The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “It will be directly,” says I, rising gallantly, “if you’ll condescend to join me in a bottle of fizz.” I was setting a chair when I heard her gasp; she was staring as though I were Marley’s ghost. Hold on, thinks I, my new whiskers are grown enough to be presentable, surely – and then I almost dropped the chair, for it was Phoebe Carpenter, pillar of the Church and wholesaler of firearms to the Taiping rebels.

  “Colonel Flashman!” cries she. “Oh, dear!”

  “Mrs Carpenter!” cries I. “Good God!”

  She swayed, eyes closed, and sat down abruptly, gulping and staring at me wide-eyed as I resumed my seat. “Oh, what a start you gave me!”

  “That’s what I said, up the Pearl River,” says I. “Well, well, I never! Here, take a glass … and do tell me how the Reverend Josiah is keeping. Missionary society doing well, is it?”

  “Oh, dear!” she whispers, trembling violently, which improved proved an already delightful appearance. I hadn’t known her because the Phoebe I remembered had borne her beauty in matronly modesty, innocent of rouge and fairly swathed in muslin; this was a most artistic translation, red-lipped and polished, with her gold ringlets piled behind her head and her udders threatening to leap with agitation from a low-cut gown of black satin which I doubted had come from the last sale of work. She drank, her teeth chattering.

  “What must you think?” says she, speaking low, and taking a quick slant to see that no one was listening.

  “Well,” says I cheerily, “I think you’re wanted in Hong Kong, for gun-running, which should get you about five years if anyone were inconsiderate enough to mention it to the Singapore traps. I also think that would be a crying shame –”

  “You wouldn’t betray me?” she whimpers faintly.

  “You betrayed me, dear Phoebe,” says I gently, and laid my hand on hers. “But of course I wouldn’t –”

  “You might!” says she, starting to weep.

  “Nonsense, child! Why ever on earth should I?”

  “For … for … re-revenge!” She stared piteously, like a blue-eyed fawn, her bosom heaving. “I … we … deceived you most shamefully! Oh, dear, what am I to do?”

  “Have some bubbly,” says I soothingly, “and rest assured I have no thoughts of revenge. Compensation, perhaps …”

  “Comp-compensation?” She blinked miserably. “But I have no substance … I couldn’t afford …”

  “My dear Mrs Carpenter,” says I, squeezing her hand, “you have absolutely capital substance, and you know perfectly well I don’t mean money. Now … I’m sure Josiah has told you all about Susannah and the Elders. Well, I’m not feeling exactly elderly, but … oh, Susannah!” I beamed at her, and she blinked again, dabbed her nose and looked at me thoughtfully, still heaving a bit but settling down and accepting another ration of fizz.

  “I’m by no means sure that they would send me to prison!” says she, unexpectedly, pouting. “After all, it was a very good cause!”

  “It was a dam’ bad cause,” says I, “and if you think they won’t shove you in clink, just ask dear Josiah.”

  “I can’t! He has abandoned me!”

  “You don’t mean it!” I was astonished. “He must be mad. You mean he just up and left you? Here?”

  “Can you suppose I would accept employment in a restaurant if I were still a clergyman’s wife? Well, I am still his wife,” she admitted, taking another sip, “but he has deserted me and gone to Sumatra.”

  “Has he, though? Missionary work or piracy? Well, that’s bad luck to be sure. But you’ll soon get another chap, you know, with your looks,” I reassured her. “Well, take tonight, for example. Why, before I even recognised you, I was most entirely fetched –”

  “Oh, say you will not inform on me!” She leaned forward, all entreaty. “You see, I have a most fortunate situation here, and am in hope to save sufficient to go back to … to England … to Middle Wallop and my dear parents … at the rectory …”

  “I knew it must be a rectory. Middle Wallop, eh?”

  “When I think of it,” says she, biting her lip, “compared to …” She gestured at the room pathetically.

  “… compared to beating copra in the women’s compound with all those smelly Chinese sluts? Absolutely. Well, now, Phoebe, tempus is fugiting – when does your shop shut, and where shall we … ah … ?”

