should take part with Coventry and Williams, but modesty forbade.
'I’m no diplomat, sir,' says I. 'Too blunt by half. His lordship and Owen will do it ten times better without me. Besides,' I added, blunt honest old Flashy, 'the fact is he don’t like me. Dunno why, but there it is. No point in putting his back up, so the less I’m mentioned, the better.'
D’you know, Williams absolutely shook his head in sympathy, and Bertie went so far as to give my arm a clap before I withdrew. He was even more demonstrative an hour later, when I was summoned to his presence just as I was on the point of turning in, and found him sitting on the edge of his bed in his dressing-gown, glass in hand, cigar at the high port, plainly dog-weary but content at having laboured well in the vineyard.
'Well, he’s signed!' cries he jovially. He picked up a paper and held it out: just a few lines, with a forest of names at the foot, led by 'W. Gordon-Cumming' and the Prince’s scrawl. 'Not without the deuce of a struggle, Owen Williams tells me. Swore it was tantamount to a confession, but gave in when they told him it was that or ruin. Help yourself, Flashman,' indicating decanter and humidor, 'and sit ye down. Gad, I don’t care if I never have such an evening again—after dinner, too, shan’t sleep a wink.' He swigged comfortably. 'D’you know, I did not half believe he’d put his signature to it—but you knew, downy old bird that you are!' He was positively twinkling.
'Well, sir, he really didn’t have much choice, did he? All things considered, he’s come off dam' lightly.'
'That’s what Lycett Green thinks, tho' he’d the grace not to say so. Oh, aye, they’ve all put their names to it, as you see. He peered at the paper, shaking his head. 'I must say, it’s a damning thing for an innocent man to sign … and yet …' He screwed up his little eyes at me. 'D’you think there’s the least possibility he’s telling the truth?'
'Look at it this way, sir—would you have signed it, knowing yourself innocent? Or would you have damned ’em for liars and offered to put ’em through every court in the land? Or taken a horsewhip to ’em?'
And think what Mama would have made of that, I might have added. He looked solemn, wagging his head, and then demanded, almost peevishly:
'What the devil possessed him to do it—to cheat, I mean? Was he off his head; d’you think? You know, temporarily deranged? One hears of such things.'
'Dunno, sir. And I doubt if he does, either.'
He shook his head and rumbled a few philosophies while we sipped and smoked. He was enjoying his relief, and when we parted he was at his most affable, pumping my fin and calling me Harry again, 'I’m obliged to you … not for the first time. This—' he tapped Cumming’s paper '—was a brainwave, and the sooner it’s safely bestowed, the better. Not the sort of item we’d care to see in the morning press, what? Well, good-night to you, old fellow, thank’ee again … aye, and thank the Lord we’ll hear no more of it!'
And if you believe that, sweet prince, you will indeed believe anything, thinks I. For if there was one stone cold certainty, it was that we would hear more, abundantly more and running over, of the Great Baccarat Scandal of Tranby Croft. Bertie, blind to everything but the need to keep it from the Queen’s ears, and asses like Coventry and Williams, might suppose that the vows of silence sworn by all and sundry would prove binding—honour and all that, you know. I knew better. At least a dozen folk, two of ’em women, were in the secret, and the notion that they’d all hold their tongues was plain foolish. It was bound to get out—as I’d deter-mined it should from the moment I’d stood in Gordon-Cumming’s presence, weighed him up, and realised what a prime subject he was for shoving down the drain. All it needed after that, as you know, was an inspiration, and careful management; now, nature could take its course.
Which it did, and if it took longer to leak out than I’d expected, the resultant row was worth the delay. It’s still not established who blew the gaff, but my firm belief is that it was Bertie himself, unlikely as that may seem. But the fact is that the Yankee papers named as their source none other than Elspeth’s chum, Daisy Brooke aforementioned (it was they who christened her Babbling Brooke), and since she was warming the princely mattress in those days, it’s odds on that he whispered the scandal to her, more fool he. Daisy swore ’twasn’t so, and threatened to sue, but never did.
Whoever blabbed, it was all over the clubs and messes before Christmas that Cumming had cheated, chaps were cutting him dead, and he was demanding retractions and apologies and not getting them. So there he was, reputation blasted, and nothing for it, you’d have thought, but to order a pint of port and a pistol for breakfast or join the Foreign Legion.
