Evil in a Mask
( Roger Brook - 9 )
Dennis Wheatley
Feb 1807 - Sep 1809
The latest of the Roger Brook stories, continuing his story through the years 1807-1809. Napoleon is at the height of his powers. By now he is the complete autocrat, his lust for power driving him to wage needless wars that are bleeding France white.
Roger Brook, still the most valuable and resourceful of secret agents, moves amongst the centres of power of Europe and beyond: Talleyrand, Mettcrnich, the Shah of Persia, men whose decisions mark the fate of nations.
But, interwoven with the historical pattern, runs the thread of Roger's passionate involvement with the lovely Lisala de Pombal—a woman as licentious as she is beautiful. A woman who plays her part in leading him from one desperate situation to another.
Dennis Wheatley
Evil in a Mask
ARROW BOOKS
ARROW BOOKS LTD 178-203 Great Portland Street, London Wi
London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg Cape Town and agencies throughout the world
First published by Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd 1969 Arrow edition 1971
© Dennis Wheatley Limited 1969
Made and printed in Great Britain
by The Anchor Press Ltd, Tiptree
Essex
ISBN o 09 004640 4
For
Wing-Commander Anthony Wellington, DSO, DFC, to whom I owe my knowledge of Brazil in that country's early days; and to his dear wife, with most grateful thanks for their many hospitalities during my visits to Rio.
D.W.
The Field of Eylau
Roger Brook had been lucky, very lucky.
On this night he was in his late thirties and, from the age of nineteen, he had spent at least half the intervening years on the Continent, acting as a secret agent for Britain's great Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. Yet only once had he been caught out, and then by a friend who shared his views on the future of Europe, so had refrained from having him shot as a spy. He had passed unscathed through the hell of the French Revolution, been present at the siege of Acre, at the Battles of the Nile and Jena and numerous other bloody conflicts. Yet only once, at Marengo, had he been wounded.
But now, at last, his luck had run out.
Meeting Roger in a salon or ballroom, the sight of him would have made most women's hearts beat a little faster. He was just over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips. His brown hair swept back in a wave from his high forehead. Below it a straight, aggressive nose stood out between a pair of bright blue eyes. From years of living dangerously his mouth had become thin and a link hard, but the slight furrows on either side of it were evidence of his tendency to frequent laughter. His strong chin and jaw showed great determination; his long-fingered hands were beautifully modelled; and his calves, when displayed in silk stockings, gave his tall figure the last touch of elegance.
Even on that February morning of 1807 as he sat his fine charger, booted and spurred, his long, fur-lined cloak wrapped tightly round him against the bitter cold, a woman's eye would have singled him out from among the score or more of gallant figures that formed a group a little in the rear of the Emperor
Napoleon. But his state was very different now, and he had little hope of living through the night.
Fifteen months earlier, two great turning points had occurred in the war that Britain and France had been waging— with only one short interval of uneasy peace in 1803—for the past fourteen years. In October 1805, Nelson's victory at Trafalgar had, at last, freed England from the threat of invasion. But in the same month Napoleon had dealt a shattering blow at the Third Coalition which Pin, with dogged determination, had built up against him. At Ulm the Emperor had smashed the main Austrian army; and, in November, entered Vienna in triumph. A month later, at Austerlitz, he had inflicted another terrible defeat on both the Austrians and their Russian allies. Utterly crushed, the Austrians had sued for peace. By the Treaty of Pressburg he gave it to them. But it cost the Emperor Francis nearly three million subjects and one-sixth of his revenue. This loss of sovereignty over numerous territories led, in the following August, to Francis' resigning the greater Imperial dignity and becoming only Emperor of Austria. Thus ended the Holy Roman Empire after an existence of over one thousand years.
Meanwhile Napoleon, anxious to keep Prussia quiet while he dealt with Russia, entered into negotiations with King Frederick William III. As French troops were occupying the British territory of Hanover, the Emperor was able to offer it as a bribe; and the shifty, weak-willed King agreed to accept it as the price of an alliance signed at Schonbrunn. -
But neither party was being honest with the other. Napoleon was secretly putting out peace feelers to the British Government, which included an offer to return Hanover to Britain, while Frederick William was in secret negotiation with the Czar Alexander to double-cross the French. When the Emperor and the King became aware of each other's treachery, both realised that war between them was inevitable. In September the King, gambling on the traditional invincibility of the Prussian Army, had sent Napoleon an ultimatum. It proved a futile gesture, since the dynamic Emperor was already on the march, and he advanced with such speed that by mid-October the two armies clashed.
Prussia had for so long sat timidly on the fence that her army had lost all resemblance to the magnificent war machine created by Frederick the Great; whereas that of France was inspired by an unbroken succession of victories, and was superbly led. At Jena, by a swift concentration of the corps of Lannes, Soult, Augereau, Ney and the Guard, Napoleon overwhelmed one-half of Frederick William's army. At Auerstadt, Davoust, although outnumbered by two to one, destroyed the other.
Relentlessly pursued by Murat's cavalry, the surviving Prussians retreated to the east. At Erfurt sixteen thousand of them surrendered to him. Fortress after fortress fell, and on the 25th of the month, Davoust captured Berlin.
It was in November, while in the Prussian capital, that the Emperor had initiated his new policy designed to bring Britain to her knees. Known as the Continental System, it decreed that every port under the control of France and her Allies should be closed to British shipping. At that date England was the only country that had undergone the Industrial Revolution. It was through her trade that she earned the great wealth which enabled her to subsidise the armies of her Allies on the Continent. So Napoleon hoped that by depriving her of her European markets he would not only render her incapable of supplying such subsidies in future, but also bring about her financial ruin.
Meanwhile, his armies were pressing on into Prussian Poland and, on December 19th, he established his headquarters in Warsaw. Soon after Jena, Frederick William had tentatively asked for peace terms, but Napoleon refused to negotiate unless his enemy would retire behind the Vistula, cede to him the whole of Western Prussia and become his ally in the war against Russia.
It was not until Christmas that the French went into winter quarters, and the respite the Emperor gave his troops was all too short. His restless mind had conceived a new plan for getting the better of the Czar. Until Poland had been eliminated as a sovereign State in the latter half of the last century, by the three partitions of her territories between Russia, Prussia and Austria, she had been a great Power; and her people were noted for their bravery. He would incite them to rebel against their Russian master, by offering to re-create an independent Poland under his protection. But Frederick William was getting together another army in East Prussia; and, if it were allowed to join up with the Russians, the French might be outnumbered; so Napoleon decided that he must move fast.
Even so, it was the Russians, being acclimatised to fighting in ice a
nd snow, who moved first. The Czar's principal Commander, General Bagration, made a daring move westwards, in the hope of saving Danzig from the French. By ill luck he ran into Bernadotte's corps. Immediately Napoleon was informed of this, he directed his main army northward with the object of driving the Russians into the sea. Through a captured despatch, Bagration learned of the Emperor's intention. Swiftly he retreated towards Konigsberg, but at Eylau he turned on his pursuers, and there ensued the bloodiest battle that had been fought in the past hundred years.
It was upon the field of Eylau, on the night of February 8th, that Roger lay stricken and despairing of his life.
The campaign had been the most ghastly that the Grande Armee had ever endured. Not yet recovered from its serious wastage at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, and its exertions during scores of melees while pursuing the Prussians, it was short of every sort of supply. The terrain over which it had been advancing was a vast, sparsely-populated area of plains deep in snow, and frozen lakes. At times there had been sudden, partial thaws, so that the land became a sea of mud in which the men's boots were frequently sucked off and could be retrieved only with difficulty. The cold was excruciating and the rations meagre to semi-starvation point. The officers no longer attempted to prevent looting and atrocities. The soldiers, desperate for food and warmth, had treated the wretched peasants in every village they came upon with the utmost ferocity, seizing their food, torturing them to reveal hidden stores, pulling down their hovels to make camp-fires, then leaving them to die.
On the night of the 7th, after confused fighting, the Russians had been driven from the little town of Eylau and retired to a strong position formed by an irregular line of hills.
