The Launching of Roger Brook rb-1

by Dennis Wheatley

  Quickly recovering himself he smiled at her. "That is quite under­standable, Mademoiselle. My family is an exceptionally large one and even Madame, here, may scarcely remember some of these people of whom I have been speaking."

  "Have you, perhaps, also relatives in England?" Brochard inquired with apparent unconcern.

  Roger instantly realised that the question was inspired by a still unsatisfied curiosity about the letter he had received and, knowing that others would be arriving for him as time went on, he determined on a bold course.

  "Why, yes, Monsieur," he replied, amiably. "My godmother married an Englishman by the name of Jackson, and she now lives there. Only last spring I spent some months at their home in Hampshire and 'tis to that visit I owe my slight knowledge of English."

  "I had quite forgotten that," remarked Maitre Leger with his dry smile and, evidently wishing to amuse himself by testing Roger's powers of invention further, he began to question him about his visit.

  Here, although it remained unrealised by anyone present, Roger was naturally on much safer ground, and he was able to provoke much hearty laughter by relating what he knew they would regard as some of the strange and barbarous customs of their hereditary enemies. But he also took occasion to establish the fact that he and his "god­mother" doted on each other and kept up a regular correspondence.

  At the close of the meal Maitre Leger took occasion to say that he found his young protege such excellent company that he must dine with them again sometime.

  On this Madame raised the well-marked eyebrows above her big blue eyes and exclaimed: "Do'st mean to tell me that thou hast allowed my young cousin to feed all this while with the apprentices in the kitchen! For shame. Monsieur! In future he must take his meals with us."

  "You are most kind, Madame," Roger demurred, fearing that Maitre Leger might not approve, "but I have no wish to intrude, or to slight my colleagues by appearing to have sought a place above them."

  "Nay," said the lawyer, with a kindly smile, " 'twill be no intrusion, as Madame likes to have young people about her. You can tell the others that it is Madame's desire on account of the relationship you bear her."

  Thus, through Maitre Leger's original prevarication and Roger's own ready wit, a new, broader and far happier life suddenly opened out for him. He dined each night at leisure in comfortable surroundings and enjoyed good talk. In addition he was granted the use of the parlour afterwards, where he sometimes played cards with Madame and Manon, and at others read books from Maitre Leger's well-stocked shelves. Sometimes, too, the family invited friends in for a musical evening, so Roger took up the bass-viol; but he had no ear and did little credit to the Leger quartet in their renderings of chamber music.

  In the first week of December he saw Athenais again, but, once more, only a fleeting glimpse of her as she drove past him in her coach, and she was not looking in his direction. The mystery of her non-reappearance at the Cathedral remained unsolved, but, at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not due to illness. Her little face, framed now that winter had come in a fur hood, looked as lovely as ever and remarkably healthy.

  That afternoon he was further cheered by receiving a reply to his second letter to his mother; in it she said that she had despatched all his clothes and other things that she thought might be useful to him in a spare sea-chest of his father's, as it had a stout lock and being strongly made would travel well. Then, on the twentieth of the month, he had a note from the authorities to say that it had arrived by barge from St. Malo and was down at the quay awaiting collection.

  To his annoyance he found that he had to pay a heavy duty upon certain of the articles it contained, but Brochard advanced him the money to cover this, and it was a great joy to have a good store of clothes and certain possessions of his own again. He explained the arrival of the chest and its contents by saying that they were the things he had taken with him to England on his visit to his godmother the previous spring, and he had expected them to have reached Rennes by the time of his own arrival; hence his arriving there so ill-provided, but for several months the chest had been lost in transit.

  After a careful sorting out he sold about a third, of his things, which enabled him to repay the advance he had had and left him enough money over to buy small Christmas presents for the Legers, Manon, Brochard and Quatrevaux. As they were accustomed to exchange gifts at the New Year they were somewhat surprised at receiving his presents on the 25th, but Maitre Leger unconsciously saved him from the slip by remarking that the Germans always kept Weihnachtsfest instead of Nouvelle Annie.

  When the New Year came his tactful gifts at Christmas were more than repaid. Quatrevaux had told Manon something of the dance that Hutot led Roger and she had told Madame Leger. In conse­quence the two women had cleared out a little boxroom on a half-landing and furnished it as a bedroom; then on New Year's morning they blindfolded Roger, led him upstairs and removed the bandage when he was in his new abode.

  It was a tiny place and had no window, but it was his own and meant an end of getting up at all sorts of godless hours to lower the rope for Hutot; so Roger could not have been more delighted, and his two laughing benefactresses were amply repaid for the trouble they had taken by the pleasure he showed.

  Thus, with the New Year of 1784 Roger entered on a far happier period than he had known for some time. His work was still monotonous, his prospects entirely uninspiring and his affair with Athenais at a standstill; but he was free of Hutot; well fed, comfortably clothed and housed, and accepted as a member of a pleasant, laughter-loving family.

  His open adoption by the Legers as their cousin also led to his making many other acquaintances, since, when they had friends to dine, the visitors often included Roger in their return invitations, and when Manon Prudhot was invited to a young people's party he was now generally asked to accompany her.

  It was at her suggestion that he took up dancing. He assented willingly, as at home he had learnt only a few country dances and he felt that he was now reaching an age where he should be able to lead a lady out to a minuet, quadrille or gavotte without embarrassment. Manon was in the habit of going once or twice a week to the Assembly Rooms or other public dance places with Julien Quatrevaux, but she was anxious not to make her affair with him too conspicuous, so they welcomed Roger as a third. They were able to introduce him to plenty of partners and he soon attached himself to one girl in particular, named Tonton Yeury.

  Tonton was the daughter of a goldsmith, and a dark, vivacious little thing. She had a retrousse1 nose, brown almond-shaped eyes and was never serious for a moment. Few girls could have been in stronger contrast with Athenais, and that was perhaps one of the reasons why Roger was attracted to her. His love and longing for the imperious Mademoiselle de Rochambeau remained unabated, but in Tonton's merry company he was able temporarily to forget his secret passion.

  By early January one of the severest winters that France had known for many years developed with extreme rigour, so that the canals and the river Vilaine were frozen a foot thick, and after Mass each Sunday the richer inhabitants of Rennes made carnival on the ice. Roger and his friends joined in the skating, sledging and tobogganing with great zest; but in all other respects they suffered considerably from the severity of the weather. None of them had any heat in their bedrooms and the offices in which Roger and Julien laboured for long hours each day had only small wood-burning stoves. In consequence they had to work in the frowsty cold, muffled up in their overcoats, and each time they dressed or undressed their teeth chattered from the icy blast that seemed to whistle in through every crevice.

  On his third skating expedition Roger again saw Athenais. Count Lucien and a dark, good-looking young man somewhat older than himself were with her, so he did not dare approach; but, to his joy she gave him a friendly wave as the two youths propelled her swiftly past in a lovely little single-seated sleigh fashioned like a swan.

  That night he was torn between bliss at her recognition of him and
agonising jealousy at the thought that the dark young man must inevitably be in love with her and that she, quite probably, returned his love. Yet the sight of her served to revive all his old ambitions and he began to seek for an opportunity to secure advancement in the firm.

  It came a few evenings later. Towards the end of dinner, Maitre Leger and Brochard were discussing a case in which one of the firm's richest clients was involved and, seizing on a point that did not appear to have occurred to either of them, Roger felt that without appearing impertinent he might draw their attention to it.

  The point was quite a minor one but both men looked a little surprised that he should have sufficient shrewdness to appreciate that it might be of some value. Maitre Leger would no doubt have thought no more of the matter had not Brochard remarked, with a smile:

  "You display good reasoning powers. Monsieur Breuc, and we shall make a lawyer of you yet," which gave Roger the opening to reply:

  "Thank you, Monsieur, but 'twill take a long time, I fear, from the little experience I gain as a Latin copyist."

  "I would that we could give you something of more interest," said Maitre Leger, "but to set anyone without proper training to the drafting of documents usually results in additional labour for someone else later on."

  Brochard gave a somewhat spiteful little laugh. " 'Twould be easy enough for me to teach Monsieur Bruec the rudiments of the business in the evenings, but I am sure he is much too occupied in gallivanting about the town with his friends to desire that!"

  "On the contrary. Monsieur," Roger took him up swiftly. "If you would be so kind, I place my leisure entirely at your disposal."

  A new interest suddenly showed in Brochard's alert eyes and, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, he replied:

  "So be it, then. Two evenings a week should suffice. Let us say Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after dinner we will adjourn to old Fusier's office. Being smaller it is warmer than the others and I will have the fire kept up after he has gone."

  The legal coaching that resulted from this arrangement did not seriously interfere with Roger's amusements and made him feel that at last he was getting somewhere, if only towards a better job than the wearisome monotony of endless copying. He found, too, that beneath Monsieur Emile Brochard's rather severe and taciturn manner there lay a very vital and likeable personality.

  Brochard was a Bordelals, and he had inherited a strong share of that tradition which made the great city of Bordeaux, from having been a fief of the English Crown for so many centuries, still markedly English in customs and sympathies. He had a passionate admiration for the British, formed mainly from the quite erroneous belief that everything they did was based on reason and, as a freethinker, he re­garded "Reason" as the Supreme Deity. He was, like the great majority of educated people in France at that time, convinced that his country was on the verge of ruin, and that only the granting of a liberal Constitution by the King, coupled with the abolition of all aristocratic privileges, could possibly save it from complete disaster. And, again and again, he pointed out to Roger legal cases where the verdict would go to a noble, simply because he was a noble, whereas under English law the verdict would have gone to a commoner, not because he was a commoner, but because reason and justice were on his side.

  Roger proved so attentive and appreciative an audience to these disquisitions that they fell into the habit of talking for an hour or so on such matters after the evening's lessons were concluded.

