Evil in a Mask rb-9

by Dennis Wheatley

  Roger bowed again. 'For that I thank you, milord.' As he had been considerably worried about how he was to find the further instalments to pay for the house, its being taken over was a relief. But that had hardly crossed his mind when de Pombal delivered another blow:

  'You will agree, I am sure, that a formal leavetaking would prove most painful to Lisala; so it would be best if you left here some time today, without giving any particular reason, I will then tell her that, after you and I had discussed her fu­ture, you volunteered to leave rather than continue to com­promise her by your attentions.'

  For Roger that meant that he would be deprived of a last night with his beloved, the opportunity to tell her the truth about what had taken place and that, her father's having iden­tified him as Colonel de Breuc had wrecked all hope of their marrying. But, since he could not say that to the Marquis, he saw no option other than to agree.

  He went upstairs with fury in his heart, packed his belong­ings into two small bags, then sat down to write a note to Lisala. In it he told her the reason for his tearing, said that he would do his utmost to devise a way by which they could meet in secret, and vowed his eternal devotion.

  His next problem was to get it to her unseen. As he carried his bags out to the stable, he ran into the giant Negro, Baob. It then occurred to him that this neweomer to the household was much more likely to prove trustworthy than one of the servants whom the Marquis had brought with him from Por­tugal. So he gave Baob the note, together with a muriodor and charged him to give the missive to Lisala when no-one was looking. With a cheerful grin the colourfully-clad black man accepted the commission.

  An hour later Roger was drinking a botde of wine with Philippe. The inn was crowded to capacity, but the French­man, eager to repay Roger in some measure for the fortune he was now making, at once volunteered to turn out the guest who was occupying his old room, so that he could install him­self there for as long as he wished; and said that he would get for him a slave as a personal servant.

  Next morning Baob arrived with a note from Lisala. It was brief but poignant. I am utterly distraught. I could kill my father for having turned you out. You must find some way to come to me at nights. You must. You must.

  Her window was at least clearly, the only means of the house, then round the

  At ten o'clock that night Roger was outside the house, re­connoitring it for a possible means of getting up to Lisala's bedroom. He knew already that, like every other house in Rio, the heavy doors were securely bolted and the ground-floor windows shuttered and barred, as a protection against the in­numerable thieves and half-starved, desperate men who swarmed in the city. Had Lisala's room been at the front of the house, he might have climbed to it by way of the verandah; but hers and that of the Dona Christina were at the back and on that side there was not even a creeper that might have given him a handhold to scale the wall. Her window was at least fifteen feet above the ground and clearly the only way of reaching it was by a ladder.

  Moodily, he walked all round the house then round the outbuildings. In a loft above the big barn the slaves slept on a thin layer of infrequently-changed straw, and no precautions were taken to prevent desperadoes entering there. The door of the barn was a little open, so he went in. The starlight was just sufficient for him to make out a long ladder against the wall; but a glance was enough to tell him that it was far too heavy for him to lift unaided.

  On recrossing the yard, he saw that Lisala's window was now dimly lit. Evidently she was expecting him; but not that he would have arrived so early. Apparently she had been lis­tening intently, so had caught the sound of his careful foot­steps, as the curtain was pulled aside and she put her head out of the window.

  'Roger, Roger my love, come up to me,' she whispered.

  'I cannot,' he whispered back. 'How can I without a lad­der? And the one in the barn is too heavy for me to lift. You must come down and let me in.'

  She shook her head. 'No. You know those bolts, bars and chains on the doors as well as I do. Undoing them would make such a clatter it's certain I'd be heard.'

  At that moment there came the screech of ill-fitting wood on wood, as the Dona Christina threw up her window. Roger had just time to dive behind a wagon that was standing in the yard, then came the high-pitched voice of the old woman:

  ‘Who's that? Who is that out there?'

  Lisala had drawn in her head and swiftly snuffed her candle. Roger held his breath and remained crouching behind the wagon. Minutes passed; the silence was intense. At last the duenna decided that she had been mistaken in thinking that someone was outside, gave a raucous cough and shut her win­dow. Before moving, Roger slowly counted up to a thousand; then he tiptoed away.

