relations.
In the meantime, I had Pam's other business to attend to, so I spent the afternoon in the Native Infantry lines, looking at the Company sepoys to gauge for myself what their temper was. I did it idly enough, for they seemed a properly smart and docile lot, and yet it was a momentous visit. For it led to an encounter that was to save my life, and set me on one of the queerest and most terrifying adventures of my career, and perhaps shaped the destiny of British India, too.
I had just finished chatting to a group of the jawans,*(*Soldiers.) and telling 'em that in my view they'd never be called on to serve overseas, in spite of the new act,9 when the officer with me — fellow called Turnbull — asked me if I'd like to look at the irregular horse troop who had their stables close by. Being a cavalryman, I said yes, and a fine mixed bunch they were, too, Punjabis and frontiersmen mostly, big, strapping ruffians with oiled whiskers and their shirts inside their breeches, laughing and joking as they worked on their leather, and as different from the smooth-faced infantry as Cheyennes are from hottentots. I was having a good crack with them, for these were the kind of scoundrels with whom I'd ridden (albeit reluctantly) in my Afghan days, when their rissaldar*(*Native officer commanding a cavalry troop.)- came up — and at the sight of me he stopped dead in the stable door, gaping as though he couldn't believe his eyes. He was a huge, bearded Ghazi of a fellow, Afghan for certain by the devil's face of him — I'd have said Gilzai or Dourani — with a skull cap on the back of his head, and the old yellow coat of Skinner's riders over his shoulders.10
'Jehannum!' says he, and stared again, and then stuck his hands on his hips and roared with laughter.
'Salaam, rissaldar,' says I, 'what do you want with me?'
'A sight of thy left wrist, Bloody Lance,' says he, grinning like a death's head. 'Is there not a scar, there, to match this? —' and he pulled up his sleeve, while I stared in disbelief at the little puckered mark, for the man who bore it should have been dead, fifteen years ago — and he'd been a mere slip of a Gilzai boy when it had been made, with his bleeding fore-arm against mine, and his mad father, Sher Afzul, doing the honours and howling to heaven that his son's life was pledged eternally to the service of the White Queen.
'Ilderim?' says I, flabbergasted. 'Ilderim Khan, of Mogala?' And then he flung his arms round me, roaring, and danced me about while the sowars*(*Troopers.) grinned and nudged each other.
'Flashman!' He pounded my back. 'How many years since ye took me for the Sirkar? Stand still, old friend, and let me see thee! Bismillah, thou hast grown high and heavy in the service — such a barra sahib,*(*Great lord, important man.) and a colonel, too! Now praise God for the sight of thee!'
And then he was showing me off to his fellows, telling them how we'd met in the old Kabul days, when his father had held the passes south, and how I'd killed the four Gilzais (strange, the same lying legend coming up twice in a day), and he'd been pledged to me as a hostage, and we'd lost sight of each other in the Great Retreat. It's all there, in my earlier memoirs, and pretty gruesome, too, even if it was the basis of my glorious career.*(*See Flashman)
So now it was Speech Day with a vengeance, while we relieved old memories and slapped each other on the shoulder for half an hour or so. And then he asked me what I was doing here, and I answered vaguely that I was on a mission to the Rani, but soon to go home again; and at this he looked at me shrewdly, but said nothing more until I was leaving.
'It will be palitikal, beyond doubt,' says he. 'Do not tell me. Listen, instead, to a friend's word. If ye speak with the Rani, be wary of her; she is a Hindoo woman, and knows too much for a woman's good.'
'What d'you know about her?' says I.
'Little enough,' says he, 'except that she is like the silver krait, in that she is beautiful and cunning and loves to bite the sahibs. The Company have made a cutch-rani*(*'Cutch' in this sense means inferior, as opposed to 'pukka', meaning first-rate. E. g. pukka road, a macadam surface, cutch road, a mere track. Thus cutch-rani, a nominal queen, without power.) of her, Flashman, but she still has fangs. This,' he added bitterly, 'comes of soft government in Calcutta, by ducks and mulls*(*Ducks and mulls — Bombay Anglo-Indians and Madras Anglo-Indians. Slang expressions current among the British in India, but probably seldom used by Indians themselves.) who have been too long in the heat. So beware of her, and go with God, old friend. And remember, while thou art in Jhansi, Ilderim is thy shadow — or if not me, then these loose-wallahs and jangli-admis*(*Thieves and jungle-men.) of mine. They have their uses —' And he jerked a thumb towards his troopers.
