Flashman and the Emperor

by Robert Brightwell

  She sat in a nearby chair and regarded me. She cocked an eyebrow when she noticed a clear sign of my growing interest protruding from the water and smiled. “There will be plenty of time for all of your desires. We have all afternoon. As you will learn, we do not like to rush things in Rio.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to wait,” I said petulantly. After all, I was the paying client and I thought it was long overdue that I asserted some control. I reached out for her, but she playfully slapped my hand away.

  “Trust me, it will be better my way,” she replied, grinning. She reached forward to take a handful of dried leaves from a basket, then dropped them in a small pestle and started to grind them with a wooden mortar. Then she reached into another bowl and took a dried flower head and crumbled that in too.

  “Ah, I know that smell,” I exclaimed. “Those are hemp flowers. They use those to make something called bhang in India.”

  “Did you try it?” she asked, smiling as she added some new shredded leaves to the mix, which brought the aroma of tobacco to the heady scent of hemp and bath oils.

  “I had it in a milk drink once. It tasted foul and gave me a headache.”

  “You should have smoked it,” she advised as she began to load a clay pipe with the mixture in the pestle. Leaning over a candle she puffed several times on the pipe to get it alight and then sat back inhaling deeply, before blowing the smoke out through her nostrils. “Here,” she passed the pipe to me. “This will make you feel like a true Carioca.”

  I drew in the smoke, which seemed pleasant enough. In India, I had seen that bhang users were often left in a stupor from its ingestion, but this did not make me feel sleepy at all. Quite the reverse: as I puffed away my muscles relaxed, but I felt a restless energy build in me. Aphrodite talked, I cannot remember about what, but I do recall thinking that she was growing even more beautiful. At length she stood and removed a brooch from her shoulder and her robe fell to her feet revealing golden-skinned perfection.

  There was a hiss as the pipe fell from my gaping jaw into the water. Then with a roar I was leaping out of the bath like an oiled porpoise, sweeping her up in my arms and onto the bed. My stars, in a long and lecherous career I have known passion and lust, but nothing like that longing for my goddess. She squealed in delight and soon we were tumbling over the covers while I went to work in earnest.

  If Aphrodite had ever needed a temple, it would have resembled those I had seen in India. The ones with every conceivable amorous position known to man carved into its walls, not to mention one or two that were just impossible unless you were double jointed. I had tried most of them with the redoubtable Mrs Freese back in ’03 and had been given further instruction by a concubine called Fatimah. Her tuition had damn nearly wasted me away. Now all the favourite tricks from my extensive carnal repertoire came back to me. I seemed to have limitless energy and half an hour after we started, I still had the strength to hold her up for a Delhi Knee-Trembler, while she seemed to be verging on exhaustion. She called out something in Portuguese and in a trice, two other girls were pressing up against me too.

  An hour later and I was lying slightly dazed on the bed, still struggling to believe what had just happened. Three naked girls shared the sheets with me, all sighing and grinning like the cat that had stolen the cream. Only now was I completely spent. I was forty then and had not performed like that in twenty years, if ever. God knows what she had mixed in with that tobacco, but it was worth its weight in gold. The door was pushed open and in walked a fat black woman, a maid, judging from her clothes. She beamed in delight at the sight before her.

  “Well now, sugar,” she crowed. “Now you are finished with those thin creatures, you let me know if you are ready for a real woman.”

  I could not help but smile proudly back. “Just whistle up another basket of those leaves and I will see to you presently,” I told her. She cackled with delight and went out again. Thankfully, when she did return, it was with a bottle of local rum rather than leaves. One more bout would probably have killed me off. I sipped the spirit gratefully, enjoying the more familiar intoxication.

  It was dark when I finally made it downstairs again. Jackson was sitting beside Madame Sousa at a desk in the large reception room. They both seemed to be poring over a thick book, but at the sight of me she rose and came towards me, beaming.