  Next day Baob brought another note from Lisala. In it she implored Roger to find some way to come to her and heaped curses on her father.

  Roger wrote back, saying that the only way in which he might reach her room was for her to secure somehow a rope ladder, or at least a knotted rope, which she could lower to him so that he could climb up.

  The following day she replied to the effect that he must surely realise how impossible it was for her to come by a rope, or hide it if she did; so he must suggest some other means of coming to her.

  Although he had brooded over the question for hours, he could think of none, and wrote to tell her so, ending by assuring her that he shared her distress, and of his unfailing devotion.

  There, for the time being, their correspondence ended; and he endeavoured to reconcile himself to their unhappy situation. Now and then they met at the houses of mutual friends, but had no opportunity to exchange even a few words together unheard by others. On such occasions her huge tawny eyes silently reproached him, but he could do no more than acknow­ledge her glances by an almost imperceptible shrug, and little helpless gestures.

  With February there came Lent and a fervid display of the religious fanaticism that obsessed the population of Rio. There were fasts, processions in which hundreds of people followed sacred relics of the saints, crawling on their knees along the ground, public flagellations and votive offerings, out of which the unwashed priesthood lined their coffers.

  From dawn to dusk the big Candelabra Church and all the others were packed with penitents beating their breasts and wailing repentance for their sins. Out of curiosity, Roger visited a few of the churches, but left again almost at once, repelled by the stench, not only of the living but also of the dead.

  For there were no cemeteries in Rio. Everyone of import­ance was buried either under the floor or in cavities in the walls of the churches. Owing to the high rate of mortality, there had been recent interments in all of them and, quite often, the stones had not been securely replaced, with the result that the horrible emanations from rotting corpses pervaded these places of worship.

  Slaves and the destitute who died in the gutters were not buried at all. Their bodies were roughly bundled up in straw, thrown into carts, then dumped on the waste ground outside the city. Great flights of vultures descended upon them and, within a few hours, picked the bones clean.

  One day Roger rode out to see the slave market at Vallonga. It was situated in a long, narrow valley between two wooded hills, one of which ended in a high cliff dropping sheer to the sparkling sea. On it stood a small, whitewashed Chapel to the

  Virgin and the big warehouses into which the human cargoes from Africa were herded, after the tax upon them had been paid to the Crown.

  Their sufferings during the long crossing were so terrible that it was a miracle that any of them survived. Three hun­dred and more were packed into the holds of small ships, where they lay for weeks head to foot like sardines, manacled and bound. To weaken them and so decrease the possibility of mutineering, they were deliberately half-starved. Even so, a,t times they were seized by a suicidal despair. Groups of them stag­gered to their feet; then, weeping and cursing, beat with their handcuffs on the iron gratings that confined them. The frenzy spread until the hold became a s
eething mass of screaming men and women. But their hopes of deliverance were invariably crushed. A dozen of the crew would descend with muskets and pour volley after volley of buckshot into the demented swarm of Negroes, killing some, wounding others so that they soon died from untended wounds, and cowing the remainder into submission.

  When the survivors were flogged ashore, their bodies were those of living skeletons, scarcely able to walk, their ribs suck­ing out under the taut skin of their chests. Still manacled, they were kept in the long warehouses for several weeks while being fattened up for sale. Their stomachs shrunken from many weeks of semi-starvation, they were unable to keep down the quantities of corn mush with which they were forcibly fed, and spewed it up. Lying in their vomit and excrement, they gradu­ally put on weight until they were thought sufficiently saleable to be auctioned.

  Roger knew, too, that their last days would be scarcely less terrible. In the Southern States of America, it was the custom that, when the cotton-picking slaves became too old to work any longer in the fields, they were allowed to sit idle in the sun and given enough food to support them. But that was not so here in Brazil. When slaves, through illness or old age, became a charge upon their master, they were turned out to fend for themselves. For a year or two they might continue a miserable existence begging their bread in the streets then, incapable from weakness or disease of doing so any longer, they died like pariah dogs; and the sanctimonious frequenters of the so-called Christian churches did not even spare a glance for the wasted bodies of such human offal.

