Dennis Wheatley - The Rising Storm

DENNIS WHEATLEY

THE RISING STORM

HUTCHINSON & GO. (Publishers) LTD

London New York Melbourne Sydney Cape Town

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO

MY MOTHER

WITH LOVE AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF MY FIRST VISITS WITH HER TO PARIS, VERSAILLES AND FONTAINEBLEAU

Printed in Great Britain by The Anchor Press, Ltd., Tiptree,

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

THE MYSTERIOUS RENDEZVOUS

THE forest of Fontainebleau was at its loveliest. The past winter had been exceptionally severe but now, towards the end of April, spring had come to northern France again. In the long rides the young grass made a carpet of emerald and the great trees were feathered with tenderest green. The day was a Sunday, the weather fine, the air balmy and the sky a palish blue.

No hunting, except by the King's packs, was ever permitted in the royal domain, and the only buildings in it were widely separated keepers' cottages. Once clear of the town, and the huge slate-roofed Chateau with its many courts, gardens, promenades and lake, one might ride for miles without setting eyes on a human being. Only the occasional scurrying of an animal, and the faint, mysterious whispering of the branches overhead, broke the stillness.

Down one of the rides, deep in its solitude, a young man was riding his horse at a walking pace. He was dressed with considerable elegance in the fashion of the year, 1789. His three-cornered hat was laced with gold, as were also his long-skirted dove-grey coat and embroidered waist­coat. His breeches and gauntlets were of the softest doeskin; his tall riding-boots polished to a mirror-like brilliance. His brown hair was un-powdered, but elaborately dressed with side-curls above the ears and a neat queue tied with a ribbon at the back of his neck. He had a thinnish, brown face, straight nose, mobile mouth and a good chin. He was twenty-one years of age, although he looked somewhat older.

At first sight a man might have put him down as a young gallant who had never fought outside a fencing school, but that impression was hardly in keeping with his sword—an old-fashioned weapon with a plain steel hilt entirely contradicting his otherwise foppish appearance.

Had anyone meeting him on his solitary ride spoken to him they would never have suspected from his reply that he was anything other than the young French nobleman that he appeared to be, because four years' residence in France while in his teens, and a natural flair for languages, had made him bi-lingual; but he was, in fact, the son of an English Admiral, and his name was Roger Brook.

However, he was not using his own name at the moment. On his return to France, after an absence of close on- two years, he had again assumed the soubriquet that he had earlier adopted—that of M. le Chevalier de Breuc. So doing not only saved him the annoyance of being cheated by innkeepers and others as presumably a rich English milord but for his present purpose it served him better to be thought a Frenchman.

For the past four days he had been living at the Auberge du Cadran Bleu in the little town of Fontainebleau, and he had spent the greater part of his time wondering how he could manage to get himself admitted to the private apartments of the Chateau.

It was in a further attempt to find a solution to that extremely knotty problem that he had hired a horse and was riding slowly through the forest on this April afternoon; for he had felt that two or three hours of complete solitude and concentration might produce the inspiration of which he stood so badly in need.

Like all the royal Palaces at that date anyone was at liberty to saunter about its grounds or walk through its great halls and galleries, even when the King and Queen were in residence—as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were now. They lived for most of the day in public and there was no bar to the curious coming to stare at them as they went from one part of the Palace to another, or even while they ate their food at State dinners. But it was quite a different matter to acquire the entree to the royal circle, with the privilege of attending levees and mingling freely with the members of the Court.

To do so was Roger Brook's object in coming to Fontainebleau; in fact it was one of the main reasons for his return to France, and unless he could find some way to get on intimate terms with the Royal Family itself, or at least some of its most trusted advisers, the mission upon which he had been sent was doomed to failure.

Two years earlier he had, partly by chance but also largely owing to his own wit and courage, been able to render a signal service to his country in providing the key to the successful outcome of some ex­tremely delicate diplomatic negotiations.1 It was then that Britain's twenty-nine-year-old Prime Minister, brilliant Billy Pitt, had realized the possibilities that lay in a young man who possessed his qualities of good birth, education and manners, coupled with a certain innocence of expression which covered considerable shrewdness and determination.

The Government of the day was dependent for its information about affairs at foreign Courts on its diplomatic representatives abroad and the spies they employed. But the former, while having the entrée to society in the capitals in which they served, were naturally greatly handicapped in obtaining particulars of secret policy through the very fact that they were Britain's representatives; and the latter, while valuable for securing purely military information, were not of the social status to penetrate the cabinets of Kings and the boudoirs of their mistresses.

Roger Brook, on the other hand, could both pass as a Frenchman and be received as an equal by the aristocracy of any country. So Mr. Pitt had decided to employ him as his personal secret agent and, in the previous year, had sent him to the Courts of Denmark, Sweden and Russia.1 Now, after a short but hectic sojourn in England, during which he had narrowly escaped being hanged for murder, the Prime Minister had charged him with further work in France.

His new mission was a delicate and nebulous one. It presented no apparent dangers or call for heroic measures, but needed considerable tact and the ability to form cool, unbiased judgments as to the real value of statements made by a great variety of people, most of whom were bitterly prejudiced. It was, in fact, to assess the probable outcome of the political ferment which was now agitating the whole French nation.

That drastic changes were about to take place no one could doubt. The centuries-old feudal system, of which the monarchy was the apex, had worked reasonably well in its day; but Cardinal Richelieu had destroyed the power of the great nobles and a generation later Louis XIV had turned them into little more than bejewelled lackeys by in­sisting that they should leave their estates permanently to add to the lustre of his own setting at Versailles; so the monarchy had become absolute, with no restraint of any kind on the power that the Kings exercised over the whole nation.

The so-called Parliaments of Paris, Bordeaux and other great cities were no more than judicial assemblies, without power to make or alter laws, their function being only to register the royal edicts and conduct trials of special importance. The Monarch ruled through a number of Governors and Intendants, who again had no power to legislate but were high Civil Servants charged with administering the royal decrees in their respective provinces and collecting taxes. So the people had no legitimate outlet of any kind for their grievances, and had become entirely subject to the good or evil influences that a handful of men and women near the King, but incredibly remote from them, exerted on him.