A Flash of Purity and Truth

by machiavellijr

Summary:

So... How did Flashy win the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth by hiding under the bed? What did it have to do with Lillie Langtry's eyes? Why does he now own a medium-sized yacht? And how did he wind up needing Elspeth to - well...

Notes:

• For Delancey654.

Chapter 1: Prologue: Gandamack Lodge, 1900

“But Harry, darling, you travelled so very widely yourself, in – oh, all those places. And you remember I did too, in America, and Madagascar, and Greece. Why should we not lend our patronage to-”

“A pack of carping bluestockings who think that having waved at West Africa from a P&O steamer makes them Marco Polo in crinolines?”

“No, Harry dear, to Miss Jex-Blake and her Seminars. You know, Girton College's course of talks by well-travelled ladies. Why, some of them have been in Sumatra, and Dahomey, why, you wrote about that yourself.”

 

“Well, yes, enough of that, anyway. I will not entertain the ladies of Cambridge to tea and reminiscences here, much less put them up for a whole damn week, and that's final.”

 

At the age of seventy-eight, give or take a year, you might have thought I'd be master in my own house. But you'd not have met Elspeth, so you'd not understand that when she prattles on for long enough you feel like agreeing to anything, whether it's to shut her up or because even at seventy-five she's such a sweet, beautiful creature that nobody ever wants to deny her anything, even when she's stitching up relatively innocent old buffers for cheating at baccarat, or spending their hard-won loot endowing a gentlewomen's literary college, of all things.

 

Or, yet, reminding them of blessedly distant days among the cannibals and slavers, with King Gezo slobbering like a demented baboon whilst his Amazons sharpened their teeth and bayonets. Not that I put much of the latter into my celebrated publication “Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life” - I could hardly admit in print to being a slave-trader, not that I'd wanted to be one in the first place.

 

Be that as it may, Elspeth had her way as she usually does, and the guest of honour Miss Kingslake or Kingslay or Kingswench – King's-something anyway, which seemed about right when her eternal Majesty looked like finally shuffling off at any second - duly arrived, early in that frozen sodden spring of the year '0 0 when the canal bust its banks and the floodwaters froze into one great mirror a mile wide. Further from the tropics than Gandamack Lodge in a cold wet February is hard to imagine, unless it's the distance between the dancing girls of Lahore and the undergraduettes of Girton en masse . Not that they were bad-looking, but earnest discussion of Horace at the breakfast-table reminds me unpleasantly of John Charity Spring.

 

There was one little redhead in particular, Miss Letitia Martin, I think, with a jaw like a paving slab, who'd have had an astonishing figure if it hadn't had quite so much tweed covering it, and if I'd been even ten years younger … and if wishes were horses my stables would run a damn sight cheaper. Besides, if you've read this far in my memoirs you know my reaction to well-meaning hypocrites sounding off about the noble savages and how awfully they suffer from their contact with the white man (which they do, but I don't cry about it whilst enjoying my coffee, sugar, diamonds etc., and they'd do worse to me if they could). As for the evils of sending a gunboat to knock the cities of the helpless native about his ears, I'm all for them, for if you send the Navy to do it with shellfire little and often, you won't have to scare up a proper expedition and commandeer Flashy into it, when the local petty princeling decides he can do as he likes to the soft-touch English.

 

Miss Kingsley herself was a fearsome long lean creature who rather reminded me of Lady Sale (of horrific memory) crossed with a melancholy carven idol – lipless, titless, deeply wrinkled though she can't have been much past forty. Despite Elspeth's assurances, she had never been in Dahomey, but further to the South, mostly in the black-water country of the Cameroons and Equatorial Guinea, which is as unlike the Benin country as Italy is to Scotland. She really had travelled, though, and without any more Christian piety about the benighted natives than was absolutely inevitable. I even found myself enjoying her talks, mostly because at seventy-eight nobody was going to make me go there (more fool me), and because of her very sound remarks on the essential nature of good red wine and brandy to avoiding fevers “especially among the older men” (hear hear, says I, and that'll teach Elspeth to mutter about my drinking), though she did have the common belief of all “explorers” in this benighted day that travelling with three dozen native porters, a Frog guide and a cracked German philologist is “going alone into the Dark Continent”. I don't hold out much for the intelligence, humanity or essential goodness of the African – no more do I for the average explorer, or the House of Lords – but they're surely human.

