Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 2: Flashman and the Mountain of Light, Flash For Freedom!, Flashman and the Redskins
Books 4-6 in George MacDonald Fraser’s uproarious bestselling Flashman series, now available in one ebook for the first time.FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT: 1845-1846Given the choice between defending Britannia’s frontier against the mighty Sikh army and pleasuring a ravishing maharani in the Court of the Punjab, Flashman knew where he’d rather be. Of course, that was before he found out about the torture chambers or the malevolent influence of the Mountain of Light…FLASH FOR FREEDOM!: 1848-1849Flashman seems destined for the House of Commons, until his political ambitions are scuppered by a crooked game of pontoon with Disraeli (with someone else, doing the cheating for a change!) Forced to flee London, he boards a vessel bound for the United States – via the African slave coast. Before the odyssey ends, Flashy will encounter an assortment of interesting Yanks including a New Orleans madam and a young Mr Lincoln…FLASH AND THE REDSKINS: 1849-50 / 1875-76With charges of slave-stealing, slave-trading, false pretences and murder hanging over him, Flashman is desperate to leave New Orleans. So desperate that when a besotted brothel keeper invites him to lead a wagon train of whores bound for the California goldfields, he jumps at the chance.
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THE FLASHMAN PAPERS BOOKS 4–6
FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT FLASH FOR FREEDOM! FLASHMAN AND THE REDSKINS
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT
From The Flashman Papers, 1845–46
Edited and Arranged by
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
For Kath, as always, and with salaams to Shadman Khan and Sardul Singh, wherever they are.
Table of Contents
The life and conduct of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, were so irregular and eccentric that it is not surprising that he was also erratic in compiling his memoirs, that picturesque catalogue of misadventure, scandal, and military history which came to light, wrapped in oilskin packets, in a Midlands saleroom more than twenty years ago, and has since been published in a series of volumes, this being the ninth. Beginning, characteristically, with his expulsion from Rugby in 1839 for drunkenness (and thus identifying himself, to the astonishment of literary historians, with the cowardly bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays), the old Victorian hero continued his chronicle at random, moving back and forth in time as the humour took him, until the end of his eighth packet found him, again the worse for drink, being shanghaied from a Singapore billiard-room after the China War of 1860. Along the way he had ranged from the First Afghan War of 1842 to the Sioux campaign of 1876 (with a brief excursion, as yet unpublished, to a brawl in Baker Street as far ahead as 1894, when he was in his seventy-second year); it goes without saying that many gaps in his story remain to be filled, but with the publication of the present volume, which reverts to his early manhood, the first half of his life is almost complete; only an intriguing gap in the early 1850s remains, and a few odd months here and there.
Thus far, it is not an improving tale, and this latest chapter is consistent in its depiction of an immoral and unscrupulous rascal whose only commendable quality (terms like “virtue” and “saving grace” are not to be applied to one who gloried in having neither) was his gift of accurate observation; it was this, and the new and often unexpected light which it enabled him to cast on great events and famous figures of his time, that excited the interest of historians, and led to comparison of his memoirs with the Boswell Papers. Be that as it may, it was a talent fully if nervously employed in the almost forgotten imperial campaign described in this volume – “the shortest, bloodiest … and strangest, I think, of my whole life”. Indeed it was strange, not least in its origins, and Flashman’s account is a remarkable case-history of how a war can come about, and the freaks and perfidies and intrigues of its making and waging. It is also the story of a fabulous jewel, and of an extraordinary quartet – an Indian queen, a slave-girl, and two mercenary adventurers – who would be dismissed as too outlandish for fiction (although Kipling seems to have made use of one of them) if their careers were not easily verifiable from contemporary sources.
This, as with previous packets of Flashman’s papers entrusted to me by their owner, Mr Paget Morrison, has been my chief concern – to satisfy myself that Flashman’s narrative tallies with historic fact, so far as it can be tested. Beyond that I have only corrected occasional lapses in spelling, and supplied the usual footnotes, appendices and glossary.
G.M.F.
“Now, my dear Sir Harry, I must tell you,” says her majesty, with that stubborn little duck of her head that always made Palmerston think she was going to butt him in the guts, “I am quite determined to learn Hindoostanee.”
This at the age of sixty-seven, mark you. I almost asked her what the devil for, at her time of life, but fortunately my idiot wife got in first, clapping her hands and exclaiming that it was a most splendid idea, since nothing so Improved the Mind and Broadened the Outlook as acquaintance with a Foreign Tongue, is that not so, my love? (Elspeth, I may tell you, speaks only English – well, Scotch, if you like – and enough nursery French to get her through Customs and bullyrag waiters, but anything the Queen said, however wild, always sent her into transports of approval.) I seconded loyally, of course, saying it was a capital notion, ma’am, bound to come in handy, but I must have looked doubtful, for our sovereign lady refilled my teacup pretty offhand, leaving out the brandy, and said severely that Dr Johnson had learned Dutch at the age of seventy.
“And I have an excellent
