Table Of ContentBlack Ajax
George MacDonald Fraser
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part 1 - The Witnesses
Chapter 1 - Paddington Jones
Chapter 2 - Lucien de la Guise
Chapter 3 - Marguerite Rossignol
Chapter 4 - Buckley Flashman
Chapter 5 - William Hazlitt
Chapter 6 - Bill Richmond
Chapter 7 - Tom Cribb
Chapter 8 - John Doe
Chapter 9 - Bob Logic
Chapter 10 - Pierce Egan
Chapter 11 - Henry Downes Miles
Chapter 12 - William Crockford
Chapter 13 - H.R.H. the Prince of Wales
Chapter 14 - Tom Molineaux
Chapter 15 - Bob Gregson
Chapter 16 - Captain Barclay
Epilogue
Glossary
About the Author
Praise
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Galway, Ireland, 1818
The black man is dying, but neither he nor any of the other men in the barn
suspects it. After all, he is quite young, and if the heavy negroid face is
unhealthily puffy and badly scarred by old wounds which show oddly pale
against the coarse dark skin, these are hardly fatal signs, and not unusual in his
profession. He slumps, overweight and flabby, on a bench against the rough
timber wall, a grimy blanket draped across his naked shoulders, an old hat on his
woolly bullet head, and the hand holding a bottle of cheap spirits shakes visibly
when he raises it to his lips, one of which has been split so deeply that it has
healed into a permanent cleft running halfway to his chin. His arms are long and
muscular, and though there are creases of fat overlapping his waistband, his
sheer bulk gives an impression of formidable strength not yet quite gone to seed.
His eyes are closed, and he is plainly tired, but not with a weariness that can be
cured by rest; there may be no outward sign of deadly illness, but the pain in his
kidneys and the ringing in his head are now continuous, and seem to him to be
draining the spirit out of his big, hard-used body. A few years ago he was as
famous in England as Napoleon; now he hardly remembers that time.
Squatting in the straw, watching him anxiously and now and then addressing
him in low voices to which he responds with a grunt or a nod, are two men in the
crimson coats and yellow facings of the 77th Foot. They are not typical of the
British Army, for they, too, are black. They have been drawn to the barn by
fraternal sympathy with the dying man, a sentiment not shared by the only other
person in view, a small, rat-like Cockney shabbily dressed in a worn tail-coat
whose buttons are either tarnished or missing, stained pantaloons, and a beaver
hat almost innocent of fur. He is the manager, for want of a better word, of the
man on the bench, and is reflecting glumly that his protege is the very picture of
a beaten-up, broken-down, drunken pug who could (bar his sable skin) serve as a
model for all those other prize-ring cast-offs from whom the manager, in his
time, has scraped a meagre dishonest living, parading them from one country fair
to the next, shouting himself hoarse with lies about their past prowess, thrusting
them into combat with a bellyful of beer to batter or be battered by the local
bully, and passing round the hat afterwards. It may be a far cry from the Fives
Court or Wimbledon Common, from the hundred-guinea purses and the twenty
thousand pound side-bets, but it usually pays enough to keep manager and man
in food and drink as far as the next village or market-town.
Not that he expects much today, from the ragged, noisy crowd of yokels and
urchins gathered about the makeshift roped square in the farmyard. Bleeding
bumpkins, in the manager's estimate, never seen a shilling in their lives, living
on pepper, potatoes and water, slaves to Popish superstition, and content to sleep
in sties with their animals, if they have any. His one hope is the local squireen,
easily recognisable because he wears boots and sits in a dog-cart above the
throng, passing the flask with his cronies and flipping a farthing to the ancient
fiddler scraping out a jig tune; with luck the bucolic potentate will be good, if
not for cash, at least for a leg of mutton and a bag of spuds, provided the fight is
a good and bloody one.
That depends, the manager is well aware, not so much on the local champion,
a brawny, red-haired blacksmith who waits basking in the admiration of the
gaping rustics, as on his own black fighter, whose behaviour this past month has
been causing concern. Moody and withdrawn at the best of times, he has been
going into long, trance-like silences, coming out of them only at the call of
“Time!”, when he has instinctively come to scratch with his fists up, moving in a
slow parody of that lightning dance-step which was once the wonder of the
Fancy. Twice he has been so sluggish that the despairing Cockney has had to
throw in the towel against opponents too unskilled or lacking the strength to
knock him out; once, he has come unexpectedly alive and smashed an opponent
into insensibility in a matter of seconds. His manager can only pray that today he
will perform somewhere between those two extremes and give the spectators
their money's worth.
