The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “I am Standing Bear, the grown-man name given me by the Hunkpapa Sioux. But as a child among the Brulés I was called the One-Who-Catches, the Clutcher, the Grabber, because I was greedy, and took what I wished.” He said it without amusement. “The name Frank was given me by my parents, Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone and his wife the black white woman, Walking Willow.”

  The sonorous drone of the Sioux words, the liquid movements of his hands as he followed the names in sign-language, lulled the meaning away from me for a moment. Then it struck home, and my hand began to tremble on my knee, even before he said the next words, his dark eyes intent on me.

  “You knew my mother many years ago as Clay-on-nee, a slave-girl. You know her now as Mees-ez Candee.”

  “I don’t believe you!” It was wrenched out of me. “Your tongue is forked! You’re a Brulé – a full-blood Sioux if ever I saw one! You can’t tell me you’re her child! I don’t believe it!”

  “You sold her among the Navajo. How should I know that, if not from her? And why should she tell it to anyone but her own son, so that he might one day avenge her on the man who traded her for two thousand dollars?” It was as flat and emotionless as Mrs Candy herself; his fingers flicked like pistons as he spelled out the sum. “When I was a child, she told me how in the year of the great Cheyenne sickness, she had been in a wagon-train of black slave-women commanded by a man Comba, who betrayed and sold her to the Navajo at Santa Fe. Last year in Chicago, when Sintay Galeska Spotted Tail took us to the house-of-makes-plays-and-songs, he spoke to you of the days when you were young men, and how you had led a caravan of black slave-girls – also in the year of the great Cheyenne sickness. Then I knew that you, the Washechuska soldier-chief, were also Comba.”

  “Those black girls we watched tonight! Ees, they were as pretty as the black ones in your wagons, Wind Breaker! You remember them – the year the Cut-Arms were sick! Hunhe, what little beauties those were!”

  I could see Spotted Tail’s grinning face in the cab as we came back from the theatre – and all I’d been thankful for was that Elspeth didn’t understand a word of it! This one had understood, though, and had kept the same stone face he was keeping now. But he’d passed the word to his mother in her Denver whorehouse that “Comba” was back. And she’d done the rest …

  My mind whirled as I took it in. A chance in a million, that Standing Bear had been present at Chicago to hear Spotted Tail’s randy recollections of twenty-five years before – but the rest of it fitted like an old shoe. I found myself staring at him – could he be the child of a Sioux and an octoroon? Yes; Cleonie herself had hardly been black to speak of – dammit, in her Mrs Candy guise I’d thought she was Italian. And she’d married this Broken-Bollocks fellow around ’53, by her own account – well, Standing Bear was certainly somewhere in his early to middle twenties – oh, Christ, and he’d been treasuring up vengeance against me all these years. And now he had me.

  “Now, look here, Standing Bear,” says I. “I believe you. Your tongue is straight. But your mother is quite mistaken, you know – as I could have explained to her if she’d only let me. Good God above, I didn’t sell her – I loved her truly and dearly, and was all set to take her to Mexico, but this wicked old woman who owned her, she sold your mother behind my back!” I shook my fist and went red in the face. “That spiteful old buffalo cow! I could have murdered her! To sell that dear, lovely girl whom I worshipped and hoped to marry—”

  “Did the priest of Santa Fe speak with a forked tongue?” asks he quietly. “Why should he?”

  “All priests speak with forked tongues,” says I earnestly. “Every damned one of ’em. The snake-that-rattles speaks straighter—”

  “And the wicked old woman?” The dark eyes were cold as ice. “When I was a little boy, my mother left the lodges of the Sioux – and went back to Santa Fe, and saw the wicked old woman. Mees-ez Soo-zee. The wicked old woman was kind to her, and helped her …” He leaned forward a little, and the words dropped like tombstones. “The wicked old woman told my mother how you had betrayed many women, and had stolen money, and done murder, and had a bad heart.” His head shook, slowly. “Your tongue is forked. You know it. I know it. You sold my mother to the Navajo.”

