The Launching of Roger Brook rb-1

by Dennis Wheatley

  They knew that the tower was quite safe, although it always seemed to sway slightly as the wind moaned round its top in winter and summer alike. Yet this, and being so far above the earth, had never failed to give them a rather queer feeling ever since they had come to favour it as a retreat on account of its absolute privacy. Since Colonel Thursby received no visitors, no one except themselves ever came there and, even had strangers done so, the echo of their footsteps on the stone stairs would have given warning of then-approach at least several minutes before they could have reached the turret chamber. It was, therefore, an ideal place for two young conspirators to make plans and exchange confidences.

  Having gazed their fill at the view, they settled themselves side by side on the settee.

  "Well, little boy," said Georgina with an air of superiority. "Tell me about yourself? Hast thou done well at thy lessons this term or been the recipient of many birchings?"

  "I'm not a' little boy," Roger protested hotly, "And don't you try to play the fine lady with me, just because you've been to Court and done a season."

  She laughed. "Oh, Roger! Should I live to be a hundred I'll never forgo teasing you, and I vow you'll still rise to it. All the same, you may like it or not, but having been presented makes a woman of me."

  "It takes more than that to make a girl into a woman," he scoffed.

  "That's as maybe, m'dear, but at all events you can lay no claim

  yet to being a man."

  "Another few weeks will see me one—unless...."

  As he broke off her big eyes opened wide. "Unless what? Whatever

  do you mean?"

  "Oh, God!" he burst out. "How much rather I'd remain a boy and be going back to Sherborne!" Then he suddenly buried his face in his hands.

  "Why, Roger, dear!" She threw a warm arm round his shoulders and pulled his head down into her lap. "What is it? Do tell me. We've never had any secrets from each other, and never shall."

  For a moment, conscious of her soft thigh against his forehead, he allowed that pleasant but disturbing sensation to distract his thoughts, then he muttered: "Of course I'll tell you. It's all right. I'm not blubbering. I'm too scared and angry to do that."

  She released him, but seeing his distress, took one of his hands between her own, seeking by their firm pressure to give him strength, as she commanded: "Out with it, now!"

  Roger gulped back the tears he had denied, and that neither Gunston nor his father had been able to draw from him. Then, bit by bit, half incoherently at first but graduating to a fierce, steady monologue of pent-up resentment, he poured out to her the story of the day before and the hideous fate that he now felt menaced him.

  Her dark eyes fixed intently on him she let him ease himself of his burden without interruption, until he at last fell silent; then she said:

  "But Roger, this is monstrous. Can you not appeal to your mother to make your father see reason?"

  He shrugged. "My mother thinks more of him than she does of God. She loves me, but she'd never intervene; and 'twould be useless if she tried."

  "Your other relatives, then?"

  "I have none, except my mother's people whom I've never seen. My father, like myself, was an only son." "But you cannot submit to this?" "What other course is open to me?"

  "God knows, m'dear; but the injustice of it makes my blood boil."

  For the best part of another hour they talked round and round the subject without corning any nearer to a solution. The sun was now well up in the heavens and striking down on the stone cupola of the tower made the turret room close and hot. Roger got up to open one of the windows and stripping off his long-skirted coat flung it over the back of a chair.

  They had fallen silent again. The wind had dropped and up there in their eerie no sound reached them from the earth far below. Roger felt, as he had often felt before in the turret, as if he was in a different world that had no connection with the life he knew. There was some­thing God-like in being at that high altitude from which the men working in the fields looked to be no more than pigmies. Time seemed to be standing still, and even the interview that he so dreaded coming no nearer despite the steady mounting of the sun which, with the passing of a few more hours, must inevitably set.

  Suddenly Georgina spoke: "Roger! There's but one thing for it. You must run away."

  "What's that!" he swung round to stare at her. "Run away! How can I? Where to?"

  "Romantic young fools are always mining away to sea," she declared. "Why shouldn't you run away from it?"

  "But there is nowhere I could go?" he faltered.

