Flashman's Waterloo Read online

  Flashman’s Waterloo

  Robert Brightwell

  This book is dedicated to my parents, David and Sheila Brightwell

  Copyright © Robert Brightwell 2016

  Robert Brightwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This ebook may not be reproduced or copied except for the use of the original purchaser.

  Headlines from the French Moniteur newspaper covering the return of Napoleon:

  - 10 March: The Corsican ogre has just landed in Golfe-Juan

  - 11 March: The tiger has arrived at Gap

  - 12 March: The monster has slept in Grenoble

  - 13 March: The tyrant has crossed Lyon

  - 18 March: The usurper has been seen sixty leagues from Paris

  - 19 March: Bonaparte strides along but he will never enter Paris

  - 20 March: Napoleon will be tomorrow below our city walls

  - 21 March: The Emperor has reached Fontainebleau

  - 22 March: His Imperial and Royal Majesty entered yesterday his castle of Tuileries among his lawful subjects

  Introduction

  This sixth packet of memoirs from the notorious Georgian rogue Thomas Flashman covers the extraordinary events that culminated in a battle just south of Brussels, near a place called Waterloo.

  The first six months of 1815 were a pivotal time in European history. As a result, countless books have been written by men who were there and by those who studied it afterwards. But despite this wealth of material there are still many unanswered questions including:

  - Why did the man who promised to bring Napoleon back in an iron cage, instead join his old commander?

  - Why was Wellington so convinced that the French would not attack when they did?

  - Why was the French emperor ill during the height of the battle, leaving its management to the hot-headed Marshal Ney?

  - What possessed Ney to launch a huge and disastrous cavalry charge in the middle of the battle?

  - Why did the British Head of Intelligence always walk with a limp after the conflict?

  The answer to all these questions in full or in part can be summed up in one word: Flashman.

  This extraordinary tale is aligned with other historical accounts of the Waterloo campaign and reveals how Flashman’s attempt to embrace the quiet diplomatic life backfires spectacularly. The memoir provides a unique insight into how Napoleon returned to power, the treachery and intrigues around his hundred day rule and how ultimately he was robbed of victory. It includes the return of old friends and enemies from both sides of the conflict and is a fitting climax to Thomas Flashman’s Napoleonic adventures.

  As always, if you have not read them already, the adventures of Thomas’ nephew in the later Victorian era, edited by George MacDonald Fraser are strongly recommended.

  Robert Brightwell

  Chapter 1 – England, September 1814

  “Are you sure we should be doing this, sir?” asked old Jasper as I pushed the creaking door open.

  “Oh yes, it is a little treat I have promised myself for a long time.”

  “But they will hear us in the big house, sir. I don’t think her ladyship will be happy.”

  “Nonsense, man, it is three in the morning; they will all be asleep. Now put your fiddle down and light some of these candles so that we can see what we are doing.” I held up my lantern to shine its beam across the little chapel. There were eight short pews down either side of the aisle and a small stone altar at the far end, but it was not these I was interested in. I walked down one side using the light to read the memorials on the wall to the local worthies.

  After six years abroad, the last two living mostly in wooden lodges, it was strangely comforting to be back within the solid stone walls I had known in my childhood. I knew many of the families whose names were carved into the stone slabs and just a mile away was another chapel where my own ancestors resided. As the light grew in the little church so did a feeling of unease about what I was planning to do, but I pushed it aside and looked down at the tombstones set in the floor for my quarry.

  “Here it is, sir,” called Jasper from the other side of the church. I grinned in delight as I saw the new crisply carved tomb that he was pointing to. It was chest high, cut in local limestone and capped with a large brass plaque.

  “It was good of him to keep the top nice and flat, that will make things much easier,” I crowed as I strolled across. One of the heavy oak pews had been shortened to make room for this fresh edifice, which made some useful steps up to its surface. In a moment I was standing on it and staring down at the polished inscription glinting in the light from the lantern at my feet. The name Lord Augustus Berkeley was followed by a nauseating description of the peer’s virtues, which bore no similarity to the permanently bad-tempered, overbearing, vicious and spiteful villain I remembered.

  “Noble and charitable my arse,” I scoffed staring down at it. I didn’t recall any charity when I was forced to flee to India back in ’02 to avoid his lordship’s heavies. Admittedly he had just discovered I had bedded both of his daughters in a single night, but that was not entirely my fault. We had been in Paris then but his henchmen had pursued me all the way to London, where they doubtless had orders to break my skull and drop my body in a weighted sack from a bridge over the Thames. I had promised myself then, as I was forced to sail away on the Indiaman to the other side of the world, that one day I would come back and dance on his grave. Now that promise was about to be fulfilled. “Go on, Jasper, get your fiddle and strike up a jig.”

  As the old family retainer moved to the back of the chapel to retrieve his instrument, still grumbling to himself that no good would come of the night’s work, I reflected that this was not quite how I had expected my homecoming to begin. My ship from Canada had landed three days before. My friend Campbell and I had caught the stage from Portsmouth to London but then found I had missed the mail coach north. Too impatient to wait for the next one, I had hired a horse and come on alone.