  Utterly appalled by this spectacle of ruthless inhumanity, had Roger been a less rational man he would have gone into the Chapel of the Virgin and overthrown her image for per­mitting such atrocities. As it was, having long since rejected the belief that, if a Christian God did exist, he had any power whatever to protect his votaries, he rode back into Rio sick with rage and disgust.

  At the end of the month, news arrived that caused the mer­chant community of Rio to become delirious with joy. For three centuries Brazil, as a colony of Portugal, had been re­stricted to selling her products only to the mother country; and Portugal could absorb only a limited quantity of the valu­able merchandise that Brazil could supply. Under the liberal influence of Jose da Silva Lisboa, Vicondc de Cairu, the Prince Regent had issued an Ordinance opening Brazilian ports to the ships of all nations. A still further cause for rejoicing was that Don Joao had left Bahia and was on his way to Rio, which he intended to make his permanent capital.

  Lenten tribulations were swept aside and the Carnival that normally followed it was anticipated by several days. The city became a Bedlam. The wealthy retired into their houses. The narrow streets became solid rivers of dancing, laughing people. Silk and satin garments, which slaves were normally forbidden to wear, were donned by the Fiesta Kings and Queens elected by them. Carried high upon swaying palanquins, they made their way slowly through the throng, preceded by drummers, trumpeters and rattle-wielders.

  All order vanished. The Viceroy's dragoons were power­less to stop even the worst excesses. Reeling with drink, the Negroes defied their masters, broke into the shops and copu­lated joyfully with their women in the gutters.

  This saturnalia continued for several days; then it eased a little, only to be renewed when on March 7th Don Joao and his Court, accompanied by several thousand other exiles, ar­rived. The Prince was received with unbounded enthusiasm. Every window in the city remained alight all night. The fol­lowing morning, a thousand dead-drunks lay snoring where they had fallen in the alleys adjacent to the Viceroy's Palace. The great horde of diseased, crippled and destitute descended on them like flights of vultures, to rob them of the few coins or trinkets they possessed.

  From the beginning Roger had decided that Rio was an impossible place for a civilised man to make his permanent home in. For the week he had been living under the same roof as Lisala he had put all thoughts of the future from him, ex­cept the possibility that, in time, her father would consent to their marriage. All hope of that had been shattered, and even his ingenuity had failed to devise a means by which he might continue to be her lover.

  Several weeks had now passed since they had slept together and the feeling had been growing upon him that there was little likelihood of their ever doing so again. The unsavoury city, with the din of church bells calling its religion-obsessed population to some service every hour of the day, and the disgusting orgies that had been taking place during the past fortnight had, at length, decided him to endeavour to forget Lisala and make his way back to Europe as soon as an oppor­tunity offered.

  It came on March 20th, with the arrival of the British fri­gate. Phantom. Roger gave her Captain time to go ashore and make his number with the Portuguese authorities; then, the following morning, had himself rowed out to her. Her Com­mander was a Captain Jackson and it chanced that, in the eighties, he had served in the Caribbean as a Midshipman un­der Roger's father. Over a bottle of Canary Sack, they talked of the Admiral and other matters.

  Captain Jackson had brought out a despatch from Mr. Can­ning to Don Joao's Foreign Minster and, when a reply was ready, would return to England. He willingly agreed to take Roger with him.

  The Phantom had left Portsmouth on February 10th, and up till then there had been little difference in the situation on the Continent. Junot had swiftly subdued Portugal, and Napo­leon was continuing to perfect his 'Continental System'. The Kingdom of Etruria, in northern Italy, had, in 1802, been created by him as a puppet State for the daughter of Carlos VI of Spain. That winter he had arbitrarily taken it over, and incorporated the Kingdom in that of Italy, which was governed for him by his stepson, Eugene de Bcauharnais. Then, in January, when the Pope had insisted on maintaining his neut­rality and refused to close his ports to Brittish shipping, the Emperor had sent an army to occupy Rome.

