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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1999

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille

George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

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Source ISBN: 9780007217229

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007325733

Version: 2015-07-23

The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.

To the question, how did I get the idea, I simply reply that I don’t know. Who ever knows? Anthony Hope conceived The Prisoner of Zenda on a walk from Westminster to the Temple, but I doubt if he could have said, after the calendar month it took him to write the book, what triggered the idea. In my case, Flashman came thundering out of the mists of forty years living and dreaming, and while I can list the ingredients that went to his making, heaven only knows how and when they combined.

One thing is sure: the Flashman Papers would never have been written if my fellow clansman Hugh Fraser, Lord Allander, had confirmed me as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1966. But he didn’t, the canny little bandit, and I won’t say he was wrong. I wouldn’t have lasted in the job, for I’d been trained in a journalistic school where editors were gods, and in three months as acting chief my attitude to management, front office, and directors had been that of a seigneur to his serfs – I had even put Fraser’s entry to the House of Lords on an inside page, assuring him that it was not for the Herald, his own paper, to flaunt his elevation, and that a two-column picture of him was quite big enough. How cavalier can you get?

And doubtless I had other editorial shortcomings. In any event, faced with twenty years as deputy editor (which means doing all the work without getting to the big dinners), I promised my wife I would ‘write us out of it’. In a few weeks of thrashing the typewriter at the kitchen table in the small hours, Flashman was half-finished, and likely to stay that way, for I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm, and lost interest – until my wife asked to read what I had written. Her reaction galvanised me into finishing it, one draft, no revisions, and for the next two years it rebounded from publisher after publisher, British and American.

I can’t blame them: the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully, and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story is a pretty eccentric subject. By 1968 I was ready to call it a day, but thanks to my wife’s insistence and George Greenfield’s matchless knowledge of the publishing scene, it found a home at last with Herbert Jenkins, the manuscript looking, to quote Christopher MacLehose, as though it had been round the world twice. It dam’ nearly had.

They published it as it stood, with (to me) bewildering results. It wasn’t a bestseller in the blockbuster sense, but the reviewers were enthusiastic, foreign rights (starting with Finland) were sold, and when it appeared in the U.S.A. one-third of forty-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir, to the undisguised glee of the New York Times, which wickedly assembled their reviews. ‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of.

You see, while I had written a straightforward introduction describing the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Papers’ in a saleroom in Ashby-de-la-Zouche (that ought to have warned them), and larded it with editorial ‘foot-notes’, there had been no intent to deceive; for one thing, while I’d done my best to write, first-person, in Victorian style, I’d never imagined that it would fool anybody. Nor did Herbert Jenkins. And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit. (The only one who was half-doubtful was my old chief sub on the Herald; called on to review it for another paper, he demanded of the Herald’s literary editor: ‘This book o’ Geordie’s isnae true, is it?’ and on being assured that it wasn’t, exclaimed: ‘The conniving bastard!’, which I still regard as a high compliment.)

With the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad who, despite his cowardice, depravity and deceit, had managed to emerge from fearful ordeals and perils an acclaimed hero, his only redeeming qualities being his humour and shameless honesty as a memorialist. I was gratified, if slightly puzzled to learn that the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, had said of the book: ‘I haven’t heard this voice in fifty years’, and that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was recommending it to his subordinates. My interest increased as I wrote more Flashman books, and noted the reactions.

I was, several critics agreed, a satirist. Taking revenge on the nineteenth century on behalf of the twentieth, said one. Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy, said another. Plainly under the influence of Conrad, said yet another. A full-page review in a German paper took me flat aback when my eye fell on the word ‘Proust’ in the middle of it. I don’t read German, so for all I know the review may have been maintaining that Proust was a better stand-off half than I was, or used more semi-colons. But there it was, and it makes you think. And a few years ago a highly respected religious journal said that the Flashman Papers deserved recognition as the work of a sensitive moralist, and spoke of service not only to literature and history, but to the study of ethics.

My instant reaction to this was to paraphrase Poins: ‘God send me no worse fortune, but I never said so!’ while feeling delighted that someone else had said it, and then reflecting solemnly that this was a far cry from long nights with cold tea and cigarettes, scheming to get Flashman into the passionate embrace of the Empress of China, or out of the toils of a demented dwarf on the edge of a snake-pit. But now, beyond remarking that the anti-imperial left-winger was sadly off the mark, that the Victorians were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation, and that I hadn’t read a word of Conrad by 1966 (and my interest in him since has been confined to Under Western Eyes, in the hope that I might persuade Dick Lester to film it as only he could), I have no comments to offer on opinions of my work. I know what I’m doing – at least, I think I do – and the aim is to entertain (myself, for a start) while being true to history, to let Flashman comment on human and inhuman nature, and devil take the romantics and the politically correct revisionists both. But my job is writing, not explaining what I’ve written, and I’m well content and grateful to have others find in Flashy whatever they will (I’ve even had letters psychoanalysing the brute), and return to the question with which I began this article.

A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tupenny bloods, the Wolf of Kabul and Lionheart Logan (where are they now?), the Barrack-Room Ballads, films like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s; the discovery, through Scott and Sabatini and Macaulay, that history is one tremendous adventure story; soldiering in Burma, and seeing the twilight of the Raj in all its splendour; a newspaper-trained lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion; being a Highlander from a family that would rather spin yarns than eat … I suppose Flashman was born out of all these things, and from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a child – and having a wayward cast of mind.

Thanks to that contrary streak (I always half-hoped that Rathbone would kill Flynn, confounding convention and turning the story upside down – Basil gets Olivia, Claude Rains triumphs, wow!), I recognised Flashman on sight as the star of Hughes’ book. Fag-roasting rotter and poltroon he might be, he was nevertheless plainly box-office, for he had the looks, swagger and style (‘big and strong’, ‘a bluff, offhand manner’, and ‘considerable powers of being pleasant’, according to his creator) which never fail to cast a glamour on villainy. I suspect Hughes knew it, too, and got rid of him before he could take over the book – which loses all its spirit and zest once Flashy has made his disgraced and drunken exit.

[He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]

What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending … just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.

In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).

Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.

I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.

When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.

And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.

George MacDonald Fraser

Dedication

For Kath, a memento of Ischl and the salt-mine

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FLASHMAN, Harry Paget, brigadier-general, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.: Chevalier, Legion of Honour; Order of Maria Theresa, Austria; Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary); U.S. Medal of Honor; San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class; b. May 5, 1822, s. of H. Buckley Flashman, Esq., Ashby, and Hon. Alicia Paget; m. Elspeth Rennie Morrison, d. of Lord Paisley, one s., one d. Educ. Rugby School. 11th Hussars, 17th Lancers. Served Afghanistan 1841–2 (medals, thanks of Parliament); chief of staff to H.M. James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, Batang Lupar expedn, 1844; milit. adviser with unique rank of sergeant-general to H.M. Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, 1844–5; Sutlej campaign, 1845–6 (Ferozeshah, Sobraon, envoy extraordinary to Maharani Jeendan, Court of Lahore); polit. adviser to Herr (later Chancellor Prince) von Bismarck, Schleswig-Holstein, 1847–8; Crimea, staff (Alma, Sevastopol, Balaclava), prisoner of war, 1854; artillery adviser to Atalik Ghazi, Syr Daria campaign, 1855; India, Sepoy Mutiny, 1857–8, dip. envoy to H.R.H. the Maharani of Jhansi, trooper 3rd Native Cavalry, Meerut, subseq. att. Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, Cawnpore (Lucknow, Gwalior, etc., V.C.); adjutant to Captain John Brown, Harper’s Ferry, 1859; China campaign 1860, polit. mission to Nanking, Taiping Rebellion, polit. and other services, Imperial Court, Pekin; U.S. Army (major, Union forces, 1862, colonel (staff) Army of the Confederacy, 1863); a.d.c. to H.I.M. Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 1867; interpreter and observer Sioux campaign, U.S., 1875–6 (Camp Robinson conference, Little Big Horn, etc.); Zulu War, 1879 (Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift); Egypt 1882 (Kassassin, Tel-el-Kebir); personal bodyguard to H.I.M. Franz-Josef, Emperor of Austria, 1883; Sudan 1884–5 (Khartoum); Pekin Legations, 1900. Travelled widely in military and civilian capacities, among them supercargo, merchant marine (West Africa), agriculturist (Mississippi valley), wagon captain and hotelier (Santa Fe Trail); buffalo hunter and scout (Oregon Trail); courier (Underground Railroad); majordomo (India), prospector (Australia); trader and missionary (Solomon Islands, Fly River, etc.), lottery supervisor (Manila), diamond broker and horse coper (Punjab), dep. marshal (U.S.), occasional actor and impersonator. Hon. mbr of numerous societies and clubs, including Sons of the Volsungs (Strackenz), Mimbreno Apache Copper Mines band (New Mexico), Khokand Horde (Central Asia), Kit Carson’s Boys (Colorado), Brown’s Lambs (Maryland), M.C.C., White’s and United Service (London, both resigned), Blackjack (Batavia). Chmn, Flashman and Bottomley, Ltd; dir. British Opium Trading Co.; governor, Rugby School; hon. pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females. Publications: Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life; Twixt Cossack and Cannon; The Case Against Army Reform. Recreations: Oriental studies, angling, cricket (performed first recorded ‘hat trick’, wickets of Felix, Pilch, Mynn, for 14 runs, Rugby Past and Present v. Kent, Lord’s 1842; five for 12, Mynn’s Casuals v. All-England XI, 1843). Add: Gandamack Lodge, Ashby, Leics.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

Dedication

Biographical Note

Explanatory Note

The Road to Charing Cross

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Appendix

Notes

The Subtleties of Baccarat

Appendix

Flashman and the Tiger

Notes

Footnotes

About the Author

The FLASHMAN Papers: In chronological order

The FLASHMAN Papers: In order of publication

Also by George MacDonald Fraser

About the Publisher

EXPLANATORY NOTE

When Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., the celebrated Victorian soldier, scoundrel, amorist, and self-confessed poltroon, began to write his memoirs early in the present century, he set to work with a discipline remarkable in one whose life and conduct were, to put it charitably, haphazard and irregular. Disdaining chronology, he adopted a random method, selecting episodes in his adventurous life and shaping them into complete, self-contained narratives, in the fashion of a novelist rather than an autobiographer. This was of immense help to me when the Flashman Papers, which were still unpublished at Sir Harry’s death in 1915, turned up as a collection of packets in a tea-chest at a Midlands saleroom in 1966, and were entrusted to me, as editor, by Flashman’s executor, the late Mr Paget Morrison of South Africa.

In accordance with his strict instructions, I dealt with the packets one at a time and found that, thanks to Sir Harry’s methodical approach, only a minimum of editing – correcting his occasional spelling mistakes and providing footnotes – was necessary to render the work fit for publication. Each packet contained a book almost ready-made, and soon the public, who until then had been aware of Flashman only as the cowardly bully of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, were in possession of his illuminating and often scandalous accounts of the First Afghan War, the Schleswig-Holstein Question, the African-American slave trade, and the Crimean War.

It was with the fifth packet that the pattern changed. Along with his account of the Indian Mutiny, Sir Harry had enclosed a separate brief narrative on an entirely different subject which he plainly felt did not call for extended treatment. Since it was too short for separate publication, and its inclusion with the Mutiny memoir would have made for an unwieldy book, I put it by, hoping the later packets would yield similar fragments which, with the first, might make a full volume.

Since then, two other such pieces have come to light, and the result is this collection of minor episodes in the career of an eminent if disreputable Victorian. One deals with a hither-to-unknown European crisis which, but for Flashman’s reluctant intervention, might well have advanced the outbreak of the First World War by three decades, with incalculable consequences. Since it is by far the longest fragment, presents a picture of a great monarch, involves if only at a distance many leading statesmen of the time, and finds Flashman in alliance with the shade of an old adversary, I have given it priority. The second piece clears up at last one of the most puzzling mysteries of the Victorian era, the notorious Baccarat Scandal in which the Prince of Wales was an unhappy actor. The third extract touches briefly on two of the most spectacular military actions of the century, and sees Flashman pitted against one of the great villains of the day, and observing, with his usual jaundiced eye, two of its most famous heroes. As this extract was the first to come to light, more than twenty years ago, and its known existence has caused some speculation among students of the Papers, I have given its title to the full volume.

G.M.F.

The Road to Charing Cross

You don’t know Blowitz, probably never heard of him even, which is your good luck, although I daresay if you’d met him you’d have thought him harmless enough. I did, to my cost. Not that I bear him a grudge, much, for he was a jolly little teetotum, bursting with good intentions, and you may say it wasn’t his fault that they paved my road to Hell – which lay at the bottom of a salt-mine, and it’s only by the grace of God that I ain’t there yet, entombed in everlasting rock. Damnable places, and not at all what you might imagine. Not a grain of salt to be seen, for one thing.

Mind you, when I say ’twasn’t Blowitz’s fault, I’m giving the little blighter the benefit of the doubt, a thing I seldom do. But I liked him, you see, in spite of his being a journalist. Tricky villains, especially if they work for The Times. He was their correspondent in Paris thirty years ago, and doubtless a government agent – show me the Times man who wasn’t, from Delane to the printer’s devils – but whether he absolutely knew what he was about, or was merely trying to do old Flashy a couple of good turns, I ain’t sure. It was certainly his blasted pictures that led me astray: photographs of two lovely women, laid before my unsuspecting middle-aged eyes, one in ’78, t’other in ’83, and between ’em they landed me in the strangest pickle of my misspent life. Not the worst, perhaps, but bad enough, and deuced odd. I don’t think I understand the infernal business yet, not altogether.

It had its compensations along the way, though, among them the highest decoration France can bestow, the gratitude of two Crowned Heads (one of ’em an out-and-out stunner, much good may it do me), the chance to serve Otto Bismarck a bad turn, and the favours of that delightful little spanker, Mamselle Caprice, to say nothing of the enchanting iceberg Princess Kralta. No … I can’t think too much ill of little Blowitz at the end of the day.

He was reckoned the smartest newsman of the time, better than Billy Russell even, for while Billy was the complete hand at dramatic description, thin red streaks and all, and the more disastrous the better, Blowitz was a human ferret with his plump little claw on every pulse from Lisbon to the Kremlin; he knew everyone, and everyone knew him – and trusted him. That was the great thing: kings and chancellors confided in him, empresses and grand duchesses whispered him their secrets, prime ministers and ambassadors sought his advice, and while he was up to every smoky dodge in his hunt for news, he never broke a pledge or betrayed a confidence – or so everyone said, Blowitz loudest of all. I guess his appearance helped, for he was nothing like the job at all, being a five-foot butterball with a beaming baby face behind a mighty moustache, innocent blue eyes, bald head, and frightful whiskers a foot long, chattering nineteen to the dozen (in several languages), gushing gallantly at the womenfolk, nosing up to the elbows of the men like a deferential gun dog, chuckling at every joke, first with all the gossip (so long as it didn’t matter), a prime favourite at every Paris party and reception – and never missing a word or a look or a gesture, all of it grist to his astounding memory; let him hear a speech or read a paper and he could repeat it, pat, every word, like Macaulay.

Aye, and when the great crises came, and all Europe was agog for news of the latest treaty or rumour of war or collapsing ministry, it was to the Times’ Paris telegrams they looked, for Blowitz was a past master at what the Yankee scribblers call ‘the scoop’. At the famous Congress of Berlin (of which more anon), when the doors were locked for secret session, Bismarck looked under the table, and when D’Israeli asked him what was up, Bismarck said he wanted to be sure Blowitz wasn’t there. A great compliment, you may say – and if you don’t, Blowitz did, frequently.

It was through Billy Russell, who you may know was also a Times man and an old chum from India and the Crimea, that I met this tubby prodigy at the time of the Franco-Prussian farce in ’70, and we’d taken to each other straight off. At least, Blowitz had taken to me, as folk often do, God help ’em, and I didn’t mind him; he was a comic little card, and amused me with his Froggy bounce (though he was a Bohemian in fact), and tall tales about how he’d scuppered the Commune uprising in Marseilles in ’71 by leaping from rooftop to rooftop to telegraph some vital news or other to Paris while the Communards raged helpless below, and saved some fascinating Balkan queen and her beautiful daughter from shame and ruin at the hands of a vengeful monarch, and been kidnapped when he was six and fallen in love with a flashing-eyed gypsy infant with a locket round her neck – sounded deuced like The Bohemian Girl to me, but he swore it was gospel, and part of his ‘Destiny’, which was a great bee in his bonnet.

‘You ask, what if I had slipped from those Marseilles roofs, and been dashed to pieces on the cruel cobbles, or torn asunder by those ensanguined terrorists?’ cries he, swigging champagne and waving a pudgy finger. ‘What, you say, if that vengeful monarch’s agents had entrapped me – moi, Blowitz? What if the gypsy kidnappers had taken another road, and so eluded pursuit? Ah, you ask yourself these things, cher ’Arree –’

‘I don’t do anything o’ the sort, you know.’

