The Irish Witch Read online

  THE IRISH WITCH

  by

  Dennis Wheatley

  This book has been lightly edited for style and pace, at the request of the Wheatley family.

  For

  PAT AND MARISE DERWENT

  A small appreciation of their

  many kindnesses to Joan,

  myself and the children

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Only a Few Days from Home

  2 A Bitter Blow

  3 A Lovers’ Quarrel

  4 The New Hell Fire Club

  5 A Tangled Skein

  6 The End of the Road

  7 Disaster

  8 News out of Portugal

  9 The Power of the Frog

  10 Plot to Supplant a Rival

  11 Home Again! Home Again!

  12 Seen in a Crystal

  13 To Go, or not to Go

  14 The Greatest Statesman of His Age

  15 The War Reopens

  16 A Hideous Affray

  17 The Battle of the Nations

  18 Fate Strikes Again

  19 The House with the Red Shield

  20 In the Toils Once More

  21 The Last Campaign

  22 Un Cri de Cœur

  23 Lost, Stolen or Strayed

  24 Blackmail

  25 Render unto Satan

  Epilogue

  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 naval 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

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  1

  Only a Few Days from Home

  On the last morning of the year 1812, in the chapel of the Royal Castle, Stockholm, Roger Brook married a girl he had first met nearly two years earlier. She had then been Lady Mary Ware.

  When Roger had first become acquainted with his new wife she had been staying at the British Legation in Lisbon as the guest of the Minister’s niece, who had been one of her friends at school. Lady Mary was an orphan with no close relatives, and very little money; for her father had been far from rich, and the greater part of his income was entailed so had gone with the Earldom to a distant cousin. Although no great beauty, little Mary had a piquant charm, and Roger had found her both intelligent and amusing. But he had not had the faintest intention of marrying her.

  That was not because she lacked fortune and influence, as he had ample of both himself; and, when, having fallen desperately in love with him, she had plucked up the courage to ask him to make her his wife, he had told her gently that it would be disastrous for them to marry, because, for one thing, he was of an incurably roving disposition and, for another, as she was then only eighteen and he was just over forty, he was much too old for her.

  But he had come to Portugal only to collect a legacy and, in fact, when he got home, intended to settle down for good; for he had high hopes of at last within a few years, marrying his adored Georgina, with whom he had been in love all his life. She had returned his love, ever since their teens; but a great part of his life, as Mr. Pitt’s most resourceful secret agent, had had to be spent abroad, and it was not until the death of her last husband, the Baron von Haugwitz, that she had been free to agree to marry him.

  Yet, alas, things had gone woefully wrong. In his second identity as Colonel Comte de Breuc, one of Napoleon’s A.D.C.s, he had again got caught up in the Emperor’s affairs and sent to Germany. In Berlin he had been falsely accused of the murder of Von Haugwitz, and condemned to death. A reprieve had led instead to several months in prison, but meanwhile Georgina had had seemingly incontestable evidence that he had been executed. Desperately distressed, and no longer caring what became o
f her, the beautiful Georgina had agreed to gratify the vanity of the old Duke of Kew by becoming his Duchess.

  On Roger’s escape and return to England, grieved beyond measure as the two life-long lovers were by this situation, they at least had the consolation that the Duke was in his mid-seventies and an habitually heavy drinker, which made it highly probable that, within two or three years at most, Georgina would again be a widow.

  Alas for their hopes! When Roger got back from Portugal, he learned that the old Duke had had a stroke. Copious bleedings by his doctors had failed to revive or kill him, and his consumption of alcohol was now strictly limited. So the final opinion of the doctors was that he might, as a paralysed vegetable, live on into his nineties.

  Faced now with the possibility that, for years to come, the lovers would be able to enjoy each other’s company only when Georgina came up to London for the season, and for a few odd nights during the rest of the year, Georgina had urged Roger to marry again. He had been averse to doing so, but after a few months living on his own at Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park—a grace and favour residence of which Mr. Pitt had given him a life tenancy—he had become so bored that he had agreed to go on a secret mission to the Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden. Bernadotte had persuaded him to go on as his emissary to the Czar, and that had led to his once more becoming involved with Napoleon, then in Moscow.

  It was in October 1812 that, to Roger’s amazement, he had again run into Mary, in St. Petersburg. On her return to London from Lisbon having no social background and very little money; she had married a merchant in the Baltic Trade, named Wicklow, and went to live in the City with him. Napoleon’s Continental System had damaged British trade with Russia so severely that Mr. Wicklow was one of many who got into financial difficulties. As a last resort he had sold his house and possessions in London and, taking Mary with him, sailed on a final venture with goods for St. Petersburg. In the Gulf of Helsingfors his ship had been wrecked and he lost everything. After living on his wits for a while in the Russian capital, he had committed suicide, leaving poor Mary friendless and deeply in debt.

  She was in such dire straits that Roger had not had the heart to leave her there; so resorted to the desperate expedient of taking her back to Moscow with him, in boy’s clothes and in the rôle of his soldier servant. There had followed the terrible retreat in which Napoleon left half a million men behind him to die in the snow. During those many ghastly weeks, Mary shared with Roger every type of danger and privation. Her unfailing fortitude and good humour had turned his affection for her into a much deeper feeling; so when at last they escaped into Sweden, he decided that, since he could not marry Georgina, he would never find a more loving wife than little Mary.

  His abiding love for Georgina remained unaltered. Over the long years the unity of their hearts had impelled them to disregard the marriages that both had made, and between his long absences from England as a secret agent they had always renewed their passionate attachment.

