The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald
head was aching abominably, but when he and Kraftstein had examined it, they pronounced it satisfactory—from their point of view. De Gautet had laid his cuts exactly, and provided the wounds were left open they would quickly heal into excellent scars, Kraftstein assured me.
“Give you a most distinguished appearance,” says Rudi. “All the little Prussian girls will be fluttering for you.”
I was too sick and shocked even to curse at him. The pain seemed to be searing into my brain, and I was half-swooning as Kraftstein bandaged my skull and the pair of them supported me upstairs and laid me down on my bed. The last thing I heard before I slipped into unconsciousness was Rudi saying that it would be best if my highness rested for a while, and I remember thinking it odd that he had slipped out of his play-actor’s role for a while and then back into it.
That was my only experience of schlager-play, and it was one too many. But it taught me something, and that was a fearful respect for Otto Bismarck and his ruffians. If they were capable of that kind of cold-blooded mutilation then there was nothing they wouldn’t do; from that moment I put all thought of trying to escape from Schönhausen out of my mind. I hadn’t the game for it.
As to the scars, they healed quickly under Kraftstein’s care. I’ll carry them to my grave, one close to my right ear, the other slightly higher, but just visible now that my hair is thinner. Neither is disfiguring, fortunately; indeed, as Rudi observed, there is something quite dashing-romantic about them. They’ve been worth a couple of campaigns, I often think, in giving people the wrong impression of my character.
They hurt most damnably for a couple of days, though, during which I kept to my room. That was all the convalescence they would allow me, for they were in a great sweat to begin what Rudi was pleased to call my “princely education”.
This consisted of some of the hardest brain work I’ve ever had in my life. For a solid month, every waking hour, I lived, talked, walked, ate and drank Prince Carl Gustaf until I could have screamed at the thought of him—and sometimes did. At its worst it amounted to gruelling mental torture, but in recalling it now I have to admit that it was brilliantly done. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but the three of them—Rudi, Kraftstein, and Bersonin—came as close as one humanly could to turning me into another person.
They did it, subtly and persistently, by pretending from the first that I was Carl Gustaf, and spending hour after hour reminding me about myself. I suppose to approach the thing in any other way would have been useless, for it would have been constant admission of the imposture, and what an idiot, hare-brained scheme it was. They took me through that Danish bastard’s life a hundred times, from the cradle upwards, until I swear I must have known more about him than he did himself. His childhood ailments, his relatives, his ancestors, his tutors, his homes, his playmates, his education, his likes, his dislikes, his habits—there wasn’t a call of nature that he had answered in twenty years that I wasn’t letter-perfect in by the time they had done. Hour after hour, day after day, they had me sitting at that long table while they poured fact after fact into me—what food he liked, what pets he had had, what he read, what colour his sister’s eyes were, what nursery name his governess had called him (Tutti, of all things), how long he had lived at Heidelberg, what his musical tastes were (“Fra Diavolo”, by one Auber, had apparently impressed him, and he was forever whistling an air from it; it says something for their teaching that I’ve whistled it off and on for fifty years now). Where they had got all their information, God only knows, but they had two huge folders of papers and drawings which seemed to contain everything that he had ever done and all that was known about him. I couldn’t tell you my own grandmother’s Christian name, but God help me I know that Carl Gustaf’s great-uncle’s mastiff was called Ragnar, and he lived to be twenty-three.
“And what was your highness’s favourite game when you were little?” Rudi would ask.
“Playing at sailors,” I would reply.
“What was the English ship you boasted to your mother you had captured at Copenhagen?”
“The Agamemnon.”
“How did you come to capture it?”
“How the blazes do I know? I was only three, wasn’t I? I can’t remember.”
“You have been told. It was stuck in a mudbank. In your infant re-enactment you covered yourself in mud in a garden pond, don’t you remember?”
That was the kind of thing I had to know, and when I protested that no one was ever likely to ask me what games I had played when I was little, they wouldn’t argue, but would pass patiently on—to remind me of the fever I had had when I was fourteen, or the time I broke my arm falling from an apple tree.
All our talk was conducted in German, at which I made capital progress—indeed, Rudi’s one fear was that I might be too proficient, for Carl Gustaf apparently didn’t speak it too well, for all his Heidelberg education. Bersonin, who despite his taciturnity was a patient teacher, instructed me in Danish, but possibly because he himself only spoke it at second hand, I didn’t take to it easily. I never learned to think in it, which is unusual for me, and I found it ugly and dull, with its long vowels that make you sound as though you had wind.
But the real curse of my days was being instructed in the actual impersonation. We had the tremendous advantage, as I was to see for myself later, that Carl Gustaf and I were real doppelgängers, as like as two tits. Even our voices were the same, but he had mannerisms and tricks of speech that I had to learn, and the only way was for me to try attitudes and phrases over and over, in different styles, until Rudi would snap his fingers and exclaim: “Er ist es selbst! Now say it again, and yet again.”
For example, it seemed that if you asked Carl Gustaf a question to which the normal answer would have been “yes” or “of course”, he, instead of contenting himself with “ja”, would often say “sicher”, which means “positively, certainly”, and he would say it with a jaunty air, and a little stab of his right fore-finger. Again, in listening to people, he would look past them, giving tiny occasional nods of his head and making almost inaudible grunts of agreement. Lots of people do this, but I don’t happen to be one of them, so I had to practise until I found myself doing it almost without thinking.
And he had a quick, brisk laugh, showing his teeth—I worked at that until my throat smarted and my jaws ached. But this was easy compared with the contortions I went through in trying to mimic his trick of raising one eyebrow by itself; I came near to setting up a permanent twitch in one check, and eventually they decided to let it be, and hope that no one noticed that my eyebrows perversely worked together.
Fortunately, Carl Gustaf was a cheerful, easy-going chap, much as I am myself, but I had to work hard to try to correct the sulky look I get when I’m out of sorts, and my habit of glowering and sticking out my lower lip. This ray of Danish sunshine didn’t glower, apparently; when he was in the dumps he showed it with an angry frown, so of course I had to knit my brows until they ached.
How well I learned my lessons you may judge when I tell you that to this day I have his trick of rubbing one hand across the back of the other (when thinking deeply), and that I entirely lost my own habit of scratching my backside (when puzzled). Royalty—I have Bersonin’s solemn word for it—never claw at their arses to assist thought.
Now the result of all this, day after day, and of the unbroken pretence that my captors kept up, was remarkable and sometimes even frightening. I suppose I’m a good actor, to begin with—after all, when you’ve been shamming all your life, as I have, it must come pretty natural—but there were times when I forgot that I was acting at all, and began to half-believe that I was Carl Gustaf. I might be practising before the long cheval glass, with Rudi and Bersonin watching and criticising, and I would see this bald-headed young fellow in the green hussar rig flashing his smile and stabbing his forefinger, and think to myself, “Aye, that’s me”—and then my mind would try to recapture the picture of the dark, damn-you-me-lad-looking fellow with the curly hair and whiskers—and I would discover that I couldn’t do it. That was when I found it frightening—when I had forgotten what my old self looked