  Despite changing my mount halfway, it had still taken me two days and it was well past nightfall when I reached the Flashman family estate. I had ridden the last few miles almost from memory as I could see little of where I was going, but eventually the hooves crunched up the gravel drive I had known so well. However, my plans for a jubilant homecoming had to be postponed; when Jasper had finally opened the front door to my persistent knocking he told me that it was well past midnight and my father was a-bed having taken a sleeping draught for his gout.

  “I will come back and see him in the morning, then,” I told Jasper. “Now I want to go and see my son and find out what kind of welcome I can expect from my wife. Are they both well, do you know?” As readers of my earlier adventures will recall, I had only discovered my son’s existence recently and had not spoken to my wife in six years.

  “It will be too late for that now, sir,” the old servant had cautioned. “They will be a-bed too. You had best spend the night here and see everyone in the morning.” He had been right of course but I had been in no mood for sleeping, which had led to our current nocturnal adventure.

  The first few notes scratched from Jasper’s violin and while there was little room to dance, I started to shuffle my feet over the waste of brass that was Berkeley’s eulogy.

  “See, you old bastard,” I shouted down at him. “I am still here and if there is any justice you will be in the fiery pit. Huh, you said I had no breeding but now you are just a breeding ground for worms, while here I am dancing over your rotten corpse, how do you like that?”

  I think I must have been exhausted and part out of mind as I had hardly slept in three days. Suddenly the whole situation seemed ridiculous and I just stood and roared with laughter
. Jasper stopped playing and stared at me in astonishment as I shouted at him in delight, “I have only gone and bloody survived. Everything they threw at me and yet still I have made it back.” God, there had been a lot too since I had last been in that chapel; I had faced countless columns of French infantry, Polish lancers, Spanish partisans, vengeful dwarfs, angry fathers and husbands, republican plotters, secret police and more recently, American soldiers, sailors and Iroquois warriors.

  Despite all their efforts to kill me, in various colourful ways, I had made it back with nothing more than a few scars to show for their trouble. Now, at last, the future promised peace and tranquillity. The war in America was winding down; Napoleon had abdicated from the throne of France and was ruling his new kingdom, the little island of Elba. Europe was at peace at last. Nothing it seemed could disturb a well-earned period of rest and relaxation for one Major Thomas Flashman, soon to be retired on half pay and determined never to stand on a battlefield again.

  In fact, I had not only survived, but if I played my cards right I could live a prosperous and comfortable life. My wife, Louisa, was now a wealthy woman, having inherited Berkeley’s estate, while the reason our marriage had failed lay mouldering beneath my feet. But a lot can happen in six years, and I had no idea how my wife felt about her husband after her father had done his best to poison her against me. Campbell had told me that a man called Lamb had been with her when he had last seen her in London. Jasper had also confirmed that this Lamb character had been spending a lot of time on the estate recently. Indeed, just before he died, Berkeley had been making enquiries at Horseguards, the headquarters of the army, to see if they would confirm me as dead so that Louisa could re-marry. Fortunately the wheels of officialdom work slowly. Horseguards wrote to Wellington, my former commander in Spain and his letter advising that I was in all probability dead arrived only just after my letter from Canada confirming I was still very much with the living.

  I had no idea if Louisa wanted to re-marry or if that was her father’s idea. Campbell had confided that she must have had some feelings for me as she had asked him if there was any hope for my survival at their last meeting. Back then he had thought me dead too and she had cried when he told her that almost certainly I had been killed. Well I would just have to be especially endearing, give her time to get used to me being around again and rely on the old Flashy charm. What girl could resist that? I found that out a few seconds later.

  “What on earth do you think you are doing dancing on my father’s tomb?” The sharp female voice cracked through the chapel like a whip. As I whirled round I saw a woman in a hooded cloak walking towards me while another elderly servant looked nervously around the door behind her, holding a blunderbuss gun across his chest.

  “Thomas!” She stopped in her tracks when she recognised me. As her head tilted up the candles showed me her face for the first time in six years and by God she was still a stunner. Sight of her took my breath away for an instant. She looked exactly the same as the girl I had married on an Indiaman ship ten years before, when we had both been twenty-three. My, a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then.

  While I looked in wonder at her beauty, her eyes abruptly blazed with anger. “So this is the first thing you wanted to do when you got home, is it? No thought to see me or your son, just to dance over my father’s body and taunt him in his grave?”

  “No, no,” I protested. I cast around for an excuse and saw one trying to sidle out of the chapel holding a fiddle. “He told me you would be asleep,” I cried pointing an accusing finger at Jasper. The old man dutifully cringed from the look of scorn Louisa gave him before she whirled back to me.

  “Don’t try and tell me that dancing on my father’s tomb was Jasper’s idea as well,” she raged as I started to climb down onto the stone floor.

  As soon as I was on the ground I turned to face her, giving her what I hoped was my best winning smile and holding out my arms in welcome. “Come here, my darling, your husband is home.”

  She came all right. I barely had a chance to glimpse in the gloom of the church her right hand before it slapped me hard around the face. “Husband,” she shouted scornfully. “I came halfway around the world to find you in India, but then you row with my father and never send me a single letter, not one in six years until you hear that I am rich.”

