Captain Blood

Captain Blood

by

Rafael Sabatini



Web-Books.Com
Captain Blood

1. The Messenger 4
2. Kirke's Dragoons 10
3. The Lord Chief Justice 17
4. Human Merchandise 28
5. Arabella Bishop 33
6. Plans Of Escape 44
7. Pirates 58
8. Spaniards 67
9. The Rebels-Convict 73
10. Don Diego 83
11. Filial Piety 89
12. Don Pedro Sangre 99
13. Tortuga 105
14. Levasseur's Heroics 111
15. The Ransom 119
16. The Trap 129
17. The Dupes 138
18. The Milagrosa 150
19. The Meeting 160
20. Thief And Pirate 169
21. The Service Of King James 179
22. Hostilities 191
23. Hostages 199
24. War 210
25. The Service Of King Louis 221
26. M. De Rivarol 229
27. Cartagena 239
28. The Honour Of M. De Rivarol 246
29. The Service Of King William 252
30. The Last Fight Of The Arabella 257
31. His Excellency The Governor 262


1. 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; a stream which poured for the second time that
day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain,
had preached a sermon containing 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 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 affection:
"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 upon 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 bad 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 high-born 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 poysoned, 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 this Monmouth who now
proclaimed himself King of England was not even the illegitimate child of the late
sovereign. What but ruin and disaster could be the end of this grotesque pretension?
How could it be hoped that England would ever swallow such a Perkin? And it was on
his behalf, to uphold his fantastic claim, that these West Country clods, led by a few
armigerous Whigs, had been seduced into rebellion!
"Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?"
He laughed and sighed in one; but the laugh dominated the sigh, for Mr. Blood was
unsympathetic, as are most self-sufficient men; and he was very self-sufficient;
adversity had taught him so to be. A more tender-hearted man, possessing his vision
and his knowledge, might have found cause for tears in the contemplation of these
ardent, simple, Nonconformist sheep going forth to the shambles - escorted to the
rallying ground on Castle Field by wives and daughters, sweethearts and mothers,
sustained by the delusion that they were to take the field in defence of Right, of Liberty,
and of Religion. For he knew, as all Bridgewater knew and had known now for some
hours, that it was Monmouth's intention to deliver battle that same night. The Duke was
to lead a surprise attack upon the Royalist army under Feversham that was now
encamped on Sedgemoor. Mr. Blood assumed that Lord Feversham would be equally
well-informed, and if in this assumption he was wrong, at least he was justified of it. He
was not to suppose the Royalist commander so indifferently skilled in the trade he
followed.
Mr. Blood knocked the ashes from his pipe, and drew back to close his window. As he
did so, his glance travelling straight across the street met at last the glance of those
hostile eyes that watched him. There were two pairs, and they belonged to the Misses
Pitt, two amiable, sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their
worship of the handsome Monmouth.
Mr. Blood smiled and inclined his head, for he was on friendly terms with these ladies,
one of whom, indeed, had been for a little while his patient. But there was no response
to his greeting. Instead, the eyes gave him back a stare of cold disdain. The smile on
his thin lips grew a little broader, a little less pleasant. He understood the reason of that
hostility, which had been daily growing in this past week since Monmouth had come to
turn the brains of women of all ages. The Misses Pitt, he apprehended, contemned him
that he, a young and vigorous man, of a military training which might now be valuable to
the Cause, should stand aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe and tend his
geraniums on this evening of all evenings, when men of spirit were rallying to the
Protestant Champion, offering their blood to place him on the throne where he
belonged.
If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have
urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon
the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had
equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer. But
they would have answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man
who deemed himself a man to take up arms. They would have pointed out that their
own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a ship - which by an ill-
chance for that young man had come to anchor at this season in Bridgewater Bay - had
quitted the helm to snatch up a musket in defence of Right. But Mr. Blood was not of
those who argue. As I have said, he was a self-sufficient man.
He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant, candle-lighted
room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his housekeeper, was in the very act of
spreading supper. To her, however, he spoke aloud his thought.
"It's out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way."
He had a pleasant, vibrant voice, whose metallic ring was softened and muted by the
Irish accent which in all his wanderings he had never lost. It was a voice that could woo
seductively and caressingly, or command in such a way as to compel obedience.
Indeed, the man's whole nature was in that voice of his. For the rest of him, he was tall
and spare, swarthy of tint as a gipsy, with eyes that were startlingly blue in that dark
face and under those level black brows. In their glance those eyes, flanking a high-
bridged, intrepid nose, were of singular penetration and of a steady haughtiness that
went well with his firm lips. Though dressed in black as became his calling, yet it was
with an elegance derived from the love of clothes that is peculiar to the adventurer he
had been, rather than to the staid medicus he now was. His coat was of fine camlet, and
it was laced with silver; there were ruffles of Mechlin at his wrists and a Mechlin cravat
encased his throat. His great black periwig was as sedulously curled as any at
Whitehall.
Seeing him thus, and perceiving his real nature, which was plain upon him, you might
have been tempted to speculate how long such a man would be content to lie by in this
little backwater of the world into which chance had swept him some six months ago;
how long he would continue to pursue the trade for which he had qualified himself
before he had begun to live. Difficult of belief though it may be when you know his
history, previous and subsequent, yet it is possible that but for the trick that Fate was
about to play him, he might have continued this peaceful existence, settling down
completely to the life of a doctor in this Somersetshire haven. It is possible, but not
probable.
He was the son of an Irish medicus, by a Somersetshire lady in whose veins ran the
rover blood of the Frobishers, which may account for a certain wildness that had early
manifested itself in his disposition. This wildness had profoundly alarmed his father, who
