The Launching of Roger Brook

by Dennis Wheatley

  The dining-room was furnished with the new tulip-wood which was just then coming into fashion and the two sideboards were laden, one with half a dozen hot dishes, the other with a cold ham, pig’s face and crystal bowls of peaches, nectaries, apricots and grapes from Colonel Thursby’s glass-houses.

  The Colonel and Roger helped themselves lavishly, but after surveying the tempting array uncertainly for a moment, Georgina declared with a pout: ‘The very sight of food so early in the day gives me the vapours. Twill be as much as I can do to face a bowl of bread and milk.’

  Roger looked at her in astonishment, but the Colonel gave him a sly wink. ‘See, Roger, what a London season has done for your old play-fellow. Had we had notice of your coming, I vow she would have had her hair dressed a foot high and used a sack of flour upon it; ’tis only overnight that she has lost that fine appetite of hers.’

  Then he turned to his daughter and gave her a friendly slap on the behind. ‘Don’t be a fool, girl, or you’ll be famished by mid-morning. Pretend to live on air when you’re in London, if you will, but spare us these conceits here in the country.’

  Georgina suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Oh, well, give me some salmon pasty then, and an egg; but no bacon; the fat makes me queasy, and that’s the truth.’

  Roger had been so occupied with his own concerns that he had temporarily forgotten that Georgina must have only just returned from her first London season, and so now should be definitely regarded as grown up. With a smile he asked her how she had enjoyed herself.

  ‘’Twas a riot,’ she declared, enthusiastically. ‘Balls, routs and conversaziones tumbled a-top of each other with a swiftness you’d scarce credit possible. For all of ten weeks I was never up before mid-day or abed before two in the morning.’

  ‘I wonder you didn’t die of your exertions, but I must say you look none the worse for it,’ remarked her father. ‘’Tis your poor aunt that I was sorry for, though. I wouldn’t have had the chaperoning of you for a mint of money.’

  Georgina shrugged. ‘Since you paid her five hundred guineas to take me out, and footed the bill for her to present that milk-sop daughter of hers into the bargain, she has no cause to complain.’

  ‘Was Queen Charlotte’s drawing-room as splendid as accounts of it lead one to believe?’ asked Roger.

  ‘’Twas a truly marvellous spectacle. All the gentlemen in their fine uniforms and the ladies with tiaras and great ostrich feathers in their hair. And you should have heard the buzz when I made my curtsy. I near died of gratification.’

  Her father glanced at her with unconcealed pride. ‘Yes, you certainly took the town by storm; ’tis not many girls who become one of the reigning toasts in their first season.’

  ‘You did not lack for beaux, then?’ Roger said, feeling a distinct twinge of jealousy.

  ‘Lud, no!’ she laughed. ‘I had a score of proposals, and am half committed to three young bucks; but I doubt if I’ll take any of them.’

  ‘What did you enjoy most—apart from all these flirtations?’ inquired Roger, with a faintly malicious grin.

  Her black eyes sparkled. ‘’Tis hard to say. The ball father gave for me at our own house in Bedford Square was a roaring success. Then there was our grand day at the Derby, where I won twenty guineas. I loved His Grace of Queens-berry’s water party down at Richmond, and the night we all went masked to Vauxhall Gardens. But I think my most prodigious thrill, apart from my presentation, was to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth at His Majesty’s theatre in Drury Lane.’

  For half an hour she rattled on, dazzling Roger with descriptions of the great world as yet beyond his ken, then her father left them to go out and see his gardeners.

  ‘Well! How shall we spend the day?’ she asked, after a pause to regain her breath. ‘Shall we ride in the forest, go down the cliff and provide a fresh scandal for the neighbours by bathing from the beach, or take luncheon up to our old haunt in the tower?’

  Roger had intended only to spend an hour with her and then return to face his irate parent, but the more he thought of doing so the more unnerving the prospect became. The gravity of the issue was such that his father’s anger could scarcely be increased whatever he did now; so he decided that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and spend the day with Georgina, as she obviously expected him to do.

  From his ride through the forest on the previous day he knew that the flies were now hatching out in such numbers as to prove irksome during a picnic. The promised heat of the day made a swim sound attractive, and he cared little for the fact that for a young man to bathe with a fully grown girl was frowned upon, but the tower offered the best prospect of a long talk entirely free of any possibility of interruptions, so, after a moment, he voted for it.

  Although they had only just finished breakfast Georgina went off to the kitchen to procure supplies; since it entailed no small effort to climb the three hundred odd stairs to the little room at the top of the tower and, once there, to descend and reascend for any purpose would have been a foolish waste of time and energy.

  A quarter of an hour later she rejoined him in the garden and as she came towards him across the lawn, a well-laden basket over her arm, he thought how seductive she was looking. As always, except when about to go out riding, she was wearing more diaphanous clothes than were usual in the country. A full skirt of sprigged India muslin billowed about her legs and, as the gentle breeze pressed it against her, gave a hint of the shapely limbs beneath it. The sleeves were cut very wide, showing her well-made brown arms to the elbows and a double fichu of white goffered organdie crossed on her breast accentuated the outline of her rounded bosom.

  Roger took the basket from her and a few minutes’ walk brought them to the base of the tower. Square and unornamented it rose starkly to the sky, the small round cupola which crowned it no longer visible from where they stood, Georgina led the way in through its narrow door, and they began the ascent.

  The stairs were narrow and the atmosphere abominably stuffy, being relieved only by air holes consisting of narrow slits at every twenty feet, through which no more than a glimpse could be obtained of the surrounding country. Three times on the way up they paused, hot and panting, to regain their breath, but at last they came out into the turret chamber.

  It was a small square apartment, large enough only to contain a brocaded settee, two chairs and a table, but its windows provided an outlook that was probably unrivalled in southern England. Inland, meadows and cornfields were spread below them, merging into forest and heath, as far as the eye could reach, finally to blend with the sky in purple distances; while to seaward the white coast-line from Durlston Head, beyond Poole, to St. Catherine’s Point, at the southern extremity of the Isle of Wight, lay unrolled to their gaze like some gargantuan map; and the white sails of ships could be seen far out at sea.

  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 their 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 coming 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 eyrie 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 Godlike 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 running 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, beating 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 day’s 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 fac
e 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.