  Oh, well, that disposed of that – worth a try, though. In the same steady voice he went on:

  “When my mother learned from me last year that you had returned again from the Land of the Grandmother, she sought you out and trapped you, as one does the coyote, and had you taken on the Yellowstone by Jacket, brother of Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone, and he brought you a prisoner to the Sioux lodges for delivery to me, so that you might die by kakeshya as my mother willed. I was away on the Rosebud, having fought the Grey Fox Crook, and I came back to Little Bighorn even as Yellow Hair’s soldiers attacked. How you came to be in that battle I do not know, but I saw you there, and I saved you. I threw dust in the eyes of my brothers.” He reached forward to point at my head. “I even took your scalp – a little – to deceive them. So that in their fighting-madness they should not kill you quickly. So that I should have you.”

  In the face of that awful implacable regard, the voice without emotion, I could say nothing – I could think plenty, though, and it was all dreadful. I’d been preserved from that carnage, so that I should suffer the unspeakably worse fate designed by that malignant slut Cleonie-Candy, a fate that this remorseless savage would take delight in inflicting. Better if I’d died with Custer, or blown my brains out … but wait, there was something here that made no sense –

  “But … but he – you – the man who rescued me! He – he spoke English! Like an American!”

  “And how the devil else should I speak it? I didn’t have the advantage of a Rugby education, you know. Harvard had to be good enough for me.”

  I can’t begin to describe the effect of hearing that pleasant, half-amused, half-impatient American voice issuing from the copper-red hawk face with its feathered braids; it was like having a Chinese mandarin suddenly bursting into “Boiled Beef and Carrots”. I literally couldn’t believe my ears; from the sonorous rolling tones of the Sioux he had slipped straight into the clipped voice of a well-educated, civilised man, without a muscle altering in his face. It was still a Brulé Sioux who sat regarding me stonily – until suddenly he burst out laughing, with his head thrown back, and then came abruptly to his feet, like a great cat uncoiling itself, and stood grinning fiercely down at me, his hands on his hips. No Indian in creation ever stood like that – but he wasn’t an Indian any longer. Oh, it was still an Indian’s face and body – but the voice, the expression, the gestures, the whole style of him … was of a white man.

  “That’s right – stare all you want to!” cries he. “Have a good look! By God, it would serve you right if I went through with it! If I carried out her wishes to the last burning inch! It would have served you right if I’d let them cut you up with Custer! I nearly did.” He stood nodding grimly down at me; the grin had narrowed to a tight-lipped smile. “I nearly did. But it wouldn’t have done. Would it?”

  I’m not often at a loss for words, but now I sat dumb, understanding nothing, while my heart began to thump like a trip-hammer. I felt weak, and though I opened my mouth once or twice, no words came out. I could only stare at the tall painted savage with his braids and buckskins, the Burned Thigh brave with his hawk face and red skin. Then I managed to ask:

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He moved slowly to stand in front of me. “You know why,” says he. “You must know why.” Suddenly he sank down swiftly in a crouch before me so that his face was on a level with mine, no more than a foot away. He was grinning again, but there was an odd look in the dark eyes – mockery, and wariness, and something I couldn’t read. “You didn’t know my mother when she went to you as Mrs Candy. Why should you, after twenty-five years? But this is different. Look at my face – as I’ve looked at yours. As I looked at it in Chicago and at Camp Robinson, and here tonight. Even if I hadn’t my mother’s word for it,
just looking would be enough for me. But I have her word, too – that I was born in a Navajo village of New Mexico in spring of the year 1850.”

  It was as though I was hypnotised. It was nonsense, of course, but I looked anyway, and began to tremble again. For I did know the face. I understood why he had drawn my eye from the first, in Chicago, and again at Camp Robinson, and why I’d felt that strange comfort when he’d ranged up beside me on that hair-trigger day of the council with the agency Sioux. Oh, yes, I knew the face; I’d seen it most days of my life. The bold dark eyes with the slightly hooded lids, the aquiline nose when he turned in profile (I know my own side-view better than most, you see, because of the weeks I spent comparing it with Carl Gustaf’s picture in the triple mirror at Schonhausen). Even the full mouth and the heavy jaw … he was a damned good-looking young devil, though, wasn’t he, this Standing Bear? But I couldn’t take it in – I’d been too numbed by this sort of shock, lately … Mrs Candy was Cleonie … this was her son … and now I was being expected to believe …

  “Oh, come along, you silly old bastard!” cries he impatiently – and I knew it was true beyond a doubt. It would have taken a son of mine, at a moment like this, to talk to his father that way. But … no, it couldn’t be true, although I knew it was. I searched for contradiction.