 

I think it was the second evening that something or other put Elspeth in mind of Red Indians, and she mentioned to the company that I'd been at the Little Bighorn with Custer. That put Miss Kingslake's hackles right up,

 

“I had understood, Sir Harry, that there were no survivors of that accursed oppressive venture.”

 

“No others, Miss, but I came through no more than half-scalped, and back to tell old Grant how it all went wrong.” I considered showing her the scar on my head, but Elspeth does complain when I give her gentler guests fits of conniptions, so I forbore.

 

“Doubtless he was disappointed at the failure of that mission of slaughter.”

Old Grant, disappointed because not enough Indians got the chop? Disappointed, aye, you could say that's what he was at the blind senseless waste of a crack regiment – that or bellowing blind fury at Custer's idiocy. Certainly Autie's life wouldn't have been worth a bent penny if he'd survived to come home without his men, and when the Army caught up with Crazy Horse as they were bound to do eventually it went hard with him too, but he was never the butcher that some Southerners made him out to be.

 

“Be that as it may, Sir Harry, my father was in the Indian Country in those days, and told me all I need of the horrors done by “civilised, decent” Americans there.” Ah, so that's where I knew the name. George Kingsley was some sort of jobbing medic, vaguely attached to the Army as he made an investigation of cholera (or was it the clap) among the Indians and settlers. Like most supernumeraries he'd been a tiresome bore and more trouble to the Army than any amount of medical advances could justify, but I felt well-disposed towards him because I'd met him on the train back from Deadwood in '76. Come to think of it, he'd said something about Little's ill-treatment of the Sioux then, but I'd more or less ignored him, feeling full of pride in my lost, found and lost-again son, not to mention full of beer, good steak and hope that I might see Elspeth and get back to England tout suite.

 

Which I did, in a manner of speaking, but hardly by the direct route, and not without Elspeth having one of her rare bouts of courage and duplicity (and willingness to shell out my money in bucketloads in a good cause). Oh, and I picked up another gong for my Who's Who entry, and lasting renown in another country nobody's ever heard of, but that's by the by, and there was no loot or fame in it. It was all because Elspeth expressed a hitherto unrevealed desire to see New Orleans...

 

Chapter 2: Home is the hunter... almost

Why Elspeth wanted to see New Orleans so much, I couldn’t imagine. Yes, it had even in those grey Reconstructed years the reputation for fabulous wickedness that clung to no other city in the civilised world, save perhaps Paris. It had something else the rest of America didn’t, as well - class, even if it was mostly found in the knocking shops rather than the best drawing-rooms (come to that, the knocking-shops had the best drawing-rooms, or at least Susie’s did). If “Rudi von Starnberg” had shown up in New York with his pockets all to let, he’d have been laughed at if not shanghaied, but in N’Awlins my fine impersonation of an officer and gentleman had served me as well as it ever had in Piccadilly. But if Elspeth wanted gracious civilisation we could just go home, and fabulous wickedness (whilst quite alright by her in the bedroom) didn’t strike me as something she’d go and seek out; not with me along, at any rate.

 

Something certainly had her excited, because she fairly rushed us onto the train at Chicago, and vainly hurrying Elspeth had been my sorry lot, on and off, for forty years already - after another twenty-five I still don’t think I’ve managed it successfully more than twice. She was late for Investitures, Royal Presentations and Coronations (albeit only foreign ones) but by heaven she wasn’t going to be late to New Orleans. The train was absolutely brand spanking new, with a definite smell of paint and brass polish like a barracks the day before a regimental inspection, and something of the same stuffed air, like Prussians with hoosier accents. I couldn't imagine anything further from where I'd left Bill Hickock in the wild town of Deadwood, just a few hundred miles away, but even then his like were a stage exhibit “back in the world”. On the Illinois Central Railroad, all was warmth, softness and coming up with good reasons to keep Elspeth in a remarkably brief peignoir rather than hobnobbing with whatever Society wanted to go from Chicago to Louisiana in the rain, via St Louis.

