The Wanton Princess

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Bourrienne no longer has a use for you. He has acquired a very able young man named Méneval as his assistant.’

  ‘What then would you have me do, Consul?’ asked Roger.

  ‘I know not,’ came the testy reply. ‘If you can think of some way to serve me, come to me again.’

  Roger bowed, turned and made for the door. He had nearly reached it when the harsh voice cried behind him, ‘Stay! I am losing my wits. I’ll forget my own name next. You travelled across India in the summer of ‘97, did you not?’

  Actually, that after three and a half years he should have recalled such a fact about one of the hundreds of officers with whom he was in contact was a demonstration of his remarkable memory. Replying that he had, Roger turned about to find him perched on the edge of his desk swinging his legs and now all smiles.

  ‘Then, Breuc, you are the very man I’m looking for,’ he said quickly. ‘It is probable that you can inform me on many matters about which I am anxious to know.’

  Slipping off his desk he crossed the room to a cabinet of maps, pulled one out, opened it, spread it on the floor, lay down at full length facing it and signed to Roger to join him. Having made Roger trace his journey right across the subcontinent from Calcutta to Bombay, during the next half hour he shot a hundred questions at him about the cities through which he had passed, the personalities of their rulers, the religions of the people, their like or dislike of the British, the climate, the navigability of the rivers and a score of other matters.

  At length he got to his feet, playfully pulled Roger’s ear and said:

  ‘Breuc, your arrival is most opportune. I am preparing an expedition to wrest India from the English. You shall go with it as A.D.C.-in-Chief to the Commander. You will be invaluable to him. Report to Berthier, tell him I have nominated you for that post and that I wish you to work with him on the preparations for this project.’

  The appointment meant promotion, so Roger hurriedly stammered his thanks, then left the room filled with dismay. With the possible exception of Egypt, India was the last place in the world that he wanted to go to again; but it would have been useless, even dangerous, to say so.

  At Berthier’s headquarters, he found the ill-made little Chief-of-Staff clad in one of the spectacular uniforms that he and Murat were so fond of designing for themselves; but where the tall cavalryman had the figure and panache to carry them off, they made this human filing cabinet only look ridiculous.

  Having said that Roger’s assistance would be welcome, Berthier informed him that General Menou had succeeded Kléber as C.-in-C. Egypt, and that before going on to India the new expedition would reinforce and secure his position there. He then spoke of Kléber’s assassination. It had occurred on a spot that they had both known well—the terrace of a Palace that Bonaparte had occupied while in Cairo. Adjacent to the terrace there was an old, empty cistern which could be entered from the garden. The assassin, a young fanatic named Soleiman Haleby, had concealed himself in the cistern and, when Kléber had come out to stroll on the terrace, scrambled out of the cistern and stabbed him with a dagger. Bonaparte, when occupying the Palace, had often taken his exercise on the terrace in the evenings, and had been warned of the danger of leaving the cistern unguarded, but had ignored it. They now agreed that it was fortunate for France that it was not he who had fallen a victim to the Mohammedan’s dagger.

  The following morning Roger started work with a group of officers who were planning the expedition to India. In his free time, he looked up a number of friends and paid his duty calls.

  The First Consul had offered his mother a suite of apartments in the Tuilleries, but she had refused it and was living with her eldest son Joseph and his sweet wife Julie, at their splendid mansion in the Rue du Rocher.

  Although Madame Letizia was as yet only fifty years old, the hardships through which she had passed, her great strength of character and the uprightness of her disposition combined to give her the prestige of a far more venerable woman. Having questioned Roger closely about his wound, knowing him to be intimate with her most brilliant son, she spoke to him openly of her distress that Napoleon should have quarrelled with Lucien.

  She had not the least interest in politics and thought only of the well-being of her children, maintaining always that she loved best, at any time, the one who was suffering most. But it could not be doubted that Lucien was her favourite son, and she intensely resented Napoleon’s having deprived him of his office.

