At all events, these scraps of gossip reached me from time to time over the next few years. In that time I was out of England a good deal—as will be set down in another packet of my memoirs, if I’m spared to write them. My doings in the middle ’forties of the century don’t fit in with my present tale, though, so I pass them over for the moment and come to the events to which my meeting with Lola and Otto Bismarck was the prelude.

Chapter 4

I can see, now, that if I hadn’t deserted Speedicut that night, hadn’t been rude to Bismarck, hadn’t set Jack Gully on to give him a beating, and finally, hadn’t taken my spite out on Lola by peaching on her to Ranelagh—without all these “if’s” I would have been spared one of the most frightening and incredible experiences of my life. Another glorious chapter in the heroic career of Harry Flashman would not have been written, and neither would a famous novel.

However, I’ve seen too much of life to fret over if’s and but’s. There’s nothing you can do about them, and if you find yourself at the end of the day an octogenarian with money in the bank and drink in the house—well, you’d be a fool to wish that things had fallen out differently.

Anyway, I was home again in London in ’47, with cash in my pocket for once—my own cash, too, dishonestly got, but no dirtier than the funds which old Morrison, my father-in-law, doled out as charity to keep us respectable “for my wee daughter’s sake.” His wee daughter, my Elspeth, was as pleased to see me as she ever was; we still suited very well between the sheets, however much she was playing loose with her admirers. I had ceased worrying about that, too.

However, when I arrived home, hoping for a few months’ rest to recover from the effects of a pistol-ball which had been dug out of the small of my back, there was a nasty shock awaiting me. My dear parents-in-law, Mr and Mrs Morrison of Paisley, were now in permanent residence in London; I hadn’t seen much of them, thank God, since I had married their beautiful, empty-headed trollop of a daughter several years before, when I was a young subaltern in Cardigan’s Hussars. We had detested each other then, they and I, and time hadn’t softened the emotion, on either side.