest of them, I'm told, took five thousand men to lift, and they brought it from fifty miles away; all told, fifteen thousand died in building the place - but I guess that's small beer to a Malagassy contractor working for royalty.

Even more amazing though, is the smaller palace beside it. It is covered entirely in tiny silver bells, so that when the sun is on it, you can't even look, for the blinding glare. As the breeze changes, so does the volume of that perpetual tingling of a million silver tongues; it's indescribably beautiful to see and hear, like something in a fairy-tale - and yet it housed the cruellest Gorgon on earth, for that's where Ranavalona had her private apartments.

I'd little time to marvel, though, before we were inside the great hall of the main palace itself, with its soaring arched roof like a cathedral nave. It was thronged with courtiers bedecked in such a fantastic variety of clothing that it looked like a fancy-dress ball, with nothing but black guests. There were crinolines and saris, sarongs and state gowns, muslins and taffetas of every period and colour - I recall one spindly female in white silk with a powdered wig on her head a la Marie Antoinette, talking to another who seemed to be entirely hung in coloured glass beads. The contrast and confusion was bewildering: mantillas and loin-cloths, bare feet and high-heeled shoes, long gloves and barbaric feather headdresses - it would have been exotic but for the unfortunate fact that Malagassy women are damned ugly, for the most part, tending to be squat and squashed, like black Russian peasants, if you can imagine. Mind you, I saw a lissom backside in a sari here and there, and a few pairs of plumptious bouncers hanging out of low corsages, and thought to myself, there's a few here who'd repay care and attention - and they'd probably be glad of it, too, for a more sawn-off and runty collection than their menfolk I never did see. It's curious that the male nobility are far poorer specimens than the common men; Dago blood somewhere, I suspect. They were got up as fantastically as the women, though, in the usual hotch-potch of uniforms, with knee breeches, buckled shoes, and even a stovepipe hat thrown in.

There was a nigger orchestra pumping away abominably somewhere, and the whole throng were chattering like magpies, as Malagassies always do, bowing and scraping and leering and flirting in the most grotesque caricature of polite society - I couldn't help thinking of apes that I'd seen at the circus in childhood, decked out in human clothes. A white man in rags cut no ice at all, and no one spared me more than a glance as I was marched up a side staircase, along a short passage, and into a small ante-room. Here, to my astonishment, I was left alone; they shut the door on me, and that was that.

Steady, Flash, thinks I, what's this? It looked an innocent room enough, overcrowded with artistically-carved native furniture, large pots containing reeds, some fine ornaments in ivory and ebony, and on the walls several prints depicting niggers in uniform which I wouldn't have given house-room to, myself. I stood listening, and through a large muslin-screened inner window heard the murmur and music of the great hall; by standing on a table I could just peep over the sill and through the muslin observe the assembly below. My window was in a corner, and from beneath it a broad gallery ran clean across the top end of the hall, high above the crowd. There were a dozen Hova guardsmen in sarongs and helmets ranged along the balcony rail.

Somewhere deep in the palace a bell rang, and at once the chatter and music died, and the whole crowd below turned to stare up at the balcony. There was the wailing of what sounded like a native trumpet, and a figure stepped out on to the balcony almost directly beneath me - a stalwart black in a gold metal headdress and leopard-skin loin-cloth, with massive muscular arms stretched out before him, carrying a slender silver spear in ceremonial fashion.*(* This spear was known as the "Hater of Lies".) The assembled cream of Malagassy society gave him a good hand, and as he stepped aside four young girls in flowered saris appeared, carrying a kind of three-sided tent of coloured silk, but with no roof to it.

Then, to the accompaniment of clashing cymbals and a low, sonorous chanting that made my hair stand on end, there came out a couple of old coves in black robes fringed with silver, swinging little packets on the ends of strings, but not making much of it; they stood to one side, and to a sudden thunderous yell from the crowd of "Manjaka! Manjaka!" four more wenches trooped out, carrying a purple canopy on four slender ivory poles. Beneath it walked a stately figure enveloped in a scarlet silk cloak, but I couldn't see the face at all, for it was hidden by a tall sugar-loaf hat of golden straw, bound under the chin by a scarf. So this is Her Nibs, thinks I, and despite the warmth, I found myself shivering.