  She tossed her black ringlets impatiently. "The world is wide and you are strong and healthy. These summer months you might do worse than go to live with the Egyptians in the forest, or you could make your way to London and find some employment there."

  "No," he shook his head glumly, " 'tis too drastic a measure that you propose, and the remedy would prove a greater affliction than the illness. By it I'd cease to be all that I am and lose such small advantages as my birth and education give me. I'm determined to make something worth while of my life, and 'twould be the height of folly to throw away the best years of my youth scraping a living as a tinker."

  "I don't mean run away for good, stupid, but just for a month or two; until this threat to your happiness has blown over, or your father has been given another ship and ordered back to sea."

  For the first time he considered her suggestion seriously and, crossing the narrow room, sat down again beside her.

  "I might do that," he murmured. " 'Tis certainly a possibility. But the forest is no good. The Egyptians might have you but they wouldn't have me. They'd think that I'd been sent to spy on them."

  "Go to London, then. 'Tis less than a hundred miles and you could walk there in a week."

  "Maybe, but I have not a single friend there, or even an acquaint­ance."

  "Had it been last month I could have given you a score of intro­ductions; but, alas! town will now be as empty as a drum and all my friends of the season gone back to their places in the country. Still, you're a likeable fellow, Roger, and would soon find plenty of people to help you."

  "I fear your wish is father to the thought, m'dear," he said despondently. "Among persons of quality the making of friendships is always easy, but in such a case I'd have put all that behind me. The poor live hard and for the most part are driven by their needs to batten upon one another. I know no trade and could be of little use to anyone except as a scrivener. I'd find myself starving within a week."

  "Nonsense!" she flashed at him. "Where there's a will there's a way! You've a pair of hands and they could be put to a dozen different uses."

  Roger's fatal imagination was again working overtime. He had never been to London, but he knew enough about it to realise that the gilded world in which she had disported herself so gaily for a few weeks was very far from being the metropolis that a patronless and penniless young man would find should he go there. Old Ben, the Brooks' houseman, was a Londoner by birth, and he had often told Roger horrifying tales of the debtors' prison at Newgate, the Fleet, and the madhouse at Bedlam, where the lunatics, bearing their heads against the walls and eating the filthy straw on which they lay, were exhibited in chains to anyone who cared to tip the warder a shilling. From Old Ben's stories, too, he conjured up the noisome alleys haunted by disease-ridden Molls, the filth, the stench and the cut-purses who haunted the thieves-kitchens on the lookout for some greenhorn from the country whom they might despoil.

  "No," he said, after a moment, "I wouldn't dare to go to London."

  "Then tramp the country," she replied tartly. " 'Tis high summer, and 'twon't harm you to sleep under a hedgerow now and then."

  "Not now and then, perhaps; but I'd have to live, and I couldn't beg my bread all the time. I've no trade, I tell you! and I'm not strong enough yet to do the full days' labour of a man. I'd face it if I had sufficient money to ensure me food for the time we have in mind, but I haven't—that's
the rub."

  "I can set your mind at rest on that score," swiftly volunteered Georgina. "My Derby winnings have gone, alas, on furbelows, likewise my quarter's allowance from papa. But I've pretty trinkets that should fetch a tidy sum, and you shall have them. You could dispose of them with ease in Winchester or Southampton."

  "I couldn't take them from you," Roger demurred.

  "Be not a fool! I'll not give you the best or most valuable. Those I shall keep for my own adornment; but in my grandmother's box which has come to me there is a plenitude of old gewgaws that I'd ne'er be seen dead in. Yet they are of gold and should fetch a good price in a county town."

  "No, no! I'll not rob you. 'Tis part of your inheritance and you may need them some day to raise money for some project of your own."

  "Stuff and nonsense! As my father's heir I don't lack for fortune; and even if I did, my face and figure would soon make it for me. These oddments are but a bagatelle, and you must take them, Roger. 'Tis the only way to save yourself from the nightmare of this life at sea."

