George Fraser - Flashman in the Great Game

‘Oh, Harry, Jane Speedicut will be green ! You and I – guests of Her Majesty! It will be the finest thing – and I have my new French dresses – the ivory, the beige silk, the lilac satin, and the lovely, lovely green which old Admiral Lawson so admired – if you think it is not a leetle low for the Queen? And my barrege for Sunday – will there be members of the nobility staying also? – will there be ladies whose husbands are of lower rank than you? Ellen Parkin – Lady Parkin, indeed! – was consumed with spite when I told her – oh, and I must have another maid who can manage my hair, for Sarah is too maladroit for words, although she is very passable with dresses – what shall I wear to picnics? – for we shall be bound to walk in the lovely Highland countryside – oh, Harry, what do you suppose the Queen reads? – and shall I call the Prince “highness” or “sir”?’

I was glad, I can tell you, when we finally reached Abergeldie, where we had rooms in the castle where guests were put up – for Balmoral was very new then, and Albert was still busy having the finishing touches put to it. Elspeth by this time was too nervous even to talk, but her first glimpse of our royal hosts reduced her awe a trifle, I think. We took a stroll the first afternoon, in the direction of Balmoral, and on the road encountered what seemed to be a family of tinkers led by a small washerwoman and an usher who had evidently pinched his headmaster’s clothes. Fortunately, I recognised them as Victoria and Albert out with their brood, and knew enough simply to raise my hat as we passed, for they loathed to be treated as royalty when they were playing at being commoners. Elspeth didn’t even suspect who it was until we were past, and when I told her she swooned by the roadside. I revived her by threatening to carry her into the bushes and molest her, and on the way back she observed that really Her Majesty had looked quite royal, but in a common sort of way.

By the time we were presented at Balmoral, though, the next day, she was high up the scale again, and the fact that we shared the waiting-room beforehand with some lord or other and his beak-nosed lady, who looked at us as though we were riff-raff, reduced my poor little scatterbrain to quaking terror. I’d met the royals before, of course, and tried to reassure her, whispering that she looked a stunner (which was true) and not to be put out by Lord and Lady Puffbuttock, who were now ignoring us with that icy incivility which is the stamp of our lower-class aristocracy. (I know; I’m one myself nowadays.)

It was quite handy that our companions kept their noses in the air, though, for it gave me the chance to loop a ribbon from the lady’s enormous crinoline on to an occasional table without her knowing, and when the doors to the royal drawing-room were opened she set off and brought the whole thing crashing down, crockery and all, in full view of the little court circle. I kept Elspeth in an iron grip, and steered her round the wreckage, and so Colonel and Mrs Flashman made their bows while the doors were hurriedly closed behind us, and the muffled sounds of the Puffbuttocks being extricated by flunkeys was music to my ears, even if it did make the Queen look more pop-eyed than usual. The moral is: don’t put on airs with Flashy, and if you do, keep your crinolines out of harm’s way.

And, as it turned out, to Elspeth’s lifelong delight and my immense satisfaction, she and the Queen got on like port and nuts from the first. Elspeth, you see, was one of those females who are so beautiful that even other women can’t help liking ’em, and in her idiot way she was a lively and engaging soul. The fact that she was Scotch helped, too, for the Queen was in one of her Jacobite moods just then, and by the grace of God someone had read Waverley to Elspeth when she was a child, and taught her to recite ‘The Lady of the Lake’.

I had been dreading meeting Albert again, in case he mentioned his whoremongering Nephew Willy, now deceased, but all he did was say:

‘Ah, Colonel Flash-mann – haff you read Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime? ’

I said I hadn’t, yet, but I’d be at the railway library first thing in the morning, and he looked doleful and went on:

‘It warns us that bureaucratic central government, far from curing the ills of revolution, can actually arouse them.’

I said I’d often thought that, now that he mentioned it, and he nodded and said: ‘Italy is very unsatisfactory,’ which brought our conversation to a close. Fortunately old Ellenborough, who’d been chief in India at the time of my Kabul heroics, was among those present, and he buttonholed me, which was a profound relief. And then the Queen addressed me, in that high sing-song of hers:

‘Your dear wife, Colonel Flashman, tells me that you are quite recovered from the rigours of your Russian adventures, which you shall tell us of presently .They seem to be a quite extraordinary people; Lord Granville writes from Petersburg that Lady Wodehouse’s Russian maid was found eating the contents of one of her ladyship’s dressing-table pots – it was castor oil pomatum for the hair ! What a remarkable extravagance, was it not?’

That was my cue, of course, to regale them with a few domestic anecdotes of Russia, and its primitive ways, which went down well, with the Queen nodding approval and saying: ‘How barbarous! How strange!’ while Elspeth glowed to see her hero holding the floor. Albert joined in in his rib-tickling way to observe that no European state offered such fertile soil for the seeds of socialism as Russia did, and that he feared that the new Tsar had little intellect or character.

‘So Lord Granville says,’ was the Queen’s prim rejoinder, ‘but I do not think it is quite his place to make such observations on a royal personage. Do you not agree, Mrs Flashman?’

Old Ellenborough, who was a cheery, boozy buffer, said to me that he hoped I had tried to civilise the Russians a little by teaching them cricket, and Albert, who had no more humour than the parish trough, looked stuffy and says:

‘I am sure Colonel Flash-mann would do no such thing. I cannot unner-stend this passion for cricket; it seems to me a great waste of time. What is the proff-it to a younk boy in crouching motionless in a field for hours on end? Em I nott right, Colonel?’

‘Well, sir,’ says I, ‘I’ve looked out in the deep field myself long enough to sympathise with you; it’s a great fag, to be sure. But perhaps, when the boy’s a man, his life may depend on crouching motionless, behind a Khyber rock or a Burmese bush – so a bit of practice may not come amiss, when he’s young.’

Which was sauce, if you like, but I could never resist the temptation, in grovelling to Albert, to put a pinch of pepper down his shirt. It was in my character of bluff, no-nonsense Harry, too, and a nice reminder of the daring deeds I’d done. Ellenborough said ‘Hear, hear’, and even Albert looked only half-sulky, and said all diss-cipline was admirable, but there must be better ways of instilling it; the Prince of Wales, he said, should nott play cricket, but some more constructiff game.

After that we had tea, very informal, and Elspeth distinguished herself by actually prevailing on Albert to eat a cucumber sandwich; she’ll have him in the bushes in a minute, thinks I, and on that happy note our first visit concluded, with Elspeth going home on a cloud to Abergeldie.

But if it was socially useful, it wasn’t much of a holiday, although Elspeth revelled in it. She went for walks with the Queen, twice (calling themselves Mrs Fitzjames and Mrs Marmion, if you please), and even made Albert laugh when charades were played in the evening, by impersonating Helen of Troy with a Scotch accent. I couldn’t even get a grin out of him; we went shooting with the other gentlemen, and it was purgatory having to stalk at his pace. He was keen as mustard, though, and slaughtered stags like a Ghazi on hashish – you’ll hardly credit it, but his notion of sport was that a huge long trench should be dug so that we could sneak up on the deer unobserved; he’d have done it, too, but the local ghillies showed so much disgust at the idea that he dropped it. He couldn’t understand their objections, though; to him all that mattered was killing the beasts.