  “Ah, if it is not my new favourite customer. I do hope you will come and see us again soon – and your friend here is always welcome.” Then as she got close, she leant up against my ear and whispered the amount due for the afternoon’s entertainment, a staggering sum.

  “How much?” I gasped, shocked.

  “I must charge you for three girls. But if you are paying in English coin it will be less, as Brazilian money is more tin than silver.”

  I could hardly complain about the service and so I paid up. To my surprise, she gave the money to Jackson, who counted it, made a note in what I now realised was a ledger in front of him and then dropped the cash in a box.

  “You surely have not spent all this time doing accounts?” I asked, astonished.

  “Mr Jackson has been most useful and informative,” announced Madame Sousa.

  “I have been doing some drawing too,” Jackson added as he got to his feet and picked up his artist’s case. I shook my head in bemusement and headed towards the door, but as I did so Madame Sousa caught Jackson’s arm. She reached into her cash box for some coins and pressed them into his hand.

  “A token of my appreciation,” she announced.

  “Good God, Jackson,” I exclaimed. “You must be the only man to walk out of a knocking shop with more money than you went in with.” He grinned sheepishly as he followed me out onto the street. “Did you really only draw a girl, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, would you like to see it?” He pulled out a sheet of paper from his folder. We stood near a lit brazier so that I could see his handiwork. There depicted in charcoal was a naked stunner pouting across the bed sheets. It was a shocking waste of flesh. But to be fair to Jackson, he was in truth a good artist, for he had caught her expression of puzzled frustration perfectly.

  “When we get back to England, Jackson, you must introduce me to your Penelope and I will tell her what an extraordinary man she is marrying. But I would not show her that drawing if I were you.”

  From out of the darkness came more men with chairs, free men, I guessed from the way they negotiated the rate. Soon we were heading back to the harbour, with a spare man running ahead with a burning torch to light the way. The city seemed more active at night, with people on the streets and a crowd in the square outside the theatre. Orchestral music could be heard through the broken windows, but it had to compete with more primal sounds. From several locations around the outskirts of the city, came the sound of rhythmic drumming, like a fast heartbeat.

  “Do you think that they are having some kind of festival?” Jackson asked. Then he sniffed, “What is that strange smell? It seems to be following us.”

  “Ah, I think that is me,” I admitted. As well as the bath oils, after our prolonged bout of passion, the girls had discovered that I had a dozen mosquito bites. Rio, it turned out, was surrounded with swamps in which they bred. There were swarms of the vicious bloodsuckers, which made disease rife, particularly in the poorer parts of town that were closer to these bogs. They had insisted on dabbing each one with a pungent oil that they assured me would keep the insects away. It might well work with insects, but I feared that the rank odour might have a similar effect on humans as well.

  Erskine was in a rare old temper when we got back to the ship. The British envoy had refused to consider his idea of using the Rising Star to promote British trade. He had made it abundantly clear that he wanted nothing to do with the ship or Cochrane. I was not surprised, for the Spanish had protested strongly to Britain when Cochrane had accepted command of the Chilean fleet. To try to forestall the efforts of their renegade admiral, the British government had passed a Foreign Enli
stment Act, which made it illegal for British citizens to fight in wars in which the British government was a neutral party. Cochrane had ignored this legislation and carried on regardless. His many successes since had seriously damaged diplomatic relations between Spain and Britain. The poor envoy must have realised that any hint of support for Cochrane by him, would result in furious protests from Spain and, probably, his recall to London.

  I tried to explain this to Erskine, but he was having none of it. Like me, he had been a soldier in the Peninsular War and had a very poor opinion of Spanish abilities.

  “We should be making alliances with the New World,” he fumed. “That is where we will grow trade in the future. Spain is in decline and will never recover.” He took a deep breath and then fixed me with his beady eyes. “You look pale, Flashman, are you all right? And what on earth is that God-awful stink?

