The Rising Storm

by Dennis Wheatley

  Having had a good night, Roger did not feel like sleep, but he made a pretence of obeying her while actually continuing to watch her covertly from under his long lashes.

  Getting up she fetched a book from her valise and, sitting down again on the cushions close beside him, began to read it. Roger could see at a glance that it was in Greek, which surprised him for two reasons—firstly because it was unusual for ladies of that day to receive a classical education, and secondly because, seeing that it was Sunday, he would have expected her to read only books of devotions. It occurred to him then that it might be a Greek Testament, but, being an excellent classical scholar himself, further surreptitious glances told him that, far from it being anything of the sort, it was a copy of the Poems of Sappho.

  This small piece of information caused Roger to make a swift readjustment in his previous assessment of the Señorita d’Aranda. Intense, open and intelligent he already knew her to be, but an interest in Sappho indicated that she was by no means a prude. He began to think that however badly he might burn his fingers as a result of possible dalliance with this new flame, he was going to get more fun for his pains than he had at first supposed; and while considering that highly consoling assumption he quite unwittingly dropped off to sleep.

  It was, no doubt, his still youthful capacity for almost unlimited sleep, when not otherwise engaged, that played a big part in the swift restoration of his vitality after he had sustained any serious hurt or strain. When the doctor came that evening he pronounced the patient’s progress to be excellent, and agreed that provided his foot was kept up on a cushion no harm should come of his making a twenty-mile stage in a comfortable coach the following day.

  Accordingly a leisurely start was made at nine o’clock next morning. Isabella insisted on Roger having the same corner seat, next the near window, as that in which she had brought him wounded from the field of honour; while, again, she sat next to him with Quetzal on her other side and the Señora Poeblar beyond the boy in the far corner. Room had been made for Maria on the front seat, opposite the Señora, and Roger’s baggage was piled in with the rest. In addition to Pedro and Manuel with their blunderbusses on the boot and box, and Isabella’s armed outrider, Hernando, they now had two tough-looking hired men, both carrying pistols and cutlasses, riding one either side of the coach. So as they left Nevers behind, perched so romantically upon its hill above the confluence of the Loire and the Allier, they felt that de Roubec would be hard put to it to muster a sufficient number of mounted ruffians to attack them with any hope of success.

  It was the 4th of May, the fateful day on which, provided there were no further postponements, the States General was to assemble for its first momentous meeting at Versailles; but Isabella d’Aranda’s party gave it no thought as they knew that, even by fast courier, it must be several days before news of what had occurred could catch up with them.

  The weather was clement and the country through which they were passing mainly cultivated, as they were now on the fringe of the Bourbonnais, which contained some of the finest farming land in France. Roger was no agricultural expert but, like every Englishman of his day, he knew enough of farming to realise that the rich soil was not producing crops to one half the value of that in his native Hampshire—and the reason was not far to seek.

  Even the poorest nobility of France considered it beneath them to farm their own properties. Instead, they let it out in small holdings to the ignorant peasants on the evil metayer system, by which the tenant surrendered half his produce to his landlord in lieu of rent; so economical tillage was impossible and such modern ideas as crop rotation entirely unknown. Whereas in England every big landowner for several generations past had taken the keenest interest in all new developments, and King George himself took pride in growing the biggest turnips in his realm.

  But for the first hour of the journey Roger was given little leisure to study the countryside, as Isabella had not yet heard a full account of his fight with de Roubec’s men, and while he told her of it she had to translate the story bit by bit into Spanish for the benefit of the Señora Poeblar and little Quetzal.

  When he had done, she mentioned for the first time that they would not normally have been on the road so late in the evening had not one of the horses cast a shoe in mid-afternoon. That had slowed their pace to a walk for several miles, and held them up when they reached a wayside village for the best part of an hour while the smith was fetched from his field to re-shoe the horse. She added that she blamed herself for having let Hernando ride on ahead to secure accommodation in Nevers, but it was a routine that they had adopted for the afternoon ever since leaving Fontainebleau, and she had not thought to alter it that morning after her escort of hussars had turned back.

  All things considered they thought themselves lucky to have escaped as lightly as they had. But they agreed that with the protection they now enjoyed there was a very good chance that de Roubec would throw in his hand, return to Paris and report that the task he had been given was beyond his powers of fulfilment.

  In the early afternoon they arrived at a little town called St. Pierre, where they meant to pass the night. The only inn there was the usual miserable place lacking both common rooms and glass windows; but it was one of the penalties of journeying by short stages that travellers who did so were forced to feed in their bedrooms. As Roger knew by experience, in such places single travellers often had to share a room with one or more strangers, the landlord was also usually the cook and the chambermaids, almost invariable ugly, uncouth slatterns. There was never any garden to sit out in, the beds were bug-ridden and the other furniture either of the poorest quality or non-existent. The only point in which they were superior to their English counterparts was that they offered not more, but a greater variety of food.

