I remembered well giving an exaggerated account of my Spanish adventures to an officer in Canada. My aim back then was to convince them that I had suffered enough and deserved a berth on the next homebound boat. Not that the tale did me much good; I was sent on to Niagara anyway, where I was stationed with the Iroquois. “That was all a long time ago,” I protested. I had long since learned to play down my martial reputation, it only leads to trouble. “I am forty-two now, far too old for heroics, and I have been away from home for over two years. I just want a berth on the next ship back to Britain.”
“Nonsense,” laughed McCarthy. “I am sixty and I hope I am not too old for heroics. But don’t worry, we will get you home, although you may have to wait a few weeks for a ship.”
I sighed with relief and then remembered another nagging worry. “You are not expecting trouble from these Ashanti fellows I heard about on the way here, then?”
McCarthy gave a snort of derision. “No, they may have ambushed a patrol under my adjutant, but when another officer and a friendly Fantee chieftain led a force against them, they backed away. They are just opportunist bullies, Flashman. When people stand up to them they shrink back to their own lands. They do not want a war with us.”
I had asked my question to get some reassurance I was safe, but McCarthy’s answer did not entirely give me the comfort I was looking for. “But they attacked your adjutant,” I persisted. “Was that in our territory or theirs?”
“Just fifteen bloody miles away,” McCarthy admitted as I felt the first twinge of alarm. “But Chisholm always gets himself carried by bearers on expedition and takes no notice of local features. He probably gets lost on the way to the privy.” He dismissed the incident. “There is no cause for concern, for I am presently gathering several large bands of allied warriors to give a show of strength to the Ashanti. In fact, you must join me on one of the inspections – to have a man with your martial reputation will be a boost to our soldiery. As you have probably heard, most did not come here voluntarily.”
“Yes, young Wetherell told me that half of them die in the fever season and er… when is the fever season?”
“Don’t worry,” grinned McCarthy. “You have just missed it. The rainy season here is in the summer months. There are torrential downpours; cesspits flood and drainage ditches overflow. On top of that you have rotting vegetation and drowned animals and swarms of flies from larvae that hatch in the puddles. It is a pestilent place then. We get the first cases of fever in June and July, but in August there are also fogs, which make the air damp, and that is when the disease really takes hold.”
“It sounds bloody awful,” I said with feeling. “I am surprised you get anyone to come here at all. You cannot fight a fever like that if it is in the air that you breathe. Dammit, if I was offered this posting or a flogging, I think I would take the lash.”
“Some do,” admitted McCarthy. “But it can be a beautiful place too and the people are friendly, loyal and proud fellows for the most part. And anyway, Wetherell was exaggerating. In my time we have never lost more than a quarter of the white folk in a season.” He paused, thinking before adding, “Although a lot of the survivors were old-timers, and so I suppose the deaths amongst the new arrivals were higher.”
I did not know what to say to that, other than to hope that a homeward bound ship would be along soon. I pitied the poor devils that would still be here next summer and then one in particular sprang to mind. “I was surprised to see a white woman teaching in the courtyard. Surely she has not come here to escape a flogging?”
McCarthy coloured slightly at the mention of the woman and immediately began to look a little uncomfortable. “Ah, well, no. It is a little bit of a delicate situation, Flashman, I’m sure you will understand. More whisky?”
He bustled off to the decanter and was clearly hoping that I would drop the subject, but my interest and indeed ardour was aroused. If I had to spend much time on this wretched shore waiting for a ship, then the delightful Mrs Bracegirdle would be one of the few things to make such a stay palatable. “Surely you will not deny the curiosity of a brother officer,” I cajoled, now playing the army card for all it was worth. “Obviously it will go no further.”
“Well, I have given my word,” muttered McCarthy as he put the glass down beside me. He paused, obviously hoping that I would let him off the hook, but I kept silent and stared at the amber liquid as though waiting for him to continue. “But I suppose you will be going soon and so it will not matter,” he continued at last. “But I am relying on your utmost discretion, Flashman, as the lady’s reputation would be ruined if this got out.”
“Of course,” I said, eagerly awaiting him to dish the dirt.
“Well the woman was originally a Miss Temple, a vicar’s daughter from Oxfordshire. The father was due to be appointed as the canon of a cathedral when his daughter was discovered indulging her basest pleasures with two farm hands in a hayloft.”
“Two at the same time,” I repeated in what I trusted was a dismayed tone.
I had hoped he would give more details but instead he continued. “Yes, well, as you can imagine, there was the risk of an enormous scandal. Her father did his best to hush it up, but he had to get his daughter out of the way. In the end he married her off to an old friend of his who was home on leave from a posting here. I gather it was a condition of the marriage contract that the groom took his new bride with him when he returned.” McCarthy shrugged, “I know, it does seem a rather extreme solution to the problem.”
“The callous bastard, he must have known she could die here.” I was referring to the father, who was evidently willing to sell his daughter down the river to protect his own career. But McCarthy misunderstood me.