  The only sympathy that Roger felt for Lucien was that he had lost his simple, sweet-natured wife Catherine in the preceding Spring. Otherwise he regarded him as a dangerous fanatic who might, if given the chance, endanger the First Consul’s regeneration of France. Further, Roger despised him as the worst possible type of pseudo ‘Friend of the People’ for he had used his position as Minister of the Interior to amass a great fortune at their expense and to persuade or blackmail into sleeping with him many pretty women.

  Napoleon’s oldest sister, Eliza, was also a great partisan of Lucien’s. After Brumaire her ineffective husband, Bacciocchi, had been packed off to attend to certain administrative matters in Corsica and Marseilles, upon which she had happily settled down, Lucien’s wife being ill, to take charge of his ménage in the Grande Rue Verte. They regarded themselves as spiritual affinities and both looked on the other as an astute literary critic. On the money that they owed to the First Consul’s liberality they had a happy time gathering distinguished writers round them and encouraging them to write articles criticising Napoleon.

  When Roger called upon Eliza he found her dressed in an unbelievably ugly garb of her own design which she told him was to serve as the uniform of a new Literary Society she was forming and, knowing him to be an educated man, she invited him to become a member. Having pleaded that his military commitments were, at the moment, too onerous to permit him that pleasure, he bowed himself out of the presence of Napoleon’s blue-stocking sister.

  Young Caroline Murat he found equally discontented with the way things were going. She alone of Madame Letizia’s children possessed the individuality and determination which, had she been a man, could have made her another Napoleon. As things were she could achieve her boundless ambitions only through her husband. As a girl of seventeen, when at Bonaparte’s headquarters in Italy after his victorious campaign of ‘96, she had fallen in love with Murat, and he with her. To her fury she had then been sent to Madame Campan’s Academy to acquire a finishing education. She had sullenly refused to take advantage of this opportunity; but those years of boredom had not deflected her from her purpose of acquiring Murat for a husband, and he had continued to regard her, as his General’s sister, as a good catch. So much so that, on the night of 18th Brumaire, he had sent a couple of his Hussars to pound on the door of the Academy and shout the news to her that he and Bonaparte had saved the Revolution.

  Immediately she had been freed from Madame Campan’s tutelage she had badgered her brother to let her marry Murat. Bonaparte had demurred because by then he had good cause to dislike and distrust his brilliant cavalry leader.

  Murat preferred to hobnob with junior officers because to them he could boast of his exploits without fear of contradiction and not long since he had given a party for a number of them. At this party he had introduced a special Punch which, he said, could only be made with Rum from Martinique. He added that he had been shown how to mix it by a charming lady in whose company he had spent the whole day. Then he produced a new type of silver lemon squeezer which, he said, she had given him. On examining the squeezer one of his guests announced to the raucous laughter of the by then drunken company that on its base were engraved the initials J.B. This, and the connections with Martinique, plainly implied that it was the First Consul’s wife with whom Murat had spent a whole day, and that he had enjoyed Josephine’s favours.

  Such was Caroline’s doggedness of purpose that she had bullied Napoleon into letting her marry Murat; but when the story of the drinking party cam
e to his ears, he had, after Marengo, sent Murat off to subdue southern Italy, and Caroline did not disguise from Roger her intense bitterness that Napoleon should have deprived her of her husband for so long.

  Roger also called upon Pauline Leclerc. He knew that as a young girl, when Bonaparte was no more than a promising junior General who had never conducted a campaign, she had fallen desperately in love with the ex-Terrorist Fréron, and that Napoleon had firmly vetoed her marrying this unsavoury character, then old enough to be her father. His selection a little later of Leclerc for her as a husband had been due to the fact that Leclerc was outstanding among his officers as a gentleman, well educated and would prove an asset to the Bonaparte family. Pauline, who was extremely highly sexed, and by then eager to be allowed to get into bed with any good-looking man, had been attracted by Leclerc and readily agreed to accept him as her husband.

