The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “For God’s sake!” I burst out. “Look, I’ve agreed to do what you want, but this is abominable! I won’t—”

  “You will,” says Bismarck. “Prince Carl Gustaf has two duelling scars, received while he was a student at Heidelberg. There is no question of your impersonating him without them. I am sure,” he went on, smiling unpleasantly, “that de Gautet will administer them as painlessly as possible. And if they cause you some trifling smart, you may console yourself that they have been paid for in advance, by your amiable friend Mr Gully. You recall the occasion?”

  I recalled it all right, and it was no consolation at all. So now the swine was going to get his own back, and if I resisted I’d have Kraftstein pulling pieces out of me with his bare hands for my pains. There was nothing for it but to submit, and so I allowed myself to be led down to a big bare room off the courtyard where there were fencing masks and foils hung on the walls, and chalk lines on the floor, like a fencing school.

  “Our gymnasium,” says Bismarck. “You will spend some time here during your preparation—you are heavier than Carl Gustaf by a pound or two, I should judge. Perhaps we can relieve you of some of it this morning.”

  Coming from a man with sausages of fat beginning to bulge over his collar, this was pretty cool, but I was too busy gulping down my fear to mind. Presently de Gautet arrived, looking even more snake-like than he had the previous night, and when Bismarck explained what was to do, you could see the rascal’s mouth start to water.

  “You must be exact to the inch,” says Bismarck. “Look here.” He stood in front of me, drawing from his pocket the little miniature he had shown me last night, glancing at it and then at me and frowning. “You see how they run—so and so. Now, the crayon.” And to my horror he took a fat black pencil which Kraftstein held out, and with great care began to mark on the skin of my head the places where the cuts were to go.

  It was the final obscene touch that brought the bile up into my mouth, so that I almost spewed at him. He stood there, his face close to mine, hissing gently through his teeth and sketching away on my crawling flesh as though it had been a blackboard. I shuddered away, and he growled at me to be still. I was paralysed—I don’t think that of all the beastly things that man ever did, or all the terror he caused me, that there was anything as loathsome as that casual marking of my skin for de Gautet to cut at. There is only one word for it—it was German. And if you don’t understand what I mean, thank God for it.

  At last he was done, and Kraftstein could arm us for the schlager play. It seemed horrible to me at the time, but looking back from the safety of old age I can see that it is more childish than anything else. For all their pride in taking scars to impress everyone with how manly they are, the Germans are damned careful not to cause themselves any serious damage. Kraftstein fitted big metal caps onto the crowns of our heads; they were equipped with spectacles of iron in front to protect the eyes and nose, and there were heavy padded stocks to go round our necks. Then there was a quilted body armour to buckle round our middles, with flaps to cover the thighs, and a padded bandage to wrap round the right arm from wrist to shoulder. By the time we were fully equipped I felt like Pantaloon with dropsy; it was so ridiculous that I almost forgot to be afraid.

  Even when the schlager was put into my hand it looked such a ludicrous weapon that I couldn’t take it seriously. It was more than a yard long, with a triangular blade, and had a huge metal bowl at the hilt to protect the hand: it must have been about a foot across.26

  “The soup-plate of honour,” says Bismarck. “You have used a sabre, I suppose?”

  “Ask your man about that when we’ve finished,” says I, blustering with a confidence I didn’t feel: de Gautet was swishing his schlager in a frighteningly professional way.

  “Very good,” says Bismarck. “You will observe that your opponent’s head is covered, as is yours, at all points except for the cheeks and lower temples. These are your targets—and his. I may tell you that, with de Gautet, you are as likely to hit those targets as I was to strike Mr Gully. You may cut, but not thrust. Do you understand? I shall call you to begin and to desist.”

  He stepped back, and I found myself facing de Gautet across the chalked floor; Rudi and Kraftstein had taken their places along the walls, but Bismarck stayed within a couple of yards of us, armed with a schlager to strike up our blades if need be.

  De Gautet advanced, saluting with a flourish; in his padding he looked like some kind of sausage-doll, but his eyes were bright and nasty through the spectacles. I didn’t salute, but came on guard sabre-fashion, right hand up above my head and blade slanting down before my face.

