The Rising Storm rb-3

by Dennis Wheatley

  The Rising Storm

  ( Roger Brook - 3 )

  Dennis Wheatley

  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.

  Thus a situation had gradually developed in which new taxes were levied, restrictions placed on commerce, treaties made, armies conscrip­ted and wars declared, all without nobles, clergy or people having the least say in these matters which concerned them so vitally.

  Roger Brook had had an unusually good opportu
nity of absorbing the background of the situation, owing to the variety of his experiences during his four years in France as a youth. He had for over a year occupied a privileged position in the household of a great nobleman in Paris, but he had for still longer lived with a middle-class family in a provincial city. He had for some months enjoyed the comfort of a luxurious chateau buried in the heart of the country, but he had also spent many weeks tramping from village to village through north­-western France as the assistant of a poor quack doctor. So he knew that discontent at the present state of things was far from being confined to one class.

  He had seen the miserable mud-walled, windowless hovels of the peasantry and knew the many impositions which made their lives so hard. There was the forced labour, often at seasons most inconvenient to themselves, that they were compelled to give on the King's highways; the Government's control of grain, which forced them to sell at a fixed price, so that they were debarred from making a good profit; the petty dues that they had to pay on going through toll-gates whenever they moved a mile or so from their homes, and a great variety of small but irksome taxes which provided the main incomes of the local nobility and clergy.

  Yet he also knew that many of them were by no means so abjectly poverty-stricken as they appeared. The fact that few of even the better farmhouses had glass in their windows was not because their owners could not afford to pay for it; the reason was that their taxes were assessed quite arbitrarily on their apparent capacity to pay, and this evil system drove them to conceal every sou they made above their bare living expenses instead of using the money for the betterment of their own condition.

  Deplorable as was the state of the peasantry, the great bulk of the nobility felt that they had equally good grounds for complaint. By tradition only the profession of arms was open to them, and that was so ill-paid that during the past two centuries they had gradually become impoverished through having to sell much of their property to equip themselves to fight in France's wars. The thrifty peasants had already acquired over a third of all the cultivatable land in France, and hundreds of noble families now had nothing left but a dilapidated ch&teau and a few acres of grazing-ground.

  Yet neither class had any sympathy for the woes of the other. The nobles—some of whom eked out a miserable existence on as little as twenty-five louis a year—knew that their tenants cheated them when­ever they could. The peasants bitterly resented the freedom of the nobility from all forms of taxation, and grudged every sou they had to surrender in that variety of petty dues which made up the sole source of income of their masters. Neither the uncouth, ragged tillers of the soil, nor the proud, out-at-elbows country gentry had collectively any animus against the Court; but both were sullen, discontented, and ready to welcome any change which might lead to a betterment of their lot.

  It was in the cities and towns that the real trouble was brewing. The growth of industry had produced in all of them a slum population that recognized no individual master. Their poverty was appalling and in times of scarcity they died by the thousand; so they were inflammable material for the fiery words of any agitator.

  In the towns, too, the greatest change had occurred since the break­down of the feudal system. With it had passed the mediaeval thraldom of the Church, leading to freer thought and the spread of secular education. An extremely numerous middle class, including thousands of respectable artisans as well as professional men and wealthy mer­chants, had grown up in them. It was they who most bitterly resented the privileged position of the idle, arrogant nobility. Moreover, for half a century past, many of them had been reading the controversial works of the political philosophers, and this had led to an almost universal demand among them that they should be given some share in the government of their country.

  Finally, it was the deplorable state into which the finances of France had fallen in recent years, coupled with a succession of bad harvests that had inflicted grievous hardship on the poor, both in town and country, which had led to a nation-wide agitation for a complete overhaul of the machinery of State.

  Even when Roger had fled from France twenty months earlier, as the result of a duel, die popular clamour for reform had reached such a pitch that the government was seriously concerned by it.

  That spring of 1787, so desperate had the financial situation become that the King had resorted to an expedient which none of his prede­cessors had been forced to adopt for over a hundred and fifty years— the summoning of an Assembly of Notables at Versailles to discuss ways and means of re-establishing the nation's credit. But instead of accepting their advice his Ministers had endeavoured to use them as support for a new patchwork of ineffective measures. The nobles and the higher clergy, of which the Notables were almost entirely composed, had become openly resentful, and the Parliament of Paris had refused to register the new edicts. Thereupon the King had temporarily exiled the Parliament to Troyes and dissolved the Assembly; so, far from any good having come out of this meeting, the grievances of the nation had received the widest possible publicity, which led to still more violent agitation against the incompetent Government.

