The Irish Witch
( Roger Brook - 11 )
Dennis Wheatley
Dennis Wheatley
THE IRISH WITCH
For
Pat and Marise Derwent A small appreciation of their many kindnesses to Joan, myself and the children
I
Only a Few Days from Home
On the last morning of the year 1812, in the chapel of the Royal Castle, Stockholm, Roger Brook married a girl he had first met nearly two years earlier. She had then been Lady Mary Ware.
When Roger had first become acquainted with his new wife she had been staying at the British Legation in Lisbon as the guest of the Minister's niece, who had been one of her friends at school. Lady Mary was an orphan with no close relatives, and very little money; for her father had been far from rich, and the greater part of his income was entailed so had gone with the Earldom to a distant cousin. Although no great beauty, little Mary had a piquant charm, and Roger had found her both intelligent and amusing. But he had not had the faintest intention of marrying her.
That was not because she lacked fortune and influence, as he had ample of both himself; and, when, having fallen desperately in love with him, she had plucked up the courage to ask him to make her his wife, he had told her gently that it would be disastrous for them to marry, because, for one thing, he was of an incurably roving disposition and, for another, as she was then only eighteen and he was just over forty, he was much too old for her..
But he had come to Portugal only to collect a legacy and, in fact, when he got home, intended to settle down for good; for he had high hopes of at last within a few years, marrying his adored Georgina, with whom he had been in love all his life. She had returned his love, ever since their teens; but a great part of his life, as Mr. Pitt's most resourceful secret agent, had had to be spent abroad, and it was not until the death of her last husband, the Baron von Haugwitz, that she had been free to agree to marry him.
Yet. alas, things had gone woefully wrong. In his second identity as Colonel Comte de Breuc, one of Napoleon's A.D.C.s, he had again got caught up in the Emperor's affairs and sent to Germany. In Berlin he had been falsely accused of the murder of Von Haugwitz, and condemned to death. A reprieve had led instead to several months in prison, but meanwhile Georgina had had seemingly incontestable evidence that he had been executed. Desperately distressed, and no longer caring what became of her, the beautiful Georgina had agreed to gratify the vanity of the old Duke of Kew by becoming his Duchess.
On Roger's escape and return to England, grieved beyond measure as the two life-long lovers were by this situation, they at least had the consolation that the Duke was in his mid-seventies and an habitually heavy drinker, which made it highly probable that, within two or three years at most, Georgina would again be a widow.
Alas for their hopes! When Roger got back from Portugal, he learned that the old Duke had had a stroke. Copious bleedings by his doctors had failed to revive or kill him, and his consumption of alcohol was now strictly limited. So the final opinion of the doctors was that he might, as a paralysed vegetable, live on into his nineties.
Faced now with the possibility that, for years to come, the lovers would be able to enjoy each other's company only when Georgina came up to London for the season, and for a few odd nights during the rest of the year, Georgina had urged Roger to marry again. He had been averse to doing so, but after a few months living on his own at Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park—a grace and favour residence of which Mr. Pitt had given him a life tenancy—he had become so bored that he had agreed to go on a secret mission to the Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden. Bernadotte had persuaded him to go on as his emissary to the Czar, and that had led to his once more becoming involved with Napoleon, then in Moscow.
It was in October 1812 that, to Roger's amazement, he had again run into Mary, in St. Petersburg. On her return to London from Lisbon having no social background and very little money; she had married a merchant in the Baltic Trade, named Wicklow, and went to live in the City with him. Napoleon's Continental System had damaged British trade with Russia so severely that Mr. Wicklow was one of many who got into financial difficulties. As a last resort he had sold his house and possessions in London and, taking Mary with him, sailed on a final venture with goods for St. Petersburg. In the Gulf of Helsingfors his ship had been wrecked and he lost everything. After living on his wits for a while in the Russian capital, he had committed suicide, leaving poor Mary friendless and deeply in debt.
She was in such dire straits that Roger had not had the heart to leave her there; so resorted to the desperate expedient of taking her back to Moscow with him, in boy's clothes and in the role of his soldier servant. There had followed the terrible retreat in which Napoleon left half a million men behind him to die in the snow.
During those many ghastly weeks, Mary shared with Roger every type of danger and privation. Her unfailing fortitude and good humour had turned his affection for her into a much deeper feeling; so when at last they escaped into Sweden, he decided that, since he could not marry Georgina, he would never find a more loving wife than little Mary.
His abiding love for Georgina remained unaltered. Over the long years the unity of their hearts had impelled them to disregard the marriages that both had made, and between his long absences from England as a secret agent they had always renewed their passionate attachment.
That this would be so again he was well aware but, in spite of it, he was confident that he could make Mary happy. The dangerous life he had led ever since his youth had made him a past master of dissimulation. He would see to it that she never knew of the occasional nights of sweet delirium that he spent with Georgina and, for the first time in the seventeen years since he had lost his wife Amanda, his charming grace and favour residence, Thatched House Lodge, would again become a true home for him. Mary had been there once, loved it, and was eagerly looking forward to becoming its mistress.