  Her words recalled Roger to his impending fate; yet he still hesitated. Even provided with a little store of gold, to abandon every­one he knew and the only way of life he understood, for a lonely and perhaps perilous existence, was no light undertaking. Certain aspects of the unknown had always had greater terrors for him than the known, and to be cast out of the world of security and comfort that had been his ever since his birth, into one of uncertainty and hardship, filled him with misgiving.

  "No," he said. "No, Georgina, I can't do it. You forget that I've led an even more sheltered life than you and am not yet sixteen. That is too young to face the world alone, even for the few months that you suggest."

  "Ah!" she sneered, "There you've hit upon it. You're not a man, as you would like to think. Only a timorous little boy." "I'm nothing of the kind!" he declared angrily.

  "Well, you behave like one," she retorted. "And you are certainly not a man yet; any girl could tell that with half a look at you." "What the devil do you mean?"

  "What I say! And disabuse yourself of the idea that a midshipman's uniform could turn you into one. It couldn't; any more than being presented at Court turns a girl into a woman."

  Roger flushed to his temples. "Oh, you mean that!" he said softly.

  For a moment they sat there staring at one another. The tower was now swaying slightly again and they both had that strange feeling of being utterly alone, entirely divorced from the everyday existence that was going on far below them. As the blood mounted to Roger's face he could feel his heart beating wildly. Georgina's dark eyes were unnaturally bright. Her red lips were a little parted and she was smiling at him; a queer, enigmatic, mocking little smile.

  Suddenly he pulled her towards him and their mouths met in a violent kiss. Her lips seemed to melt under the pressure of his and the feel of the soft contours of her body against his own set his brain on fire. The kiss ended only when they were forced to draw breath, and a second later he exclaimed:

  "By heaven! I'll show you if I'm a man, or not!" Then, as their mouths hungrily closed on each other's again, he thrust her back against the cushions and crushed her to him in a fierce embrace.

  For several minutes they lay there, now lost to all sense of time, place, age, or convention; their youthful passions rising to fever pitch from a series of avid caresses during which his trembling hands became ever more audacious.

  Suddenly she pushed him roughly away from her with a breathless cry of: "Fie, Roger! Stop it now! I'll let no man handle me so unless he loves me."

  "But I do! I do!" he blurted out, now wrought up to an un­governable pitch of excitement. "Georgina, I've always loved you! I've loved you since the very first moment I set eyes on you!"

  "It isn't true! I'll not believe it!" she whispered, her face now as flushed as his. But she did not attempt to repel his renewed caresses, only whispered again: "Roger! You mustn't! Desist now, I beg. You're not a man, only a boy, and 'tis folly to pretend otherwise."

  "I'll show you that I'm a man," he muttered, and as their lips met again he pressed her down beneath him. For a moment their two hearts palpitated wildly against one another and he stared down into her face with eager yet fearful eyes; then he gasped: "Do you want me to prove it?"

  Her only reply was a half-hysterical laugh and a tightening of her soft arms round his neck.

  CHAPTER V

  THE ROAD TO FORTUNE

  ROGER sat staring out of the turret window that overlooked the vast sweep of the bay, but his eyes no more took in the ancient Abbey of Christchurch or the waves creaming against the jagged rocks of the Needles, than they had the details of the view from the roof of his own home first thing that morning.

  His face was red, his hair tumbled and he had great difficulty in keeping his hands from trembling. Never before had his young soul plumbed such depths of abject misery. Only a short time before he had been fired with a mad elation and almost swooned with rapture in the intoxication of a hitherto unexperienced pleasure. It had been all too short, yet, while it lasted, far beyond his wildest imaginings. But now, the awful consciousness of all that his act implied was fully borne in upon him. It seemed that for the past twenty-four hours his evil angel had held undisputed sway over his affairs. A midshipman's commission had been sprung upon him without warning; he had got drunk and defied his father; and now he had seduced Georgina.