  Well that was just too much. “Damn you,” I roared. “I don’t care about your money; I have six years’ rent from my London house untouched. I came because I wanted to see you and my son. And anyway,” I added indignantly, “I did write, I must have written you a hundred letters. But your father, the noble and charitable lord, according to his inscription, burned them as they arrived and told me to stop writing as my correspondence would never be delivered.” In truth I had written no more than a dozen letters before Berkeley responded, but my protestations took the wind out of her sails. She looked reproachfully at her father’s tomb and evidently did not need convincing he was capable of such an act.

  She continued in a softer tone, “Surely you realised that I would not have minded you waking me at any time of the night. I have had a man staying at the coaching inn at Rugby with horses for you ever since I got the news you were alive and coming home.”

  I had been on the back foot at the start of our conversation, but now I sensed I had the upper hand and I was determined to keep it. So I drew myself up a little and tried to look pompously stuffed as I responded, “I heard you have been spending a lot of time with a fellow called Lamb, I did not want to arrive unexpectedly and cause a scene.”

  “Charles and I are just good friends…”

  “Charles Lamb... You don’t mean old Spanker who used to be in Byron’s crowd?” She coloured at that and I crowed in delight as I realised who my rival for her affections was. He was a timid fellow who had been in Byron’s circle of friends years ago, when I had been trying to make some gelt selling them forged antiquities. I had heard in one of the fashionable brothels in town, that instead of rogering the girl, he got his jollies by spanking her instead. You can rest assured that I spread that story around so that he soon had his new nickname.

  “So has he tanned your arse too?” I asked vindictively, and as her colour deepened I saw that he probably had. But unless you were a Haymarket whore, Charles Lamb was lamb by name and lamb by nature. He was notorious for avoiding any kind of conflict. I could just imagine that he was now terrified of coming across me. “Wait a minute, though,” I queried as old memories came back to me. “Didn’t he marry one of those girls who liked to dress up as a page boy to please Byron?”

  “Yes,” Louisa admitted irritably, “but there was a scandal and they are getting a divorce.” I didn’t know it then, but found out a few days later that it was a capital scandal too. It was the talk of London during 1813, not that gossip ever made it to Canada. Lady Caroline Lamb had become obsessed with Byron and had been having an affair with him before and during her marriage. But she had to compete with others for Byron’s attention, including Spanker’s own mother, who was another notorious society trollop. When Byron spurned Caroline Lamb she confronted him and made a tremendous scene which culminated in her trying to cut her own wrists with a broken champagne glass. Georgian society was infamously liberal, but it had its limits and that was going too far. A mistress had to know her place, especially if she was also someone else’s wife! Caroline Lamb had been bustled away to Ireland, leaving Spanker to find amusement elsewhere.

  He had been a junior minister in government and the son, at least legally as most doubted his paternity, of Lord Melbourne. As the injured party in a divorce, I could imagine that Louisa’s father would see him as a suitably noble marriage prospect. Berkeley was desperate for his daughter to shed her union to a disreputable but conveniently missing husband. Yes, it was a wedding that would have tidied up several loose ends, but now I had gone and ruined everything by re-appearing.

  I had expected Louisa to look embarrassed or ashamed, but not a bit of it. H
er chin rose and a shrewdly calculating look crossed her face. “If we are going to talk of gossip and rumour, we could talk about a story Lady Jersey told me of you and a Spanish woman in Seville Cathedral.”

  That shocked me, I can tell you. I knew that the story of Agustina and I had been the talk of the army in Spain after a spiteful priest tried to ruin my reputation, but I had no idea that the tale had reached England. “Whatever you heard is an outrageous lie,” I blustered before she held up a hand to stop me.

  “Thomas, let us both leave the past where it belongs.” She came forward then, smiling at me, and put her arm through mine. “Come, husband, let me take you home.”

  Chapter 2

  I awoke next morning in what must have been the lord’s old bedroom in the centre of the house, with his naked daughter sleeping beside me. It gave me no small pleasure that the old bastard would be spinning in his grave if his ghost could see me. Everything he had, apart from his title, which went to a nephew, was now Louisa’s – and as her husband, it was now mine too. It was not the money that was important, but the place in society. Despite my attempts to shirk every danger across several continents and campaigns, I had emerged with much credit. I was considered by many, including Wellington, as something of a hero and a man who had accomplished many challenging missions. But heroes were ten a penny now the war was over, with many already put on half pay. Instead my elevation from third son of a local landowner to having my own country estate, meant that I should have been able to live comfortably for the rest of my days. On top of that I had a son, my own flesh and blood, whose existence I had hitherto been unaware of.

  I remember lying there that morning and being completely confident that I had seen the last of my army days. At last a life of pleasure and comfort was spread out before me, without the slightest hint of bayonet charges, murderous savages or the various other homicidal lunatics that I seemed to attract. For once I do not think it was naiveté on my part, for only one man could have possibly foreseen the extraordinary chain of events that were to come and he was sitting quietly on an island in the Mediterranean at the time. And even he could not have predicted the critical role that I was to play in the dramas ahead.