The Irish Witch

by Dennis Wheatley

  Roger and Mary feared that the Indians they had glimpsed were trackers sent out from French Mills. Leaping Squirrel reassured them that the men were a party of hunters intent on their own business, and to be avoided only because they might have proved hostile. But, he added grimly, their lead must be lessening, as they had to take much longer rests than the trackers would need, and the time had come when they must try to hide their trail by wading in a lake which he knew lay a few miles head.

  That evening they came to it and, for a quarter of an hour, splashed through the bitterly cold water along its shore, entering and leaving it several times to confuse their pursuers.

  Now that the danger of capture had become ominously nearer, Roger could not keep his mind off that possibility. It would certainly mean death for Leaping Squirrel. There was no way of preventing that. But what would happen to himself and Mary after they had been marched back to French Mills?

  Colonel Jason could hardly have failed to connect their disappearance with Leaping Squirrel’s escape on the same night. In any case, their being captured with him would be indisputable evidence of it. What, Roger wondered, was the penalty for assisting an enemy spy to escape? Almost certainly a sentence of several months in prison. But would matters end even there? At French Mills there was no prison, so he would be sent down to Albany, or perhaps New York. A trial would also lead to an investigation of his past. It would emerge that the document stating him to be a surveyor in the employ of the Ministry of Rivers and Forests was a forgery; and, quite possibly, that he was an Englishman. The discovery of his nationality, together with the fact that he had secured a guide known to be a spy to get him over the frontier into Canada would lead to the assumption that he, too, was a spy. The possible result could be, not months, but years in prison, or worse.

  And what of Mary? It was hardly likely that they would imprison her. But she would be stranded. As the van Wycks knew the truth about them, they would almost certainly help her. Even so, she could not live on them indefinitely. She would have to take some dreary job in a shop, or become a dressmaker, and live in constant misery at the thought of him in prison.

  It was not to be wondered at that, during their third day in the forest, Roger was constantly looking over his shoulder, and frequently tempted to force the pace. But he could not do that for, although gallant little Mary trudged doggedly on, she had now to lean on his arm for most of the time, and was fast approaching exhaustion.

  At last, on the Friday, their fourth day after leaving French Mills, they emerged from the forest to see again the valley through which the St. Lawrence ran. A high cliff still prevented them from getting down to the river, but Roger heaved a great sigh of relief when Leaping Squirrel told him that within two hours they would be across it.

  After walking for a little over a mile, the Indian led them to the edge of the cliff and pointed to the right. Immediately below them were rapids with water foaming between a number of big, flattish rocks, and nearer the bank several large, swirling pools. But further along the cliff was rugged and broken, where there had been a landslide, making it possible to climb down to the water, and there it was smooth.

  For some minutes they gazed down at the river; then, just as they turned away, a great bald-headed eagle swooped, screeching, down upon them. Evidently its nest was below the place where they were standing on the edge of the cliff, and it feared they were about to harm its young.

  Mary gave a cry of fright and swiftly backed away from the big, terrifying bird. Next second she uttered a piercing scream. She had retreated too far and put a foot over the cliff edge. Roger dashed forward, but was too late to grab her. Flinging himself flat, he looked over, praying that she might have landed on a ledge. But she had not. His eyes starting from his head, he saw her, a whirling bundle of furs, hurtling downward until, with a great splash, she hit one of the pools and disappeared.

  8

  News out of Portugal

  It was on the evening of April 6th, while Roger and Mary were on their way with Leaping Squirrel from French Mills to the place at which the latter hoped to get them across the St. Lawrence, that a Captain John Harley of the 47th Foot delivered to Lady Luggala’s residence a packet addressed to Jemima. She did not receive it until she returned from a rout soon after two o’clock in the morning.

