Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (27 page)

She gave him her
nicest smile. “I shall feel very guilty at having interrupted your holiday,
Duke; but I know no one else at the moment who could render me a similar service,
so I shall count on you. If there is any way in which I can repay your kindness
you have only to let me know.”

His brilliant
grey eyes held hers for a moment. “The pleasure of being in your Highness’
company again will be reward enough.”

Ten minutes
later the party broke up. De Richleau returned to Sacher’s, collected the
suitcases which contained his Tyrolean costume and some other clothes, then
drove to the station. On his way he stopped the cab in front of one of Vienna’s
best florists. There, he spent ten pounds on orchids and wrote a card for
delivery with them to Sophie von Hohenberg. He also bought a dozen white
gardenias, which he had carefully packed between layers of cotton wool in a box
with air holes, to take with him.

That night he
slept at Linz. In the morning he dressed in his Tyrolese clothes and caught the
train south, through winding mountain villages, for Ischl. A little time before
the train reached its destination, he took his things from the rack and
repaired to the lavatory. There, he gummed on the side-whiskers and powdered
his hair and eyebrows. Then he waited in the corridor until the train drew into
the station.

Ischl was a town
with a population of 10,000. It had originally come into being owing to the
salt mines in its neighbourhood, and they were still worked with considerable
profit to its inhabitants; but these enjoyed additional prosperity from the
fact that it was the favourite country residence of the Imperial family, and
still more on account of its beautiful surroundings which now brought 20,000
holiday-makers to it every year. So the Duke knew that he would have no
difficulty in finding a modest
pension
 where he
could stay with very little risk of running into anyone who knew him as either
De Richleau or Königstein. Ignoring the offer of a porter to carry his bag, he
marched off into the town. After a brief inspection of the exterior of a score
of small private hotels, he entered one called
der Gasthaus
Pohl,
and took a room in the name of Mr. Richwater.

His intention
was to pose as a professional guide, but he knew that he would not be able to
pass himself off as one in the town; so there he meant to account for his
Tyrolean costume by assuming the role of an eccentric Englishman. To establish
himself in the part he addressed the hotel proprietor in shocking German,
pretended to be extremely pernickety about his food, asked a dozen searching
questions about the hygiene of the establishment, and finally demanded that a
good guide should be on the doorstep at four o’clock the following morning to
take him to some of the local beauty spots.

On Herr Pohl
remarking that four o’clock seemed a little early, the Duke declared that
nobody could keep really fit unless they walked at least ten miles a day, and
that he often did twenty. Then he carried his bag upstairs, unpacked it, put
his gardenias in water and came down to lunch. Immediately the meal was over he
set out on a preliminary reconnaissance of the town.

Its setting was
enchanting as it lay at the conjunction of three valleys: one, to the north,
down which the train had brought him that morning past the glassy waters of the
Ehensee; a second running south to Laufen; and a third to the west through
gentler country to St. Wolfgang, on the shore of another great lake, beyond
which lay Salzburg. The Gemunden mountains ringed the town about, but they had
neither the starkness nor inaccessibility of the great Alps. In most places
their slopes were gentle and the belts of forest that zig-zagged across their
sides contained oaks, beeches and chestnuts, as well as pines, so they offered
a paradise for rambles and picnics.

At a stationer’s
De Richleau bought three kinds of notepaper, a guide-book, and a large map.
From the last he soon found his bearings, and walked out to the Palace. It had
none of the Imperial dignity of Sch
ö
nbrunn, but was just
a large mansion with a pleasant private garden. Not very far from its gates
there was a small café, which, at this hour of the afternoon, was almost
deserted. Sitting down at one of the tables outside it, he ordered a stein of
beer and got into conversation with the waitress. She was a plump, pink-faced
little chatter-box and after ten minutes he had as much information about the
principal inmates of the Palace as she could give him. The lovely Archduchess
had arrived on the preceding Thursday. As far as the girl knew, she was
perfectly well. She rode for about two hours most mornings, and had driven out
every afternoon in her carriage, usually returning about five o’clock.

When he had
finished his beer De Richleau returned to his
pension
and, on the
notepaper he had bought, using three different pens, forged three references
for himself as a guide; afterwards folding and soiling them as though they had
long been in use. He then made up four of the gardenias into a small posy. Into
its middle he inserted a short note, leaving just a corner of it sticking out
so that it should not be overlooked. He had written the note in the painful
copper plate hand of a semi-educated man, and it ran:

Erzherzogin Ilona
Theresa,

Noble lady, I Johann
Stein am the best guide in this district. Be pleased to engage me and I will
show you our loveliest beauty spots. For this I will make no charge. The honour
is enough. God be with you Erzherzogin. K
ü
ss
die hand.

He had not dared
to write to Ilona, even anonymously. It was certain that her mail would be
opened and sorted for her, and his letter would either have gone into the
waste-paper basket with the mad, impertinent and unanswerable scrawls which
royal personages were always receiving, or, had it reached her at all, have
first aroused the most undesirable curiosity of some secretary. But he hoped
that the white gardenias would prove a key to their sender, and that if she
read the note she would have the wit to act upon it.

Having completed
his preparations he returned to the Palace. A sentry was posted on its gate but
no officers were about, so De Richleau addressed him in good German:

“Tell me,
friend, how shall I set about trying to get the Archduchess to take me on as
her guide?”

The soldier
shook his head. “Such matters are none of my business. I have no idea.”

The Duke had not
supposed that he would have, and had asked the question only as a lead-in. He
went on:

“I have some
pretty flowers here. I thought, perhaps, that if I threw them to her Highness
as she passes she might stop to thank me. Then I would have a chance to ask her
if she will let me be her guide on some-excursions.”

