Flashman and the Mountain of Light. George Fraser MacDonald

The Queen had been a pretty slip of a girl then, smiling timidly up as she pinned on the medal I didn’t deserve; now she was a stout little old body, faded and grey, fussing over the teacups at Windsor and punishing the meringues. Her smile was still there, though; aye, cavalry whiskers, even white ones, still fetched little Vicky.

      ‘It is such a cheerful language,’ says she. ‘I am sure it must have many jokes, does it not, Sir Harry?’

      I could think of a few, but thought it best to give her the old harmless one that begins: ‘Doh admi joh nashe men the, rail ghari men safar kar raha ta –’

      ‘But what does it mean, Sir Harry?’

      ‘Well, ma’am, it means that two fellows were travelling by train, you see, and they were, I regret to say, intoxicated –’

      ‘Why, Harry!’ cries Elspeth, acting shocked, but the Queen just took another tot of whisky in her tea and bade me continue. So I told her that one chap said, where are we, and t’other chap replied, Wednesday, and the first chap said, Heavens, this is where I get out. Needless to say, it convulsed them – and while they recovered and passed the gingerbread, I asked myself for the twentieth time why we were here, just Elspeth and me and the Great White Mother, taking tea together.

      You see, while I was used enough, in those later years, to being bidden to Balmoral each autumn to squire her about on drives, and fetch her shawl, and endure her prattle and those damned pipers of an evening, a summons to Windsor in the spring was something new, and when it included ‘dear Lady Flashman, our fair Rowena’ – the Queen and she both pretended a passion for Scott – I couldn’t think what was up. Elspeth, when she’d recovered from her ecstasy at being ‘commanded to court’, as she put it, was sure I was to be offered a peerage in the Jubilee Honours (there’s no limit to the woman’s mad optimism); I damped her by observing that the Queen didn’t keep coronets in the closet to hand out to visitors; it was done official, and anyway even Salisbury wasn’t so far gone as to ennoble me; I wasn’t worth bribing. Elspeth said I was a horrid cynic, and if the Queen herself required our attendance it must be something grand, and whatever was she going to wear?

      Well, the grandeur turned out to be Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show¹ – I concluded that I’d been dragged in because I’d been out yonder myself, and was considered an authority on all that was wild and woolly – and we sat in vile discomfort at Earl’s Court among a great gang of Court toadies, while Cody pranced on a white horse, waving his hat and sporting a suit of patent buckskins that would have laid ’em helpless with laughter along the Yellowstone. There was enough paint and feathers to outfit the whole Sioux Nation, the braves whooped and ki-yikked and brandished their hatchets, the roughriders curvetted, a stagecoach of terrified virgins was ambushed, the great man arrived in the nick of time blazing away until you couldn’t see for smoke, and the Queen said it was most curious and interesting, and what did the strange designs of the war paint signify, my dear Sir Harry?

      God knows what I told her; the fact is, while everyone else was cheering the spectacle, I was reflecting that only eleven years earlier I’d been running like hell from the real thing at Little Bighorn, and losing my top hair into the bargain – a point which I mentioned to Cody later, after he’d been presented. He cried, yes, by thunder, that was one war-party he’d missed, and didn’t he envy me the trip, though? Lying old humbug. That’s by the way; I realised, when the Queen bore Elspeth and me back to Windsor, and bade us to tea à trois next day, that our presence at the show had been incidental, and the real reason for our invitation was something else altogether. A trifling matter, as it turned out, but it inspired this memoir, so there you are.

