“I’m in your hands, my dear,” says I. “Take me where you will.”
“Ah won’ jes’ take yuh, honey,” purrs she. “Ah’ll transpo’t yuh. Home, Andy!”
The cab lurched off, and I lurched on, so to speak, encircling her tiny waist with an arm and undoing her veil from the velvet neck-ribbon which secured it. It wouldn’t come loose, and in my impatience I kissed her through it, which was a novel sensation, while she squeaked and giggled and said I was so vig’rous she feared I would do her an injury.
“Jes’ you rest quiet a li’l bit,” she protested, “an’ quit chewin’ up mah veil, you naughty boy! Theah – now it’s out the way, yuh kin chew me instaid, yuh greedy ole thing! My, Ah nevah did know sech whiskers; you must be about the whiskeredest man in town, Ah reckon! Gently, now, honey, gently – Ah’s fragile!”
I had lifted her bodily on to my knee, for she was the daintiest little bundle imaginable, and if the cab had been roomier I’d have done the deed then and there, for she kissed most artistically, and what with abstinence and encountering a little goer so unexpected, I was randier than the town bull. When I became more familiar, she wriggled and squealed, so I pinned her tiny wrists in one hand, scooped out her boobies, and began nibbling, at which she became unmanageable, swearing that she’d scream an’ scream, it was so awful ticklish, an’ ifn I’d jes’ wait, now, she’d show me the highest ole time when we got to her place.
We were on busier streets by now, with some traffic and passers-by, so I desisted, and she popped her bouncers away and patted my hand.
“Ah don’ believe yore f’m Washin’ton at all,” says she. “Yuh sure don’ taste like Washin’ton, all of seegars, yuh know? An’ Ah think Ah detect an English accent, ain’t that so?”
Smart, too. I said I was Canadian, and she said, uh-huh, which is the most expressive word in the American language, surveying me through her veil as she adjusted it. She asked where I was staying, and I said Willard’s, naming the only hotel I’d heard of. She said, “Well, lan’s sakes!”, and I guessed she was weighing my dishevelled appearance – creased pants, torn jacket, no hat or tie or choker even … and a finger of doubt began to stir in my mind. This was a twenty-dollar whore if ever there was one; yet she’d picked me up (most convenient, too) in my shabby condition, played up like a good ’un when I’d assailed her, and never a word about cash or her “present” to a client who looked as though he’d just crawled out of a hawsehole (which I had, more or less). Dooced rum … unless her maiden heart had been smitten by my manly address and Flashy charms … but even I ain’t that vain. Something was amiss, and my coward’s instinct was just considering whether to leap out and run for it, when the cab stopped, and she was smiling invitingly through the veil.
“Heah we are, honey! Home, sweet home!”
To my astonishment we had drawn up on a street broad enough to be the Avenue, outside a palatial building which was plainly a hotel – for a moment I wondered if it might be Willard’s, and she expected to be entertained in my room. There was a fine marble frontage,20 carriages were coming and going, with black porters holding doors, gas-flares sparkled on the jewellery and glossy evening tiles of the fashionably dressed folk crowding the steps, even at this ungodly hour; some grand function must be dispersing.
“Well, c’mon, honey, han’ me down, why don’t yuh!” cries my companion, so there was nothing for it but to jump out into the usual two feet of mud and the appalling stink of sewer gas. She hesitated on the step, drawing up her skirt with plaintive squeaks, so I swung her up in my arms and ploughed to the sidewalk, grateful to have my scarecrow duds shielded from the gaze of the throng.
“Don’ set me down!” she whispered, and giggled. “Ah guess we cain’t go in the front do’ thisaway, kin we? Theah – down the alleyway, an’ we’ll go in the side-do’. Say, ain’t this some fun, though?”
Some fun – what the deuce was I, Harry Flashman, V.C., and soon to be knighted by Her Majesty, en route from India to England, doing toting a tittering whore down a reeking lane in America’s capital city? Well, the wind bloweth where it listeth, you see, and if it carries you up several flights of back stairs, along corridors where the air has been replaced by cigar smoke and the carpet fairly squelches with tobacco juice, and at last into a dimly lit salon whose ornate gilt-and-plush decor would do credit to a Damascus brothel, why, you must make the best of it and get her stripped and on to the bed before your luck changes. Which mine was about to do, with the most incredible coincidence that I can remember in a long career which has had more than its ration of freaks of chance. It had been staring me in the face, but lust is blind, alas, and I hadn’t seen it.
