Flashman's Waterloo (Adventures of Thomas Flashman Book 6)

by Robert Brightwell

  I saw my son for the first time that morning; he was named Thomas after me. A hatchet-faced harridan of a governess brought him to me while I was having breakfast. As I gazed at him in wonder I was uncomfortably aware that I had no idea about dealing with children. I had not had much to do with them since I had been one myself. The boy looked as though he had been scrubbed to within an inch of his life. His cheeks positively glowed under carefully combed hair as he stared curiously at me in what were probably his best clothes.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Papa,” he intoned and then blow me if the little squirt did not give a little bow in greeting. I roared with laughter at the stiff formality, causing the lad to step back a pace nervously while staring at his mother for a clue as to my amusement.

  “Don’t worry, lad,” I said getting up and ruffling his blonde locks. “We will spend some time together this afternoon.” I thought back to how my friend, the Iroquois warrior Black Eagle, had planned to spend time with his son when I had left him a couple of months previously. “I know, I will take you hunting.”

  The boy shrank back in alarm while the two women in the room reacted as though I had suggested an afternoon of hard liquor and cockfighting in the stews of London.

  The governess got in first, puffing herself up like an outraged bullfrog. “Sir, the boy has lessons all afternoon.”

  “Well he will be missing them today, then, won’t he?” I retorted. “I have not seen my son for six years; it will not matter if he misses some algebra. It is a waste of time anyway.”

  “But Thomas, your son is only just learning to ride,” intervened Louisa more soothingly, “and there are no hunts organised for this afternoon.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” I said grinning. “Leave that to me and I’ll wager that we will bring home a nice fat buck for dinner, won’t we, lad?” I said grinning encouragingly at him, but the boy appeared apprehensive at the prospect. He glanced appealing up at his governess as though he would prefer an afternoon of Latin verbs to a jaunt out with his father. Could this really be my son, I wondered; he had certainly not got his bookishness from me. The boy had his mother’s green eyes and fair hair and I struggled to see a sign he had any Flashman blood at all. “Dress him in green and brown,” I said curtly to the sour-faced governess as she started to lead the boy away. The last thing I needed was him being presented in a red jacket and white breeches for a traditional fox hunt.

  After breakfast Louisa busied herself with her estate manager, making no effort to involve me in the running of my new home and lands. I did not mind as I wanted to ride back to the Flashman property and see my father. I thought he would tell me what had really been going on while I was away. I was shocked when I stepped into his study for he seemed to have aged at least a dozen years in the six I had been away.

  “Why the devil did you not write to me before?” he scolded after he had heard my adventures.

  “I couldn’t while I was hiding in Paris and in Canada there are no mail coaches - the weather brings the whole country to a virtual standstill during parts of the year. But the governor general said he would include my arrival in one of his reports.”

  “Well if he did, someone supressed it. Old Berkeley spent the last year of his life trying to get you formally declared dead so that he could arrange for that Lamb fellow to marry Louisa.”

  “The bastard,” I said with feeling. Then I decided to broach the subject that was uppermost in my mind. “Do you think Louisa still has feelings for Lamb?” I enquired as casually as I could. “How much time did he spend with her?”

  The old man shot me a piercing glare. “You should know better than me what her feelings are towards you.” He grinned then and added, “But I don’t think you need to worry about that rascal. He could not get back to London fast enough when he learned that you were alive. He was well aware of your reputation.”

  “My reputation?” I asked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Good grief, boy, the papers have been full of your exploits while you have been away. Did you not lead a charge with some Spanish general at Talavera and then don a French uniform to discover that the French were planning to trap the British army? There was also the tale of you riding disguised as a Polish lancer in the midst of the French invasion force for Portugal. Then after you had been wounded at Albuera, we heard you were one of the first to fight your way into the fortress of Badajoz.” He laughed and slapped his knee in delight, “Lamb knows that you must have killed countless men and I can only imagine the tricks you learned with those savages in Canada. He was terrified you would come after him when you learned he had been dallying with your wife.”

  I sat back in my chair, stunned for a moment. While all those tales my father had heard were true, and there were more besides, not one of those actions was intentional and more often than not I was screaming in fright at the time. I could not help but laugh out loud at the absurdity of the situation.

  My father beamed at me and then leant forward and gripped my shoulder. “I have not had much chance to say this to you until now, but I am proud of you, boy, right proud. I’ll be honest and say that you have taken to soldiering a lot better than I thought you would. I did not think you had it in you as a boy.”

  “Oh you would have been surprised if you had seen me in Spain,” I said nonchalantly. But by the devil, he would have been appalled after reading the papers, if he had seen the bowel-loosening moments of fear that had occasioned those tales. “But I am home now,” I assured him. “And I have no intention of going abroad again,” I added with what later proved to be unfounded optimism.

  He gave me the news then of my brothers and their families and how my investments had fared while I had been away. Then content that I was at least solvent, I returned to the Berkeley estate.