  For a further year the ancien regime had been bolstered up by one expedient after another, but by the summer of '88, faced with an empty treasury, the King had been driven to dismiss his principal Minister, the vain and ineffectual Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, and recall the Swiss banker, Monsieur Necker, who, since he held the most liberal views, had the confidence of the public. It had then been decided to give way to the insistent demand for the calling of an Etats General

  —the nearest thing France could be said to have to an assembly truly representative of the nation.

  As a States General had not been convened since 1614 many months had elapsed since the decision to call one, while innumerable questions of procedure were argued by a second Assembly of Notables, and arrangements made for the election of clergy, nobles and commoners to the Three Estates which it comprised; but at last all these matters had been settled and the deputies were to meet at Versailles in the coming month.

  The hopes placed in the outcome of this meeting were many and varied. The King hoped it would find him a way out of his financial difficulties without loss of his authority, the people that it would lead to a reduction of their taxes, Monsieur Necker that it would result in his increased prestige, and both the bourgeoisie and the majority of the nobles and clergy that out of it would emerge some form of constitutional government.

  But until it actually met one man's guess was as good as another's It might become a permanent institution on the lines of the British Parliament, or it might be summarily dismissed after a few ineffectual sessions, as had been the Assembly of Notables. It was to assess the most likely possibility that Roger Brook had been sent to France, and, further, to form a well-grounded opinion as to what would follow in either case.

  If the Estates were abruptly dismissed, would that lead to open rebellion—or even civil war? If so was it likely or unlikely that Louis XVI would succeed in holding down his rebellious subjects? Was there any likelihood of him granting his people a Constitution ? If that occurred and the Estates became a permanent body with legislative powers, who would dominate it—Necker or some other? And would whoever it might be incline to friendship or enmity with Britain? All this and much more Mr. Pitt was most anxious to know, so that as the situation developed he might adjust his policy accordingly.

  Roger had just spent a fortnight in Paris. He had looked up a number of old acquaintances and made many new ones; he had talked with innumerable people in cafes, shops and places of entertainment. Having lived for so long in France he already knew that the average English­man's belief, that the French were a nation of bloodthirsty cut-throats dominated by a leaven of fastidious but decadent and unscrupulous aristocrats, was far from the mark; and that in reality the individuals of the two races were inspired in their private lives by very similar thoughts and feelings. But on his return to the French capital he was very soon conscious of
two things.

  Firstly, although he had thought himself so well informed at the age of nineteen, how abysmally ignorant he had really been upon a great variety of matters. Secondly, that a quite staggering change had taken place in the mentality of the French people.

  Previously, with the exception of one in a thousand, they had given their whole minds to business and pleasure, regarding politics as a thing apart that concerned only the King and his Ministers: so that however much they might deplore the state into which their country had fallen it was futile for them to think about it, since it was quite im­possible for them to influence the future course of events. But now, with the extraordinary innovation of being given the opportunity to elect representatives who would voice their opinions, politics had entered like a virus into the blood of the whole race. They were like a child with a new toy, and wherever he went people were discussing in a most heated fashion the forthcoming meeting of the States General, the excellencies of Monsieur Necker or the iniquities of the "Austrian woman", as they now called the Queen. It was therefore easy for him to gather a consensus of opinion and his unobtrusive activities had soon led him to three definite conclusions:—

  That the people of Paris were not in the main antagonistic towards the King or the monarchy, as such; but they were towards the Queen and a continuance of absolutism. That there would be serious trouble if the King dismissed the States with nothing accomplished. And that His Highness the Due d'Orleans was sailing very near treason in some of his measures to gain popularity for himself at the expense of the Court and his cousin the King.

  From the provincials he met he gathered that the elections had set the whole country in a ferment, and that opinion in the big cities, par­ticularly Marseilles and Lyons, was running nearly as strongly in favour of forcing some definite concession from die King as it was in Paris; but a tour of the provincial cities to verify these possibly biased state­ments would have been a lengthy undertaking, and he had felt that in any case feeling in them could have little influence on events during the opening sessions of the States. On the other hand the much abused Court might yet have some strong cards up its sleeve to play in an emergency, so he had decided that his next step must be an attempt to ascertain its real strength and disposition.