  Seeing that it was addressed in Charles’s writing, Jemima bade Lady Luggala a swift goodnight, went straight up to her room and tore open the packet with eager fingers. To her delight, she found that it contained a letter several pages in length. Its opening, ‘Most beautiful and adorable of the Sex’, caused her to flush with pleasure, and quickly she read on:

  ‘You will, I trust, have received my missive despatched by a sloop sailing from Lisbon within a few hours of my landing, just to inform you that, although we met rough weather in the Bay of Biscay, being a good sailor I arrived none the worse for that.’

  Jemima had not received such a missive, but at once assumed that either it had gone astray or the sloop had been sunk. The letter continued:

  ‘In Lisbon I spent several very pleasant days, as I had brought with me a letter of introduction to the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Stuart, our Minister in that city; and, after reporting to the Garrison Commander I went straight to the Legation. There I was most kindly received by Sir Charles and his lady, who insisted I should be their guest until I received orders to proceed to the front.

  ‘At two dinner parties given by the Stuarts, and other entertainments to which I was invited, I met as well as numerous British officers several Portuguese Generals and Ministers and their wives, and all cannot speak too highly of His Grace of Wellington’s conduct of the campaign. And well they may, since with an army that until recently rarely numbered more than sixty thousand men, for four long years he has bedevilled the French, who at times had four hundred thousand men in the Peninsula, driven them from Portugal and has now freed half Spain.

  ‘The Stuarts have living with them their niece, Deborah—a poor, pale hop-pole of a girl who suffers from shyness, but is a kindly creature. On two occasions I drove out, with her as my guide, to see the now famous “Lines of Torres Vedras”, behind which our army remained secure during the winter of 1810-11. The earthworks and innumerable bastions in this great double line of fortifications are of such amazing strength that no-one, having seen them, can be surprised that Marshal Masséna, despite his great superiority in numbers, realised that any attempt to force them would have led to the massacre of his army. For his failure to make the attempt Bonaparte recalled and broke him. That, to my mind, was cutting off his nose to spite his face, for it is generally held that Masséna was the ablest of all the French Marshals.

  ‘It transpired that Deborah had known Uncle Roger, as he stayed here with the Stuarts during the Spring of 1811. At that time she had with her an ex-school friend, one Lady Mary Ware with whom, I gather, Uncle R had a secret affair, during which Miss D acted as their confidante. The last Miss D heard of Lady M was in the following autumn—that she was about to marry a wealthy merchant. Since then D’s letters have been returned marked “gone from here”, and I could give her no news of Uncle R, since he left England on one of his secret missions some fifteen months ago.

  ‘I need no telling how distant our war here is to people at home in England. It is scarcely even mentioned by society belles like yourself, except when news comes of some relative killed or seriously wounded. And I’ll confess that I hardly gave it a thought myself except when there had been occasion to celebrate a victory. But now that I am involved, I feel you will want to know something of the situation in the Peninsula and of our prospects.

  ‘It has been a grim struggle and our army would long since have been defeated and driven into the sea had it not been for the brilliance of our great commander, and the fact that the enemy had for years to hold down all but a tiny corner of Spain, and the greater part of Portugal. It is this last that, in spite of their enormous superiority in numbers, has prevented them from, ever bein
g able to bring against us in the open field a force greatly exceeding our own. And the Duke is truly inspired. Again and again, whenever he has found himself in an unfavourable position, he has had the courage to invite censure by retiring, as he has twice done from Madrid; yet, time after time when opportunity offered, he has caught the French off their guard by clever stratagems, launched a lightning attack and destroyed whole divisions of them.

  ‘We also owe far more than people realise to the Portuguese and the Spaniards. While behind the lines of Torres Vedras the Duke embodied and trained many regiments of the former. They are well disciplined troops and in battles since have displayed high courage. The contribution by the Spaniards has been still greater, although at times their forces have proved a dubious asset.