‘But you do, of a certainty!’ cries he. ‘I see it in your eye, the burning question! You consider, you speculate, you! What, you wonder, would have become of Blowitz? Or of France? Or The Times, by example?’ He inflated, looking solemn. ‘Or Europe?’

‘Search me, old Blowhard,’ says I rescuing the bottle. ‘All I ask is whether you got to grips with that fascinating Balkan bint and her beauteous daughter, and if so, did you tackle ’em in tandem or one after t’other?’ But he was too flown with his fat-headed philosophy to listen.

‘I did not slip, me – I could not! I foiled the vengeful monarch’s ruffians – it was inevitable! My gypsy abductors took the road determined by Fate!’ He was quite rosy with triumph. ‘Le destin, my old one – destiny is immutable. We are like the planets, our courses preordained. Some of us,’ he admitted, ‘are comets, vanishing and reappearing, like the geniuses of the past. Thus Moses is reflected in Confucius, Caesar in Napoleon, Attila in Peter the Great, Jeanne d’Arc in … in …’

‘Florence Nightingale. Or does it have to be a Frog? Well, then, Madame du Barry –’

‘Jeanne d’Arc is yet to reappear, perhaps. But you are not serious, my boy. You doubt my reason. Oh, yes, you do! But I tell you, everything moves by a fixed law, and those of us who would master our destinies –’ he tapped a fat finger on my knee ‘– we learn to divine the intentions of the Supreme Will which directs us.’

‘Ye don’t say. One jump ahead of the Almighty. Who are you reincarnating, by the way – Baron Munchausen?’

He sat back chortling, twirling his moustache. ‘Oh, ’Arree, ’Arree, you are incorrigible! Well, I shall submit no more to your scepticism méprisant, your dérision Anglaise. You laugh, when I tell you that in our moment of first meeting, I knew that our fates were bound together. “Regard this man,” I thought. “He is part of your destiny.” It is so, we are bound, I, Blowitz, in whom Tacitus lives again, and you … ah, but of whom shall I say you are a reflection? Murat, perhaps? Your own Prince Rupert? Some great beau sabreur, surely?’ He twinkled at me. ‘Or would it please you if I named the Chevalier de Seignalt?’

‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘In Italy they called him Casanova. Aha, that marches! You see yourself in the part! Well, well, laugh as you please, we are destined, you and I. You’ll see, mon ami. Oh, you’ll see!’

He had me weighed up, no error, and knew that on my infrequent visits to Paris, which is a greasy sort of sink not much better than Port Moresby, the chief reason I sought him out was because he was my passport to society salons and the company of the female gamebirds with whom the city abounds – and I don’t mean your poxed-up opera tarts and cancan girls but the quality traffic of the smart hôtels and embassy parties, whose languid ennui conceals more carnal knowledge than you’d find in Babylon. My advice to young chaps is to never mind the Moulin Rouge and Pigalle, but make for some diplomatic mêlée on the Rue de Lisbonne, catch the eye of a well-fleshed countess, and ere the night’s out you’ll have learned something you won’t want to tell your grandchildren.

In spite of looking like a plum duff on legs, Blowitz had an extraordinary gift of attracting the best of ’em like flies to a jampot. No doubt they thought him a harmless buffoon, and he made them laugh, and flattered them something monstrous – and, to be sure, he had the stalwart Flashy in tow, which was no disadvantage, though I say it myself. I suppose you could say he pimped for me, in a way – but don’t imagine for a moment that I despised him, or failed to detect the hard core inside the jolly little flâneur. I always respect a man who’s good at his work, and I bore in mind the story (which I heard from more than one good source) that Blowitz had made his start in France by paying court to his employer’s wife, and the pair of them had heaved the unfortunate cuckold into Marseilles harbour from a pleasure-boat, left him to drown, and trotted off to the altar. Yes, I could credit that. Another story, undoubtedly true, was that when The Times, in his early days on the paper, were thinking of sacking him, he invited the manager to dinner – and there at the table was every Great Power ambassador in Paris. That convinced The Times, as well it might.

So there you have M. Henri Stefan Oppert-Blowitz,¹ and if I’ve told you a deal about him and his crackpot notions of our ‘shared destiny’, it’s because they were at the root of the whole crazy business, and dam’ near cost me my life, as well as preventing a great European war – which will happen eventually, mark my words, if this squirt of a Kaiser ain’t put firmly in his place. If I were Asquith I’d have the little swine took off sudden; plenty of chaps would do it for ten thou’ and a snug billet in the Colonies afterwards. But that’s common sense, not politics, you see.

That by the way. It was at the back end of ’77 that the unlikely pair of Blowitz and Sam Grant, late President of the United States, put me on the road to disaster, and (as is so often the case) in the most innocent-seeming way.

Like all retired Yankee bigwigs, Sam was visiting the mother country as the first stage of a grand tour, which meant, he being who he was, that instead of being allowed to goggle at Westminster and Windermere in peace, he must endure adulation on every hand, receiving presentations and the freedom of cities, having fat aldermen and provosts pump his fin, which he hated of all things, listening to endless boring addresses, and having to speechify in turn (which was purgatory to a man who spoke mostly in grunts), with crowds huzzaing wherever he went, the nobility lionising him in their lordly way, and being beset by admiring females from Liverpool laundresses to the Great White Mother herself.

Hard sledding for the sour little bargee, and by the time I met him, at a banquet at Windsor to which I’d been bidden as his old comrade of the war between the states, I could see he’d had his bellyful. Our last encounter had been two years earlier, when he’d sent me to talk to the Sioux and lost me my scalp at Greasy Grass,fn1 and his temper hadn’t improved in the meantime.

‘It won’t do, Flashman!’ barks he, chewing his beard and looking as though he’d just heard that Lee had taken New York. ‘I’ve had as much ceremony and attention as I can stand. D’you know they’re treating me as royalty? It’s true, I tell you! Lord Beaconsfield has ordained it – well, I’m much obliged to him, I’m sure, but I can’t take it! If I have to lay another cornerstone or listen to another artisans’ address or have my hand tortured by some worthy burgess bent on wrestling me to the ground …’ He left off snarling to look round furtive-like in case any of the Quality were in earshot. ‘At least your gracious Queen doesn’t shake hands as though she purposed to break my arm,’ he added grudgingly. ‘Not like the rest of ’em.’

‘Price of fame, Mr President.’

‘Price of your aunt’s harmonium!’ snaps he. ‘And it’ll be worse in Europe, I’ll be bound! Dammit, they embrace you, don’t they?’ He glared at me, as though daring me to try. ‘Here, though – d’you speak French? I know you speak Siouxan, and I seem to recollect Lady Flashman extolling your linguistic accomplishments. Well, sir – do you or don’t you?’

I admitted that I did, and he growled his satisfaction.

‘Then you can do me a signal favour … if you will. They tell me I must meet Marshal Macmahon in Paris, and he hasn’t a word of English – and my French you could write on the back of a postal stamp! Well, then,’ says he, thrusting his beard at me, ‘will you stand up with me at the Invalids or the Tooleries or wherever the blazes it is, and play interpreter?’ He hesitated, eyeing me hard while I digested this remarkable proposal, and cleared his throat before adding: ‘I’d value it, Flashman … having a friendly face at my elbow ’stead of some damned diplomatic in knee-britches.’

Ulysses S. Grant never called for help in his life, but just then I seemed to catch a glimpse, within the masterful commander and veteran statesman, of the thin-skinned Scotch yokel from the Ohio tanyard uneasily adrift in an old so-superior world which he’d have liked to despise but couldn’t help feeling in awe of. No doubt Windsor and Buck House had been ordeal enough, and now the prospect of standing tongue-tied before the French President and a parcel of courtly supercilious Frogs had unmanned him to the point where he was prepared to regard me as a friendly face. Of course I agreed straight off, in my best toady-manly style; I’d never have dared say no to Grant at any time, and I wouldn’t have missed watching him and Macmahon in a state of mutual bewilderment for all the tea in China.

So there I was, a few weeks later, in a gilded salon of the Elysée, when Grant, wearing his most amiable expression, which would have frightened Geronimo, was presented to the great Marshal, a grizzled old hero with a leery look and eyebrows which matched his moustache for luxuriance – a sort of Grant with garlic, he was. They glowered at each other, and bowed, and glowered some more before shaking hands, with Sam plainly ready to leap away at the first hint of an embrace, after which silence fell, and I was just wondering if I should tell Macmahon that Grant was stricken speechless by the warmth of his welcome when Madame Macmahon, God bless her, inquired in English if we’d had a good crossing.

She was still a charmer at sixty, and Sam was so captivated in relief that he absolutely talked to her, which left old Macmahon standing like a blank file. Blowitz, who as usual was to the fore among the attendant dignitaries and crawlers, came promptly to the rescue, introducing me to the Marshal as an old companion-in-arms, sort of, both of us having served in Crimea. This seemed to cheer the old fellow up: ah, I was that Flashman of Balaclava, was I? And I’d done time in the Legion Étrangère also, had I? Why, he was an old Algeria hand himself; we both had sand in our boots, n’est-ce pas, ho-ho! Well, this was formidable, to meet, in an English soldier of all people, a vieille moustache who had woken to the cry of ‘Au jus!’ and marched to the sausage music.² Blowitz said that wasn’t the half of it: le Colonel Flashman had been a distinguished ally of France in China; Montauban would never have got to Pekin without me. Macmahon was astonished; he’d had no notion. Well, there weren’t many of us left; decidedly we must become better acquainted.

The usual humbug, though gratifying, but pregnant of great effects, as the lady novelists put it. For early in the following May, long after Grant had gone home (having snarled his way round Europe and charmed the Italians by remarking that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained), and I was pursuing my placid way in London, I was dumbfounded by a letter from the French Ambassador informing me that the President of the Republic, in recognition of my occasional services to France, wished to confer on me the Legion of Honour.

Well, bless the dear little snail-eaters, thinks I, for while I’ve collected a fair bit of undeserved tinware in my time, you can’t have too much of it, you know. I didn’t suspect it, but this was Blowitz at work, taking advantage of my meeting with old Macmahon to serve ends of his own. The little snake had discovered a use for me, and decided to put me in his debt – didn’t know Flash too well, did he? At all events, he’d dropped in Macmahon’s ear the suggestion that I was ripe for a Frog decoration, and Macmahon was all for it, apparently, so back to Paris I went in my best togs, had the order (fourth or fifth class, I forget which) hung round my unworthy neck, received the Marshal’s whiskery embrace, and was borne off to Voisin’s by Blowitz to celebrate – and be reminded that I owed my latest glorification to him, and our shared ‘destiny’.

‘What joy compares itself to advancing the fortunes of an old friend to whom one is linked by fate?’ beams he, tucking his napkin under his several chins and diving into his soup. ‘For in serving him, do I not serve myself?’

‘That’s my modest old Blow,’ says I. ‘What d’ye want?’

‘Ah, sceptique! Did I speak of obligation, then? It is true, I hope to interest you in a small affair of mine – oh, but an affair after your own heart, I think, and to our mutual advantage. But first, let us do honour to the table – champagne, my boy!’

So I waited while he gorged his way through half a dozen overblown courses – why the French must clart decent grub with glutinous sauces beats me – and when the waiters had cleared and we were at the brandy and cigars he sighed with repletion, patted his guts, and fished a mounted picture from his pocket.

‘It is a most amusing intrigue, this,’ says he, and presented it with a flourish. ‘Voilà!’

I’m rather a connoisseur of photography, and there was a quality about the present specimen which took my attention at once. It may have been the opulence of the setting, or the delicacy of the hand-colouring, or the careful composition which had placed two gigantic blackamoors with loin-cloths and scimitars among the potted palms, or the playful inclusion of the parakeet and tiny monkey on either side of the Oriental couch on which lounged a lovely odalisque clad only in gold turban and ankle-fetters, her slender body arched to promote jutting young bumpers which plainly needed no support, her lips parted in a sneer which promised unimaginable depravities. A caption read ‘La Petite Caprice’; well, it was a change from Frou-Frou … I tore my eyes away from the potted palms, a mite puzzled. As I’ve said, Blowitz had put me in the way of Society gallops, but never a professional.

‘Très appétissante, non?’ says he.

I tossed it back to him. ‘Which convent is she advertising?’

He clucked indignantly. ‘She is not what you suppose! This is a theatrical picture, made when she was employed at the Folies – from necessity, let me tell you, to finance her studies – serious studies! Such pictures are de rigueur for a Folies comedienne.’

‘Well, I could see she hated posing for it –’

‘Would it surprise you,’ says he severely, ‘to learn that she is a trained criminologist, speaks fluently four languages, rides, fences and shoots, and is a valued member of the département secret of the Ministry of the Interior, at present in our Berlin Embassy … where I was influential in placing her? Ah, you stare! Do I interest you, my friend?’

‘She might, if she was on hand. But since she ain’t, and posing for lewd pictures belies her stainless purity –’

‘Did I say that? No, no, my boy. She is no demi-mondaine, la belle Caprice, but she is … a woman of the world, let us say. That is why she is in Berlin.’

‘And what’s she to do with this small affair after my own heart to our mutual advantage?’

He sat back, lacing his tubby fingers across his pot. ‘As I recall, you were at one time intimate with the German Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, but that you hold him in no affection –’

I choked on my brandy. ‘Thank’ee for the dinner and the Legion of Honour, old Blow,’ says I, preparing to rise. ‘I don’t know where you’re leading, but if it’s to do with him, I can tell you that I wouldn’t go near the square-headed bastard with the whole Household Brigade –’

‘But, my friend, be calm, I beg! Resume the seat, if you please! It is not necessary that you … go near his highness! No such thing … he figures only, how shall I say – at a distance?’

‘That’s too bloody close!’ I assured him, but he protested that I must hear him out; our destinies were linked, he insisted, and he would not dream of a proposal distasteful to me, death of his life – quite the reverse, indeed. So I sat down, and put myself right with a brandy; mention of Bismarck always unmans me, but the fact was I was curious, not least about the delectable Mamselle Caprice.

‘Eh bien,’ says Blowitz, and leaned forward, plainly bursting to unfold his mystery. ‘You are aware that in a few weeks’ time a great conference is to take place at Berlin, of all the Powers, to amend this ridiculous Treaty of San Stefano made by Russia and Turkey?’ I must have looked blank, for he blew out his cheeks. ‘At least you know they have recently been at war in the Balkans?’

‘Absolutely,’ says I. ‘There was talk of us having a second Crimea with the moujiks, but I gather that’s blown over. As for … San Stefano, did you say? Greek to me, old son.’

He shook his head in despair. ‘You have heard of the Big Bulgaria, surely?’

‘Not even of the little ’un.’

He seemed ready to weep. ‘Or the Sanjak of Novi Bazar?’

‘Watch your tongue, if you please. We’re in a public place.’

‘Incroyable!’ He threw up his hands. ‘And it is an educated Englishman, this, widely travelled and of a military reputation! Europe may hang on the brink of catastrophe, and you …’ He smote his fat forehead. ‘My dear ’Arree, will you tell me, then, what events of news you have remarked of late?’

‘Well, let’s see … our income tax went up tuppence … baccy and dog licences, too … some woman or other has sailed round the world in a yacht …’ He was going pink, so just to give him his money’s worth I added: ‘Elspeth’s bought one of these phonographs that are all the rage … oh, aye, and Gilbert and Sullivan have a new piece, and dam’ good, too; the jolliest tunes. “I am an Englishman, be-hold me!” … as you were just saying –’³

‘Enough!’ He breathed heavily. ‘I see I must undertake your political education sur-le-champ. Gilbert and Sullivan, mon dieu!’

And since he did, and I’ll lay odds that you, dear reader, know no more about Big Bulgaria and t’other thing than I did, I’ll set it out as briefly as can be. It’s a hellish bore, like all diplomaticking, but you’d best hear about it – and then you can hold your own with the wiseacres at the club or tea-table.

First off, the Balkans … you have to understand that they’re full of people who’d much rather massacre each other than not, and their Turkish rulers (who had no dam’ business to be in Europe, if you ask me) were incapable of controlling things, what with the disgusting inhabitants forever revolting, and Russia and Austria trying to horn in for their own base ends. By and large we were sympathetic to the Turks, not because we liked the brutes but because we feared Russian expansion towards the Mediterranean (hence the Crimean War, where your correspondent won undying fame and was rendered permanently flatulent by Russian champagne).fn2

At the same time we were forever nagging the Turks to be less monstrous to their Balkan subjects, with little success, Turks being what they are, and when, around ’75, the Bulgars revolted and the Turks slaughtered 150,000 of them to show who was master, Gladstone got in a fearful bait and made his famous remark about the Turks clearing out, bag and baggage. He had to sing a different tune when the Russians invaded Ottoman territory and handed the Turks a handsome licking; we couldn’t have Ivan lording it in the Balkans, and for a time it looked as though we’d have to tackle the Great Bear again – we sent warships to the Dardanelles and Indian regiments to Malta, but the crisis passed when Russia and Turkey made peace, with the San Stefano Treaty.

