Читать книгу Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 4: Flashman and the Dragon, Flashman on the March, Flashman and the Tiger - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 21

In a Gazette article entitled “The Fate of the Peiping Captives in the Late War”, you may read how Col. Sir H. Flashman “endured a captivity little better than slavery at the hands of his tormentors”, who treated him “in the most degrading and insulting manner”, and subjected him “to such usage as can seldom have been met with by a British officer in the hands of a savage foreign Power”. It’s gospel true, and omits only that if the Army had known the circumstances they’d have been lining up to change places with me.

I was fourteen memorable days (and nights) in the Summer Palace of Pekin, held thrall by the notorious Yi Concubine, and since they followed the pattern of the first, you may think I was on velvet, which I was … and silk, satin, gauze, fur, grass, marble (which is perishing cold), yellow jade (even colder), Oriental carpet, leather upholstery, a Black Watch tartan rug (wherever that came from), and the deck of a pleasure barge on the Jade Fountain Lake, which was her most extraordinary choice of all, I think. We’d been cruising about, watching a battle between little model gunboats blazing away at each other with tiny brass cannon, when my lady becomes bored, and consequently amorous, and decided she didn’t care to wait till we reached shore – so she made every other soul on board (half a dozen female attendants, two eunuchs, and the entire crew) jump overboard and flounder ashore in ten feet of water, so that I could rattle her undisturbed. Two of the girls were almost drowned.

From this you might suppose that my sojourn was a continuous orgy; not at all. Most of the time I was confined to Yehonala’s pavilion, with a couple of the burliest eunuchs on guard, for she was by no means preoccupied with me in those critical times when she was juggling to catch a crown; sometimes I didn’t see her for two days on end – early in my captivity, for instance, she went with the Emperor to Jehol, forty miles away, where she tucked him up to die out of harm’s way before returning to Pekin for the showdown with Sang and the barbarians. She was plotting and politicking for dear life then, and I was her Wednesday afternoon football match and brandy-and-cigar in the evening, so to speak – and her week-end picnic. A humiliating position which I was mortal glad of after what I’d been through, and I just prayed she wouldn’t lose interest in her new toy before Elgin closed his grip on Pekin. For, incredibly, our army was holding off at the last, fearful that a hostile advance might spell the end of us hostages, yet fearing, too, that delay might be equally fatal.