Royal Flash. George Fraser MacDonald

sir!’ He pretended distress. ‘Not that name, I beg you. It is the Countess of Landsfeld who is your friend, if I may be so bold as to remind you.’

      ‘Aye, so it is,’ says I. ‘Will you tell me what she wants of me, then?’

      ‘My dear sir,’ says he, smirking. ‘A matter of “the most delicate”, is it not? What that may be – surely you are in a better position than I to say, eh? Ha-ha. But you will be going to Bavaria, I take it, to hear the particulars “from her own lips”?’

      That was what I was asking myself. It was unbelievable, of course: Lola a queen, to all intents – that was wild enough. But Lola seeking my help – when our last encounter had been distinguished by the screaming of abuse and the crashing of chamber pots – to say nothing of the furore at the theatre when she had seen me among her betrayers … well, I know women are fickle, but I doubted if she remembered me with any affection. And yet the letter was practically fawning, and she must have dictated the sense of it, if not the words. It might be she had decided to let bygones be bygones – she was a generous creature in her way, as so many whores are. But why? What could she want me for – all she knew of me was my prowess in bed. Did the maîtresse en titre want to instal me as her lover? My mind, which is at its liveliest in amorous imagination, opened on a riotous vision of Flashy, Pride of the Hareem … but no. I have my share of conceit, but I could not believe that with the pick of all the young stallions of a palace guard, she was yearning for my bonny black whiskers.

      And yet here was a lawyer, authorised on her behalf, ready to advance me £500 to go to Munich – ten times more than was necessary for the journey. It made no sort of sense – unless she was in love with me. But that was out of court; I’d been a good enough mount for a week or so, no doubt, but there had been nothing deeper than that, I was certain. What service, then, could I perform that was so obviously of importance?

      I have a nose for risk; the uneasy feeling that had come over me on first reading her letter was returning. If I had any sense, I knew, I would bid the greasy Mr Greig good day and tell him to tear his draft up. But even the biggest coward doesn’t run until some hint of danger appears, and there was none here at all – just my uneasy instinct. Against which there was the prospect of getting away from my damned relations – oh, God, and the horrors of accompanying the Morrisons into Society – and the certainty of an immediate tidy sum, with more to follow, and sheer curiosity, too. If I did go to Bavaria, and the signs were less pleasant than appeared at present – well, I could cut stick if I wanted. And the thought of renewing acquaintance with Lola – a ‘warm’ and ‘friendly’ Lola – tickled my darker fancies: from Greig’s reports, even if they were only half true, it sounded as though there was plenty of sport at the Court of Good King Ludwig. Palace orgies of Roman proportions suggested themselves, with old Flashy waited on like a Sultan, and Lola mooning over me while slaves plied me with pearls dissolved in wine, and black eunuchs stood by armed with enormous gold-mounted hair-brushes. And while cold reason told me there was a catch in it somewhere – well, I couldn’t see the catch, yet. Time enough when I did.

      ‘Mr Greig,’ says I, ‘where can I cash this draft?’

      Getting away from London was no great bother. Elspeth pouted a little, but when I had given her a glimpse – a most fleeting one – of Lauengram’s signature and of the letter’s cover, and used expressions like ‘special military detachment to Bavaria’ and ‘foreign court service’, she was quite happily resigned. The idea that I would be moving in high places appealed to her vacant mind; she felt vaguely honoured by the association.

      The Morrisons didn’t half like it, of course, and the old curmudgeon flew off about godless gallivanting, and likened me to Cartaphilus, who it seemed had left a shirt and breeches in every town in the ancient world. I was haunted by a demon, he said, who would never let me rest, and it was an evil day that he had let his daughter mate with a footloose scoundrel who had no sense of a husband’s responsibilities.

      ‘Since that’s the case,’ says I, ‘the farther away from her I am, the better you should be pleased.’

      He was aghast at such cynicism, but I think the notion cheered him up for all that. He speculated a little on the bad end that I would certainly come to, called me a generation of vipers, and left me to my packing.

      Not that there was much of that. Campaigning teaches you to travel light, and a couple of valises did my turn. I took my old Cherrypicker uniform – the smartest turn-out any soldier ever had anywhere – because I felt it would be useful to cut a dash, but for the rest I stuck to necessaries. Among these, after some deliberation, I included the duelling pistols that a gunsmith had presented to me after the Bernier affair. They were beautiful weapons, accurate enough for the most fastidious marksman, and in those days when revolving pistols were still crude experimental toys, the last word in hand guns.

      But I pondered about taking them. The truth was, I didn’t want to believe that I might need them. When you are young and raw and on the brink of adventure, you set great store by having your side-arms just right, because you are full of romantic notions of how you will use them. Even I felt a thrill when I first handled a sabre at practice with the 11th Light Dragoons, and imagined myself pinking and mowing down hordes of ferocious but obligingly futile enemies. But when you’ve seen a sabre cut to the bone, and limbs mangled by bullets, you come out of your daydream pretty sharp. I knew, as I hesitated with those pistols in my hands, that if I took them I should be admitting the possibility of my own sudden death or maiming in whatever lay ahead. This was, you see, another stage in my development as a poltroon. But I’d certainly feel happier with ’em, uncomfortable reminders though they were, so in they went. And while I was at it, I packed along a neat little seaman’s knife. It isn’t an Englishman’s weapon, of course, but it’s devilish handy sometimes, for all sorts of purposes. And experience has taught me that, as with all weapons, while you may not often need it, when you do you need it badly.