I was undressing her with one practised hand and myself with the other even as I kicked the door to, and such is my skill in these matters that I had my pants round my ankles and her bare to her stockings by the time we reached the bed, where she tried to break free, breathless and giggling.
“Lemme take off mah hat, for mercy’s sake!” cries she. “No, honey, jes’ you hold on – Ah gotta see mah maid! Calm yo’self, do – Ah won’ be but a second!” She slipped from my ardent grasp and scampered to an inner door, popping her head through and calling: “Ah’m back, Dora!”, and then something in a lowered voice that I didn’t catch – a maid, forsooth, and not just a bedroom but a suit of apartments; my blonde charmer was evidently at the top of her tree. I could believe it, too, gloating at the white perfection of that little body as she closed the door, turning towards me and making a fine coquettish show of slipping off her garters and rolling down her stockings. She sauntered forward, stretching up to the chandelier chain to turn the gas up to its full brightness, and began to untie the bow securing her veil, all coy and playful.
“Well, now, big boy,” drawls she, “let’s have a real good look at yuh … my, Ah do declare Ah never …” And then she stopped, with something between a gasp and a cry, her knuckles flying to her veiled lips, starting back as I went for her with a lustful “Tally-ho!”
“No … no!” she faltered, and for an instant I checked in astonishment: the sight of Flashy stark and slavering might well strike maidenly terror in amateurs and virgins (my second bride, Duchess Irma, near had the conniptions on our wedding night) but this was a seasoned strumpet … and then I twigged, this must be her special ploy to rouse the roués, playing the helpless fawn shrinking before the roaring ravisher. Wasted on me, absolutely; cowering or brazen, it’s all one to your correspondent; as she turned to flee, whimpering, I seized her amidships, tossed her into the air, planted her on hands and knees, and was installed before she could budge, roaring feigned endearments to soothe her pretended alarm and bulling away like fury. With two lost months to make up for, I’d no time to waste on further refinements, nor, I fear, did I treat her with that solicitude which a considerate rider should show to his mount, especially when she’s barely five feet tall and half his weight. Having slaked what the lady novelists would call my base passion, I staggered up and collapsed on the bed, most capitally exhausted, leaving her prone and gasping on the carpet with her little bottom a-quiver, very fetching, and her hat and veil still in place.
What with weariness and contentment, I must have dozed off, for I didn’t hear her leave the room. It may have been five minutes or twenty before I became drowsily aware of voices not far away; I stirred and sat up, but there was no sign of her. Gone to make do and mend, thinks I – and since I didn’t have a red cent to requite her, it struck me as a capital time to resume my scattered togs and make tracks for the ministry. In a trice I had my shirt and pants on, and was slipping on a boot, well pleased at having had a most refreshing gallop for nothing, when a man’s voice spoke loud and close at hand. Starting round, I saw that the door to the adjoining room was slightly ajar, and other voices were being raised in exclamation, the blonde whore’s among them. For perhaps five seconds I sat stricken with wonder, and then the man’s voice was raised again, sharp with impatience, and my blood turned to ice.
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“What d’ye mean – he ain’t Comber? O’ course he’s Comber – dammit, Joe heard that skunk Crixus call him so – didn’t ye, Joe?”
My hair stood upright at the deep bass reply – for it was the voice of the nigger who’d broken me out of Crixus’s house: “Sure he did, Massa Charles, over’n over! Ain’t no doubt about it –”
“Don’t dare tell me, you black fool!” That was the whore, shrill with fury – but where was the Dixie drawl? Gone, and in its place the voice of a Creole lady, sharp and imperious. “He’s the wrong man, I say! I know him! His name’s Tom Arnold! He ran off a slave wench from my husband’s plantation ten years ago, and killed two men! He’s wanted for murder and false bills and slave-stealing, I tell you! Damn you, colonel, do you think I don’t know a man who’s been my lover?”
