Flashman. George MacDonald Fraser
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on, damn you!’ he shouted suddenly, his face white with rage and fear.
I looked at him for a moment, then brought my pistol up no higher than hip level, but with the barrel pointing well away to the side. I held it negligently almost, just for a moment, so that everyone might see I was firing deliberately wide. I squeezed the trigger.
What happened to that shot is now regimental history; I had meant it for the ground, but it chanced that the surgeon had set his bag and bottle of spirits down on the turf in that direction, maybe thirty yards off, and by sheer good luck the shot whipped the neck off the bottle clean as a whistle.
‘Deloped, by God!’ roared Forrest. ‘He’s deloped!’
They hurried forward, shouting, the surgeon exclaiming in blasphemous amazement over his shattered bottle. Bryant slapped me on the back, Forrest wrung my hand, Tracy stood staring in astonishment – it seemed to him, as it did to everyone, that I had spared Bernier and at the same time given proof of astounding marksmanship. As for Bernier, he looked murder if ever a man did, but I marched straight up to him with my hand held out, and he was forced to take it. He was struggling to keep from dashing his pistol into my face, and when I said:
‘No hard feelings, then, old fellow?’ he gave an incoherent snarl, and turning on his heel, strode off.
This was not lost on Cardigan, who was still watching from a distance, and presently I was summoned from a boozy breakfast – for the plungers celebrated the affair in style, and waxed fulsome over the way I had stood up to him, and then deloped. Cardigan had me to his office, and there was the adjutant and Jones, and Bernier looking like thunder.
‘I won’t have it, I tell you!’ Cardigan was saying. ‘Ha, Fwashman, come here! Haw-haw. Now then, shake hands directly, I say, Captain Bernier, and let me hear that the affair is done and honour satisfied.’
I spoke up. ‘It’s done for me, and indeed I’m sorry it ever happened. But the blow was Captain Bernier’s, not mine. But here’s my hand, again.’
Bernier said, in a voice that shook: ‘Why did you delope? You have made a mock of me. Why didn’t you take your shot at me like a man?’
‘My good sir,’ I said. ‘I didn’t presume to tell you where to aim your shot; don’t tell me where I should have aimed mine.’
That remark, I am told, has found its way since into some dictionary of quotations; it was in The Times within the week, and I was told that when the Duke of Wellington heard it, he observed:
‘Damned good. And damned right, too.’
So that morning’s work made a name for Harry Flashman – a name that enjoyed more immediate celebrity than if I had stormed a battery alone. Such is fame, especially in peacetime. The whole story went the rounds, and for a time I even found myself pointed out in the street, and a clergyman wrote to me from Birmingham, saying that as I had shown mercy, I would surely obtain mercy, and Parkin, the Oxford Street gunmaker, sent me a brace of barkers in silver mountings, with my initials engraved – good for trade, I imagine. There was also a question in the House, on the vicious practice of duelling, and Macaulay replied that since one of the participants in the recent affair had shown such good sense and humanity, the Government, while deploring such meetings, hoped this might prove a good example. (‘Hear, hear,’ and cheers.) My Uncle Bindley was heard to say that his nephew had more to him than he supposed, and even Basset went about throwing a chest at being servant to such a cool blade.
The only person who was critical was my own father, who said in one of his rare letters:
‘Don’t be such an infernal fool another time. You don’t fight duels in order to delope, but to kill your adversary.’
So, with Josette mine by right of conquest – and she was in some awe of me, I may say – and a reputation for courage, marksmanship, and downright decency established, I was pretty well satisfied. The only snag was Bryant, but I dealt with that easily.
When he had finished toadying me on the day of the duel, he got round to asking about his ten thousand – he knew I had great funds, or at least that my father did, but I knew perfectly well I could never have pried ten thousand out of my guv’nor. I told Bryant so, and he gaped as though I had kicked him in the stomach.
‘But you promised me ten thousand,’ he began to bleat.
‘Silly promise, ain’t it? – when you think hard about it,’ says I. ‘Ten thousand quid, I mean – who’d pay out that much?’
‘You lying swine!’ shouts he, almost crying with rage. ‘You swore you’d pay me!’
‘More fool you for believing me,’ I said.
‘Right, by God!’ he snarled. ‘We’ll see about this! You won’t cheat me, Flashman, I’ll—’
‘You’ll what?’ says I. ‘Tell everyone all about it? Confess that you sent a man into a duel with an unloaded gun? It’ll make an interesting story. You’d be confessing to a capital offence – had you thought of that? Not that anyone’d believe you – but they’d certainly kick you out of the service for conduct unbecoming, wouldn’t they?’
He saw then how it lay, and there was nothing he could do about it. He actually stamped and tore his hair, and then he tried pleading with me, but I laughed at him, and he finished up swearing to be even yet.
‘You’ll live to regret this!’ he cried. ‘By God, I’ll get you yet!’
‘More chance of that than you have of getting ten thousand anyway,’ I told him, and he slunk off.
He didn’t worry me; what I’d said was gospel true. He daren’t breathe a word, for his own safety’s sake. Of course if he had thought at all he would have sniffed something fishy about a ten thousand bribe in the first place. But he was greedy, and I’ve lived long enough to discover that there isn’t any folly a man won’t contemplate if there’s money or a woman at stake.
However, if I could congratulate myself on how the matter had turned out, and can look back now and say it was one of the most important and helpful incidents of my life, there was trouble in store for me very quickly as a result of it. It came a few weeks afterwards, and it ended in my having to leave the regiment for a while.
It had happened not long before that the regiment had been honoured (as they say) by being chosen to escort to London the Queen’s husband-to-be, Albert, when he arrived in this country. He had become Colonel of the Regiment, and among other things we had been given a new-designed uniform and had our name changed to the Eleventh Hussars. That by the way; what mattered was that he took a close interest in us, and the tale of the duel made such a stir that he took special notice of it, and being a prying German busybody, found out the cause of it.
That almost cooked my goose for good. His lovely new regiment, he found, contained officers who consorted with French whores and even fought duels over them. He played the devil about this, and the upshot was that Cardigan had to summon me and tell me that for my own good I would have to go away for a while.
‘It has been demanded,’ said he, ‘that you weave the wegiment – I take it the official intention is that that should be permanent, but I intend to interpwet it as tempowawy. I have no desire to lose the services of a pwomising officer – not for His Woyal Highness or anyone, let me tell you. You might go on weave, of course, but I think it best you should be detached. I shall have you posted, Fwashman, to another unit, until the fuss has died down.’
I didn’t much like the idea, and when he announced that the regiment he had chosen to post me to was stationed in Scotland, I almost rebelled. But I realised it would only be for a few months, and I was relieved to find Cardigan still on my side – if it had been Reynolds who had fought the duel it would have been a very different kettle of fish, but I was one of his favourites. And one must say it of old Lord Haw Haw, if you were his favourite he would stand by you, right, reason or none. Old fool.
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