of spirit … I'm trying to … make you understand. Please — tell me, even now, what I can do.'
'Well,' says I, thoughtfully, 'you could go and fart in a bottle and paint it.'
'What?' says he, bewildered. 'What did you say?'
'I'm trying to indicate that you can take yourself off,' says I. 'You're a selfish little swine, East. You admit you've behaved like a scoundrel to me, and if that wasn't enough, you have the cheek to waste my time — when I need it for prayer. So go to hell, will you?'
'My God, Flashman … you can't mean it! You can't be so hard. It only needs a word! I own I've wronged you, terribly … maybe in more ways than I know. Sometimes … I've wondered if perhaps you too loved Valla … if you did, and placed duty first …' He gulped again, and peered at me. 'Did you … love her, Flashman?'
'About four or five times a week,' says I, 'but you needn't be jealous; she wasn't nearly as good a ride as her Aunt Sara. You should have tried a steam-bath with that one.
He gave a shocked gasp, and I absolutely heard his teeth chatter. Then: 'God, Flashman! Oh … oh, you are unspeakable! You are vile! God help you!'
'Unspeakable and vile I may be,' says I, 'but at least I'm no hypocrite, like you: the last thing you want is for God to help me. You don't want my forgiveness, either; you just want to be able to forgive yourself. Well, you run along and do it, Scud, and thank me for making it easy for you. After what you've heard tonight, your conscience needn't trouble you any longer about having left old Flashy to his fate, what?'
He stumbled off at that, and I was able to resume my own debate about whether it was best to slide out or stay. In the end, my nerve failed me, and I curled up in the lee of the parapet for the night. Thank God I did, for on the next morning Wheeler got his miracle.
She was the most unlikely messenger of grace you ever saw — a raddled old chee-thee*(*Half-caste.) biddy with clanking earrings and a parasol, drawn in a rickshaw ghari by two pandies, with another couple marching as guard, and a havildar out in front brandishing a white flag. Wheeler ordered a stand-to when this strange little procession was seen approaching the east corner of the entrenchment, and went off himself with Moore to meet it, and a few minutes later word was passed for me and Vibart, who was up at my end of the parapet, to present ourselves.
Wheeler and the other senior men were grouped inside the parapet, while the old wife, fanning herself with a leaf and sipping at a chatti, was sitting just outside with her escort squatting round her. Wheeler was holding a paper, and glancing in bewilderment from it to the old woman; as we came up someone was saying: 'I wouldn't trust it a blasted inch! Why should they want to treat, at this time o'day? Tell me that!', and Wheeler shook his head and passed the paper to Vibart.
'Read that,' says he. 'If what it says is true, the Nana wishes to make terms.'
It didn't sink in, at first; I studied the paper over Vibart's shoulder, while he read it out half-aloud. It was a brief, simple note, written in a good hand, in English, and addressed to Wheeler. As near as I recall, it said:
To subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria — all who are not connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad.
It was signed on behalf of Nana Sahib, with a name I couldn't make out, until Vibart muttered it out: 'Azeemoolah Khan'. He looked at Wheeler, then at the old woman, and Wheeler flapped a hand and says:
'This is Mrs Jacobs, of … ah, Cawnpore city. She has this note from Azeemoolah himself, in the presence of the Nana.'
'How-dee-do, gentlemen,' says Mrs Jacobs, bowing with a great creak of stays from her seat in the ghari. 'Such jolly weather we are having, yess?'
'I don't like it,' says Wheeler quietly, turning his back so that she shouldn't hear; the others grouped round us. 'As Whiting says, why should he offer terms when he must know we're at his mercy? All he needs do is wait.'
'Perhaps, sir,' says Vibart, 'he don't know how reduced we are.' He let out a deep breath. 'And we have our women and children to think of —'
At this the others broke in, in a fierce babble of low voices: 'It's a plot!' 'No, it ain't!' 'We've stood the bastards off this long —' 'It's false — I can smell nigger treachery a mile away.' 'Why should it be treachery — my God, what have we to lose? We're done for as it is …', while I tried to keep my face straight and the delicious hope began to break over me — we were saved! For it seemed to me in that moment that whatever anyone said, whatever Wheeler felt, he was going to have to accept any terms the pandies offered — he couldn't refuse, and doom the women and children in that stinking barrack to certain death, however fearful of treachery he might be. We were being offered at least a chance of life against the certainty of death: he had to take it.
