The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “Still I cannot place you, Captain. It is most intriguing; but it will come back, no doubt. However, I trust you were not disappointed with your evening’s entertainment.”

  “It might have been better,” says I, grinning at him.

  “Even so, you contrived very well. I have you to thank for these,” and he touched his lips and reddened nose. “One day I shall hold you to your promise, and show you the schlager play. I look forward to that; we shall see how much credit you obtain from my country’s sport.”

  “More than you’ve got from mine, I hope,” says I, laughing.

  “Let us hope so,” says he. “But I doubt it.”

  “Go to the devil,” says I.

  He turned away, chuckling to himself. “After you, I think.”

  Chapter 3

  One of the difficulties of writing your memoirs is that they don’t run smooth, like a novel or play, from one act to the next. I’ve described how I met Rosanna James and Otto, but beyond a paragraph in The Times announcing her divorce from Captain James towards the end of the year, I didn’t hear of her again for months. As for Bismarck, it was a few years before I ran into him again, and then it was too soon.

  So in the first place I must skip over a few months to my second meeting with Rosanna, which was brought about because I have a long memory and a great zeal in paying off old scores. She had put herself on the debit side of Flashy’s ledger, and when the chance came to pay her out I seized on it.

  It was the following summer, while I was still in London, officially waiting for Uncle Bindley at the Horse Guards to find me an appointment, and in fact just lounging about the town and leading the gay life. It wasn’t quite so gay as it had been, for while I was still something of an idol in military circles, my gloss was beginning to wear a bit thin with the public. Yesterday’s hero is soon forgotten, and while Elspeth and I had no lack of invitations during the season, it seemed to me that I wasn’t quite so warmly fêted as I had been. I wasn’t invariably the centre of attraction any longer; some chaps even seemed to get testy if I mentioned Afghanistan, and at one assembly I heard a fellow say that he personally knew every damned stone of Piper’s Fort by now, and could have conducted sightseers over the ruins.

  That’s by the way, but it was one of the reasons that I began to find life boring me in the months that followed, and I was all the readier for mischief when the chance came.

  I forget exactly what took me to one of the Haymarket theatres on an afternoon in May—there was an actress, or an acrobat she may have been, whom I was pushing about just then, so it may have been her. In any event, I was standing in the wings with some of the Gents and Mooners,15 during a rehearsal, when I noticed a female practising dance-steps on the other side of the stage. It was her shape that caught my eye, for she was in the tight fleshings that ballet-dancers wear, and I was admiring her legs when she turned in profile and to my astonishment I recognised Rosanna.

  She was wearing her hair in a new way, parted in the centre, and held behind her head in a kerchief, but there was no mistaking the face or the figure.

  “Splendid piece, ain’t she?” says one of the Mooners. “They say Lumley”—he was the manager—“pays her a fortune. ’Pon my soul, I would myself, what?”

  Oho, I thought to myself, what’s this? I asked the Mooner, offhand, who she might be.

  “Why, she’s his new danseuse, don’t you know,” says he. “It seems that opera hasn’t been bringing in the tin lately, so Lumley imported her specially to dance between the acts. Thinks she’ll make a great hit, and with those legs I’ll be bound she will. See here.” And he pushed a printed bill into my hand. It read:

  HER MAJESTY’S THEATRE

  Special Attraction

  Mr Benjamin Lumley begs to announce that between the acts of the Opera, Donna Lola Montez, of the Teatro Real, Seville, will have the honour to make her first appearance in England in the Original Spanish dance, El Oleano.

  “Ain’t she a delight, though?” says the Mooner. “Gad, look at ’em bouncing when she struts!”

  “That’s Donna Lola Montez, is it?” says I. “When does she perform, d’ye know?”

  “Opens next week,” says he. “There’ll be a crowd and a half, shouldn’t wonder. Oh, Lovely Lola!”

  Well, I’d never heard of Lola Montez, but I saw there was something here that needed going into. I made a few discreet inquiries, and it seemed that half the town was talking about her already, for Lumley was making a great to-do about his beautiful new attraction., The critics were slavering in advance about “the belle Andalusian”, and predicting a tremendous success, but nobody had any notion that she wasn’t a genuine Spanish artiste at all. But I was in no doubt about her; I’d been close enough to Rosanna James to be sure.

