Dennis Wheatley - The Ravishing of Lady Jane Ware

The fact that he had not been asked to surrender his sword and so was not actually under arrest, caused him some relief; but he was far from taking that as a sign that he had nothing to fear. At the door of the big antechamber on the first floor, his escort, with whom he had exchanged no more than a courteous greeting, handed him over to the Chamberlain-in-Waiting, and left him.

In the lofty white and gold salon, a number of people, mostly officers, were sitting about or talking in small groups. Roger knew a number of them, but had too much on his mind to wish to enter on idle conversation; so, after nodding to a few acquaintances, he sat down on a fauteuil at the far end of the room.

He had not been there long when Duroc, Marshal of the Emperor's Palaces and Camps, came into the room to speak to the big, black bearded General Montbrun who, with Lasalle, St. Croix and Colbert was, after Murat, one of Napoleon's four finest cavalry leaders.

The Marshal was one of Roger's oldest friends. Getting up, he crossed the room toward him. When Duroc had finished talking to the General, he turned, raised his eyebrows and exclaimed with pleasure:

'How good to see you, mon cher ami. I had no idea that you were in Paris.'

'You surprise me,' Roger replied. 'I got back only yesterday. But the Emperor has sent for me, and I felt certain you would be able to inform me of the reason.'

'No. He has made no mention of you to me.'

'What sort of mood is he in today?'

'There has been nothing so far to put him out of temper. But he is, of course, as busy as usual; so it will probably be an hour or two before he sees you.'

'I suppose he and Berthier are hard at it making plans to put an end to the trouble in Spain?

'Oh, no. He is not worrying himself on that score. He still regards it as no more than risings here and there by ill-armed rabbles, stiffened by an English army of no great size. It now looks as though a peace with Austria will soon be signed. Then he'll be able to withdraw his legions and send an army of a hundred thousand men to clean up the Peninsula, but you must forgive me now, as I have much to do. Unless he sends you off on some mission, we must agree a night to dine together.'

When Roger returned to his chair, he was in two minds whether or not to be pleased that a long wait lay ahead of him. On the one hand he was anxious to get his audience over, and so learn the worst; on the other he had had little time to think out how he could most effectively use the forged letter, and the delay would give him a chance to do so.

He had been pondering the matter for three-quarters of an hour when Marshal Brune came in and took a seat near him. Brune was the son of a lawyer: a well-educated man with literary pretensions, who prided himself particularly on his poetry; but it, was so indifferent that he had had to buy a printing press to get it printed. Like Lannes, Augereau and Bernadotte, he regretted the ending of government by the people, so was not well regarded by Napoleon. Unlike those Marshals, he had little ability as a soldier, and his only claim to military fame had been in 1799 when Bonaparte was in Egypt.

Bonaparte's absence had led to the loss of Italy, and France had been threatened with invasion from both the east and north. Massena had held the bastion of Switzerland and won undying fame by defeating the Russians under the redoubtable Suvarov; while Brune had been dispatched to repulse an English army that had landed in Holland. It had been commanded by the hopelessly inefficient Duke of York, and at Alkmaar Brune had compelled him to surrender. But every General knew that, given sufficient troops, any fool could have done that.

Nevertheless, the public had acclaimed him a hero, so Napoleon had thought it politic to include him in the original creation of Marshals; but there his elevation had stopped short. When the other Marshals, with the exception of Jourdan, Serurier and Perignon, had been made Dukes, Brune had received no title. Many people believed that this omission was due to his having, while Governor of Hamburg, gravely offended Napoleon by referring to himself as a Marshal of France, instead of a Marshal of the Empire. In recent years he had been employed mainly on administrative duties.

Greeting Roger pleasantly, he remarked anxiously, 'I would I could guess why our master has sent for me. I hope to God it is not to dispatch me with a corps into Spain.'

'Indeed,' Roger replied noncommittally, still occupied by his own uneasy forebodings. 'I would have thought that after all this time you would have welcomed a command in the field.'

Brune passed his hand over his tall, bald forehead. 'I would; but not in Spain. The war there is not war as we understand it. Every hand there is against us. Rather than let us buy their food and fodder, the peasants burn them. Even the children are used to carry intelligence to the English, so that General Wellesley is kept informed of our every move, which makes it impossible for us ever to take him by surprise. Our armies are isolated, each hundreds of miles from the others, and separated by countless thousands of murderous brigands. They take no prisoners. Instead, they flay or roast alive any Frenchman they can catch. The women are as bad as the men, and at times pretend friendliness in order to poison our troops. It is certain death for fewer than a score of our men to venture a few miles from their camps. Do you know, if one General wishes to send a message to another, he now has to provide his courier with an escort of two hundred horse to make certain of his reaching his destination?'

Roger nodded. 'How awful for our people. I had not realised that things were quite so bad as that. But I gather that Austria is on the verge of agreeing a peace. Once that is signed, the Emperor will be able to send a great army into Spain and subdue it.

'You think so? Well, perhaps you are right, but I doubt it. No one would dispute, his genius. I tell you, though; the war there is utterly unlike those he has been accustomed to waging. He has always relied for his victories on skilful combinations with each unit reaching its appointed place on time before the opening of a battle. To do so in Spain is impossibility. That clever little devil, Berthier, can pore over his maps and get out schedules of march till his great head bursts like a pricked balloon; but it will be all to no purpose, because Spain is cut up by a dozen ranges of high mountains, and there are no roads by which guns and baggage trains can cross them.'

Having been in Spain himself on several occasions, Roger knew that the tall, gloomy Marshal was right, and that even Napoleon would have to surpass himself to subdue all resistance in the Peninsula. They talked on for a while about the state of Europe generally, until Brune was summoned to the presence. Roger sat on for another hour; then, at last, he in turn was called on to face the unpredictable Corsican.

A corporal of the Old Guard stood rigidly on either side of the tall, gilded, double doors. The Chamberlain-in-Waiting tapped sharply on the parquet with his white wand of office; two footmen in liveries bespangled with golden bees and eagles threw the doors open and, as Roger was announced, he advanced into the great room, his head held high, his befeathered hat under his arm.

At the far end, the Emperor was pacing slowly to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his big head thrust a little forward. He was dressed, as usual, in the white and green uniform of the Guides, and presented a very different figure from that when Roger had first met him at the siege of Toulon. Then, he had been a lean faced scraggy fellow, with long, untidy hair, wearing a shabby uniform, who appeared hardly more than a youth and was remarkable only for his aggressive jaw and dark, flashing eyes. Now he looked much older than his age. He was scrupulously clean, and his hair was cut short. Both his unnaturally pallid face and his body had filled out. He had become corpulent and stooped a little when he was not consciously holding himself erect in public. His powerful jaw remained his most prominent feature, and his fine eyes held their old intensity, as he suddenly turned his head and snapped at Roger: