The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “Williams was croupier!” cries Bertie, eager to share the guilt.

  “Only on the second night, sir!” says Williams. “There was no croupier on the Monday.” Bertie scowled, but couldn’t deny it.

  “At all events, there were two tableaux of players, one to your right, sir, and one to your left? Where was Gordon-Cumming sitting?”

  They consulted about this, and decided he’d been in the left-hand group, or tableaux. Mrs Arthur Wilson, our host’s wife, had been first to the Prince’s left, then an empty chair (though they couldn’t swear it had never been occupied), then Berkeley Levett, then round the corner young Jack Wilson, the son of the house, and Gordon-Cumming next to him, with one of the Somersets beyond. Each staked individually, and took turns at handling the cards dealt to their side.

  “How did they place their stakes, precisely?” I asked.

  “With counters supplied by his highness,” says Coventry, looking at him as though he were an opium runner. “I think I see the case yonder.”

  Sure enough, there was a polished wooden box on the table, and Bertie opened it reluctantly to display the leather counters, all stamped with his feathers crest – brown £10 chips, bright red fivers, blue oncers, and so on. Tools of the devil, I could hear the Queen calling them; they travelled with him everywhere.

  “I take it everyone staked before his highness dealt?” says I. “Pushing their counter – or counters – forward on the table? Then the cards would be dealt, your highness would declare the bank’s score, and then you’d pay out or rake in accordingly – is that so, sir?” Bertie gave a furtive grunt; he was hating this as much as I was enjoying it, I dare say. “Well, then what happened?” They all stood mum, waiting on each other. “Come along, gentlemen,” says I, getting brisk. “Who saw whom cheating, and when, and how?”

  It was like pulling teeth; they hemmed and hawed, or at least Coventry did, while Williams contradicted him and Bertie ground his teeth and flung his cigar in the fire. At last they got it straight, more or less. On the very first deal, young Jack Wilson had seen Cumming stake £5, and then, looking again when their side won and the Prince was preparing to pay out, had seen to his astonishment that Cumming’s stake had magically increased from one red counter to three – £15 where there had been only £5 before. He couldn’t be mistaken, because Cumming placed his stake on a piece of white paper which he used for making notes of the play. Young Wilson had thought it damned odd, and later, on the fifth or sixth deal (he couldn’t swear which), when their side had won again, he’d seen Cumming drop three red chips, furtive-like, on to the paper where there had originally been only one. He’d collected £20, cool as dammit, and young Wilson had whispered to Levett, seated beside him, the good news that his colonel was working a flanker. Levett had sworn Wilson must be wrong, but had watched himself, and blowed if he hadn’t seen Cumming do the same thing again, twice. Once he’d added two £5 chips, and the second time he’d added one, on both occasions after his tableau had been declared the winner.

  Described like that, in detail, it sounded impressive, I had to admit, and the Prince regarded me with piggy triumph. “There, you see, Flashman – two men, one in his own regiment, too! And both sure of what they saw!”

  “You saw nothing out o’ the way yourself, sir?”

  “Certainly not. I was occupied with the cards and the bank.”

  True enough, he would be – but there was something damned strange which they’d evidently overlooked.

  “If Cumming was cheating,” I asked them, “why on earth did he use the brightest chips – the red fivers?” I indicated the open box. “Look at ’em, they stand out a mile! And to make ’em even more conspicuous, he laid them on a white paper! Hang it all, sir, if he’d wanted to be caught he couldn’t have been more obvious!”

  They couldn’t explain it, and Bertie said testily that what I’d said might very well be true, but it didn’t alter the fact that he’d been seen padding his stakes, whatever blasted colour they were, and what was to be done, eh?

  I said I’d heard the stories of young Wilson and Levett, but what about the other three? Williams said that after the first night’s play young Wilson had told his mother what he and Levett had seen; Wilson’s sister and her husband, a chap called Lycett Green, had also been informed, and they’d resolved to keep an eye on Cumming the next night, Tuesday. Young Wilson had arranged for a long table to be set up in the billiard room, covered with baize and with a chalk line round the margin beyond which the stakes would be placed – that way, they thought, Cumming wouldn’t be able to cheat. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Were they mad?” says I. “They were sure the man was a swindler, yet they were prepared to play with him again – and spy on him? And they never thought to tell old Wilson, the father of the family, or anyone senior?”