He did neither. To the shocked murmurs and secret glee of Society, the delight of the public, and I’ve no doubt the tenor of the Prince of Wales, he brought an action for slander against his five accusers from Tranby.
The trial came off in June of ’91, and it’s one of the regrets of my life that I was not present, if only to see stout Bertie in the witness-box, squirming under the inquisition of saucy jurors who didn’t know their place, unlike the judge and counsel who grovelled to him something servile, and did everything but tote him in and out of court in a palankeen. The proceedings lasted a week, and by all accounts it was one of the finest legal circuses ever seen, with the judge as ringmaster and nothing lacking but an orchestra and chorus girls. Knowing our revered Lord Chief Justice of the day, the ancient Coleridge, I wasn’t surprised, for he was a jolly old buck with a tremendous fund of good stories; once made a speech lasting twenty-three days, they tell me, and was responsible for the three-mile limit, in case you’re interested.
You may be sure I was sorely tempted once or twice to view the spectacle, but decided reluctantly to keep clear—when you’ve had a hand in engineering a disaster it’s best to stand well out from under to avoid falling debris. I knew Bertie and Co wouldn’t advertise my part in the affair, which was deplorable enough with-out the notorious Flashy being dragged in, and sure enough they didn’t. One or two who knew I’d been at Tranby quizzed me, but I took a stern and silent line—you know, shockin' biznai, old comrade, beyond belief, state o' the Army, damnable altogether , , , that sort of thing.
Aside from the verdict, which I’ll tell you presently in case you_ don’t know, the great sensation was the storm that burst over the head of our unfortunate Heir Apparent. God forbid I should ever feel sorry for the fat bounder, but even I was astonished at the way the press and pulpits laid into him; you’d have thought he’d been kidnapping nuns and selling ’em to the Port Said brothels. And all because he’d been playing baccarat! 'Woe to the Monarchy!' wailed one rag, another spoke of a 'chorus of condemnation', and the rest expressed shock and disgust, denounced his taste for the 'lowest type of gambling', and recoiled from the spectacle of 'the future King of England officiating at a gamblers' orgy'. Even the Times went wild with terms like 'regret', 'concern', and 'distress', a Scotch journal decided that 'the Prince is evidently not what he ought to be', but the leader I liked best was the one that said the British Empire was humiliated and the rest of civilisation was pointing the finger at us.
As to the trial itself, you can go to the official record if you’ve a mind to, but I flatter myself you won’t learn much that I haven’t told you. The lawyers went back and forth over every blessed moment of those three nights, every shift of those damned counters, every syllable of who said what to whom, and what expressions they wore, and what they thought and why, over and over, and I dare say at the end of it the jury were as fogged as the public. The biggest guns of the day fought the case: Clarke, the Solicitor-General, no less, who appeared for Cumming, was reckoned the shrewdest mouthpiece of the day, while the defendants were rep-resented by two of the best hatchet-men in the business, Charles Russell and young Asquith—you know the latter as the buffoon who infests Number 10 Downing Street at the moment, and my recollection of him is as a shining morning face to which I once presented a prize at the City of London School, but for all that he was accounted a sharp hand in court, while Russell was a human hawk, and looked it.
Reading the press reports, I concluded that the evidence given didn’t differ much from what I myself remembered of events, and in nothing essential. Owen Williams had drawn up a precis of what had happened at Tranby, in which various holes were picked: there seemed to be uncertainty over the order of the interviews on the Wednesday evening, and some vagueness as to who had suggested presenting the damning document to Cumming—which wasn’t surprising, since it had been yours truly, and they were keeping me out of it. Elspeth likewise: I’d been worried that she might be called as a witness, since on the first night she’d sat as an onlooker, and on the second had for a time taken Lady Coventry’s place next to Cumming, but either they’d forgotten about her—or more likely they’d remembered, and had realised that the last thing the trial needed was her drivelling brightly in the witness-box. Like several others of the party, she wasn’t even mentioned.
None of which mattered to the case. Cumming, in evidence, repeated his flat denial of the charges, claiming that he’d lost his head and signed the paper only because he’d been persuaded that there was no other way to avoid a public scandal. He got in a sly thrust at Bertie by suggesting that H.R.H. had been chiefly concerned to cover his own ample rear—which, as I knew, was gospel true.
