The Launching of Roger Brook

by Dennis Wheatley

  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 retroussé nose, brown almond-shaped eyes and was never serious for a moment. Few girls could have been in stronger contrast with Athénaïs, 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 Athénaïs. 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, Maître Léger 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. Maître Léger 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 Maître Léger, ‘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 Breuc 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 Bordelais, 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 Athénaïs in her little white and gol
d 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 evergrowing hostility of the masses towards the warmly-clothed and well-fed upper classes.

  Brochard declared that the worst evil lay in the infamous Pacte 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-’69, 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 Léger 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 Maître Léger 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 had not even had a distant glimpse of Athénaïs during the past two months and, as he had learned in casual conversation from Maître Léger 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 Athénaïs’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.

  As Roger continued to spend two evenings a week studying with Brochard, he took an early opportunity of asking him why, in view of the recent treaty of peace and France’s deplorable financial situation, she should undertake such a stupendous outlay in preparation for another war.

  The Bordelais shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘’Tis said that the King wishes for peace, yet he never ceases to build ships of war with every few francs that he can scrape together. The truth is that he is weak as water and swayed in his opinion from one side to the other by every person that he talks to. One day he supports M. de Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, who desires a better understanding with England, the next M. de Castries and M. de Ségur, the Minister of War, who naturally desire to set their dangerous toys in motion. The Peace of Versailles stipulated that within a year France and England should enter into a Commercial Treaty. ’Twould greatly benefit both countries by a reduction of the present crushing duties that they level on one another’s merchandise. If ’tis concluded the peace party should triumph. But the nobles, in the main, look to war as a pleasurable excitement from which they may win personal glory and the bulk of the spoil from any victorious campaign, so they are ever eager for it. Others, like our client, the Marquis de Rochambeau, consider that France should by right dominate the world, and spend their lives intriguing to embroil us with one country or another in the hope of bringing a new slice of territory under the banner of the Fleur-de-Lys. But, make no mistake, if they force us into another conflict within the next ten years France will become bankrupt on account of it.’

  The idea of spying on behalf of his country had never entered Roger’s head, and to send home a chance come-by military secret of a people who were affording him hospitality seemed a mean thing to do; yet, having thought the matter over, he decided that the Cherbourg project was so flagrantly a pistol levelled at the very heart of England that he could not possibly rest easy while his own country remained in ignorance of it; so he wrote to his mother giving her as full particulars as he could gather, and asked her to pass them on to his father for submission to their lordships at the Admiralty.

  Although he was totally unaware of it he had pulled off a coup that any professional spy would not have stuck at murder to achieve. His mother acknowledged the letter and a week later, greatly to his surprise, he received a terse note from his father, which ran:

  I cannot find it in me to forgive the unpardonable affront you put upon me personally and the deliberate wrecking of all my cherished hopes in you. Yet I am pleased that you have not so far forgotten yourself as to fail in your duty as an Englishman. Their Lordships were mightily pleased with what you sent and have commanded me to convey their thanks to you, hence this letter. I may add that any more of the same or similar that you may be able to send will be received with appreciation; but, since I may be from home on a round of inspections, ’twould be better that you write direct to one Gilbert Maxwell, Esq., of No. 1 Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, to whom your name has now been given.

  On re-reading the note it was clear to Roger that his father would never have written to him at all had he not been commanded to do so by their Lordships, and, as there was no other information worth reporting, that appeared to end the matter.

  Summer merged into autumn and the only change that it made for Roger was that he gave up reading poetry with the fair-haired Louise to resume dancing; this time with another brunette, named Geneviève Boulanger. But now he was looking forward to Athénaïs’s return from the country and daily his hopes rose of once more catching sight of his little goddess.

  In October all Europe was electrified by a war scare, caused by Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II of Austria, manifesting most bellicose intentions towards the Dutch. The news sheets were full of most contradictory reports about the grounds of the quarrel, so Roger, as usual in such matters, wen
t for enlightenment to the knowledgeable Brochard.

  ‘’Tis the well-being of the great port of Antwerp that is at the bottom of it,’ Brochard informed him. ‘Long ago, after the Dutch had rebelled against the Spaniards and gained their independence in the United Provinces, the Treaty of Munster gave them the land on each side of the mouth of the river Scheldt, while the Spaniards retained the city of Antwerp, which lies some way up it. In due course Antwerp and the Belgian Netherlands passed from Spain to Austria, and, as you know, they still form part of Joseph II’s Empire, although separated from its main part by numerous German Principalities. The Dutch built forts on both sides of the river mouth and for many years have levied the most crushing tolls on all merchandise either going up to Antwerp or coming seaward from the port. In short, they have virtually levied a tax on the whole sea trade of the Austrian Netherlands and, in consequence, Antwerp has declined from one of the greatest cities in Europe to a town of a mere forty thousand souls of whom ’tis said, twelve thousand are now reduced to living on charity.’

  ‘And the Emperor has formed a resolution to open up the port?’ put in Roger.

  Brochard nodded. ‘Precisely. Unlike his sister, Joseph II is a great reformer. He has spent most of his reign travelling to all parts of his dominions, and in others, to see things for himself; and to find out in what way he can better the lot of the many races that go to make up his people. When he visited the Austrian Netherlands he was infuriated to find that his subjects there had become desperately impoverished solely to enrich the Dutch. He demanded that they should open the Scheldt to his traffic. Since, after a year’s arguing, they still refuse to do so, this month, as a test case, he sent two Austrian ships up the river with orders to refuse to halt at the forts. The Dutch fired on both ships, and drove them back, so the Emperor is now reported to be mobilising an army with a view to invading the United Provinces.’