for an Irishman was of a singularly peace-loving nature. He had early resolved that the
boy should follow his own honourable profession, and Peter Blood, being quick to learn
and oddly greedy of knowledge, had satisfied his parent by receiving at the age of
twenty the degree of baccalaureus medicinae at Trinity College, Dublin. His father
survived that satisfaction by three months only. His mother had then been dead some
years already. Thus Peter Blood came into an inheritance of some few hundred pounds,
with which he had set out to see the world and give for a season a free rein to that
restless spirit by which he was imbued. A set of curious chances led him to take service
with the Dutch, then at war with France; and a predilection for the sea made him elect
that this service should be upon that element. He had the advantage of a commission
under the famous de Ruyter, and fought in the Mediterranean engagement in which that
great Dutch admiral lost his life.
After the Peace of Nimeguen his movements are obscure. But we know that he spent
two years in a Spanish prison, though we do not know how he contrived to get there. It
may be due to this that upon his release he took his sword to France, and saw service
with the French in their warring upon the Spanish Netherlands. Having reached, at last,
the age of thirty-two, his appetite for adventure surfeited, his health having grown
indifferent as the result of a neglected wound, he was suddenly overwhelmed by
homesickness. He took ship from Nantes with intent to cross to Ireland. But the vessel
being driven by stress of weather into Bridgewater Bay, and Blood's health having
grown worse during the voyage, he decided to go ashore there, additionally urged to it
by the fact that it was his mother's native soil.
Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater, possessor of a fortune
that was approximately the same as that with which he had originally set out from
Dublin eleven years ago.
Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored to him, and
because he conceived that he had passed through adventures enough for a man's
lifetime, he determined to settle there, and take up at last the profession of medicine
from which he had, with so little profit, broken away.
That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night, six months later, when
the battle of Sedgemoor was fought.
Deeming the impending action no affair of his, as indeed it was not, and indifferent to
the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog, Mr. Blood closed his ears to the
sounds of it, and went early to bed. He was peacefully asleep long before eleven
o'clock, at which hour, as you know, Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the
Bristol Road, circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself and
the Royal Army. You also know that his numerical advantage - possibly counter-
balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the other side - and the
advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon an army that was more or less
asleep, were all lost to him by blundering and bad leadership before ever he was at
grips with Feversham.
The armies came into collision in the neighbourhood of two o'clock in the morning. Mr.
Blood slept undisturbed through the distant boom of cannon. Not until four o'clock, when
the sun was rising to dispel the last wisps of mist over that stricken field of battle, did he
awaken from his tranquil slumbers.
He sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and collected himself. Blows were
thundering upon the door of his house, and a voice was calling incoherently. This was
the noise that had aroused him. Conceiving that he had to do with some urgent
obstetrical case, he reached for bedgown and slippers, to go below. On the landing he
almost collided with Mrs. Barlow, new-risen and unsightly, in a state of panic. He
quieted her cluckings with a word of reassurance, and went himself to open.
There in slanting golden light of the new-risen sun stood a breathless, wild-eyed man
and a steaming horse. Smothered in dust and grime, his clothes in disarray, the left
sleeve of his doublet hanging in rags, this young man opened his lips to speak, yet for a
long moment remained speechless.
In that moment Mr. Blood recognized him for the young shipmaster, Jeremiah Pitt, the
nephew of the maiden ladies opposite, one who had been drawn by the general
enthusiasm into the vortex of that rebellion. The street was rousing, awakened by the
sailor's noisy advent; doors were opening, and lattices were being unlatched for the
protrusion of anxious, inquisitive heads.
"Take your time, now," said Mr. Blood. "I never knew speed made by overhaste."
But the wild-eyed lad paid no heed to the admonition. He plunged, headlong, into
speech, gasping, breathless.
"It is Lord Gildoy," he panted. "He is sore wounded at Oglethorpe's Farm by the river.
I bore him thither and and he sent me for you. Come away! Come away!"
He would have clutched the doctor, and haled him forth by force in bedgown and
slippers as he was. But the doctor eluded that too eager hand.
"To be sure, I'll come," said he. He was distressed. Gildoy had been a very friendly,
generous patron to him since his settling in these parts. And Mr. Blood was eager
enough to do what he now could to discharge the debt, grieved that the occasion should
have arisen, and in such a manner - for he knew quite well that the rash young
nobleman had been an active agent of the Duke's. "To be sure, I'll come. But first give
me leave to get some clothes and other things that I may need."
"There's no time to lose."
"Be easy now. I'll lose none. I tell ye again, ye'll go quickest by going leisurely. Come in
take a chair " He threw open the door of a parlour.
Young Pitt waved aside the invitation.
"I'll wait here. Make haste, in God's name." Mr. Blood went off to dress and to fetch a
case of instruments.
Questions concerning the precise nature of Lord Gildoy's hurt could wait until they were
on their way. Whilst he pulled on his boots, he gave Mrs. Barlow instructions for the day,
which included the matter of a dinner he was not destined to eat.
When at last he went forth again, Mrs. Barlow clucking after him like a disgruntled fowl,
he found young Pitt smothered in a crowd of scared, half-dressed townsfolk - mostly
women - who had come hastening for news of how the battle had sped. The news he
gave them was to be read in the lamentations with which they disturbed the morning air.
At sight of the doctor, dressed and booted, the case of instruments tucked under his
arm, the messenger disengaged himself from those who pressed about, shook off his
weariness and the two tearful aunts that clung most closely, and seizing the bridle of his
horse, he climbed to the saddle.
"Come along, sir," he cried. "Mount behind me."
Mr. Blood, without wasting words, did as he was bidden. Pitt touched the horse with his
spur. The little crowd gave way, and thus, upon the crupper of that doubly-laden horse,
clinging to the belt of his companion, Peter Blood set out upon his Odyssey. For this
Pitt, in whom he beheld no more than the messenger of a wounded rebel gentleman,
was indeed the very messenger of Fate.
1. Kirke's Dragoons

