Flashman and the Dragon. George Fraser MacDonald

is no disrespect to any of these ladies, all of whom I loved dearly, to say that when it came to taking the eye, the female coming up the steerage gangplank was the equal of any and all. For one thing, she was six feet six if she was an inch, with the erect carriage of a guardsman, and light on her feet as a leopard. She was Chinese, beyond a doubt, perhaps with a touch of something from the Islands; when she laughed, as she did now, to the squat fellow behind her, it was with a deep, clear ring, and a flash of teeth in a lean, lovely face; not Chinese style, at all. She had a handkerchief bound tight round her head, and for the rest her clothing consisted of a blouse, cotton breeches ending at the knee, and heavy sandals. But round her neck she had a deep tight collar that seemed to be made of steel links, and her arms, bare to the shoulder, were heavy with bangles. As to the lines of her figure, Rubens would have bitten his brush in two.

      With the plank crowded ahead of her, she had to wait, holding the side-rail in one hand and lolling back at full stretch, carelessly, laughing and talking to her companion. She chanced to look up, and met my eye; she said something to the man, and looked at me again, laughing still, and then she was up the plank like a huge cat and out of sight.

      I’m not the most impressionable of men, but I found I was gripping the rail with both hands, and clenching my jaw in stern resolve. By gum, I couldn’t let that go unattended to. Built like a Dahomey Amazon, but far taller and incomparably more graceful. And possibly the strongest female I’d ever seen, which would be an interesting experience. No common woman, either; how best to coax her up to the cabin? Probably not money, nor a high hand. Well, the first thing was to get a closer look at her.

      I waited till we had cast off, and the screw was churning the water, with the lights on Tsungming Island glittering in the dark distance far ahead. Then I asked the steward where the ladder was to the steerage; he pointed down the companion, and said I would find the mate by the saloon door, he’d show me. Sure enough, a fellow in a pilot cap came out of the saloon and started up the ladder as I started down. He glanced up, smiling, starting to bid me good evening, and then his jaw dropped, and my hand shot under my jacket to the butt of the Adams.

      It was Mr Frederick Townsend Ward.

      For perhaps five seconds we just stared at each other, and then he laughed, in the pleasantest tone imaginable.

      ‘Well, damn me!’ says he. ‘It’s the Colonel! How are you, sir?’

      ‘Keep your hands in front of you – sir,’ says I. ‘Now come up, slowly.’ I stepped back to the cabin deck, and he followed, still grinning, glancing at my hidden hand.

      ‘Say, what’s the matter? Look, if that’s a piece under your coat – this is a law-abiding boat, you know—’

      ‘You mean she isn’t running guns to the Taipings?’

      He laughed heartily at this, and shook his head. ‘I gave that up! Say, and you took a shot at me – two shots! What did you do that for? You weren’t going to come to any harm, you know. I’d ha’ taken you back to Macao when we’d delivered the goods!’ He sounded almost aggrieved.

      ‘Oh, forgive me! No one told me that, you see. It must have slipped everyone’s mind, along with the trivial fact that you were carrying guns, not opium.’

      ‘Listen, Carpenter said the less you knew the better,’ says he earnestly. ‘Those were his orders. The damned dummy,’ he added irritably. ‘If he’d ha’ given me a real Chink pilot, we’d never ha’ seen that Limey patrol-boat. Hey, how did you come out of that, though?’

      ‘Perhaps I didn’t.’ I said it on the spur of the moment, and his eyes widened.

      ‘You don’t mean they broke you?’ He whistled. ‘Gee, I’m sorry about that! I sure am, though.’ Absolutely, he sounded shocked. ‘Over a passel o’ guns. Well, I’ll be!’ He shook his head, and smiled, a mite sheepish. ‘Say, colonel … why don’t you let that hog-leg alone, and come on in my berth for a drink? See here, I’m sorry as hell – but t’wasn’t my fault. ’Sides, it’s over and done with now.’ He looked at me, half-grinning, half-contrite. ‘And you’re ahead o’ me by two shots. No hard feelings. Okay?’ And he held out his hand.

      Now, I know a rogue when I see one – and I was forming a strange suspicion that Mr Ward wasn’t a rogue at all. Oh, I’ve known charming rascals, bland as be-damned, and the eyes give them away every time. This fellow’s were bright and dark and innocent as a babe’s – which you might say was all against him. And yet … he sounded downright pleased to see me. I couldn’t credit he was that good an actor; and why should he trouble to be? There was nothing I could do to him, now; certainly not here.

      ‘I ought to blow your blasted head off!’ says I.

      ‘You dam’ near did!’ cries he cheerily, and when I continued to ignore his hand: ‘Okay, you’ve got a right to be sore, I guess. But why don’t we go lower a couple, anyway? I’m off watch.’

      Indeed, why not? I can only say he was a hard man to refuse, and the truth is I was curious about him. He was a rare bird, I felt sure, so I followed him out of the warm night into the stuffy little cabin, where he seated me on the bunk and poured out two stiff tots. ‘Say, this is fine!’ says he, sitting on the locker. ‘How’ve you been?’ And without letting me reply he rattled off into a recital of his own escape through the paddy, and how he’d smuggled himself back to Macao, and thence up the coast to Shanghai, where he’d flourished his papers at Dent’s, and got himself a mate’s berth. I watched him like a hawk, but he was easy as old leather, prattling away. Crazy, undoubtedly, but if he was crook, it didn’t show.

      ‘It’s not a bad berth,’ says he, ‘but I won’t stick. Fellow called Gough, one of your people, commands a gunboat flotilla for the Imps. He’s offered me second place on the Confucius; reckon I’ll take it.’

      ‘What happened to the notion of being a Taiping prince?’ I asked, and he grinned and pulled a face.

      ‘No, sir, thank you. I’ve had a look at ’em, these past few weeks. They’re not for Fred T.’ He shook his head so firmly that, thinking of my own mission, I pressed him for information.

      ‘Well, all this stuff about being Christians – they don’t have the first notion! They have a lot o’ mumbo-jumbo about Jesus, that they’ve picked up an’ got wrong, but … Listen – to give you an idea, when they get a new recruit they give him three weeks to learn the Lord’s Prayer, and if he can’t – whist!’ He chopped his hand against his neck. ‘No fooling! Now, what kind of Christianity is that, will you tell me? And they treat the people something shameful. Take all their goods – ’cos no one can have property in the Taiping, it’s all in common, ’lessn you’re one of the top Wangs. And they put ’em to work in companies, like it was the army, and if they’re too old or sick to work – whist again! And everybody has to work for the Taiping, see, and obey all their foolish rules about religion, an’ learn the proclamations of the Heavenly King by heart – and, boy, they’re the wildest stuff, I tell you! The Thousand Correct Things, an’ the Book of Celestial Decrees, and nobody understands ’em a little bit!’

      I said the missionaries were all for them, and he shook his head again. ‘Maybe they used to be, but now they’ve had a good look. You go upriver, into a Taiping province, you see the ruin, the gutted villages, the bodies laying about in thousands – and it ain’t as if all their rules and discipline made things better – why, they make it worse! Nobody has land, so nobody can plant ’cept the Taiping tells him, an’ the local governors, why, they have to wait for orders from further up, an’ the fellow further up … well, there’s nothing in it for him, and he probably used to be a shoemaker, anyway, so what does he know about crops? He knows the rules, though, and learns a new chapter of the Bible each day, and thinks Moses was a Manchoo Mandarin who thought better of it!’

      I recalled that the Heavenly King himself had been an educated man, and while he was crazy there must be some Taipings who knew how things should be run; he scoffed me out of court.

      ‘That