  However, persons of quality who travelled in France took every precaution to minimise such discomforts, carrying with them their own beds, window curtains, and even folding furniture, as though they were proceeding on a military campaign. And Isabella was no exception to the rule. In half an hour the best of the three rooms in the place had been made tolerably comfortable, and Roger installed on his own bedroll to rest after his journey. He still felt weak from his loss of blood, so dozed for most of the rest of the day, while Isabella whiled away the time playing chess with her duenna.

  The following day they moved on to Moulins, and found it a surprisingly poor, ill-built town for the capital of the rich Bourbonnais and seat of the King’s Intendant. The Belle Image, at which they put up, proved a more spacious but scarcely cleaner hostelry than the pigsty in which they had passed the previous night, and on Roger sending out for news-sheets he was surprised to learn that none was available, even in the cafés. As with everywhere else in France, the town was agog with political speculations, but all were based on the wildest rumours and authentic news entirely lacking.

  On the 6th they passed through pleasant country again, making a slightly longer stage of thirty miles, to St. Pourcain. They arrived to find the place in a tumult, and it transpired that a foreigner had been arrested on suspicion of most nefarious designs. Further enquiry elicited the fact that he was a German who had been caught pacing out the measurements of some fields just outside the town and making notes of their acreage in a little book. Later, when his papers were examined, it emerged that he was a perfectly honest gentleman with large estates in Pomerania, who, on travelling through the Bourbonnais, had been struck with the richness of its soil compared with his own semi-sterile lands, and had formed the project of buying a property in the neighbourhood. But it was several hours before the local authorities could persuade the angry, ignorant peasantry that he was not an agent of the Queen who had been sent to measure their land with a view to doubling the taxes upon it.

  As Roger and Isabella were discussing the matter that evening he asked her: “Why is it that so many people who have never even seen Madame Marie Antoinette believe her capable of the most abominable immoralities, and regard h
er as deserving of such universal hatred?”

  Isabella sadly shook her head. “It is a tragedy, and all the more so in that when she first came to France her beauty and graciousness instantly won for her the adoration of those very masses that now curse her. But she has since been the victim of many unfortunate circumstances over which she had no control.”

  “I pray you tell me of them,” Roger said. “I know most of her story, but since, until quite recently, she has played no part in politics I find this long, gradual decline in her popularity quite inexplicable, and the problem fascinates me.”

  Settling herself more comfortably on her cushions, Isabella replied: “She has been dogged by bad luck from the very moment that she arrived at Versailles as Dauphine. Then, she was a child of fourteen, lacking in all experience of intrigue; yet she found herself at once forced into the position of leader of the set that was striving to bring about the ruin of Madame du Barri. Her mother, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa, had counselled her to conciliate her father-in-law’s powerful mistress; but all her instincts revolted against making a friend of that rapacious, gutter-bred courtesan.

  “Instead, she quite naturally showed her liking for the du Barri’s enemy, the Duc de Choiseul, who, as Prime Minister, had negotiated the Franco-Austrian alliance and her own marriage. He and his friends represented all that was best in France, but for years they had been fighting a losing battle against the greedy libertines with whom the bored, immoral old King surrounded himself; and soon after Madame Marie Antoinette’s appearance on the scene the struggle ended in the du Barri’s favour. De Choiseul was sent into exile and the du Barri’s protégé, the unscrupulous Duc d’Aiguillon, was made principal Minister in his place. Unfortunately the little Dauphine had already shown her colours too plainly to be forgiven her partisanship, and she had committed the unhappy error of backing the losing side. She could not be dismissed with de Choiseul and his friends, but with their departure she was left almost isolated. Within a few months of her coming to France most of the important places at Court were filled by people who knew that they would not have been there had she had her way, and whom she received only because she had to.”

  Roger nodded. “That was certainly a most unfortunate start for her.”

  “It was more than that; it has influenced her whole reign. Four years later when she and her husband came to the throne they swept clean the Augean stable. But it was not only the du Barri who was sent packing. Out of greed a considerable section of the nobility of France had prostituted itself in order to grab the wealth and favours that it had been so easy for the du Barri to bestow. They too found themselves debarred the Court and all prospects of advancement under the new reign. In consequence, scores of powerful families have nurtured a grudge against the Queen ever since.”

  “But why the Queen and not the King?”

  “Because they count him too lethargic to have bothered to deprive them of their sinecures unless she had pressed him to do so; and it was she, not he, who originally championed de Choiseul against them.”

  Isabella ticked off her little finger. “So you see that is one set of unrelenting enemies who for fifteen years have lost no opportunity of blackening and maligning poor Madame Marie Antoinette. From the beginning too she had to contend against the spiteful animosity of the Royal Aunts, Louis XV’s three elderly unmarried sisters. Madame Adelaide was the leading spirit of those stupid, gossiping old women. She both hated the Austrian alliance and resented the fact that a lovely young princess had come to take precedence over her in doing the honours of the Court; so she egged on the other two, and between them they formed a fine breeding-ground for malicious tittle-tattle about their impetuous niece.

