The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ sure she would.”

      “Would you care to test it?” says he, with an infuriating smile. I could have boxed his ears, but I kept my temper very well.

      “Go to the devil, you mincing pimp,” I told him, and left him standing in the hall. I went straight to Elspeth’s room, told her what had happened, and cautioned her against seeing Watney again.

      “Which one is he?” she asked, admiring her hair in the mirror.

      “Fellow with a face like a horse and a haw-haw voice.”

      “There are so many like that,” says she. “I can’t tell one from the other. Harry, darling, would I look well with ringlets, do you think?”

      This pleased me, as you can guess, and I forgot the incident at once. I remember it now, for it was that same day that everything happened all at once. There are days like that; a chapter in your life ends and another one begins, and nothing is the same afterwards.

      I was to call at the Horse Guards to see my Uncle Bindley, and I told Elspeth I would not be home until the afternoon, when we were to go out to tea at someone-or-others. But when I got to Horse Guards my uncle bundled me straight into a carriage and bore me off to meet – of all people – the Duke of Wellington. I’d never seen him closer than a distance, and it made me fairly nervous to stand in his ante-room after Bindley had been ushered in to him, and hear their voices murmuring behind the closed door. Then it opened, and the Duke came out; he was white-haired and pretty wrinkled at this time, but that damned hooked nose would have marked him anywhere, and his eyes were like gimlets.

      “Ah, this is the young man,” says he, shaking hands. For all his years he walked with the spring of a jockey, and was very spruce in his grey coat.

      “The town is full of you just now,” says he, looking me in the eyes. “It is as it should be. It was a damned good bit of work – about the only good thing in the whole business, by God, whatever Ellenborough and Palmerston may say.”

      Hudson, thinks I, you should see me now; short of the heavens opening, there was nothing to be added.

      The Duke asked me a few sharp questions, about Akbar Khan, and the Afghans generally, and how the troops had behaved on the retreat, which I answered as well as I could. He listened with his head back, and said “Hmm,” and nodded, and then said briskly:

      “It is a thorough shame that it has been so shockingly managed. But it is always the way with these damned politicals; there is no telling them. If I had had someone like McNaghten with me in Spain, Bindley, I’d still be at Lisbon, I dare say. And what is to happen to Mr Flashman? Have you spoken to Hardinge?”

      Bindley said they would have to find a regiment for me, and the Duke nodded.

      “Yes, he is a regimental man. You were in the 11th Hussars, as I remember? Well, you won’t want to go back there,” and he gave me a shrewd look. “His lordship is no better disposed to Indian offiers now than he ever was, the more fool he. I have thought of telling him, more than once, that I’m an Indian officer myself, but he would probably just have given me a setdown. Well, Mr Flashman, I am to take you to Her Majesty this afternoon, so you must be here at one o’clock.” And with that he turned back to his room, said a word to Bindley, and shut the door.

      Well, you can guess how all this dazzled me; to have the great Duke chatting to me, to learn that I was to be presented to the Queen – all this had me walking on the clouds. I went home in a rosy dream, hugging myself at the way Elspeth would take the news; this would make her damned father sit up and take notice, all right, and it would be odd if I couldn’t squeeze something out of him in consequence, if I played my cards well.

      I hurried upstairs, but she wasn’t in her room; I called, and eventually old Oswald appeared and said she had gone out.

      “Where away?” says I.

      “Well, sir,” says he, looking mighty sour, “I don’t rightly know.”

      “With Miss Judy?”

      “No, sir,” says he, “not with Miss Judy. Miss Judy is downstairs, sir.”

      There was something damned queer about his manner, but there was nothing more to be got from him, so I went downstairs and found Judy playing with a kitten in the morning room.

      “Where’s my wife?” says I.

      “Out with Captain Watney,” says she, cool as you please. “Riding. Here, kitty-kitty. In the Park, I dare say.”

      For a minute I didn’t understand.

      “You’re wrong,” says I. “I sent him packing two hours ago.”

      “Well, they went riding half an hour ago, so he must have unpacked.” She picked up the kitten and began to stroke it.

      “What the devil d’you mean?”

      “I mean they’ve gone out together. What else?”

      “Dammit,” says I, furious. “I told her not to.”

      She went on stroking, and looked at me with her crooked little smile.

      “She can’t have understood you, then,” says she. “Or she would not have gone, would she?”

      I stood staring at her, feeling a chill suddenly settle on my insides.

      “What are you hinting, damn you?” I said.

      “Nothing at all. It is you who are imagining. Do you know, I believe you’re jealous.”

      “Jealous, by God! And what have I to be jealous about?”

      “You should know best, surely.”

      I stood looking thunder at her, torn between anger and fear of what she seemed to be implying.

      “Now, look’ee here,” I said, “I want to know what the blazes you’re at. If you have anything to say about my wife, by God, you’d best be careful …”

      My father came stumping into the hall at that minute, curse him, and calling for Judy. She got up and walked past me, the kitten in her arms. She stopped at the door, gave me a crooked, spiteful smile, and says:

      “What were you doing in India? Reading? Singing hymns? Or did you occasionally go riding in the Park?”

      And with that she slammed the door, leaving me shot to bits, with horrible thoughts growing in my mind. Suspicion doesn’t come gradually; it springs up suddenly, and grows with every breath it takes. If you have a foul mind, as I have, you think foul thoughts readier than clean ones, so that even as I told myself that Judy was a lying bitch trying to frighten me with implications, and that Elspeth was incapable of being false, at the same time I had a vision of her rolling naked in a bed with her arms round Watney’s neck. God, it wasn’t possible! Elspeth was an innocent, a completely honest fool, who hadn’t even known what “fornication” meant when I first met her … That hadn’t stopped her bounding into the bushes with me, though, at the first invitation. Oh, but it was still unthinkable! She was my wife, and as amiable and proper as a girl could be; she was utterly different from swine like me, she had to be. I couldn’t be as wrong in my judgement СКАЧАТЬ