Flashman And The Tiger

Ile had stopped on the bridge, turned to face me. "I told you her father and brothers fell in the war of ’70 against the Germans, and what she said of fighting in her own way. I did not tell you how they died. Papa and Jacques were killed in the battle at Gravelotte. Claude died of his wounds, neglected … in a German hospital. Valéry was in the intelligence. He was captured at St Privat on a mission d’espionnage. He was shot by a firing squad of Fransecky’s Pomeranians, the day after the signing of the armistice, February the first, 1871!" Suddenly the eyes in the bulldog face were bright with angry tears. "They knew the armistice had been signed, but they shot him just the same. Just the same! German chivalry."

It had started to snow, and he was hunched up against the chill wind, staring down at the river.

"So they were gone, all four, it seemed in a moment … as the poet says of a snowflake on the water. Did I mention that the diplomat in Turkey and the informer in Egypt were both Germans? No? Well, Caprice does not like Germans. As the Count von Starnberg discovered. But I am keeping you standing in the cold, colonel! Give me your arm, my friend! Shall we seek a café and a cup of chocolate—with a large cognac to flavour it, eh?"

•   •   •

Some clever ass has said that "if" is the biggest word in the language, but I say it’s the most useless. There have been so many coincidences in my life, good and bad, that I’ve learned the folly of exclaiming "If only … !" They happen, and that’s that, and if the one that brought my Austrian odyssey to a close was uncommon disastrous—and infuriating, because I’d foreseen its possibility—well, I can be philosophic now because, as I’ve observed before, I’m still here at ninety, more or less, and you can’t ask fairer than that.

But that don’t mean I’ll ever forgive the drunk porter who mislaid my trunk at Charing Cross, because if he hadn’t … there, you see, "if " almost got the better of me, and no wonder when I think what came of that boozy idiot’s carelessness. Shocking state the railways are in.

However, we’ll come to Charing Cross all in good time. I’d have been there weeks earlier if (there it is again, dammit) Kralta hadn’t been so amorously intoxicated, and the circumstances of our reunion in Vienna so different from what I’d expected. When I took the train from Ischl early in December I was looking forward to a couple of cosy and intimate weeks in which I rogered her blue in the face, sparked her to the opera or whatever evening amusements Vienna offered, wined and dined of the best, saw the sights, took her riding (for she looked too much like a horse to be anything but an equestrian), viewed the Blue Danube from the warm comfort of her bedroom, and back to the muttons again. A modest enough ambition, and would have had me home again by Christmas. Well, I was taken aback, if not disappointed, by what awaited me at the Grand Hotel, and followed in the ensuing weeks.

I’d telegraphed from Ischl to advise her that I’d be rolling in, and when I arrived at the Grand, which was the newest and best-appointed of the leading hotels, she was awaiting me in a suit of rooms that Louis XIV might have thought too large and opulent for his taste. Vienna’s like that, you see; in most great cities the new districts are where the Quality hang out, but in Vienna the old sections are the exclusive ones, infested by the most numerous nobility in Europe, living in palaces and splendid mansions built centuries ago by ancestors who plainly felt that even a lavatory wasn’t a lavatory unless it could accommodate a hunt ball, with gilded cherubs on the ceiling and walls that looked like wedding cakes. Even new hotels like the Grand were to match, and the whole quarter reeked of money, privilege, and luxury in doubtful taste. It was reckoned to be the richest Upper Ten outside London, and the two hundred families of princes, counts, and assorted titled (rash spent ten million quid among ’em per annum, which ain’t bad for gaslight and groceries. They spent more, ate more, drank more, danced more, and fornicated more than any other capital on earth (and that’s Fetridge[23] talking, not me), and cared not a rap for anything except their musical fame, of which they’re wonderfully jealous—not without cause, I’d say, when you think of the waltz.

I’d arranged to arrive in town late, at an hour when Kralta would he cleared for bed and action, but when I reached the hotel close on midnight I saw that I’d been too long in the provinces; the hall was thronged with revellers, the dining salon was full, and an orchestra was going full swing. Even so, I was unprepared for the start I received when I was ushered into her drawing-room: where I’d looked to find her alone, there were thirty folk if there was one, all ablaze in the pink of fashion, and me in my travelling dirt.