Assuming, that is, that he can be got on his feet and led out to the yard, where
the crowd is growing restive, the shrill Irish voices demanding a sight of the
famous black, the legendary American hero whose feats once echoed even to
this distant backwater, and who remains sprawled and apparently comatose on
his bench in the dim interior of the barn. As the two soldiers and the cursing
manager haul him upright he mutters a complaint of noises in his head; they
demand, what noises?, but he cannot tell them. The manager becomes abusive,
and to their astonishment and alarm the battered black face, its eyes still closed,
smiles as though at some happy memory, for it is not the angry Cockney snarl
that he hears, but another voice, eager and excited, from long ago, ringing down
the years …
“You know how many people came to Copthorn? Ten thousand! Ten goddam
thousand, boy! An' they came on foot, an' on horses, an' in carriages, to see Tom
Molineaux, the Black Ajax – you! An' when you meet Cribb again, there'll be
twenty, maybe thirty thousand, with the Dook o' Clarence, and Mistah
Brummell, an' Lord Byron, an' every bang-up swell in London, yeah, an' maybe
the Prince his own self! With half a million guineas a-ridin' on the fight – an' a
million dollars' worth of it'll be on you!”
Through the fog that clouds his mind, he hears it, and then it fades to a
whisper, and is gone. He opens his eyes and stands, swaying slightly, steadied by
the two soldiers, while the Cockney at the barn door proclaims his fighter. As the
raucous voice silences the spectators' chatter, the black man closes his eyes
again, wincing at the stabbing pain in his lower body. Death is much closer now,
but he is not aware of its approach, and if he was he would not care. The
manager's speech has finished, the fiddler strikes up a lively march, the black
soldiers urge him gently forward, and he takes a faltering step. The scraping of
the fiddle is drowning out the noises in his head, then blending into another
sound from far away, the thumping of brass and a kettle drum's rattle, growing
louder amidst a tumult of distant voices, the murmur of a great multitude, and
the music of Yankee Doodle, stirring him to action …
Soft grass under restless feet shod in black pumps and white silk stockings
with floral patterns. He skips on the damp turf, and a smirr of rain is on his face
and chest, shivering him with its chill, as he moves forward into the winter
sunlight, drawing the great caped coat closer about his shoulders. Out of the
shadow, into the open, and the murmur of the throng swells to a great shout,
Yankee Doodle rises to a crescendo, and now his feet are marching, the press of
faces before him falling back to give him passage. White faces, all about him,
smiling and grim, curious and jeering, hostile and laughing, fearful and
admiring, marvelling and excited, and for a brief moment memory mingles with
imagination in the mist of his mind, and he sees himself with their eyes …
The caped figure striding through the lane of people and carriages held back
by the “vinegars”, brisk burly attendants in long coats and top hats carrying
horsewhips, his stride becoming a swagger as he shrugs off the cape to reveal the
magnificent body beneath, the black skin gleaming as though it has been oiled,
the jaunty head with its tight curls, the white silk breeches with ribbons at the
knee and coloured scarf encircling the slender waist. He breaks into the shuffle
of a plantation dance, laughing and waving to either side, a fine lady smiles from
beneath the broad brim of her Mousquetaire and tosses him a posy which he
catches, putting a flower behind his ear and bowing low over her hand before
dancing on, blowing kisses to the roaring crowd as the faces retreat into shadow
and the sound dies …
He is floating high above them, looking down on a vast human amphitheatre,
thousands upon cheering thousands ranged about a great roped circle, and
beyond them the rolling wooded English countryside is bright in the December
noontide, with scattered bands of running people and carts and carriages and
horsemen, all hastening to join the huge expectant throng whose every eye is
turned on that black and white figure, no bigger than a doll far beneath him,
striding ahead, arms raised and hands clasped overhead in the age-old salute of
the prize ring. Within the circle he can see the roped square, and the little knots
of men standing and crouched about it, the umpires by the scales, the bottle-
holders and timekeeper, the vinegars patrolling the space between square and
outer circle to ensure order, the gamblers' runners scurrying to and fro, and at
one corner of the square a slim slight man, a Negro like himself but lighter in
colour …
… whose eyes are glittering with fierce excitement as they come face to face
by the roped square. The mulatto is muttering to him and towelling his shoulders
vigorously against the biting cold, but the black fighter does not hear him. As he
pulls off his waist-scarf and knots it to the ring-post all his attention is directed to
the opposite corner where a man is standing clear of the rest, a tall white man
with a rugged open face beneath crisp black curls, clad like himself in breeches
and pumps, a man with the shoulders of an Atlas, massive arms crossed on his
deep chest, heavy-hipped and long-legged, shifting slightly as he waits, rising on
tip-toe and down again. He nods with a little smile, and as the black man raises a
hand in reply his other self, back in the Irish barn, feels a strange peace settling
upon him, a sense of contentment at the end of a long journey, and he realises
with a growing wonder that the journey ended there, by that roped square long
ago, when he looked across into the strong acknowledging face of the tall curly-
headed man, nodding to him, and recognised, for the first and only time in his
life, a companionship that was far beyond any bond of love or affection or
loyalty that he had ever known, because it was of equals, apart and alone. He
cannot explain it or even understand it, but he knows that the tall man feels it
too, and he laughs in pure happiness as he snatches the hat from the top of the
ring-post where his scarf is fluttering in the breeze, and sends it skimming over
the ropes …
… to fall in the dust of the farmyard, startling a stray fowl which runs
squawking wildly, and the red-haired blacksmith is rushing him, blue eyes
glaring and arms flailing, and his feet shift and his body sways instinctively as