  At first I was just amused, but then it occurred to me that here was a heaven-sent opportunity to have my own back on her. If she was exposed, denounced for what she really was, that would put paid to her making a hit. It would also teach her not to throw piss-pots at me. But how to do it best? I pondered, and in five minutes I had it pat.

  I remembered, from the conversations we had had during our passionate week, her mention of Lord Ranelagh, who was one of the leading boys about town just then. She was forever chattering about her admirers, and he was one she had turned down; snubbed him dead, in fact. I knew him only to see, for he was a very top-flight Corinthian, and didn’t take much heed even of heroes if they weren’t out of the top drawer (and I wasn’t). But all I’d heard suggested that he was a first-class swine, and just the man for me.

  I hunted him out at his club, slid inside when the porter wasn’t looking, and found him in the smoke-room. He was lying on a couch, puffing a cigar with his hat over his brows; I spoke right out.

  “Lord Ranelagh,” says I. “How are you? I’m Flashman.”

  He cocked an eye lazily under the brim of his hat, damned haughty.

  “I’m certain I haven’t had the honour,” says he. “Good day to you.”

  “No, no, you remember me,” says I. “Harry Flashman, you know.”

  He pushed his hat right back, and looked at me as if I was a toad.

  “Oh,” says he at length, with a sneer, “The Afghan warrior. Well, what is it?”

  “I took the liberty of calling on your lordship,” says I, “because I chanced to come across a mutual acquaintance.”

  “I cannot conceive that we have any,” drawls he, “unless you happen to be related to one of my grooms.”

  I laughed merrily at this, although I felt like kicking his noble backside for him. But I needed him, you see, so I had to toad-eat him.

  “Not bad, not bad,” says I. “But this happens to be a lady. I’m sure she would be of interest to you.”

  “Are you a pimp, by any chance? If so—”

  “No, my lord, I’m not,” says I. “But I thought you might be diverted to hear of Mrs James—Mrs Elizabeth Rosanna James.”

  He frowned, and blew ash off his ridiculous beard, which covered half his shirt-front.

  “What of her, and what the devil has she to do with you?”

  “Why, nothing, my lord,” says I. “But she happens to be taking the stage at Her Majesty’s next week, masquerading as a famous Spanish dancer. Donna Lola Montez, she calls herself, and pretends to be from Seville. An impudent imposture.”

  He digested this, while I watched his nasty mind working.

  “How d’ye know this?” says he.

  “I’ve seen her at rehearsal,” says I, “and there’s no doubt about it—she’s Rosanna James.”

  “And why should this be of interest to me?”

  I shrugged at this, and he asked what my purpose was in telling him.

  “Oh, I was sure you would wish to be at her first performance—to pay your respects to an old friend,” says I. “And if so, I would solicit a place for myself in your party. I entertain the same affection for her that I’m sure your lordship does.”

  He considered me. �
��You’re a singularly unpleasant creature,” says he. “Why don’t you expose her yourself, since that’s obviously what you want?”

  “Your lordship, I’m sure, has a style in these things. And you are well known, while I …” I didn’t want to be the centre of any scandal, although I wanted to have a front seat to see the fun.

  “I can do your dirty work, eh? Well, well.”

  “You’ll go?”

  “That is no concern of yours,” says he. “Good day.”

  “May I come?”

  “My dear sir, I cannot prevent you going where you choose. But I forbid you absolutely to address me in public.”

  And he turned over on his side, away from me. But I was satisfied; no doubt he would go, and denounce “Donna Lola”. He had his own score to pay off, and was just the sort of mean hound who would do it, too.

  Sure enough, when the fashionable crowd was arriving at Her Majesty’s the following Monday, up rolls Lord Ranelagh with a party of bloods, in two coaches. I was on hand, and tailed on to them at the door; he noticed me, but didn’t say anything, and I was allowed to follow into the omnibus-box which he had engaged directly beside the stage. One or two of his friends gave me haughty stares, and I took my seat very meek, at the back of the box, while his lordship showed off at the front, and his friends and he talked and laughed loudly, to show what first-rate bucks they were.

  It was a splendid house—quite out of proportion to the opera, which was “The Barber of Seville”. In fact, I was astonished at the gathering: there was the Queen Dowager in the Royal Box, with a couple of foreign princelings; old Wellington, wrinkled and lynx-eyed, with his Duchess; Brougham, the minister, the Baroness de Rothschild, Count Esterhazy, the Belgian ambassador, and many others. All the most eminent elderly lechers of the day, in fact, and I hadn’t a doubt that it wasn’t the music they had come for. Lola Montez was the attraction of the night, and the talk through the pit was of nothing else. Rumour had it that at certain select gatherings for the highest grandees in Spain, she had been known to dance nude; it was also being said that she had once been the leading light of a Turkish harem. Oh, they were in a fine state of excitement by the time the curtain went up.

  My own idea of theatrical entertainment, I admit, is the music-hall; strapping wenches and low comedians are my line, and your fine drama and music bore me to death. So I found “The Barber of Seville” a complete fag: fat Italians screeching, and not a word to be understood. I read the programme for a bit, and found more entertainment in the advertisements than there was on the stage—“Mrs Rodd’s anatomical ladies’ stays, which ensure the wearer a figure of astonishing symmetry”; I remember thinking that the leading lady in “The Barber” could have profited by Mrs Rodd’s acquaintance. Also highly spoken of were Jackson’s patent enema machines, as patronised by the nobility when travelling. I wasn’t alone, I noticed, in finding the opera tedious; there were yawns in the pit, and Wellington (who was near our box) began to snore until his Duchess dug him in the ribs. Then the first act ended, and when the applause died away everyone sat up, expectant; there was a flourish of Spanish music from the orchestra, and Lola (or Rosanna) shot dramatically on to the stage.

  I’m no authority on the dance; the performer, not the performance, is what I pay to see. But it seemed to me that she was damned good. Her striking beauty brought the pit up with a gasp: she was in a black bodice, cut so low that her breasts seemed to be in continual danger of popping out, and her tiny pink skirt showed off her legs to tremendous advantage. The slim white neck and shoulders, the coal-black hair, the gleaming eyes, the scarlet lips curled almost in contempt—the whole effect was startling and exotic. You know these throbbing, Spanish rhythms; well, she swayed and shook and stamped her way through them in splendid passion, and the audience sat spellbound. She was at once inviting and challenging; I doubt if there was any gesture or movement in the whole dance that a magistrate could have taken exception to, and yet the whole effect of it was sensual. It seemed to say “Bed me—if you dare”, and every man in the place was taking her clothes off as he watched. What the women thought I can’t imagine, but I guess they admired her almost as much as they disliked her.16

  When she finished abruptly, with a final smash of her foot and clash of cymbals from the orchestra, the theatre went wild. They cheered and stamped, and she stood for a moment still as a statue, staring proudly down at them, and then swept straight off the stage. The applause was deafening, but she didn’t come back, and there were sighs and a few groans when the curtain went up again on the next act of the opera, and those damned Macaronis began yelping again.

  Through all this Ranelagh had sat forward in his chair, staring at her, but never said a word. He didn’t pay the least attention to the opera, but when Lola came on for her second dance, which was even more tempestuous than the first, he made a great show of examining her through his glasses. Everyone else was doing the same, of course, in the hope that her bodice would burst, which it seemed likely to do at any moment, but when the applause broke out, wilder than ever, he kept his glasses glued to his eyes, and when she had gone he was seen to be frowning in a very puzzled way. This was all leading up to the denouement, of course, and when she bounced on, snapping her fan, for the third time, I heard him mutter to his nearest neighbour:

  “You chaps keep your eyes on me. I’ll give the word, mind, and then we’ll see some fun.”