 

St Louis, by the way, didn't look one bit more attractive than it had when I was swimming for my life away from it off the texas deck of the Missouri Star, so instead of disembarking to see the sights I bethought myself of that distant year in more consoling ways and tried to teach Elspeth some of the positions I'd learned in a cramped wagon back then – they work just as well in a Pullman car, and Elspeth at fifty was a better mount than any of Miz Susie's lovelies at nineteen.

 

We pulled into a rather cool and soggy New Orleans on the evening of the third day. Elspeth's endless gossiping about American bigwigs I'd barely met and never paid the slightest attention to was starting to pall – what did I care if some Senator had offered to horsewhip a colleague for failing to raise his hat to her in the street, as long as he hadn't been raising anything in her bed? Or, as I sometimes thought, even if he had, for what was I going to do about it? I could divorce her – Cardigan had done it – and unlike twenty years earlier I'd money of my own from Lucknow and Peking. I didn't care for the sort of society that would cut me for having been divorced, and I've never been short of women proposing to marry me, but... would I ever trade Elspeth for any of them? In all truth, I could never imagine her not being there, not when I was calm and sober, any more than I could imagine selling up my commission before that smarmy little clerk Cardwell – who ever heard of a Balliol man knowing anything about soldiering – abolished it and did me out of at least four thousand pounds.

 

Anyway, that's by the by and I'm just putting off one of the odder incidents in my long and chequered career. You see, we pulled into New Orleans, and were met on the station platform by -

 

“Josie? My Josie? What the deuce are you doing here?” I couldn't have been more flabbergasted if it had been the ghost of Elphey Bey. Though he would have been a lot less welcome.

“It's a surprise, Papa! Mother arranged it all – we're here on our honeymoon, Sam and I, sailing with the Langtries. She thought it would be such a lovely surprise for you, seeing us all the way out here, and we can take you home on Eddie's yacht.”

 

I distantly recalled Edward Langtry, an Irish boy with more money than sense who raced yachts well and horses badly. I couldn't exactly disapprove of him as company for my Jo; I heard he was nicknamed Fog at Trinity College, because he was thick and wet. Certainly he'd never touch her, or offer her the slightest offence, but it was most unlike my dashing, vivacious daughter to want anything to do with a strait-laced Victorian bore. That, of course, was before I met his wife, who was along convalescing from a bad case of typhoid.

 

I didn't meet her until we were aboard the Langtries' yacht Red Gauntlet , because Edward wanted to sail right away and catch the trade winds or avoid the hurricanes or some such thing. I wasn't too sorry to be missing New Orleans; I've been there under too many names (including mine) and it might have been hard to explain to Elspeth how the only part of the city I knew was the French Quarter's street of expensive bordelloes. Or to resist the temptation to go and see if they were still there.

 

We were bundled upon the yacht practically straight away, sitting in the stinking mud of the Mississippi with Eddie and, Heaven help us, Jo's husband and distant cousin Sam Morrison, a Scotchman of such surpassing dullness that only Elspeth's constant insistence that it was our duty to support her wretched family had ever persuaded me to let Jo marry him. Still, he made pots of money, somehow, and with his grandchildren sitting by me it's hard to dislike the man too much.