The trouble was that this treaty created what was called ‘Big Bulgaria’, which would clearly be a Russian province and stepping-stone to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The Austrians, with their own ambitions in the Balkans, were also leery of Russia, so to keep the peace Bismarck, the ‘honest broker’ (ha!) called the Congress of Berlin to amend San Stefano to everyone’s satisfaction, if possible.⁴

‘Everyone will be there! Tout le monde!’ Blowitz was fairly gleaming with excitement. ‘Prince Bismarck will preside, with your Lord Salisbury and Lord Beaconsfield – as we must learn to call M. D’Israeli – Haymerle and Andrassy from Austria, Desprez and Waddington from France, Gorchakov and Shuvalov from Russia – oh, and so many more, from Turkey and Italy and Germany … it will be the greatest conference of the Powers since the Congress of Vienna, with the fate of Europe – the world, even – at stake!’

I could see it was just his meat; but what, I wondered, did it have to do with me. He became confidential, blowing garlic at me.

‘A new treaty will emerge. The negotiations will be of the most secret. No word of what passes behind those closed doors will be permitted to escape – until the new treaty is published, no doubt by Prince Bismarck himself.’ His voice sank to a whisper. ‘It will be the greatest news story of the century, my friend – and the correspondent who obtains it beforehand will be hailed as the first journalist of the world!’ The round rosy face was set like stone, and the blue eyes were innocent no longer. ‘The Times will have that story … First! Alone! Exclusive!’ His finger rapped the table on each word, and I thought, aye, you could have heaved your wife’s former husband into the drink, no error. Then he sat back, beaming again. ‘More brandy, my boy!’

‘Got an embassy earwig, have you? How much are you paying him?’

He winked, like a conspiring cherub. ‘Better than any “earwig”, dear ’Arree, I shall have the entrée to the mind of one of the principal parties … and he will not even know it!’ He glanced about furtively, in case Bismarck was hiding behind an ice bucket.

‘The Russian Ambassador to London, Count Peter Shuvalov, will be second only to Prince Gorchakov in his country’s delegation. He is an amiable and experienced diplomat – and the most dedicated lecher in the entire corps diplomatique.⁵ Oh, but a satyr, I assure you, who consumes women as you do cigars. And with a mistress who knows how to engage his senses, he is … oh, qui ne s’en fait pas … how do you say in English –?’

‘Easy-going?’

‘Précisément! Easy-going … to the point of indiscretion. I could give numerous instances – names which would startle you –’

‘Gad, you get about! Ever thought of writing your recollections? You’d make a mint!’

He waved it aside. ‘Now, this Congress will dance, like any other, and it is inevitable that M. Shuvalov will encounter, at a party, the opera, perhaps on his evening promenade on the Friedrichstrasse, the enchanting Mamselle Caprice of the French Embassy. What then? I will tell you. He will be captivated, he will pursue, he will overtake … and his enjoyment of her charms will be equalled only by the solace he will find in describing the labours of the day to such a sympathetic listener. I know him, believe me.’ He sipped a satisfied Chartreuse. ‘And I know her. No doubt she will be the adoring ingénue, and M. Shuvalov will leak like an old samovar.’

I had to admire him. ‘Crafty little half-pint, ain’t you, though? Here, give us another squint at that picture … by Jove, lucky old Shovel-off! But hold on, Blow – she may romp each day’s doings out of him, but she can’t get you the treaty word for word – and that’s what you want, surely?’

‘Mais certainement! Am I an amateur, then? No … I absorb her reports by the day, and only when all is concluded, and the treaty is being drafted, do I approach a certain minister who holds me in some esteem. I make it plain that I am au fait with the entire negotiation. He is aghast. “You know it all?” he cries. “A matter of course,” I reply with modesty, “and now I await only the text of the treaty itself.” He is amazed … but convinced. This Blowitz, he tells himself, is a wizard. And from that, cher ’Arree,’ says he, smiling smugly, ‘it is but a short step to the point where he gives me the treaty himself. Oh, it is a technique, I assure you, which never fails.’

It’s true enough; there’s no surer way of getting a secret than by letting on you know it already. But I still couldn’t see why he was telling me.

‘Because one thing only is lacking. It is out of the question that Caprice should communicate with me directly, for I shall be jealously observed at all times, not only by competitors, but by diplomatic eyes – possibly even by the police. It is the price of being Blowitz.’ He shrugged, then dropped his voice. ‘So it is vital that I have what you call a go-between, n’est-ce pas?’

So that was it, and before I could open my mouth, let alone demur, his paw was on my sleeve and he was pattering like a Yankee snake-oil drummer.

‘’Arree, it can only be you! I knew it from the first – have I not said our fates are linked? To whom, then, should I turn for help in the greatest coup of my career? And it will be without inconvenience – indeed, to your satisfaction rather –’

‘So that’s why you wangled me the Order of the Frog!’

‘Wangle? What is this wangle? Oh, my best of friends, that was a bagatelle! But this what I beg of you … ah, it imports to me beyond anything in the world! And I would trust no other – my destiny … our destiny, would forbid it. You will not fail Blowitz?’

When folk yearn and sweat at me simultaneous, I take stock. ‘Well, now, I don’t know, Blow …’

‘Shall I give you reasons? One, I shall be forever in your debt. Two, my coup will enrage Prince Bismarck … that pleases, eh? And three …’ he smirked like a lascivious Buddha ‘… you will make the acquaintance … the intimate acquaintance, of the delicious Mamselle Caprice.’

At that, it wasn’t half bad. It was safe, and I could picture Bismarck’s apoplexy if his precious treaty was published before he could make his own pompous proclamation. I took another slant at the photograph lying between us … splendid potted palms they were, and while her pose of wanton invitation might be only theatrical, as Blowitz had said, I couldn’t believe she wasn’t enjoying her work.

‘Well … what would I have to do?’

D’you know, the little villain had already reserved me a Berlin hotel room for the duration of the conference? Confidence in destiny, no doubt. ‘It is in the name of Jansen … Dutch or Belgian, as you prefer, but not, I think, English.’ He had it all pat: I would rendezvous with Caprice at her apartment near the French Embassy, and there, in the small hours of each morning, when she had sent Shuvalov on his exhausted way, she would give me her reports, writ small on rice paper.

‘Each day you and I will lunch – separately and without recognition, of course – at the Kaiserhof, where I shall be staying. You will have concealed Mamselle’s report in the lining of your hat, which you will hang on the rack at the dining-room door. When we go our respective ways, I shall take your hat, and you mine.’ This kind of intrigue was just nuts to him, plainly. ‘They will be identical in appearance, and I have already ascertained that our sizes are much the same. We repeat the performance each day … eh, voilà! It is done, in secrecy the most perfect. Well, my boy, does it march?’

The only snag I could see was being first wicket down with the lady after she’d endured the attentions of blasted Shovel-off, and would be intent on writing her reports. Happy thought: being a mere diplomat, his performance might well leave her gnawing her pretty knuckles for some real boudoir athletics – in which case the reports could wait until after breakfast.

Well, if I’d had any sense, or an inkling of what lay years ahead, or been less flown with Voisin’s arrack, I’d have given the business the go-by – but you know me: the promise of that photograph, and the thought of dear Otto smashing the chandelier in his wrath, were too much for my ardent boyish nature. And it never hurts to do the press a good turn.

So it was with a light heart and my hat on three hairs that I found myself strolling under the famous lime trees to the Brandenburg Thor a few weeks later, taking a long slant at the Thier Garten in the June sunshine, and marvelling at the Valkyrian proportions of German women – which awoke memories of my youthful grapplings with that blubbery baroness in Munich … Pech-something, her name was, a great whale of a woman with an appetite to match.

That had been thirty years ago, and I hadn’t visited Germany since, with good reason. When you’ve been entrapped, kidnapped, forced to impersonate royalty, shanghaied into marriage, half-hung by Danish bandits, crossed swords in dungeons with fiends like Rudi von Starnberg, drowned near as dammit, and been bilked of a fortune … well, Bognor for a holiday don’t look so bad.fn3 Thank God, it was far behind me now; Rudi was dead, and lovely Lola, and even Bismarck had probably given up murder in favour of war … not that he’d done much in that line for a few years. Mellowing with age, like enough. Still, I’d steer well clear of their Congress: Otto aside, I’d no wish to have D’Israeli inveigling me into a game of vingt-et-un.fn4 Nor had I any great desire to ‘do’ Berlin; it may have the finest palaces in Germany, and the broadest streets, which is capital if you enjoy miles of ornamented stucco and don’t mind tumbling into drains which are mostly uncovered, but it also has the disadvantage of being full of Germans, most of ’em military. They say there’s a garrison of 20,000 (in a town no bigger than Glasgow) and it seemed to me the whole kit-boodle of ’em were on Unter den Linden – sentries presenting arms at every door and the pavements infested by swaggering Junkers with plumed helmets and clanking medals, still full of Prussian bounce because they’d licked the Frogs eight years before, as though that mattered.

The Congress was to begin on the 13th, and it was on the evening of the 12th that I left my modest hotel on the Tauben Strasse and walked the short distance to the discreet, pleasant little court off the Jager Strasse where Mamselle had her apartment – both of us quietly tucked away (trust Blowitz) but convenient for Unter den Linden, and the Wilhelmstrasse where the Congress was to sit. Blowitz had fixed the time, and primed her; his note awaiting me at my hotel had hinted delicately that she knew I wasn’t a puritan, exactly, and would expect to be paid in kind for my services, so I was in excellent fettle as I knocked at her door. My one doubt was that, being used to coupling for her country (or, in this case presumably, for The Times), she might be a dutiful icicle with one eye on the clock and her mind elsewhere, in which case I’d just have to jolly the sparkle into her eyes.

I needn’t have fretted; it was there from the first in the mouth-watering vision who opened the door determined to practise her art on Flashy. Like all good actresses, she’d decided exactly how to play her part, and dressed according in a déshabillé of frothy black lace clinging to a petite hourglass shape which recalled the Maharani Jeendan of intoxicating memory. Without her turban, her hair showed light auburn, cut in a fetching schoolgirl fringe above a lovely impudent face whose smile of invitation would have melted Torquemada. For an instant it faded on ‘Herr … Jansen?’ only to return as I made my gallant bow.

‘Oh, pardon!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was expecting someone … much older!’

‘Mamselle,’ says I, saluting her dainty fingertips, ‘you and I will get along famously! May I return the compliment by saying that your photograph don’t do you justice?’

‘Ah, that photograph!’ She made a pretty moue and rolled her eyes. ‘How I blushed to see it outside the theatre … but now, it has its uses, non?’ She didn’t wink, but her voice did, and her smile, as she closed the door and looked me up and down, was pure sauce. ‘Stefan tells me it brought you to Berlin … oui?’

‘Stefan has a reputation for accuracy, oui,’ says I, and now that the courtesies had been observed, and she was French anyway, I slipped my hands under her delectable stern, hoisted her up, and kissed her soundly. She gave a muffled squeak for form’s sake before thrusting her tongue between my lips, but just as I was casting about for a convenient settee she disengaged, giggling, and said I must put her down, and we should have an aperitif, and then I must explain something to her.

‘No explanation necessary,’ growls I, but she wriggled clear, rolling her rump, and checking my pursuit with a shaken finger – and if you’d seen that bouncy little bundle, pouting mischievous reproof and absolutely crying, ‘Non-non-la-la!’ like the maid in a French farce, you’d have been torn between bulling her on the spot and brushing away a sentimental tear. I did neither; I enjoy a good performance as well as the next licentious rascal, and never mind playing wait-a-bit with a coquette who knows her business. So I sat on the couch while she filled two glasses, pledged me with a flashing smile, and then sauntered artlessly into the sunlight from the window to give me the benefit of her transparent négligée. There followed as eccentric a conversation as I can recall – and I’ve been tête-à-tête with Mangas Colorado Apache, remember, and the lunatic leader of the Taiping Rebellion.

Mamselle (solicitous): You are comfortable? Eh bien, you must rest quietly a moment, and be courtois … what you call proper, correct … until you have explained what I wish to know.

Flashy (slavering with restraint): Good as gold. Fire away.

M (handing him an illustrated journal): So tell me, then, what is so très amusant about that?

F: Good God, it’s Punch! One of last month’s.

M (ever so serious): If I am to be perfect in English, I must understand your humour, n’est-ce pas? So, instruct me, if you please.

F: What, this cartoon here? Ah, let’s see … two English grooms in Paris, and one is saying there ain’t no letter ‘W’ in French, and t’other says: ‘Then ’ow d’yer spell “wee”?’ Just so … well, the joke is that the second chap doesn’t know how to spell ‘oui’, you see …

M: And one is to laugh at that?

F: Well, I can’t say I did myself, but –

M: Pouf! And this other, then? (Sits by F, taps page with dainty scarlet nail, regards him wide-eyed)

F (aware that only a wisp of gauze lies between him and the delightful meat): Eh? Oh, ah, yes! Well, here’s a stout party complaining that the fish she bought yesterday was ‘off’, and the fishmonger retorting that it’s her own fault for not buying it earlier in the week …

M (bee-stung lips breathing perfume): What then?

F: Gad, that’s sweet! … Ah, well, I guess that the joke is that he’s blaming her, don’t you know, when in fact he’s been selling the stuff after it’s started to stink.

M (bewildered, nestling chin on F’s shoulder): So le poissonnier is a thief. That amuses, does it?

F: See here, I don’t write the damned jokes … (Attempts to fondle her starboard tit)

M (parrying deftly): Good as gold, méchant! Now, this page here, the lady in harlequin costume … ah, très chic, her hat and veil trop fripon, and her figure exquisite, mais voluptueuse! (sits bolt upright, inspired to imitation)

F: God love us!

M (swaying out of reach) … but her expression is severe, and she carries a baton – to chastise? She is perhaps a flagellatrice? Formidable! But this also is humorous?

F: Certainly not. This picture is intended to be ogled by lewd men. Speaking as one myself …

M: No, no, be still, you promised! What is ogled?

F: What people did at your Folies photograph, as well you know! Enjoyed posing for it, didn’t you? – dammit, you’re enjoying this!

M (wickedly): Mais certainement! (nestles again, nibbling F’s ear) Et vous aussi? No-no-no-wait! One last question … ah, but only one … these words, above this article … what do they mean?

F (reading): ‘Hankey Pankey’ … (as she bursts out laughing) I knew it, bigod! You understand Punch’s beastly jokes as well as I do, don’t you? Well, just for that, young woman, I shan’t tell you what Hankey-Pankey means … I’ll show you! (Demonstrates, avec élan et espièglerie and lustful roarings, to delighted squeals and sobs from Mamselle. Ecstatic collapse of both parties)⁶

Afterwards, as I lay blissfully tuckered, with that splendid young body astride of me, moist and golden in the fading sunlight, her eyes closed in a satisfied smirk, I found myself wondering idly if the French secret service ran an École de Galop to train their female agents in the gentle art of houghmagandie, as Elspeth calls it – and if so, were there any vacancies for visiting professors? Anyway, Mamselle Caprice must have been the Messalina Prizewoman of her year; no demi-mondaine perhaps, according to Blowitz, but as expert an amateur as I’d ever struck, with the priceless gift of fairly revelling in her sex, and using it with joyous abandon … and considerable calculation, as I was about to learn.

She stretched across to the nearby table for a gilt-tipped cigarette, lighting it from a tiny spirit lamp, and I couldn’t resist another clutch at those firm pointed poonts overhead. She squirmed her bottom in polite response, trickling smoke down her shapely nostrils as she studied me, head on one side; then she leaned down, murmuring in my ear.

‘If you were Count Shuvalov … would you be ready to confide in me now?’ She gave a little chuckle, and nibbled.

‘I’ll be damned! Been using me for net practice, have you?’ I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Experimenting on me, you little trollop – of all the sauce!’

‘Why not?’ says the shameless baggage, sitting up again and drawing on her scented weed. ‘If I am to learn his secrets, it is well I should know what … beguiles men of his age. After all, you and he are no longer boys, but mature, possibly of similar tastes …’

‘A couple of ageing libertines, you mean? Well, thank’ee, my dear, I’m obliged to you – as I’m sure Count Shovel-off will be, and if you pay him the kind of loving attention you’ve just shown me, I daresay he’ll be sufficiently captivated to gas his fat head off –’

‘Oh, he is captivate’ already,’ says she airily. ‘He has admired the notorious photograph … and we have met, and he has begged an assignation for tomorrow night.’⁷

‘Has he, now? That’s brisk work.’ Highly professional, too … by Blowitz? … by the French secret department? Certainly by the brazen little bitch sitting cool as a trout athwart my hawse, sporting her boobies and blowing smoke-rings while she mused cheerfully on how best to squeeze the juice out of her Russian prey.

