The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware Read online

  THE RAVISHING OF LADY MARY WARE

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  DEDICATION

  As several chapters of this book concern

  Marshal Bernadette, the founder of the

  present Royal House of Sweden, I take

  great pleasure in dedicating it to my friend

  IWAN HEDMAN

  who has done so much to popularise the

  Swedish translations of my books.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Wanted for Murder

  2 The Gamin Marshal

  3 The Forged Letter

  4 Roger Faces the Emperor

  5 The Imperial Divorce

  6 A New Mission

  7 At the End of the Road

  8 Resurgent Germany

  9 Death Stalks at Midnight

  10 A Limited Compensation

  11 The Trap

  12 ‘He Who Laughs Last’

  13 The Forwardness of Lady Mary Ware

  14 The Devil with Blue Eyes

  15 The Serpent Enters Eden

  16 England, Home and Beauty

  17 A Gall of Conscience

  18 Caught in the Toils Once More

  19 Caesar versus Caesar

  20 Advance to Desolation

  21 A New Problem

  22 Napoleon Signs his Army’s Death Warrant

  23 Death Takes Something on Account

  24 The Grim Reaper Gives No Respite

  25 Old Soldiers Sometimes Die

  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 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

  1

  Wanted for Murder

  On a lovely morning in late September 1809, a man and a woman were sitting at a table on the vine-covered terrace of the inn at the little village of Winningen, on the Moselle.

  The man was forty-one and the woman just a year older. Their clothes were of the finest quality, but slightly rumpled from hasty travel—which was not to be wondered at, since forty-eight hours earlier they had been fleeing for their lives, and had with them only the garments they were wearing. But now they were lazily partaking of a bottle of good wine, their faces as serene as the river which flowed swiftly past to join the Rhine, eight miles downstream at Coblenz.

  Apart from them the terrace was deserted, and there were few passers-by in the street, for the vintage was in progress and every hand needed to get in the grapes before the coming of the first frosts. Yet anyone catching sight of them could not have failed to be struck by the strong, resolute face of the man and the voluptuous beauty of the woman.

  He was Roger Brook, the son of the late Admiral Sir Christopher Brook; but he was wearing a French uniform and had spent more than half his life on the Continent. Circumstances had led to his assuming a second identity as le Chevalier de Breuc, a native of Strasbourg. For many years Billy Pitt had looked on him as his most resourceful secret agent. He had served the Prime Minister well all through the French Revolution and later, as an A.D.C. to General Bonaparte, he had risen to become Colonel le Baron de Breuc, a Commander of the Legion of Honour and one of the most trusted members of the Emperor’s personal staff.

  His companion’s name was Georgina, and she was now the very recent widow of Baron von Haugwitz. But she too was English by birth, the only daughter of a Colonel of Engineers who had made a fortune from inventions, and a gipsy mother. It was to the former that she owed an exceptional education and a fine intelligence; from the latter she inherited her superb dark beauty, her abundant vitality and, at times the gift of foretelling the future.

  Roger took from his pocket a news sheet that had been printed in Coblenz the previous day and given to him by a waiter when they had been breakfasting in the coffee room earlier that morning. For
the dozenth time he read the leading article, which ran:

  MOST MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY OF THE CENTURY

  It is reported that the Herr Baron Ulrich von Haugwitz and a French lady, the Baronne de Breuc, were found dead yesterday in the most extraordinary circumstances. The questioning of the servants at the Herr Baron’s Schloss Langenstein leads to the belief that the two were lovers. For some utterly inexplicable reason, they elected to consummate their passion for one another in a wine press. Presumably they fell asleep there, and failed to wake when, in the late afternoon, vintagers tipped hods of grapes into the press upon them. Or it may be that they were swiftly suffocated.

  Their presence at the bottom of the vat remained undiscovered until the must running from the press took on an unusual pinkish colour. The Kellermeister ordered the press to be emptied. Only then, when a ton of grapes had been removed, there was revealed, to the amazement and horror of those present, the naked, flattened corpses of the Herr Baron and the French Baronne.