  “Salute!” snaps Bismarck.

  “Pish to you!” says I, guessing that it would offend his fine Teutonic spirit to ignore the formalities. I was getting cocky, you see, because all this paraphernalia had convinced me that the business wasn’t really serious at all. I’m not a sabre expert—a strong swordsman, rather than a good one, was how the master-at-arms in the 11th Hussars had described me—and if I have to use one I’d rather it wasn’t in single combat, but in a mêlée, where you can hang about on the outskirts, roaring your heart out and waiting for an opponent with his back turned. However, it seemed to me now that I ought to be able to guard the unprotected areas that de Gautet would be cutting at.

  He came on guard, the blades grated between us, and then he twitched his wrist, quick as light, right and left, aiming deft little cuts at the sides of my head. But Flashy’s nobody’s fool; I turned my wrist with his, and caught the cuts on my own blade. He cut again, and the blade rang on my cap, but I broke ground and let go a regular roundhouse slash at him, like a dragoon full of drink. With the schlager, I learned later, you are supposed to employ only wrist cuts, but I was just an ignorant foreigner. My sweep, if it had landed, would have loosed Mr de Gautet’s guts all over the floor, but he was quick and turned it with the forte of his blade.

  He came in again, on guard, his narrow eyes on mine, and the blades rasped together. He feinted and cut hard, but I was there again, and as we strained against each other I sneered at him over the crossed blades and exerted all my strength to bear down his guard. I felt his blade giving before mine, and then it whirled like lightning and it was as though a red-hot iron had been laid against my right temple. The pain and shock of it sent me staggering back, I dropped my schlager and grabbed at my face, and as Bismarck jumped between us I saw the most unpleasant sight I know, which is my own blood; it coursed down my cheek and on to my hand, and I howled and dabbed at the wound to try to staunch it.

  “Halt!” cries Bismarck, and strode over to inspect my wound—not because he gave a tuppenny damn about me, but to see if it was in the right place. He seized my head and peered. “To an inch!” he exclaimed, and tipped his hand triumphantly to de Gautet, who smirked and bowed.

  “Fahren sie fort!” cries Bismarck, stepping back, and signing to me to pick up my schlager. Shaking with pain and rage, and with the blood feeling as though it were streaming out of me, I told him what he could do with it; I wasn’t going to stand up to be cut to bits for his amusement.

  He went red with fury. “Pick it up,” he rasped, “or I’ll have Kraftstein hold you down and we’ll set the other scar on you with a rusty saw!”

  “It’s not fair!” I shouted. “I think my skull’s fractured!”

  He damned me for a coward, snatched up the schlager, and thrust it into my hand. And in case worse should happen, I squared up to de Gautet again, resolving to take the other cut as quickly as possible, and then to settle the account in my own way, if I could.

  He shuffled in, full of bounce, cutting smartly right and left. I parried them, tried a quick cut of my own, and then flicked up my point to leave my left side unguarded. Instinctively he slashed at the gap, and I took it with my eyes shut and teeth gritted against the pain. My God, but it hurt, and I couldn’t repress a shriek; I reeled, but kept a tight grip on my schlager, and as de Gautet stepped back, satisfied wi
th his butchery, and glanced towards Bismarck, I forced myself into a sudden lunge that sent my point through his lousy body.

  The next thing I knew I had been hurled to the floor, and as I lay there, blinded with my own blood, all hell broke loose. Someone fetched me a tremendous kick in the ribs, I heard Rudi shouting and de Gautet groaning—delightful sound—and then I must have fainted, for when I opened my eyes I was sprawled on one of the benches, with Kraftstein sponging the blood from my face.

  My first thought was: they’ll settle my hash now, for certain, and then I realised that Bismarck and de Gautet had vanished, and only young Rudi was left, grinning down at me.

  “I couldn’t have done better myself,” says he. “Not much, anyhow. Our friend de Gautet won’t be quite so cock-a-hoop another time. Not that you’ve damaged him much—you barely nicked his side—but he’ll ache for a day or two. So will you, of course. Let’s have a look at your honourable scars.”

