The Rising Storm

by Dennis Wheatley

  There was nothing to stop him leaving Paris next day for England. Mr. Pitt had not sent him to France and would certainly be much annoyed with him for having gone there. He had shot his bolt with the Queen in vain, and if he stayed on to enter into some almost hopeless intrigue with the deputies of the Extreme Left his master would have more cause for anger with him than ever. It would probably wreck his career for the second and last time.

  Yet he knew that he was going to stay on; both because, having already adopted unorthodox means in the hope of being able to fulfil his mission, he would not give up the game as long as there was a card left in the pack; and because, since Isabella now felt her danger to be so acute as to have left her husband on account of it, and life for her held no future except with him, he could not possibly abandon her.

  At eleven o’clock next morning she joined him in the visitors’ parlour at the Carmelite Convent. It was a bare, sparsely furnished room, the antithesis of the surroundings that any couple would have chosen to make love in; and they did not attempt it.

  After they had spent a few moments saying how happy they were to be reunited once more, Roger said: “Tell me, my love, why you have sought this retreat. Have you recently had fresh evidence of your husband’s intention to poison you?”

  “Nay,” she shook her head. “But circumstances have altered. Had I not pretended a sudden fit of religion during the last stages of our journey, and insisted that I must make a novena here immediately on my arrival in Paris, I might be dead by now.”

  “I must confess to still having doubts that his intentions are so evil,” Roger told her. “For the past month I have been racked with anxiety for your safety. My ultimate reasoning led me to conclude that if Don Diego meant to rid himself of you he would do so while you were travelling, preferably far from a town, at some small inn where the odds would have been all against any serious enquiry into your death being made. Moreover, had he done so he would then have reached Paris a free man, and been able to offer himself to the Lady Georgina before any question could arise of her leaving for England. Whereas now …”

  “Rojé, you do not understand!” she cut him short. “However black any man’s thoughts, he would incline to put off so terrible a deed until the last extremity. Diego believed that Lady Etheredge was willing to spend several weeks in Paris. Perhaps she would have been, but for the fact that she is now pursued by a new admirer, and he an Englishman who is pressing her to return home in his company at an early date.”

  “Who is he?” asked Roger with quick interest. “And what type of man?”

  “He is the Earl of St. Ermins; and he is young, rich and handsome. We met him at Tours. He was engaged on a leisurely progress round the historic châteaux of the Loire; but he abandoned it, and joining his coach to our cavalcade accompanied us on the last stages to Paris. Each day Diego became more green with jealousy. By the time we reached the capital he was near desperate. Had I lodged with him at the Spanish Embassy, I vow that within the next few days he would have taken any gamble to rid himself of me; so that he might declare himself, rather than see Lady Etheredge leave for England with his rival.”

  “I will admit that puts a very different complexion on the matter,” Roger agreed. “But, thank God, you will be safe from him here until I can make arrangements to take you away with me.”

  She smiled. “There is naught for which to wait. I saw Her Majesty last night, and she gave me every assurance in connection with Diego’s mission that I could desire. I wrote him to that effect first thing this morning. Maria I had to leave behind at the Embassy, but I could send money to her and instructions how to join us later. Quetzal is here with me now, as I arranged for him to sleep in the gardener’s lodge. There is at last, my dearest love, no reason left to prevent us taking the road to happiness together, tomorrow.”

  “I fear there is still one,” he demurred. “Having come to Paris, I took the opportunity yesterday to raise certain questions with the Government in connection with work upon which I am engaged; so I could hardly leave now without making some attempt to complete this business satisfactorily.”

  “What is this work of yours?” she asked with a frown. “You made only the vaguest references to it in Aranjuez, so the thought of it passed entirely from my mind until Quetzal caught us up in Madrid, and gave it as your reason for not joining us on the pretext I had suggested.”

  “It is the agreement of certain navigational rights between several countries,” Roger replied quietly. “For some time past I have been asked by my Government, when travelling here and there, to settle such questions to the best of my ability.”

  She shrugged. “Surely such matters are of very minor importance. Can you not take me to England without delay, and get your Government to instruct their Consul here to conclude the negotiations in your stead?”

  “Seeing that I started the ball rolling myself, I fear that might be taken very ill. But I think my business will be settled one way or the other within the next few days. So we could get away by the end of the week.”

  “Ah well,” she sighed. “ ’Tis a disappointment after the happy dreams I had last night; but since we have waited for one another for so long, and you require only so short a period, I will endeavour not to show too great an impatience.”

  For the better part of two hours they talked of the retired but happy life they proposed to lead in England; then, as he was about to leave her, she asked when he would visit her again.

  “In view of our projected elopement it might be unwise for us to court suspicion by my coming here too frequently,” he answered cautiously. “Let us leave it till Wednesday. I will come in the morning at ten o’clock and, with luck, by then I shall be in a position to fix a time for our departure.”

  When he had left her he was glad that he had not committed himself to a series of visits. He had found their long talk in that bare, cold room a considerable strain; but he hoped and believed that matters would be very different once they could get away, as there would be the excitement of the elopement and the brighter prospect of all the new interests of their life together.