I was over the bed like a startled hare, boots in hand, and was racing for the outer door when a huge black shape came storming in from the adjoining room, and Old Brooke would have picked him first of the Schoolhouse chargers, for he came at me in a flying lunge that would have had every cap in the air on Big Side. His shoulder took me flush on the thigh, and it was like being hit by the Penzance Express; I went headlong, smashing into the furniture and fetching up against the wall with a jar that shook every bone in my body. Joe was up like a cat, fists clenched as he stood over me, shouting:
“It’s him, sho’ ’nuff! You bet it’s him – Comber! Ain’t no doubt, Miz Annette!”
And there she stood in the connecting doorway, the tiny body wrapped in a silk robe, and as I saw her face in full light for the first time, I could only lie and stare in utter disbelief. The slim, childlike shape had filled out in ten years, she’d put on an inch or two in height, the sharp elfin features were fuller (and all the prettier for it, I may say), and her hair that had been fair was dyed bright gold, but there was no mistaking the icy little vixen with whom I’d rogered away the clammy afternoons at Greystones in her abominable husband’s absence. Annette Mandeville, fragile blossom of the Old South, half-woman, half-alligator, who wore spurred riding boots to bed and whose diminutive charms I must have explored a dozen times – and now I’d just spent an hour in her company, conversing, kissing, caressing, carrying her bodily up five flights of stairs, rattling her six ways from Sunday – and never for a moment suspecting who she was!
Impossible, says you; even the coarsest voluptuary (guilty, m’lud) couldn’t have failed to recognise her, surely? Well, consider this: in your lifetime you probably wear as many as three hundred pairs of boots and shoes, perhaps more; I ask you, if when you were forty your orderly laid out a pair of pumps which you’d worn for a week when you were thirty, would you remember ’em? No, you admit, likely not, unless there was something singular about them. You see my point: by ’59 I’d known, in the scriptural sense, 480 women (I’d reckoned up 478 when I was confined in the Gwalior dungeon the previous year, and since then there’d been only the Calcutta bint and Miranda), so was it wonderful that I shouldn’t recognise Annette Mandeville after ten years? I think not. Oh, you may point out that of all my prancing-partners she was by far the smallest, and that when I saw her in the buff, even with her face veiled, I should have recollected the tiny nymph of Mississippi. But against that I argue that the vulgar, cracker-voiced hoyden of Washington was as unlike the high-bred frigid midget of Greystones as could be. They were two different women (and I wasn’t surprised to learn later that in the intervening years, after the demise of the disgusting Mandeville, little Annette had earned a fine living on the boards, her doll-like stature being admirably suited to juvenile roles, including Little Eva, which she’d played with great success in Northern theatres). So I can’t blame myself for being taken in.
It’s not the only case of female double jeopardy that I’ve experienced, by the way. Elsewhere in my memoirs you’ll find mention of a French-mulatto trollop with whom I dallied in my salad days, and who came to my carnal attention again twenty-seven years later, and I’m damned if I recognised her, either.
That’s all by the way; what mattered, as I wallowed amidst the shattered furniture, was not that I’d failed to identify La Mandeville’s dainty buttocks in ecstatio, but that she was here at all, and in company with yet another branch of the B. M. Comber Admiration Society, to judge by the snatch of talk I’d heard from the adjoining room a moment since. To add to my confusion, Black Joe, who’d been a friend an hour ago, had just tried to hurl me through the wall and was now standing over me sporting his fives in a threatening manner. I didn’t know what to make of him, or her, or any damned thing – and now men were surging into the room, and Mandeville was pointing and shrilling:
“Comber or not, that man is Tom Arnold! He was our slave-driver. Let him deny it if he can!”
Black Joe took his eyes off me for an instant, possibly to contradict her, and I seized the opportunity to lash him across the knee with a broken chair-leg. He staggered, cursing, and I was up and past him, tripping in my blind flight but recovering and snatching for the handle of the outer door. I wrenched it open, and found myself face to face with a goggling darkie in a white jacket bearing a tray and beaming inquiry:
“Podden me, suh, but wuz you de gennelman whut sent for bourb’n an’ seltzer?”
