Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald

      It was ridiculous – alarmingly so, but there was no use to protest. I threw the cloak round my shoulders, drew the hood forward, and followed over the crest and down the slope to our lines already lit by storm lanterns against the gathering dusk. Sure enough, there were tall Ab warriors, and womenfolk and children, moving among the tents, staring at our fellows and the jawans^fn12 who’d plainly been put on their best behaviour, for they were calling greetings to the Abs, offering them seats by their fires, glad-eyeing the Shoho girls, and letting the chicos play with their equipment. My conductor led the way to a big marquee set apart, with a couple of Dragoons with drawn sabres at the fly, and the gigantic figure of Speedy between them, handing me down and ushering me inside.

      ‘None o’ the press gang saw him?’ My escort assured him they hadn’t. This was too much, and I said so.

      ‘Of all the dam’ nonsense! Henty’s seen me, hasn’t he? Why shouldn’t the rest of ’em?’

      ‘Henty’s safe,’ says Speedy. ‘The rest ain’t, least of all the confounded nosey-parker Stanley – you know him, the Chicago wallah.²⁴ He’d trumpet your arrival to the four winds!’

      ‘And who’d give a mad clergyman’s fart if he did? Why shouldn’t he? Oh, the blazes with this! Where’s Bob Napier, then? Or has he gone off the deep end too?’ I flung off the cloak, and was about to give my disquiet full flow when I realised that my auditors – the escort, Speedy, and a bookish-looking Sapper captain – were glancing apprehensively at the far end of the tent – and there he was, the Bughunter in person, and even in my agitation my first thought was that if ever a played-out veteran needed a long furlough, he did. He’d always looked middling tired, with his down-turned brows and pouchy eyes and drowsy moustache, but now he was old, too, regarding me with a tolerant but weary smile as he rose from behind his table and came forward under the lamp.

      ‘You must not mind Sir Harry’s John Company manners, gentlemen,’ says he. ‘The first time I heard his voice he was addressing a governor-general of India in the most cavalier terms. You remember the great diamond, twenty years ago, at Kussoor?’^fn13 And blessed if he wasn’t bright-eyed with memory. ‘Give me your hand, old comrade, and welcome indeed, for I never was so pleased to see anyone, I can tell you!’

      That was the moment when I knew, beyond all doubt, that the doom had come upon me yet again.

      If you’ve read Tom Brown you may remember a worthy called Crab Jones, of whom Hughes said that he was the coolest fish in Rugby, and if he were tumbled into the moon this minute he’d pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets. Bob Napier had always reminded me of Crab, in the Sikh War, the Mutiny, China, and along the frontier: the same sure, unhurried style, the quiet voice, the methodical calm that drove his more excitable subordinates wild. He was also the best engineer in the army, and the most successful commander of troops I ever knew.

      He was nearing sixty in Abyssinia, and if he looked worn it was no wonder. We’d shared several campaigns, but he’d had the rougher passage every time, thanks to his talent for getting in harm’s way – and out again, usually leaking blood. God knows how many wounds he’d taken; once, I recall, he’d had his field-glasses shot out of his hand, three bullet-holes in his coat, and a slug through his foot – he probably clicked his tongue and frowned that time. Not surprisingly, he was as often sick as well; he’d been in a shocking state, they say, when he licked Tantia Topi in the Mutiny, and according to Colin Campbell there had been ‘no twa pun o’ him hingin’ straight’ when he’d planned the capture of Lucknow. (That means he wasn’t at all well, by the way.) When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling. Now, on the brink of retirement and pension, they’d handed him the poisoned chalice of Abyssinia … and here he was, welcoming me with that famous smile which everyone remembered, perhaps because it was so out of keeping with the stern, old-fashioned figurehead, asking about my doings, remarking how well I looked, inquiring after Elspeth (whom he’d never met), drumming up sandwiches and beer for my refreshment, observing again what luck it was my turning up like this, and how glad they were of the Maria Theresas.

      Dashed unnerving, so much cordiality from a man who’d never been one of your hearties. In a generation of great captains like Campbell and Rose and Outram, such giants as the Lawrences and Nicholson and Havelock and Harry Smith, to say nothing of fighting madmen like Hope Grant and Rake Hodson, Napier had always been the modest, quiet man on the edge of the party, only occasionally showing a flash of sardonic humour, but always happy to escape to his work and his studies, music and painting and peering at rocks.^fn1

      Since he’d mentioned the dollars, I reminded him tactfully that I’d been homeward bound when I’d allowed Speedicut to press me into the service, and hinted politely that I’d be obliged for a warrant and a trifle of journey money to see me on my way again.

      ‘See to that, Moore, if you please,’ says he to the Sapper, whom he introduced as his secretary and interpreter. ‘By the way, how many languages do you have, Moore? A dozen? How does that compare with your store … Sir Harry?’ He’d been on the brink of calling me ‘Flashman’, being my senior by ten years, and now a general; mere ‘Harry’ would have been beyond him altogether these days, and I made a note not to address him by the old familiar ‘Bob’.

      I said I might scratch by in a dozen, but wasn’t fluent in more than six.

      ‘One of them being Arabic, I seem to remember,’ says Napier, which set me worrying. Why Arabic? He didn’t enlarge, but dismissed Moore and my escort and settled back in his chair, motioning Speedy to take a seat by the table. ‘Well, this is quite splendid, Sir Harry. I gather from Vienna’s message that you’ve been in Mexico lately. Political indaba,^fn2 was it?’

      ‘Not exactly, sir. Foreign enlistment, you might say.’

      ‘I see. So you have no official position just now? On the retired list?’ He nodded. ‘Well, Moore will have your warrant ready in the morning … if you want to use it immediately, that is.’ He glanced at Speedy, and Speedy, sitting there in his barbarous finery like the King of the Cannibal Islands, smiled ever so roguish, as though he were in on some jolly secret.

      ‘I don’t follow, sir … why shouldn’t I use it?’

      ‘No reason at all,’ says Napier, ‘except that, knowing your … your knack for adventurous service, shall I call it? … it had occurred to me that you might care to postpone your departure … in a good cause after your own heart?’ He ended on a question, and Speedy chuckled, damn him, watching me with the idiot grin of one waiting to see a glad surprise sprung.

      ‘It is an altogether unofficial thing, and indeed must be strictly secret.’ Napier sat forward, instinctively lowering his voice. ‘You are entirely strange in the country, Sir Harry, and care has been taken that no highland Abyssinian should lay eyes on you, and that your presence here is unknown to all but a few of our own people who can be relied upon. You see, there is a part to be played – a secret and, it may well be, a perilous part, and one that no other man in the Army could even attempt to play.’ He paused, his hooded eyes on mine. ‘A part on which the success or failure of the expedition may well depend.’ He paused again. ‘Shall I continue?’

      At this point, when it was plain that some beastly folly was about to be unveiled, Inner Flashman would gladly have cried: ‘Not unless you wish to risk seeing a grown man burst into tears and run wailing into the Abyssinian night!’ Outer Flashman, poor devil, could only sit sweating nonchalantly, going red in the face with funk and hoping that Napier might construe it as apoplectic rage at the prospect of having my travel arrangements upset. He took stricken silence for assent, and rose, beckoning me to an easel on which was a map of the country – a most odd map in that it had length but little breadth, like the one which I attach to this memoir, and was made up of several photographs glued together, something I had never seen before.

      ‘You know