‘You see,’ says she, ‘to captivate, to seduce, is nothing … he is only a man.’ She gave the little shrug that is the Frenchwoman’s way of spitting on the pavement. ‘But afterwards … to make him tell what I wish to know … ah, that is another thing. Which is why I ask you, who are experienced in secret affairs, Blowitz says. You know well these Russians, you have made the intrigues, you have made love to many, many women, and I am sure they have – how do you say? – practised their nets on you.’ She smiled sleepy seductive-like, and leaned down again to flicker the tip of her tongue against my lips. ‘So, tell me … which of them most appealed, to win your confidence? The fool? The task-mistress? The slave? L’ingénue? Or perhaps la petite farceuse who teases you with foolish jokes, and then …’ She wriggled, stroking her bouncers across my chest. ‘To which would you tell your secrets?’

‘My, you’ve studied your subject, haven’t you?’ I eased her gently upright. ‘Well, the answer, my artful little seductress, is … to none of ’em – unless I wanted to. But I ain’t Shovel-off, remember. From what I hear he’s the kind of vain ass who can’t resist showing off to every pretty woman he meets, so it don’t matter a rap whether you play the innocent or Delilah or Gretchen the Governess. Get him half-tipsy, pleasure him blind, and listen to him blather … but don’t try to come round him with jokes from Punch, ’cos they’d be lost on him. Tease him with a few funny bits from Tolstoy, if you like, or the latest wheezes from Ivan the Terrible’s Guffawgraph –’

‘Oh, idiot!’ She slapped me smartly on the midriff, giggling. ‘You are not serious, you! I ask advice, and you make game of me!’

‘Advice, my eye – mocking a poor old man, more like.’

‘Old? Ha!’ exclaims she, rolling her eyes – she could pay a neat compliment, the minx.

‘As if there was anything I could teach you about bewitching a man!’ I can pay a compliment, too. She gave a complacent toss of the head, arms akimbo.

‘Oh, one can always learn, from a wise teacher … I think,’ says she, assuming the depraved sneer she had worn in her photograph, ‘that since I do not like M. Shuvalov, I should prefer to be Gretchen the Governess, très implacable, sans remords!’ She made growling noises, flourishing an imaginary whip. ‘Ah, well, we shall see! And now,’ she hopped nimbly down, ‘I make supper!’

Which she did, very tasty: an omelette that was like a soufflé for lightness, with toast and a cold Moselle, fruits soaked in kirsch, and coffee Arabi style – black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell. Listening to her cheery prattle and bubbling laughter across the table, I found myself warming to Mamselle Caprice, and not only ’cos she was a little stunner and rode like a starving succubus and cooked rather well. I liked her style: no humbug, just Jezebel with a sassy twinkle and a fifth-form fringe, lightly touched by the crazy gods – as many politicals are; Georgie Broadfoot was daft as a brush. In her case it might have been a mask, a brass front over inner hurt; she was in a dirty business, and no doubt her male colleagues, being proper little Christian crooks, would make it plain that they regarded her as no better than a whore – I did myself, but I wasn’t fool enough to damp her amorous ardour by showing it. But no, ’twasn’t a mask; as we talked, I recognised her as one of these fortunate critters who (like yours truly) are simply without shame, and wouldn’t know Conscience if they tripped over it in broad day. She was fairly gloating at the prospect of wringing Shuvalov dry for the sheer fun of it – and the handsome fee Blowitz had promised her.

‘A hundred golden pounds!’ cries she gleefully. ‘You see, it is not a secret department matter, but personal to Stefan and his paper. And since he has friends in high places … behold, I am in Berlin!’

‘And that’s all that matters to me, my little Punch-fancier,’ says I, nuzzling her neck as we repaired to the couch. ‘As an Asian princess once said to me: “Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions”.’

‘An Asian princess!’ She clapped her hands. ‘Ah, but I must hear of this! Was she beautiful? Did you carry her off? Were you her slave?’ and so on, so I told her all about Ko Dali’s dreadful daughter, and how she’d rescued me from a Russian dungeon, and filled me with hasheesh unawares, and dam’ near had me blown to bits, and was surpassingly beautiful (at which Caprice pouted ‘Pouf!’) but bald as an egg (which sent her into peals of delight). Whether she believed me, God knows, but she demanded particulars of a most intimate nature, inviting comparison between the Silk One and herself, and that inevitably led to another glorious thrashing-match which restored her amour-propre and left me in what I once heard a French naval officer describe as a condition of swoon.

Only when I was taking my leave did we return to the subject of Shuvalov. His assignation with her was for eight the following evening, after the first day of the Congress, and she expected to have him off the premises by midnight, whereafter I would roll up to see that all was well, she would write her report, and we would enjoy a late supper and whatever else came to mind before I left with her despatch in my hat for transfer to Blowitz later in the day.

She hadn’t counted on Shovel-off’s appetite for jollity, though. The clocks were chiming twelve when I sauntered up the Jager Strasse in the warm dark of the next night, and turned into her court only to see that her curtain was still closed – the signal we’d agreed if the Russian buffoon was still infesting her quarters. I took a turn up and down, thankful that it wasn’t winter; Berlin in June evidently went home with the milk, and there were open carriages carrying merry-makers up the Mauer Strasse to the Linden, sounds of gaiety and music came from the Prinz Carl Palace across the way, and beyond it I could see lights burning in the great ministries on the Wilhelmstrasse: understrappers of the Congress still hard at it while their betters waltzed and junketed – aye, and rogered away the diplomatic night, if Shuvalov was anything to go by. It was close on two, and I was in a fine fume, when a cloaked and tile-hatted figure emerged at last from Caprice’s court, taking the width of the pavement, damn him, and a moment later I was being admitted to her apartment by a furious harem houri clad only in a gold turban with a slave-fetter on one ankle, fairly spitting blood while she filled an antique bath-tub with hot water; the air was thick with steam and Gallic oaths which I hadn’t heard outside a Legion barrack-room.

Count Shuvalov, she informed me, was a sacred perverted beast, a savage and a mackerel and a swine of tastes indescribable. He professed to have been so enraptured by her photograph that he had brought the turban and shackles for her to wear, describing himself as Haroun al-Raschid and demanding from her an Arabian Nights performance which I doubt even Dick Burton had ever heard of. He had also insisted that they smear each other all over with quince jam, to which he was partial, and while much of it had been removed in the ensuing frolic, I noticed that she still had a tendency to attract fluff and other light debris as she raged to and from the kitchen with hot kettles for her bath.

‘And for a hundred pounds I endure this!’ cries she, kicking her fettered foot and fetching herself a crack on the shin with the chain. ‘Ah, merde, it will not come off – and I shall never be clean again! Oh, but it is not only this disgusting confiture, this … this ordure collant, but his loathsome touch, his foul body and vile breath, his hideous tongue upon me … ugh! Muscovite ape! Oh, do not look at me – I cannot bear to be seen!’ In fact she looked adorable, if you can imagine an Alma Tadema beauty striking passionate poses while picking feathers off her bottom.

I soothed her by undoing the ankle-chain, lifting her into the bath, and lovingly soaping her from head to foot while murmuring endearments. I’m a dab hand at this, having trained under Queen Ranavalona, so to speak, and after a while her plaintive cursing gave way to little sighs and whimpers, her eyes closed and her mouth trembled, and when I suggested I could do with a sluicing myself she responded with an enthusiasm that would have done credit to those poor little Kashmiri sluts who bathed me so devotedly at Lahore, the night the ceiling fell in.fn5 Aye, I’ve wallowed in some odd spots in my time, but nowhere more happily than Berlin, with that delightful mermaid performing as though Shovel-off had never existed, and the floor ankle-deep in suds. Heaven knows what the charwoman had to say in the morning.

It cheered Caprice up no end, and by the time we’d dried off and drowsed a little and made an early breakfast of coffee and rolls, she was her vivacious self again, even making fun of Shovel-off’s amorous peculiarities. Her first report for Blowitz was a brief one, the Galloping Cossack having been too intent on his muttons for much conversation, but having taken his measure she was sure she could make him sing in due course. ‘A shallow fool, mais pompeux, and his brain is in his –’ was her charming verdict. ‘Also he is jealous of his leader, the Prince Gorchakov.’ She lowered an eyelid. ‘Let me touch that key, and he will boast everything he knows!’

And I guess he did. Having sampled her myself, and marked her A1 at Flashy’s, I’d still wondered if she could keep Shuvalov in thrall for the whole Congress – it lasted a month, you know – but damme if she didn’t. Not that he saddled her up every night, you understand, but more often than not, and whether she was ringing the changes, Pride o’ the Harem one night, Gretchen the Governess the next, or was tempting him with different flavours of jam, I didn’t inquire. She kept him happy, I had my ration of her, and for the rest, Blowitz’s arrangements went like clockwork: there he was every day, browsing at the Kaiserhof while I lunched at t’other side of the room, never a glance between us, and each picking up the other’s tile when we left.

We had one scare, when an idiot diner by mistake went off with my hat containing Caprice’s report. My first thought was, oh lor’, we’re rumbled, and I was ready to make for the long grass till I saw that Blowitz was on the q.v., but instead of leaping up with screams of ‘Ah, voleur! Rendez le chapeau!’ as you’d expect from a Bohemian Frog, he quietly despatched a waiter in pursuit, the apologetic diner replaced my roof on its peg – and no attention had been drawn to Blowitz or to me. My opinion of little fat Stefan went up another rung; he was a cool hand – and even, it seemed to me, sometimes a reckless one.

It was about half way through the Congress, when the other correspondents were all in a frenzy at the absolute lack of news from the secret sessions, that he broke cover with an item that was plainly from the horse’s mouth. Gorchakov had made some speech in camera, and there was the gist of it in The Times two days later. Diplomatic Berlin was in uproar at once; who could have leaked the news? It was after this that Bismarck, who took the breach as a personal affront, looked under the table to see if Blowitz was roosting there. His fury was even greater soon after, when The Times had the news that D’Israeli had threatened to leave Berlin over some wrangle that had arisen, and then decided to stay after all.

Of course the blabberer in both cases had been Shuvalov, as I learned from Caprice, who had passed the glad tidings on to Blowitz via my tile. I was fearful that Shovel-off might twig he was being milked, but she ‘Pouf!’-ed it away; he was too dull and besotted to know what he was saying after she’d put him over the jumps, and depend upon it, says she, Stefan knew what he was about.

She was right, too. The little fox had been angling, like every other scribbler, for an interview with Bismarck – and after the column about Dizzy appeared, hanged if he didn’t get one! Otto, you see, was so piqued and mystified that his precious Congress was being blown upon, that he invited Blowitz to dinner, no doubt hoping to learn what his source had been. Fat chance. Blowitz came away with a five-hour interview, leaving the Iron Chancellor none the wiser and fit to be tied, The Times triumphed yet again, and the rest of the press gang could only gnash their teeth.

What between helping to spoil Bismarck’s digestion and whiling away the golden afternoons with Caprice (for we’d abandoned our nocturnal meetings, and I was collecting her reports in the mornings) I was in pretty bobbish form, and took to promenading about the town in search of amusement. I didn’t find it on one day at least, when chance took me down the Wilhelmstrasse past the Congress hall, and who should I meet face to face but dear Otto himself; he was with a group of his bag-carriers and other reptiles, coming down the steps to his carriage, and for one blood-freezing instant our eyes met – as they had not done since that day at Tarlenheim thirty years before when he’d launched me unsuspecting into his ghastly Strackenz murder plot. I’d never have recognised him if I hadn’t seen his mug in the papers, for the nasty young Norse God had turned into a jowly sausage-faced old buffer whose head seemed to grow straight out of his collar without benefit of neck. Just for a second he stared, and I thought bigod he remembers me, but there ain’t a thing he can do, so why don’t I exclaim: ‘Well, Otto, old sport, there you are, then! Drowned any Danish princelings lately?’ It’s the kind of momentary madness that sometimes takes me, but thank God I tipped my tile instead, he did likewise, frowning, and a moment later he was clambering aboard and I was legging it in search of a gallon or two of brandy. Quite a turn he’d given me – but then, he always did. Bad medicine, Bismarck; bad man.

I kept clear of the official cantonment thereafter, and by the last week of the Congress was beginning to be infernally bored, even with Caprice; when I found myself knocking at her door in the expectation of having it opened by Elspeth, smiling blonde and beautiful, I realised it was time for the train home. Oddly enough, if I’d cut out then it wouldn’t have mattered, for Blowitz no longer needed her reports, although he continued to change hats with me at the Kaiserhof.

The fact was his stock had risen so high with his three ‘scoops’ that he was being fed information by the bushel, the embassy fawns being anxious to stand well with him; he even put it about, very confidential-like, that Bismarck had promised to give him the treaty before it was published, which wasn’t true, but made them toad-eat him harder than ever. I knew nothing of this, of course, and on the penultimate day of the Congress, a Friday, as I was strolling home enjoying the morning after a strenuous late breakfast with Caprice, I was taken flat aback by Blowitz’s moon face goggling at me from the window of a drosky drawn up near my hotel.

‘In! In!’ hisses he, whipping down the blind, so I climbed aboard, demanding what the devil was up, and before I was seated he was hammering on the roof and bawling to the coachee to make for the station with all speed.

‘We leave on the 12.30 for Cologne!’ cries he. ‘Fear not, your bill is paid and your baggage awaits at the train!’

‘The dooce it does! But the Congress don’t end till tomorrow –’

‘Let it end when it will! It is imperative that I leave Berlin at once – that I am seen to leave, mortified and en colère!’ He was red with excitement – and beaming. ‘Regardez-moi – do I look sufficiently enraged, then?’

‘You sound sufficiently barmy. But what about the treaty – I thought t’wasn’t to be finished until this evening?’

He pulled back the lapel of his coat, chuckling, whipped out a bulky document, waved it at me, and thrust it away again. ‘A treaty of sixty-four articles – approved, printed, fini! What d’you say to that, my boy? Nothing remains but the preamble and a few extra clauses to be adopted at today’s session.’ He rubbed his hands, squirming with delight. ‘It is done, dear friend, it is done! Blowitz triumphs! He is exalted! Ah, and you, my brave one, my accomplice extraordinary, I could embrace you –’

‘Keep your dam’ distance! Look here, if you’ve got the thing, what are you in such an infernal hurry for?’

He smote his forehead. ‘Ah, forgive me – in my joy I go too fast. Let me explain.’ He was licking his lips at his own cleverness. ‘You remember I told you in Paris how I would persuade some diplomat of eminence to give me an advance copy of the treaty? Eh bien, this morning I received it. I rejoice, knowing that no other journalist will see the treaty until after the signing ceremony tomorrow. But in the meantime a crisis has raised itself. Since my interview with Prince Bismarck the German press has been in jealous agitation, and to pacify them he has let it be known that he will give them the treaty this evening! When I learn this, I am thunderstruck!’ He assumed a look of horror. ‘Of what use to me to have the treaty in my pocket if it is to appear in the Berlin journals tomorrow? Where then is my exclusive account, my priority over my rivals?’

‘Down the drain, I’d say. So why are you exalted?’

‘Because I see at once how to frustrate them. I go to Prince Hohenlohe, the German Minister, and demand that as a reward for my services to the Congress – and because I am Blowitz – Prince Bismarck should give the treaty only to me, so that I may publish it in The Times tomorrow. Hohenlohe consults Bismarck, who refuses (as I knew he would). He says I must wait until it is signed. But,’ he raised a pudgy finger, ‘I know Bismarck. He is one for strict justice. Having said I must wait until tomorrow, he will now make the German papers wait also. So, in effect, I have gained a postponement … you see?’

I don’t know if Macchiavelli was a fat little cove with long whiskers, but he should have been.

‘When Prince Hohenlohe tells me my request is refused, I play my part. I am affronted. My disgust knows no bounds. I tell him I am leaving Berlin at once in protest. If Blowitz is to be treated with such contempt, they may keep their Congress and their treaty. Hohenlohe is dismayed, but I am adamant. I take my leave in what you call the dudgeon – and word flies from mouth to mouth that Blowitz is beaten, that he sulks like a spoiled child, my rivals rejoice at my failure – and breathe sighs of relief … and all the time the treaty is here –’ he tapped his breast, chortling ‘– and tomorrow it will appear in The Times and in no other paper in the world!’

He paused to draw breath and gloat; you never saw smugness like it, so I pointed to the one fly I saw in his ointment.

‘But you haven’t got the preamble or the clauses they’re adopting today.’

He gave a lofty wave. ‘Soit tranquil, my ’Arree. From Hohenlohe I go tout suite to M. de St Vallier, the French Ambassador – who I know has a copy of the preamble. In confidence I show him the treaty. He is staggered, he goes pale, but when I ask for the preamble and clauses, he throws up the hands, crying why not, since already I have so much? He cannot give me his copy of the preamble, but he reads it aloud, page upon page, and now it is here –’ he tapped his brow ‘– and will be dictated to my secretary after we board the train.’

I ain’t given to expressions of admiration, as you know, but looking at that grinning cherub with his baby peepers and daft whiskers I confess I put a finger to my hat brim. ‘Though I still don’t see why you’re in such an almighty sweat to leave. Can’t you telegraph your story to London?’