 

We put to sea as quickly as Eddie and Sam could get the engine going, down around the endless twists of the Mississippi channel whilst a wizened pilot with a bottle of Chartreuse in his hand told the youngsters lies about his invaluable service in the Civil War giving sage advice to Farragut. I've met Farragut and if the arrogant bastard ever listened to a pilot in his life I'm a Dutchman. Whilst the boys listened, the crew did whatever sailors do when sailing down a bloody big river and Elspeth and Jo had a tearful reunion, I was left to make the acquaintance of Lillie Langtry. What can I sat about Mrs Edward Langtry? If I hadn't intervened with Bertie she might have been my Queen. If Elspeth had died of the Russian 'flu ten years ago she might have been my wife.

 

I can't for the life of me explain her attraction, save that she was more than averagely pretty, but my God it was powerful. Less so then than later when fights broke out over who'd escort her into dinner, but even at twenty-five she'd a sort of sardonic look about her, a suspicion of a raised eyebrow over heavy-lidded eyes, like Juno listening to one of Jupiter's less persuasive excuses. One of Oscar's poisonous little friends painted her, looking like butter wouldn't melt in her cupid's-bow mouth, except for those eyes. In profile, she was a beauty, but straight on you couldn't look away if your life depended on it; she could hold men's attention away from Elspeth and Jo, and I don't know that I ever saw any woman do that without a crown on her head.

 

I saw two things in her straight away. She didn't give two hoots for Edward, save for spending his money, and she wanted the bright lights and big cities more than anything. She was full of all the things she'd do in London, which she'd barely even seen – theatres and orchestras and Society. It galled her unspeakably that she'd not got to New York, and that New Orleans was largely shut down by some political upset (if you want an account of the Redeemers and Black and White Republicans and the Long Street Compromise you'll have to ask someone who was paying attention). What, she asked me, was the use of sailing all this way just to sail back again? Except for giving friends' fathers-in-law lifts home from the wars, of course.

 

We'd been five days at sea, and I'd been five days bored to death by sailor-talk from Eddie, who had it in his head that I'd vast experience of and interest in life on the seven seas, when the mast sprung or the boom lapsed or some other nautical disaster. I asked if we couldn't go on with the engine, but apparently Red Gauntlet didn't carry sufficient coal to go anywhere much, and the only thing for it was to put into the nearest port. Not, note, the nearest British port. No, the prize muff had to find the one genuinely dangerous spot in the Caribbean, and moor us in Port-au-Prince, capital of the Frog basket-case “Free Negro Republic” of Haiti. Next to us in the dilapidated, stinking harbour, sat a long, low sloop, with the legend Salve Marinera, San Serafino painted on the stern in cheap, flaking gilt. If that ship had never been there... well, many things would have been different. Bertie would have had to find himself a different mistress, for starters.

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Out of the frying pan...

Practically as soon as we dropped anchor in the broad and reeking harbour of Port-au-Prince, Elspeth came down with a bad case of the trots. It was an inevitable hazard of travel in the tropics in those days, and I suppose still is. Still, its inevitability doesn't make it much easier to live with, and even a luxurious cabin on a large yacht is not large enough for an invalid wife and a long-suffering husband. Despite Elspeth's best effort to be a good patient (and in all truth she was better than I'd ever been, with barely a whine or a whimper) I'd thoroughly had enough by the second evening. Eddie and Sam were ashore, arguing with shipwrights and chandlers and dodging the riots which were disfiguring the local scene at the time; Jo had gone with them to speak French unto the benighted heathen (and the Haitians as well), so Lillie was left aboard to keep me company.

 

On the first night, we talked about the theatre and France, which we agreed was jolly nice to visit, but not all it was cracked up to be and we'd certainly not live there. On the second night, I gave a fine display of restrained, unholy lust, sighing over how if I were twenty years younger and my wife not suffering in the stern... On the third, I murmured sweet nothings, flattered her maturity and worldliness (of which, having grown up in Jersey, she was distinctly uncertain), agreed that Edward was a total muff unsuited to Society, which was God's own truth, kissed her in her cabin's swing seat, and off we went.