  On one occasion, towards the end of February, Brochard remarked that the English were sensible enough to turn even their apparent misfortunes to advantage, as was instanced by the swift reorientation of their policy towards the United States. Having lost the war they had wasted no time in bitterness and rancour, but had at once set about relieving the acute shortage of manufactured goods that had resulted from their own five-year blockade of the Americas. Before there had even been time for the British Army to be evacuated British merchants by the hundred had crossed the Atlantic to offer the hand of friendship and, as the Americans possessed hardly any industry of their own, Britain was now enjoying a tremendous trade boom.

  Roger replied a little dubiously: "That may be so, but when I was in England last year I heard many people express the opinion that the country was showing grave signs of decadence and was, in fact, pretty well on its last legs. It is the general view here, too, that, while England succeeded by the skin of her teeth in securing a reasonably good peace, the American war cost her exceeding dear, both in money and prestige; and that the many victories of the Continental Allies during it have more than made up to France for the defeats she suffered in the earlier Seven Years' War."

  "You have been listening to the talk of wishful-thinking fools," scoffed Brochard. "In the war of '56-'63, we lost our hold on India and were thrown out of Canada for good. Nothing we have gained in the more recent conflict is one-tenth the value of either of those great dominions. And Britain still controls the seas to the detriment of our commerce. As for the English having become decadent, I am amazed to hear that any among them are pessimistic enough to think it. Decadence comes only to countries that are governed by the old, and since last December Britain has had for her Prime Minister young Mr. Pitt, who is not yet twenty-five years of age. What greater proof of vitality and will to develop new ideas could any country give than that?"

  It was the first that Roger had heard of this remarkable appoint­ment of so young a man as Billy Pitt to the highest office under the British Crown. His mother now corresponded with him regularly, but her letters contained little other than local news and she never mentioned politics.

  As long as the fierce frosts held the land in their grip he got what fun he could skating every Sunday. Twice more in February and March he saw Athenais in her little white and gold swan sleigh, but each time she was accompanied by several people so he did not dare to approach her.

  The bitter cold continued right up to April so that people almost began to despair of the winter ever ending, and in many parts of the country starvation was widespread. Paris had for two months been without wood for fires and the situation there was said to be desperate. The King had given lavishly from his private purse to succour the thousands who were starving and ordered a great acreage of the royal forests to be cut down for fuel. He had also forbidden the use of private horse-drawn vehicles in the streets of the capital, since the recklessly-driven cabriolets of the younger nobility had knocked down and killed hundreds of poor people who were unable to get out of the way in time owing to the slipperiness of the icy roads. But these measures did little to alleviate the general distress or lessen the ever-growing hostility of the masses towards the warmly-clothed and well-fed upper classes.

  Brochard declared that the worst evil lay in the infamous Pacts de famine by which a group of unscrupulous financiers and nobles controlled the grain supply of the whole country, and released it only in comparatively small quantities in times of shortage, such as the present, in order to make enormous profits. He said that the old King, Louis XV, had himself taken the lead in this iniquitous traffic, to which had been due the three years' famine of '67-'68, and that although Louis XVI had done his best to suppress it the monopolists had proved too powerful for him, and continued to make vast fortunes from the sufferings and death of the people. Roger was horrified, and agreed that the mere depriving of their privileges of these highly-placed criminals was far too lenient a punishment for such inhumanity.

  With May there came several changes in the Leger household. A new apprentice at last arrived to relieve Colas of his drudgery; and Hutot left, regretted by none, to take up a position with a lawyer at Dinan. The following week Maitre Leger took on a junior Latin copyist and to Roger's great satisfaction he was promoted to the drafting of documents under Brochard with an increase of salary to eighteen louis per annum.

  Now that he had a chance to set his wits to work, Roger found a new interest in the law, but his love affair could hardly have been in a worse state. He h
ad not even had a distant glimpse of Athenais during the past two months and, as he had learned in casual con­versation from Maitre Leger that the de Rochambeau family always spent the summer on their country estate, he had little hope of doing so for another five.

  He had already tired of Tonton Yeury's empty, facetious laughter, and for some time past had been striving to console himself with a tall, serious-minded blonde named Louise Ferlet. When the weather was fine on Sundays they went for picnics and read poetry together; but as he lay on the grass beside Louise he could never for long escape a secret craving that, instead of her golden head, it was Athenais's that rested on his shoulder.

  In August their picnics came to an end on account of bad weather, accompanied by exceptionally high winds. A few days after the most devastating of several bad storms there was some excitement in Rennes, on account of the Marquis de Castries spending a night in the town on his way through to Cherbourg. De Castries was a Marshal of France and the Minister for the Navy, and he was going in person to inspect the damage that the storms had caused to some new works that were under construction at the Breton port.

  From various conversations Roger learned that this fine natural harbour was in process of conversion into a huge new naval base. A mole was to be formed of eighty immense cases of conical form filled with stones, sunk close to one another, each costing twelve thousand louis. When completed, as it was hoped that it would be in eight years, the anchorage would be capable of sheltering no less than one hundred ships of the line; and it was further proposed to build a great watch-tower on the high ground behind the port, from which, through a glass, the coast of England would be visible, and, in clear weather, British squadrons entering or leaving Portsmouth roads could be kept under constant observation. Quite clearly this vast labour and expenditure could have been undertaken with only one object—the determination of the French to dominate the Channel.