‘From Berlin? Oh, my boy, you want to laugh! Where my every action is watched, my movements followed – why, let a telegraph clerk catch a glimpse of my message and I should be in a police cell!’ He grew earnest. ‘But it is not the authorities I fear – it is envious rivals. My little charade of pique will deceive the many, but not all. Some, knowing Blowitz, will suspect me still. They may board the train. They would rob me if they could. That,’ says he, clapping a hand on my knee, ‘is why I bring you with me. I am small, you are large. Who knows what they may attempt between here and Paris? But what have I to fear,’ cries he, with a great idiot laugh, ‘when the bravest soldier of the British Army, the partner of my fate, is by my side?’

A great deal, I could have told him, if Bismarck’s bullies were after him; he’d find himself relying on the communication cord. But no, that wasn’t likely; even Otto wouldn’t dare. Blowitz’s brother journalists were another matter, as I saw when we reached the station, and they were on the platform to see him off with covert grins and ironic tile-doffing; I hadn’t realised what respect and jealousy my stout friend attracted. He bustled down the train looking like an angry frog in his great fur coat and felt hat, ignoring their greetings, and I played up by taking his arm and wearing my most threatening scowl.

The secretary and Blowitz’s colleague, Wallace, were already aboard, and when we pulled out punctually on 12.30, Blowitz told the secretary to get out his book, folded his hands across his paunch, closed his eyes, and recited steadily for half an hour. It was fearful stuff, all in German, with an occasional phrase in French or English by way of explanation, and he didn’t even pause; once, when the train clanked to an unexpected halt and we were almost jolted from our seats, he forged right ahead with his dictation, and when it was done he sat drooping like a limp doll, and then went straight off to sleep. For concentration and power of mind, I don’t recall his equal.

Sure enough, there were fellows from the other papers on the train. Wallace spotted two Germans and an Italian in the next carriage, but once one of ’em had tried to look in on us, and I’d sent him about his business, they let us alone. They followed us when we alighted for refreshment at Cologne, but we baffled ’em by each taking a different way back to the train, so that they had to separate, one dogging Blowitz, another behind me, the third after the secretary – and no one at all to watch Wallace, who was lurking in the W.C. with treaty, preamble and all inside his shirt, until the time came for him to board another train to Brussels, where he would telegraph the whole thing to London. Wallace had wondered if the Belgians would accept such an important document; Blowitz told him that if there was any difficulty he was to send for the superintendent, tell him The Times was thinking of setting up (and paying handsomely for) a daily line to London, and that this despatch was by way of a test. Of course, if Brussels didn’t want the business …’nuff said.

So next morning, Saturday July 13, 1878, before the leading statesmen of Europe had even penned their signatures to the treaty, Otto Bismarck was goggling apoplectically at a telegram from London informing him that the whole sixty-four articles, preamble, etc., were in that day’s Times – with an English translation. Talk about a ‘scoop’! Blowitz was drunk with glory, conceit, and gratitude when I managed to tear myself from his blubbering embrace in Paris, and I wasn’t displeased myself. T’isn’t every day you play a part in one of the great journalistic coups, and whenever I see some curmudgeon at the club cursing at the labour of cutting open his Times and then complaining that there’s no news in the dam’ thing, I think, aye, you should see what goes to the making of those paragraphs that you take for granted, my boy. My one regret as I tooled back to London was that I hadn’t been able to bid a riotous farewell to Caprice; she’d been worth the trip, ne’er mind spoking Otto’s wheel, and I found myself smiling fondly as I thought of Punch and the gauzy lace clinging to that houri shape in the sunlight … Ah well, there would doubtless be more where that came from.

In case you don’t know, the great Berlin Treaty panned out to general satisfaction – for the time being anyway. ‘Big Bulgaria’ was cut in two; Roumania, you’ll be charmed to learn, became independent; Austria won the right to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina (which only an idiot would want to do, in my opinion, but then I ain’t the Emperor Franz-Josef); Russia got Bessarabia, wherever that may be; the Turks remained a power in the Balkans, more or less, and by some strange sleight of hand we managed to collar Cyprus (no fool, D’Israeli, for all he dressed like a Pearly King). There had been a move at one stage (this is gospel, though you mayn’t credit it) to invite my old comrade William Tecumseh Sherman, the Yankee general, to become Prince of Bulgaria, but nothing came of it. Pity; he was the kind of savage who’d have suited the Bulgars like nuts in May.

At all events, what they call ‘a balance’ was achieved, and everyone agreed that Bismarck had played a captain’s innings, hoch! hoch! und he’s ein jolly good fellow. So he ought to have been content – but I can tell you something that wasn’t suspected at the time, and has been known to only a handful since: the Congress left darling Otto an obsessed man. It’s God’s truth: the brute was bedevilled by the galling fact that little Blowitz had stolen a march on him, and he could not figure out how it had been done. Astonishing, eh? Here was the greatest statesman of the age, who’d just settled the peace of Europe for a generation and more, and still that trifle haunted him over the years. Perhaps ’twas the affront to his dignity, or his passion for detail, but he couldn’t rest until he knew how Blowitz had got hold of that treaty. How do I know, you may ask? Well, I’m about to tell you – and I’m not sure that Bismarck’s mania (for that’s what it amounted to) wasn’t the strangest part of the adventure that befell me five years later, and which had its origins in my meetings with Grant and Macmahon, Caprice’s picture, and the Congress of Berlin.⁸

The trouble with a reputation like mine is that you’re bound to live up to it. It’s damnably unfair. Take General Binks or Colonel Snooks, true-blue military muttonheads, brave as be-damned, athirst for glory, doing their dutiful asinine bit in half a dozen campaigns, but never truly catching the public eye, and at last selling out and retiring from obscurity to Cheltenham with a couple of wounds and barely enough to pay the club subscription, foot the memsahib’s whist bill, send Adolphus to a crammer ’cos the Wellington fees are beyond them, and afford a drunken loafer to neglect the garden of Ramilles or Quatre Bras or whatever they choose to call their infernal villas. That’s Snooks and Binks; profitable labour to the grave, and no one notices.

And then take Flashy, born poltroon and wastrel, pitchforked against his will into the self-same expeditions and battles, scared out of his wits but surviving by shirking, turning tail, pretence, betrayal, and hiding behind better men – and emerging at the end o’ the day, by blind luck and astonishing footwork, with a V.C., knighthood, a string of foreign decorations as long as Riley’s crime sheet, a bloody fortune in the bank, and a name and fame for derring-do that’s the talk of the Empire. Well now, Flash old son, says you, that’s compensation surely, for all the horrors unmanfully endured – and don’t forget that along the road you’ve had enough assorted trollop to fill Chelsea Barracks, with an annexe at Aldershot. And Elspeth, the most undeserved benefit of all.

Furthermore, you’ve walked with the great ones of the earth, enjoy the admiring acquaintance of your gracious Queen and half a dozen other royalties and presidents, to say nothing of ministers and other prominent rabble, and are blessed (this is the best of it) with grandlings and great-grandlings too numerous to count … so what the devil have you to complain of? Heavens, man, Binks and Snooks would give their right arms (supposing they haven’t already left ’em in the Punjab or Zululand or China, from which you escaped with a pretty whole skin) for one-fiftieth of your glory and loot. And you’ve never been found out … a few leery looks here and there, but no lasting blemishes, much. So chubbarao,fn6 Flashy, and count yourself lucky.

Well, I do; damned lucky. But there’s been a price to pay, and I don’t mean in terror and agony and suffering. Not at all. My cavil is that having bought it cruel hard, I wasn’t left to enjoy it in peace, like Binks and Snooks. They could run up to Town to get their hair cut and drop in at the club at a moment of national crisis, and no one paid them any heed, much less expected ’em to race round to Horse Guards applying to be let loose against the Ashantis or the Dervishes or whatever other blood-drinking heathen were cayoodling round the imperial outposts. Retired, gone to grass, out of reckoning absolutely, that was Colonel Snooks and General Binks.

Ah, but Flashy was a different bag of biltong altogether. Let some daft fakir start a rising in a godforsaken corner you never heard of, or the British lion’s tail be tweaked anywhere between Shanghai and Sudan, and some journalistic busybody would be sure to recall that ’twas in that very neck of the woods that the gallant Flashy, Hector of Afghanistan, defender of Piper’s Fort, leader of the Light Brigade, won his spurs or saved the day or committed some equally spectacular folly (with his guts dissolving and praying for the chance to flee or surrender, if only they knew it). ‘The hour demands the man, and who better to uphold Britannia’s honour in her present need than the valiant veteran of Lucknow and Balaclava …’ and so forth. They were never rash enough to suggest I should have command, but seemed to have in mind some auxiliary post of Slaughterer-General, as befitting my desperate reputation.

Not that the ha’penny press matters – but the United Service and Pall Mall do, with their raised eyebrows and faintly critical astonishment. ‘Ah, Flashman, lamentable business in Egypt, what? Goin’ with Wolseley, I daresay … No? You surprise me.’ Dash it, you can see them thinking, man of his reputation, prime of life, don’t he know his duty, good God? If I’d had the belly of Binks or Snooks’s gout (both of ’em younger than I) I’d not be thought of, but when you’ve a lancer figure and barely a touch of grey in your whiskers and the renown of Bayard, you’re expected to be clamouring for service. And when your sovereign lady regards you pop-eyed over the teacups with a bland ‘I expect, dear Sir Harry, that you will be accompanying Sir Garnet to Egypt,’ you can hardly remind her that you’re past sixty and disinclined, especially when the idiot you married in an evil hour is assuring Her Majesty that you’re champing at the bit. (Wanted me away, I suspect, so that she could cuckold me in comfort.) All round it’s a case of ‘No show without Flashy’, and before you can say God-help-us you’re in the desert listening to ‘Cock o’ the North’ and trying to look as though you’re itching to come to grips with twice your weight in angry niggers.

It is, I repeat, damnably unfair, and by the autumn of ’83 I’d had enough of it. In the five years since Otto’s Congress I’d been well in the public eye, chiefly because of my supposed heroics in South Africa in ’79 – a place I’d have shunned like the plague but for Elspeth’s insatiable fondness for money, as if old Morrison’s million wasn’t enough without bothering her empty head over her cousin’s supposed mine (but I’ll record that disgusting episode another day). Then in ’82 there had been the Egyptian garboil I mentioned a moment ago; Joe Wolseley had asked for me point-blank, and with the press applauding and the Queen approving and Elspeth bursting into tears as I rogered her farewell, what the blazes could I do but fall in?

In the event it wasn’t the worst campaign I’ve seen, not by a mile; at least it was short. We only went in with great reluctance (when did Gladstone ever show anything else?) to help the Khedive quell his rebellious army, who were slaughtering Christians and vowing to drive all foreigners from the country – bad news for our Suez Canal investors (44 per cent, what?) and our lifeline to India. Joe brought ’em to heel smartly enough at Tel-el-Kebir, where the kilties massacred everything in sight, and my only bad scare was when I found myself perforce charging with the Tin Bellies at Kassassin, but by gallantly turning aside to help Baker Russell when his horse was shot, and so arriving when the golliwog infantry were already taking to their heels, I missed the worst of it, cursing my bad luck and Baker for holding me up. A good glare and loud roar, sabre in hand, work wonders; Joe said I’d been an inspiration to the Household riders, and wanted me to stay on at Cairo, but I muttered that he didn’t need me now that peace was breaking out, and his staff-wallopers grinned at each other and said wasn’t that old Flashy, just?⁹

I was mighty glad to be home by Christmas of ’82, I can tell you, for while Egypt was quiet enough by then, I could guess it was liable to be hot enough presently, and not just with the sun. After we’d brought the Khedive’s troops back to their allegiance, the idea was that we’d withdraw, but that was all my eye (we’re there yet, have you noticed?), for down south, in the Sudan, the war drums were already beating, with the maniac Mahdi stirring up the Fuzzy-Wuzzies in a great jihad to conquer the world, with Egypt first on the list. Hell of a place the Sudan, all rock and sand and thorn and the most monstrous savages in creation; Charley Gordon, my China acquaintance, had governed it in the ’seventies, and spent most of his time poring over the Scriptures and chasing slavers before retiring to Palestine to watch rocks and contemplate the Infinite. Mad as a cut snake, he was, but the Sudan had gone to pot entirely after he left, and was now going to need attention – from guess who? From the Khedive’s army, led by soldiers of the Queen, that was who, whether Gladstone liked it or not, and I was shot if I was going to be one of ’em.

So I came home, along of Joe and Bimbashi Stewart and others, having served my turn – but would you believe it, in ’83 when that immortal ass Hicks was given command of the Khedive’s army, half of whom had been our enemies a few months earlier, and told to deal with the Sudan, there were those at Horse Guards with the brazen cheek to suggest that I should go out again, to serve on his staff? Since he was my junior, I was able to scotch that flat, but when word came in September that he’d gone off Mahdi-hunting at last, blowed if one of the gutter rags didn’t come out with a leaderette regretting ‘that the task has fallen to an officer of comparative inexperience, while such distinguished soldiers as Lord Wolseley, Major-General Gordon, and Sir Harry Flashman, men thoroughly familiar with the country and the enemy, remain at home or unemployed.’

It was the mention of Gordon’s name, more than my own, that brought the sweat out on my brow, for while no one in his senses would suggest that I should replace Hicks, there was a strong shave in the clubs that Cracked Charley would be recalled and given the job, and I knew that if he was, Flashy would be the first he’d want to enlist.¹⁰ China had given him the misguided notion that I was the devil’s own fire-eater, and just the chap to have on hand when Fuzzy charged the square. Well, soldiering under Joe Wolseley had been bad enough, but at least he was sane. Gordon? I’d as soon go to war with the town drunk. The man wasn’t safe – sticking forks in people and scattering tracts from railway carriages and accosting perfect strangers to see if they’d met Jesus lately, I ask you! No, a holiday abroad was indicated, before the Mad Sapper came recruiting.

And I’d just reached that conclusion when Blowitz’s letter, bearing that fateful second photograph, landed on the breakfast table. It couldn’t have come more pat. This is what he wrote, with more underlinings and points of admiration than Elspeth at her worst – not Times style at all:

Dearest Friend!

I write to you by Royal Command – what do you think of that!! It is true – a PRINCESS, no less! And such a Princess, plus belle et elegant, whose most Ardent Desire is to meet the gallant and renowned Sir H.F. – for reasons which I shall explain when we meet.

Come to Paris no later than October the fourth, my dear Harry. I promise you will be enchanted and oblige your best of friends and loyal comrade in destiny

Stefan O-B.

P.S. Recalling your interest in photography! I enclose a portrait of Her Royal Highness. A bientôt!

Well, wasn’t this the ticket? Elspeth was in Scotland enduring her sisters, and here was the ideal billet where I could lurk incog. while Gordon beat the bushes – and enjoy some good carnal amusement, to judge from the photograph. Not that Her Highness was an outstanding beauty, but her picture grew on me as I studied it. It showed a tall, imposing female standing proud in a splendid gown of state, a coronet on her piled blonde hair, one gloved hand resting on the arm of a throne, the other holding a plumed fan, the sash of a jewelled order over her bare shoulders, and enough bijouterie disposed about her stately person to start a bazaar. She was in profile, surveying the distance with a chilling contempt which sat perfectly on a rather horsey face with a curved high-bridged nose. Minor Mittel European royalty to the life, with the same stench-in-the-nostrils look as my darling little Irma of Strackenz, but nowhere near as pretty. Striking, though, and there were promising signs: she’d be about forty and properly saddle-broken, with the full mouth and drooping lower lip which betoken a hearty appetite, and a remarkable wasp waist between a fine full rump and upper works which would have made Miss Marie Lloyd look positively elfin. I could imagine stripping her down and watching her arrogance diminish with each departing garment. And she had an Ardent Desire to meet the gallant Sir H.F. I reached for Bradshaw.

Reading the letter again later, it struck me that there was something familiar about it; an echo of the past which I couldn’t place – until a couple of days later, the afternoon of October the third to be precise, when I was ensconced in my smoker on the Continental Mail Express, and suddenly I knew what I’d been reminded of: that doom-laden summons that had taken me to Lola Montez in Munich, oh, so long ago. There was the same slightly eccentric wording (though Blowitz’s English was a cut above that of Lola’s Chancellor – what had his name been? Aye, Lauengram) and the purport was uncannily similar: an invitation from an exotic titled woman of mystery, for reasons unstated, with a strong hint of fleshly pleasures in prospect … and what besides? In Lola’s case there had been a nightmare of terror, intrigue, imposture, and deadly danger from which I’d barely escaped with my life – oh, but that had been a Bismarck plot in the bad old days; this was jolly little Blowitz, and a doubtless spoiled and jaded piece of aristocracy in search of novelty and excitement … but how had she heard of me (Blowitz cracking me up, to be sure) and why was I worth fetching across the Channel? Odd, that – and for no reason I remembered Rudi Starnberg’s voice across the years: ‘She brought me all the way from Hungary’, and found myself shivering. And why no later than October the fourth?