  That this would be so again he was well aware but, in spite of it, he was confident that he could make Mary happy. The dangerous life he had led ever since his youth had made him a past master of dissimulation. He would see to it that she never knew of the occasional nights of sweet delirium that he spent with Georgina and, for the first time in the seventeen years since he had lost his wife Amanda, his charming grace and favour residence, Thatched House Lodge, would again become a true home for him. Mary had been there once, loved it, and was eagerly looking forward to becoming its mistress.

  He felt certain, too, that she would also delight in the children when they came to stay—although they were no longer children. When he had last seen his daughter, Susan, she had been sixteen and rapidly becoming a lovely young woman; while Charles, Earl of St. Ermins, Georgina’s son, must by now have left Eton and be a handsome young buck about town.

  On arriving in Stockholm after their escape from Russia. Roger had learned one piece of news that filled him with considerable anxiety. Although, under pressure from Napoleon, Sweden was officially at war with Britain, by mutual consent no hostilities were taking place. Commerce between the two countries was at a standstill but the ships of the United States were filling the gap by carrying goods between them, and Roger had supposed that he and Mary would have no difficulty in securing passages in one of them to an English port.

  To his dismay he was told that America was now also at war with Britain. Although war had been declared by the United States as long ago as June 18th, when news of it reached Russia it had been regarded as so relatively unimportant compared to the great war on the Continent that few people, either in St. Petersburg or with Napoleon’s army, knew about it; so Roger had not even heard a rumour of what afterwards became known as ‘The War of 1812’.

  At first this new situation caused him considerable worry about how he and Mary were to get home. But when he consulted the Crown Prince Bernadotte, the latter swiftly reassured him by saying, ‘Be not the least concerned, my friend. The British need our goods as much as we do theirs; so they turn a blind eye to American ships entering their ports, and you will find plenty of skippers in Gothenburg willing to run you over.’

  It was in this happy frame of mind that, on January 5th, Roger left Stockholm with Mary. It was just a year since he had arrived there on his secret mission to the Crown Prince. But his status was now very different. He had come there in his rôle of Colonel Comte de Breuc, giving out that he had recently escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in England. To make his story credible he had had with him only the clothes he stood up in, and travelled the two hundred and fifty miles from Gothenburg to Stockholm in a stuffy diligence. Now he left with a charming wife and an ample wardrobe, as Britain’s un-official Ambassador and the honoured friend of the Crown Prince, who had placed one of the Royal sledges at their disposal.

  With frequent relays of horses, the drive along the well-kept highway, the snow on which was regularly cleared into lofty banks on either side, naturally made the journey much quicker, so they arrived in Gothenburg on the 7th. There were several American traders in the harbour. Learning that one, the Cape Cod, was due to sail for Hull in two days’ time, Roger went aboard to interview her master, Captain Absolom.

  He proved to be a stocky, fair-haired New Englander, abrupt of speech but not discourteous, and readily agreed a price to take Roger and Mary across the North Sea.

  Roger was much relieved at this, as he had needed no telling about the cause of the war, since the Americans had been threatening hostilities for several years past, and he feared that he might meet with a certain amount of hostility.

  The trouble arose from what was known as the British ‘Navigation System’. This had been initiated as far back as Stuart times, the policy on which the System was based being that, as Britain was vulnerable to invasion only from the sea, her shipping must greatly exceed that of any other nation—not for commercial reasons, but so that, in the event of war, great numbers of seamen should be available for drafting into the Royal Navy.

  As a result of this policy Britain had secured the great bulk of the carrying trade of the world. As far back as 1728, of the four thousand two hundred-odd ships arriving in her principal ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol, fewer than four hundred and forty had been under foreign flags; and in 1792, when the present war against France had started, there were eighty thousand trained seamen in British ships. By lowering the percentage of Britons legally required to serve in merchant ships to one in four, fifty thousand more had become available to man warships.

  Another principle of British maritime policy was that it was forbidden to import any goods into her Colonies except in British-built ships. And even when, after the war in the 1770s, the United States had gained their independence, British control over their shipping had remained indistinguishable in practice from what it had been in Colonial days.

  However, the Americans being mainly of British stock, large numbers of them had the sea in their blood. Mo
reover, they had better timber for building ships than even that to be procured in England. In the forty years following Independence, this had resulted in their creating a merchant marine second in size only to that of Britain.

  Between 1792 and 1805 this had proved to the advantage of both Britain and France, as both countries had had to reduce their merchant fleets in order to increase their navies, and American merchantmen had filled the gap by carrying much-needed supplies, mostly from the Caribbean. It had also, of course, greatly increased the wealth of the United States.

  The first cause for complaint by the United States had arisen in May 1805 when, in the test case of the ship Essex, it had been ruled by a British Court that American ships should not be allowed to carry goods from the West Indies to a country at war with Britain, unless they had been ‘neutralised’ by first landing their cargo in a United Kingdom port—and unloading, warehousing and reloading caused most annoying delays and loss of profit to American merchants.

  But the real trouble was started by Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of 1806, reinforced by his Decree of Milan in 1807, whereby he established his Continental System, the object of which was to ruin British commerce by closing to British goods the ports of all the countries he controlled. That did not seriously affect the Americans, but what followed did.

  In retaliation, in the winter of 1806-1807, the British issued Orders in Council, decreeing a blockade of the ports of France and her allies and forbidding neutral vessels to enter such ports unless they had first called at British ports and paid British dues on their cargo.

  As the United States could not conform to both the French and British decrees, their ships henceforth risked confiscation by one or the other; but, having no Navy capable of protecting their shipping, all they could do was angrily to declare the decrees of both countries contrary to International Law.