He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back, a hand to his brow. “And that was why you fainted?” he asked incredulously.
She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
He held out both hands to her.
“Aline! Aline!” His voice broke on the name. “It was I...”
“O blind Andre, it was always you — always! Never, never did I think of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when... when that theatre girl came into your life, and then...” She broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away. “I thought of following ambition, since there was nothing left to follow.”
He shook himself. “I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad,” he said.
“Blind, Andre; just blind,” she assured him.
“Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen.”
“And yet,” she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of old, “I have never found you lack presumption.”
M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window, beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if each saw Paradise in the other’s face.
CAPTAIN BLOOD
OR, CAPTAIN BLOOD: HIS ODYSSEY
Originally published in 1922, this swashbuckling historical adventure novel is Sabatini’s best-known work and was a tremendous success during his lifetime. Set at the end of the seventeenth century, its protagonist is Dr. Peter Blood, a retired soldier and sailor, who has abandoned such careers in favour of the life of a country physician in the seaside town of Bridgewater, Somerset. The story then relates a series of misadventures that ensues when Blood becomes accidentally caught up in the Monmouth Rebellion (an attempt, in 1685, to overthrow the Stuart monarchy by dethroning James II).
Sabatini was a proponent of basing historical fiction as closely as possible on real historical events and people. Although Blood is a fictional character, much of the historical background of the novel is based on fact. The Monmouth rebels were sold into slavery as described in the book and the shifting political alliances of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 are used in the novel as a plot device to allow Blood’s return to respectability.
Sabatini based the first part of Blood’s story on Henry Pitman, a surgeon that tended the wounded Monmouth rebels and was sentenced to death by Judge Jeffreys. His sentence was commuted to penal transportation to Barbados where he escaped and was captured by pirates. Unlike the fictional Blood, Pitman did not join them and eventually made his way back to England, where he wrote a popular account of his adventures. For Blood’s life as a buccaneer, Sabatini used several models, including Henry Morgan and the work of Alexandre Exquemelin for historical details.
Sabatini first introduced the character Captain Blood in a series of eight short stories in Premier Magazine as Tales of the Brethren of the Main, published from December 1920 to March 1921 and reprinted in Adventure Magazine from January to May 1921, with a novella “Captain Blood’s Dilemma”, published in Premier Magazine in April 1921 (and Adventure Magazine in October 1921). The Odyssey-like story arc of these tales was then woven by Sabatini into a continuous narrative in novel form, published as Captain Blood: His Odyssey in 1922.
Sabatini continued to write of Blood’s adventures in two short story collections: The Chronicles of Captain Blood (1931) and The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1936).
Cover of the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE MESSENGER
CHAPTER II. KIRKE’S DRAGOONS
CHAPTER III. THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
CHAPTER IV. HUMAN MERCHANDISE
CHAPTER V. ARABELLA BISHOP
CHAPTER VI. PLANS OF ESCAPE
CHAPTER VII. PIRATES
CHAPTER VIII. SPANIARDS
CHAPTER IX. THE REBELS-CONVICT
CHAPTER X. DON DIEGO
CHAPTER XI. FILIAL PIETY
CHAPTER XII. DON PEDRO SANGRE
CHAPTER XIII. TORTUGA
CHAPTER XIV. LEVASSEUR’S HEROICS
CHAPTER XV. THE RANSOM
CHAPTER XVI. THE TRAP
CHAPTER XVII. THE DUPES
CHAPTER XVIII. THE MILAGROSA
CHAPTER XIX. THE MEETING
CHAPTER XX. THIEF AND PIRATE
CHAPTER XXI. THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
CHAPTER XXII. HOSTILITIES
CHAPTER XXIII. HOSTAGES
CHAPTER XXIV. WAR
CHAPTER XXV. THE SERVICE OF KING LOUIS
CHAPTER XXVI. M. de RIVAROL
CHAPTER XXVII. CARTAGENA
CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HONOUR OF M. DE RIVAROL
CHAPTER XXIX. THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAM
CHAPTER XXX. THE LAST FIGHT OF THE ARABELLA
CHAPTER XXXI. HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR
Poster for the 1935 film adaptation, starring Errol Flynn in the title role
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 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 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, wi
th 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 th
e 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.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 375