  He did not dare to look at her, as he was desperately afraid that she would either burst into floods of tears or wither him to the very soul with one outraged glance from her black eyes.

  Then she whispered: "Roger, what ails thee, m'dear? Doest thou not like me any more?"

  Her whisper brought him some relief. She was not angry, only frightened. "Indeed I do," he gulped, still not daring to turn his face to hers. "I—I think you're adorable. And have no fear. I'll make an honest woman of you. We'll have to wait until I'm old enough to marry, but I'm willing to wait as long as need be, if you are."

  "Roger," she said, in a much firmer voice. "Come here. Come back and sit beside me."

  He turned then, and was staggered to see that she had already tidied her hair, smoothed out her skirts, and was sitting there, a picture of demure amusement, quietly laughing at him.

  "Don't you—don't you mind?" he faltered.

  "Of course not, you silly fellow. "For me, it wasn't the first time."

  "D'you mean you've done that sort of thing before?" he said incredulously, his relief struggling with a sudden new-born jealousy.

  "Why not?" she shrugged. "It has just as much attraction for a woman as a man, and it's absurdly unfair that men should love where they list while girls are supposed to go through life like marble images."

  "Who was it with?" he demanded truculently.

  " Tis none of your business. Yet I don't mind telling you. In London I favoured one of my beaux far above the rest. Old Aunt Sophie was so exhausted from sitting up for me to all hours on rout seats and stiff-backed gilded chairs that she slept most afternoons. My little fool of a cousin, Dorothea, took some evading but two or three times a week I managed to give her the slip and go out shopping with my maid. Jenny was a sensible gel and easily bribeable, so I used to send her to do my shopping and spend the time pleasuring my lover in his rooms in Jermyn Street."

  Quite illogically, in view of his recent act, Roger was frankly horrified. "D'you really mean that you actually went to a man's rooms of your own free will and let him seduce you?"

  "Well, what if I did," she shrugged. "I see no reason why you should look so shocked about it. But as a matter of fact, he didn't seduce me. I'd lost all I had to lose last spring, before I went to London."

  Roger's new feeling of jealousy returned with redoubled force at the thought that someone in the neighbourhood had been the first to enjoy Georgina's charms, and the not unnatural assumption that on that first occasion she must have been forced to it against her will, made him positively seethe with anger.

  "Tell me
his name," he cried. "Tell me his name, and, by heaven, I'll kill him."

  "You won't; and you couldn't if you tried, my littlest gallant. 'Twas Captain Coignham.''

  Roger's eyes almost popped from his head. "What!" he gasped, "Not the highwayman?"

  "Yes, indeed. I know of no other."

  He groaned. "Oh, Georgina; and I've warned you so often that 'tis dangerous for you to ride alone in the forest."

  His fervid imagination swiftly conjured up a wild scene of the screaming Georgina being dragged from her horse, pulled in among the bushes, brutally raped and left dishevelled and swooning. Yet his morbid curiosity got the better of him and he could not resist adding: "It must have been simply terrible for you; but how did it happen?"

  " 'Twas not so terrible," she smiled reminiscently. "We came face to face no great distance from the Queen's Elm. I've always felt that jewellery was made to be worn, not kept locked up in a box. I had that day a fine sapphire ring on my finger and a diamond aigrette in my hat. He greeted me most polite, but bade me hand them over. I parleyed with him a little and begged him to let me at least keep the ring, since it had been my mother's. He declared that I could keep both the ornaments if I was willing to ransom them with a kiss a-piece. He was a personable fellow, well groomed and of good address, so I considered the saving of my jewels cheap at the price. We both dismounted and he gave me the first kiss. 'Twas a long one and the fellow knew his business. Then he picked me up in his strong arms and carried me through the trees to a mossy bank, as he said, to give me the other in surroundings more suited to my beauty. Call me a brazen hussy if you will, but I've not a shadow of regret over that sunny day last spring when I came upon Captain Coignham in the forest. 'Twas a fine romantic way to lose one's maidenhead."