It checked me for a split second, which was long enough for Joe to seize my collar from behind, pluck me backwards, growl “Wrong room, boy!” and slam the door shut. I lost my balance and sprawled in the wreckage once more, and before I could stir they were on me, two burly ruffians with bullet heads and no necks, one at either arm. I heaved one aside, and was wrestling with the other when I realised that three other men had emerged from the adjoining room and were advancing past Annette, and at the sight of them I ’vasted heaving and subsided, paralysed with horror.
To judge by their dress, they were thoroughly worthy citizens, bearing every mark of wealth and respectability: one wore U.S. Army uniform, with the epaulettes and double buttons of an infantry colonel; another might have been a prosperous professional man, with his immaculate broadcloth coat and heavy watch-chain across his bulky middle, and the third was an absolute Paris fashion plate in silk tailcoat, embroidered weskit, ruffles, and a gold-topped cane on which he limped slightly as he advanced – he’d have been the altogether dandy if he hadn’t had the misfortune to be as fat as butter. They might have been three of Mandeville’s richer clients, but for the mutual eccentricity in their appearance which froze me where I lay.
All three were wearing hoods over their heads, ghastly white conical things like gigantic candle-snuffers with eyeholes and blank gaping mouths.
Chapter 8
Barring an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Holy War, with its fanged devils sporting their horns and tails in the infernal regions, the great terror of my infancy was a lurid coloured print entitled “All Hope Abandon”, purporting to show what happened when the Spanish Inquisition got hold of you – which they undoubtedly would, my nurse assured me, if I didn’t eat my crusts, or farted in church. It showed a dreadful gloomy vault in which a gibbering wretch, guarded by hairy Dagoes in morions, was cowering before three Inquisitors, one of whom was pointing to a fiery archway through which could be seen hideous shadows of stunted figures operating pulleys and wheels and brandishing whips; you couldn’t really tell what they were doing, even if you squinted sidelong, but you could imagine it, you see, while your infant soul quaked at the visible terror of those three awful hooded Inquisitors, one of whom I was convinced was the Pope – nurses were sounder theologians then than they are now, I daresay. In any event, pointed cowls with empty eyes haunted my young nightmares, and the sight of them now, real and palpable, for the first time in my life, damned near carried me off. To make matters worse, I saw that the two thugs who had laid hold of me, and were now on their feet, had masks on their ugly phizzes, and Joe had a cocked revolver in his hand.
“Cover him, Joe!” barks the hooded soldier. “An’ you, suh, lay right still theah! Ye heah?”
“An’ speak up!” snaps the broadcloth figure, deep and harsh. “What’s yo’ name, suh? Out with it – Comber or Arnold?”
The broad Southern accents were the last thing you’d have expected to hear out of those grotesque hoods, but my amazement redoubled when the fat dandy limped up and stooped his great bulk to inspect me through blank eyeholes.
“I’ll lay seven to two he answers to both,” drawls he – another Southerner, but where the others were broad Dixie, he was your refined magnolia, elaborately soft and courteous. “Good mornin’, suh. Pray pardon this intrusion, an’ our outlandish attire. No cause for alarm, I assure you.”
It didn’t assure me for a moment, with those three horrid masks looming over me, but the politely mocking voice stirred me to fury in spite of my terror. “Damn your impudence! Who … who are you, and what d’you mean by it – you and your infernal nigger, he’s broke my bloody leg –”
“Hold yo’ tongue!” snarled the colonel’s hood, and he snatched Joe’s pistol and levelled it. “Stir a finger an’ Ah’ll burn yo’ brains –”
“Stow it, Clotho,” says the fat hood quietly, and set the weapon aside with his cane. “Pistols, ’pon my soul – we’re in a Washin’ton ho-tel, suh, not a Memphis boa’din’ house. ’Sides, firearms ain’t necessary …” He lowered his cane – and a glittering blade shot out from its ferrule, stopping an inch above my palpitating breast. “… are they? Have no fear, suh – just a precaution ’gainst any sudden outcry on your part, like hollerin’ for help, or showin’ fight.” He gave a fleshy chuckle. “But you wouldn’t be so foolish – would you now?”
Before that wicked point and soft-spoken menace I shrank back, gasping. “In God’s name … what d’ye want with me? I’m a British officer, under the protection of my ministry, damn you –”
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 305