      She wanted our opinion, she said, on a matter of the first importance – and if you think it odd that she should confide in the likes of us, the retired imperial roughneck of heroic record but dubious repute, and the Glasgow merchant’s daughter … well, you don’t know our late lamented Queen Empress. Oh, she was a stickler and a tartar, no error, the highest, mightiest monarch that ever was, and didn’t she know it, just – but if you were a friend, well, that was a different palaver. Elspeth and I were well out of Court, and barely half way into Society, even, but we’d known her since long ago, you see – well, she’d always fancied me (what woman didn’t?), and Elspeth, aside from being such an artless, happy beauty that even her own sex couldn’t help liking her, had the priceless gift of being able to make the Queen laugh. They’d taken to each other as young women, and now, on the rare occasions they met tête-à-tête, they blethered like the grandmothers they were – why, on that very day (when I was safely out of earshot) she told Elspeth that there were some who wanted her to mark her Golden Jubilee by abdicating in favour of her ghastly son, Bertie the Bounder, ‘but I shall do no such thing, my dear! I intend to outlive him, if I can, for the man is not fit to reign, as none knows better than your own dear husband, who had the thankless task of instructing him.’ True, I’d pimped for him occasional, but ’twas wasted effort; he’d have been just as great a cad and whoremaster without my tuition.

      However, it was about the Jubilee she wanted our advice, ‘and yours especially, Sir Harry, for you alone have the necessary knowledge’. I couldn’t figure that; for one thing, she’d been getting advice and to spare for months on how best to celebrate her fiftieth year on the throne. The whole Empire was in a Jubilee frenzy, with loyal addresses and fêtes and junketings and school holidays and water-trough inaugurations and every sort of extravagance on the rates; the shops were packed with Jubilee mugs and plates and trumpery blazoned with Union Jacks and pictures of Her Majesty looking damned glum; there were Jubilee songs on the halls, and Jubilee marches for parades, and even Jubilee musical bustles that played ‘God Save the Queen’ when the wearer sat down – I tried to get Elspeth to buy one, but she said it was disrespectful, and besides people might think it was her.

      The Queen, of course, had her nose into everything, to make sure the celebrations were dignified and useful – only she could approve the illuminations for Cape Town, the chocolate boxes for Eskimo children, the plans for Jubilee parks and gardens and halls and bird-baths from Dublin to Dunedin, the special Jubilee robes (it’s God’s truth) for Buddhist monks in Burma, and the extra helpings of duff for lepers in Singapore: if the world didn’t remember 1887, and the imperial grandmother from whom all blessings flowed, it wouldn’t be her fault. And after years in purdah, she had taken to gallivanting on the grand scale, to Jubilee dinners and assemblies and soirées and dedications – dammit, she’d even visited Liverpool. But what had tickled her most, it seemed, was being photographed in full fig as Empress of India; it had given her quite an Indian fever, and she was determined that the Jubilee should have a fine flavour of curry – hence the resolve to learn Hindi. ‘But what else, Sir Harry, would best mark our signal regard for our Indian subjects, do you think?’

      Baksheesh, booze, and bints was the answer to that, but I chewed on a muffin, looking grave, and said, why not engage some Indian attendants, ma’am, that’d go down well. It would also infuriate the lordly placemen and toad-eaters who surrounded her, if I knew anything. After some thought, she nodded and said that was a wise and fitting suggestion – in the event, it was anything but, for the Hindi-wallah she fixed on as her special pet turned out to be not the high-caste gent he pretended, but the son of a puggle-walloper in Agra jail; if that wasn’t enough, he spread her secret Indian papers all over the bazaars, and drove the Viceroy out of his half-wits. Aye, old Flashy’s got the touch.²

      At the time, though, she was all for it – and then she got down to cases in earnest. ‘For now, Sir Harry, I have two questions for you. Most important questions, so please to attend.’ She adjusted her spectacles and rummaged in a flat case at her elbow, breathing heavy and finally unearthing a yellowish scrap of paper.

      ‘There, I have it. Colonel Mackeson’s letter …’ She peered at it with gooseberry eyes. ‘… dated the ninth of February, 1852 … now where is … ah, yes! The Colonel writes, in part: “On this head, it will be best to consult those officers in the Company service who have seen it, and especially Lieutenant Flashman …”’ She shot me a look, no doubt to make sure I recognised the