That, coming from an Afghan upper roger*(*A young chief — Sansk., 'yuva rajah'. For this and other curiosities of Anglo-Indian slang, see Hobson-Jobson, by H. Yule (1886).) who was also a friend, was the best kind of insurance policy you could wish — not that I now had any fears, fool that I was, about my stay in Jhansi. As to what he'd said of the Rani — well, I knew it already, and Afghans' views on women are invariably sour — beastly brutes. Anyway, I didn't doubt my ability to handle Lakshmibai, in every sense of the word.
Still, I found his simile coming to mind next day, when I attended her durbar again, and watched her sitting enthroned to hear petitions, dressed in a cloth-of-silver sari that fitted her like a skin, with a silver-embroidered shawl framing that fine dark face; when she moved it was for all the world like a great gleaming snake stirring. She was very grave and queenly, and her courtiers and suppliants fairly grovelled, and scuttled about if she raised her pinky; when the last petitioner had been heard, and a gong had boomed to end the durbar, she sat with her chin in the air while the mob bowed itself out backwards, leaving only me and her two chief councillors standing there — and then she slipped out of her throne with a little cry of relief, hissed at one of her pet monkeys and chased it out on to the terrace, clapping her hands in mock anger, and then returned, perfectly composed, to lounge on her swing.
'Now we can talk,' says she, 'and while my vakeel*(*Legal representative (possibly used here ironically). reads out the matter of my ‘petition’, you may refresh yourself, colonel —' and she indicated a little table with flasks and cups on it. 'Ah, and see,' she added, flicking a flimsy little handkerchief from her sari, 'I am wearing French perfume today — do you care for it? My lady Vashki thinks I am no better than an infidel.'
It was my perfume, right enough; I bowed acknowledgement while she smiled and settled herself, and the vakeel began to drone out her petition in formal Persian.
It's worth repeating, perhaps, for it was a fair sample of the objections that many Indian princes had to British rule — the demand for restoration of her husband's revenues, compensation for the slaughter of sacred cows, reappointment of court hangers-on dismissed by the Sirkar, restitution of confiscated temple funds, recognition of her authority as regent, and the like. All a waste of time, had she but known it, but splendid stuff for me to talk to her about over the next week or two while I pursued the really important work of charming her into a recumbent position.
I had no doubt she was willing enough for me to make the running there — she was wearing my scent, and letting me know it, and she was as pleasant as pie in her cool way at that meeting — nodding graciously as I talked to her wise men about the petition, smiling if I ventured a joke, inviting them to admire my reasoning (which they fell over themselves to do, absolutely), even asking my advice occasionally, and always considering me languidly with those dark slanting eyes as I talked. All of which might have seemed suspiciously amiable after her frankness at our first encounter — but since then she'd had time to weigh the political advantages of being pleasant to me, and was setting out to make me enjoy my work.
But I knew politics wasn't the half of it — I know when a woman's got that little flutter in her midriff about me, and in our ensuing meetings I could watch her enjoying using her beauty on me — and she could do that with a touch that Montez might have envied. I'll admit it now, I found her enchanting; she had the advantage of being a queen, of course, which makes a beauty all the more tantalising — well, even I, on short acquaintance; could hardly have taken her belly in one hand, her bum in the other, and fondled her flat on her back with passionate murmurs, as one would do in ordinary circumstances. No, with royalty you have to wait a little. Not that I wasn't tempted, in those early talks, when she had dismissed her councillors, and we were alone, and just once or twice, from the warm gleam in her eye as she swayed on her swing or lay on her daybed, I wondered if perhaps … but I decided to make haste slowly, and play the bowling as it came down.
It came mighty fast, too, sometimes, for if she was generally content just to politick flirtatiously, I soon discovered that she could be dead serious when Jhansi and her own ambitions were concerned; let the talk turn that way, and you saw the passion of her feeling.
'Five years ago, how many beggars were on the streets?' she rounded on me once. 'One for every ten today. And who has accomplished this? Who but the Sirkar, by assuming the affairs of the state, so that one white sahib
