I was badly shaken, I can tell you, and not my own man again till I was well away from her house and pondering, in my philosophic way, on means of getting my own back on the vicious, bad-tempered slut. It will seem to you to be the usual, sordid conclusion to so many Flashman amours, but I have dwelt on it at some length for good reason. It wasn’t only that she was, in her way, as magnificent a creature as I’ve ever had the good fortune to mount, and comes back to my mind whenever I see a hair-brush. That alone would not be sufficient. No, my excuse is that this was my first encounter with one of the most remarkable women in my life—or in the life of anyone in the nineteenth century, for that matter. Who could have guessed then that Marie Elizabeth Rosanna James would turn a crowned head, rule a great kingdom, and leave a name to compare with Dubarry or Nell Gwynn? Well, she was Flashy’s girl for a week, at least, which is something to boast of. But I was glad to be shot of her at the time, and not just because of the way she treated me: I discovered soon after that she hadn’t been altogether truthful about herself. She hadn’t mentioned, for example, that her soldier husband was in the process of divorcing her, which would have been enough to scare me away to less controversial beds if I’d known it sooner. Apart from the unpleasant social aspects of being cited, I couldn’t have afforded it.

But she was important in my life in another way—she had been the means of my meeting the splendid Otto. You could say that it was through her that the mischief was born between him and me, and our enmity shaped his future, and the world’s.

Nothing might have come of it, though, had I not run into him again, by pure chance, a month or so later. It was at Tom Perceval’s place in Leicestershire, where I joined a party to see Nick Ward7 fight some local pug, and to do a little hunting in Tom’s coverts. Young Conyngham,8 who was a fool of a gambler, was there, and old Jack Gully, who had once been Champion of England and was now a rich ironmaster and retired from the House of Commons as well; there were about a dozen others whom I’ve forgotten, and Speedicut, too—when I’d told him how I’d spent the night of his arrest, he just roared with laughter and cried “Flashy’s luck! Well, only the brave deserve the fair!” And he insisted on telling everyone how it had happened, himself lying in a dirty cell full of drunkards while I was bumping a beauty.