  The marriage had been a great success, but not to the extent that Pauline was content to remain sighing for Leclerc when he had been sent off to the Army of the Rhine. Since then, rumour had it she had indulged in a triple affaire with the Generals Moreau, Macdonald and Beurnonville simultaneously when they had been in Paris at the same time. She had early become conscious of her great beauty and her power to attract men. So now her greatest pleasure was to adorn herself in magnificent toilettes—the bills for which were nearly ruining the unfortunate Leclerc—and, reclining elegantly on a sofa, excite the admiration and desire of her male visitors.

  The only other thing with which she concerned herself was her intense hatred of Josephine. The First Consul’s wife had the advantage of her that, although she had never been presented at Court, she had been brought up as a demoiselle of the ancien régime. Her taste in clothes and décor was impeccable, she received her husband’s guests with charm and dignity and she was now his greatest asset in helping him to bridge the gap between the societies of the old France and that which had arisen as a result of the Revolution. Pauline, on the other hand, was a vulgar little parvenue; but that did not detract from her beauty.

  And there was another thing which attracted Roger to her. Greedy though she might be to get all she could out of Napoleon, she was the only one of his family who respected and loved him. He had always been her favourite brother and she placed his interests above all else.

  With her Roger considerably outstayed the accepted formal call of twenty minutes. Reclining on a couch, clad in rich but revealing draperies, she was a sight to stir any man’s desire, and she made no secret of the fact that she was enjoying Roger’s undisguised admiration. When he at length rose to make his devoirs, she fluttered her long eyelashes at him provocatively and said, ‘I find you most sympathetic, Colonel Breuc; I pray you come to see me soon again.’

  But Roger was not destined to see her again for a long time to come. During the past few days he had been giving much thought to his future. On one matter he was fully determined—he was not going with the expedition to India. To avoid doing so he intended to pretend a relapse. It would be accepted without question that, with his normally weak chest and a lung wound scarcely healed, he had acted most rashly in leaving the South of France in mid-winter for the cold and windy streets of Paris.

  What then, though? He had not the least desire to return to St. Maxime. His affaire with little Jeanne had been a pleasant interlude but her kisses had already begun to cloy before he left. If resumed it would soon become most wearisome to him; yet, if he went back there and broke it off, she would be terribly hurt. Besides, he had vegetated for more than long enough. Returning to Paris had brought home to him how greatly, if subconsciously, he had missed being au courant with events, privy to secret matters of importance, and the companionship of men and women of his world.

  It then occurred to him that had he still been in the service of Mr. Pitt he would be about to feign a relapse, not to escape going with the expedition to India but in order to get away to England and inform him of it. Thinking matters over, he quickly came to the conclusion that no longer being a secret agent did not relieve him of his obligations to his own country. He might live and make his career in France, but that did not mean that he could stand by and watch a serious blow struck at England if he had the power to prevent it. And this threat to her rich possessions in India could develop into a very serious blow.

  Having sent his excuses to Berthier, he retired to bed at La Belle Etoile and remained there for two days. He then wrote to the First Consul reporting that he had sadly overestimated the extent to which he had recovered from his wound and, greatly as he regretted it, there could be no question of his going to India. Instead, the state of his lung required that he leave the cold, damp capital and spend a further period in the sunshine of the south.

  His good friend Duroc brought him in person Bonaparte’s permission to go again on indefinite leave, condoled with him, sat beside his bed for a while and, much distressed, left him under the impression that his cough was so bad that it might lead to a consumption.

  Duroc had not been gone long when it struck Roger that if he took the diligence next day, he might, provided that he was not held up by bad weather in the Channel, be in England for Christmas. Accordingly he sent out to book a seat, with a message that he would be joining the diligence outside Paris. Then, after darkness had fallen that afternoon he drove in a hired carriage to the first posting stage on the road to Calais and put up at the inn there for the night.

