Flashman and the Cobra Read online

  Flashman and the Cobra

  Robert Brightwell

  Copyright © Robert Brightwell 2012

  Published in 2015 by Grinning Bandit Books

  http://grinningbandit.webnode.com

  Smashwords Edition

  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.

  This book is dedicated to all the readers of my first novel and particularly those who provided positive feedback on various websites. Your comments were greatly appreciated and encouraged me to continue with this project.

  Introduction

  This is the second instalment in the memoirs of the Georgian Englishman Thomas Flashman, which were recently discovered on a well-known auction website. Thomas is the uncle of the notorious Victorian rogue Harry Flashman, whose memoirs have already been published, edited by George MacDonald Fraser. Thomas shares many of the family traits, particularly the ability to find himself reluctantly at the sharp end of many major events of his age.

  This second packet of the Thomas Flashman papers takes him to territory familiar to readers of his nephew’s adventures, India, during the second Mahratta war. It also includes an illuminating visit to Paris during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. During Thomas’s time, India was more of a frontier country for the British and, as he explains, the British were very nearly driven out of much of it.

  The second Mahratta war saw Europeans and Indians fighting on both sides, including Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington who fought his first battles there. As you might expect Flashman is embroiled in treachery and intrigue from the outset and, despite his very best endeavours, is often in the thick of the action. He meets many of the leading characters, from British governors and generals to Mahratta warlords, fearless Rajput warriors, nomadic bandit tribes, hairy highlanders and, not least, a four-foot-tall former nautch dancer, who led the only Mahratta troops to leave the battlefield of Assaye in good order.

  Flashman gives an illuminating account with a unique perspective on both sides of the conflict. It details feats of incredible courage (not his, obviously), reckless folly and sheer good luck that were to change the future of India and the career of a general who would later win a war in Europe.

  As editor I have restricted myself to checking the historical accuracy of the facts, which have been confirmed by several contemporary accounts. I have also added a series of historical notes at the end of the book on the characters and events that are featured.

  The memoirs of Thomas’s more famous nephew, Harry Flashman, edited by George MacDonald Fraser, are also strongly recommended.

  RB

  Prologue – London, 1848

  I was at a Waterloo Dinner years ago, the guest of his Britannic Majesty King George IV of Great Britain, Crown Prince of Hanover, Defender of the Faith, Prinny to his friends - or Fat George as he was universally known behind his back. For these annual events celebrating that famous day in 1815 the walls are lined with portraits of heroes from the battle. Naturally I don’t feature, although with a debilitating deathcap fungus I might have done as much as anyone to help us win. In pride of place was a flattering portrait of George himself. I am not sure if he was literally mad like his father or just suffering from excessive toadying; but he had convinced himself that he had been present at the battle, when at the time his obese frame had not been closer to France than Dover. His delusions were such that he even claimed to have led a charge at Salamanca in Spain, disguised as General Bock.

  Fat George sat in his reinforced chair at the end of the table in the uniform of the colonel in chief of one of the regiments of guards; but the closest thing to enemy fire he had experienced was when the French ambassador broke wind. In between stuffing his face he spouted on about ordering the charge of the Scots Greys and how he watched us beat back the Napoleon’s Old Guard. “I have often heard your Majesty say so,” intoned Wellington when looked upon for confirmation and we all sat there agreeing with him to protect our pensions.

  Some years after the battle George insisted on travelling to Belgium to see first-hand the site of his imaginary triumphs. Wellington was ordered to accompany him as one of the guides and he brought me too for my own unique perspective on the battle. We rode around that bloody valley alongside the royal carriage for hours, but the king was not really interested in facts. It was the romance of battle he wanted to imbibe. After being taken around countless locations where hundreds of his loyal subjects had died showing great courage, the only time he expressed any emotion was when he was shown where Lord Uxbridge’s leg had been buried. He bawled over it like a baby. Uxbridge still lives without his leg – he is Lord Anglesey now – so it was not even the loss of the man he was crying over, just the leg.

  At this dinner Fat George asked Wellington if Waterloo was his finest victory, and after a moment’s reflection the duke replied that no, he considered that the battle of Assaye was his greatest triumph. Without hesitation the royal fat-wit replied, “Yes, we certainly gave the French a thrashing that day too, didn’t we?” Wellington agreed that “not a Frenchman had been left alive on the field of battle”, but his eye sought mine across the table and we shared a moment. We were the only ones at that gathering who had been at Assaye.

  The enemy then had not been the French but a confederation of Indian warlords, and according to all the logic of warfare, the warlords should have won. In fact if it had not been for an error of judgement on my part, the battle would have been lost and Arthur Wellesley, as he was then, would have disappeared in ignominy. His first battle had ended in disgrace after half his force marched straight past the enemy in the dark and the rest got lost in some woods. He only retained command after that disaster because his brother was governor general of India and therefore commander in chief for the region.