  She swirled through the dance, showing splendid amounts of her thighs, and gliding about sinuously while peeping over her fan, and at the finish there was a perfect torrent of clapping and shouting, with bouquets plopping down on to the stage and chaps standing up and clapping wildly. She smiled now, for the first time, bowing and blowing kisses before the curtain, and then suddenly, from our box there was a great hissing in unison, at which the applause faltered and died away. She turned to stare furiously in our direction, and as the hissing rose louder than ever there were angry shouts and cries from the rest of the theatre. People craned to see what the row was about, and then Ranelagh climbs to his feet, an imposing figure with his black beard and elegant togs, and cries out, very distinctly:

  “Why, this is a proper swindle, ladies and gentlemen! That woman isn’t Lola Montez. She’s an Irish girl, Betsy James!”

  There was a second’s silence, and then a tremendous hullabaloo. The hissing started again, with cries of “Fraud!” and “Impostor!”, the applause began and sputtered out, and angry cat-calls and boos sounded from the gallery. In a moment the whole mood of the theatre had changed; taking their cue from Ranelagh and his toadies, they began to howl her down; a few coins clattered on the stage; the conductor, gaping at the audience with his mouth open, suddenly flung down his baton and stamped out; and then the whole place was in a frenzy, stamping and calling for their money back, and shouting to her angrily to get back to the bogs of Donegal.

  She was standing blazing with fury, and when she moved towards our box some of the chaps scrambled back to get out of harm’s way. She stood a moment, her bosom heaving, her eyes sweeping the box—oh, yes, she recognised me all right, and when she began to curse at us I think it was me as much as Ranelagh she was getting at. Unfortunately, she swore in English, and the mob caught it and yelled louder than ever. Then she dashed down the bouquet she was holding, stamped on it, kicked it into the orchestra, and with one last damnation in our direction, ran from the stage as the curtain fell.17

  I must say I was delighted; I hadn’t thought it could go off so well. As we crowded out of the place—“The Barber”, of course, was entirely forgotten in the sensation—I came up to Ranelagh’s elbow and congratulated him; I couldn’t have paid her out so splendidly myself, and I told him so. He gave me a cold nod and sailed off, the snobbish bastard, but I wasn’t in a mood to mind too much; that was me quits with Mistress Lola for her brickbats and insults, and I went home in high good humour.

  She was finished on the London stage, of course. Lumley dismissed her, and although one or two atte
mpts were made to present her at other theatres, the damage was done. All sorts of people now seemed to remember her as Mrs James, and although she wrote a letter of denial to the press, no one believed it. A few weeks later she had disappeared and that, thought I, was the end of Lola Montez so far as I was concerned, and good riddance. A brilliant bed-mate, I don’t deny, in her way, and even now the picture of her kneeling naked among the bed-clothes can set me itching—but I’d never liked her particularly, and was glad to see her sent packing.

  But it wasn’t the end of her, by any means. Although it was some years before I saw her again—in circumstances that I couldn’t have dreamed of—one heard of her from time to time through the papers. And always it was sensational news; she seemed to have a genius for thrusting herself into high places and creating scandal. First there was a report of her horse-whipping a policeman in Berlin; next she was dancing on the tables during a civic banquet in Bonn, to the outrage of Prince Albert and our Queen, who were on a State visit at the time. Then she was performing in Paris, and when the audience didn’t take to her she stripped off her garters and drawers and flung them at the gallery; she started a riot in the streets of Warsaw, and when they tried to arrest her she held the peelers off with pistols. And of course there were scores of lovers, most of them highly-placed: the Viceroy of Poland, the Tsar of Russia (although I doubt if that’s true), and Liszt the musician.18 She took up with him two or three times, and once to get rid of her he locked her in a hotel room and sneaked out by the back door.

  I met him, later on, by the way, and we discussed the lovely Lola and found ourselves much in agreement. Like me, he admired her as a tumble, but found her all too overpowering. “She is a consuming fire,” he told me, shaking his white head ruefully, “and I’ve been scorched—oh, so often.” I sympathised; she had urged me on in love-making with a hair-brush, but with him it had been a dog-whip, and he was a frail sort of fellow, you know.

  At all events, these scraps of gossip reached me from time to time over the next few years. In that time I was out of England a good deal—as will be set down in another packet of my memoirs, if I’m spared to write them. My doings in the middle forties of the century don’t fit in with my present tale, though, so I pass them over for the moment and come to the events to which my meeting with Lola and Otto Bismarck was the prelude.