The Prisoner in the Mask Read online

  THE PRISONER IN THE MASK

  Dennis Wheatley

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 First Glimpse of the Future Duke de Richleau

  2 Bedroom Scene

  3 The Germ of a Conspiracy

  4 The Taunt that Rankled

  5 The Road to Glory

  6 Paris in the Nineties

  7 The Rendez-vous

  8 The Spy?

  9 A Rake’s Progress

  10 Rip Van Quesnoy

  11 Red Roses—But for Whom?

  12 The Prince’s Mistress

  13 ‘Long Live the King!’

  14 Night of Disaster

  15 Anxious Days

  16 Alarms and Excursions

  17 The Only Way

  18 Nightmare Journey

  19 A Terrible Ordeal

  20 The Long Road Back

  21 The Treble Life of M. le Comte de Quesnoy

  22 The Loyal (?) Wife

  23 At the Eleventh Hour

  24 On the Run

  25 ‘There is Many a Slip …’

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duke de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ’all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE DUKE DE RICHLEAU

  Outside the snow lay a foot deep on the ground and to all appearances the great house was fast in the grip of the Russian winter. But tomorrow a score of moujiks would again sweep clean the paths about it and clear the fallen branches from the sleigh track that led through the larch woods to the little town of Jvanets.

  A full moon in the cloudless sky made the frozen scene almost as bright as day. To the east the plain stretched unbroken towards the limitless grain-fields of the Ukraine, to the north sprawled two acres or more of stables and farm buildings, to the south there were dark forests, and to the west a succession of terraces dropped down to the broad ice-bound waters of the Pruth.

  In those days—the early 1890’s—the river formed the south-western frontier of the Czar Alexander III’s vast dominions. Across it lay the Burkovina, then part of Rumania, and the Carpathian mountains, beyond which stretched the plains of Hungary, while farther away to the north there jutted out the bulge of Austrian Poland. Kiev, Bucharest, Warsaw, Odessa and Budapest all lay within a radius of 400 miles; so although the house stood on Russian soil it was in the very heart of Central Europe.

  It was a rambling fifty-room mansion, and had been built over a hundred years earlier by a brave and handsome Hetman Plackoff, whose forebears had ruled as autocrats in those parts for many generations. Catherine the Great in enlarging her Empire had annexed his territories, but he had served the beautiful and amorous Empress well in more ways than one; so she had restored his lands, used her good taste to help him to plan and furnish this fine country seat, and had made his sons pages at her glittering court.

  But for a generation past there had no longer been a Prince Plackoff in the service of the Czars. The last had left only a daughter and she had married a French nobleman of equally illustrious lineage, the ninth Duke de Richleau. Although his family had long since regained the fortune they lost during the Revolution, the present Duke preferred life in Russia, as he could live there still in feudal state. In consequence, for many years they had made their home at Jvanets, leaving it only now and then for a few months to plunge again into the social whirl of the great capitals.

  The loss of his wife in ’88 had been a great blow to him, but after a while he had resumed his normal activities, and among them was lavish entertaining. At Jvanets he could offer his guests some of the best shooting in South Russia, and friends of many nationalities willingly travelled great distances to participate in the famous winter drives organised by his Chief Verderer for the hunting of bear, wolf and boar. But on this January night of 1894 his house-party was a small one and, purely by chance, almost ent
irely French.

  In the main rooms of the house there was no hint of the bitter cold outside. Heavy curtains of rich brocade were drawn across the tall double windows and liveried footmen kept well supplied with logs the blazing fires on the big open hearths.

  Dinner had run its usual eight courses and when the ladies had left the room the men lingered for a while over their Tokay and Madeira. Now gathered at one end of the table they made a more picturesque group than would have such a party at the present day, for it was an age in which individuality of attire was still permitted.

  De Richleau, now in his forty-sixth year, was wearing a traditional Russian costume; a high-necked, short-skirted blouse of figured black brocade, tightly belted at the waist and trimmed with sable. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered and carried himself very upright. His cheeks were rosy, his nose aquiline and his dark hair was turning grey. In the same fashion as the Russian Grand Dukes he had a square beard neatly parted in the centre and brushed outward, beneath an upturned moustache.