He felt certain, too, that she would also delight in the children when they came to stay—although they were no longer children. When he had last seen his daughter, Susan, she had been sixteen and rapidly becoming a lovely young woman; while Charles, Earl of St. Ermins, Georgia's son, must by now have left Eton and be a handsome young buck about town.
On arriving in Stockholm after their escape from Russia. Roger had learned one piece of news that filled him with considerable anxiety. Although, under pressure from Napoleon, Sweden was officially at war with Britain, by mutual consent no hostilities were taking place. Commerce between the two countries was at a standstill but the ships of the United States were filling the gap by carrying goods between them, and Roger had supposed that he and Mary would have no difficulty in securing passages in one of them to an English port.
To his dismay he was told that America was now also at war with Britain. Although war had been declared by the United States as long ago as June 18 th, when news of it reached Russia it had been regarded as so relatively unimportant compared to the great war on the Continent that few people, either in St. Petersburg or with Napoleon's army, knew about it; so Roger had not even heard a rumour of what afterwards became known as 'The War of 1812'.
At first this new situation caused him considerable worry about how he and Mary were to get home. But when he consulted the Crown Prince Bernadotte, the latter swiftly reassured him by saying, 'Be not the least concerned, my friend. The British need our goods as much as we do theirs; so they turn a blind eye to American ships entering their ports, and you will find plenty of skippers in Gothenburg "willing to run you over.'
It was in this happy frame of mind that, on January 5th, Roger left Stockholm with Mary. It was just a year since he h
ad arrived there on his secret mission to the Crown Prince. But his status was now very different. He had come there in his role of Colonel Comte de Breuc, giving out that he had recently escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in England. To make his story credible he had had with him only the clothes he stood up in, and travelled the two hundred and fifty miles from Gothenburg to Stockholm in a stuffy diligence. Now he left with a charming wife and an ample wardrobe, as Britain's unofficial Ambassador and the honoured friend of the Crown Prince, who had placed one of the Royal sledges at their disposal.
With frequent relays of horses, the drive along the well-kept highway, the snow on which was regularly cleared into lofty banks on either side, naturally made the journey much quicker, so they arrived in Gothenburg on the 7th. There were several American traders in the harbour. Learning that one, the Cape Cod, was due to sail for Hull in two days' time, Roger went aboard to interview her master, Captain Absolom.
He proved to be a stocky, fair-haired New Englander, abrupt of speech but not discourteous, and readily agreed a price to take Roger and Mary across the North Sea.
Roger was much relieved at this, as he had needed no telling about the cause of the war, since the Americans had been threatening hostilities for several years past, and he feared that he might meet with a certain amount of hostility.
The trouble arose from what was known as the British 'Navigation System'. This had been initiated as far back as Stuart times, the policy on which the System was based being that, as Britain was vulnerable to invasion only from the sea, her shipping must greatly exceed that of any other nation—not for commercial reasons, but so that, in the event of war, great numbers of seamen should be available for drafting into the Royal Navy.
As a result of this policy Britain had secured the great bulk of the carrying trade of the world. As far back as 1728, of the four thousand two hundred-odd ships arriving in her principal ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol, fewer than four hundred and forty had been under foreign flags; and in 1792, when the present war against France had started, there were eighty thousand trained seamen in British ships. By lowering the percentage of Britons legally required to serve in merchant ships to one in four, fifty thousand more had become available to man warships.
Another principle of British maritime policy was that it was forbidden to import any goods into her Colonies except in British-built ships. And even when, after the war in the 1770s, the United States had gained their independence, British control over their shipping had remained indistinguishable in practice from what it had been in Colonial days.
However, the Americans being mainly of British stock, large numbers of them had the sea in their blood. Moreover, they had better timber for building ships than even that to be procured in England. In the forty years following Independence, this had resulted in their creating a merchant marine second in size only to that of Britain.
Between 1792 and 1805 this had proved to the advantage of both Britain and France, as both countries had had to reduce their merchant fleets in order to increase their navies, and American merchantmen had filled the gap by carrying much-needed supplies, mostly from the Caribbean. It had also, of course, greatly increased the wealth of the United States.
The first cause for complaint by the United States had arisen in May 1805 when, in the test case of the ship Essex, it had been ruled by a British Court that American ships should not be allowed to carry goods from the West Indies to a country at war with Britain, unless they had been 'neutralised' by first landing their cargo in a United Kingdom port—and unloading, warehousing and reloading caused most annoying delays and loss of profit to American merchants.
But the real trouble was started by Napoleon's Berlin Decree of 1806, reinforced by his Decree of Milan in 1807, whereby he established his Continental System, the object of which was to ruin British commerce by closing to British goods the ports of all the countries he controlled. That did not seriously affect the Americans, but what followed did.