  The dead woman had been Roger’s third wife, Lisala: the beautiful but incredibly evil daughter of a Portuguese diplomat, the Marquis de Pombal. Roger had met her in Tehran when a member of a mission that Napoleon had ent to Persia, and her father had been Ambassador to he Shah. They had entered on a hectic love affair. Many months later they had sailed together to Brazil, when the Portuguese Royal Family had gone into exile to escape from the French, who were about to enter Lisbon.

  In Brazil, Lisala had told Roger that she was pregnant by him. They had planned to elope, but had been betrayed by a Negro slave. In the mêlée that followed, she had driven a stiletto through her father’s back and killed him. Roger had got her away to a British frigate lying in Rio harbour. He already knew her to be a nymphomaniac and utterly unscrupulous in gaining her own ends; but, as he believed her to be Carrying his child, he had felt bound to marry her.

  In Europe, matters had gone from bad to worse. Once more in the service of Napoleon, Roger had accompanied him to the Conference of Erfurt. There Lisala had given birth to a black baby. The child’s father had been the Negro slave who had betrayed them. Horrified, Roger would have rid himself of her, but she knew the double life he was leading and threatened to reveal that he was an English spy.

  At Erfurt, Roger had again met Georgina: the first and only truly great love of his life. He and Lisala had gone to stay at Schloss Langenstein with Georgina and her husband. Her marriage had turned out most unhappily. Von Haugwitz was a homosexual, but his fondness for boys did not prevent him from becoming Lisala’s lover. In lust and depravity, they proved to be a pair. By then Roger found it impossible to restrain her. For her amusement, financed by the Baron, she secretly opened a brothel.

  Sent on a mission from Vienna to Paris by the Emperor, Roger had returned unexpectedly and overheard the Baron and Lisala plotting to murder him and Georgina. Lisala was boundlessly extravagant. She had a great fortune in Portugal but, owing to the war, could get no money out of that country. Von Haugwitz was also at his wits’ end for money. Georgina, too, was very wealthy, but her money was in England. Her death would enable von Haugwitz to claim her fortune as soon as the war was over. With Roger also dead, Lisala and the Baron would be able to marry and share this great wealth.

  To save Georgina, Roger had again gone to Langenstein. But to get her away from the Schloss had presented a most difficult problem, as the Baron’s retainers were under orders to keep a watch on her and prevent her from leaving. Roger had decided that the best chance of doing so was to suggest that they should all go on an expedition to Frankfurt, about which the servants would be told the previous night; then, during the night, to drug the Baron and Lisala. In the morning Georgina would say that her husband and Roger’s wife were not going on the expedition after all. Instead, they had gone out early to see the vintagers at work. She and Roger would not then be prevented from driving off in the coach that had been ordered.

  But they dared not leave their would-be murderers lying drugged in their beds, for it was certain they would be found there before the escapers could get away. So the question remained of where to hide them. As no-one went into the weinstube until late in the afternoon, they had decided to conceal the unconscious Baron and Lisala in one of the big presses.

  The plan had worked, except that when Roger had forced the coachman to turn the coach about and drive in the direction of Coblenz instead of Frankfurt, a footman had jumped off the back of the vehicle and run up to the Schloss to tell the Baron’s steward what had occurred. The Baron’s men had pursued them, but they had managed to get away. Had they remained on the Prussian side of the Rhine, the Baron could have had Roger arrested for carrying off Georgina; but, by crossing the river at Coblenz, they had entered French territory, so could consider themselves safe from his fury when he had sufficiently recovered to realise how he had been fooled.

  Roger had had no means of assessing the power of the drug which he and Georgina had forced von Haugwitz and Lisala to swallow at pistol point; but he had quite reasonably assumed that its effect would wear off in twelve hours, so they should have come to soon after midday or, in any case, well before the vintagers came to the weinstube for the evening pressing. But evidently it had proved more potent than he had expected. That it had resulted in their deaths did not distress him. Even had he deliberately killed them, it would not have weighed heavily on his conscience, for both were given over to every form of evil and would, in due course, have brought pain and grief to many other people. So it was well that they were dead. Moreover, their deaths had altered immensely for the better the prospects of Georgina and himself.