  His son, Armand, who carried his second title, Count de Quesnoy, was wearing what would now be called a smoking jacket, of deep blue velvet with arabesques of braid on its satin lapels. Young Prince Igor Préobajenskoi, the only Russian present, was in the white and gold uniform of the Imperial Guard and one of the three French guests, General the Marquis de Galliffet, had on a semi-military mess-jacket designed by himself. The other two wore the loose-fitting fore-runners of modern tails with stiff, bulging white shirt-fronts and wide open collars, the points of which stuck up almost to their ears. The seventh member of the party, and the oldest, was the silver-haired Abbé Nodier. He acted as chaplain to the household but was also a valued friend of the family, for he had once been the Duke’s tutor and was now tutor to the eighteen-year-old Count.

  Next in age to him was the General, then sixty-two and France’s most distinguished soldier. He was clean-shaven except for a sweeping cavalry moustache and wore his white hair en brosse, like a Prussian. He had served at the siege of Sevastopol, in Italy, Algeria and Mexico. Above all he had won imperishable glory in the Franco-Prussian war at the disastrous battle of Sedan. As Brigadier commanding the 3rd Chasseurs d’Afrique he had led them in the charge again and again, and towards the end, when his Divisional Commander had asked if he could help protect the flying infantry from massacre, he had replied: ‘Mon Général, we shall continue to charge until either there are none of us left or we have no horses left upon which to charge.’

  Beside him sat Gabriel Syveton, a heavy-faced man in his early forties. His sensual mouth was partly hidden by a drooping fair moustache, but he had a broad forehead and his pale blue eyes held a hard intelligence. He had been a Professor at the Sorbonne until a few years back when his father died and left him a considerable fortune, amassed at an iron foundry in Lens. He had then devoted himself to politics and was immensely ambitious both to become in time a Minister, and also socially. His first wife had died in giving birth to an only son, and he had since married again a young girl whose family were of the English aristocracy. Until recently his bourgeois extraction had debarred him from such company as he was enjoying at present, and he had been unknown to the Duke until the third French guest had asked if he might bring him and his wife to Jvanets.

  His sponsor was the Vicomte de Camargue, who was in his middle thirties but looked considerably more as, although his mutton-chop whiskers flourished, he had become prematurely bald. He was very tall, stooped slightly and spoke with a marked lisp.

  The party was completed by Prince Igor and the Duke’s son. The Prince was a nephew of de Richleau’s and there only because, having recently married, he had been asked to bring his wife on a formal visit. He was twenty-two, had a mop of dark curls and was handsome in a slightly Tartar way; but few women would have given him a second look once their glance had fallen on his cousin.

  Although the Count de Quesnoy was barely eighteen he was already within an inch of the five feet eleven that he was finally to attain and he showed no trace of the gaucherie frequently associated with his age. His hair was dark and slightly wavy, his forehead broad, his face oval, with a rather thin but well-modelled mouth, and a pointed chin that showed great determination. He had inherited his father’s aquiline nose, but his eyes came from his mother. They were grey, flecked with tiny spots of yellow. At times they could flash with piercing brilliance and, although he was not yet fully conscious of it, they held hypnotic power. Above them a pair of devils eyebrows tapered up towards his temples.

  When the men had finished their wine they made a dutiful appearance in the drawing-room of the Countess Olga Plackoff, a widowed cousin by marriage of the Duke’s who, since his wife’s death, had kept house for him.

  There was a little music, of a quite high standard for amateurs, mild clapping and well-turned compliments. The Duke enjoyed a game of backgammon with the Vicomtesse de Camargue, and his son manœuvred Angela Syveton into the adjacent conservatory for half an hour’s tête-à-tête, while the rest of the party held a conversazione round the blazing fire.

