Dennis Wheatley - The Shadow of Tyburn Tree

Without waiting for an answer Natalia Andxeovna added: "As for the Finns, they have long been bitterly resentful of Swedish despot­ism. In the event of war, Gustavus would find himself hard put to it to prevent his Finnish levies from going over to Russia, and offering to liberate their country in order that they might lay it at the feet of the Empress. Therefore, whatever ambitions Gustavus may cherish in secret, he can do little to further them at the expense of Russia, unless he is prepared to defy his Riksdag and jeopardise his crown."

It was just such intelligence of the way the Russians saw things, garnered from the highest sources, that Mr. Pitt had foreseen that Roger, in his character of a well-bred, wealthy, young idler, might be able to pick up; and as Natalia Andreovna clearly knew what she was talking about he would have liked to continue the conversation for much longer. But, rising to her feet and shaking out her wide, star-spangled skirts, she said with a smile: "And now, Monsieur, for one evening I have given you a more than fair measure of my time; so you may take me back to the ballroom, that I may dance with a few of my beaux before I go home."

Roger was too tactful to seek to detain her; but, as he escorted her upstairs he pressed her to give him an early opportunity of seeing her again, and she said that he might present himself at her salon on Thursday evening. They had hardly reached the ballroom before half-a-dozen men came up and formed a little court round her, so with one last, meaning look straight into her green eyes, he bowed himself away.

It was now past two o'clock. Queen Sophia Magdalena had already left and many of the older guests were leaving. As the party no longer held any interest for Roger he decided to go too, and, having made his adieu to his pretty hostess, he went downstairs again and had his hired coach called up to the door.

As it rumbled back towards the city he felt that he had ample cause to congratulate himself on the fruits of his first night in Sweden. In it he had accomplished more than during the whole of the fifteen days he had spent in Denmark; as the good relations he had established with the French Ambassador's wife and the Russian Ambassador's daughter could not possibly have been bettered for his purpose.

He smiled to himself a little as he thought of the familiarities he had so boldly taken with Natalia, and wondered if he would have dared to do so had he then known that she was regarded as a semi-royalty. All unknowing he had taken a big risk, for had she been of a different temperament she might have held it against him and seriously queered his pitch, but it seemed that he could hardly have played his cards better.

She had not the faintest resemblance to any other girl that he had ever met, and he could not make up his mind if he liked her or not'. She had a great opinion of herself, but not without reason, as she was unusually intelligent as well as beautiful in a strange way that was all her own. He recalled the Marquise's warning that the slim, green-eyed Russian was reputed to have a most malicious sense of humour, and his own experience of her led him to believe that when her passions were aroused she would prove extremely vicious; but he knew that he was already strongly attracted, and decided that it was, perhaps, just as well that his inclination coincided with his duty, since it was so clearly in the interests of his mission to develop his budding affaire with her.

The whole of the next day he spent in exploring the city and enter­ing into conversation with everyone with whom he came in contact; and the opinions of the townsfolk gave him cause to moderate the view that Natalia Andreovna had given him of King Gustavus, as a monarch with little real power or prestige.

He gathered that before Gustavus's reign Sweden had been reduced to abject poverty by the misrule of several generations of rapacious nobles who had preyed upon her mercilessly; whereas, during the past sixteen years the King had brought her people both freedom and prosperity. With the aid of the banker Liljencrantz he had straightened out the appalling mess in which he found the country's finances; and with the aid of the jurist Liliestrale he had. restored both justice and the dignity of the church. He had himself impeached the two Supreme Courts before the Senate, disbenched five of the eight judges, and dismissed scores of lesser magistrates convicted of taking bribes. He had redistributed the clergy's livings and compelled the venal priests among them to live in their parishes and serve their parishioners, instead of taking their fees for doing nothing. He had reorganised the army, abolished the sale of commissions, and made merit the only road to promotion.

The latter step was one of the causes of the hostility with which the nobles regarded him, but their main grievance was that, having robbed their Estate of much of its former power, they could no longer sell their votes on domestic matters to the highest bidder, which venality had previously been one of their main sources of income.

The King, it emerged, was a great lover of the spectacular and also of the theatre. Some people resented the large sums he spent on display, and his purchase of a magnificent collection of art treasures from all parts of Europe; but most were of the opinion that the former was compensated for by the resulting free entertainments and that the latter redounded to the glory of their country.

The only matter in which Gustavus had seriously jeopardised his popularity with the masses was in the taxation of spirits. Formerly it had been an age-old right for everyone to distil whatever they required for their own consumption, and the bare idea of taxing liquor raised a most frightful outcry. Troops had to be employed to collect the tax, and, on even this proving ineffective, the King had sought to turn the manufacture into a royal monopoly by ordering the destruction of all private stills and erecting large distilleries of his own. Riots had ensued, and the indignant mob burnt down several of the royal distilleries, so the King had endeavoured to sell the monopoly to the Government, but without success, and the struggle still continued.

Apart from this grievance, Roger formed the opinion that the great mass of the people was solidly behind their King. Moreover, they both hated and feared the Russians, and since they still regarded the Baltic provinces as the rightful property of the Swedish crown, were quite prepared to support Gustavus in a war aimed at retrieving this portion of their old empire.

Next morning Roger drove out to the French Embassy, and at breakfast there was introduced by the Ambassador to several gentle­men, most of whom were Swedes. Among them was Count Hans Axel af Fersan, a great Francophile, who openly avowed that when he had been a visitor at the Court of Versailles he had fallen in love with Queen Marie Antoinette. He and Roger took an immediate liking to one another and on Roger's side, although he was in no situation to acknowledge it, the bond was strengthened by the discovery that they were both partially of Scots descent; since his mother had been a McElfic and the daughter of the Eail of Kildonan, while the af Fersans were a branch of the Macpherson clan which had settled in Sweden many years before.

The name of Count Axel af Fersan was already known to Roger, from his talks with various people on the previous day, as that of a prominent Swedish statesman who was the leader of the Hat party and one of the King's most bitter opponents in the Riksdag ; but he felt that his new acquaintance could hardly be old enough to have played a leading part in Swedish politics for any length of time, and on his tactful inquiry the Count burst out laughing.

"Nay, nay, my friend!" he declared with a shake of his head. "You are confusing me with my revered senior Count Fredrik, who was already a great figure in Sweden before I was born. And, being of a j younger generation, I do not share the prejudices against the King which still rankle among the older nobility. In fact I think that many of the reforms he has introduced were long overdue, and in some ways I have a considerable admiration for him."