Royal Flash

would have loosed Mr de Gautet's guts all over the floor, but he was quick and turned it with the forte of his blade.

He came in again, on guard, his narrow eyes on mine, and the blades rasped together. He feinted and cut hard, but I was there again, and as we strained against each other I sneered at him over the crossed blades and exerted all my strength to bear down his guard. I felt his blade giving before mine, and then it whirled like lightning and it was as though a red-hot iron had been laid against my right temple. The pain and shock of it sent me staggering back, I dropped my schlager and grabbed at my face, and as Bismarck jumped between us I saw the most unpleasant sight I know, which is my own blood; it coursed down my cheek and on to my hand, and I howled and dabbed at the wound to try to staunch it.

'Halt!' cries Bismarck, and strode over to inspect my wound— not because he gave a tuppenny damn about me, but to see if it was in the right place. He seized my head and peered. 'To an inch!' he exclaimed, and tipped his hand triumphantly to de Gautet, who smirked and bowed.

'Fahren sie fort!' cries Bismarck, stepping back, and signing to me to pick up my schlager. Shaking with pain and rage, and with the blood feeling as though it were streaming out of me, I told him what he could do with it; I wasn't going to stand up to be cut to bits for his amusement.

He went red with fury. 'Pick it up,' he rasped, 'or I'll have Kraftstein hold you down and we'll set the other scar on you with a rusty saw!'

'It's not fair!' I shouted. 'I think my skull's fractured!'

He damned me for a coward, snatched up the schlager, and thrust it into my hand. And in case worse should happen, I squared up to de Gautet again, resolving to take the other cut as quickly as possible, and then to settle the account in my own way, if I could.

He shuffled in, full of bounce, cutting smartly right and left. I parried them, tried a quick cut of my own, and then flicked up my point to leave my left side unguarded. Instinctively he slashed at the gap, and I took it with my eyes shut and teeth gritted against the pain. My God, but it hurt, and I couldn't repress a shriek; I reeled, but kept a tight grip on my schlager, and as de Gautet stepped back, satisfied with his butchery, and glanced towards Bismarck, I forced myself into a sudden lunge that sent my point through his lousy body.

The next thing I knew I had been hurled to the floor, and as I lay there, blinded with my own blood, all hell broke loose. Someone fetched me a tremendous kick in the ribs, I heard Rudi shouting and de Gautet groaning— delightful sound—and then I must have fainted, for when I opened my eyes I was sprawled on one of the benches, with Kraftstein sponging the blood from my face.

My first thought was: they'll settle my hash now, for certain, and then I realised that Bismarck and de Gautet had vanished, and only young Rudi was left, grinning down at me.

'I couldn't have done better myself,' says he. 'Not much, anyhow. Our friend de Gautet won't be quite so cock-a-hoop another time. Not that you've damaged him much—you barely nicked his side—but he'll ache for a day or two. So will you, of course. Let's have a look at your honourable scars.'

My head was aching abominably, but when he and Kraftstein had examined it, they pronounced it satisfactory—from their point of view. De Gautet had laid his cuts exactly, and provided the wounds were left open they would quickly heal into excellent scars, Kraftstein assured me.

'Give you a most distinguished appearance,' says Rudi. 'All the little Prussian girls will be fluttering for you.'

I was too sick and shocked even to curse at him. The pain seemed to be searing into my brain, and I was half-swooning as Kraftstein bandaged my skull and the pair of them supported me upstairs and laid me down on my bed. The last thing I heard before I slipped into unconsciousness was Rudi saying that it would be best if my highness rested for a while, and I remember thinking it odd that he had slipped out of his play-actor's role for a while and then back into it.

That was my only experience of schlager-play, and it was one too many. But it taught me something, and that was a fearful respect for Otto Bismarck and his ruffians. If they were capable of that kind of cold-blooded mutilation then there was nothing they wouldn't do; from that moment I put all thought of trying to escape from Schonhausen out of my mind. I hadn't the game for it.

