The Rafael Sabatini Megapack. Rafael Sabatini
insufferable heat of Jamaica in that season. The time for her return being now at hand, a passage was sought for her aboard the Royal Mary, and in view of her uncle’s rank and position promptly accorded.
Lord Julian hailed her advent with satisfaction. It gave a voyage that had been full of interest for him just the spice that it required to achieve perfection as an experience. His lordship was one of your gallants to whom existence that is not graced by womankind is more or less of a stagnation. Miss Arabella Bishop—this straight up and down slip of a girl with her rather boyish voice and her almost boyish ease of movement—was not perhaps a lady who in England would have commanded much notice in my lord’s discerning eyes. His very sophisticated, carefully educated tastes in such matters inclined him towards the plump, the languishing, and the quite helplessly feminine. Miss Bishop’s charms were undeniable. But they were such that it would take a delicate-minded man to appreciate them; and my Lord Julian, whilst of a mind that was very far from gross, did not possess the necessary degree of delicacy. I must not by this be understood to imply anything against him.
It remained, however, that Miss Bishop was a young woman and a lady; and in the latitude into which Lord Julian had strayed this was a phenomenon sufficiently rare to command attention. On his side, with his title and position, his personal grace and the charm of a practised courtier, he bore about him the atmosphere of the great world in which normally he had his being—a world that was little more than a name to her, who had spent most of her life in the Antilles. It is not therefore wonderful that they should have been attracted to each other before the Royal Mary was warped out of St. Nicholas. Each could tell the other much upon which the other desired information. He could regale her imagination with stories of St. James’s—in many of which he assigned himself a heroic, or at least a distinguished part—and she could enrich his mind with information concerning this new world to which he had come.
Before they were out of sight of St. Nicholas they were good friends, and his lordship was beginning to correct his first impressions of her and to discover the charm of that frank, straightforward attitude of comradeship which made her treat every man as a brother. Considering how his mind was obsessed with the business of his mission, it is not wonderful that he should have come to talk to her of Captain Blood. Indeed, there was a circumstance that directly led to it.
“I wonder now,” he said, as they were sauntering on the poop, “if you ever saw this fellow Blood, who was at one time on your uncle’s plantations as a slave.”
Miss Bishop halted. She leaned upon the taffrail, looking out towards the receding land, and it was a moment before she answered in a steady, level voice:
“I saw him often. I knew him very well.”
“Ye don’t say!” His lordship was slightly moved out of an imperturbability that he had studiously cultivated. He was a young man of perhaps eight-and-twenty, well above the middle height in stature and appearing taller by virtue of his exceeding leanness. He had a thin, pale, rather pleasing hatchet-face, framed in the curls of a golden periwig, a sensitive mouth and pale blue eyes that lent his countenance a dreamy expression, a rather melancholy pensiveness. But they were alert, observant eyes notwithstanding, although they failed on this occasion to observe the slight change of colour which his question had brought to Miss Bishop’s cheeks or the suspiciously excessive composure of her answer.
“Ye don’t say!” he repeated, and came to lean beside her. “And what manner of man did you find him?”
“In those days I esteemed him for an unfortunate gentleman.”
“You were acquainted with his story?”
“He told it me. That is why I esteemed him—for the calm fortitude with which he bore adversity. Since then, considering what he has done, I have almost come to doubt if what he told me of himself was true.”
“If you mean of the wrongs he suffered at the hands of the Royal Commission that tried the Monmouth rebels, there’s little doubt that it would be true enough. He was never out with Monmouth; that is certain. He was convicted on a point of law of which he may well have been ignorant when he committed what was construed into treason. But, faith, he’s had his revenge, after a fashion.”
“That,” she said in a small voice, “is the unforgivable thing. It has destroyed him—deservedly.”
“Destroyed him?” His lordship laughed a little. “Be none so sure of that. He has grown rich, I hear. He has translated, so it is said, his Spanish spoils into French gold, which is being treasured up for him in France. His future father-in-law, M. d’Ogeron, has seen to that.”
“His future father-in-law?” said she, and stared at him round-eyed, with parted lips. Then added: “M. d’Ogeron? The Governor of Tortuga?”
“The same. You see the fellow’s well protected. It’s a piece of news I gathered in St. Nicholas. I am not sure that I welcome it, for I am not sure that it makes any easier a task upon which my kinsman, Lord Sunderland, has sent me hither. But there it is. You didn’t know?”
She shook her head without replying. She had averted her face, and her eyes were staring down at the gently heaving water. After a moment she spoke, her voice steady and perfectly controlled.
“But surely, if this were true, there would have been an end to his piracy by now. If he…if he loved a woman and was betrothed, and was also rich as you say, surely he would have abandoned this desperate life, and…”
“Why, so I thought,” his lordship interrupted, “until I had the explanation. D’Ogeron is avaricious for himself and for his child. And as for the girl, I’m told she’s a wild piece, fit mate for such a man as Blood. Almost I marvel that he doesn’t marry her and take her a-roving with him. It would be no new experience for her. And I marvel, too, at Blood’s patience. He killed a man to win her.”
“He killed a man for her, do you say?” There was horror now in her voice.
“Yes—a French buccaneer named Levasseur. He was the girl’s lover and Blood’s associate on a venture. Blood coveted the girl, and killed Levasseur to win her. Pah! It’s an unsavoury tale, I own. But men live by different codes out in these parts.…”
She had turned to face him. She was pale to the lips, and her hazel eyes were blazing, as she cut into his apologies for Blood.
“They must, indeed, if his other associates allowed him to live after that.”
“Oh, the thing was done in fair fight, I am told.”
“Who told you?”
“A man who sailed with them, a Frenchman named Cahusac, whom I found in a waterside tavern in St. Nicholas. He was Levasseur’s lieutenant, and he was present on the island where the thing happened, and when Levasseur was killed.”
“And the girl? Did he say the girl was present, too?”
“Yes. She was a witness of the encounter. Blood carried her off when he had disposed of his brother-buccaneer.”
“And the dead man’s followers allowed it?” He caught the note of incredulity in her voice, but missed the note of relief with which it was blent. “Oh, I don’t believe the tale. I won’t believe it!”
“I honour you for that, Miss Bishop. It strained my own belief that men should be so callous, until this Cahusac afforded me the explanation.”
“What?” She checked her unbelief, an unbelief that had uplifted her from an inexplicable dismay. Clutching the rail, she swung round to face his lordship with that question. Later he was to remember and perceive in her present behaviour a certain oddness which went disregarded now.
“Blood purchased their consent, and his right to carry the girl off. He paid them in pearls that were worth more than twenty thousand pieces of eight.” His lordship laughed again with a touch of contempt. “A handsome price! Faith, they’re scoundrels all—just thieving, venal curs. And faith, it’s a pretty tale this for a lady’s ear.”
She looked away from him again, and found