“It is forbidden
to throw things at the royal carriages,” said the soldier.

De Richleau had
expected as much. For the past half century every royal family in Europe,
except that of Britain, had gone about in fear of nihilists. They were
desperate and often half-crazy men, belonging to various societies which
plotted the murder of royalties quite irrespective of their personal
characters, and solely as a spectacular means of drawing attention to the ills
of the proletariat. Ilona’s grandmother, the Empress Elizabeth, had been
stabbed to death by one sixteen years before, when about to board a steamer on
Lake Geneva; and hardly a year passed without a bomb being hurled at one of the
Russian Grand Dukes. Actually, De Richleau’s one purpose in talking to the
sentry was to convince him that the bouquet was not a bomb, otherwise he might
have attempted to prevent its being thrown into the carriage. Exposing the
flowers by turning back their tissue paper wrapping, he showed them to the man,
and said:

“See: they are
very special flowers and fit even for a Princess. I am a poor man but I bought them
at the best shop in the town for her. I paid a lot of money for them. It will
be hard on me if they are to be wasted after all.”

The sentry
shrugged. “All right then. But hold them behind you and stand some distance
away from me when you throw them, so that they’ll think I couldn’t guess what
you meant to do.”

After thanking
the soldier with suitable humility, the Duke took up his position on the far
side of the entrance and waited there patiently for some twenty minutes. At
length the royal carriage came down the road at a smart trot. Ilona was seated
alone, facing the horses: opposite her were the dapper, broad-shouldered Count
Adam Grünne and the small, dark, mischievous-eyed Sárolta Hunyády. As the
carriage slowed down to turn through the gates, De Richleau took off his hat
and neatly pitched his posy into Ilona’s lap.

Adam Grünne’s
mouth dropped open and he instantly dived at it; but as he grabbed the
tissue-paper covered missile he must have felt that it contained nothing solid,
as he did not throw it out. By that time the carriage was well past De
Richleau, so he was unable to see the final outcome of his ruse; but, although
he waited hopefully near the gate for over an hour, he was not sent for.

He spent the
evening making an intensive study of the map he had bought and memorizing
passages from the guide-book, so that when, at four o’clock next morning, he
kept his appointment with the professional guide Herr Pohl had engaged for him,
he already had a good working knowledge of the district.

The Duke,
although a little above medium height, was slight of frame, so that as the
hours wore on the stamina he displayed was more and more astonishing to his
companion. On the guide’s advice, they went up the south valley, towards
Laufen, and with only brief infrequent halts, except to eat lunch at a wayside
inn, they kept on the move for nearly eleven hours. During that time they made
many detours and short climbs to reach some of the best view-points. As a
soldier, the Duke had a trained eye for country, and he could not glance out of
the window of a train without instinctively thinking that some fold in the
hills would make a good battery position, or a sunken road be a good site
behind which to entrench infantry. So by the time they got back to Ischl he felt
that he had fully mastered the country for ten miles to the south of the town.

After arranging
for his guide to call for him at the same hour the next morning, he had a short
rest on his bed. Then he made up four more of the gardenias into another little
bouquet and inserted among them a similar note to that of the day before.

When he arrived
at the Palace gate he found a different sentry on duty, so had to repeat his
little act about wishing to become the Archduchess’ guide. But the man proved
more obdurate than his predecessor, and the Duke had to take his posy to pieces
for inspection, then tip the fellow a
florin
before he
would consent to it being thrown, with due precautions, so that he could not
afterwards be accused of not having attempted to prevent the act.

As the carriage
approached, De Richleau’s heart began to beat more quickly. When it turned into
the entrance he saw that Ilona was again seated alone on the back seat, but
today, instead of Sárolta, the flaxen-haired Baroness Paula von Wolkenstein was
seated opposite her, beside Adam Grünne. At the moment he pitched the posy
Ilona turned to look at him, but there was no sign of recognition in her eyes.
Yet this time Adam Grünne caught the flowers and handed them to her. Then she
called to her coachman to pull up.

De Richleau
could not guess if his ruse was by way of succeeding, but he ran after the
carriage until it halted some thirty yards inside the gates. Then, clutching
his hat to his stomach with both hands, as a peasant would have done, he bowed
jerkily, and raised his eyes only when Ilona addressed him:

“Thank you, my
good fellow, for the flowers. I am very fond of white gardenias. In the note
you threw to me yesterday you said you were the best guide in the district. Is
that true?”

“Küss die hand,
Erzherzogin.
Only try me and I promise you will
be satisfied. But here are my references.” He bowed again and held them out.

Adam Grünne took
the three dirty papers, glanced through them and nodded. Then Ilona said:

“Very well,
then. Be at the gate here at half past two to-morrow afternoon.”

At a sign from
her, the coachman’s whip tickled the horses, and the carriage rolled on. Ilona’s
eyes had remained quite expressionless while she was speaking, and as De
Richleau slowly walked away he still had no means of knowing if the gardenias
had told her who he was; or if their significance had escaped her, and she had
simply decided to give a trial to a new guide who had adopted an original
method of bringing himself to her notice. But his uncertainty on that point did
little to reduce his elation at having secured a command to attend her next
day, and he returned to his
pension
in a very
happy frame of mind. Nevertheless he was now feeling very tired after his long
tramp so, instead of waiting for dinner, he asked the cook to slice some rolls
and fill them with ham for him, then ate them while drinking a pint of the
local white wine in the little lounge, and afterwards went straight to bed.