 

I didn't hear Red Gauntlet's little tender, the Mitten, pull alongside. When the ladder crashed down like a ton of bricks I was far too engaged stripping Lillie's stays off her and gloating over that long, slim body which everyone in Christendom has now seen on the stage or in cheap postcards. I had her in the half-Flashman grip, buttock in the left hand, tit in the right, and was just about to set to work in earnest when I heard Jo chattering and clattering down the companionway.

 

Well, I've been interrupted in ecstatio by provosts-marshal, military policemen, outraged husbands, outraged superior officers, the Bavarian civil guard (that one nearly ended badly), barbarian queens and three heads of state, but never yet by my own daughter, who if a married woman was still twenty, as innocent as a daughter of mine and Elspeth's could well be, and as incapable of discretion as Elspeth had been at that age, which is to say, totally. Unfortunately, Lillie and Eddie's cabin was at the very stern of the ship, and that ladder was the only way out. I hadn't time to get my shirt back on and my trousers done up, but I could just about manage to stagger to the great, curved stern-window and take a header out of it into the harbour. What I was going to do next, I've no idea – swim round to the side of the ship, I suppose, and claim I'd been for a refreshing dip in the soup of donkey-corpses and dilute shit, or that I'd fallen overboard. Something better than debauching my son-in-law's friend in front of my daughter, anyway.

 

I must have fallen on a lump of timber or a dead donkey or something. Instead of the shock of cool water (and possibly the slight flavour of decomposing pack animal) I saw stars and white fire before I splashed my way to the companion-ladder, let down for the bumboats which passed between ships at anchor selling oranges and cheap whores. I thought the ladder seemed rather on the long side, but I staggered up onto deck, and promptly dropped like the dead.

 

I tossed and turned for days in what seemed an inordinately small bunk. As I lay, I dreamed that Lola Montez and Ranavalona stood over me, debating which of them should keep me as a slave. John Charity Spring appeared and proposed that, like Solomon, they divide me in half, which occasioned further debate as to which should have the half that functioned, but didn't talk. This I barred absolutely, but didn't have the energy to protest, until at length Arnold turned up, damned the lot of them for Godless fornicators, and threatened me with a birch made from Elspeth's hair. I passed out around the time he started trying to lasso my member with it, and all was blissfully dark.

 

I awoke to the definite realisation that wherever I was, it wasn't Lillie's cabin on Red Gauntlet . Nor was it mine and Elspeth's. I was still on a ship, but a bigger and dirtier one, all gimcrack finery over dirt and rot. A hulking 32-pound cannon stood in one corner, with a neat pyramid of rather rusty shot standing by it. The ship didn't seem to be moving, just rocking gently as if at its moorings, so I staggered up on deck, taking the full width of every passageway as if I'd been pouring gin on beer for three days. As I looked around me in perfect crogglement at the filthy and disorderly decks of an honest-to-God warship, a Dago in ragged French Foreign Legion dress uniform wandered up and saluted me (in Spanish) as “Colonel Flashman”.

 

“Who the Devil are you?” I asked, quite reasonably, I think, “Er, perché, er, estoy presente, er, capitan?” I thought perhaps I ought to recognise him, but he looked like any other Latin military man; his uniform didn't fit, his pistol was filthy and his cap several sizes too large.

 

“What do you mean, why are you here, Sir? You came aboard. Quite wet, but definitely of your own accord. Are you here for the Delegation, Colonel?”

“What damn delegation? And how do you know who I am?”

“He doesn't. I, on the other hand, know perfectly well. Colonel Flashman. Or should I say Lieutenant Comber? Or Major Flashman, US Army?” Another figure appeared. This one was in smart uniform, but not Frog Legion, nor comic-opera Dago, but the grey of the Confederate States, eleven years vanished. This one I knew. The last time I'd seen him I'd been dispatching him to charge to certain death at Gettysburg – Captain Matthew Manly, of the 24^th North Carolina Regiment.

 

“Matthew! Grand to see you, old chap. So glad to see you made it out of the war. What the Devil brings you here? Come to that, where is “here” anyway? Ain't I supposed to be on a yacht in Port-au-Prince?” When in doubt and assailed by ghosts from the distant past, toady like mad and look for an escape route.