  “We close in an hour. I live in the house,” says she, looking at the table, and shot me a reproachful pout – my, she was a little stunner. “You do very wrong to compel me. If you were a gentleman …”

  “I’d shop you like a worthy citizen. If you were a lady, you wouldn’t hocus fellows into running guns. So we’re well suited – and I ain’t compelling you one bit; you’re all for it.” I gave her a wink and a squeeze. “Now, then, where can I spend the next hour? Got a billiard table, have you? Capital. Just pass me the word when you’ve got the dishes washed – oh, and see we have a couple of bottles, iced, upstairs, will you? Come on, goose – we’ll have the jolliest time, you know!”

  She gave her head a little toss, going pink, and glanced at me slantendicular. “And you promise faithfully not to tell … anything? Oh, if only I could be sure!”

  “Well, you can’t. Oh, come … why should I peach on a little darling like you, eh?” As we stood up, close together, I squeezed the satin unseen, and her mouth opened on a little gasp. “See? Two hours from now, you won’t care.”

  I ambled down to the empty billiard room, in prime fettle, calling “Kya-hai!” and ordering up another bottle of bubbly. I tickled the pills until it arrived, and then wandered, glass in hand, to the verandah to look out into the tropic dark; it had started to rain with great force, as it does in Singapore, straight down in stair-rods, battering the leaves and gurgling in the monsoon ditch, bringing that heavy, earthy smell that is the East. I stood reflecting in great content: homeward bound, champagne, good Burma cheroot, and lissom little Phoebe under starter’s orders. What more could a happy warrior ask? After the second glass I tried a few combination shots, but my eye wasn’t in any longer, and after a while I left off, yawning and wishing impatiently that Phoebe would hurry the mateys along, beginning to feel sleepy as well as monstrous randy.

  The door opened abruptly and a chap stuck his head in, rain glistening on his hat and cape. He gave me a cheery nod.

  “Evenin’, sport. Seen Joss about, have you?”

  “Joss?”

  “The guv’nor. You know, Carpenter. Or maybe you don’t know. Ne’er mind, I daresay he’s upstairs.” He was with-drawing.

  “Hold on! D’you mean … the Rev. Josiah Carpenter?”

  “The one and only,” says he, grinning. “Our esteemed proprietor.”

  I gaped at him. “Proprietor? You mean he owns this place? He’s not … in Sumatra?”

  “Well, he wasn’t this afternoon. I say, are you all right?”

  “But Mrs Carpenter distinctly … told me …”

  “Oh, she’s about, is she? Good, I’ll see her. Chin-chin.”

  The door slammed, leaving me standing bewildered – and angry. What was the little bitch playing at? She’d said … hold on … she had said … I turned sharply at a step on the verandah, lurching heavily against the table and catching hold to steady myself.

  The big blond-bearded chap who’d been in the restaurant was standing in the open screen; he was wearing a pilot-cap now, and there seemed to be another fellow in a sou’wester, just behind him in the shadows … why was I so dizzy all of a sudden?

  “Hollo,” says the blond chap, and his glance went to the bottle and glass on the side-table. He grinned at me. “Enjoying your drink?”

  [With words apparently failing their

  author for once, the eighth packet

  of the Flashman Papers ends here.]

  APPENDIX I:

  The Taiping Rebellion

  The Taiping Rebellion was the worst civil war in history, and the second bloodiest war of any kind, being exceeded in casualties only by the Sec
ond World War, with its estimated 60 million dead. How many died during the fourteen years of the Taiping Rising can only be guessed; the lowest estimate is 20 million, but 30 million is considered more probable (three times the total for the First World War). When it is remembered that the Taiping struggle was fought largely with small arms and only primitive artillery, some idea may be gained of the scale of the land fighting, with its attendant horrors of massacre and starvation. Again, the word “battle” nowadays is frequently applied to struggles lasting over months (Ypres, Stalingrad, etc). Using the more traditional sense of the term, which covers only days, it can be said that the bloodiest battle ever fought on earth was the Third Battle of Nanking in 1864, when in three days the dead exceeded a hundred thousand.