Dawn filtered through dark, heavily-laden clouds. The artillery on both sides opened fire as the French columns began to advance. Davoust's men pushed back the Russian left and Napoleon ordered Augereau's corps to attack the enemy centre. Battling against driving snow, his leading troops succeeded in seizing a slight eminence that could give the French a valuable advantage. But the Muscovites were strong in cannon. From their iron mouths there poured discharge after discharge of grapeshot, ploughing wide lanes of dead and dying through Augerau's infantry, until his corps was nearly annihilated. As it fell back, a horde of Cossacks came charging down on the survivors, completing its destruction. Davoust's corps fared little better, having been forced to retreat under the massed fire of the Russian batteries.
By midday the battle had degenerated into wild confusion. There were scores of small bodies of troops locked in bloody hand-to-hand conflict with, here and there, gallant but futile cavalry charges. Napoleon, now worried, but determined to be victorious, then launched eighty squadrons of cavalry against the Russian centre. With fanatical bravery, the Cuirassiers charged the Muscovite infantry, hacked a way through them and, reaching the enemy's cannon, began to sabre the gunners. But Bagration had not yet used his reserves. The fire from his second line of infantry halted the French horsemen. Only moments later, fresh sotnias of Cossacks were launched against them, and they were driven back in disorder.
Meanwhile a body of four thousand Russian Grenadiers had emerged from the tangled conflict and, with a fanaticism equalling that of the French, fought its way through their lines straight into the village of Eylau.
The Emperor and his staff were standing there, watching the battle from a cemetery that stood on high land. Berthier, his Chief of Staff, fearing that they would all be killed or captured, ordered up the horses. But Napoleon calmly stood his ground, while giving the signal for his grand reserve, the Imperial Guard, to go into action.
AH day these veterans of a hundred fights had sullenly remained idle. Now, fresh and vigorous, the finest troops in the Grande Armee, they rushed to the attack, fell upon the Russian Grenadiers and massacred them.
As dusk drew on, the outcome of the battle still remained uncertain. The best hope for the French lay with Davoust. His troops had succeeded in clinging on to a village they had seized that morning. From it he threatened the enemy's flank; a determined drive against it could have brought victory. But it was not to be. At the urging of Scharnhorst, the Prussian' General Lestocq with a division of eight thousand men, had made a forced march from Konigsberg. They arrived just in time to check the attack that Davoust was about to make.
When the battle opened, Ney's corps had been many miles distant from the main army. At the sound of the guns he, too, had made a forced march in that direction. Only his coming up in time could save Davoust's near-exhausted men from destruction by the newly-arrived Prussians.
The forces engaged had been approximately equal: some seventy-live thousand men on either side. Nightfall brought only semi-darkness, owing to the snow. Over a great area it had been churned up or trampled flat by batteries changing position, charging cavalry and struggling infantry. In innumerable places it was stained with the blood of horses and men. Here and there the white carpet was broken by dark, tangled heaps of corpses several feet high. Others were scattered in pairs or singly where they had been shot or struck down. Fifty thousand men lay there in the snow; dead, dying or seriously disabled. Roger was one of them.
During that day he and his fellow aides-de-camp had galloped many miles carrying scrawled messages from the Emperor to corps and divisional commanders. Several of them had not returned, others were bleeding from wounds received while carrying out their missions. Roger had remained unscathed until the terrible battle was almost over. Night was falling when a galloper arrived from Davoust to report the Marshal's desperate situation. During the day Ney had sent several messages to say that he was on his way. The arrival of his corps was the only remaining hope of saving Davoust Napoleon cast a swift glance at the now much smaller group of officers behind him. Unless his messenger made a great detour, he would have to pass a wood soil held by the Russians, and time was precious. His eye fell on Roger. As he was personally known to every senior Commander in the Grande Annee, in his case a written message was superfluous. Raising a hand, the Emperor shouted at him in the harsh Italian-accented French habitual to him:
'Breuc! To Ney! Tell him that I am counting on him. That without him the battle may yet be lost.'