She paced slowly to the front of the balcony and the sycophantic mob beneath went wild, clapping and calling and stretching out their hands. Then she stepped back, the girls with the silk tent contraption carried it round her, shielding her from all curious eyes except the two that were goggling down, unsuspected, from above; I waited, breathless, and two more girls went in beside her, and slipped the cloak from her shoulders. And there she was, stark naked except for her ridiculous hat.

Well, even from above and through a muslin screen there was no doubt that she was female, and no need for stays to make the best of it, either; she stood like an ebony statue as the two wenches began to bathe her from bowls of water. Some vulgar lout grunted lasciviously, and realizing who it was I shrank back a trifle in sudden anxiety that I'd been overheard. They splashed her thoroughly, while I watched enviously, and then clapped the robe round her shoulders again. The screen was removed, and she took what looked like an inlaid ebony horn from one of her attendants and stepped forward to sprinkle the crowd. They fairly crowed with delight, and then she withdrew to a great shout of applause, and I scrambled down from my window thinking, by George, we've never seen little Vicky doing that from the balcony at Buck House - but then, she ain't quite equipped the way this one is.

What I'd seen, you may care to know, was the public part of the annual ceremony of the Queen's Bath. The private proceedings are less formal - although, mind you, I can speak with authority only for 1844, or as it is doubtless known in Malagassy court circles, Flashy's year.

The procedure is simple. Her Majesty retires to her reception room in the Silver Palace, which is the most astonishing chamber, containing as it does a gilded couch of state, gold and silver ornaments in profusion, an enormous and luxurious bed, a piano with "Selections from Scarlatti" on the music stand, and off to one side, a sunken bath lined with mother-of-pearl; there are also pictures of Napoleon's victories round the walls, between silk curtains. There she concludes the ceremony by receiving homage from various officials, who grovel out backward, and then, with several of her maids still in attendance, turns her attention to the last item on the agenda, the foreign castaway who has been brought in for her inspection, and who is standing with his bowels dissolving between two stalwart Hova guardsmen. One of her maids motions the poor fool forward, the guardsmen retire - and I tried not to tremble, took a deep breath, looked at her, and wished I hadn't come.

She was still wearing the sugar-loaf hat, and the scarf framed features that were neither pretty nor plain. She might have been anywhere between forty and fifty, rather round-faced, with a small straight nose, a fine brow, and a short, broad-lipped mouth; her skin was jet black and plump³⁷ - and then you met the eyes, and in a sudden chill rush of fear realized that all you had heard was true, and the horrors you'd seen needed no further explanation. They were small and bright and evil as a snake's, unblinking, with a depth of cruelty and malice that was terrifying; I felt physical revulsion as I looked at them - and then, thank God, I had the wit to take a pace forward, right foot first, and hold out the two Mexican dollars in my clammy palm.

She didn't even glance at them, and after a moment one of her girls scuttled forward and took them. I stepped back, right foot first, and waited. The eyes never wavered in their repellent stare, and so help me, I couldn't meet them any longer. I dropped my gaze, trying feverishly to remember what Laborde had told me - oh, hell, was she waiting for me to lick her infernal feet? I glanced down; they were hidden under her scarlet cloak; no use grubbing for 'em there. I stood, my heart thumping in the silence, noticing that the silk of her cloak was wet - of course, they hadn't dried her, and she hadn't a stitch on underneath - my stars, but it clung to her limbs in a most fetching way. My view from on high had been obscured, of course, and I hadn't realized how strikingly endowed was the royal personage. I followed the sleek scarlet line of her leg and rounded hip, noted the gentle curve of waist and stomach, the full-blown poonts outlined in silk - my goodness, though, she was wet - catch her death …

One of the female attendants gave a sudden giggle, instantly smothered - and to my stricken horror I realized that my indecently torn and ragged trousers were failing to conceal my instinctive admiration of her majesty's matronly charms - oh, Jesus, you'd have thought quaking fear and my perilous situation would have banished randy reaction, but love conquers all, you see, and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. I shut my eyes and tried to think of crushed ice and vinegar, but it didn't do the slightest good - I daren't turn my back on royalty - had she noticed? Hell's bells, she wasn't blind - this was lese-majeste of the most flagrant order - unless she took it as a compliment, which it was, ma'am, I assure you, and no disrespect intended, far from it . .