Aye, odd … but not fishy, surely? It’s the curse of a white liver that it has you starting at shadows, imagining perils where none exist. On t’other hand, it’s been a useful storm signal over the years, and it was still at work ever so little when we pulled into the Gare du Nord.

At the sight of Blowitz on the platform, my cares dissolved. He was a trifle plumper in the cheek, a shade greyer in the whisker, but still the same joyful little bonhomme, rolling forward waving his cane with glad cries, fairly leaping up to embrace me and dam’ near butting me under the chin, chattering nineteen to the dozen as he led me out to a fiacre, and not letting me get a word in until we were seated at the self-same table in Voisin’s, when he had to leave off to attend to the maître. I couldn’t help grinning at him across the table, he looked so confounded cheery.

‘Well, it’s famous to see you again, old Blow,’ says I, when he’d ordered and filled our glasses. ‘Here’s to you, and to this mysterious lady. Now – who is she … and what does she want?’

He drank and wiped his whiskers, business-like. ‘The Princess Kralta. But of blood the most ancient in Europe, descended from Stefan Bathory, Arnulf of Carinthia, Barbarossa … name whom you will, she is de la royauté la plus royale – and landless, as the best monarchs are. But rich, to judge from the state she keeps – oh, and received everywhere, on terms with the highest. She is befriended of the German Emperor, for example, and –’ he shot me a quizzy look ‘– of our old acquaintance Prince Bismarck. No-no-no,’ he added hastily, ‘her intimacy with him is of a … how shall I say? … of an unconventional kind.’

‘I’ve met some of his unconventional intimates, and I didn’t take to ’em a bit. If she’s one of his –’

‘She is not one of anyone’s! I mention Bismarck only because when I first met the Princess she brought me a friendly message from him. C’est vrai, absolument! Can you guess what it was? That he bears me no ill will for my activities at the Congress of Berlin!’ He shook his head, chuckling. ‘Can you believe it, eh?’

‘No – and neither will you if you’ve any sense. That bastard never forgave or forgot in his life. Very well, ne’er mind him – what more about this Princess? Is she married?’ It’s always best to know beforehand.

‘There is a husband.’ He shrugged. ‘But he does not figure.’

‘Uh-huh … so, what does she want with me?’

He gave a little snort of laughter. ‘What do women ever want with you? Ah, but there is something else also.’ He leaned forward to whisper, looking droll. ‘She wishes to know a secret … a secret that she believes only you can tell her.’

He sat back as the food arrived, with a cautioning gesture in case I made some indiscreet outcry, I suppose. Since I knew the little blighter’s delight in mysterious hints I just waded into the grub.

‘You do not ask what it is?’ he grumbled. ‘Ah, but of course – le flegme Britannique! Never mind, you will raise a brow when you hear, I promise!’

And I did, for I never heard an unlikelier tale in my life – all of it true, for I saw it confirmed in the little blighter’s memoirs a few years ago, and why should he lie to posterity? But even at the time I believed it because, being a crook myself, I can spot a straight tongue, and Blowitz had one.

He’d met the Princess Kralta at a diplomatic dinner, and plainly fallen head over heels – as he often did, in his harmless romantic way – and she had equally plainly given him every encouragement. ‘You have seen her likeness, but believe me, it tells you nothing! How to describe her … her magnétisme, the light of charm in those great blue eyes, the little toss of her silky blonde hair as she smiles, revealing the brilliancy of her small teeth – you found her portrait forbidding, non? My friend, when you see those queenly features melt into the tenderest of expressions, the animation of her darting glances, the melodious quality of her voice … ah, mais ravissante –’

‘Whoa, steady lad, mind the cutlery. Liked her, did you?’

‘My friend, I was enchanted!’ He sighed like a ruptured poodle. ‘I confess it, I who have encountered the charms of the loveliest women in Europe, that the Princess Kralta wove a spell about me. And it is not only her person that allures, her exquisite elegance, her divinity of shape and movement –’

‘Aye, she’s well titted out, I noticed.’

‘– but the beauty of her nature, her frank friendliness and ease of deportment, the candour of her confidences …’

He babbled through the next two courses, but don’t suppose that I despised his raptures – there are women like that, and as often as not they’re not the ones of perfect feature. Angie Burdett-Coutts was no radiant looker, but she’d have caused a riot in the College of Cardinals simply by walking by, whereas the Empress of Austria, of whom more presently, was perfection of face and figure and quite as exciting as a plate of mashed turnip. I’d seen enough of la Kralta in her picture to believe that she might well have the magic, February face or no.

She’d gone out of her way to captivate Blowitz over a period of months, doing him little kindnesses, making friends with his wife, and trusting him with her most intimate confidences – which is the surest way a woman has of getting a man under her dainty thumb. Once or twice she spoke of the Berlin Congress, and Bismarck’s curiosity as to how Blowitz had got his ‘scoop’ – it had irritated Otto that he couldn’t fathom that, and he’d told her he was determined to find out some day.

‘Indeed, my friend,’ says Blowitz to me as he plunged into his dessert, ‘she confessed to me that she had promised the Prince she would use all her womanly wiles to wring the secret from me. I admired her honesty in admitting as much, but assured her that I never, under any persuasion, betray my sources. She laughed, and told me playfully that she would continue to try to beguile the truth from me.’

‘And did she succeed?’

‘No – but I was content that she should try. One does nothing to discourage the attention of a lady of such fascination. I am not vain of my attractions,’ sighs he, glancing ruefully at the balding little tub with ghastly whiskers reflected in the long glass on Voisin’s wall, ‘and I know when I am being … how would you say? … worked upon. I enjoy it, and my affection and regard for the lady are not diminished. Rather they increase as she continues to confide in me with a candour which suggests that her friendship and interest in me are true, and not merely assumed. Listen, and judge for yourself.’

And he launched into a piece of scandal which I’d have said no woman in her right mind would have confided to a journalist – not if she valued her reputation, as presumably this Kralta female did. Yet she’d confessed it, says Blowitz, to convince him how deeply she trusted him.

This was her story: she’d been staying at some fashionable spa where the German Emperor, an amiable dotard with whom, as Blowitz had said, she was on friendly terms, had sent for her in great agitation. Would she do him a favour – a service to the state and to the peace of the world? At your service, Majesty, says loyal Kralta. The Emperor had then confessed that he was damnably worried about Bismarck: the Chancellor was in a distracted state, nervous, irritable, complaining about everyone, suspicious that the Great Powers were plotting mischief against Germany, moody, obstinate, and off his oats entirely. Even now he was alone on his estate, sunk in the brooding dumps, and unless something was done he’d go to pieces altogether; international complications, possibly even war, would follow.

What Otto needed to set him to rights, said the Emperor, was an amusement, something to divert him from vexatious affairs of state – and Princess Kralta was just the girl to provide it. She must visit Bismarck’s estate in perfect secrecy, taking only her maid and enough clothing for a week’s stay; anonymous agents would drive her to the station, put her in a reserved compartment, meet her, arrange delivery of her luggage, and take care of all expenses. Her husband would have been got out of the way before her departure: the Emperor would send him to Berlin on a mission which would keep him there until after Kralta had returned to the spa. No word of her visit must be spoken; the Emperor’s part must never be mentioned.

Blowitz paused. ‘She agreed, without hesitation.’

‘Hold on there!’ says I. ‘Are you telling me that the German Emperor, the All-Highest Kaiser of the Fatherland, pimped for Otto Bismarck? Get away with you!’

‘I am telling you,’ says Blowitz primly, ‘precisely what the Princess told me. No more, no less, c’est tout.’

‘Well, dammit, what she’s saying is that she was sent – where, Schönhausen? – to grind Otto into a good humour!’

‘I do not know “grind”. And she did not mention Schönhausen. May I continue?’

‘Oh, pray do! I’m all attention!’

‘She goes to Bismarck. He asks “Did the Emperor send you?” She says he did not, and that she has come to see how such a great man will receive “a giddy little person who ventures into the lion’s solitude” – those were her very words to me. The Chancellor laughs, hopes it will not be a short visit, and then,’ says Blowitz, poker-faced, ‘assists her to unpack her “frills and furbelows” – her own words again – expressing gay amusement as he does so.’ He shrugged and sat back, helping himself to brandy.

‘Well, come on, man! What else did she tell you?’

‘Only that at the end of her visit the Chancellor saw her to her landau saying: “I have been delighted to forget the affairs of the world for a time.” The Princess returns to her watering-place, her husband is summoned back from Berlin, and the Emperor thanks her joyfully for saving the peace of Europe.’ Blowitz swilled and sniffed his brandy. ‘And that, my boy, is all the lady’s tale.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned! That’s one you wouldn’t send to The Times! D’you believe her?’

‘Without doubt. What woman would invent such a story? Also, I know when I am being deceived.’

I didn’t disbelieve it myself – although the Emperor’s part took a little swallowing. And yet … if he truly believed that a week’s rogering with a royal flashtail would put Otto in trim and keep the ship of state on a smooth course, why not? Bismarck would be all for it – he’d been the town bull around Schönhausen in his young days, and would be just as randy in his sixties. Well, it was an interesting piece of gossip, and confirmed that the haughty Princess Kralta was partial to mutton – come to think of it, Blowitz had a gift for encountering females who were patriotic riders, hadn’t he just? And of introducing ’em to me, bless him. Well, well. I returned to the point – which had suddenly become clear to me.

‘Well, Blow, I’m grateful to you for rehearsing the lady’s character for me,’ says I. ‘Very instructive, possibly useful. Of course,’ I went on carelessly, ‘the secret which she believes she can learn only from me is the one that Bismarck’s dying to know – how you got the Berlin Treaty in advance. That’s it, ain’t it?’

For once he was taken flat aback. His blue eyes popped, his jaw dropped, and then he burst out laughing.

‘Oh, but you should have been a journalist!’ cries he. ‘And I hoped to amaze you with my dénouement! How did you guess?’

‘Come, now, what other secret do I have that she could want to know? But if you’re willing to let her have it, why not tell her yourself?’ I nearly added that he could have charged her a delightful price for it (as I fully intended to, given the chance), but I knew that wasn’t his style. Odd fish, Blowitz; ready and willing to put me in the way of fleshly delights, as he’d shown in the past, but strict Chapel himself. He regarded me seriously.

‘I shall tell you,’ says he slowly. ‘The Princess’s confession to me of her visit to Prince Bismarck moved me deeply. En fait, she was saying to me: “Here is my trust, ma confiance, my honour as a woman; I place it in your hands, Blowitz.” Oh, my dear ’Arree, quel geste! What trust, what proof of devoted affection!’ So help me, he was starting to pipe his eye. ‘From such a woman, so worldly, so intelligent, so sensible, it could not fail to awaken in me emotions of gratitude and obligation. It gave her the right to demand from me an equal proof of my friendship, my trust in her. You, my friend, will see that, I know.’

Well, I didn’t, in fact, but I ain’t a besotted Bohemian. He sighed, long and solemn, like an old horse farting.

‘When she renews her request that I divulge my secret, I feel I can no longer refuse. It means much to her, since it will enable her to gratify Prince Bismarck, and it can bring no harm to me. I resolve, then, to tell her.’

He took another gulp of brandy, leaned towards me, and became dramatic, as though he were telling a ghost story in whispers.

‘We are in her salon, seated upon a sofa that stands against a great mirror covering the wall behind us. The salon is dim, the curtains drawn, the only light comes from a candelabrum on the table before us. As I prepare to speak, I see one of the candles flicker. I am astonished. All doors and windows are closed, so whence comes this draught? I move myself on the sofa – and a zephyr from the direction of the mirror fans my cheek. What can it mean, I ask myself. And then – I know!’

You never saw such desperate bad acting – hands raised, eyes and mouth agog, worse than Irving hearing the bells. Then he glared like a mad marmoset, one finger out-thrust.

‘I realise I am the victim of treachery, which I hate above all else in the world! I closely scrutinise the mirror! What do I see but that a gap has opened in the glass! So! One stands behind the mirror, a witness to take down what I say! I rise, pointing to the flickering flame, then to the cloven mirror, just as the Princess puts out a hand to remove the candlestick. I address her in a voice which I vainly strive to render calm. “Too late, madame!” I cry. “I have understood!” She touches an electric button, a door opens, a butler enters, and without a word the Princess indicates to me the way to the door. I bow. I withdraw. I leave the house.’

He dried up there abruptly, looking expectant, so I said that after such a thrilling tale I was surprised that five masked chaps with stilettos hadn’t leaped on him in the hall. He said stiffly that they hadn’t, and the mortification he felt at her duplicity had been keener than any stab wounds. I said that I gathered he was still on terms with the lady, though, and he blew out his cheeks in resignation.

‘Que voulez-vous? Am I one to bear a grudge against a beautiful woman? True, our relationship cooled for a time – until a few weeks ago, in effect, when she begged me to visit her, and pleaded that the importance she had attached to learning my secret had made it imperative that she have a witness. Her contrition was expressed with such charm and sincerity that I forgave her at once, and she then confessed that she had a favour to ask of me. I had once told her, had I not, that among my friends I numbered the celebrated Sir Harry Flashman? I replied that you were my best of friends, and she sighed – oh, such a sigh! – and cried out “Ah, that hero! What I would give to meet him!” I assured her that it could be arranged – and then,’ he twinkled mischievously, ‘it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to repay you, cher ’Arree, for your great service to me in Berlin. “It happens,” I told her, “that Sir Harry also possesses the secret of the Congress treaty. No doubt he could be persuaded to divulge it to one so charming as yourself.” My friend, she was overjoyed, and urged me to effect an introduction without delay.’ He beamed at me, stroking his whiskers. ‘You see my thought – while I do not doubt your ability to captivate a lady who already holds you in the warmest regard, it will do no harm if you are also in a position to answer a question to which she attaches such importance. It will amuse you to be … persuaded, non?’

I studied the innocent-cunning face, wondering. ‘Subtle little devil, ain’t you, Blow? Why are you so obliging? You know how I’ll make her pay for the secret – are you using me as a penance for her sins, by any chance?’

‘My dear friend! Ah, but that is unkind! When I have no thought but to amuse you! Oh, perhaps I am also taking my little revenge on la Grande Princesse by making her a suppliant to one less foolishly sympathetic than Blowitz. But who knows,’ he tittered, ‘it may end by amusing her also!’

‘If you mean that she’ll find me a welcome change from Otto Bismarck, I’m flattered,’ says I, and asked when I’d meet the lady. He became mysterious again, saying it would be for tomorrow night, but wouldn’t tell me where. ‘Be patient, my friend. I wish your rendezvous to be a surprise, what you call a treat – my petit cadeau to you. Believe me, it will be a most novel meeting-place – oh, but romantic! You will be delighted, I promise, and I will have made you a trifling repayment towards the debt I owe you for Berlin.’

So I humoured him, and agreed to be at my hotel, the Chatham, the following evening, with my valise all packed. His mention of Berlin had reminded me of Caprice, but he had not seen her in two years. ‘After the Congress I heard of her in Rome and Vienna, but nothing since, and I do not inquire, since I suppose her work is of a secret nature still. Ah, but she had the true gift of intrigue, la petite Caprice! Decidedly she must marry an ambassador of promise; then her talents will have full play, eh?’

Looking back, I guess Blowitz’s ‘treat’ was a sight to see. The first of anything usually is, and the inauguration which took place in Paris that Sunday night was historic, in a Froggy sort of way. If I wasn’t unduly impressed, Blowitz himself was partly to blame; one evening of his company was always about my limit, and his enthusiasm for his ‘petit cadeau’ was such that I was quite put off beforehand, and a day spent loafing in the hotel hadn’t raised my spirits. The small unease that had been in my mind on the Channel crossing had returned, as it always does when I ain’t quite sure what I’m being pushed into, or why, and when Blowitz collected me from the Chatham as dusk was falling, I was carrying a decided hump – all the greater ’cos common sense told me I’d no reason for it.

Blowitz was in a fine excitement, greeting me exuberantly, telling the cabby to make all haste to the Place de Strasbourg, and parrying my inquiries with a waggishness which set my teeth on edge: all would be revealed presently; yes, we had a small journey to our rendezvous with Princess Kralta, but everything was arranged, and I would be transported in more ways than one – this with a hysterical giggle as he bounced up and down on his seat, urging the driver to hurry. I fought down an urge to kick the little chatterbox out of the cab, and consoled myself with the thought that presently I’d be having my wicked way with that fine piece of blue-blooded batter; the vision of her imperious figurehead and strapping form had been in my mind all day, competing with my vague unease, and now that the reality was in prospect, I was becoming a mite impatient.

Shortly before seven we pulled up at the canopied entrance of the Gare de l’Est, Blowitz clamouring for porters and hurrying me into the concourse – so our ‘small journey’ was to be by rail, which meant, I supposed, that Madame’s mansion lay in one of the fashionable districts outside the city.

