Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (paper ebook reader txt) 📕

Captain Blood

By Rafael Sabatini.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint I: The Messenger II: Kirke’s Dragoons III: The Lord Chief Justice IV: Human Merchandise V: Arabella Bishop VI: Plans of Escape VII: Pirates VIII: Spaniards IX: The Rebels-Convict X: Don Diego XI: Filial Piety XII: Don Pedro Sangre XIII: Tortuga XIV: Levasseur’s Heroics XV: The Ransom XVI: The Trap XVII: The Dupes XVIII: The Milagrosa XIX: The Meeting XX: Thief and Pirate XXI: The Service of King James XXII: Hostilities XXIII: Hostages XXIV: War XXV: The Service of King Louis XXVI: M. de Rivarol XXVII: Cartagena XXVIII: The Honour of M. de Rivarol XXIX: The Service of King William XXX: The Last Fight of the Arabella XXXI: His Excellency the Governor Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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I The Messenger

Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood’s attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below, pouring for the second time that day in the direction of Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke’s chaplain, had preached a sermon that contained more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only when it so suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. One other thing he did. He flung after those war-fevered enthusiasts a line of Horace⁠—a poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate attachment:

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”

And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood inherited from the roving sires of his Somersetshire mother remained cool amidst all this frenzied fanatical heat of rebellion, why the turbulent spirit which had forced him once from the sedate academical bonds his father would have imposed upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty⁠—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who⁠—as the ballad runs⁠—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth’s army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy to their ruin.

You see, he knew too much about this fellow Monmouth and the pretty brown slut who had borne him, to be deceived by the legend of legitimacy, on the strength of which this standard of rebellion had been raised. He had read the absurd proclamation posted at the Cross at Bridgewater⁠—as it had been posted also at Taunton and elsewhere⁠—setting forth that “upon the decease of our Sovereign Lord Charles the Second, the right of succession to the Crown of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, did legally descend and devolve upon the most illustrious and highborn Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, son and heir apparent to the said King Charles the Second.”

It had moved him to laughter, as had the further announcement that “James Duke of York did first cause the said late King to be poisoned, and immediately thereupon did usurp and invade the Crown.”

He knew not which was the greater lie. For Mr. Blood had spent a third of his life in the Netherlands, where this same James Scott⁠—who now proclaimed himself James the Second, by the grace of God, King, et cetera⁠—first saw the light some six-and-thirty years ago, and he was acquainted with the story current there of the fellow’s real paternity. Far from being legitimate⁠—by virtue of a pretended secret marriage between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter⁠—it was possible that