“Bracegirdle is not a bad man. He is doing a great deal to help me set up the new settlements of freed slaves that are being landed here. During the fever season he asked if his wife could be berthed on the schooner, away from the contagion. I sent Hannah and young John aboard as well, to keep her company.” He laughed, “Mind you, I have to say that her arrival has done wonders for attendance in church. Half the garrison seem to be there some days and I am sure it is not for Bracegirdle’s sermons.”
“Is there a conflict between these missionaries and your native allies?” I asked. “The Fantee village I arrived in did not seem too keen on Christianity.” I had a sudden image of Jonah roasting on his own pyre, although I doubted he would have been killed if he had not been a certifiable lunatic. They had let me live, after all, and I was a Christian, albeit a bad one according to them.
“Fenwick brought you in, didn’t he? Was it from Banutu’s village? He is a strange bird,” declared McCarthy in what I thought was a monumental understatement. “There is no great conflict with the locals. The missionaries concentrate their attention on the returned slaves, many of whom are already Christian. I give them parcels of land to build their communities as well as agricultural supplies and I have even built a few schools for the children. The missionaries help with those and build churches only in those settlements. I don’t care who the others worship, but I will not tolerate human sacrifice, not in British settlements.
“Fenwick said that the Ashanti sacrificed three thousand for their king’s funeral, most of them Fantee prisoners. Is that right?”
“It is their custom to make sacrifices when someone dies, some of the other tribes are the same. Often it is a slave girl to look after the deceased in the afterlife. There would have been a number killed for a king, but I doubt it was three thousand. The Ashanti are not that wasteful. The real number has probably been exaggerated to highlight the importance of the old ruler.”
It was at this point that Hannah opened the door to the governor’s office and walked in. “Mr Brandon is waiting to see you,” she told her husband. “Do you want me to ask the mess orderly to prepare a room for Thomas in the officers’ quarters?”
“That would be very kind,” said McCarthy rising again from his chair. “Brandon is
our quartermaster,” he explained. “I will ask him to give some supplies to Fenwick to take back to the village. It is the least we can do after they have rescued our friend here.” He held out his hand in greeting, “Welcome to Cape Coast Castle, Thomas.”
Chapter 5
My life in the castle quickly settled down into a regular routine. Each morning I would arise from my comfortable billet in the officers’ quarters and climb to the tallest point on the battlements to scan the horizon. I was searching for the sails of an approaching ship, but each morning I was disappointed. I would take breakfast in the mess and then spend the cooler part of the day exploring the town and surrounding area. The hotter afternoons would be spent at the castle, often observing the splendid Mrs Bracegirdle teaching her charges in the shade. Then, if the sea was not too rough, I would take a swim before dinner.
It was a fairly idyllic existence, unlike that for many of the castle’s previous inhabitants. One morning I went down to the slave dungeons. By then I was used to warm weather, but the air got damp and clammy as I went down the passages, holding a lantern as there was little natural light. The huge great barrelled chambers were cooler than outside, but then they were empty, as they had been for nearly twenty years. Packed with humanity, with little if any sanitation for weeks at a time, the conditions must have been truly unbearable. It would have been stiflingly hot, dark and crowded and the desperate wretches would have known the fate that awaited them. From what I had heard, the conditions on the slave ships were even worse. Tens of thousands had passed through the place; you could almost sense the despair as though it had been absorbed by the surrounding brick and stone.
It was a relief to get back out in the sunshine. I had seen more than enough slaves in my time. There had been the slave pens in Algiers full of Europeans and Americans, then more recently Brazil, whose plantations and cities were dependent on them. It was sobering to think that there was probably a similar castle still full of them in Brazil’s African colonies. At least their new emperor was trying to put a stop to it all.
When I explored the town, I found it a thriving and diverse place. The majority of its citizens were African, but judging from appearances, more than a few had traces of white bloodstock in their lineage. The castle had been started by the Swedes in the 1600s and so Europeans had been in the region for nearly two hundred years. There were also Arab traders in their turbans, with their veiled womenfolk. I noticed that even the African women were more modestly dressed here, most with strips of cloth wrapped around their bodies. The commercial area was a hive of activity with fishermen on the beachfront selling their catches, hunters nearby offering a wide variety of bushmeat and farmers trading fruit and vegetables. Beyond them were the craftsmen: carpenters, blacksmiths, an ivory carver and several who were skilfully hammering intricate patterns into metal plates and bowls.
I met Major Chisholm there, who I had talked to before in the mess. He was an old Africa hand with fourteen years’ experience of the continent. I guessed that he could not afford a commission elsewhere. He had asked me about my campaigns in Europe with a note of envy, for there was little chance of advancement with his posting, yet with disease rife, there was probably a higher chance of being killed. McCarthy had been right about his sense of direction, for I’ll swear he had got himself lost again. He was searching for the silversmith to repair a mounting on a pistol and must have walked right past the fellow before he found me.
As he had been beaten by them, I was interested to get his view on the Ashanti, to see whether McCarthy was being overly optimistic.
