The Rising Storm Read online

  THE RISING STORM

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO

  MY MOTHER

  WITH LOVE AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF MY

  FIRST VISITS WITH HER TO PARIS, VERSAILLES AND

  FONTAINEBLEAU

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  The Mysterious Rendezvous

  Chapter II

  The Masked Ladies

  Chapter III

  The Family Compact

  Chapter IV

  The Lady from Spain

  Chapter V

  The Unworthy Priest

  Chapter VI

  The Affaire Réveillon

  Chapter VII

  The Road to the South

  Chapter VIII

  Of Love and Death

  Chapter IX

  Mediterranean Idyll

  Chapter X

  The Hooded Men

  Chapter XI

  The Grand Duke’s Mistress

  Chapter XII

  Hostages to Fortune

  Chapter XIII

  The First Revolution

  Chapter XIV

  Uneasy Interlude

  Chapter XV

  The Assassins

  Chapter XVI

  On a Night in Naples

  Chapter XVII

  The Earthly Paradise

  Chapter XVIII

  Desperate Measures

  Chapter XIX

  The Rising Storm

  Chapter XX

  The Queen’s Friends

  Chapter XXI

  On the Beach

  Chapter XXII

  The King’s Business

  Chapter XXIII

  Intrigue at Aranjuez

  Chapter XXIV

  The Outcome of the Mission

  Chapter XXV

  A la Lanterne

  Chapter XXVI

  Three Kinds of Wine

  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 Duc 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

  Chapter I

  The Mysterious Rendezvous

  The forest of Fontainebleau was at its loveliest. The past winter had been exceptionally severe but now, towards the end of April, spring had come to northern France again. In the long rides the young grass made a carpet of emerald and the great trees were feathered with tenderest green. The day was a Sunday, the weather fine, the air balmy and the sky a palish blue.

  No hunting, except by the King’s packs, was ever permitted in the royal domain, and the only buildings in it were widely separated keepers’ cottages. Once clear of the town, and the huge slate-roofed Château with its many courts, gardens, promenades and lake, one might ride for miles without setting eyes on a human being. Only the occasional scurrying of an animal, and the faint, mysterious whispering of the branches overhead, broke the stillness.

  Down one of the rides, deep in its solitude, a young man was riding his horse at a walking pace. He was dressed with considerable elegance in the fashion of the year, 1789. His three-cornered hat was laced with gold, as were also his long-skirted dove-grey coat and embroidered waistcoat. His breeches and gauntlets were of the softest doeskin; his tall riding-boots polished to a mirror-like brilliance. His brown hair was unpowdered, but elaborately dressed with side-curls above the ears and a neat queue tied with a ribbon at the back of his neck. He had a thinnish, brown face, straight nose, mobile mouth and a good chin. He was twenty-one years of age, although he looked somewhat older.

  At first sight a man might have put him down as a young gallant who had never fought outside a fencing school, but that impression was hardly in keeping with his sword—an old-fashioned weapon with a plain steel hilt entirely contradicting his otherwise foppish appearance.

  Had anyone meeting him on his solitary ride spoken to him they would nev
er have suspected from his reply that he was anything other than the young French nobleman that he appeared to be, because four years’ residence in France while in his teens, and a natural flair for languages, had made him bi-lingual; but he was, in fact, the son of an English Admiral, and his name was Roger Brook.

  However, he was not using his own name at the moment. On his return to France, after an absence of close on two years, he had again assumed the soubriquet that he had earlier adopted—that of M. le Chevalier de Breuc. So doing not only saved him the annoyance of being cheated by innkeepers and others as presumably a rich English milor’, but for his present purpose it served him better to be thought a Frenchman.

  For the past four days he had been living at the Auberge du Cadran Bleu in the little town of Fontainebleau, and he had spent the greater part of his time wondering how he could manage to get himself admitted to the private apartments of the Château.

  It was in a further attempt to find a solution to that extremely knotty problem that he had hired a horse and was riding slowly through the forest on this April afternoon; for he had felt that two or three hours of complete solitude and concentration might produce the inspiration of which he stood so badly in need.

  Like all the royal Palaces at that date anyone was at liberty to saunter about its grounds or walk through its great halls and galleries, even when the King and Queen were in residence—as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were now. They lived for most of the day in public and there was no bar to the curious coming to stare at them as they went from one part of the Palace to another, or even while they ate their food at State dinners. But it was quite a different matter to acquire the entrée to the royal circle, with the privilege of attending levees and mingling freely with the members of the Court.

  To do so was Roger Brook’s object in coming to Fontainebleau; in fact it was one of the main reasons for his return to France, and unless he could find some way to get on intimate terms with the Royal Family itself, or at least some of its most trusted advisers, the mission upon which he had been sent was doomed to failure.

  Two years earlier he had, partly by chance but also largely owing to his own wit and courage, been able to render a signal service to his country in providing the key to the successful outcome of some extremely delicate diplomatic negotiations.1 It was then that Britain’s twenty-nine-year-old Prime Minister, brilliant Billy Pitt, had realised the possibilities that lay in a young man who possessed his qualities of good birth, education and manners, coupled with a certain innocence of expression which covered considerable shrewdness and determination.

  The Government of the day was dependent for its information about affairs at foreign Courts on its diplomatic representatives abroad and the spies they employed. But the former, while having the entrée to society in the capitals in which they served, were naturally greatly handicapped in obtaining particulars of secret policy through the very fact that they were Britain’s representatives; and the latter, while valuable for securing purely military information, were not of the social status to penetrate the cabinets of Kings and the boudoirs of their mistresses.

  Roger Brook, on the other hand, could both pass as a Frenchman and be received as an equal by the aristocracy of any country. So Mr. Pitt had decided to employ him as his personal secret agent and, in the previous year, had sent him to the Courts of Denmark, Sweden and Russia.1 Now, after a short but hectic sojourn in England, during which he had narrowly escaped being hanged for murder, the Prime Minister had charged him with further work in France.

  His new mission was a delicate and nebulous one. It presented no apparent dangers or call for heroic measures, but needed considerable tact and the ability to form cool, unbiased judgments as to the real value of statements made by a great variety of people, most of whom were bitterly prejudiced. It was, in fact, to assess the probable outcome of the political ferment which was now agitating the whole French nation.

  That drastic changes were about to take place no one could doubt. The centuries-old feudal system, of which the monarchy was the apex, had worked reasonably well in its day; but Cardinal Richelieu had destroyed the power of the great nobles and a generation later Louis XIV had turned them into little more than bejewelled lackeys by insisting that they should leave their estates permanently to add to the lustre of his own setting at Versailles; so the monarchy had become absolute, with no restraint of any kind on the power that the Kings exercised over the whole nation.

  The so-called Parliaments of Paris, Bordeaux and other great cities were no more than judicial assemblies, without power to make or alter laws, their function being only to register the royal edicts and conduct trials of special importance. The Monarch ruled through a number of Governors and Intendants, who again had no power to legislate but were high Civil Servants charged with administering the royal decrees in their respective provinces and collecting taxes. So the people had no legitimate outlet of any kind for their grievances, and had become entirely subject to the good or evil influences that a handful of men and women near the King, but incredibly remote from them, exerted on him.

  Thus a situation had gradually developed in which new taxes were levied, restrictions placed on commerce, treaties made, armies conscripted and wars declared, all without nobles, clergy or people having the least say in these matters which concerned them so vitally.

  Roger Brook had had an unusually good opportunity of absorbing the background of the situation, owing to the variety of his experiences during his four years in France as a youth. He had for over a year occupied a privileged position in the household of a great nobleman in Paris, but he had for still longer lived with a middle-class family in a provincial city. He had for some months enjoyed the comfort of a luxurious château buried in the heart of the country, but he had also spent many weeks tramping from village to village through north-western France as the assistant of a poor quack doctor. So he knew that discontent at the present state of things was far from being confined to one class.

  He had seen the miserable mud-walled, windowless hovels of the peasantry and knew the many impositions which made their lives so hard. There was the forced labour, often at seasons most inconvenient to themselves, that they were compelled to give on the King’s highways; the Government’s control of grain, which forced them to sell at a fixed price, so that they were debarred from making a good profit; the petty dues that they had to pay on going through toll-gates whenever they moved a mile or so from their homes, and a great variety of small but irksome taxes which provided the main incomes of the local nobility and clergy.

  Yet he also knew that many of them were by no means so abjectly poverty-stricken as they appeared. The fact that few of even the better farmhouses had glass in their windows was not because their owners could not afford to pay for it; the reason was that their taxes were assessed quite arbitrarily on their apparent capacity to pay, and this evil system drove them to conceal every sou they made above their bare living expenses instead of using the money for the betterment of their own condition.

  Deplorable as was the state of the peasantry, the great bulk of the nobility felt that they had equally good grounds for complaint. By tradition only the profession of arms was open to them, and that was so ill-paid that during the past two centuries they had gradually become impoverished through having to sell much of their property to equip themselves to fight in France’s wars. The thrifty peasants had already acquired over a third of all the cultivatable land in France, and hundreds of noble families now had nothing left but a dilapidated château and a few acres of grazing-ground.

  Yet neither class had any sympathy for the woes of the other. The nobles—some of whom eked out a miserable existence on as little as twenty-five louis a year—knew that their tenants cheated them whenever they could. The peasants bitterly resented the freedom of the nobility from all forms of taxation, and grudged every sou they had to surrender in that variety of petty dues which made up the sole source of income of their masters. Neither the uncou
th, ragged tillers of the soil, nor the proud, out-at-elbows country gentry had collectively any animus against the Court; but both were sullen, discontented, and ready to welcome any change which might lead to a betterment of their lot.

  It was in the cities and towns that the real trouble was brewing. The growth of industry had produced in all of them a slum population that recognised no individual master. Their poverty was appalling and in times of scarcity they died by the thousand; so they were inflammable material for the fiery words of any agitator.

  In the towns, too, the greatest change had occurred since the breakdown of the feudal system. With it had passed the mediaeval thraldom of the Church, leading to freer thought and the spread of secular education. An extremely numerous middle class, including thousands of respectable artisans as well as professional men and wealthy merchants, had grown up in them. It was they who most bitterly resented the privileged position of the idle, arrogant nobility. Moreover, for half a century past, many of them had been reading the controversial works of the political philosophers, and this had led to an almost universal demand among them that they should be given some share in the government of their country.

  Finally, it was the deplorable state into which the finances of France had fallen in recent years, coupled with a succession of bad harvests that had inflicted grievous hardship on the poor, both in town and country, which had led to a nation-wide agitation for a complete overhaul of the machinery of State.

  Even when Roger had fled from France twenty months earlier, as the result of a duel, the popular clamour for reform had reached such a pitch that the government was seriously concerned by it.