  Coventry looked stuffed at this, and Bertie muttered about the shocking state of Society nowadays, ignorant upstarts who knew no better, and he was a fool to have come within a hundred miles of the confounded place, etc., etc. Williams said that Mrs Wilson had wanted at all costs to avoid a scandal, and if they hadn’t played it would have looked odd, and people might have talked … and so on, and so forth.

  “Very well, what happened on the Tuesday night?” I asked. “Was he seen juggling his chips again?”

  “Twice, at least,” says Williams. “He was seen to push a £10 counter over the line after his highness had declared baccarat to the bank.” Meaning the bank had lost. “On another occasion he used his pencil to flick a £5 counter, increasing his £2 stake to £7, which,” he added gloomily, “was what I, as croupier, paid him.”

  “But you saw nothing irregular yourself?”

  “No … tho’ I recall that at one hand – I can’t tell which – Cumming called out to his highness, ‘There is another tenner due here, sir,’ and from what I have learned this evening I believe it may have been on an occasion when he … when he played … ah, wrongly.” He was one of your decent asses, Williams, and didn’t like to say it plain.

  “I remember distinctly telling him to put his stakes where I could see ’em,” says Bertie. “But I suspected nothing.”

  “Who was sitting by him – the second night?”

  Coventry gave a start. “Why, my wife – Lady Coventry. But I believe she gave her place up to Lady Flashman for one or two coups, did she not, Williams?”

  “Why, so she did,” says Williams, turning to me. “I remember now – Cumming was advising your wife about her stakes, Flashman.” He gave a ruptured grin. “They were being rather jolly about it, you know; she was … well, I gathered she did not know much about the game, and he was helping her.”

  “I don’t suppose she saw anything fishy,” says Bertie bitterly. I knew what he meant: if Cumming had worn a black mask and made ’em turn out their pockets at pistol-point, she’d have thought it was all in the game.

  “Well, there you are, Flashman,” says Bertie. He flung down in a chair, a picture of disgruntled anxiety. “You know as much as we do. It’s past belief. That Gordon-Cumming, of all men …” He gave a despairing shrug. “But there can be no doubt of it … can there?” He was positively yearning at Coventry and Williams. “They are certain of what they saw?”

  Sure as a gun, they told him, so I intruded the kind of question that occurs only to minds like mine.

  “And you’re satisfied they ain’t lying?” says I, and was met by exclamations of dismay, paws in the air, whatever next?

  “Of course they’re not!” barks Bertie. “Heavens above, man, would they invent such a dreadful thing?”

  “It’s about as likely as Bill Cumming cheating for a few sovs,” I reminded him. “But there it is, one or t’other – unless Levett and young Wilson were drunk and seeing double.”

  “Really, Flashman!” cries Williams. “And the other witnesses, on the second night? You’ll hardly suggest that Mrs Wilson or Mrs Lycett Green were –”

  “No, general – but I will sug
gest that people often see what they expect to see. And I’m dam’ sure both those ladies and Lycett Green sat down last night convinced, from what they’d been told, that Cumming was a wrong ’un. Very well,” I went on, as they whinnied their protests and Bertie told me I was talking bosh, “have it as you please, I still say Cumming hasn’t been nailed to the wall hard enough to satisfy me … but he’s got a heap of explaining to do, I grant you.” I set my sights on Bertie. “And since your highness has done me the honour to ask my advice, I respectfully suggest that you examine these five all-seeing accusers yourself – and Gordon-Cumming – before things go any further.”

  Since this was plain common sense, it earned me a couple of bovine looks and a royal glare and growl, so I begged leave to withdraw and loafed off, leaving the three wise men to blink at each other and resume their chorus of “What is to be done?” – five words which are as sound a motto for disaster as I know. I’ve heard ’em at Kabul before the Retreat, at Cawnpore, on the heights above the North Valley at Balaclava, and I won’t swear someone wasn’t croaking them as we laboured up the Greasy Grass slope behind G. A. Custer, God rest his fat-headed soul. No one ever knows the answer, you see, so everyone looks blank until the man in command (in this case Good Prince Edward) makes up his mind in panic, and invariably does the wrong thing.