  So far as his account goes, up to the summer of 1860, Flashman gives an accurate, if necessarily condensed version of the Taiping movement and its astonishing leader, the Cantonese clerk Hung Hsiu-chuan, who fell into a trance after failing his civil service examinations, saw visions of Heaven, and became inspired to overthrow the Manchus, cast the idols out of China, and establish the Taiping Tienkwo, the Heavenly Dynasty of Perfect Peace, based on his own notions of Christianity. He is said to have been much influenced by a missionary tract, “Good Words to Admonish the Age”.

  That Hung was a leader of extraordinary magnetism is not to be doubted, and he was materially assisted by the corruption and decadence of Manchu government; China was ripe for revolution. At first his small movement concentrated on attacking idolatry, but with the persecution of the sect for heresy, magic, and conspiracy, his crusade developed into guerrilla warfare, and the first rising in Kwangsi in 1850 spread into other provinces. With able generals, such as Loyal Prince Lee, the Taiping armies fought with increasing success; their organisation and discipline far outmatched the Imperials, and after the capture of Nanking in 1853 they threatened Pekin and controlled more than a third of China, establishing capitals in provinces which they had devastated. Flashman saw them when they were at their peak and might still have accomplished their revolution, but the seeds of defeat were already apparent. For all their zeal and military discipline, the Taipings were poor social organisers and administrators; their rule was oppressive and haphazard, and they failed to attract either foreign support (although their apparent Christianity gained them some European sympathy at first) or the Chinese middle and upper classes. They also suffered from internal feuds and the degeneration of the once inspirational Hung, who after 1853 went into almost complete seclusion with his women and mystical meditations. Strategically, the Taipings made the mistake of never securing a major port through which they might have made contact with the outside world, and failing to concentrate their thrust at Pekin, the seat of Imperial power.

  After the events of 1860, their decline was rapid. Tseng Kuo-fan organised the Imperial reconquest, aided by the Ever-Victorious Army under Ward and Gordon, and after Hung’s suicide by poison in June 1864, Nanking fell, and the greatest rebellion ever seen in the world was over; six hundred towns had been destroyed, whole provinces devastated, billions of pounds worth of property lost, and countless millions were dead, including all the rebel leaders. Loyal Prince Lee and Hung Jen-kan were both executed in 1864. Other notable Wangs were:

  The East King (Tung Wang), Yang Hsiu-ching, a charcoal burner who became a shrewd and ruthless general; also known as God’s Holy Ghost. He was murdered in 1856 by

  The North King (Pei Wang), Wei Chiang-hui, pawnbroker, who in turn was executed with twenty thousand followers by the Heavenly King in 1856.

  The West King (Si Wang), and the South King (Nan Wang) were both killed in action in 1852.

  Apart from these early Wangs (“The Princes of the Four Quarters”) the principal leaders included the young and formidable General Chen Yu-cheng, who with Lee raised the siege of Nanking, and died in 1862; the redoubtable Shih Ta-kai, also known as the Assistant King (I Wang), executed in 1863; Hung Jen-ta (Fu Wang), elder brother of the Heavenly King, executed 1864; the Ying Wang (Heroic King), executed 1862; and most pathetic of all, Tien Kuei, the Junior Lord (Hung Fu), son of the Heavenly King, executed by the Imperialists in 1864; he was fifteen.

  Among eye-witnesses of the Taipings, none is more interesting than Augustus Lindley, an intensely partisan young Englishman who defended them as moderates, contended that the Heavenly King had been elected, not merely self-declared, denied that his claim of relationship to Christ was meant to be taken literally, and defined as “anti-Taiping” all Britons of the Elgin school, the opium interests, missionaries, Roman Catholics, and merchants generally. He paints an attractive picture of Loyal Prince Lee, whom he met (and shared his indignation at being repulsed from Shanghai), and is a mine of detail about Taipingdom. He is at variance, however, with other contemporary writers, the most extreme of whom describe the Taipings as enslavers, destroyers of trade, living on loot, etc.* At this distance they look, as Flashman says, like a worthy movement gone wrong; in fairness, it has to be said that they included some sincere reformers, even among local commanders, and in some areas at least brought lower taxation and tried to encourage trade and agriculture.

  As to the havoc they wrought, the one point on which most authorities seem to agree is that the Imperialist forces were worse. Jen Yu-wen described the carnage when the Taipings took Nanking (with 30,000 Bannermen wiped out and thousands of women burned, drowned, and cut down) as the first and last Taiping massacre; considering the scale of bloodshed in the war, it is difficult to accept this.

