The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald
came up to Ranelagh’s elbow and congratulated him; I couldn’t have paid her out so splendidly myself, and I told him so. He gave me a cold nod and sailed off, the snobbish bastard, but I wasn’t in a mood to mind too much; that was me quits with Mistress Lola for her brickbats and insults, and I went home in high good humour.
She was finished on the London stage, of course. Lumley dismissed her, and although one or two attempts were made to present her at other theatres, the damage was done. All sorts of people now seemed to remember her as Mrs James, and although she wrote a letter of denial to the press, no one believed it. A few weeks later she had disappeared and that, thought I, was the end of Lola Montez so far as I was concerned, and good riddance. A brilliant bed-mate, I don’t deny, in her way, and even now the picture of her kneeling naked among the bed-clothes can set me itching—but I’d never liked her particularly, and was glad to see her sent packing.
But it wasn’t the end of her, by any means. Although it was some years before I saw her again—in circumstances that I couldn’t have dreamed of—one heard of her from time to time through the papers. And always it was sensational news; she seemed to have a genius for thrusting herself into high places and creating scandal. First there was a report of her horse-whipping a policeman in Berlin; next she was dancing on the tables during a civic banquet in Bonn, to the outrage of Prince Albert and our Queen, who were on a State visit at the time. Then she was performing in Paris, and when the audience didn’t take to her she stripped off her garters and drawers and flung them at the gallery; she started a riot in the streets of Warsaw, and when they tried to arrest her she held the peelers off with pistols. And of course there were scores of lovers, most of them highly-placed: the Viceroy of Poland, the Tsar of Russia (although I doubt if that’s true), and Liszt the musician.18 She took up with him two or three times, and once to get rid of her he locked her in a hotel room and sneaked out by the back door.
I met him, later on, by the way, and we discussed the lovely Lola and found ourselves much in agreement. Like me, he admired her as a tumble, but found her all too overpowering. “She is a consuming fire,” he told me, shaking his white head ruefully, “and I’ve been scorched—oh, so often.” I sympathised; she had urged me on in love-making with a hair-brush, but with him it had been a dog-whip, and he was a frail sort of fellow, you know.
At all events, these scraps of gossip reached me from time to time over the next few years. In that time I was out of England a good deal—as will be set down in another packet of my memoirs, if I’m spared to write them. My doings in the middle forties of the century don’t fit in with my present tale, though, so I pass them over for the moment and come to the events to which my meeting with Lola and Otto Bismarck was the prelude.
I can see, now, that if I hadn’t deserted Speedicut that night, hadn’t been rude to Bismarck, hadn’t set Jack Gully on to give him a beating, and finally, hadn’t taken my spite out on Lola by peaching on her to Ranelagh—without all these “if’s” I would have been spared one of the most frightening and incredible experiences of my life. Another glorious chapter in the heroic career of Harry Flashman would not have been written, and neither would a famous novel.
However, I’ve seen too much of life to fret over if’s and but’s. There’s nothing you can do about them, and if you find yourself at the end of the day an octogenarian with money in the bank and drink in the house—well, you’d be a fool to wish that things had fallen out differently.
Anyway, I was home again in London in ’47, with cash in my pocket for once—my own cash, too, dishonestly got, but no dirtier than the funds which old Morrison, my father-in-law, doled out as charity to keep us respectable “for my wee daughter’s sake”. His wee daughter, my Elspeth, was as pleased to see me as she ever was; we still suited very well between the sheets, however much she was playing loose with her admirers. I had ceased worrying about that, too.
However, when I arrived home, hoping for a few months’ rest to recover from the effects of a pistol-ball which had been dug out of the small of my back, there was a nasty shock awaiting me. My dear parents-in-law, Mr and Mrs Morrison of Paisley, were now in permanent residence in London; I hadn’t seen much of them, thank God, since I had married their beautiful, empty-headed trollop of a daughter several years before, when I was a young subaltern in Cardigan’s Hussars. We had detested each other then, they and I, and time hadn’t softened the emotion, on either side.
To make matters worse, my father was away from home. In the past year or two the old fellow had been hitting the bottle pretty hard—and pretty hard for him meant soaking up liquor in every waking moment. Once or twice they had to put him away in a place in the country where the booze was sweated out of him and the pink mice which nibbled at his fingers and toes were shoo’ed away—that was what he said, anyway—but it seemed that they kept coming back, and he was off getting another “cure”.
“A fine thing,” sniffed old Morrison—we were at dinner on my first evening home, and I had hoped to have it in bed with Elspeth, but of course we had to do “the polite” by her parents—“a fine thing, indeed. He’ll drink himsel’ intae the grave, I suppose.”
“Probably,” says I. “His father and grand-father did, so I don’t see why he shouldn’t.”
Mrs Morrison, who in defiance of probability had grown with the years even more like a vulture, gave a gasp of disgust at this, and old Morrison said he didn’t doubt that the son of the house would follow in his ancestors’ besotted footsteps.
“Shouldn’t wonder,” says I, helping myself to claret. “I’ve got a better excuse than they had.”
“And whit does that mean, sir?” bridled old Morrison. I didn’t bother to tell him, so he started off on a great rant about ingratitude and perversity, and the dissolute habits of myself and my family, and finished up with his age-old lamentation about his daughter having married a wastrel and a ruffian, who hadn’t even the decency to stay at home with his wife like a Christian, but must be forever wandering like Ishmael …
“Hold on,” says I, for I was sick of this. “Since I married your daughter I have been twice abroad, on my country’s service, and on the first occasion at least I came home with a good deal of credit. I’ll wager you weren’t slow to boast about your distinguished son-in-law when I came back from India in ’42.”
“And what have ye made of it?” sneers he. “What are ye? A captain still, and like to remain one.”
“You’re never tired of reminding Elspeth in your letters that you keep this family, this house, and the rest of it. Buy me a majority, if military rank means so much to you.”
“Damn yer impudence!” says he. “Is it no’ enough that I keep you and yer drunken father oot o’ the poor’s-hoose, where ye belong?”
“I’d have thought so,” says I, “but if you want me to shoot up the military tree as well—why, it costs money, you know.”
“Aye, weel, deil’s the penny ye’ll get from me,” snaps he. “Enough is bein’ spent on wanton folly as it is,” and it seemed to me he darted a look at his vinegary spouse, who sniffed and coloured a bit. What’s this, I wondered: surely she hasn’t been asking him to buy her a pair of colours: Horse Guards wouldn’t have taken her, anyway, not for a commission: farrier-sergeant, perhaps, but no higher.
No more was said at dinner, which ended in a merry atmosphere of poisonous ill-will, but I got the explanation from Elspeth when we had retired for the night. It seemed that her mother had been growing increasingly concerned at her inability to get Elspeth’s two virgin sisters married off: the oldest girl, Mary, had been settled on some commercial creature in Glasgow, and was breeding at a rare rate, but Agnes and Grizel were still single. I said surely there were enough fortune-hunters in Scotland ready to take a shot at her father’s money, but she said no, her mother had discouraged them. She was flying higher, reasoning that if Elspeth had been able to get me, who had