  “You said … you said this Sioux fellow … what’s his name? You said he was your father.”

  “That was Standing Bear who said that,” says he in Siouxan. “Standing Bear the Brulé, the One-Who-Catches, to whom Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone was as a father.” He broke into English again. “But I’m also Frank Grouard – or, properly speaking, Frank Flashman, son of Cleonie the slave-girl and the Englishman who sold her at Santa Fe.”

  “Grue-what?” says I, for no particular reason.

  “Grouard. French – it was her father’s name, so she gave it to me.” He was watching me intently, with amusement and that other glint that I couldn’t pin down. “Comes as a surprise, does it? From all I’ve heard about you – from Susie Willinck, too – I don’t see why it should. You must have more bastards than Solomon.” I don’t shock easy, but that was like a blow in the face, coming from him. “And there’s no miracle about it, you know. You and mother—” It shocked me, too, to hear him call her that, in that fashion, like a civilised son “—you were lovers in the summer and autumn of ’49, and while I can’t prove my birthday, she’s sure of it. The Navajo don’t keep parish records, either, but there are respectable citizens of Santa Fe, including one notary public, who’ll testify that when she arrived there in ’55, I had the appearance of a well-grown five-year-old. Well,” says he, and grinned triumphantly. “How d’ye do … Papa?”

  It’s not easy, you know. He was right enough – I daresay I have by-blows all over the shop (India, mostly, and there’s a Count Pencherjevsky in Russia whose paternity don’t bear close scrutiny) and one of ’em was sure to come home to roost in the end. It takes the wind out of your sails, though, when he turns up as a Sioux brave with a Boston accent. For I was in no doubt now, you see – somehow it was less of a shock than “Mrs Candy” had given me, or the news that he was her son; it was almost as though I’d been expecting it. You may say he could have been the child of one of Susie’s customers at Santa Fe, but I knew he wasn’t. It was not a question of Cleonie’s word, or his, or even the physical resemblance – which, in an instant, I’d recognised far more easily than Mrs Candy’s to Cleonie. I simply knew; it was there, in him, his being and bearing and manner and … style. When he was being white, that is.

  He was still squatting on his heels before me, watching me with that odd calculating grin, waiting. I don’t know what I felt at all, but I know what I did.

  “Well,” says I, and put out my right hand warily. “How d’ye do … son?”

  I don’t know what he made of it, either. He took my hand, firm enough for a moment, but the shine in his eyes could have been anything – surprise, pleasure, emotion, amusement, anger, hatred even, but my guess is it was pure devilment. The young bastard (and I use the term with feeling) had had me on toast, sitting there solemnly playing his noble savage, keeping the old man agog, enjoying watching me squirm while he scared the hell out of me, turning the knife of fear and bewilderment in my innards, and keeping the really juicy surprise to the end. Oh, he’d had the time of his life. Good actor, too – aye, it all fitted, the skill in histrionics and dissimulation, the delight in twisting the victim’s tail, the mockery, the cool damn-you cut of his jib, the callous way he talked of things other youngsters would have been ashamed of. Oh, he was Flashy’s boy, no error – even if I hadn’t sold his mama down the river, there’d have been no touching reunion between father and son. We ain’t cut out for affection, much, our lot.

  But that’s not to say we aren’t curious, and now that our formal introduction had taken place, so to speak, we compared notes, mostly his. He was itching to tell it, of course, knowing it must make my flesh creep, which was just nuts to him, being a Flashman – and the shock of that realisation, still sinking in, was enough to render me silent and attentive; if the 7th Cavalry had attacked our cave I doubt if I’d have noticed.