 

“You ah on a yacht in Port-au-Prince, you yellow-bellied louse. This is His Excellency the President of San Serafino's armed yacht, Salve Marinera. An' Ah'll have you know ah am Colonel Manly, Commander of the Presidential Guard of the Estimable and Se-rene Republic of San Serafino and the Lower Yucatan.”

 

I recalled, vaguely, hearing that the Yucatan, the bit of Mexico at the bottom with the swamps and wild Indians, had declared independence a few times in the past – my old Naval crony Astley Key had bashed them over the head a few years earlier for impounding British ships – but was no further advanced in knowing what the Hell I was doing on it. I suppose the bash on the head must have disoriented me enough that I swam to the wrong ship, but why was one officer welcoming me with open arms whilst the risen ghost of Matt Manly insulted me?

 

My confusion was not aided by the arrival of a white-uniformed Hispanic apparition, the very image of a comic-opera Generalissimo, on the same crowded deck. This one I did not recognise, but he recognised me, and inclined his heavily-plumed head with a Teutonic click of the heels.

 

“Colonel Manly, do not be insulting the great Colonel Sir Harry Flashman in such a manner. He was a great hero in our battles against the Liberales. Our Empress called him her English right arm.” Well, that was sort of true. I'd certainly been on the Mexican Imperialists' side, if mainly because they were desperate for anything that looked like English support, and could have shot me for gun-running (a long and irrelevant story) if I'd put up a protest, so my essentials had been well in the mangle throughout Maximilian von Habsburg's doomed attempt to stick the Mexican crown on his head. I'd also had some sort of scheme going about...

 

“The Treasure of Montezuma! That's why I recall this hero's name! He was to reveal it to El Emperador, and would have done it, too, had the great German donkey not been shot. Colonel Flashman, I am Hernando Iturbide de Bolitho y Domanova, late of His Imperial Majesty Maximilian's household, now President of the independent Republic of San Serafino. Allow me to show you to my cabin, where you can rest until we can set sail for San Serafino.”

“Hang on just a minute! I'm sailing home, nowhere else. I was on a yacht, with my wife. The Red Gauntlet. Just see me back over there and I'll send help from England, I assure you. Any amount of it.” Or anything else I could promise that wouldn't see me back to Mexico, where several of the factions still had me under a death sentence, to get roped into another bloody silly revolution.

 

“Colonel, it pains me most deeply, but the yacht you mention has sailed two days ago. Haiti is not on the telegraph, but I give you my word that as soon as we reach San Serafino I will send to the Mosquito Coast for a British ship. In the meantime, I hope you will accept my family's hospitality aboard this fine vessel.”

 

“Mistah President, don't go trustin' that traitor! He sold out the South for Abe Lincoln, he lost us the damn war! He'll lose you yours too.” Manly was apoplectic, and his tight grey tunic was liable to burst at the seams.

 

“Colonel, I cannot believe this to be true, but it makes little difference. I need British support against the Liberales, and I need the treasure, if it is still to be found. Colonel Flashman will come with us, and he will aid us in our struggle for independence.”

 

Would I Hell. Still, stuck on the deck of a foreign warship, with two armed men liable to come to blows over my fate, was no time to say so. After considerable additional argument, the President won the day, and escorted me to his cabin. This was considerably cleaner than the rest of the ship, and had a long sofa as well as a proper bed, and a barefoot, ragged-trousered marine standing guard outside.

 

It also contained one of the more decorative women I've seen in my life, one of those dark Viennese soubrettes, all tits and sausage curls. She, I thought, must be one of the “family” El Presidente etc had mentioned, as she was wearing an improbable confection of silk and French lace which would have paid the ransom of a particularly debauched king. She looked at me rather as if I had been sent by whatever deity answers the prayers of bored wives on sea-voyages, but said nothing and let her maid, who was decidedly less ornamental, usher me onto the couch. Before I could do more than smooth out my whiskers and introduce myself, she had buggered off, with no more than a lingering look, a tiny shake of her tremendous poonts and a murmured name – Carlota.