  My head was aching abominably, but when he and Kraftstein had examined it, they pronounced it satisfactory—from their point of view. De Gautet had laid his cuts exactly, and provided the wounds were left open they would quickly heal into excellent scars, Kraftstein assured me.

  “Give you a most distinguished appearance,” says Rudi. “All the little Prussian girls will be fluttering for you.”

  I was too sick and shocked even to curse at him. The pain seemed to be searing into my brain, and I was half-swooning as Kraftstein bandaged my skull and the pair of them supported me upstairs and laid me down on my bed. The last thing I heard before I slipped into unconsciousness was Rudi saying that it would be best if my highness rested for a while, and I remember thinking it odd that he had slipped out of his play-actor’s role for a while and then back into it.

  That was my only experience of schlager-play, and it was one too many. But it taught me something, and that was a fearful respect for Otto Bismarck and his ruffians. If they were capable of that kind of cold-blooded mutilation then there was nothing they wouldn’t do; from that moment I put all thought of trying to escape from Schönhausen out of my mind. I hadn’t the game for it.

  As to the scars, they healed quickly under Kraftstein’s care. I’ll carry them to my grave, one close to my right ear, the other slightly higher, but just visible now that my hair is thinner. Neither is disfiguring, fortunately; indeed, as Rudi observed, there is something quite dashing-romantic about them. They’ve been worth a couple of campaigns, I often think, in giving people the wrong impression of my character.

  They hurt most damnably for a couple of days, though, during which I kept to my room. That was all the convalescence they would allow me, for they were in a great sweat to begin what Rudi was pleased to call my “princely education”.

  This consisted of some of the hardest brain work I’ve ever had in my life. For a solid month, every waking hour, I lived, talked, walked, ate and drank Prince Carl Gustaf until I could have screamed at the thought of him—and sometimes did. At its worst it amounted to gruelling mental torture, but in recalling it now I have to admit that it was brilliantly done. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but the three of them—Rudi, Kraftstein, and Bersonin—came as close as one humanly could to turning me into another person.

  They did it, subtly and persistently, by pretending from the first that I was Carl Gustaf, and spending hour after hour reminding me about myself. I suppose to approach the thing in any other way would have been useless, for it would have been constant admission of the imposture, and what an idiot, hare-brained scheme it was. They took me through that Danish bastard’s life a hundred times, from the cradle upwards, until I swear I must have known more about him than he did himself. His childhood ailments, his relatives, his ancestors, his tutors, his homes, his playmates, his education, his likes, his dislikes, his habits—there wasn’t a call of nature that he had answered in twenty years that I wasn’t letter-perfect in by the time they had done. Hour after hour, day after day, they had me sitting at that long table while they poured fact after fact into me—what food he liked, what pets he had had, what he read, what colour his sister’s eyes were, what nursery name his governess had called him (Tutti, of all things), how long he had lived at Heidelberg, what his musical tastes were (“Fra Diavolo”, by one Auber, had apparently impressed him, and he was forever whistling an air from it; it says something for their teaching that I’ve whistled it off and on for fifty years now). Where they had got all their information, God only knows, but they had two huge folders of papers and drawings which seemed to contain everything that he had ever done and all that was known about him. I couldn’t tell you my own grandmother’s Christian name, but God help me I know that Carl Gustaf’s great-uncle’s mastiff was called Ragnar, and he lived to be twenty-three.

  “And what was your highness’s favourite game when you were little?” Rudi would ask.

  “Playing at sailors,” I would reply.

  “What was the English ship you boasted to your mother you had captured at Copenhagen?”

  “The Agamemnon.”

  “How did you come to capture it?”

  “How the blazes do I know? I was only three, wasn’t I? I can’t remember.”

  “You have been told. It was stuck in a mudbank. In your infant re-enactment you covered yourself in mud in a garden pond, don’t you remember?”

  That was the kind of thing I had to know, and when I protested that no one was ever likely to ask me what games I had played when I was little, they wouldn’t argue, but would pass patiently on—to remind me of the fever I had had when I was fourteen, or the time I broke my arm falling from an apple tree.