Oglethorpe's farm stood a mile or so to the south of Bridgewater on the right bank of the
river. It was a straggling Tudor building showing grey above the ivy that clothed its lower
parts. Approaching it now, through the fragrant orchards amid which it seemed to
drowse in Arcadian peace beside the waters of the Parrett, sparkling in the morning
sunlight, Mr. Blood might have had a difficulty in believing it part of a world tormented by
strife and bloodshed.
On the bridge, as they had been riding out of Bridgewater, they had met a vanguard of
fugitives from the field of battle, weary, broken men, many of them wounded, all of them
terror-stricken, staggering in speedless haste with the last remnants of their strength
into the shelter which it was their vain illusion the town would afford them. Eyes glazed
with lassitude and fear looked up piteously out of haggard faces at Mr. Blood and his
companion as they rode forth; hoarse voices cried a warning that merciless pursuit was
not far behind. Undeterred, however, young Pitt rode amain along the dusty road by
which these poor fugitives from that swift rout on Sedgemoor came flocking in ever-
increasing numbers. Presently he swung aside, and quitting the road took to a pathway
that crossed the dewy meadowlands. Even here they met odd groups of these human
derelicts, who were scattering in all directions, looking fearfully behind them as they
came through the long grass, expecting at every moment to see the red coats of the
dragoons.
But as Pitt's direction was a southward one, bringing them ever nearer to Feversham's
headquarters, they were presently clear of that human flotsam and jetsam of the battle,
and riding through the peaceful orchards heavy with the ripening fruit that was soon to
make its annual yield of cider.
At last they alighted on the kidney stones of the courtyard, and Baynes, the master, of
the homestead, grave of countenance and flustered of manner, gave them welcome.
In the spacious, stone-flagged hall, the doctor found Lord Gildoy - a very tall and dark
young gentleman, prominent of chin and nose - stretched on a cane day-bed under one
of the tall mullioned windows, in the care of Mrs. Baynes and her comely daughter. His
cheeks were leaden-hued, his eyes closed, and from his blue lips came with each
laboured breath a faint, moaning noise.
Mr. Blood stood for a moment silently considering his patient. He deplored that a youth
with such bright hopes in life as Lord Gildoy's should have risked all, perhaps existence
itself, to forward the ambition of a worthless adventurer. Because he had liked and
honoured this brave lad he paid his case the tribute of a sigh. Then he knelt to his task,
ripped away doublet and underwear to lay bare his lordship's mangled side, and called
for water and linen and what else he needed for his work.

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