  Thomas Junior was waiting for me in a green tweed suit and so I decided to change into the old buckskins I had brought back with me from Canada. Both the lad and Louisa looked bemused as I stood at the top of the stairs bedecked in tasselled suede, with my old tomahawk stuck in my belt and a borrowed musket under my arm.

  “You can’t go out dressed like that, you will be the talk of the village,” exclaimed Louisa.

  “Nonsense, they can prattle about what they want, but now my son and I are going hunting, aren’t we, Thomas?” The boy looked a little uncertain on that point but dutifully followed his father out of the house and off towards the woods. I tried to engage him in conversation, but it was heavy going. He did not seem to have any friends among the village boys and compared to my childhood with two brothers, his life seemed very dull. The only time he appeared at all animated was when he told me about the book he was reading. I could not help but doubt his parentage again; perhaps there were others before Lamb that my father was not aware of. I knew all too well that Louisa’s sister had whelped a kid with a coachman on the estate. If you have read my earlier memoirs you will know how that incident nearly got me killed and I wondered if Louisa had pleasured herself with the servants while I had been away. She was a passionate woman and it was hard to believe that Lamb had been her only lover.

  The lad and I strolled across the fields and entered the woods at the edge of the estate. I knew there were deer in those trees as I had seen many while riding along the track that led through the middle of them. We left the path and started to stalk silently through the woodland. I had eventually got quite good at this in Canada and I tried to teach my son what my friend Black Eagle had taught me. The boy soon moved silently beside me, but whether that was my tutoring or the fact he was not heavy enough to break most of the twigs, it was hard to say.

  Eventually I spotted some deer tracks and we crouched down to move even more stealthily through the trees.

  “There,” I whispered, pointing. “Look, can you see that deer track in the mud? And look beyond it, a wet hoof print on that leaf. It has not yet dried out so the animal must be close.” I learned these tricks when I was in North America, I explained to him.
“We hunted deer, buffalo and even bears over there.” To my disappointment, the boy was singularly unimpressed with my hunting experience. He looked with puzzlement at the tracks I was clearly pleased to find and then stared into the trees over my shoulder. “I think the deer must be close,” I whispered and then to encourage any sort of response from him I added, “What do you think?”

  He looked at me with guileless innocence and then pointed past my shoulder, “It is over there,” he whispered.

  I whirled round and strike me if he wasn’t right: a big six-pointed buck not more than a hundred and twenty yards off, gnawing at some tree bark. Feeling something of a fool at my unnecessary tracking, I slowly brought the musket up to fire while whispering for the boy to stay behind me. As the gun butt nestled into my shoulder I moved partly behind a nearby tree to hide from the animal and rested the barrel against the trunk to steady it. I squinted to line the muzzle up with the chest of the deer and then raised the gun slightly to take account of the range. With my old hunting gun in Canada I would have been confident of at least a hit, but I had never fired this weapon before and they all had their peculiarities of aim. I took a breath to steady myself and slowly squeezed the trigger.

  I just had time to glimpse a new chunk of wood fly off the tree trunk near the animal’s head before the musket smoke obscured my view of the animal darting off into the trees. The forest was still ringing with the loud report of the gun when I turned round, cursing loudly at the miss, to discover my son was no longer there.

  “Where are you, boy?” I shouted as I looked around. He had been standing right behind me a moment before, but now there was no sign of him. Then I saw a polished boot protruding from behind a nearby tree. “What are you doing hiding?” I demanded.

  Slowly the boy edged sheepishly out. He looked anxiously at me with wide eyes and then stared down at the still smoking gun in my hand. “Why were you hiding?” I repeated more calmly.

  “I don’t like the sound of gunfire, it frightens me,” he whispered.

  You might have been disgusted by such craven timidity but I wasn’t. In fact I beamed in delight at the boy, for here, at last, was conclusive proof: he was clearly a Flashman after all.

  Chapter 3

  Louisa and I settled down into a routine of sorts. She made it very clear that she did not want my help in running the estate, which she had done for years on behalf of her father. I could have insisted but it would not have helped rebuild our somewhat fragile reunion. Instead I was left to amuse myself, but in no doubt that everything I did would doubtless reach the ears of Louisa through some estate worker.

  For years I had sat in army camps, ridden on campaigns and quivered with fear on battlefields, all the while dreaming of a more peaceful life on a country estate. But now I had such an existence I soon became hellishly bored. There was nothing to do except hunt and that soon became tedious. All the local farmers wanted to talk about was the weather, the size of the harvest or some freak two-headed calf that had apparently been delivered stillborn from a cow near Coventry. And if you tried to ignore them, why, the impertinent devils would just knuckle their brows and step out in front of you, forcing you to stop. Then they insisted on enquiring about my health, how pleased I must be that the war was over and whether I had ever seen a two-headed cow in Spain!

  I suggested that a trip back to London might be necessary, but Louisa got upset at the thought that I was tired of her already. In truth her company was the highlight of the day or should I say night. But I could not keep her between the sheets beyond mid-morning as the servants kept trying to bustle in on some errand such as bringing us breakfast or feeding the fire. You could hear the silly maids giggling outside the door and whispering about whether we had fornicated ourselves to exhaustion or if we were likely to be awake. One even questioned my stamina in the saddle, the cheeky bitch.

  Eventually, sensing my growing irritation with this bucolic life, Louisa suggested a party to welcome me home, with all of the local quality invited. I grudgingly agreed that this was a good idea, but then she had to ruin it by insisting that Lamb be asked to come too. That was going too far and I swore I would sooner push an egg in a bottle than agree to that. I was not having the cuckolding little wretch anywhere near Louisa again if I could help it. But she told me that he had been writing to her terrified that I would come to town and call him out for a duel or murder him in the night. She said that I had to make peace with him as he had been a good friend to her when she had thought me dead.

  “I’ll bet he was,” I retorted, but then there were tears from her and I found myself agreeing to let him come. Oh I had thought of calling him out, too; I could probably have beaten him easily with swords or pistols and no one would have blamed me for killing the odious little villain. But there was always the chance that he could get off a lucky shot and having had a ball pass through my innards once, it was not an experience that I wanted to risk repeating.

  So a month after my return I found myself standing in the ballroom of Berkeley Hall getting my fist pumped by all the nearby gentry and kissing their shrill wives and watching as they piled in to eat and drink their fill and more at my expense. At least there was less talk of two-headed cows; most of the conversation centred on the Congress of Vienna. Now Napoleon was beaten, the allied powers and representatives of the new French king were meeting there to discuss how the continent of Europe would be divided up between them. Naturally after the euphoria of victory had died away, suspicions had grown between the allies. People were in full cry that the Russians were getting too much and that it was dangerous to let those sausage-eating Prussians get too powerful. Most were completely bemused at what that treacherous bastard Talleyrand was doing at the congress at all representing the French king, given that previously he had been Napoleon’s foreign minister. One thing all present were agreed on, though, was that with all those damned foreigners involved, good old John Bull would not see his fair share.

  I had just endured listening to some local archdeacon railing at the treachery of the French – he had quite splenetic views for a man of the cloth that involved hanging most of them – when Louisa pushed through the press of people around me. I saw following her the pale face of Charles Lamb. I also became uncomfortably aware that many faces in the room were turning to watch the encounter. Given the efficiency of the gossips, I’ll wager that everyone there had heard the story of Lamb and Louisa getting together and their shock at my resurrection from the dead. Conversation in the room gradually stilled as Louisa stood before me. In a loud voice she said, “Thomas, I would like to present you to Charles Lamb.” She then gave me a warning glare and murmured “Remember you promised to be polite, you gave me your word.”

  Lamb hesitantly held out his paw and said with an obviously forced grin, “Hullo Flash, it is good to see you again.” You could have heard a pin drop as I looked down at the proffered hand. I would not have been surprised if some local squire was running a book on whether I would simply chuck him out or brain him with the fire poker first. But with Louisa watching I had little choice but to swallow down my natural inclinations and grip his fist with a smile as forced as his own.

  “You are welcome, Lamb,” I replied stiffly.

  There was a collective sigh of disappointment from the masses, many of whom turned back to their own conversations when they saw no sport in the offering.

  “That is good,” said Louisa, somewhat triumphantly. “I will leave you two to talk of old times,” she said shooting me another stern glance before she swept away to attend to some old countess who was waving to attract her attention. A stricken look crossed Lamb’s face as he watched his protector move off. He had been a stuck-up bastard with me in the past, but now the boot was on the other foot and it was time for me to pay him back.

  “Flash, I really am most dreadfully sorry, you know.”

  Checking we were not being overheard any more, I gave him my nastiest smile and replied, “It is Major Flashman to you, Spanker.”
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  Lamb wrung his hands together and looked even more anguished. “I swear we thought you were dead. Berkeley promised as much. He said he knew of people who had seen your corpse and that the confirmation was just a formality.” He looked for some show of understanding but I just glared silently at him, enjoying his discomfort. “You have probably heard of my troubles with Caroline,” he continued miserably. “Louisa was mourning you and we just fell to comforting each other somehow.”

  “Don’t you dare mention my wife’s name,” I snarled at him. I decided it was time to play on his fears. “Have you any idea how many men I have killed, with pistols, swords, cannon and even my own bare hands?” He blanched as I added, “Dozens, and not one of them has done me the disservice you have.”

  “Please, Flash, I mean Major Flashman. You can call me out if you wish, you have that right. But I implore you to remember that I am as much a victim here as you. I was misled as to your vitality...”

  “You certainly were,” I sneered. “I have spent the last two years with the Iroquois warriors in Canada. Do you know what they would do with someone like you?” Without waiting for a reply I continued, “They would kill and scalp the devil.” He started to go green at the thought and so I added maliciously “Have you ever heard a scalp torn from a skull? It makes a nasty tearing and sucking sound. You never forget it once you have heard it.” I thought he would throw up then and wondered if I had gone too far. I had wanted to scare him enough to keep away, but not to do anything desperate. “Stay this evening,” I allowed, “but after that I do not want to see you anywhere near this house or Louisa – is that understood?”