Dennis Wheatley: To The Devil A Daughter

To The Devil A Daughter

by Dennis Wheatley

By Dennis Wheatley

Novels

The Launching of Roger Brook

The Shadow of Tyburn Tree

The Rising Storm

The Man Who Killed the King

The Dark Secret of Josephine

The Rape of Venice

The Sultans Daughter

The Wanton Princess

Evil in a Mask

The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware

The Irish Witch

Desperate Measures

The Scarlet Impostor

Faked Passports

The Black Baroness

V for Vengeance

Come into My Parlour

Traitors Gate

They Used Dark Forces

The Prisoner in the Mask

The Second Seal

Vendetta in Spain

Three Inquisitive People

The Forbidden Territory

The Devil Rides Out

The Golden Spaniard

Strange Conflict

Codeword Golden Fleece

Dangerous Inheritance

Gateway to Hell

The Quest of Julian Day

The Sword of Fate

Bill for the Use of a Body

Black August

Contraband

The Island Where Time Stands Still

The White Witch of the South Seas

To the Devil A Daughter

The Satanist

The Eunuch of Stamboul

The Secret War

The Fabulous Valley

Sixty Days to Live

Such Power is Dangerous

Uncharted Seas

The Man Who Missed the War

The Haunting of Toby Jugg

Star of Ill Omen

They Found Atlantis

The Ka of Gifford Hillary

Curtain of Fear

Mayhem in Greece

Unholy Crusade

1

Strange Conduct of a Girl Unknown

Molly Fountain was now convinced that a more intriguing mystery than the one she was writing surrounded the solitary occupant of the house next door. For the third morning she could not settle to her work. The sentences refused to come, because every few minutes her eyes wandered from the paper, and her mind abandoned its search for the appropriate word, as her glance strayed through the open window down to the little terrace at the bottom of the garden that adjoined her own.

Both gardens sloped steeply towards the road. Beyond it, and a two hundred feet fall of jagged cliff, the Mediterranean stretched blue, calm and sparkling in the sunshine, to meet on the horizon a cloudless sky that was only a slightly paler shade of blue. The road was known as the `Golden Corniche' owing to the outcrop of red porphyry rocks that gave the coast on this part of the Riviera such brilliant colour. To the right it ran down to St. Raphael; to the left a drive of twenty odd miles would bring one to Cannes. Behind it lay the mountains of the Esterel, sheltering it snugly from the cold winds, while behind them again to the north and east rose the great chain of snow tipped Alps, protecting the whole coast and making it a winter paradise.

Although it was only the last week in February, the sun was as hot as on a good day in June in England. That was nothing out of the ordinary for the time of year, but Mrs. Fountain had long since schooled herself to resist the temptation to spend her mornings basking in it. Her writing of good, if not actually best seller, thrillers meant the difference between living in very reasonable comfort and a near precarious existence on the pension of the widow of a Lieutenant Colonel. As a professional of some years' standing she knew that work must be done at set hours and in suitable surroundings. Kind friends at home had often suggested that in the summer she should come to stay and could write on the beach or in their gardens; but that would have meant frequent interruptions, distractions by buzzing insects, and gusts of wind blowing away her papers. It was for that reason she always wrote indoors, although in the upstairs front room of her little villa, so that she could enjoy the lovely view. All the same, to day she was conscious of a twinge of envy as she looked down on the girl who was lazing away the morning on the terrace in the next garden.

With an effort she pulled her mind back to her work. Johnny, her only son, was arriving to stay at the end of the week, and during his visits she put everything aside to be with him. She really must get up to the end of chapter eight before she abandoned her book for a fortnight. It was the trickiest part of the story, and if she had not got over that it would nag at her all through his stay. And she saw so little of him.

Despite herself her thoughts now drifted towards her son. He was not a bit like his father, except in his open, sunny nature that so readily charmed everyone he met. Archie had been typical of the Army officer coming from good landed gentry stock. After herself, hunting, shooting and fishing had been his passions, and on any polo ground he had been a joy to watch. Johnny cared for none of those things. He took after her family, in nearly all of whom a streak of art had manifested itself. In Johnny's case it had come out as a flair for line and colour, and at twenty three his gifts had already opened fine prospects for him with a good firm of interior decorators. But that meant his living in London. He could only come out to her once a year, and she could not afford to take long holidays in England.

She had often contemplated selling the villa and making a home for him in London; but somehow she could not bring herself to do that. When she and Archie married in 1927 they had spent their honeymoon at St. Raphael, and fallen nearly as much in love with that gold and blue coast of the Esterel as they were with each other. That was why, when his father had died in the following year, they had decided to buy a villa there. As a second son his inheritance amounted to only a few thousands, but they had sunk nearly all of it in this little property and never regretted it. During the greater part of each year they had had to let it, but that brought them in quite a useful income, and for all their long leaves, while Johnny was a baby and later a growing boy, they had been able to occupy it themselves; so every corner of the house and every flowering shrub in the garden was intimately bound up with happy memories of her young married life.

The coming of the war had substituted long months of anxious separation for that joyful existence, and in 1942 all hope of its resumption had been finally shattered by an 8 mm. shell fired from one of Rommel's tanks in the Western Desert. Johnny had then been at school in Scotland, and his mother, her heart numb with misery, had striven to drown her grief by giving her every waking thought to the job she had been doing since 1940 in one of the Intelligence Departments of the War Office.

The end of the war had left her in a mental vacuum. Three years had elapsed since Archie's death, so she had come to accept it and was no longer subject to bouts of harrowing despair. But her job was finished and Johnny had just gone up to Cambridge; so she was now adrift without any absorbing interest to occupy the endless empty days that stretched ahead. Nearly six years of indifferent meals, taken at odd hours while working, often till midnight, on

Top Secret projects that demanded secretarial duties of the most conscientious type, had left her both physically and mentally exhausted; so when it was learned that the villa had not been damaged or looted of its furniture, her friends had insisted that she should go south to recuperate.

She went reluctantly, dreading that seeing it again would renew the intolerable ache she had felt during the first months after her loss. To her surprise the contrary had proved the case. If Archie's ghost still lingered there, it smiled a welcome in the gently moving sunlight that dappled the garden paths, and in the murmur of the sea creaming on the rocks there seemed to be a faint echo of laughter. It was the only permanent home they had ever had, and in these peaceful surroundings they had shared she found a new contentment.