  Knowing the dilatoriness of the Portuguese, it was not to be expected that a reply to Mr. Canning's despatch would be forthcoming for at least a week; so Captain Jackson said he would let Roger know when it came to hand, which would still give Roger several hours' notice before Phantom was ready to sail.

  Towards the end of the week Roger began to wonder what course he should pursue with regard to Lisala. If there had been any possibility of securing a private meeting with her, he certainly would have done so; but if he made a formal call on the de Pombals, nothing was to be gained by that, and the unexpected announcement of his coming departure might quite possibly lead to a most undesirable scene in the presence of her family. Eventually he decided to write a letter and get Baob to deliver it to her.

  Next morning, up in his room, he set about it, giving as his reasons for leaving Rio: the hopelessness of their again being even temporarily united and—which was true enough—the fact that, having all his life lived at the centre of great events, he could not bring himself to remain any longer in exile in such uncongenial surroundings. He was just about to add how much her love had meant to him and how he would always treasure the memory of it, when Mobo, the slave whom Phi­lippe had procured to act as Roger's servant, came up to say that Baob was below asking to see him.

  Putting aside his letter, Roger told Mobo to go down and bring Baob up. On entering the room the huge, gaily-clad Negro bowed profoundly and, as Roger had felt almost cer­tain would be the case, handed him a letter from Lisala.

  Breaking the seal, he opened and read it. To his consterna­tion she had written to tell him that she was enceinte, and to implore his help. She had done everything she could think of to terminate her pregnancy, but had failed. In due course, Dona Christina, or her Aunt Anna, could not fail to realise her condition, and would tell her father. The fate of girls of good family in such circumstances was ordained by custom. Her baby would be taken from her and she would be forced to take the veil. The thought of spending the rest of her life in a convent was more than she could bear. She would rather commit suicide. Her only hope was in him. Somehow he must get her out of the house and take her to some
distant place where she could have his child and they would afterwards live happily together.

  Roger's brain began to race. For a moment he visualised the sort of existence Lisala would be compelled to lead in a convent: fasts, penances, perpetual discomfort in rough clothes or on board-hard beds, periods of enforced silence, having to kneel on the cold stones of a chapel several times a day. He could not possibly abandon her to such a fate. And she was carrying his child. From long experience he had always been most careful about taking every possible precaution. But ob­viously they must have slipped up on one of those first nights in Rio, when weariness after their hideous voyage had made them careless.

  How to get her away from her family presented a prob­lem that seemed to defy solution. At least he could thank his gods that a British ship lay in the harbour and, if only he could get Lisala on board, he felt sure that Captain Jackson would give her passage with him to England. But how could that be done?

  If the de Pombal ladies had made frequent excursions into the town, he could have hired a band of desperadoes to help him kidnap Lisala; but, as far as he knew, since the beginning of the horrible Fiesta, except on one occasion to pay homage to Don Joao, they had never left the house. And they might not do so again for another week or more. In the meantime, the odds were that the Phantom would have sailed. To make sure of her sailing with them he must have Lisala in his keep­ing within forty-eight hours.

  There was only one thing for it. He must abduct her from the house. Already he had racked his brain in vain for a way to get up to her room. That could only be done by raising the heavy ladder, and he could not do that without help. His first thought was to take Mobo with him; but he promptly dis­missed it. The Negro was barely capable of brushing his clothes and running small errands. As a companion in a dan­gerous undertaking he would prove a liability rather than an asset. The penalties for slaves who broke the law were so ter­rible that they did so only when driven by dire necessity. When Mobo's dull brain grasped the fact that he was being used in an illegal act, he would first take the opportunity to do a bolt, and chance his luck in coming upon one of the numerous en­campments of runaway slaves who were scraping a living in the depths of the jungle.