  Chapter 4

  We left Rio two days later. After the rejection of his plans, Erskine was keen to push on as soon as more fuel was aboard. Coal was loaded – ironically, it had been mined in Britain – while I stood on the deck staring dreamily at the shore. I mulled over returning to my goddess a final time before we sailed. But I would have needed at least a week on a diet of beef, oysters and strong stout beer, before I could even contemplate repeating my earlier feats. There are some perfect memories that are just not worth ruining for the chance of repetition. Instead, I found my thoughts turning to the next stage of our journey.

  I had never sailed around Cape Horn, but like everyone, I had heard stories of the terrible storms it harbours and of great ships smashed to matchwood or lost with all hands. Until then I had tried not to think about it, but now we were heading south and not due to drop anchor again until we reached Valparaíso in Chile.

  Gradually, we moved down the coast and the hot sweltering temperatures cooled to just pleasantly warm. When we were close enough to see land, the steaming jungle had been replaced by scrub and grassland. For many days we headed south, until I began to think that the continent would never end. Then at last we headed south-west. We were not going to go around the southernmost tip of land, but instead try to navigate some rocky channels behind it. While they offered more shelter, there was a greater risk of being smashed on the rocks as the wind whistled unpredictably through them.

  As we got closer, it grew cooler still, until I was forced to wear an old greatcoat on deck. The dark mass of the cape appeared on the horizon and I saw that what I had taken for clouds around the tips of distant mountains, was in fact snow. It was one of the eeriest landfalls I ever made. There was not a single sign of civilisation as far as you could see in any direction. There were no people at all living this far south and we knew that if we foundered for any reason, we would be lost.

  Erskine kept a look out for icebergs as these had been seen around the cape at all times of the year. They were often blamed for the disappearance of ships, as when the weather was rough with sleet and hail, they were often not seen until it was too late. Mercifully, there was just a steady breeze rather than a tempest as we approached the coast. We entered a bay with clear blue water and black rock rising up on either side. The wind was steady from the northwest allowing us to make good passage until we were in the lee of the land. Erskine had ordered the boilers lit and soon the paddle wheel was turning once more. The end of the bay closed into a channel. As we pointed the bow towards the first bend in its length the sun disappeared behind a huge mountain to leave us in shadow, and a chill went down my spine. Mile after mile we steamed, and the only signs that any man had been there before us were a few bleached ship’s timbers, wedged high up on a rocky pinnacle. We stared at them in silence, pitying the poor devils who must have been aboard her as huge seabirds wheeled overhead, screeching their indignation at another intruder to their domain.

  To me, there was something more than a bit sinister about the place. The snow-capped mountains began to close in around us as the channel became narrower and I started to wonder if Erskine had made a mistake and we were heading towards a dead end. We anchored at night; it was too dangerous to travel in the dark. Then, next morning, we set off again and to my relief the channel opened out once more. We could even use the sails as there was now a steady wind coming from the south.

  We spent the day weaving through channels and islands, sometimes with sail, at other times with steam; occasionally with both. Twisting and turning but always heading roughly west until at last we rounded a headland to see that, while there was still a myriad of islands and channels to the north and south, there was nothing but open sea facing our bows.

  “Welcome to the Pacific,” announced Erskine. “I have some champagne in my cabin that has been waiting for this moment and I don’t mind admitting that getting here has been a lot smoother than I feared.”

  “Are we truly through?” I asked, feeling a profound sense of relief.

  “Well,” Erskine pointed to the land to the north. “Those islands are the tops of mountains and the range extends out to sea. There are some rock pinnacles close to the surface. My brother hit one with his flagship.” Erskine gave a bark of laughter. “In fact, reading between the lines of the note he sent me, his men only captured Valdivia against huge odds because they knew that their ship would sink if they failed.”

  Erskine thought this was most amusing, but I was more concerned with hidden rocks waiting to tear out the bottom of our ship. “So, are we sailing out into the Pacific rather than following the coast?”

  “Yes, we will go a good few leagues out to sea before we turn north. Now, let me get that champagne.”

  They say that one sea looks like any other and perhaps it does. But to me, whether it was just in my mind or not, the Pacific felt different from the Atlantic. Both had long rolling waves that had travelled thousands of miles before they lifted our keel a few feet and both were blue or green, depending on the sky. But the Pacific was the other side of the world from everything that was familiar to me and it had a greater sense of vastness somehow. Two days out we saw a school of whales. We had seen some before in the Atlantic, but nothing like this. There were hundreds of them. Several of the huge creatures passed the hull within a few feet, as though they were curious to see us. One careless sweep of a tail fin and we would have been holed. I remembered all too well a story that we had read in a newspaper while the ship was being repaired in Cork. An American whaling ship, the Essex I think it was called, had been attacked and sunk by a huge white whale in these waters less than two years before. For all I knew, the lethal leviathan was swimming amongst that massive herd of creatures around us.

  That evening we finally turned north, to travel back up the coast of South America. It was a dark night and I was still getting used to the unfamiliar stars in the sky, but when I stared astern I saw that a strange luminescent glow had formed along our wake. One of the old hands had seen this before, and he swore that it was a good omen. I hoped he was right. For the next few days his premonition seemed well founded, for the winds were favourable and the only strange thing we saw was a huge ray basking on the surface. It was big enough for several men to stand on, but when one of the crew threw a bottle at it to see if it was still alive, it rolled and dived out of sight. Erskine did not want to close with the coast until we were well past Valdivia, as it was near there where his brother had struck the rock. So we stayed well out in the ocean. It was perhaps just as well we did, for on the seventh day heading north the storm hit us.

  There was no hope of continuing our journey. Waves the size of houses rolled towards us in endless battalions, with the ship rearing up and then plunging down over their crests. All we could do was put up a staysail to keep the bow pointing towards the wind and ride it out. The storm lasted a day and a night and if that does not sound long, then imagine how you would feel if you had been tossed around in a crate since luncheon yesterday. I spent most of the time below. There was little I could do on deck and as the waves came in you always had a doubt that the ship would come up in t
ime and we would be smashed down into the deep.

  By the time the sea finally subsided, pretty much everything that could be smashed had been destroyed. Loose crockery had not just been broken, but milled to the size of pieces of gravel. Even some of the tin plates had been bent beyond recognition and the big brick base of the cooking range had moved a foot across the galley. But they were the trivial things. The pumps had kept most of the water out and apart from a few broken ropes, the rigging was still sound, with all masts intact.

  An hour after the storm left us we were underway again and a short while after that the cook served hot food, albeit on wooden boards with strange utensils. The ship had proved once again that she was tough and resilient and I only hoped that the vessel for the homeward journey would be as sturdy. That evening we turned east, for the tempest had blown us further north. Valparaíso, Cochrane and a few weeks ashore were just two days’ sail away.

  We saw land again the next morning, at first no more than a smudge on the horizon. As the day pressed on we made out the tops of mountains, although whether this time the white on them was snow or cloud it was hard to tell. Certainly, they must have been huge, for by evening they reared up over the distant horizon but we still could not make out the shoreline at all.

  I awoke the following day eager to see the city that I had come so far to visit. But there had been some mistake in the navigation, for all I could see through the glass was a miserable little fishing village. It was dwarfed by the mountains around it and seemed to be hanging on to the land by its fingertips.

  “It is not very impressive, is it?” asked Erskine as he came and stood beside me.

  “What is?” I asked as I scanned up and down the coast in vain for some sign of a larger settlement.

  “Valparaíso,” he replied.

  “Don’t be daft, that cannot be Valparaíso,” I insisted. “Valparaíso is the main port for Santiago, their capital city. There would be docks and foreign trading ships and, well, it might not be as big as Rio, but it must be a lot bigger than a few hovels and a donkey. Why, I have passed wind that is more impressive than that miserable-looking place. It hangs like a tick in a crevice between two mountainous buttocks. No, you must have made an error with the chart.”