  “Then,” Isabella ticked off another finger, “there were her husband’s two brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois; both of whom were much cleverer and wielded considerably more influence at Court than he did. Monsieur de Provence has pretences to learning, but he is a narrow pedantic man and possessed of the most poisonous tongue in the whole Court. From boyhood he has despised and hated his ungifted elder brother and even at times given vent to his rancour that the simple, awkward Louis barred his way to the throne. To a nature so warped by gall and jealousy the Dauphin’s acquisition of a lovely wife could only mean the distillation of further venom, and Monsieur de Provence has never yet lost an opportunity of bespattering Madame Marie Antoinette with lies.”

  “Well, at least Monsieur d’Artois has proved her friend,” Roger put in.

  “In some ways, perhaps,” Isabella shrugged. “Yet he, too, helped to damage her reputation, even if unintentionally. He is certainly very different from his elder brother, for where Monsieur de Provence is fat and stolid he is slim and elegant; moreover he possesses wit and charm. But he is a shallow man and from his youth has indulged in flagrant immoralities. The Queen made a friend of him only from loneliness, and a young girl’s natural craving for a little gaiety. As her brother-in-law she felt that she could go with him to parties that her husband was too mulish to attend, and yet remain untouched by scandal. But in that she proved wrong. ’Tis said that one cannot touch pitch without blackening one’s fingers, and it proved true in this case. Her enemies seized upon Monsieur d’Artois’s evil reputation to assert that since she was often in his company she must be tarred with the same brush.”

  Isabella held up four fingers. “You see how these things add up; and we have not yet come to the end of the Royal Family. The Queen’s ill-luck persisted even to her sisters-in-law. As you may know, both Monsieur de Provence and Monsieur d’Artois married daughters of King Victor Amédeé of Sardinia, and the princesses of the House of Savoy have never been famed for their good looks. One can perhaps forgive these two sallow, pimply creatures for being a little jealous of the beautiful golden-haired Dauphine; but, unfortunately, to their ugliness were added narrowness and spite. They hated her from the outset and combined with the Royal Aunts to invent malicious stories about her. Both of them gave birth to children several years before Madame Marie Antoinette was so blessed, and both took every chance that offered to mock her covertly with her barrenness. Then when she at length produced an heir, their rancour knew no bounds. And with the second son born to the Queen it, if possible, became intensified, as each such birth has placed their own children further off in the line of succession.”

  Roger smiled grimly. “You have now more than a full hand.”

  “Yet I am far from finished. There was the affair of the Diamond Necklace, about which all the world knows. Personally I believe the Cardinal de Rohan to have been the innocent victim of a gang of rogues. But be that as it may, his prosecution by the royal command and later banishment damaged the Sovereigns as much as would have the loss of a province. The de Rohans, de Soubise, Guises and Lorraines are all one family, and that the most powerful in France. They stand united in holding the Queen responsible for their kinsman’s disgrace, and have never forgiven her for it.”

  “ ’Twas the King’s incredible stupidity in insisting on a public enquiry into the matter that did the damage.”

  “Perhaps; but the public still does not believe her guiltless, and maintains that she sacrificed de Rohan to save herself. De Rohan, too, is far from being the only man who would have made love to her if she would have let him, and because she repulsed him has now become her enemy. That is the secret that lies behind His Highness of Orléans’ vile and treasonable designs. If he could pull King Louis from the throne and seat himself upon it, he would, at one stroke, slake his vast ambitions and his thirst to be revenged on the woman who as a young girl slighted his advances.”

  Isabella had given up counting, but she paused for a moment before adding: “ ’Tis her still further misfortune that in this crisis in the affairs of France the King’s First Minister should be a man that she can neither like nor trust. Both she and the King are devout Catholics, and the interests of Church and State have for so long been one in France that it is naturally offensive to
their feelings that they should now have to rely for guidance on a member of the Reformed Religion.

  “Moreover, Monsieur Necker’s mental horizon is still that of a counting-house. They have every wish to aid him in his economies, but there are other matters of import quite as grave upon which, at times, he appears so vague they get the impression that they might almost be talking to him in a language that he does not understand. His reaction is to suspect them, and particularly the Queen, of endeavouring to deceive or make a fool of him; so he returns angry and disgruntled to his daughter’s salon. Then that clever Madame de Staël makes bitter witticisms at the expense of Her Majesty, and one more place from which help should come has become instead a hotbed of slander and sedition.”

  Roger sighed. “You have said more than enough, Señorita. I see now that almost from her childhood her enemies have been legion, so ’tis hardly to be wondered at that in the course of time they have succeeded in prejudicing the whole nation so violently against her.”

  That was the last conversation in which Isabella and Roger addressed one another formally as “Monsieur” and “Señorita”. On their first day together, at the inn in Nevers, she had asked his full name, and when he told her she had repeated Roger over two or three times as “Rojé”, in the way that foreigners usually pronounced it, remarking that it was a pleasant name; but it was not until the morning after their talk about the Queen that she uttered it again.

  They had barely cleared the last houses of St. Pourcain, on their way to Clermont, when some baggage that had been insecurely stacked on the front seat of the coach began to slip and threatened to come crashing down on Roger’s injured foot. With a cry of: “Quick, Rojé! Quick! Guard your ankle!” Isabella sprang from her seat and flinging out her hands managed to divert the landslide.