  I took a turn in the empty billiard room, imbibing a meditative brandy and tickling the pills while I considered this unexpected but most welcome bit of mischief, which promised to enliven what had been a damned dull visit so far. I’ve never been any hand, as you know, at dancing attendance on royalty – unless it’s young and female, but especially not Beastly Bert – nor do I enjoy the unsought hospitality of Society parvenus in the wilds of Yorkshire (a sort of English Texas peopled by coarse braggarts and one or two decentish slow bowlers) with nothing to do but watch horses run in the pouring rain. Racing’s well enough when you’re young and riding yourself, but now that I was in my seventieth year and disinclined to back anything more mettlesome than an armchair,a I found it quite as interesting as a sermon in Gaelic.

  So this baccarat nonsense, with its splendid possibilities of scandal, disgrace, and general devilment, looked made to order for diversion, provided it was properly mismanaged – which, with Bertie in a fine funk, Coventry and Williams advising, and myself ready to butter the stairs as chance offered, it probably would be. You may think this a tame enough occupation for one who has assisted at as many major catastrophes as I have, and a poor setting after the camps and courts of the mighty, but I was getting on, you know, and as the Good Book says, there’s a time for racketing about crying Ha-ha! among the trumpets, and a time for sitting back with your feet dipped in butter watching others fall in the mire.

  And I may tell you, not all adventures are to be found ’midst shot and shell, thank God. What happened at Tranby Croft that September week of ’90 was as desperate a drama, in its quiet way, as any I’ve struck, and a mystery which has baffled the wise for twenty years … but will no longer, for I was in the thick of it, and can tell you precisely what happened and why, and since I’ll be snug in my long home ere this account meets the public eye (supposing it ever does) you may rely on its truth, incredible as it may appear.

  In the first place, I’d never have gone near Tranby Croft but for Elspeth. She was a bosom chum of young Daisy Brooke, who was half her age and one of the leading Society fillies of the day, but cast in the same eccentric mould – well, you know what Elspeth’s like, and Daisy, who was known as Babbling Brooke, was a sort of mad socialist – even today, when she’s Countess of Warwick, no less, she still raves in a ladylike way about the workers, enough said. At the time of Tranby she was a stunning looker, rich as Croesus, randy as a rabbit, and Prince Bertie’s mount of the moment – indeed, I ain’t sure she wasn’t the love of his life, for he’d thrown over Lily Langtry in her favour and remained uncommon faithful to her until Keppel started wobbling her rump at him. I’ll say this for him, he had fine taste in bareback riders, as I should know; I’d shared Langtry with him, behind his back, and done my duty by pretty Daisy – as who hadn’t? Not La Keppel, though; she was after my time, worse luck, not heaving in view until I’d reached what Macaulay calls the years of chicken broth and flannel, when you realise how dam’ ridiculous you’d look chasing dollymops young enough to be your daughter, and seek solace in booze, baccy, and books. Regrettable, of course, but less tiring and expensive.

  Anyway, young Daisy Brooke had been first of the invited guests to Tranby, and had persuaded Bertie that the party would be incomplete without her pal Elspeth, Lady Flashman. I had my own jaundiced view of that, born of fifty years’ marriage to my dear one who, I had reason to believe, had not been averse to male attentions in those years when I’d been abroad funking the Queen’s enemies. Not that I could be certain, mind you, never have been, and she may have been as chaste as St Cecilia, but I strongly suspected that the little trollop had been galloped by half the Army List – including H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and William Gordon-Cumming, Bart. True, ’twas only gossip that she and Bertie had been at grips in a potting-shed at Windsor in ’59, when I was off in Maryland helping to start the Yankees’ civil war, but I’d seen him ogling her on and off ever since.