  It was a remarkable tale, although not unique: scores of folk in the old West grew up half-civilised, half-Indian, as he had done. So far back as he could remember, he’d been Sioux of the Sioux till he was five, and when Cleonie had gone back to whoring in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Susie Willinck had looked after him (which was a queer start, if you like), but he’d pined for the old life, and had been such a handful that they’d let him go back to Broken-Moon-Goes-Alone, who had died when Frank was about ten. Then Cleonie had put him to school, properly, at El Paso, and sent him east when he was thirteen, for by then she was well in the chips at Denver, and could afford him the best education going. He’d done uncommon well, and had gone on to Harvard, where he’d improved a talent for languages – which didn’t surprise me – and then, to Cleonie’s fury, had simply upped and gone back to the tribe, for three solid years.

  All this, in the most matter-of-fact, offhand style, leaning against the table, arms folded on his painted chest, one foot elegantly over the other – a stance I recognised only too well. He’d known whose son he was, from infancy, and how his mother earned her keep, too. It was plainly all one to him; he seemed to have strangely little feeling for her, although he had gathered that it was only by a miracle that she’d kept him alive when he was born among the Navajo. And had done damned well by him since, it struck me.

  “And you’ve been with the Sioux – you, an educated man – for the past three years?” I asked incredulously. I was still trying to hold them together in my mind – the Lacotah warrior who’d ridden to Little Bighorn and the young student who must have dined at the Oyster House and probably taken tea at Louisburg Square.

  “Not altogether,” says he carelessly. “I tired of it – I think. It was more home than anywhere, but … I’m two people, you see” – echoing the thought in my own mind. “Anyway, I ‘came in’ to the agency early last year – it was curiosity, mostly, I guess. That was only a few months before we met in Chicago. Being a Brulé, I drifted to Spotted Tail – I’m a full-blood Sioux to him, by the way; he doesn’t even know I speak English. I’ve found it best to keep my two selves separate – mother and you are the only ones who’ve ever seen both of me. But Spotted Tail found me useful, and it was a lark going with him to Washington.” He grinned at me. “Wasn’t it, just? Here, though – my stepmother’s a beauty, ain’t she? Well, not my stepmother, I suppose – but whatever she is. She and Spotted Tail got on pretty well, I thought.”

  I didn’t ponder on that, but asked why, if he’d come in to an agency, he now appeared to be living among the hostiles.

  He smiled like a cat that’s been in the birdcage. “Oh, that! Being on the agency was a bore, so after your commission made such a hash of the Camp Robinson treaty, I slipped across to Fort Fetterman as Frank Grouard and hired myself to Crook as a scout.d Been with
him on and off ever since – I scouted for him on the Rosebud last month, you know; damnedest mess you ever saw.” He laughed, and it was positively eerie to see that cruel, handsome face between the Indian braids crease into the knowing chuckle of a white man. “But the advantage is, I can slide out to the other side whenever I choose. It was because I was with Crook that I wasn’t at Little Bighorn to receive you with due ceremony. As soon as I could get away from him, on the pretext of a long scout, I changed into Standing Bear again, and arrived in time for the fun of Greasy Grass. Lucky for you, wasn’t it?”

  Now, no one in his right mind would have believed this fantastic history – unless, of course, he had himself been a German prince and a Pathan badmash and a Dahomey slaver and an Apache brave and a Madagascar Sergeant-General, among other things, during his checkered career. So I believe him, and so can you, and for once you don’t have to take my word for it, since much of what I’ve told you here about Frank Flashman, alias Grouard, alias Standing Bear, alias One-Who-Catches, alias the Grabber, is already public knowledge.

  “I’ve a notion that Crook’s people are getting wary of me, though,” he went on coolly. “Not the Sioux – they know I scout for the Army, and think it a great jest. I suppose that shows which side I’m on, doesn’t it?”

  That was the question which brought us back to the vital matter which had been uppermost in my mind while I listened to his remarkable recital. As he lounged forward and tossed some chips on the fire I asked:

  “If that’s the case – then, what now?”

  He squatted easily, blowing on the embers, and glanced up at me with his insolent smile.