Dennis Wheatley - The Launching of Roger Brook

It was a small square apartment, large enough only to contain a brocaded settee, two chairs and a table, but its windows provided an outlook that was probably unrivalled in southern England. Inland. Meadows and cornfields were spread below them, merging into forest and heath, as far as the eye could reach, finally to blend with the sky in purple distances; while to seaward the white coast-line from Durlston Head, beyond Poole, to St. Catherine's Point, at the southern extremity of the Isle of Wight, lay unrolled to their gaze like some gargantuan map; and the white sails of ships could be seen far out at sea.

They knew that the tower was quite safe, although it always seemed to sway slightly as the wind moaned round its top in winter and summer alike. Yet this, and being so far above the earth, had never failed to give them a rather queer feeling ever since they had come to favour it as a retreat on account of its absolute privacy. Since Colonel Thursby received no visitors, no one except themselves ever came there and, even had strangers done so, the echo of their footsteps on the stone stairs would have given warning of then-approach at least several minutes before they could have reached the turret chamber. It was, therefore, an ideal place for two young conspirators to make plans and exchange confidences.

Having gazed their fill at the view, they settled themselves side by side on the settee.

"Well, little boy," said Georgina with an air of superiority. "Tell me about yourself? Hast thou done well at thy lessons this term or been the recipient of many birchings?"

"I'm not a' little boy," Roger protested hotly, "And don't you try to play the fine lady with me, just because you've been to Court and done a season."

She laughed. "Oh, Roger! Should I live to be a hundred I'll never forgo teasing you, and I vow you'll still rise to it. All the same, you may like it or not, but having been presented makes a woman of me."

"It takes more than that to make a girl into a woman," he scoffed.

"That's as maybe, m'dear, but at all events you can lay no claim

yet to being a man."

"Another few weeks will see me one—unless...."

As he broke off her big eyes opened wide. "Unless what? Whatever

do you mean?"

"Oh, God!" he burst out. "How much rather I'd remain a boy and be going back to Sherborne!" Then he suddenly buried his face in his hands.

"Why, Roger, dear!" She threw a warm arm round his shoulders and pulled his head down into her lap. "What is it? Do tell me. We've never had any secrets from each other, and never shall."

For a moment, conscious of her soft thigh against his forehead, he allowed that pleasant but disturbing sensation to distract his thoughts, then he muttered: "Of course I'll tell you. It's all right. I'm not blubbering. I'm too scared and angry to do that."

She released him, but seeing his distress, took one of his hands between her own, seeking by their firm pressure to give him strength, as she commanded: "Out with it, now!"

Roger gulped back the tears he had denied, and that neither Gunston nor his father had been able to draw from him. Then, bit by bit, half incoherently at first but graduating to a fierce, steady monologue of pent-up resentment, he poured out to her the story of the day before and the hideous fate that he now felt menaced him.

Her dark eyes fixed intently on him she let him ease himself of his burden without interruption, until he at last fell silent; then she said:

"But Roger, this is monstrous. Can you not appeal to your mother to make your father see reason?"

He shrugged. "My mother thinks more of him than she does of God. She loves me, but she'd never intervene; and 'twould be useless if she tried."

"Your other relatives, then?"

"I have none, except my mother's people whom I've never seen. My father, like myself, was an only son." "But you cannot submit to this?" "What other course is open to me?"

"God knows, m'dear; but the injustice of it makes my blood boil."

For the best part of another hour they talked round and round the subject without corning any nearer to a solution. The sun was now well up in the heavens and striking down on the stone cupola of the tower made the turret room close and hot. Roger got up to open one of the windows and stripping off his long-skirted coat flung it over the back of a chair.

They had fallen silent again. The wind had dropped and up there in their eerie no sound reached them from the earth far below. Roger felt, as he had often felt before in the turret, as if he was in a different world that had no connection with the life he knew. There was some­thing God-like in being at that high altitude from which the men working in the fields looked to be no more than pigmies. Time seemed to be standing still, and even the interview that he so dreaded coming no nearer despite the steady mounting of the sun which, with the passing of a few more hours, must inevitably set.

Suddenly Georgina spoke: "Roger! There's but one thing for it. You must run away."

"What's that!" he swung round to stare at her. "Run away! How can I? Where to?"

"Romantic young fools are always mining away to sea," she declared. "Why shouldn't you run away from it?"

"But there is nowhere I could go?" he faltered.

She tossed her black ringlets impatiently. "The world is wide and you are strong and healthy. These summer months you might do worse than go to live with the Egyptians in the forest, or you could make your way to London and find some employment there."

"No," he shook his head glumly, " 'tis too drastic a measure that you propose, and the remedy would prove a greater affliction than the illness. By it I'd cease to be all that I am and lose such small advantages as my birth and education give me. I'm determined to make something worth while of my life, and 'twould be the height of folly to throw away the best years of my youth scraping a living as a tinker."

"I don't mean run away for good, stupid, but just for a month or two; until this threat to your happiness has blown over, or your father has been given another ship and ordered back to sea."

For the first time he considered her suggestion seriously and, crossing the narrow room, sat down again beside her.

"I might do that," he murmured. " 'Tis certainly a possibility. But the forest is no good. The Egyptians might have you but they wouldn't have me. They'd think that I'd been sent to spy on them."

"Go to London, then. 'Tis less than a hundred miles and you could walk there in a week."

"Maybe, but I have not a single friend there, or even an acquaint­ance."

"Had it been last month I could have given you a score of intro­ductions; but, alas! town will now be as empty as a drum and all my friends of the season gone back to their places in the country. Still, you're a likeable fellow, Roger, and would soon find plenty of people to help you."

"I fear your wish is father to the thought, m'dear," he said despondently. "Among persons of quality the making of friendships is always easy, but in such a case I'd have put all that behind me. The poor live hard and for the most part are driven by their needs to batten upon one another. I know no trade and could be of little use to anyone except as a scrivener. I'd find myself starving within a week."

"Nonsense!" she flashed at him. "Where there's a will there's a way! You've a pair of hands and they could be put to a dozen different uses."

Roger's fatal imagination was again working overtime. He had never been to London, but he knew enough about it to realise that the gilded world in which she had disported herself so gaily for a few weeks was very far from being the metropolis that a patronless and penniless young man would find should he go there. Old Ben, the Brooks' houseman, was a Londoner by birth, and he had often told Roger horrifying tales of the debtors' prison at Newgate, the Fleet, and the madhouse at Bedlam, where the lunatics, bearing their heads against the walls and eating the filthy straw on which they lay, were exhibited in chains to anyone who cared to tip the warder a shilling. From Old Ben's stories, too, he conjured up the noisome alleys haunted by disease-ridden Molls, the filth, the stench and the cut-purses who haunted the thieves-kitchens on the lookout for some greenhorn from the country whom they might despoil.