In retaliation, in the winter of 1806-1807, the British issued Orders in Council, decreeing a blockade of the ports of France and her allies and forbidding neutral vessels to enter such ports unless they had first called at British ports and paid British dues on their cargo.
As the United States could not conform to both the French and British decrees, their ships henceforth risked confiscation by one or the other; but, having no Navy capable of protecting their shipping, all they could do was angrily to declare the decrees of both countries contrary to International Law.
Another matter to which the Americans took extreme umbrage was the treatment of the seamen in their ships by the Royal Navy. A high proportion of the men in the Navy were normally fishermen and others from the seaport towns who had been seized by the press gangs and forced to serve in warships. Understandably, many of them deeply resented this, and took the first opportunity to desert in neutral ports or those of the West Indies. To earn a living, they then signed on as seamen in American traders. As a means of countering this very serious drain on naval manpower, the Admiralty had issued orders that His Majesty's ships encountering United States merchantmen at sea should halt, board them, have their crews paraded and take off any men of British nationality.
To carry out this order justly proved no easy matter, for on reaching America, many deserters had secured forged papers, alleging them to be United States citizens. On close questioning by British Captains it frequently emerged that the men concerned were really British. But, in numerous cases, men who were in fact Americans had been called liars and taken off to serve in British warships. Of the six thousand two hundred and fifty-seven men so removed from United States ships, between 1801 and 1812, it cannot be doubted that at least several hundreds had been illegally impressed, and this had led to ever-increasing antagonism to Britain. The practice had aroused a crisis of indignation when, in June 1807, the British frigate Leopard had actually fired on the American frigate Chesapeake, forced her to surrender and removed four of her sailors.
But from 1801 to 1809 Thomas Jefferson, who had played a leading part in securing American Independence, had been President of the United States, and he was a man of peace. He was strongly opposed to further federalization of the States of the Union, so was averse to forming a national Army and Navy, and was determined at alt costs to preserve neutrality. In consequence, the only action Jefferson took was to instruct Monroe, then United States Ambassador in London, to inform the British Government that all British armed vessels in United States ports were to be recalled at once and would in future be prohibited from entering them.
In 1809, James Madison—another founding-father of the Republic, and responsible more than any other man for the framing of the Constitution—had succeeded Jefferson as President. Unlike his predecessor, Madison was a strong Federalist but, even so, he did little to unite or increase the Militia of the several states or to strengthen their Naval forces. In fact in January 1812 a Bill put forward in favour of declaring war on Britain, for the provision of more frigates and the creation of a dockyard, was actually defeated.
In May 1812, the British Prime Minister, Perceval, was assassinated, and succeeded by Lord Liverpool Castlereagh. remained Foreign Secretary and continued his, policy of politely ignoring American complaints, as neither he nor his colleagues could believe that the United States would go to the length of declaring war and that, even if they did, the five thousand or so troops stationed in Canada would be amply sufficient to protect that country from invasion.
In consequence, Roger had been very surprised to learn from Bernadotte that, after so many years of resentful inactivity, the United States had actually opened hostilities the previous summer. He had also immediately assumed that this would make it very much more difficult for Mary and himself to get back to England. But Bernadotte had at once reassured him by saying:
'The United States Navy is so insignificant that, according to my latest information, the British have so fa
r virtually ignored it; and at sea the situation is little different from what it was a year ago. The only difference the state of war has made is that, on such voyages, the American merchant ships now sail under flags of neutral countries. I feel sure you will meet with no difficulty in finding a Captain who will give you and your lady passage.'
And so it had proved. On January 9th Roger and Mary went aboard the Cape Cod, which sailed a few hours later, flying the flag of Mexico, carrying a cargo of iron ore, of which Britain was in constant need for the manufacture of cannon and cannon-balls.
The two-bunk cabin they were given was small but clean and, for times when the weather was too inclement for them to sit up on deck, they had the use of the Captain's more roomy day-cabin in the stern of the ship.
Fond as Roger was of Mary, he had not been altogether happy about her while in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Apart from her schooling at an Academy for Young Ladies, she had few of the graces that went normally with the status of her birth. That was hardly surprising, as her brief married life with Mr. Wicklow had accustomed her to the habits and outlook of well-to-do traders which, in those days, were very different from the attitudes of the aristocracy. In company also he found her to be somewhat gauche, but he hoped that this awkwardness and lack of sophisticated humour would soon wear off when he had introduced her to London society. Moreover, while he could not help feeling flattered by her absorption in himself, he felt her tendency to show resentment, if left on her own, even for an hour, distinctly irritating, as he did her scarcely-hidden jealousy if he showed the least interest in any other woman. But he made allowances for the fact that while in Russia she had had him entirely to herself for so long, and felt reasonably confident that her jealous possessiveness would wear off after they had been mixing with his friends in London for a few weeks; and he was so looking forward to being home again at last that he gave litde thought to Mary's passionate obsession with him. Once home he would at long last be able to settle down, and enjoy a life of leisure, free from danger.
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