  ‘As at least you will know, owing to Cadiz being situated at the end of a narrow eight-mile long peninsula the Spaniards succeeded in retaining that city and there formed a Junta which, after the flight of their King, assembled a Cortes that declared itself the government of Spain, and later entered into an official alliance with us. Incited by their fanatical priests, all but a very small part of the population in the north and south of Spain accepted the orders of the Junta and rose in revolt against their conquerors. Not only did they raise half a dozen armies, but also innumerable bands of fierce irregulars living in the mountains have constantly harassed the French from one end of the country to the other, cutting their communications and capturing convoys of supplies.

  ‘Most unfortunately, the generals of their regular forces have proved both incompetent and unreliable; so that on numerous occasions during battles in which they took part with us, they failed to carry out the tasks allotted them by the Duke, with the result that we were deprived of what should have been complete victory. Last autumn the Cortes decreed that its generals should no longer act independently, but come under the Duke, as Generalissimo. So far, only the Spanish army in Galicia has given us full co-operation, but in this year’s campaign, we are hoping that others will also prove of value.

  ‘However, the fact remains that the Spanish regular and irregular forces have compelled the enemy to distribute his men in several armies, each of which is separated from the others by great ranges of mountains, so that none of them is readily able to come to another’s assistance.

  ‘The hatred displayed by the Spaniards and French for each other is almost unbelievable. Neither take any prisoners and butchers the wounded without mercy. When the French take a town, they massacre everyone they find in it and burn it to the ground. When the Spaniards capture a convoy or small body of troops, they torture them to death, often nailing them to doors and roasting or skinning them alive.

  ‘Only on the east coast have the French succeeded in pacifying the country and this because, alone among the Marshals, Suchet decreed a policy of conciliation, spared the towns he took and even allowed their own Mayors to continue in authority. Yet his sixty thousand men are as severely harassed as are those in other parts of the country. Spanish forces constantly attack them. They are always defeated by Suchet’s troops, but fade away into the mountains, only to reappear after a week or so and again attack.

  ‘Bonaparte’s eldest brother, Joseph, whom he made King of Spain, theoretically commands all the French in the Peninsula, but I am told has little say in directing operations. He is said to be an honest, easy-going, good-natured fellow who takes his sovereignty seriously, and does his best to protect the interests of his Spanish subjects. But the row he has to hoe must be a hard one. He is, in fact, no more than a nouveau riche bourgeois, and the Spanish aristocracy who reluctantly form his Court are the most tradition-bound and stiff-necked in the world. Moreover, poor Joseph is no general, and the Marshals hold him in contempt. It is also our good fortune that the Marshals are intensely jealous of one another and, even when in a position to do so, frequently refuse to come to one another’s aid.

  ‘Masséna was replaced by the young and energetic Marshal Marmont. For a while he gave our army considerable trouble, but his own conceit led to his downfall. Last July the Duke, with a force of some forty thousand men, had fallen back on Salamanca. Marmont was following him up with about the same number and, only two days’ march behind, King Joseph was coming to the Marshal’s support with a further fifteen thousand men. But, rather than wait for the King and have to play Number Two to him, Marmont wanted all the credit for a victory, so impetuously attacked us. The Duke gave him a tremendous trouncing, he was severely wounded by a cannon-ball and, but for the ability of General Clausel, who took over, the whole of Marmont’s army would have been destroyed.

  ‘It was from the time of this battle that the tide of war in the Peninsula really began to turn in our favour. King Joseph beat a retreat as quickly as he could to Valencia, and took refuge with the powerful army under Suchet. This opened the way for the Duke to capture Madrid and delivered both Leon and the Castiles from enemy occupation.

  ‘As the only possible hope of regaining his capital the King had to call on Marshal Soult, who for three years had been holding down the south with another great army and reigning in Seville like an independent sovereign. His march toward Valencia raised the siege of Cadiz, freeing the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese force that has held out there for so long, and gave the Cortes there undisputed power over the whole of southern Spain.