  Not only was he now free from Lisala for good and all. Had she continued to live, it was certain that, within a week or so, she would be back in Vienna, and revenged herself by denouncing him as an English secret agent. So securely had he established himself over many years as a distinguished French officer that, at first, few people would have believed her. But, on returning from Brazil, she had spent some time with him in London. In consequence she knew so much about his English connections that it needed only for her statements to be checked by a French agent for them to become proven facts. That would have put an end for good to his activities as Colonel le Baron de Breuc; and, when the Emperor realised for how long he had been fooled, his fury would have known no bounds. Roger would have become a hunted fugitive in a Europe swarming with Napoleon’s secret police.

  Georgina, too, was no longer the wife of a husband whom she detested, and from whom she might have had great difficulty in freeing herself. Being English-born, she could expect no sympathy from the French, and her late husband’s brother was Chief Minister of Prussia. His influence was great enough to have had her hunted throughout the French-dominated Continent and, if caught, sent back to her husband.

  After the desperate anxieties of the past week, they had spent the previous day at the inn, quietly recovering. During that time they had discussed the future as it then appeared to them. In view of Lisala’s almost certain denunciation of him, it was essential that Roger should not be recognised by one of the many hundred French officers with whom he was acquainted, and his whereabouts become known. As a first precaution, before arriving at the inn he had removed his rank badges, decorations and A.D.C.’s sash, and given their names as Captain and Madame Bonthon. As soon as he could, he intended to procure civilian clothes and get rid of his uniform; then make his way with Georgina by little-used roads from the Rhineland to Pressburg in Austria.

  Ultimately, they were both anxious to get back to England—Roger to escape Napoleon’s police, and Georgina to rejoin young Charles, her dearly-loved son by her second husband, the Earl of St. Ermins. But, although Roger had had himself smuggled many times across the Channel and the North Sea, he doubted his ability to do so with a woman companion, and was greatly averse to exposing her to such a risk.

  An alternative occurred to him, owing to the fact that no great while since Georgina had had a brief but passionate affair with t
he Archduke John, youngest brother of the Emperor Francis of Austria. Hostilities in the war of the Third Coalition had temporarily ceased in July by France and Austria agreeing an armistice, which still continued. Meanwhile, Austria maintained diplomatic relations with her ally, Britain. Therefore, the Archduke was in a position to secure Georgina’s safe passage to England, escorted by a diplomatic courier. So it had been decided that Roger should take her to the Austrian headquarters at Pressburg and, having handed her over to the Archduke, make his own way home.

  They were now re-discussing the matter. Having laid aside the news sheet that gave them the welcome tidings that their marriages were at an end, Roger said:

  ‘For me this means that I no longer have to go into hiding from the French; but for you, my sweet, it makes only the difference that I can escort you openly to Pressburg, so be certain of getting you there safely and more swiftly. The good offices of your dear friend John remain the best method of conveying you back to England.’

  Georgina nodded, her dark curls stirring slightly on either side of her rosy cheeks. ‘I think you right; though I regret that our parting should now be the sooner. I had looked forward to our making a long, circuitous journey together, with a spice of danger and many joyous nights spent at wayside inns. But what of yourself? Now that you no longer have anything to fear, do you intend to rejoin the Emperor?’

  ‘That depends on yourself,’ he replied, his bright blue eyes holding hers intently. ‘Do you at long last agree to marry me, wild horses will not stop me from joining you in England with all speed imaginable.’

  ‘Oh, Roger!’ she protested. ‘We have talked of this so often through the years, and always reached the same conclusion. Our joy in sleeping together has never lessened since we first became lovers as boy and girl. But solely because fate decreed that we could share a bed only for brief periods, at long intervals. You have ever been the dearest person in my life, and so will ever remain; but had we married, our mutual passion would long since have waned, and we’d be no more than a humdrum couple approaching middle age.’