07 Flashman At The Charge by George MacDonald Fraser

Author:George MacDonald Fraser
Language: eng
Format: azw
Published: 2010-10-19T23:00:00+00:00

Flashman At The Charge

I’m not slow on the uptake, even with a bearded baboon nearly seven feet tall roaring at my face from a few inches away, and what I understood from this extraordinary out-burst simply took my breath away. I’m all for family, you understand, but I doubt if I have the dynastic instinct as strong as all that.

“You are such a man,” says he, and suddenly he edged his horse even closer, and crushed my arm in his enormous paw. “You can get sons - you have done so,” he croaked, his livid face beside mine. “You have a child in England - and Sara has proved you also. When the war is over, you will leave here, and go to England, far away. No one will ever know - but you and I!”

I found my voice, and said something about Valla.

“She is my daughter,” says he, and his voice rasped like an iron file. “She knows what this means to the house of Pencherjevsky. She obeys.” And for the first time he smiled, a dreadful, crooked grin through his beard. “From what Sara tells me, she may be happy to obey. As for you, it will be no hardship. And” - he took me by the shoulder, rocking me in the saddle - “it may be worth much or little, but hereafter you may call Pencherjevsky from the other side of hell, and he will come to your side!”

If it was an extraordinary proposition, I won’t pretend it was unwelcome. Spooky, of course, but immensely flattering, after all. And you only had to imagine, for a split second, what Pencherjevsky’s reaction would have been to a polite refusal - I say no more.

“It will be a boy,” says he, “I know it. And if by chance it is a girl - then she shall have a man for a husband, if I have to rake the world for him!”

An impetuous fellow, this Count - it never occurred to him that it might be his little Valla who was barren, and not her husband. However, that was not for me to say, so I kept mum, and left all the arrangements to papa.

He did it perfectly, no doubt with the connivance of that lustful slut Sara - there was a lady who took pleasure in her experimental work, all right. I sallied forth at midnight, and feeling not unlike a prize bull at the agricultural show - “‘ere ‘e is, ladies’n’ gennelmen, Flashman Buttercup the Twenty-first of Horny Bottom Farm” - tip-toed out of the corridor where my room and East’s lay, and set off on the long promenade to the other wing. It was ghostly in that creaky old house, with not a soul about, but true love spurred me on, and sure enough Valla’s door was ajar, with a little sliver of light lancing across the passage floor.

I popped in - and she was kneeling beside the bed, praying! I didn’t know whether it was for

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