  That afternoon he went to the Spanish Embassy to call upon Georgina, but she was out, so he left a message that he would wait upon her the following morning. In the evening he went again to the Jacobins, and listened for four hours to the heated speeches of the members. The immediate crisis now seemed to have become submerged in the general question whether the right to make peace or war at any time should remain in the hands of the King; and the speakers of the Extreme Left were urging that he should be deprived of the power to do do by a clause in the new Constitution.

  On the Monday morning at eleven o’clock Roger was shown up to the salon on the first floor of the Spanish Embassy. He found Georgina with her hostess, the Condesa Fernanunez, so for a while their conversation had to remain impersonal. The war scare was naturally mentioned and the Condesa complained unhappily about the situation of the Embassy. Unlike most of the great hôtels in Paris, which were built round a courtyard with gates that could be closed in an emergency, the Spanish Embassy had all its principal rooms facing on the street. As Roger had noticed on his arrival, there was a little group of ugly-looking loiterers outside; and the Condesa said that since the trouble had started such groups had collected each day, often increasing to large proportions whenever the situation appeared to worsen, and sometimes demonstrating in the most threatening fashion against the Embassy and its Spanish inmates.

  Roger duly commiserated with her on this unpleasantness and said he hoped the crisis would soon pass; then, after they had touched upon various other matters, the Condesa, seeing that Georgina and her visitor wished to be alone, tactfully made an excuse to leave them.

  The moment the door had closed behind her, Georgina burst out: “Oh, Roger, Roger! What madness has possessed you that you are come to Paris? When you did not join us with little Quetzal in Madrid I counted you saved from your own folly, and long since this happily back in Engl
and.”

  “I had to come here,” he replied, “though I fear now that I can do little good. ’Twas work in connection with the crisis that brought me.”

  “God be praised for that!” she exclaimed. “I feared that you still felt yourself committed to the Condesa Isabella. By a merciful Providence she has taken herself off to a convent, so ’tis unlikely you will meet her.”

  “I have already done so. I came face to face with her on Saturday evening at the Tuileries, as she was about to wait upon the Queen; and I visited her yesterday at the Carmelites.”

  “What say you? Oh, Roger!” Georgina’s big dark eyes filled with tears. “I would have cut off my right hand rather than that you should have fallen into the clutches of that designing woman yet again.”

  “Georgina, you are unjust to her,” he retorted quickly. “It is more than I could hope that you should make a real friend of anyone so intense and serious-minded; but she is an honest, sweet-natured creature, who asks nothing more than to devote her whole life to me. How can I possibly abandon her, when her own life is in such dire jeopardy that she has been forced to take refuge in a convent?”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” cried Georgina angrily. “That wicked snare she laid for you concerning Don Diego’s intent to poison her was fully exploded by our journey to Paris. I never did believe one word of it. Had he ever had a mind to such a crime he would have rid himself of her in his own country and house, where he would have had a good chance to conceal the manner of her death; or at some lonely inn on the road to Paris; not waited till he arrived here, where ’tis certain that a close enquiry into her sudden death would certainly result.”

  “I thought that, too,” Roger agreed more mildly. “But she argues that any man would postpone so terrible an act while he still had hopes of achieving his ends by other means.”

  “You infer that had I been willing to let him become my lover he would no longer have had the same motive to wish to rid himself of his wife?”

  Roger nodded.

  She smiled a little ruefully. “Then, my dear, disabuse your mind of that idea. I had promised myself to remain chaste until the summer. But I felt that lest there might truly be something in this poison plot, it was little short of my duty to remove the alleged cause for it. I knew that you would never ask me to play the part of Sara Goudar for you, so I did it of my own account. I let Diego have his way with me before we left Aranjuez, and again several times on our journey.”

  “’Twas prodigious generous of you.”

  Georgina shrugged. “Since I have taken lovers before for my own amusement, and ’twas inferred that the Condesa’s life hung upon it, I could hardly do less. And, that apart, I do not think I was born with so hard a heart as to have left the poor man for good without granting him some recompense for his many weeks’ assiduous attendance on me. But the Condesa’s contention, that once he has taken his pleasure of a woman his ardour for her cools, has no foundation; at least in this case, as he has become madder for me than ever.”

  “If that is so,” said Roger thoughtfully, “the motive still remains. He knows that you have it in mind to marry again, and in taking steps to free himself, so that he may offer you his hand, lies his only hope of binding you to him.”

  “That I admit; but I do not believe for one moment that he would commit murder; even were I a Lady Macbeth and urged him to it with a promise that I would marry him if he did. The fits of sombre introspection from which he suffers at times does not affect the fact that he is a man of the highest principles.”

  “Even so, at the thought of losing you, his morbid nature might drive him to it. And I gather that you now intend to leave him very shortly.”

  “Yes; we depart first thing on Thursday morning. ’Twill be a wrench, but I have so decided. Paris is like a courtesan who overnight has become raddled from some foul disease. ’Twas a lovely city to live in not long ago, but I find it now quite hideous. No Court worth going to, no balls or routs; my gay and gallant friends all fled abroad, the shop-people and servants insolent, and a cut-throat mob out in the streets that shouts ‘Spanish whore’ at me do I but glance from a window.”