I stole another look at her, my face crimson. Those awful eyes were still on mine; then, slowly, inexorably, her glance went down. Her expression didn't change in the least, but she stirred on her couch - which did nothing to quell my ardour - and without looking away, muttered a guttural instruction to her maids. They fluttered out obediently, while I waited quaking. Suddenly she stood up, shrugged off the silk cloak, and stood there naked and glistening; I gulped and wondered if it would be tactful to make some slight advance - grabbing one of 'em, for instance … it would take both hands … better not, though; let royalty take precedence.

So I stood stock still for a full minute, while those wicked,' clammy eyes surveyed me; then she came forward and brought her face close to mine, sniffing warily like an animal and gently rubbing her nose to and fro across my cheeks and lips. Starter's gun, thinks I; one wrench and my breeches were a rag on the floor, I hooked into her buttocks and kissed her full on the mouth - and she jerked away, spitting and pawing at her tongue, her eyes blazing, and swung a hand at my face. I was too startled to avoid the blow; it cracked on my ear - I had a vision of those boiling pits - and then the fury was dying from her eyes, to be replaced by a puzzled look. (I had no notion, you see, that kissing was unknown on Madagascar; they rub noses, like the South Sea folk.) She put her face to mine again, touching my lips cautiously with her own; her mouth tasted of aniseed. She licked me tentatively, so I nuzzled her a moment, and then kissed her in earnest, and this time she entered into the spirit of the thing like a good 'un.

Then she reached down and led me across the room to the bath, undid her scarf and hat and tossed them aside, revealing long straight hair tied tight to her head, and heavy silver earrings that hung to her shoulders. She slipped into the bath, which was deep enough to swim in, and motioned me to follow, which I did, nearly bursting by this time. But she swam and played about in the water in a most provoking way, teasing and rubbing noses and kissing - but never a smile or a word or the least softening of those basilisk eyes - and then suddenly she clapped her long legs round me and we were away, rolling and plunging like damnation, one moment on the surface, the next three feet under. She must have had lungs like bellows, for she could stay under an agonizing time, working away like a lecherous porpoise, and then surfacing for a gasp of air and down again for more ecstatic heaving on the bottom. Well, it was novel, and highly stimulating; the only time I've completed the carnal act while somersaulting with my nose full of water was in Ranavalona's bath. Afterwards I clung to the edge, gasping, while she swam lazily up and down, turning those ugly, glinting eyes on me from time to time, with her face like stone.

Yet the most startling event was still to come. When she had got out of the bath and I had followed obediently, she crossed to the bed and disposed herself on it, contemplating me sullenly while I stood hesitant, wondering what to do next. I mean, usually one gives 'em a slap on the rump by way of congratulation, whistles up refreshments, and has a cosy chat, but I could guess this wasn't her style. She just lay there stark, all black and shiny, staring at me while I tried to shiver nonchalantly, and then she grunted something in Malagassy and pointed to the piano. I explained, humbly, that I didn't play; she stared some more, and three seconds later I was on the piano stool, my wet posterior clinging uncomfortably to the seat, picking out "Drink, Puppy Drink", with one finger. My audience didn't begin to throw things, so I ventured on the other half of my repertoire, "God Save the Queen", but a warning growl sent me skittering back to "Drink, Puppy Drink" once more. I played it for about ten minutes, conscious of that implacable stare on the back of my neck, and then by way of variety began to sing the verse. I heard the bed creak, and desisted; another growl, and I was giving tongue lustily again, and the Silver Palace of Antananarivo re-echoed to:

"Here's to the fox

With his den among the rocks,

And here's to the trail that we follo-o-ow! And here's to the hound

With his nose upon the ground,

An' merrily we'll whoop and holl-o-o-o!"

And then the chorus, with vim - it's a rousing little ditty, as you probably know, and I bellowed it until I was hoarse. Just as I was thinking my voice would crack, blowed if she didn't glide up at my elbow, glowering without expression from my face to the keys; what the devil, thinks I, in for a penny, in for a pound, so while pounding away with one hand I pulled her on to the stool with the other, squeezing lustfully and bawling "He'll grow into a hound, so we'll pass the bottle round", and after a moment's impassive staring she began to accompany me in a most disconcerting way. This time, though, we repaired to the bed for the serious business - and I received a mighty shock, for as I was waiting for her to assume the supine position she suddenly picked me up bodily (I'm six feet and upwards of thirteen stone), flung me down, and began galloping me with brutal abandon, grunting and snarling and even drumming on me with her fists. It was like being assailed by a horny gorilla, but I gather she enjoyed it - not that she smiled, or gave maidenly sighs, but at the end she stroked her nose against mine and growled a Malagassy word in my ear several times … "Zanahary … zanahary*(* Supernatural, divine; (colloq.) wonderful.) … " which I later discovered was complimentary.

