Captain Blood | Page 3

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Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini

CAPTAIN BLOOD His Odyssey

CONTENTS
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

CHAPTER 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; 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