Dennis Wheatley - The Rising Storm

Fortunately he possessed the gift of expressing himself as fluently on paper as in speech, so his pen moved without hesitation while filling page after page with fine writing; but, nevertheless, it was close on three in the morning before he finally rose from the table and began to undress.

In consequence he slept late, but even when he woke he did not hurry to get up; and, having rung for his breakfast to be brought to him, he found his mind turning to the Senorita d'Aranda.

He had not given her a thought since they had parted two nights before, but now her long, oval face and striking black eyebrows re­appeared in his mental vision with extraordinary vividness. Idly, he wondered what would have transpired if she had been remaining on at Court, and on his return from Italy he had followed his impulse to develop her acquaintance. Although that acquaintance had been very brief, from the beginning she had made no effort to disguise her interest in and liking for him. She was clearly no coquette but a straightforward person, so if he had laid siege to her it seemed highly likely that an affaire would have developed between them.

Roger had no desire to marry, but even had he felt that way inclined, he knew that there could be no question of making Isabella d'Aranda his wife. For him it would have been a brilliant match, as she was the daughter of the greatest man in Spain after King Carlos, and her family were immensely wealthy. But for that very reason they would never have countenanced her marrying a simple gentleman of modest means such as himself. Moreover, as a Spaniard she would certainly be a Catholic, while he was a Protestant, and mixed marriages at that date were still regarded by both sides with abhorrence.

He knew well enough that no platonic affaire would have kept him interested for long, and wondered if he could have made her his mistress. As she had been so long in France, and high society there indulged in perpetual immoralities covered only with a graceful cloak of elaborately observed conventions, it was quite possible that she had been the mistress of one or more men already; and, if so, her seduction would not prove very difficult. On the other hand she was unmarried, and so by convention still forbidden fruit to the more scrupulous courtiers; and the Queen was known to regard any immorality on the part of her ladies with great severity. All things considered, Roger thought it unlikely that Isabella had as yet taken a lover.

But she would, of course, as soon as she was married. All women of her rank married whoever their parents chose for them, so love did not enter into such alliances; and it would have been considered unnatural in them had they failed to take a succession of lovers after­wards. Somehow, though, Roger did not see Isabella going to bed with one man after another. She was too intense to become promiscuous. He thought it much more likely that she would become desperately enamoured of some man who possessed brains as well as looks, probably someone considerably older than herself, and remain faithful to him, perhaps for life, or at all events as long as he remained faithful to her. Then, after he died or left her, she would be heartbroken for a while, but eventually get over it and find solace in her children.

If that were so, it would have proved no easy matter to make her his mistress, had he had the chance, and he knew that he would not have attempted to do so had he found her to be still a virgin. All the same, her very intensity was a sign that once aroused she would be capable of great passion; and Roger, having known Georgina, greatly preferred really passionate women who met a man half-way, to the kind that pretended to faint, then suffered an attack of conscience and wept copiously afterwards.

Still, the question of whether Isabella's hidden fires had yet led her to indulge herself in gallantry, or not, was of no moment now. If she had left Fontainebleau the day before, as she had said she intended to do, she would by now have accomplished the first stage of her long journey to Spain. At a rough calculation he estimated that she would have spent the night at Pethiviers, or even perhaps have got as far as Orleans. In any case when he took the road to Italy their ways would diverge further apart each day, so it was waste of time to speculate further about her.

Dismissing her from his mind he finished his breakfast, then made a leisurely toilette. At a quarter past ten he left the inn and, as on the previous day, finding no hackney-coach in the vicinity took an omnibus down to the Pont Neuf. Then he once more walked along the Quai de Louvre and crossed the Jardin des Tuileries. On its far side he entered a small cafe, sat down at a table and ordered a glass of Jerez wine. It was now close on eleven o'clock and he had come there to keep a rendezvous he had made the previous day.

If, while posing as a Frenchman, he had been noticed going into the British Embassy on several occasions by any of his acquaintances, or a police-agent stationed in the quarter, that might have aroused most unwelcome suspicions; but he had to keep in touch with it, both for drawing funds from time to time and to send in his reports, so that they might be despatched to London in the security of the Embassy bag.

To get over the difficulty, he had arranged with Mr. Daniel Hailes, who, apart from the Ambassador, was the only member of the Embassy Staff who knew of his secret activities, a simple code. They had selected a number of quiet cafes, each near one of the public gardens. If Roger sent an envelope to Mr. Hailes containing chestnut leaves it meant: "meet me at the cafe in the Palais Royale’ ; if oak leaves, the cafe" on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes; if plane tree leaves the cafe opposite the Tuileries, and so on. The number of leaves, designated the hour; the addition of one twig, "tomorrow', of two twigs "the day after tomorrow", etc. As Mr. Hailes went every morning to Monsieur Aubert to be shaved, it was simple for Roger to leave an envelope there any time during the day with lie certainty that, even if the next day was a Sunday, Mr. Hailes would be given it first thing in the morning.

In this way they could meet without the necessity of Roger having to put anything at all on paper; and in the event of somebody at Monsieur Aubert's opening the envelopes they would not have the faintest idea what the leaves and twigs meant; so no spy could be sent to the meeting places with orders to try to overhear something of the highly secret conversations which took place at them.

Roger had not been seated for many minutes in the cafe when the portly, middle-aged Mr. Hailes appeared and, giving him a friendly nod, sat down at his table. The diplomat had the rather prim appearance of a wealthy merchant and he was dressed more soberly than was cus­tomary with foreigners of his status who were attached to the Court. But he and his chief, the Duke of Dorset, formed a long-standing partnership that accounted for the particular efficiency of the British Embassy in Paris at that date. The Ambassador was a man of wit, wealth and fashion; he was extremely popular in French society and even the Queen frequently attended his thes dansant, which had become a regular feature of the Paris winter season. The First Secretary, on the other hand, kept in the background, but little escaped him, as he was both intelligent and extremely shrewd. So while His Grace stayed up all night, winning good will, Mr. Hailes worked all day, providing the brains and direction of policy.

Roger and Mr. Hailes greeted one another in French, and as though they had met purely by chance; then when the latter had ordered himself a drink, he said with a sly smile:

"Well, my dashing Chevalier? What is it you wish of me now? Not more money, I trust; for I furnished you with five hundred ecus no longer ago than last week."