As to the scars, they healed quickly under Kraftstein's care. I'll carry them to my grave, one close to my right ear, the other slightly higher, but just visible now that my hair is thinner. Neither is disfiguring, fortunately; indeed, as Rudi observed, there is something quite dashing-romantic about them. They've been worth a couple of campaigns, I often think, in giving people the wrong impression of my character.

They hurt most damnably for a couple of days, though, during which I kept to my room. That was all the convalescence they would allow me, for they were in a great sweat to begin what Rudi was pleased to call my 'princely education'.

This consisted of some of the hardest brain work I've ever had in my life. For a solid month, every waking hour, I lived, talked, walked, ate and drank Prince Carl Gustaf until I could have screamed at the thought of him— and sometimes did. At its worst it amounted to gruelling mental torture, but in recalling it now I have to admit that it was brilliantly done. I wouldn't have believed it possible, but the three of them—Rudi, Kraftstein, and Bersonin— came as close as one humanly could to turning me into another person.

They did it, subtly and persistently, by pretending from the first that I was Carl Gustaf, and spending hour after hour reminding me about myself. I suppose to approach the thing in any other way would have been useless, for it would have been constant admission of the imposture, and what an idiot, hare-brained scheme it was. They took me through that Danish bastard's life a hundred times, from the cradle upwards, until I swear I must have known more about him than he did himself. His childhood ailments, his relatives, his ancestors, his tutors, his homes, his playmates, his education, his likes, his dislikes, his habits—there wasn't a call of nature that he had answered in twenty years that I wasn't letter-perfect in by the time they had done, Hour after hour, day after day, they had me sitting at that long table while they poured fact after fact into me—what food he liked, what pets he had had, what he read, what colour his sister's eyes were, what nursery name his governess had called him (Tutti, of all things), how long he had lived at Heidelberg, what his musical tastes were ('Pea Diavolo', by one Auber, had apparently impressed him, and he was forever whistling an air from it; it says something for their teaching that I've whistled it off and on for fifty years now.) Where they had got all their information, God only knows, but they had two huge folders of papers and drawings which seemed to contain everything that he had ever done and all that was known about him. I couldn't tell you my own grandmother's Christian name, but God help me I know that Carl Gustaf's great-uncle's mastiff was called Ragnar, and he lived to be twenty-three.

'And what was your highness's favourite game when you were little?' Rudi would ask.

'Playing at sailors,' I would reply.

'What was the English ship you boasted to your mother you had captured at Copenhagen?'

'The Agamemnon.'

'How did you come to capture it?'

'How the blazes do I know? I was only three, wasn't I? I can't remember.'

'You have been told. It was stuck in a mudbank. In your infant re-enactment you covered yourself in mud in a garden pond, don't you remember?'

That was the kind of thing I had to know, and when I protested that no one was ever likely to ask me what games I had played when I was little, they wouldn't argue, but would pass patiently on—to remind me of the fever I had had when I was fourteen, or the time I broke my arm falling from an apple tree.

All our talk was conducted in German, at which I made capital progress—indeed, Rudi's one fear was that I might be too proficient, for Carl Gustaf apparently thdn't speak it too well, for all his Heidelberg education. Bersonin, who despite his taciturnity was a patient teacher, instructed me in Danish, but possibly because he himself only spoke it at second hand, I didn't take to it easily. I never learned to think in it, which is unusual for me, and I found it ugly and dull, with its long vowels that make you sound as though you had wind.

But the real curse of my days was being instructed in the actual impersonation. We had the tremendous advantage, as I was to see for myself later, that Carl Gustaf and I were real doppelgangers, as like as two tits. Even our voices were the same, but he had mannerisms and tricks of speech that I had to learn, and the only way was for me to try attitudes and phrases over and over, in different styles, until Rudi would snap his fingers and exclaim: 'Er ist es selbst! Now say it again, and yet again.'