  ‘Soult is one of the ablest of the Marshals, and his joining up with Suchet at Valencia gave King Joseph an army of ninety thousand men. In addition, the remains of the French army from Portugal had joined with other forces in the north, giving General Clausel another army of some forty thousand in the neighbourhood of Burgos. Against this one hundred and thirty thousand and many thousands more French troops garrisoning Spanish cities, the Duke could bring only sixty thousand; so, although by his operations he had liberated all Portugal and a good half of Spain, he wisely decided to give up Madrid, for while Suchet remained in Valencia Soult was advancing on the capital with one hundred thousand men. The retreat continued until mid-November, by which time the Duke had fallen back on Ciudad Rodrigo, and the French, constantly harassed by Spanish irregulars, were so exhausted that they could press on no further.

  ‘However, this set-back was of no long duration. Shortly after Christmas they learned here of the appalling disaster that had befallen Bonaparte in Russia. It is now confirmed that he left behind him, to die in the snow, no fewer than half a million men. This is greatly to our benefit, as he has withdrawn from Spain twenty-five thousand of the most seasoned officers and men to reform his Imperial Guard, several able Generals and, last but not least, our most dangerous adversary, Marshal Soult.

  ‘This still leaves some two hundred thousand French in Spain, but they have been much disheartened by losing so many of their veteran officers and N.C.O.s, while reinforcements during the winter have brought our army up to seventy-five thousand, the highest number the Duke has ever had at his disposal. Moreover, the greater part of the French army in eastern Spain is now entirely occupied in endeavouring to keep open their communications with France, which are seriously threatened by thousands of irregulars operating from the mountains of the Asturias and Navarre, under the Spanish General Mina. So we now have opposed to us only King Joseph, with Marshal Jourdan as his adviser—an ageing General of the Republican wars. We are, therefore, in great heart regarding our prospects in the coming campaign.

  ‘Reverting to myself. After five nights with the hospitable Stuarts, I was ordered to join a convoy and, with my man Briggs, took the coast road north. For many miles beyond the Lines of Torres Vedras the country is in a sad condition, since before retiring behind the lines the Duke secured the agreement of the Portuguese to lay bare the countryside, in order to deny the French sustenance and shelter. All livestock was removed, farms and barns emptied of their contents and left roofless, the people of the towns were brought into Lisbon and the peasants took to the mountains. The abandoned land is now being brought under cultivation again, but many vineyards are still thigh-h
igh in weeds and brambles, making one highly conscious of the loss and distress inflicted on the hapless poorer sort by the wars of the mighty.

  ‘By way of Caldas, Alcobacca, Leiria and Pombal we reached the considerable town of Coimbra. From there we turned inland through the mountains, then by way of Guardaz and Pinzio crossed the frontier to Ciudad Rodrigo. As the crow flies, the latter is no more than two hundred miles from Lisbon, but the winding road through the mountains adds half as much again to the distance to be covered.

  ‘The scenery along the coast road was most picturesque, particularly as the many varieties of trees were beginning to show their young Spring green, and in the clear air of the mountains breath-taking panoramas opened up at every turn of the way. Before the war the tracks must have been impassable for transport other than by mule, but our engineers have done much to widen them and, in the worst places, lessen the gradient; so it took the convoy no more than a fortnight to reach its destination.

  ‘To do so was a considerable relief to me for, the effects of war apart, Portugal is in the main a desolate and poverty-stricken country. At such miserable inns in which, now and then, I spent a night, there were no beds, but legions of bugs infesting the walls of the rooms, no fresh meat but goat, and little other food but goat’s cheese and some bread, washed down with a resinous wine that made one gasp. Fortunately, the Stuarts had warned me what to expect, so I took with me a good supply of hard tack to lessen the monotony of the army ration; although that, I will say, was good and ample, for the Duke has ever held it a first principle that his troops should never lack for food, and they love him for it.

  ‘On my arrival at headquarters, my Lord Duke received me very graciously and promised to find me a post suitable to my rank—I do not imply my rank as an officer for, as you know, nothing higher than a Lieutenantcy could initially be purchased for me, although as an officer of the Household Brigade I carry the seniority of a Captain when with other units of the Army—but as an Earl.