Flashman And The Tiger

"See here, Flashman," says the Prince of Wales, looking hunted and chewing his cigar as though it were plug tobacco, "you must get me out o' this. God knows what Mother would say ! "

I couldn’t think there was much she hadn’t said already. When you’re a queen of unblemished virtue, devoted to Duty and the high moral tone, and your son and Heir to the Throne is a notorious wastrel who counts all time lost when he ain’t stuffing, swilling, sponging off rich toad-eaters, and rogering everything in skirts, you’re apt to be censorious—why, she’d once told Elspeth that she was determined to outlive the brute ’cos he wasn’t fit to be king, so there. But in the present instance, so far as I’d gathered from his incoherent growls, I was shot if I could see what he was in a stew about; for once he appeared to be blameless. Yet here he was mangling his weed and twitching like a frightened Falstaff.

We were alone, and he was too fretful to be on his dignity, so I guided him to a chair, soothed him with a stiff b. and s., lit him a fresh smoke, waited courtier-like while he coughed his innards out, and invited him to restate his troubles, as calmly as might be, to sympathetic old Flashy.

"I’ve just told you!" snaps he, wheezing and wiping his piggy eyes. "It is the most shocking business. They say Bill Cumming has cheated at baccarat!"

That’s what I’d thought he said the first time, and wondered if I’d misheard. But he seemed sober and rational, if agitated. "You mean last night, sir—in the billiard-room?"

"Yes, confound it—and the night before! You were there, hang it all!"

Well, I had been, as an occasional spectator looking in from time to time to make sure my feather-brained wife wasn’t slapping down her jewellery and crying "Banco!", but I wasn’t having this. I should explain that baccarat is the most imbecile of card games (Elspeth plays it, after all) in which half-wits sit round a large table and the banker deals two cards to the crowd on his right, two to those on his left, and two to himself, the object being to get as near a total of nine with your two cards as may be; if your side gets two deuces, you’ll ask for a third card, won’t you, hoping for a four or a five, and the banker has the same privilege. If he gets closer to nine, he wins; if he doesn’t, you win. Endless fun, my dear, assuming you can count up to nine, and if it don’t rival chess, exactly, at least its simplicity leaves little room for sharp practice. Which was why I couldn’t credit what his fat highness was telling me.

"Cheated—at baccarat? No, sir, it can’t be done," I told him. "Well, not unless you’re the banker, and even then, with a four-pack deck, more than two hundred cards, why, you’d have to be the very devil of a mechanic." I considered. "Can’t think I’ve ever seen it tried … no, not out West, even. Mind you, they don’t go in for baccarat, much … vingt-et-un, mostly, and poker—"

"Damn poker!" croaks he. "He cheated, I tell you—and I was the blasted banker!"

Come to think of it, so he had been, on both nights, and for a happy moment I wondered if he’d been slipping ’em off the bottom himself, and was trying to shift the blame, in true royal style—but that wouldn’t do; he hadn’t the spunk for it.

"Let me get this right, sir … you tell me Gordon-Cumming cheated? For God’s sake, who says so?"

"Coventry and Owen Williams. There can be no doubt about it—I saw nothing wrong, but they are quite positive."

Since one of them was a deaf peer, and t’other a Welsh major-general, I didn’t put much stock in this. "They say they saw him sharping?"

"No, no, not they—these dreadful Wilson people, the young ones—our host’s children, dammit, four or five of them, young Wilson and that impossible fellow Green—and two of the ladies, even … they all saw him cheat, I tell you!" He thumped his knee, almost eating his cigar. "Why did I ever allow myself to be prevailed upon to come to this infernal house? It will be a lesson to me, Flashman, I don’t mind telling you—did you ever hear anything so monstrous?"

"If it’s true, sir … How do they say he cheated?"

"Why, by adding to his stake—putting on counters after the coups were declared in his side’s favour—and taking ’em off when he’d lost. They saw him do it time and again, apparently, on both nights, when I," groans he, "was holding the bank!"