Instantly Roger set spurs to his horse. He was no coward and was accounted one of the best swordsmen in France. He had fought numerous duels and was prepared to face any man in single combat with sword or pistol. But he loathed battles; for during them, without a chance to defend oneself, one might at any moment be killed or maimed by a shot from a musket or by a cannon ball. Nevertheless chance, and times deliberate fraud, resulting from his activities as a secret agent, had made him the hero of many exploits, with the result that he was known throughout the Army as 'le brave Breuc'. Napoleon undoubtedly believed him to be entirely fearless and that, he knew, was why he had been chosen for this dangerous mission. Much as he would have liked to take the detour behind the village of Eylau, he had no choice but to charge down the hill and across the front of the position still held by the Russians.
Crouching low over his mount he had followed a zigzag course, at times swerving to avoid wrecked guns and limbers, at others jumping his mare over heaps of dead and wounded. As he came level with the wood, his heart beat faster. Hating every moment, he urged his charger forward at racing speed. Along the edge of the wood muskets began to flash, bullets whistled overhead. One jerked his befeathered hat from his head. Sweating with fear, he pressed on. Suddenly the mare lurched. Knowing the animal to have been hit, he made to throw himself from the saddle. But he was a moment too late. Shot through the heart, she fell, bringing him down with one leg pinned beneath her belly. He felt an excruciating pain in his ankle and knew that it had been broken by the stirrup iron, caught between the weight of the mare and the ice-hard earth.
For a few minutes he had lain still, then endeavoured to free himself. Had his ankle not been broken, he might have succeeded in dragging his leg from beneath the mare's belly. But his
pulling on it resulted in such agony that he fainted.
When he came to, the Russian fusillade aimed at him had ceased and he could hear only distant, sporadic firing. Again he attempted to wriggle his leg from under the dead mare3 but with each effort stabs of pain streaked up to his heart, making him, in spite of the appalling cold, break out into a sweat. At length he was forced to resign himself to the fact that, without help, he must remain there a prisoner.
Whether Ney had arrived in time to save Davoust he had no idea; nor who had proved the victors in this most bloody battle. As far as he could judge, it had been a draw, so any claim to victory could be made only by the side that did not withdraw to a stronger position during the night. At least it seemed that in the Russians Napoleon had at last found his match, for they were most tenacious fighters. As he had himself said of them. 'It is not enough to kill a Russian. You must then push him over before he will lie down.'
But Roger was no longer concerned with the issue of the war. It was not his quarrel, and he was now silently cursing himself for his folly in taking part in it. After Trafalgar, he could perfectly well have remained at home in England and settled down as a country gentleman. Although he was generous by nature, he had inherited his Scottish mother's prudence about money; so he had saved a great part of his earnings and these, together with the money left him by his father, the Admiral, amounted to a respectable fortune. It was not even the call of duty that had caused him to go abroad again, but simply restlessness and discontent.
As he lay there in the snow, his head, in the fur hood of his cloak, muffled against the biting cold, he thought back on the events that had driven him to his decision. Georgina, he admitted, could not really be blamed; yet it was a whim of that beautiful, self-willed, tempestuous lady that had led to his again having himself smuggled across to France.
He had been married twice and had had many mistresses; but Georgina, the now widowed Countess of St. Ermins, had been his first love and remained the great love of his life. To her indignation he often twitted her with having seduced him when they were in their teens; but that had been on a long-past afternoon just before he had run away from home to escape having to become a Midshipman. Four years had elapsed before he had returned from the Continent. By then she was married, but had taken him as her lover. In the years that followed, he had spent many long spells abroad, but always on his return they renewed their passionate attachment. There had even been a night when both of them had decided to marry again then, with wicked delight, had slept together. After both of them had been widowed for the second time, whenever he had returned from one of his missions, he had begged her to marry him. But she contended that it was not in his nature to settle down definitely and that, even if he did, their being together as man and wife for any considerable time must inevitably take the edge off the wondrous joy they had in each other when, for only a month or two, they were reunited after a long interval.
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