  All our talk was conducted in German, at which I made capital progress—indeed, Rudi’s one fear was that I might be too proficient, for Carl Gustaf apparently didn’t speak it too well, for all his Heidelberg education. Bersonin, who despite his taciturnity was a patient teacher, instructed me in Danish, but possibly because he himself only spoke it at second hand, I didn’t take to it easily. I never learned to think in it, which is unusual for me, and I found it ugly and dull, with its long vowels that make you sound as though you had wind.

  But the real curse of my days was being instructed in the actual impersonation. We had the tremendous advantage, as I was to see for myself later, that Carl Gustaf and I were real doppelgängers, as like as two tits. Even our voices were the same, but he had mannerisms and tricks of speech that I had to learn, and the only way was for me to try attitudes and phrases over and over, in different styles, until Rudi would snap his fingers and exclaim: “Er ist es selbst! Now say it again, and yet again.”

  For example, it seemed that if you asked Carl Gustaf a question to which the normal answer would have been “yes” or “of course”, he, instead of contenting himself with “ja”, would often say “sicher”, which means “positively, certainly”, and he would say it with a jaunty air, and a little stab of his right fore-finger. Again, in listening to people, he would look past them, giving tiny occasional nods of his head and making almost inaudible grunts of agreement. Lots of people do this, but I don’t happen to be one of them, so I had to practise until I found myself doing it almost without thinking.

  And he had a quick, brisk laugh, showing his teeth—I worked at that until my throat smarted and my jaws ached. But this was easy compared with the contortions I went through in trying to mimic his trick of raising one eyebrow by itself; I came near to setting up a permanent twitch in one check, and eventually they decided to let it be, and hope that no one noticed that my eyebrows perversely worked together.

  Fortunately, Carl Gustaf was a cheerful, easy-going chap, much as I am myself, but I had to work hard to try to correct the sulky look I get when I’m out of sorts, and my habit of glowering and sticking out my lower lip. This ray of Danish sunshine didn’t glower, apparently; when he was in the dumps he showed it with an angry frown, so of course I had to knit my brows until they ached.

  How well I learned my lessons you may judge when I te
ll you that to this day I have his trick of rubbing one hand across the back of the other (when thinking deeply), and that I entirely lost my own habit of scratching my backside (when puzzled). Royalty—I have Bersonin’s solemn word for it—never claw at their arses to assist thought.

  Now the result of all this, day after day, and of the unbroken pretence that my captors kept up, was remarkable and sometimes even frightening. I suppose I’m a good actor, to begin with—after all, when you’ve been shamming all your life, as I have, it must come pretty natural—but there were times when I forgot that I was acting at all, and began to half-believe that I was Carl Gustaf. I might be practising before the long cheval glass, with Rudi and Bersonin watching and criticising, and I would see this bald-headed young fellow in the green hussar rig flashing his smile and stabbing his forefinger, and think to myself, “Aye, that’s me”—and then my mind would try to recapture the picture of the dark, damn-you-me-lad-looking fellow with the curly hair and whiskers—and I would discover that I couldn’t do it. That was when I found it frightening—when I had forgotten what my old self looked like.

  Mind you, my character didn’t change; these flashes were only momentary. But I certainly began to believe that we would carry off the imposture, and the terror that I had originally felt about it subsided to a mere craven apprehension of what the end of it all might be—when payday came and the real Carl Gustaf had come back into his own.

  However, that was in the future, and in the meantime I was floating with the tide, as is my habit, and letting my puppet-handlers think that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. For their part, they seemed delighted with my progress, and one day, about three weeks after I had come to Schönhausen, on an evening when Bismarck joined the rest of us at supper, I did something which convinced Rudi and Bersonin that the first round was won at least.

  We were sitting down to table, myself at the head, as usual, and Bismarck plumped down in his chair before I did. Now I was so used by this time to being seated first that I simply stared at him, more in curiosity, I imagine, than anything else; and he, catching my glance, actually began to get to his feet. Rudi, who missed nothing, couldn’t repress a chuckle and a delighted slap of his thigh.