  There is a considerable modern literature on the subject, and Chinese scholars have devoted close study to the writings and philosophy of the movement. (See Lindley, Ti-ping Tien-kwoh, 1866; Lewis B. Browning, A Visit to the Taipings in 1854 (in Eastern Experiences, 1871); Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion, vol. i, 1966; Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, 1973; J. C. Cheng, Chinese Sources for the Taiping Rebellion, 1963; H. W. Gordon, Events in the Life of Charles George Gordon, 1886; Walter Scott (publisher), Life of General Gordon, 1885; Morse; Wilson, Blakiston; Forrest; Scarth; Cahill.)

  * * *

  * H. B. Morse, an eminently fair authority, is blunt: “The Taiping Government is not known to have organised any form of civil administration, even in Nanking. Levying of taxes was simplicity itself: it took everything in sight.” (International Relations).

  APPENDIX II:

  The Orchid

  Yehonala, later Empress Tzu-hsi (1834–1908), known variously as the Orchid, Imperial Yi Concubine, Empress of the Western Palace, and latterly, Old Buddha, was the effective ruler of China for half a century. The daughter of a Manchu captain of the 8th Banner Corps, she was seventeen when she and her cousin, Sakota, were chosen with 26 other Manchu beauties as concubines for the young Emperor Hsien Feng, and although Sakota became Empress Consort, Yehonala quickly established herself as the Imperial favourite. When she bore the Emperor’s only son in 1856 her hold over the ailing, weakly monarch, and on political power, became greatly strengthened, with fateful results for China. For the young concubine, although well educated by Manchu standards, was ignorant of the world outside; she was also an extreme reactionary, inflexibly autocratic, and highly aggressive in diplomacy. She appears to have been a prime mover in China’s resistance policy during the Arrow War and Elgin expedition, forbidding trade, putting prices on British heads, sending suicide orders to unlucky commanders, inspiring the death warrants, and urging opposition to the barbarians at all costs. (“My anger is about to strike and exterminate them without mercy,” Daniel Varè quotes her. “I command all my subjects to hunt them down like wild beasts.”) At the same time, with the Emperor’s health failing, she was entering on a political struggle to ensure her son’s succession and her own survival.

  Flashman’s account of her scheming in September 1860 is uncorroborated, but there is no doubt that she was already deep in palace plotting, and in the year that followed her courage, ruthlessness, and genius for intrigue were tested by events which
resemble sensational fiction rather than sober fact. For the Emperor did not die quickly, as expected; he lingered for a year at Jehol, and in that time Yehonala suffered an almost fatal setback. Reports of her affair with Jung Lu, who was said to be her lover, reached the Emperor, and she was forbidden the royal presence; worse still, when a council of regency was appointed by the Emperor’s decree on the day before his death in August 1861, its leaders were her bitterest enemies, Prince I, Sushun, and Prince Cheng;* Yehonala herself was excluded.

  That should have been the end of her, but her enemies had overlooked one small but vital point. The edict of regency, signed by the Emperor, had not been sealed with the dynastic seal – Yehonala had purloined it. And at a time when it was essential for the reins of power to be seized in Pekin, Prince I and the other regents were bound by court protocol to remain with the royal corpse at Jehol, and then accompany it, in slow ceremonial procession, to the capital. Not so Yehonala and the Empress Sakota, whose duty it was to go ahead to Pekin and meet the coffin on its arrival.

  Prince I and Sushun, well aware of Yehonala’s popularity with the troops, and fearing what might happen if she reached Pekin first, arranged to have her and Sakota ambushed and murdered on the journey. But the faithful Jung Lu learned of the plot and set off from Jehol by night, overtook the royal ladies on the road, escaped the ambush, and brought them safely to the capital, where Yehonala lost no time in raising support; Sakota, as usual, was content to stay in the background. Thus when Prince I and the regents finally arrived with the cortege they were welcomed by an urbane Yi Concubine who thanked them graciously, dismissed them from the regency, and had them arrested in the name of the new Emperor (whose decrees proved to be properly sealed).