  Any rational person looking at the circumstances of Assaye would have concluded that it would have been suicidal to attack when Wellesley did. That was the obvious conclusion I made when a Mahratta warlord - who held me prisoner at the time - asked what would happen. I told them Wellesley would attack thinking it would persuade the Mahratta to hold their cavalry back and buy Wellesley time to withdraw. This was not selfless sacrifice on my part, you understand. I was only useful to them and worth keeping alive while Wellesley and the British East India Company army remained a force to be reckoned with. No one was more surprised than me when he did as I had predicted!

  You will say that I am just claiming credit for the great man’s work, but if you read the following memoir I think you will agree that I have suffered enough to earn some credit from the affair. This is an honest account of my life, and if I tell the truth about the cowardice, knavery and other discreditable acts, you can be assured that I tell the truth about the rest too.

  I also played my part in Waterloo, which explains why Wellington always ensured I was invited to these dinners, as he was one of the few to know the truth. My presence at these Waterloo events puzzled many who could not recall me at the start of the battle, only at the end. The explanation was simple: I was with the French at the start of the day. For a few months I had held the rank of colonel in the French army, a higher rank than the major I achieved with his Britannic Majesty’s forces. Wellington might have had more starch than a maiden aunt’s drawers and he did not suffer fools, but he was loyal to people who served him well. I did him more than a few favours in my time. If he did not know that half of them were by mistake or for my own gain, well, there was no need to tell him.

  But this account is not about Waterloo, it is about my first trip to India and how it was saved
for Britain. It is about incredible courage, villainy and intrigue. It is about some astonishing characters, such as the tiny female general who saved the Mughal emperor, commanded some of the best soldiers I have seen and is now considered something of a Catholic saint. It also explains why I, the third son of a Midlands landowner with no title, am in Wellington’s circle when he looks down on most people as though they were something he found under his shoe.

  His cold demeanour is legendary. But a man cannot be all ice, and Wellington had heat between the sheets as all who have read the courtesan Harriette Wilson’s racy memoirs will know. The silly bitch tried to blackmail him with them, which shows how well she understood him. He just sent a note back saying Publish and be damned. Like many others I paid up, but what she was planning to say about me was a lie. I was never that drunk and the bishop’s billiard table was not ruined after we finished.

  But even Wellington could not be that haughty when alone with me. He knows that I have caught him with his arse rising and falling over someone else’s wife. I had found them by surprise as I had thought she was my mistress at the time. When we were in Spain I also pimped one of my pretty Spanish cousins for him, not that she complained as she did rather well out of the arrangement. Little of his affairs is mentioned in the memoirs of his contemporaries, for he would call them out to a duel if they did. But take it from me, his daily ride was not always on horseback.

  I was also one of the few who had known him from near the beginning of his career. Few people rated his generalship at the start and he had to show that iron certainty to carry them with him. Mind you, there have been times when I have felt he has seen me as an inconvenient witness, which may partly explain some of the dangerous errands I have found myself being sent on.

  But back to the story of my adventures in India, a tale which obviously starts... in Paris!

  Chapter 1 – Paris, May 1802

  There are parts of my life that I am proud of and other parts I don’t normally mention. I suppose that my time in revolutionary Paris falls into the second category. The trouble was that too much temptation was put in my path, and if there is one thing I cannot resist, it is temptation. Mind you, I defy any red-blooded man to resist the bounties that were put before me then, and if I had been some bible-thumping God botherer with will power, well, we could have lost all India. Yes, strange as it seems those two weeks in France started a chain of events that would see me on the other side of the world with the fate of the empire in my shaking, sweaty palm. Your hand would be shaking too if you were being bounced from the clutches of a despotic prince to a ruthless female general, facing tigers and the insatiable Mrs Freese along the way.

  It all started in such a trivial way with a handful of roses. The Tuileries royal palace gardens in Paris had lots of roses. They were apparently Josephine’s favourite flower, and so to keep Napoleon happy the gardeners planted the finest blooms. To ensure that they looked beautiful when the first consul and his lady came by there were signs strategically placed around the gardens forbidding the picking of flowers. I know because I was deliberately standing in front of one when I suggested to Berkeley that his daughters would like nothing better than a bunch of blooms picked by his own fair hand. It was a childish prank, but I was now very fed up with Lord Augustus Berkeley, who had spent the last ten days ruining what would have been a very pleasant trip with his daughters if he had stayed at home. I was also bored as flower gardens are not really my thing and the ladies seemed to want to look at every inch.

  Berkeley must have been fed up too or he would have ignored the suggestion. Normally if he could not bet on it or shoot it then he had little interest in anything, but he pulled out a small fruit knife from his pocket and was soon cutting through stems and snapping off thorns to have a bunch of blooms to present. He was being quite industrious and several Parisians were looking offended at this breach of the rules by a visiting ‘roastbif’; I was sure one would go off to alert the park wardens. Not that the French normally obey rules themselves, you understand. Unlike the rigidly law-observing Prussians, the French see rules as guidelines for them and compulsory for other people. Soon a couple of agitated park-keepers could be seen in the distance coming our way. Murmuring something about going to look for a different colour, I slipped away, uncovering the sign, and moved out of sight down an avenue of hedges.