The station seemed uncommon busy for a Sunday night. There was a great crowd milling under the electric lamps, but Blowitz bustled through like a tug before a liner, flourishing a token and announcing himself with his usual pomposity to a blue-coated minion who conducted us through a barrier to a less-crowded platform where knots of passengers and uniformed railway officials were waiting beside a train. All eyes were turned to it, and I have to say it looked uncommon smart and polished, gleaming blue and gold under the lights, but otherwise ordinary enough, the steam hissing up from beneath the engine with that pungent railway smell, the porters busy at the five long coaches, on one of which the curtains were drawn back to reveal the glowing pink interior of a dining salon – and yet there was an unwonted hush about the working porters, an excitement among the throng watching from the barrier, and an air of expectancy in the little groups on the platform. Blowitz stopped, clutching at my arm and staring at the train like a child in a toy shop.

‘Ah, gaze upon it!’ cries he. ‘Is it not the train of trains – the ultimate, l’apogée, le dernier cri of travel! Oh, my boy, who was the genius who said “Let the country build the railway, and the railway will build the country”? And not only a country – now a continent, a world!’ He flourished a hand. ‘Behold that which will be called the monarch of the rails, as it prepares for its first journey!’ He turned to beam up at me, his eyes glistening moistly. ‘Yes, this is my surprise, my treat, my petit cadeau to you, dearest of friends – to be one of the select band who will be the pioneers on this historic voyage! You and I, ’Arree, and a mere handful of others – we alone will share this experience, the envy of generations of travellers yet to come, the first to ride upon the magic carpet of the steel highway – l’Express Orient!’

The name meant nothing then, since this was only the inception of what I suppose is now the most famous train on earth – and to be honest, it still don’t mean that much. I’m a steamship man, myself; they don’t rattle or jolt, I don’t mind the occasional heave, and the feeling of being snug and safe appeals to my poltroon nature – once aboard, the world can’t get at you, and if danger threatens you can usually take to the boats or swim for it. Trains I regard as a necessary nuisance, but with Blowitz bouncing and pawing my sleeve I was bound to be civil.

‘Well, much obliged, Blow,’ says I. ‘Handsome of you. It looks a capital train, as trains go – but how far is it going, eh?’ It didn’t look district line, exactly, but my question was ignored.

‘Capital! As trains go!’ squawks he, flinging up his hands. ‘Milles tornades! This you say of the supreme train de luxe! A veritable palace upon wheels, the reassertion of privilege in travel! Why, thanks to my good friend Nagelmacker, le haute monde may be carried to the ends of the continent in the luxury of the finest hotel, sleeping and waking in apartments of elegance and comfort, dining on the superb cuisine of a Burgundian chef, enjoying perfect service, splendid wines, everything of the best! And all this,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘for two thousand miles, from Paris to Constantinople, in a mere ninety hours, less than –’

‘What’s that? You ain’t getting me to Constantinople!’

He crowed with laughter, taking my arm to urge me forward. ‘No, no, that is for me, not for you, cher ’Arree! I travel on, about my business, which will be to seek interviews with ministers and crowned heads en route, with a grand finale in Constantinople, where I hope to obtain audience of the Sultan himself. Oh, yes, Blowitz works, while you –’ he glanced roguishly from me to the train ‘– journey only as far as Vienna, in the company of royalty more agreeable by far. Aha, that marches, eh? A day and a night in her charming company, and then – the city of the waltz, the Tokay, of music and romance, where you may dally together by the banks of the enchanted Danube –’

I managed to stem his Cook’s advertising at last. ‘You mean she’s on the train?’

He raised a finger, glancing round and dropping his voice. ‘Officially, no – the sleeping coach reserved for ladies will be unoccupied until Vienna. However,’ he nodded towards one of the darkened coaches, ‘for such a distinguished passenger as Her Highness, accommodation has been found. And now, my immovable Englishman,’ cries he grinning all over his fat cheeks, ‘you will tell me at last that you are glad you came to Paris, and that Blowitz’s little gift pleases you!’

Whatever I replied must have satisfied him, for he bore me off to meet the other passengers, all of whom seemed to know him, but in fact I wasn’t at all sure that I liked his ‘petit cadeau’. I’d come to France to skulk and fornicate in peace, not to travel; on the other hand, I’d never visited Vienna, which in those days was reckoned first among all the capitals of Europe for immoral high jinks, and a day and a night of luxurious seclusion with Her Highness should make for an amusing journey. The last railroad rattle I’d enjoyed had been the voluptuous Mrs Popplewell on the Baltimore line in ’59, and rare fun it had been – until she pitched me off the train, and I had to hightail it for dear life with the Kuklos in hot pursuit. Still, the Three Fates were unlikely to be operating in Austria – oh, the blazes with it, what was I fretting for?fn7 So I exchanged courtesies with the others, of whom I remember only the celebrated Nagelmacker, boss of the line, who looked like a Sicilian bandit but was all courtesy, and a Something-or-other Effendi, a fat beard from the Turkish Embassy; there were various scribblers and a swarm of railway directors, Frog and Belgique mostly, making about two score all told.

And then there was a sudden bustle, and we were being herded aboard, with minions directing us to our compartments – I remember Blowitz and I were in Number 151, which seemed odd on such a small train – and whistles were blowing and guards shouting, and from our window we could see the mob at the barrier hurrahing and throwing up their hats, and officials on the platform were waving, and the carriage doors were closed, crash! crash! crash!, a last whistle shrilled – and then a strange silence fell over the Gare de l’Est, and I guess little Blowitz’s enthusiasm must have had its effect, for I remember feeling a strange excitement as the train quivered ever so little, the steam rushed hissing past our window, there was a faint clank of buffers, a gentle rumble of wheels beneath our feet, and we were gliding away smoothly and ever so slowly, the waving figures on the platform passing from sight in succession, and then we were out of the station and I was thinking, you’ve been in some odd vanguards, Flashy, from the Forty-Niners to the Light Brigade, and here’s another for you, and Blowitz snapped shut his hunter and shook my hand, gulping with emotion – gad, he was a sentimental little barrel.

‘Sept heures et un, précisément,’ says he reverently. ‘L’Express Orient parti!’

He was in a state of non-alcoholic intoxication if ever I saw one, exclaiming in delight over every convenience and decoration in our cabin, and inviting me to marvel at the fine upholstered furniture, the glossy panelling, the neatly concealed little basin in a corner by the door, the array of lights and buttons, the hidden cupboards and drawers, the velvet curtains, and the rest. Every second word of his babble was ‘magnifique!’ or ‘superbe!’ or ‘merveilleux!’ and once even ‘top-hole, I declare!’, and I couldn’t deny that it was. As it turned out, my first journey on the Orient Express was to be my last, but I remember it as the best-appointed train I ever struck, and delighted Blowitz by saying so.¹¹

‘You will find no more splendid accommodation in Vienna!’ cries he. ‘Which reminds me, you should stay at the Golden Lamb on the Praterstrasse, rather than the Archduke Charles; give my name to Herr Hauptmann and you will receive every attention. And his table is all that could be desired – ah, mais écoutez! Even as I speak, le diner est servi! Allons, mettons-nous!’

That was another score for the Orient Express: we were hardly out of Paris before we had the nosebags on, and I have to concede that there was nothing wrong with the grub on offer in the opulent dining salon with its little pink shades and snowy cloths and silver and crystal and swift service. Blowitz almost burst into tears of gluttony at the sight of it, and stuffed himself to ecstasy, going into raptures at each arriving course, and reproaching me for my apparent lack of appetite; in fact I was sharp-set, but ate and drank in moderation, for my mind was on the ladies’ sleeping-coach where I supposed la Kralta would be dining in anonymous seclusion; you don’t want to be bloated when the charge is sounded. The food and wine had its effect, though; my blues had vanished, and I was beginning to enjoy the luxurious comfort. Presently, when Blowitz had engulfed his last marron glacé and staggered afoot, gasping blessings on the chef, we made our way to the little observation platform for a smoke before going our separate ways. He had given me the number of Madame’s voiture in the ladies’ car, and said with knowing chuckles that he imagined he would have No. 151 to himself for the night.

‘You will hardly wish to join the excursion at Strasbourg, which we reach at five o’clock in the morning,’ sniggers he. ‘Oh, yes, I shall take it – no rest for le pauvre Blowitz – and I confess I am still too excited to sleep anyway! Oh, my friend, what a journey! I can hardly believe it! Strasbourg, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest … we glide through them all, the jewels of Europe, and at last the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn! I cannot prevail on you to make the whole journey? No, well, it may be best that you alight with Her Highness at Vienna – only Nagelmacker’s trusted few know of her presence, but it could hardly be secret after other ladies join us, and we wish no gossip, eh?’ He tapped his booze-enriched nose. ‘My boy, I wish you joy of your adventure … ah, but one thing! In divulging our little secret, you will make no mention of La Caprice by name; that must remain confidential always. Now, to my arms!’ He embraced me as closely as his pot-belly permitted. ‘We shall meet again before Vienna. A bientôt!’

He toddled off rejoicing to the salon, and I finished my cigar, watching the dark woods and fields flow past at thirty miles an hour. Then I made my leisurely way back through the salon, where Blowitz and the boys were plainly intent on making a night of it; from the laughter and jollity I guessed they’d be singing ere long. In our sleeping coach the attendants were making up the berths, one above t’other as on shipboard; whether Blowitz or Nagelmacker had warned them to look the other way, I don’t know, but none of ’em gave me so much as a glance as I passed through the communicating door to the ladies’ coach, closed it behind me, and found myself in the long empty corridor which ran past the doors of the untenanted compartments to the front baggage car.

It was quieter here, with only the rumble of wheels and the faint creak of coachwork. The number on the nearest door suggested that Madame’s cabin was at the far end, and I paused beneath the dim night-light over the attendant’s empty stool to consider my tactics. It was a novel situation, you see, even for as practised a ram as yours truly: how d’you set about a proud beauty who’s probably ready to ride in return for information, but whom you’ve never met? Question of etiquette, really, and I couldn’t recall a similar case. I might approach her à la cavalier, all courtly grace and Flash gallantry, giving her the chance to pretend (?) willing surrender, thus respecting the conventions and prolonging the fun; or I could stride in with ‘Evening, ma’am, fine weather, what? Strip away!’ which had answered splendidly with little Duchess Irma … not that she was a total stranger; we’d met at our wedding. But recalling the haughty mien and fine proportions of Princess Kralta, I suspected that jollying her into action might be a bore, while on t’other hand she was too big to wrestle into submission in the confines of a sleeping berth … Quite a dilemma, and I was getting monstrous randy just thinking about it, so I decided to play the bowling as it came, strode down the swaying corridor, and knuckled the walnut.

‘Wer ist es?’ says a female voice, and not knowing the German for Roger the Lodger I said it was Flashman, ein Englander und ein Edelman, and a pal of Blowitz’s. At this there was a bustle within, murmured question and brisk reply, a sudden almighty clattering of crockery, a blistering rebuke in Mittel European, and finally out popped a pert little giggler of a lady’s maid bearing a tray of dinner dishes. As she emerged, a slim be-ringed hand reached from behind the door, deftly removing a bottle from the tray, the door closed, the maid shot me a smirk and scurried into the next cabin, and I was just interpreting these as excellent omens when the rebuking voice started to call ‘Herein!’ but changed it to ‘Enter!’. I tooled in, and there she stood, Her Extremely Royal Highness the Princess Kralta as ever was, clad in regal dignity and a magnificent coat of sables which covered her to the floor.

I might have thought it an odd rig at that time of night if I’d had eyes for anything except the long pale equine face framed by unbound blonde hair flowing to her shoulders, the cold blue eyes looking disdainfully down her noble nose, the full haughty mouth, the white hand clasping the coat beneath her rather pointed chin while she extended the other imperiously, slim fingers drooping to be kissed – it was as though some highly superior Norse goddess was condescending to notice an unusually dirty worm of a mortal. I nuzzled dutifully, deciding that while she couldn’t compare for beauty to Montez or Elspeth or Yehonala or a dozen others, Blowitz had been right: she had ‘magnétisme’ by the bucket, enough to inspire worship in him and his like – why, for a moment I felt awed myself … and that was enough to put me on guard, thinking ’ware this one, lad, she’s too good to be true, and likely false as a two-bob diamond for all her grand air and queenly poise; watch her like a hawk … but rejoice in the droop of the plump nether lip and the wanton way she lets you make a meal of her fingers – sure signs that with proper management she’ll romp like a demented stoat. (I can always spot ’em; it’s a gift.)

‘Enchanted, highness,’ says I, retaining her hand, and for a moment we weighed each other before she withdrew it to indicate the lower berth, which was made up as a bed. ‘You come unannounced, sir. I was about to retire. I had not expected you tonight.’ She spoke perfect English with that soft Danube accent that is so attractive in men and women both.

‘Your highness is gracious to expect me at all,’ says Galahad Flashy. ‘If I am inopportune, my excuse is that having seen your picture I could not wait to view the reality.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Indeed? But as we left Paris more than two hours ago, I take it you have restrained your eagerness long enough to dine?’ Smiling ever so cool, the smart bitch. Very good, my lass, brace yourself.

‘Sparingly, your highness,’ says I, ‘and with mounting impatience. Had I known how far your beauty outshines the image of the photographer, I’d have gone without dessert, possibly even without the poulet aux truffes. From the evidence of your dinner tray I gather you enjoyed them both, so you may judge the depth of my sincerity.’ I moved a step closer, sighed deeply, and regarded her solemnly. ‘But what am I saying? The truth is that for one glance from those glorious eyes, one gleam of the golden cascade of your hair, I’d have made do with a cheese sandwich and a pint of stout.’

It took her flat aback, small wonder, and for an instant she stiffened and I received the freezing Queen Bess stare, and then to my astonishment her lips trembled into a smile, and then a chuckle, and suddenly she was laughing outright, bless her – I’d been right, she was human beneath the ice, and I warmed to her in that moment, and not only out of lust, although I wondered if a swift Flashman cross-buttock (tit in one hand, arse in t’other) mightn’t be in order, but decided to observe the niceties a little longer. Make ’em laugh and you’re half way to bed anyway. She was regarding me now with an odd look, quarter amused, three parts wary.

‘The poulet was passable; the crêpe chantilly …’ She shrugged. ‘And I begin to see that M. Blowitz spoke no more than the truth when he said that Sir Harry Flashman was a quite unusual man. Très amusant, très beau, he told me … and très galant.’ Now the cool smile on the fine horse face was haughty-coquettish as she looked me up and down. ‘Quite overpoweringly galant.’

‘It’s these tiny compartments; chaps my size tend to loom, rather,’ says I, happy to continue bantering now that I was sure of her, and curious to see how she’d play the game – after all, she was the one who wanted something. ‘Perhaps if your highness would deign to be seated …’ I indicated the only chair, and she gave me a sidelong look and disposed herself gracefully, an elbow on the chair arm, a finger along her cheek, but still keeping the fur carefully about her.

‘Yes … certainly unusual,’ says she. ‘That is very well. I am unconventional myself. I think that we shall understand each other.’ She smiled again, which strangely enough didn’t improve her looks, for while her teeth were like pearls, they protruded slightly – breeding, no doubt. ‘In spite of your tendency to talk charming nonsense. Golden cascades and sandwiches of cheese! Is that how you approach all your ladies?’

‘Only if I’m sure it’ll be appreciated. But don’t misunderstand me, highness – it may be nonsense, but I meant every word of it.’ I took a step forward and hunkered down in front of her, eyeing her with ardour. ‘You’re what we call an absolute stunner, you know. Aye … the most desirable woman I’ve seen since –’

‘– since we left the Gare de l’Est?’ says she coolly. ‘Even that is not true. My maid is prettier by far than I … as I am sure you noticed.’

‘Pretty’s ten a penny, I said desirable. Anyway, she’s only a maid, not a princess … and she don’t want anything from me.’

She sat farther back in her chair, considering me as she toyed with her hair. ‘And I do,’ says she. ‘In fact, Sir Harry, each of us wants something from the other, do we not?’ She glanced at the bottle she’d taken from the tray, standing above the basin. ‘Shall we begin our … negotiation with a glass of wine?’

I rose to fill a couple of glasses, and when we’d sipped she set hers on the little stand by the window, crossed her legs beneath the coat, tossed back her golden mane, and looked me in the eye, no longer smiling, but not unfriendly either. I hunkered down again – believe it or not, it puts you at an advantage; women don’t care to have a great hairy man crouched at their feet, prepared to spring.

‘Stefan Blowitz tells me that you hold a secret which I wish to know,’ says she, ‘and that you are willing to –’

‘Pardon, highness … a secret Prince Bismarck wants to know.’

‘Very true.’ She inclined her head. ‘By the way, I expect “highness” from inferiors. To friends, I am Kralta.’

‘Honoured, I’m sure – I’m Harry. So first, tell me – why should busy Otto, with the cares of the world on his back, want to know an old secret that ain’t worth a button?’