So I said nothing, while they wrangled in whispers there by the parapet, with every drawn face along the entrenchment on either side turned anxiously in our direction, and that painted old harridan sitting under the canopy of her ghari, nodding and bowing whenever anyone glanced at her. And sure enough, Wheeler finally says:
'What's your opinion, Colonel Flashman?'
The temptation to sing out: 'Take it, you bloody old fool — offer to crawl on your belly the whole way to Allahabad!' was strong, but I mastered it and looked pretty cool. 'Well, sir,' says I. 'It's an offer — no more. There's nothing to be decided until we've tested it.'
That shut them up. 'True enough,' says Wheeler, 'but -
'Someone must talk to Nana Sahib,' says I. 'It may be that all isn't well with him, or that he thinks this siege ain't worth the candle. Maybe his precious pandies have had enough -
'That's it, by God!' broke in Delafosse, but I went on, very steady:
'But we can't accept — or turn him down flat — till we've heard more than is written here,' and I tapped the paper in Vibart's hand. 'He hasn't approached us out of charity, we may be sure — well, it may be treachery, or it may be weakness. Let's look him in the eye.'
It must have sounded well — bluff Flashy talking calm sense while others went pink in the face. They weren't to know I'd made up my trembling mind in the moment I'd read the note; the trick now was to make sure that Wheeler made up his, and in the right direction. For he was obviously full of suspicion about the Nana, and half- inclined to listen to the hotheads who were urging him to throw the offer back in the mutineers' teeth — you never heard such appalling nonsense in your life. Here we were, doomed for certain, being offered an eleventh-hour reprieve, and more than half the idiots in that impromptu council were for rejecting it out of hand. It made my innards heave to listen; thinks I, this is going to need delicate handling.
However, Wheeler saw the sense of what I'd said, and decided that Moore and I should go to sec the Nana and hear precisely what he had to say. Thank God he chose me — I don't care, as a rule, to put my head into the lion's den, even under a flag of truce, but this was one negotiation I wanted to have a large hand in. I didn't want any hitches about the surrender — for surrender, if I had anything to do with it, was what it was going to be. All that mattered besides was that I should keep my credit intact.
So at noon Moore and I were escorted through the pandy lines, with Mrs Jacobs in her ghari jabbering about what a shame it was, oah yess, that the present unsettled state of affairs had prevented her getting up to the hills during the hot weather. Who she was, by the way, I never discovered; she looked like a typical half-caste bawd who'd been employed as a go-between because she was obviously neutral and inoffensive. But I may be misjudging the lady.
The notorious Nana Sahib was waiting for us in front of a great day-tent in a grove of trees, with a pack of servitors and minions attending him, and a score of Maharatta guardsmen, in breastplates and helmets, ranged either side of the great Afghan carpet before his chair. That carpet gave me an uneasy twinge — it reminded me of the one on which I'd seen McNaghten seized and chopped up outside Kabul, at just such a meeting as this; however, Moore and I put out our chests and looked down our noses, as true Britons ought to do in the presence of rebellious niggers who happen to have the drop on them.
Nana himself was a burly, fat-faced rascal with curly mustachioes and a shifty look — what they call a tung admi,*(*Literally, 'a tight man'.) dressed in more silks and jewels than a French whore, sliding his eyes across Moore and me and whispering behind a plump hand to the woman beside him. She was worth a lewd thought or two, by the way; one of your tall, heavy-hipped beauties with a drooping lower lip — Sultana Adala, they called her, and I'm sorry I never got closer to her than twenty feet. We exchanged a glance or two during that interview, and let our mutual imaginations work; ten minutes alone together would have done the rest. On Nana's other side sat a nondescript and nasty-looking rascal, who I gather was his brother-in-crime, Tantia Tope.
However, the man who took things in hand was Azeemoolah Khan, a tall, handsome, light-skinned exquisite