  As to the louse Cumming, he was too tall and fair and Greek god-like by half, and had made a dead run at Elspeth back in the sixties – and him twenty years her junior, the lecherous young rip. No doubt he’d been successful, but I’d no proof; she’d basked in his admiration, right enough, but since she did that with every man she met it meant neither nowt nor somewhat. The thing that set Cumming apart from her other flirtations (?) was that after twenty years’ acquaintance she had suddenly dropped him like a hot rivet, even cut him dead in the Row. I never knew why, and didn’t inquire; the less I knew of her transgressions (and she of mine) the better – I reckon that’s why we’ve always been such a loving couple. I’d run across Cumming professionally in Zululand, where he was staff-walloping Chelmsford while I was fleeing headlong from Isan’lwana, and we’d met here and there at home, and been half-civil – as I always am to suspected old flames of Elspeth. Wouldn’t have anyone to talk to otherwise, and you can’t have ’em thinking you’re a jealous husband.

  By the time of Tranby, to be sure, Elspeth was of an age where it should have been unlikely that either Bertie or Cumming would try to drag her behind the sofa, but I still didn’t care to think of her within the fat-fingered reach of one or the trim moustache of t’other. She’d worn uncommon well; middle sixties and still shaped like a Turkish belly-dancer, with the same guileless idiot smile and wondrous blue eyes that had set me slavering when she was sixteen – she’d performed like a demented houri then, and who was to say she’d lost the taste in half a century? Why, I remember reading of some French king’s mistress, Pompadour or some such, who was still grinding away when she was eighty. Well, there you are.

  So I wasn’t best pleased when the Tranby invitation arrived; however, I figured that with Daisy on hand to keep Bertie busy, and Cumming reportedly pushing about some American female, I could stop at home with an easy mind. Then at the last minute, blessed if one of Daisy’s aged relatives didn’t croak, and since it would not have done for dear Lady Flashman to attend their foul house-party unaccompanied, I was dragooned cursing into service. I doubt if our Prince gave three cheers, either; for all the good toadying turns I’d done him, he was still leery of me, and didn’t care to look me in the eye. Guilty conscience, no doubt. Until now, that is, when he found himself taken unawares by the makings of a prime scandal, and the prospect of being ritually disembowelled by our gracious sovereign when she heard of it, and serve the fat blighter right.

  I reflected on these matters as I shoved the ivories round the cushions, and reviewed events since we’d assembled at Tranby two days earlier, which was Monday. It was your middling country house, owned by a shipping moneybags named Wilson – not Society as you’d notice, but his place was convenient to Donca
ster, where they were running the Leger on the Wednesday, and if his family and friends were second-run as these things are judged in the impolite world, well, Prince Bertie was a fellow vulgarian, and right at home. There were enough of his regular crawlers, Cumming and the Somersets, to keep him happy, the Wilson gang toadied him to admiration, and as in most bourgeois establishments the rations, liquor, and appointments were first-rate; none of your freezing baronial banquet halls where the soup arrives stone cold after being toted half a mile by gouty servitors and the bed-springs haven’t been seen to since Richard the Third’s day. It was cosy and quite jolly, the young folk were lively without being a nuisance, Bertie was at ease and affable, and if it was all a dead bore it was comfortable at least.

  Elspeth was in her element, flaunting her mature charms on the first evening in a Paris rig-out which drew glittering smiles of envy from the female brigade and an approving grunt and leer from Bertie. She’d had the deuce of a struggle getting into the thing, with me heaving at her stays, but once all was fast and sheeted home she looked nothing like the grandmother she was, with her hair artfully tinted and that milky complexion carefully enhanced, but above all with that happy, complacent radiance which she hasn’t lost yet – and she’s close on ninety now. Aye, she’s always had the priceless gift of pleasing, has Elspeth, and making people laugh – for she’s a damned funny woman when she wants to be, a top-hole mimic, and all the more engaging because she plainly hasn’t got two brains to rub together. “Never see her but it sets me in humour,” Palmerston used to say. That was her talent, to make folk happy.

  She charmed Bertie, seated by her at dinner, won admiring glances from the other men with her artless prattle, and to my astonishment even exchanged pleasant banter with Gordon-Cumming. Hollo, thinks I, has the old fire rekindled? Watching her at work, I rather liked the look of her myself, and that night, waking in the small hours to find that plump excellence cuddled up against me, I was amazed to find myself inspired to climb aboard, puffing and creaking, while she giggled drowsily, saying I was a disgrace and would do myself a mischief.