So that was my first encounter with Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, the most horrible woman I've ever met, bar none. Unfortunately, it was by no means the last, for although she never ceased to regard me with that Gorgon stare, the took an unquenchable fancy to me. Possibly it was my piano-playing,³⁸ for normally she went through lovers like a rat through cheese, and I was in constant dread in the weeks that followed that she'd tire of me - as she had of Laborde and several hundred others. He had merely been discarded, but as often as not her used-up beaux were subjected to the dreadful ordeal of the tanguin test, and then sent to the pits, or dismembered, or sewn up in buffalo hides with only their heads out and hung up to rot.

No, pleasuring Queenie wasn't a trade you could settle to, and to make it worse she was a brutally demanding lover. I don't mean that she enjoyed inflicting pain on her men, like dear Lola with her hairbrush, or the elfin Mrs Mandeville of Mississippi, who wore spurred riding boots to bed, or Aunt Sara the Mad Bircher of the Steppes - my, I've known some little turtle doves in my time, haven't I just? No, Ranavalona was simply an animal, coarse and insatiable, and you ached for days afterwards. I suffered a cracked rib, a broken finger, and God knows how many strains and dislocations in my six months as stallion-entitre, which gives you some idea.

But enough of romance; suffice to say that my initiation was successful, and I was taken on the strength of her establishment as a foreign slave who might be useful not only as a paramour but also, in view of my army experience, as a staff officer and military adviser. There was no question about this in the minds of the court officials who assigned me to my duties - no thought that I might demur, or wish to be sent home, or count myself anything but fortunate to be so honoured by them. I had come to Madagascar, and here I would stay until I died, that was flat. It was their national philosophy: Madagascar was the world, and perfect, and there could be no greater treachery than to think otherwise.

I got an inkling of this the same afternoon, when I had been dismissed the royal presence, considerably worn and shaken, and was conducted to an interview with the Queen's private secretary. He proved to be a jolly little black butterball in a blue cutaway coat with brass buttons, and plaid trousers, who beamed at me from the depths of an enormous collar and floored me by crying:

"Mr Flashman, what pleasure to see you! I being Mr Fankanonikaka, very personal and special secretary to her majesty, Queen Ranavalona, the Great Cloud Shading the World, ain't I just, though? Not above half, I don't think." He rubbed his little black paws, chortling at my dumbstruck look, and went on: "How I speak English much perfect, so as to astonish you, I being educated in London, at Highgate School, Highgate, confounded in year of Christ 1565, seven years reigning Good Queen Bess, I say. Please sitting there exactly, and attending then to me. I being an old boy." And he bowed me to a chair.

I was learning to accept anything in this extraordinary country - and why not? In my time I've seen an Oxford don commanding a slave-ship, a professor of Greek skinning mules on the Sacramento stage run, and a Welshman in a top hat leading a Zulu impi - even a Threadneedle Street nigger acting as secretary³⁹ to the Queen of Madagascar ain't too odd alongside that lot. But hearing English - even his amazing brand of the language - took me so aback that I almost committed the indiscretion of asking how the blazes I was to escape from this madhouse - and that could have been fatal in a country where one wrong word usually means death by torture. Fortunately I remembered Laborde's warning in time, and asked cautiously how he k new my name.

"Ha-ha, we are knowing all manner, no humbuggery or gammon, please," cries he, his fat face shining like boot polish. "You coming ashore from ship of Suleiman Usman, we speaking of him maybe, finding much." He cocked his head, button eyes considering me. "You telling me now of personal life yourself, where coming from, what trade, so to speak, my old covey."

So I did - at least, that I was English, an army officer, and how I'd fallen into Usman's hands. Again, remembering Laborde, I didn't mention Elspeth, although I was consumed with anxiety about her. He nodded pleasantly, and then said: