“Dammit, it bloody hurts, it really bloody hurts, and it is getting worse. I cannot take much more.”
As another minute passed Emily could be heard reaching new heights of ecstasy and my brother could be heard yelling. His shouts ended with “oh Jesus this is too much, ouch, that was a spark, Jesus there are bloody sparks now, Oh Christ my balls, I can feel my balls sparking, arrrgh.”
This last groan coincided with a final climaxing shriek of ecstasy from Emily. As the sounds of pleasure subsided above us the maid stopped turning the wheel and we could hear the attendant’s footsteps rushing down the back stairs. It was time to go.
We were out of the front of the house in a moment and back into the cab which I had kept waiting for us. We laughed all the way back to the house recounting our favourite moments until the tears streamed down our faces. James and Emily arrived back at the house half an hour later and you can be sure that I had left the drawing room door open and sat in a chair that gave me a clear view while I hid my smile behind a paper. Sarah was scrubbing the hall fireplace as she had been for the last twenty minutes. How we did not give the game away I will never know as I ended up shaking in silent laughter with a handkerchief shoved in my mouth. Emily came in first looking radiant with a face flushed red and very dishevelled hair. My brother positively limped into view a few seconds later. He was not wearing a wig and most of his hair was sticking straight up. He winced every time he took a step and had a cut under his eye which I later discovered was due to one of the crystals falling off and hitting him in the face. He looked furious and they were arguing as they crossed the hall
“I tell you we should have got a refund.”
“We can’t do that James or they will not let us come back.”
“Come back? Are you mad? We are never going back there, it was the worst experience of my life.”
“Well it was one of the best of mine. So if you want a son and heir you had better be willing to go back.”
They disappeared out of earshot after that and the maid winked at me through the door as she went back down to the servant’s quarters. If there is a moral to this tale it is this: if you must thrash your servants, be careful not to beat the ones that know your secrets.
~~~~~~
Chapter 4
While electrocuting my brother had been fun, it did not change my financial situation and so when Stewart called around that evening to collect me for a visit to a club I explained that my clubbing days were for the moment over. Gentleman would typically go to enormous lengths to avoid admitting that they were financially stretched but by then I knew Stewart well enough to be straight. He had on a couple of occasions been very open with me about atrocities in Ireland and the horrors that sometimes kept him awake at night and I felt I could be open with him in return. Telling him I was out of gelt would not be as bad as him thinking I had just tired of his company.
To my surprise, he did not seem that bothered that I was down to my last ten guineas, with only the prospect of a pitiful allowance.
“Do you play cards?” he asked.
“I played a bit at school.” I replied. “But surely I could lose as much as I could win. I need a more secure source of income than that.”
Stewart grinned. “Don’t worry Flash, I guarantee that you will not end this night with less than you started. I know just the coves to get you flush again.”
We went to a quiet club in Piccadilly where he sought out two other gentlemen. I won’t name them but they were both in their thirties and immaculately dressed in expensive clothes and in the latest fashions. They were clearly educated men and had the languid air of men with time and money to burn. We started to play cards but to my surprise after a while Stewart said that he had to leave but that my new friends would see me right. The game of fashion at the time was faro, which was more like roulette than cards. The thirteen cards from a single suit, normally spades were laid on the table to form the board and then a whole new pack was shuffled and put into a card shoe to stop them being tampered with. Someone was selected as Banker and people placed bets on what card number or rank would come out of the shoe, it did not matter which suit. The cards were drawn in pairs, the first being the bankers card and if you had money on that card you lost it and the second was the players or winning card and if you had money on that card it was doubled.
If it sounds simple it was. Purely a game of chance in theory but while we were only playing small stakes I was soon down by three guineas.
“It is time we showed you the system” one of the new fellows said. “You bet on the low cards until you see an ace and then you bet on the high ones. When you see an ace again you bet on the low.”
“But surely the odds are the same?” I saw them exchanging pitying glances. “My God are you saying the deck is rigged” I whispered “but I saw you shuffle it.”
Another deck appeared almost magically in the dealer’s hand. “You saw me shuffle a deck” he said, “but not the one we are playing with. Don’t worry about your losses, this is just a practice session for richer pickings later this evening.”
“But how will you get the cards into the shoe?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” the other one said “you just play small stakes until I give you the signal. Then gradually, and I mean gradually, you increase the stakes as you start winning. Put in a few small bets on the other end of the board so you lose a bit too.”
”So you mean we are guaranteed to win?”
“Yes provided you don’t behave like a gannet in a fishmonger’s. You need to keep natural and do what we tell you. If anyone suspects what is going on you will be ruined. But here is the most important thing, when we give you the signal you cash up and leave. Oh and we will be round later to collect ten percent of your winnings as our fee."
We left for Almack’s where there was a gathering of the wealthy set which included some aristocratic gambling addicts. Chief among these was Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire who when she died left gambling debts of £20,000 in 1806. But this was just the tip of the iceberg as during her lifetime her husband and various friends including Prinny and Thomas Coutts the banker had paid off many times this amount in other gambling debts. There were others too who lost similar sums, all playing a game where officially the odds were even, which gives you a good idea of how widespread rigged decks were in those days.
I changed my ten guineas into counters and we slowly toured the tables. Then one of my new friends indicated a table in the corner of the room that had a spare seat. Sat around the table were a matronly old lady who we will call Lady S and her daughter we will call Lady D. Both were dripping in jewels with the mother wearing diamonds and rubies around her neck while the daughter had a stunning sapphire tiara. I had seen them both before and knew them to be closely related to one of the wealthiest families in the country. I will not name them as if this fell into the wrong hands, their family still has great influence.
Two other gentlemen I did not know were also at the table, one of whom was the current banker. I politely asked to occupy a vacant seat and sat down next to Lady S. The two men seemed to be coming to the end of a long night and had clearly a lot of drink on board. In contrast the ladies were excited and fixated on the cards while drinking sweet wine and largely chattering amongst themselves. They seemed to have made a small profit for once and were feeling very pleased with themselves. In such an intimate gathering I could not see how the deck could be switched. As it turned out I did not see it happen, for I had just looked away to a disturbance as Lady Bessborough’s hair had caught light – they wore it in a big style then and she must have walked too close to a wall sconce candle. They got it out quickly and she was being ushered from the room when I felt a hand on my shoulder which was the signal that the job had been done.
Well now I knew that the winning card would be in the bottom seven but I did not want to cover them all as that would have been too obvious. So I put two guineas on all of the odd numbers up to seven and the last
guineas I had on the jack just to even things out a bit. The first pair of cards out were a double, threes, which meant that the shoe moved on to the next player, Lady S. She re-organised the large pile of counters in front of her to make room for the shoe and could not resist looking greedily at the small piles in front of me and the other players.
On average as you might expect I won on every other hand and let the money ride where it was won. I was soon up to 20 guineas, I had lost my stake on the Jack and then the first ace appeared and I slowly started migrating my stakes to the other end of the board. As I won the size of my stakes gradually increased from two to five and then to ten and twenty guineas a card. It was normal to keep all your money on the table as you only lost it on the losing card. Some times I won several hands on the trot, other times there would be several even cards in succession and I would not win at all. But apart from when I was slowly moving my bets after an ace, I rarely lost a bet. The gamblers had reminded me in our practice session that it was important to show excitement as I won as though I was genuinely surprised by my winning streak. But even though I knew I was going to win it was still genuinely exciting and it was not difficult to look. Lady S’s daughter Lady D claimed that I must be carrying luck with me that night and decided to shadow some of my bets, taking money of her mother in the process. One of the other men at the table decided to bet on the even numbers as I was betting on the odds but as he covered them all he won and lost in equal measure.
Three aces came and went and my stakes gradually migrated up and down the board accordingly growing all the time but keeping to odd numbers plus Jacks and Kings as though that was my system. The other players congratulated me on my good fortune, even Lady S, who had been obliged to send for more counters. Eventually a footman brought me a message on a tray. I already knew it would say that my father was asking that I return home urgently and it was my signal and to make my excuses to leave.
Wishing the other players good fortune I gathered up my counters and walked to the cashiers.
From a ten guinea stake I made three hundred and fifty guineas that night, which was provided as an impressively heavy velvet bag full of gold coins. I felt very vulnerable taking that amount home through the streets of London in a cab but the next day I was able to pay off my brother, the bank and the gamblers with their ten percent fee and still have over two hundred to live on.
I saw the gamblers several times at clubs in subsequent years. They were professional villains that planned carefully to enjoy retirement rather than go to the gallows. They had made it clear to me that their help was a one night only event as if one player won too regularly it would raise suspicion. Everyone they helped owned them a favour and I suspect that there were various lawyers and perhaps even judges that had a vested interest in keeping them out of the courts. Certainly whenever I saw them I would look around and try and spot who they were helping this time. Invariably if you looked carefully enough you would find a gambler having a surprisingly consistent winning streak. If you waited you would see they would make a point of quitting while they were ahead rather than losing their winnings later in the night as most genuine gamblers normally managed to do.
The amounts lost at clubs such as Almacks were truly staggering and clearly my friends were not the only ones cheating. Whole estates would change hands in a single night. There was even a rumour that the affections of Lady Melbourne were sold by one of her many lovers to another aristocrat for thirteen thousand pounds to clear a gambling debt. James Fox the Whig leader managed to run up gambling debts of a hundred and twenty thousand, which were cleared off by his wealthy father. All this on a game where officially the odds were even.
I would have been ruined and disgraced if I had been caught but evidently many fortunes were made in this manner and if you were careful like the gamblers, people were rarely caught. They took the risk of swapping the deck and they were careful not to be seen with me afterwards.
That night’s work solved all my money problems and gave me a healthy profit but I never gambled seriously on faro again, it is far too crooked for me.
~~~~~~
Chapter 5
Two days after my card success I received a message inviting me to dine with Castlereagh. I hoped that this meant that my employment prospects were picking up. I had immediately used some of my gambling money to rent some rooms of my own in a respectable looking area near the centre of town. My new landlady, a shrill lady called Mrs Partridge had let me a well furnished apartment in a large old house with a sitting room and bedroom with laundry and cleaning provided. This meant that I was able to escape from my brother’s prying eye, which was just as well as I was still struggling to stifle a laugh every time I saw him limp around.
It was the first time I’d had a place of my own and now there was a chance of a job too. To celebrate I spent the afternoon with Jasmine at Mustapha’s. I went there for two reasons. Firstly because I had been getting increasingly fond of Jasmine and spending more and more time there. Secondly because Mustapha had broken the cardinal rule of a brothel owner and given me credit over recent visits and I needed to pay him back.
I was now a well known regular. Achmed the doorman recognised that anybody who saw him in daylight more than once would not be fooled by his Turkish disguise. So for me he dropped the salaam greeting and “may a thousand angels bless the pleasure of your eminence” or similar claptrap and replaced it with “evnin guvnor, good to see you agin” and usually some comment on the latest sporting news. Mustapha would often invite me into his office for a chat over a glass of strong sweet coffee. As a break from the usual pleasures, Jasmine and I would walk in the park. It turned out, she was not Turkish either, her father had been from North Africa and her mother Spanish.
“Welcome, welcome” cried Castlereagh as I arrived at his London home later that evening. Then in a lower voice he added “Charles has been drinking all afternoon. He is in one of his depressions, I am relying on you to stop him getting embarrassingly drunk tonight as half the cabinet will be here. One of them wants to meet you too, there might be a job in it for you.”
Before he could say anymore Charles Stewart wove through the small crowd in the drawing room to thrust a drink in my hand and say “my God I am glad to see you here. This night is set to be a dull affair. God what a crowd.” He was looking at the six other men including his brother that were going to dine with us. “That is George Canning over there,” he said pointing to a balding man with an energetic manner who was jabbing another guest vigorously in the chest to make a point. “He is just too clever by half, can’t follow him when I am sober never mind when I am drunk.”
“Isn’t that Pitt?” I asked pointing to a pale grey haired man on the far side of the room. Most of the names of the leading politicians were familiar to me from the papers but they did not carry illustrations so matching faces to names was difficult if you were not familiar to this type of gathering.
“Yes that is him, talking to Wilberforce. Robert is worried about his health. Look at him, he looks much older than his 41 years. That is what seventeen years as prime minister does to you.” Pitt did indeed look drained but he was still talking animatedly to Wilberforce who I knew was the anti slavery campaigner and long time friend of Pitt.
“Who is that?” I asked pointing to another younger man that had just joined Pitt and Wilberforce.
“No idea,” said Stewart brusquely “and if I don’t know ‘em they can’t be that important. Now come on, are you going to nurse that drink all night, I need another.”
A short while later we moved into the dining room and I sat near the bottom of the table with Stewart, already realising that restraining him from being obnoxious was going to be a forlorn task. Pitt and the senior cabinet members sat at the other end of the table but the stranger that Stewart did not know came around the table and sat next to me.
“William Wickham” he said introducing himself. It was not a name I had come across in the papers but he clearly knew me.
“You are Thomas Flashman aren’t you? Castlereagh said we should have a chat.”
“Err yes, do you work with Castlereagh in the Irish Office?”
“Course he doesn’t” interrupted Stewart loudly. “I would bloody know him if he worked there, who or what are you sir?”
“Well I am sort of linked to the Foreign Office, at least the work I do is for their benefit.” Wickham spoke calmly with a smile ignoring Stewart’s aggressive tone. I noticed that Canning had looked up at the mention of the Foreign Office, until recently he had been Foreign Secretary, and gave a wry smile at Wickham’s words.
Clearly Wickham was well known to Canning but Stewart gazing glassy eyed across the table at Wickham had missed all of this and continued “Foreign Office are the last to know anything. Bloody foreign governments run rings around us. Half of these French émigrés seem to be spying for the French to keep family members safe on the other side of the channel. This Napoleon chap the French have got now seems to know what he is doing. He will give the Foreign Office a run for their... for their...” He look puzzled as though he could not remember what he was going to say and then just finished loudly and abruptly “the Foreign Office know nothing.” To emphasise his point he banged his fist down on the table which knocked his wine glass over spilling red claret all over the white tablecloth.
Castlereagh looked in mute appeal at me and tried to start another conversation at his end of the table but before I could do anything Wickham was standing and reaching across the table for Stewart’s glass. “Here old fellow let me refill that for you”. More drink was the last thing that Stewart needed and I suggested quietly that he might want to have a rest as he had taken a lot on board already.
“Nonsense” said Stewart “and miss all this fun,” he pointed to the other end of the table. “Anyway I am hungry and want to eat” he gestured to a plate of soup that a footman had just put before him. Wickham had poured just a half glass of wine for Stewart. I thought that if that was his idea to slow Stewart down it would not work as Stewart was bound to complain. But then as Wickham picked up the glass with his right hand to pass it across, I saw a white powder fall into the drink from something hidden in the palm of his hand. He looked up and saw that I had noticed and just grinned and winked. Wickham swirled the wine around the glass to mix in the powder and then placed it before Stewart.
Flashman and the Seawolf Page 4