  A minute or so later there was the sound of a heated altercation between the English aristocracy and French officialdom, two forces that rarely back down for anything. I found a gap in the foliage from which I could watch the results of my mischief and was not disappointed. The park-keepers had tried to confiscate the blooms and there was a shoving match going on between the parties. Berkeley was roaring in English that he was a British lord and guest of their country and would do whatever he damn well pleased while the parkies were jabbering in excited French and pointing at the sign I had hitherto been covering. With a bit of luck Berkeley would be hauled off to the park-keepers’ hut and told off for a while, leaving me with some peace and quiet. My thoughts were already turning back to the two redeeming features of Lord Berkeley, namely his daughters Sarah and Louisa. Quite how such a short, fat, permanently bad-tempered cove had sired two such beautiful daughters was beyond me.

  Unfortunately things escalated rather more than I had been expecting. As I edged away in the direction I had last seen the girls I caught another glimpse of their choleric father through the bushes. Two soldiers had arrived now but I thought he would probably still have got away with a caution if he had not hit one of them when they grabbed the Englishman’s arm to calm him down. Flailing fists from all parties followed, and credit to the old buffer, he floored a park-keeper before a musket butt in the midriff put him permanently out of the fight. As I disappeared around a final corner more soldiers were coming and it looked like it was going to be a night in the cells now for this peer of the realm.

  I passed several people I knew as I looked for the girls, for this was the surreal summer after the Peace of Amiens was agreed between Britain and France. The treaty had only been signed in March but nobody expected it to last long. A mass exodus in both directions had therefore begun to make the most of the opportunity before war was resumed. From France came Madame Tussaud and her first collections of grisly waxworks. The British public, having been horrified by tales of the ‘terror’ in Paris when thousands of (often innocent) people had been guillotined, were enthralled. A French balloonist also came over and, to the amazement of many, travelled from London to Colchester in forty-five minutes. He and his wife then both thrilled crowds by demonstrating a new device they called a parachute.

  Leading the crowds in the opposite direction were ladies of fashion, for despite the revolution Paris was still seen as the centre for ‘haute couture’. While French dressmakers were streaming across the Channel to sell their wares in London, many ladies were coming the other way to see French fashions first-hand for themselves. Others came out of curiosity. Revolutionary France had swept away its past, and with its radical politics and scientific institutes, it was seen as new and exciting. Top of the sightseeing list was the first consul of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, whom everyone wanted to meet.

  I was no exception, for general curiosity had brought me to France; I wanted to see how different it was. I was sure that the peace would not last, for I knew that the British had no intention of giving up Malta as required by the treaty. Despite my young age – I was just twenty then – I had a junior role with Lord Castlereagh who was in the Government. The British establishment was horrified by the thought of revolutionary France being seen as a success, for that would only encourage a similar revolution in Britain. But for both sides a temporary peace made sense, if only to give national economies a chance to recover from the high cost of war.

  I had travelled to Spain and sailed around the Mediterranean the year before on diplomatic duty. I had been given that assignment because I spoke Spanish and could pass as a Spaniard with my black hair
and slightly Latin complexion from my Spanish mother. I had returned with the undeserved reputation of being a capable agent, a sum in prize money and a taste for foreign travel. When the peace was declared it seemed a rare opportunity to see what was happening on the other side of the Channel. To add to my pleasure, when I announced my plans the Berkeley sisters from the neighbouring estate were keen to join me to see the Paris fashions, properly chaperoned, of course, as befit the daughters of an earl. They were pretty and good company, unlike their father, whose mood range spanned only from irritated to apoplectic.

  His Lordship showed no interest in coming with us and so I happily agreed to escort the girls, and even if I could not shake off the chaperone, I was sure we would have a good time. Unfortunately a week before we were due to depart Berkeley changed his mind and decided to join the trip. A fact I believe not entirely unconnected with an American he had insulted who was subsequently seeking satisfaction with a duel. In any event, he had glowered at us throughout the two-day journey to Dover, moaned constantly during the Channel crossing and then roundly berated every Frenchman he came across for all sorts of imagined slights. I was thoroughly sick of him and even his daughters were looking tense every time his brooding bulk came into view.

  I found them at the far end of the gardens. They were chattering excitedly about a reception at the Austrian embassy that we had been invited to that evening. All the leading embassies in Paris were making the most of the window of peace to organise regular functions to encourage better relations and trade between their nation and France. A junior Austrian diplomat was staying at our hotel and, with an eye for pretty girls, he had provided invitations for the whole party. Not that we were intending that Berkeley or Mrs Fairfax, the chaperone, would come with us.