“They are hugely powerful and damned cunning,” he told me. “I am sure that they bribed our guide to lead us into their ambush, not that it did him much good as he was one of the first ones killed.”
“The Fantee man who brought me here told me that we pay them a tribute to recognise their dominance over us, is that true?” I asked.
“We have loaned the local people here gold to pay tributes to the Ashanti, but we have not paid them directly.” He shrugged, “I am not sure that the Ashanti noted the distinction and to be honest we have behaved badly on our treaties with them.”
“Why, what have we done?”
“A man called Bowdich went to the Ashanti capital of Coomassie in 1817 to agree the first treaty. But when he got back here the local director of the African Company of Merchants, a trading company that was then running the colony, decided that he did not like some of the clauses agreed. They were inconclusive about sovereignty. So he secretly changed the wording to indicate that the Ashanti had acknowledged British dominion here, before sending a copy on to London. The Ashanti also sent ambassadors here who were to be sent on to London to directly negotiate with our government. The company director refused to even receive these representatives, never mind arrange their passage on a ship to England as that would have revealed his duplicity. Two years later a British government official called Dupuis arrived in the Ashanti capital of Coomassie with a copy of the London treaty to negotiate new terms. The Ashanti soon discovered that Dupuis’ copy of the existing terms differed to their own. Dupuis negotiated a new settlement, but the trading company director snubbed both him and the Ashanti after that. Dupius was scathing of the company in his final report to the government, which was one of the reasons the company was replaced. The area was then made a crown colony by the government and McCarthy, who had already been governing in Sierra Leone, was appointed governor here as well.”
“Do you think that McCarthy is right, then, that the Ashanti are just bullies who will back down?”
“They don’t trust us, but they don’t need us either. They do most of their trade through the Dutch port of Elmina just up the coast and with the Danish settlement at Accra in the south. The governor is right that they respect strength, and that we cannot allow them to kill our soldiers without responding. But if we push them too far, the king will lose face and will be forced to retaliate. The old man has a delicate path of diplomacy to tread.”
It appeared that treading paths was one thing that McCarthy was also keen to do. For a few days after this conversation, he led an expedition twenty-seven miles into the jungle. He had set off early in the morning with just a local guide for company. There were no horses at Cape Coast Castle or even mules or oxen. Such beasts of burden did not survive in the climate and so you either walked or were carried by bearers. McCarthy walked and the rest of his entourage did not catch up with him until lunchtime.
He had asked me if I wanted to come, but I saw no reason to take such a risk. Chisholm had alarmed me about the Ashanti situation and McCarthy was going almost twice as far into the jungle as Chisholm had done when he had been attacked. The governor was also only taking a small escort with him as the trip’s purpose was to seal an alliance with the Fantee chieftains. Their warriors would be his security. Personally, I preferred stone walls and a few hundred redcoats.
The day after McCarthy left, I and many of the white men remaining in the garrison went to church for the Sunday service. I had been considering how best to use the information the governor had given me to get the delectable Mrs Bracegirdle into bed. The obvious approach was blackmail, but if we were caught or she had an attack of Christian conscience and told her husband, things could unravel quickly. McCarthy would learn I had abused his trust and I still needed his help to get a boat home. Anyway, from what I had heard, the girl had been ill used and deserved better. I thought a subtler approach would offer greater rewards.
As we all piled into the whitewashed chapel, the object of my desires was playing a hymn on an old wooden organ at the front of the church. It was one of those portable affairs that required a second person to work a bellows to send wind through the pipes. Two soldiers were on their knees beside her, taking turns to pump the bellows so industriously that the music was almost painfully loud. Chisholm, as the governor’s deputy, took a seat in the front pew and I took the opportunity to grab a place beside him, to give me an unobstructed view of proce
edings. As the major glared at the soldiers and gestured for them to slow down, the good reverend finally made an appearance, walking up to the little altar. I had seen him once before. Grey-haired and balding, he must have been nearly sixty; cadaverously thin with a yellowish tinge to his complexion that he shared with many of the old-timers in the region.
“Welcome to St Saviours,” he called in his reedy voice and then proceeded to read out several parish notices. It cannot have escaped his attention that beyond a cursory glance, he had not retained the attention of his audience. Virtually every eye was fixed on his wife, who now sat demurely staring down at her keyboard, doing her best to ignore the waves of lust washing in her direction from the congregation. The next hour confirmed that people had not come for the sermon as I doubt a single one of us could have quoted from it once we were back outside. Most just sat there drinking in the vision of womanhood in front of us. She looked up only once. I tried one of my winning smiles, but her gaze went over my shoulder at the rows of faces beyond with, I thought, a touch of defiance in her expression.
All too soon the service was over and we trooped back outside and through the little churchyard. Chisholm was telling me about one of the characters buried there when a man called out in my direction.
“It is you, Yer Honour, is it not?” shouted an Irish voice from a group of soldiers standing near the church gates, waiting for their comrades to come out. As I looked up one of them came forward, a little unsteadily, clearly the worse for drink.
lashman and the Golden Sword Page 4