 

The Marine and the maid clumped off after her, and I lay a little to recover myself. I may even, still dazed from the blow to the head, have dozed for a little while, but I awoke to find the sun going down through the curved window at the rear of the cabin, setting in that glorious blaze of pink and gold you'll never see outside the tropics. I surveyed the room - an oddly-shaped cabin wedged into the stern of the ship; a large bed, a couch (on which I'd been dozing), and not a lot else bar a locked door. I made for the stern-gallery window, intending to swim for it away from this ship of madmen who all seemed to have wandered out of the dimmer reaches of my past. There might be sharks in the harbour, but there were definitely lunatics with guns and cannons present, not least that Confederate who'd somehow worked out my role in his (and his nation's) crushing defeat. I had hardly got to the latch before I heard snarling in a Carolina drawl, which presaged the appearance of “Colonel” Manly in my near vicinity. Desperate (and possibly still not thinking straight) I dived under the bed, wriggling myself out of view as a pair of grey leather boots clomped into the room. Quivering with funk, I lay very, very still.

 

Chapter 4: Eavesdroppers never hear good...

I was still lying there, scared as a rat in a corner, when Carlota returned, or at least a pair of very attractive feet returned, and asked where the big Englishman had gone. It took me a little while to work out what was wrong with their conversation; it was absolutely in German. Not, on Manly's part, very good German, but quite understandable. He broke into Spanish briefly, sending the sentry Marine to find “the English prisoner” - so much for my being an honoured guest!

From Afghanistan to the Punjab, I've heard a lot of things whilst hiding in places I oughtn't to be. None of them was as amazingly ambitious as the tale that unfolded from those two. Manly, who'd been some sort of mercenary in Nicaragua before fighting for slavery and mint juleps in the Pointless War, was planning a coup. Carlota – Mrs President Iturbide de whatsit and don'tmoveover – was in it up to her lacy décolletage. Iturbide's talk about Montezuma's treasure had just moved the timetable up; that night, Manly would do away with his erstwhile commander-in-chief, then sail back to San Serafino and use Salve Marinera's guns to blast his way into the capital and the Presidency, which he could then secure with Montezuma's treasure.

“And then, mah dear, we shall invaht those of the Ol' Cause who remain LOYAL, and rebuild the white man's lands as our forefathers intended. The south, Madame President, shall rise again. A little further to the south, perhaps, but just as clean, just as pure, just as God-fearin' and true, as ever ol' Carolina was.” He was quite cracked. Didn't he know that conquistadors had gone out with Darien and Henry Morgan? Apparently not.

“And what, President Manly, will we do with the Englishman?” Damn her, I didn't want to hear that part. My heart was already thumping, and my knees threatening to knock.

“Get the location of the treasure from him, mah dear, and then kill him. Slowly. Ah heah he's been tortured bah maysters of the art, Ah think a little Southern hospitality will do him good. Now excuse me, darlin', Ah must go make... arrangements. Do keep the late President entertained, won't you?” His boots thumped out of the cabin, and I breathed again. I could almost have fainted, but became increasingly aware of an agonising cramp in my leg, and whilst I might have passed out, I wasn't getting up in a hurry.

In any case, it can only have been minutes, perhaps seconds, of me biting my lip before Iturbide himself wandered through the door with vague Spanish apologies for shamefully neglecting his lady in the press of business, and absolutely began to undress his murderous doxy. At least, there was a great rustling and murmuring of endearments, a scrap of silk garter drifted down to lie tickling-close to my nose, and he must have been keen as mustard, particularly for an elderly chap, because within minutes the bedsprings had set to creaking, the old pantaloon's panting had redoubled in volume, and Carlota was making suspiciously practiced-sounding noises of enthusiasm.