‘I do not know,’ says she simply. ‘He did not tell me. And he is not a man of whom one asks reasons.’

‘Not even if one is on intimate terms with him?’ She didn’t even blink, let alone blush. ‘Come now, Kralta, we both know Bismarck and his fine clockwork mind. He don’t ask dam-fool questions – and this one couldn’t be sillier – without an excellent reason. Can’t you even guess what it might be?’

She took a sip of wine. ‘You have said it yourself … Harry. His fine clockwork mind. He must know all. If he has another reason I do not know it.’

And wouldn’t tell if she did. Well, it made no odds now, as I contemplated the perfect buttermilk skin and silken tresses. It was time to get to the meat of the matter.

‘Well, it don’t signify. But I beg your pardon – I interrupted. You were saying, about Blowitz …?’

‘He said that if I asked you how the Berlin Treaty was obtained … you could tell me.’

‘Absolutely. Happy to oblige.’

It surprised her. ‘Now?’

‘Well, presently. Let’s say … in Vienna.’

‘On your word of honour?’

‘Cross my heart. Never fear, I’m an authority on honour.’

She hesitated. ‘And in the meantime?’ I just grinned at her, wicked-Flashy-like, and she sat back in her chair, giving me a long look with a pout to her lower lip that set my mouth watering. ‘I see. There is a price.’

‘Fair exchange, I’d call it,’ says I, enjoying myself, and to avoid meeting my eye she turned her head aside, displaying the imperious brood-mare profile. Her voice was calm and quiet.

‘You think it fair … to exact a price? To take advantage of a helpless woman? Perhaps you are one of those men – I suppose I must call them that – who enjoy forcing a woman to humiliate herself –’

‘Aye, I’m a cruel swine, ain’t I just? And you’re about as helpless as the Prussian Army.’

‘But I am expected to ask your terms, to plead, perhaps –’

‘D’you need to ask them?’

She was still for a moment, and then she sighed, rose from her chair, still clasping the fur collar beneath her chin, and looked down at me with that cool superior smile.

‘Not for a moment,’ says she, and turning her back she shrugged the coat to the floor and stood there bare as a babe. I overbalanced and sat staring at the long shapely legs, the plump buttocks, the wasp waist, and the alabaster perfection of the smooth strong back, all revealed so unexpected. She stirred her rump, and as I reached out, clutching joyfully, she glanced complacently over her shoulder.

‘A fair exchange, n’est-ce pas?’

And I have to own that it was. That sudden shedding of her clobber just when she’d been pretending that she’d have to be coaxed or ravished, is the kind of lecherous trick that wins my heart every time, and when we came to grips she behaved like the demented stoat aforesaid. Not as skilful as many, perhaps (though you must make allowances for the limited space in a sleeping berth), but a good bruising rough-rider, full of running, and as heartily selfish as royal fillies invariably are, intent on nothing but their own pleasure, which suits me admirably: there’s nothing like voracity in the fair sex, especially when she’s as strong as a bullock, which Kralta was. Not unlike that gigantic Chinese brigandess who half-killed me on the road to Nanking, but civilised, you understand, and willing to chat afterwards, in a frank, easy way which you’d not have expected from her lofty style and figurehead.

I guess I just like contrary women, and Kralta was one. Crooked as a Jesuit’s conscience, as I was to discover, but with a spirit and quality that made you feel it was almost a privilege to mount her – but then, I’ve remarked before that royal breeding tells, and no doubt I’m as impressionable as the next horny peasant. She was a born adventuress, too – aye, the very archetype of all those subtle sirens whom romantic writers love to imagine aboard the Orient Express. I’d barely disentangled myself from those muscular satin limbs, and she’d stopped gasping in what I think was Hungarian and recovered her breath, when she murmured:

‘So … must the secret wait until Vienna?’ Her long fingers stroked my stomach, careless-like. ‘Better there should be nothing between us, nem? Then we can enjoy our journey.’ She flirted her lips across my chest. ‘Why not tell me now?’

‘So that you can call the guard and have me slung out as soon as you’ve heard it? I’ve known women who wouldn’t think twice.’

‘You think I am such a one … after …?’ Her stroking hand slid downwards. ‘Do you not trust me, when I have trusted you … Harry?’

‘Steady, girl! A little decorum, if you please … I’ll tell you, princess –’

‘Kralta …’

‘Aye, well, Kralta … I trust folk as far as I can throw ’em, which in your case,’ I fondled a voluptuous handful, ‘ain’t far, thank God. No, Vienna’ll be soon enough. I ain’t a modest man, but I’m not fool enough to think that you’d continue to play pretty just for the sake of my manly charms … d’you know?’

‘How little you know of women,’ says she. ‘Or rather, how little you know of me.’

‘I know you’re Bismarck’s mistress.’ I couldn’t resist touching this condescending madam on a raw spot – but of course it wasn’t.

‘Fat little Stefan has been gossiping, has he?’ She sounded amused. ‘What did he tell you?’

‘Oh, how the German Emperor persuaded you to gallop stout Otto into a cheerful frame of mind – which I’m bound to say you’re well equipped to do.’ I gave her bottom a hearty squeeze. ‘I’ll bet he couples like a cannibal, does he?’ Coarse stuff, you see, to put her in her place, but all it provoked was a dry chuckle.

‘Poor Blowitz! Either he is a bad reporter, or he was trying to protect my reputation.’ She eased herself up on an elbow and smiled at me bold-eyed. ‘In fact, His Majesty made no such suggestion; he merely poured out his fears to me, like the garrulous old woman that he is. It was I who suggested, delicately, since the Emperor is easily shocked, that I myself should … refresh Prince Bismarck.’

Delicacy being her forte, the brazen bitch. ‘God’s truth – d’you mean you wanted Bismarck? Talk about a glutton for punishment! What on earth possessed you?’

She gave a little dismissive shrug. ‘Amusement? Whim? What shall I call it? I am forty years old, immensely rich in my own right, titled and privileged, married to a dull nonentity … and bored beyond belief. It follows that I seek diversion, excitement, pleasure, and above all, novelty. When a new sensation offers, I pursue it … as you have discovered.’ She teased her lips across mine. ‘That is what possessed me.’

‘I’ll be damned! You didn’t tell that to the Emperor, I’ll be bound! What did he say?’

‘Oh, men are such hypocrites! He pretended not to understand … but he did everything in his power to smooth my way to Schönhausen – secret arrangements, agents to conduct me, my husband sent off on a fool’s errand.’ She gave a well-bred sneer. ‘A professional procurer could have done no more! And so … Bismarck was, as you say, “galloped” into a good humour, the Emperor was pleased and grateful, and I,’ says she, sitting up and stretching wantonly, poonts at the high port, ‘enjoyed the supreme gratification of having the most powerful man in the world panting for me in his shirt-tail.’

See why I said it was a privilege to mount her? There ain’t many women as shameless as I am – and by gum she was proud of it. Of course I was bound to ask how the most powerful man in the world had performed, and she shrugged, laughing.

‘Oh, very active … for his age. And very Prussian, which is to say gross and greedy. An ageing bull, without refinement or subtlety.’ She was one to talk. ‘As the French philosopher said, it was an interesting experience, but not one to be repeated. Now I,’ her eyes narrowed and the ripe lower lip drooped as she reclined beside me again, her hands questing across my body, ‘am devoted to repetition, and so, I believe, are you … ah, but indeed you are! And since I did not decoy you from London only to find out silly secrets …’ she slid a strapping thigh across my hips, gasped sharply in Hungarian, and began to plunge up and down ‘… oh, let us repeat ourselves, again, and again, and again …!’

So we did, as the Orient Express thundered on towards distant Strasbourg, myself rapturously content to lend support, so to speak, while royalty revelled in the joys of good hard work. God knows how Bismarck had stood it at his time of life, and I remember thinking that if one had wanted to assassinate him, Kralta could have given him a happier despatch than the old bastard deserved.¹²

Clanks and whistles and a shocking cramp in my old thigh wound awoke me as we pulled in past the Porte de Saverne to Strasbourg station, and when I tried to move, I couldn’t, because Kralta was sleeping on top of me – hence my aching limb, trapped beneath buxom royalty. That’s the drawback to railroad rattling: when you’ve walloped yourselves to a standstill there’s no room to doze off contentedly rump to rump, and you must sleep catch-as-catch-can. Fortunately she soon came awake, and I heard the rustle of her furs as she slipped out into the corridor, leaving me to knead my leg into action, sigh happily at the recollection of a rewarding night’s activity, raise the blind for a peep at the station, and groan at the discovery from the platform clock that it was only ten to five.

The place was bustling even at that ungodly hour, with some sort of reception for our passengers, and I remembered Blowitz had talked of a dawn excursion. There he was, sure enough, well to the fore with Nagelmacker and a gang of tile-tipping dignitaries; he was trying to be the life and soul as usual, but looking desperate seedy after all his sluicing and guzzling, which was a cheering sight. If I’d known then that the Strasbourg river is called the Ill, I’d have called to him to have a look at it, as suiting his condition.

That reminded me that I was in urgent need of the usual offices, and I was about to lower the blind when my eye was caught by a chap sauntering along the platform, valise in hand, a tall youthful figure, somewhat of a swell with his long sheepskin-collared coat thrown back from his shoulders, stylishly tilted hat shading his face, ebony cane, a bloom in his lapel, and a black cigarette in a long amber holder. Bit of a Continental fritillary, but there was something in the cut of his jib that seemed distantly familiar as he strolled leisurely by. Couldn’t be anyone I knew, and I put it down as a fleeting likeness to any one of a hundred subalterns in the past, lowered the blind, drew on shirt and trousers, and hobbled out to seek relief.

When I returned, the little maid had set out a tray of coffee, hot milk, and petit pain, and was plumping the pillows and smoothing the sheets of the berth. Kralta was in the chair, her robe about her, perfectly groomed and bidding me an impersonal good day as though she’d never thrashed about in ecstatic frenzy in her life.

‘Early as it is, I thought a petit déjeuner would not be amiss,’ says she. ‘Manon has made up a berth for you in the next cabin, so that you may sleep until a more tolerable hour, as I shall.’ The maid poured coffee for me and milk for her mistress, and waited on us while we ate and drank in silence – Kralta poised and dignified as befitting royalty en déshabillé, Flashy half-conscious as usual when rousted out at 5 a.m. I was glad of the coffee, and finished the pot; worn as I was with lack of sleep and Kralta’s attentions, I knew it would take more than a pint of Turkish to keep me awake.

When we’d finished, Manon removed the tray, and I was preparing to take my weary leave when Kralta stopped me with a hand on my sleeve. She said nothing, but put her hands up to my cheeks, appraising me in that shall-I-buy-the-brute-or-not style – and then she was kissing me with startling passion, mouth wide, lips working hungrily, tongue half way to breakfast. Tuckered or not, I was game if she was, and I was delving under the fur for her fleshpots when she pulled gently away, pecked me on the cheek, murmured ‘Later … we have Vienna,’ and before I knew it I was in the corridor and her lock was clicking home.

I was too tired to mind. The lower berth in the next cabin was turned down and looked so inviting that I dragged off my duds any old how and crawled in gratefully, reflecting that the Orient Express was an A1 train, and Kralta, the teasing horse-faced baggage with her splendid assets, was just the freight for it … and Vienna lay ahead. Even as my head touched the pillow the train gave a clank and shudder, and then we were gliding away again, and I was preparing for sleep by saying my prayers like a good boy, their purport being the pious hope that I hadn’t forgotten any of the positions Fetnab had taught me on the Grand Trunk, and which I’d rehearsed with Mrs What’s-her-name in the ruined temple by Meerut, and would certainly demonstrate to Kralta as soon as we found a bed with a decentish bit of romping room in it …

I expected to sleep soundly, but didn’t, for I was troubled by a most vivid dream, one of those odd ones in which you’re sure you’re awake because the surroundings of the dream are those in which you went to sleep. There I was in my berth on the Orient Express, stark beneath the coverlet, with sunlit autumn countryside going past the window, and near at hand two people were talking, Kralta and an Englishman, and I knew he was a public school man because although they spoke in German he used occasional slang, and there was no mistaking his nil admirari drawl. I couldn’t see them, and it was the strangest conversation, in which they chaffed each other with a vulgar freedom which wasn’t like Kralta at all, somehow. She said of course she’d made love to me, twice, and the man laughed and said she was a slut, and she said lightly, no such thing, she was a female rake, and he was just jealous. He said if he were jealous of all her lovers he’d have blown his brains out long ago, and they both seemed amused.

Then their voices were much closer, and Kralta said: ‘I wonder how he’ll take it?’, and the man said: ‘He’ll have no choice.’ Then she said: ‘He may be dangerous,’ and the man said the queerest thing: that any man whose name could make Bismarck grit his teeth was liable to be dangerous. The dream ended there, and I must have slept on, for when I woke, sure enough I was still in the berth, but somehow I knew that time had gone by … but why was there no feeling in my legs, and who was the chap in the armchair, smoking a black gasper in an amber holder, and rising and smiling as I strove to sit up but couldn’t? Of course! He was the young boulevardier I’d seen on Strasbourg station … but what the hell was he doing here, and what was the matter with my legs?

‘Back to life!’ cries he. ‘There now, don’t stir. Be aisy, as the Irishman said, an’ if yez can’t be aisy, be as aisy as ye can. Here, take a pull at this.’ The sharp taste of spa water cleared my parched throat, if not my wits. ‘Better, eh? Now, now, gently does it! Who am I, and where’s the delightful Kralta, and what’s to do, and how’s your pater, and so forth?’ He chuckled. ‘All in good time, old fellow. I fancy you’ll need somethin’ stronger than spa when I tell you. Ne’er mind, all’s well, and when you’re up to par we’ll have a bite of luncheon with her highness – I say, though, you’ve made a hit there! Bit of a wild beast, ain’t she? Too strong for my taste, but one has to do the polite with royalty, what?’ says this madman cheerfully. ‘Care for a smoke?’

I tried again to heave up, flailing my arms feebly, without success – and now my dream came back to me, half-understood, and I knew from the numbness of my limbs that this was no ordinary waking … Kralta, the bitch, must have doctored my coffee, and it had been no dream but reality, and this was the bastard she’d been talking to … about me. And Bismarck …

‘Lie still, damn you!’ cries the young spark, grinning with a restraining hand on my shoulder. ‘You must, you know! For one thing, your legs won’t answer yet awhile, and even if they did, you’re ballock-naked and it’s dam’ parky out and we’re doin’ forty miles an hour. And if you tried to leave the train,’ he added soothingly, ‘I’d be bound to do somethin’ desperate. See?’

I hadn’t seen his hand move, but now it held a small under-and-over pistol, levelled at me. Then it was gone, and he was lighting a cigarette.

‘So just be patient, there’s a good chap, and you’ll know all about it presently. Sure you won’t smoke? There’s no cause for alarm, ’pon honour. You’re among friends … well, companions, anyway … and I’m goin’ to be your tee-jay and see you right, what?’

D’you know, in all my fright and bewilderment, it was that piece of schoolboy slang that struck home, so in keeping with his style and speech, and yet so at odds with his looks. He couldn’t be public school, surely … not with those classic features that belong east of Vienna and would be as out of place in England as a Chinaman’s. No, not with that perfect straight nose, chiselled lips, and slightly slanted blue eyes – if this chap wasn’t a Mittel European, I’d never seen one.

‘Tee-jay?’ I croaked, and he laughed.

‘Aye … guide, philosopher, and friend – showin’ the new bugs the ropes. What did you call ’em at Rugby? I’m a Wykehamist, you know – and that was your doin’, believe it or not! ’Deed it was!’

He blew a cloud, grinning at my stupefaction, and the feeling that I’d seen him before hit me harder than ever – the half-jeering smile, the whole devil-may-care carriage of him. But where? When?

‘Oh, yes, you impressed the guv’nor no end!’ cries he. ‘“It’s an English school for you, my son,” he told me. “Hellish places, by all accounts, rations a Siberian moujik wouldn’t touch, and less civilised behaviour than you’d meet in the Congo, but I’m told there’s no education like it – a lifetime’s trainin’ in knavery packed into six years. No wonder they rule half the world. Why, if I’d been to Eton or Harrow I’d have had Flashman on toast!” That’s what the guv’nor said!’

This was incredible. ‘The … the guv’nor?’

‘As ever was! You and he were sparrin’-partners … oh, ever so long ago, before my time, ages! He wouldn’t tell about it, but he thought you no end of a fellow. “If ever you run into Flashman … well, try not to, but if you do, keep him covered, for he’s forgotten more dodges than you’ll ever know,” he told me once. “His great trick is shammin’ fear – don’t you believe it, my boy, for that’s when he’s about to turn tiger.” I remember he fingered the scar on his brow as he said it. I say, did you give him that?’ His eyes were alight with admiration, damned if they weren’t. ‘You’ll have to tell me about that, you know!’

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