  Roger laughed. “ ’Tis true enough that Paris is no place for you in these days, my poppet. But I also gather that you have acquired the means to console yourself on the way home for the loss of Don Diego.”

  Her face brightened. “So the Condesa told you of Charles, eh?”

  “If Charles is my lord St. Ermins she did indeed. And ’twas his appearance on the scene that led her to fear Don Diego’s jealousy might culminate in her murder.”

  “Oh, drat the woman! She is but making further capital out of a circumstance that might have occurred to any group of travellers. Papa used to stay with Charles’s father and knew Charles when he was a boy at Eton. What could be more natural than that he should decide to travel home with us? That he swiftly became attentive to myself, I’ll not deny; but seeing that my face is something better than a currant bun, and he a fine vigorous fellow of twenty-five, I would have been much amazed had it been otherwise. But knowing Diego’s temper I vow to you I took every possible precaution to avoid giving him cause for complaint. Indeed, so little encouragement did I give my lord that I would have accounted it no great surprise had I lost him.”

  “Am I to take it that you would have been loath to do so?”

  “Why, yes,” Georgina smiled. “To be truthful, although I have not shown it yet, I am more than a little smitten with him. He is gay, good-hearted, intelligent and well read. In fact he has much of his great-great-grandfather in him; for as you’ll know the first earl of the name was one of the numerous sons begot by King Charles II on the wrong side of the blanket. ’Tis a monstrous pity that his mother died in giving him birth, as had she not ’tis reasonable to suppose she would have got him a Dukedom. None the less, Charles is far from badly situated. His seat is in Northamptonshire, he has another place in Cornwall, one of those nice modern houses in Berkeley Square, and an ample fortune with which to keep them all up. But he is as fond of travel as I am, and likes to spend a part of every year abroad.”

  “He sounds the perfect parti for you,” Roger grinned.

  “I would not yet say that,” she said with sudden seriousness. “I have had to be so plaguey careful not to arouse Diego’s jealousy that I have so far had little opportunity to get to know Charles’s real nature. But I will admit to you that I am much attracted by what I have seen of him.”

  “Then you are now cured of the strange fascination that Don Diego had for you?”

  “No,” she replied after a moment. “I’d not go so far as that. I feel towards him quite differently. The artist in me delights in his fine presence, his courtly manners and that marvellous profile of his; yet he has never succeeded in making me desire him. Do not laugh, Roger, for I mean this. To me he is in some sort like a beautiful grown-up child, and whenever I think of him in the future it will be with something of a mother’s affection.”

  “I think I understand,” he nodded; then he stood up. “Will you forgive me if I go now? ’Tis important that I should not miss today’s debate in the Assembly.”

  She began to assure him again that Isabella was acting a part in order to ensnare him, and beg him to break free from his entanglement, but with an upraised hand he checked her.

  “I pray you say no more on this, for it can serve only to distress us both. I think with you that her fears are groundless, but I would swear to it that she honestly believes herself to be in great danger, and things must now take their course for good or ill.” Then he promised to call on Wednesday afternoon to wish her bon voyage, and left her.

  At the Assembly he learned that the debate on the Spanish alliance had been postponed for two days; but at the Jacobins that night the question of the King’s right to enter into treaties without the consent of the nation was the prime subject of the debate.

  On the previous evening Roger had asked Barnave to introduce him to Alexander Lameth, Pétion,
Robespierre and several other of his colleagues of the Extreme Left; so he was now able to move round among the tables where the members sat drinking as they listened to the orators, and get in conversation with these men again.

  Lameth and his brothers were renegades, for they were of gentle birth and had been brought up as protégés of the Queen, at her expense. Pétion was a big, coarse, forceful man, and Robespierre a prim little lawyer from Arras. The latter was an out-and-out Republican; and of such rigid principles that on having been appointed a criminal judge, through the influence of a Bishop who was a friend of his family, he had laid down the office rather than pass a death sentence, because it was against his conscience. He had an awkward, provincial manner of speaking and was not at all popular among his colleagues; but he had gained their respect by his integrity and his uncompromising hatred of everything connected with the old order.

  Roger was talking to him and Dupont, another prominent deputy of the Left, when a fattish, square-faced man of about forty came up, greeted the other two as acquaintances, and asked him if they might have a word apart. Somewhat mystified, Roger left his companions and accompanied the stranger to a quiet corner under the gallery. The fat man then addressed him in English.

  “You are Mr. Roger Brook, are you not?”

  “I am, sir,” Roger replied. “And I judge from your voice that you are a fellow countryman.”

  The other bowed. “My name is Miles, sir. William Augustus Miles, at your service. Mayhap the master whom we both have the honour to serve has mentioned me to you.”

  Fearing a trap, Roger answered with a shake of his head: “I fear, sir, you have mistaken me for another. I am a travelling journalist and owe no allegience to any particular master.”

  Mr. Miles nodded sagely. “You are right in exercising caution, but you have no need to do so with myself. I bear a message to you from Lord Robert Fitz-Gerald.”

  Roger’s eyes narrowed. “Indeed, sir?”