Well, my opinions on orgies are well-known, but once in a while it does no harm, and even through my funk the thought of all that splendid Germanic flesh going to waste just inches above my head was making me damned randy. A lustful haze might certainly explain what I did next... no, of course I didn't join in you disgusting lout. I might have tried to sneak out whilst they were otherwise engaged, but my leg didn't feel up to it, and in any case, those heavy grey boots returned, clearly having had the same thought about distraction. Unless “Colonel” Manly was in a ménage à trois with his President as well as plotting to do him in, this was the murderous moment, and once it was done it was Flashy for the Inquisition.

Just as Iturbide clocked something was not as it should be (other than Carlota's unconvincing cries of passion) and began to bellow something in Spanish, I launched myself feet-first from under the bed in the general direction of Manly, bellowing with funk, and caught him square on the ankle. He went down hard, on top of me, and on top of the robin's-egg lump on my head – the last thing I heard was Carlota's scream of shock.

I awoke, two days later, with Iturbide fussing around my bedside. He was enormously grateful that I had forestalled the assassin, and primped about like an elderly nurse, drawing my attention every five minutes to the medal he'd pinned to the pillowcase next to my head. He was still, though, dead set on going to San Serafino to find the treasure, and my accidental heroics had only persuaded him further of Flashy's indispensability.

I pleaded, I begged, I quoted King's Regulations, the Monroe Doctrine, the Army and Navy Gazette and Cochrane, and none of it moved him an inch. His diplomatic mission to the new Haitian government (who knew) was over, and nothing would do but an immediate return home in glory, and Flashy for the new Commander of the Guard until the doubloons turned up.

If there was a consolation, it was Carlota, whose complicity in the plot seemed to be our little secret. Iturbide was besotted with her and I don't think I could have shopped her if I'd tried, but I wasn't inclined to. They ain't kind to fallen women in those parts, and it would be a terrible waste – after all, it wasn't her who'd planned to torture me to death. She flirted outrageously in German, which her husband didn't speak, and demurely in Spanish, which he did, and rubbed herself against me more than necessary (but not as much as desired) whenever she reached to adjust my coverlet or mop my brow. In fact, she was doing just that, and I was wondering if my recovery had advanced enough to permit some, what would the medicoes call it, vigorous physiotherapy, when the greatest surprise of the whole damn lot knocked on the door.

“The Navy's here!” in the accent of purest Portsmouth is not something you expect to hear on a foreign ship, still less followed by my own lawful brainless beauty berating the officer of the watch for not instantly showing her to her wounded husband.

“Hang on a tick! Elspeth, what in Heaven's name are you doing here?”

“Oh, Harry, you're alright! We were so worried, you just disappeared, and we didn't even notice until we were a day out of harbour. I had to buy the yacht before Eddie would turn around – you don't mind do you? And dear Sir Astley was so good as to send some Marines, though it doesn't seem we needed them. I smiled at him, you know, and he went quite pink - imagine, at his age. Who is that German lady? Harry dearest, I do hope you haven't, you know, led her on at all – ladies do get so jealous of me, some of them quite forget themselves, though I know you are my parfait gentil knight as darling Sir Walter would say.”

“Elspeth, you old trump, I have been the model of purity. You see, I've got a medal to prove it. It says so right on the front – San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth. Now let's get back to... our yacht and get away from here.”

“Oh yes, Harry, do let's. And we must do something for the Langtries. I had to be quite forceful with young Edward, you know. Perhaps an invitation to a Royal occasion? Our dear Queen does think well of the family, and you have so many connections among the younger set....”

And that is how I came to have an Order of Purity and Truth for hiding under a dago President's bed whilst he rogered his wife, and how Lillie Langtry came to meet Bertie the Bounder, and why when that old sawbones' name came back to me I had a nasty start. Miss Kingsley might have travelled damn widely, but I wonder what her gels would make of that story, eh? Damn it to Hell, if a man can't be outrageous at ninety when can he – if they come back this year, I'll tell it.