Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,40

detachment, whose sole duty was to accompany and protect the royal visitor. In plain English, Carey’s head had been on the block should anything go wrong. But, once again, our troops had long since gained the upper hand. Whole areas had been cleared of every Zulu in sight. Their villages, or kraals, had been destroyed. Isandhlwana had almost been avenged.

Prince Louis Napoleon, carrying the hopes of Imperial France with him, embarked at Portsmouth. At the end of March 1879, he set foot in South Africa. By the beginning of June he was dead! Again the world asked: “How could it have happened?”

All this came back to me in far less time than it takes to describe. Holmes strode across to those bookshelves which ran along one wall of our sitting-room. Its scrapbooks and works of reference were his curiously assorted library. In a moment more, a folio lay open on his table, pages pasted with small newspaper cuttings, in every printer’s type. He closed the volume with a look of satisfaction.

“As I suspected, Watson, this is a minor item cut from the foot of a column in the Army and Navy Gazette. Unlike the rest of the military press, the editor is a barrack-room lawyer who tries to salt the Horse Guards’ tail once a week.”

“I was in Afghanistan at the time,” I said helpfully. “Did this make as much noise in England as the newspapers pretended?”

“Enough to put another nail in the coffin of Mr. Disraeli’s administration. Dizzy was out of office soon after, and Mr. Gladstone was in.”

He stood with his back to the fireplace and gave a faint sardonic smile.

“The Times, the Morning Post, and tutti quanti carried reports of the inquest and court-martial. For a few weeks, the Prince Imperial’s assassination made enough noise to bring fire down from heaven! Then it was forgotten.”

He paused to charge his pipe with strong black shag tobacco. Drawing upon the lighted match, he continued:

“They rode out—the prince and his guardians—to map an area of safe territory near the Blood River. The Zulu war was effectively over. King Cetewayo was in hiding. They caught him but never harmed him. Lord Chelmsford taught him to wear a silk top hat with morning dress and polished shoes. He was got ready for a voyage to England to be inspected by the Queen and given lunch at Windsor Castle.”

“Preposterous!”

He shrugged.

“The area of desert scrub had been thoroughly searched for the prince’s outing. There were no Zulus there nor anyone else. He was only going for the day, carefully escorted. The imperial party dismounted for lunch near an abandoned village by the Blood River. An hour or two later, having eaten their rations and drunk their picnic wine, they prepared to mount. At that moment the impossible happened, as it so often does in that strange country. A platoon of Zulus, with spears and captured British Army rifles, burst from the undergrowth. But still these fellows were on foot, thirty or forty yards away. The prince with his boot already in the stirrup should have got away without difficulty.”

“No one was with him?”

“Captain Carey and all but two of the escort made off together in one direction, startled but uninjured. They believed the prince was galloping alongside them. How could he not be? Even in the confusion they were sure they had seen him vault into the saddle. Or rather, they had seen his boot in the stirrup and the harness strap in the hand of this first-rate rider. He had never fallen from a horse in his life. What they did not see was that, as he pulled against the harness to swing himself up, the strap had broken. He fell back instantly, sprawling on the ground. Once he was down and his horse had bolted, it was all over in half a minute. The poor young fellow died fighting on foot with a half-empty pistol. His body was found next day.”

“I never heard the details in Kandahar.”

He stood in silence for a moment, as if paying a private tribute. Then he quoted softly, “A hopeless encounter but a hero’s end. ‘For how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’”

“Lord Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome.”

“Quite so. This poor young man was brave to the last in the face of certain death. When he was found, there were seventeen assegai wounds in the front of his body and none anywhere else.