Flashman And The Tiger

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 Doncaster, 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.