  As the French clock on the marble mantelpiece chimed eleven, the Countess Olga caught the eye of the Marquise de Galliffet. Rising, the ladies lifted their voluminous skirts a trifle with their left hands, extended their right hands for the gentlemen to kiss in turn, then with rustling trains and gently swaying bustles swept from the room on their way to bed.

  Following them out, de Richleau bowed them away up the wide staircase, then led the men across the hall to his smoking-room. Such sanctums, where in polite society the male addiction to the pestiferous herb was then alone permitted, were usually gloomy, sunless parlours in the region of the gun-room and back stairs; but the Duke was a great lover of fine cigars and smoked half a dozen daily, so he had overruled his wife’s objections and used for the purpose the fine apartment in which he dealt with his correspondence.

  It was broad and lofty so that the oil lamps on the writing table and on two fluted columns made a pool of warm light only in its centre. The pictures on the walls were shrouded in deep shadow and the ornately-scrolled and gilded ceiling could be glimpsed only when a log thrown on the fire made it burst into a sudden blaze.

  The men settled themselves on the long sofas and in deep armchairs. As Armand poured drinks for them at a side table he knew that they would soon be immersed in French politics, as had been the case every night during the stay of the three French guests. Politics bored him at any time and tonight he meant to make an excuse as soon as he decently could to slip away—but not to his own bed. His thoughts were already busy with the delights he would experience if he could succeed in seducing Syveton’s lovely young wife.

  2

  BEDROOM SCENE

  Angela Syveton lay wide awake in the broad four-poster bed. The big room was not quite in darkness, but the gentle glow of a night-light on the bedside table did little more than show the outline of her profile.

  It was a good one; forehead not too deep, straight nose, full lips and slightly jutting chin. Seen full face her forehead was broad, her eyebrows well arched and her jaw-line square almost to the point of truculence, but the suggestion of obstinacy was offset by a generous mouth and a pair of big pansy-brown eyes which, given even the smallest reason, became bright with laughter.

  Yet Angela had not much to laugh about these days. She was English by birth, only nineteen years old, and had been married for six months to a Frenchman more than twice her age whom she already detested.

  From the worldly point of view her marriage had been considered extremely satisfactory. Her father was the sixth son of a not particularly wealthy Earl and he had married the youngest daughter of a naval Captain; so although he had done quite well in the Diplomatic Service, and two years earlier become Councillor at the British Embassy in Paris, they were far from rich.

  Angela was the eldest of three sisters, so when Gabriel Syveton had shown an interest in her he had met with no discouragement from her parents. On the contrary,
it had been tactfully pointed out to her that, although Syveton was a middle-aged widower with a son of eleven, and came from a family of provincial industrialists, he was very rich and spent his money lavishly; that she could, if she chose, become the mistress of his fine house overlooking the Parc Monceau; that he could give her an equipage which would rival the best for driving in the Bois, and that instead of having her clothes made by a ‘little woman’ she would be able to buy the most lovely creations of Worth and Paquin. It should be added that, while no pressure whatever had been used, she had been given clearly to understand that the sooner she was ‘happily settled’ the better the chances would be of her sisters, who were plainer than herself, attracting suitable husbands.

  In accordance with the conventions of the day, Angela had never been left alone with her wealthy suitor for more than a few minutes at a time; so she had had little chance to form an accurate estimate of his character. His conversation, although given rather over-much to French politics, was often amusing, he treated her with the greatest politeness, and showered her with expensive flowers, huge boxes of chocolates and such other gifts as etiquette permitted. The parties he gave, ostensibly for her family but, as she knew, for her, were enough to turn any young girl’s head, and while she was not in the least attracted to him, she could not help feeling flattered and well disposed towards him on account of all these attentions.

  Like many another well-bred maiden of the nineties, she had at length been persuaded to put aside dreams of handsome young officers, with their way still to make, for a husband as old as her father who could give her a fine establishment. She had got her mansion, her retinue of servants, her carriage with the spanking greys, jewels, furs and furbelows; but she had also got Gabriel Syveton. And she knew now that her mother had taken advantage of her ignorance about what really mattered in life to betray her wickedly and shamefully.