  He was sorry to leave Paris, as he had greatly enjoyed the week he had spent there before taking to his bed, and he thought the change the city had undergone in the past fourteen months more than ever marvellous. Cleanliness, cheerfulness and observance of the law were now the order of the day. Many streets were being widened and fine new buildings put up. Factories that had lain idle for years were now working again at full capacity. Trade was booming. The new styles in furniture created to make the sacked Tuileries again habitable, and Bonaparte’s official receptions there, had created a great demand for luxury goods. The silk spinners at Lyons, the porcelain factory at Sèvres, cabinet makers, goldsmiths and jewellers, such as Jacobs, Biennais and Bohemer, who for long had been hard put to it to keep going were doing an enormous business; while the salons of the best modistes and dress-designers, above all that of Leroy, the veritable King of haute-couture, were making great fortunes for their owners. For France it had been a stupendous year and everyone knew it to be entirely due to the genius of the little Corsican.

  When Roger reached Calais he went to a small inn on the outskirts of the town and there made contact with a smuggler who had put him over on two previous occasions. He was lucky, as a cargo was being run that night, and the following day, having been landed below St. Margarets-at-Cliff, he was in Dover. From there, instead of taking the coach to London, he hired a post chaise which took him and his baggage direct to Stillwaters, arriving there on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. In the past Georgina had always had big house parties there over Christmas and, knowing how fond she was of the place, Roger thought it probable that, whether she had carried out her intention of becoming Mrs. Beefy or not, she would be in residence.

  On enquiring at the porter’s lodge he learned that the gamble he had taken had come off; also that Georgina had married in the Spring and now had nearly a score of guests staying in the house. Greatly curious to find out what sort of a man Beefy was, Roger proceeded on up the drive. He wondered, too, about Georgina’s guests, as he could not imagine her cheerfully entertaining a number of merchants and their dull wives, yet doubted if her old friends would have accepted a sugar shipper into their circle.

  On the latter question his curiosity was satisfied sooner than he expected. Half way up the drive he came upon a fine-looking man dressed in rich furs who was taking a brisk walk. Although it was a long time since they had met they recognised one another at first glance. The sable-clad gentleman was Count Simon Vorontzoff, the Russian Ambassador. At a time when Roger had been living with Georgina she had been temporarily attracted
by the Russian and this had led to the two men each playing a scurvy trick on the other; but later they had buried the hatchet, so bore one another no ill will.

  Having ordered his driver to pull up, Roger exchanged courteous greetings with Georgina’s old admirer, then asked, ‘How is our beautiful Mrs. Beefy?’

  ‘As gay and delightful as ever, I am happy to say,’ replied the Russian. ‘But, my dear Mr. Brook, you will find no place in her good graces should you call her that. Married again though she is, she made it plain to all that she intended to continue to be known as the Countess of St. Ermins.’

  Roger laughed, ‘How like her. Has she then succeeded in maintaining her position in society and establishing her sugar merchant husband in it?’

  ‘She has handled a difficult situation with great skill,’ the Ambassador said with a smile. ‘Had she been a man, her strong personality and tact, coupled with her great wealth, would have made her a most successful diplomat. She is, of course, no longer received at Court but she has retained the friendship of the haut monde by refraining from attempting to foist Mr. Beefy upon it. For brief periods she still occupies her house in Berkeley Square and entertains there lavishly, but she never takes her husband to London with her. While here, at Stillwaters, she has to stay only her older friends who, out of affection for her, had no objection to making his acquaintance.’

  ‘And what sort of a man is he?’ Roger enquired.

  ‘A very pleasant fellow. Naturally he lacks the advantages bestowed by birth, but he has a simple goodness of heart that I find attractive and he carries out his duties as host very adequately. I feel sure you will like him.’

  For Georgina’s sake Roger had every intention of making himself pleasant to her husband; and, an hour later, after being received by her and her father with surprise and delight, when Mr. Beefy returned to the house from selecting the Yule Log, he gave Roger a hearty welcome.