The Pyrates. George Fraser MacDonald

houri,” said Blood, and poured his winnings into a purse before her eyes. “A trifle of pin money I’ve been earning, me heart’s darling – forty guineas against our travelling expenses to Gretna.”

      At this the lady cried out fondly: “Why, thou foolish dear fellow, where was the need? Have I not ample funds … and there is all my jewellery.” And she fingered her necklace and stroked his cheek, all of which the Colonel bore with equanimity.

      “Only a vandal,” he murmured, nuzzling the necklace and the soft skin beneath it, “could bear to see it removed from its rightful place – tho’ faith, it’s dim by comparison with such a lovely setting.”

      He would have been less poetically carefree if he could have seen the serving-wench at that moment, discovering the spectacles which had slipped from his sleeve during his last departing fondle, to hook themselves in her apron-string. She squeaked with surprise, exclaimed: “Ow, look, the gennelman’s left ’is glasses!”, giggled, and clapped them on her pert nose for the entertainment of the customers. “Caw, look at me!” she exclaimed, peering affectedly, and then her eyes fell on the cards scattered on the table, and she gasped in genuine dismay.

      “Ow!” she cried. “Caw, bleedin’ ’ell! Ow, me! Lookathat! Ow, the rotten cheat!”

      For through the spectacles she could see that on the backs of the cards their identities were clearly marked, and even she, dumb trull that she was, knew that this was irregular. The defeated gamesters gaped, and seized the glasses from her, and peered through them, and observed their cunningly-tinted glass, and with one accord cried: “Burn my bowels! Bubbled, by God! Where is the knave, the sharp, the cut-purse!” and were on the point of making for the stairs, to wreak vengeance, when a stentorian voice thundered at the tap-room door:

      “Landlord! Hither to me! Have you a rakehell black Irishman in your house, hey? A rascal that calls himself Colonel Blood?”

      “Colonel Blood, sir?” spluttered the fat man. “My word, sir, the villain has just made off with my forty guineas!”

      “Damn your guineas, sir!” roared the newcomer, who was huge and masterful and magnificently dressed. “The villain has just made off with my wife!”

      Since no one kept their voices down in Restoration England, it followed that every word of this exchange was audible upstairs. The languid lady, suddenly distraught, shot bolt upright with a violence which pitched Blood on to the floor, clutched her bosom, and cried “My husband!”, followed by a shriek of dismay as she realised that her erstwhile lover, hoisting his breeches with one hand and grabbing his purse with the other, already had one leg over the sill. She stretched out an arm in dramatic entreaty and shrilled: “False heart, will you desert me now? Oh, stay!”

      “Just slipping out for a breath of air, my sweet,” said Blood reassuringly, and vanished, blowing a kiss, for he liked to observe the polite niceties.

      “What shall I do?” cried the lady, wringing her hands like anything, and Blood, who would deny no one advice if it might be helpful, poked his head back in to suggest: “Tell him ye walked in your sleep,” before dropping to the street.

      Now, in any romance of fiction, he would have slipped nimbly up a side-street and hid, grinning rakishly, in a doorway, while the pursuit rushed futilely by. But since this is a highly realistic, moral tale, it has to be recorded that he fell slap on to a pile of empty beer-crates, and was thrashing about cursing when the outraged husband and his burly minions (all outraged husbands in those days engaged burly minions, from some Restoration equivalent of Central Casting) emerged to seize him wrist and ankle. And they tore off his fine coat (which was the husband’s anyway, having been provided for Blood by his doting leman) and beat the living daylights out of him with stout canes, to the great satisfaction of the cheated gamesters, and the vicarious excitement of the deserted lady, who watched, biting her lips, from her bedroom window. Indeed, she became so emotional that when her lord, after a final cut at the hapless Colonel, strode into the inn, up the stairs, and confronted her with a lowering scowl and a “So-ho, madam!” she flung herself sobbing at his feet, begging forgiveness and pleading, in piteous tones, her youthful folly – she was forty-seven, to be exact, but her contrition was such a change from her customary wilfulness, and she looked so fetching in her dishevelled negligee, that he forgave her on the spot, and taking a leaf out of Marlborough’s book, pleasured her (once) in his boots, and they lived happy ever after, or so we may assume.

       A comfortable and loving note on which to end our second chapter. But sterner matters await us. Avery, his hair brushed and his heart pure, is about to set off on his perilous mission to Madagascar – will his path cross that of Black Sheba when they ship her to the Indies? And what o’ Blood, caught in the acts of abduction, seduction, marking his cards, and causing malicious damage to beer crates? He is right in it …

       CHAPTER

       THE THIRD

      In the taproom, whither they had dragged him battered and bruised as he was, Colonel Blood fetched his breath while the gamesters reviled him, the wench giggled, one burly minion brushed the stolen coat, and another snarled: “Bide you there, ye muckrake, whiles Oi fetch a constable. ’Tis the Roundhouse for ’ee, aye, an’ the gallows therearter, damn ’ee!”

      This seemed a reasonable forecast to Blood, who promptly swooned lower on his bench, gasping “Water! Water!”, at which they reviled him harder than ever, but relaxed their guard, with the result that one minion was suddenly rolling on the floor, clutching his groin and making statements, the other had the fine coat wrenched from his grasp (the Colonel, a realist, knew that you can’t get far in your shirt-sleeves) and an iron fist smashed against his jaw, and before the wench could even squeal or the gamesters swear, foxy Tom was off and running.

      Naturally, they pursued, minions, gamesters, landlord, bystanders, and other interested parties – including, eventually, the outraged husband, once he had recovered from his unexpectedly joyous reunion and hurried downstairs. And nip and double as Blood might, his beaten limbs (not improved, of course, by late nights, booze, women, and too much smoking the day before the match) would inevitably have let him down had his headlong flight not carried him suddenly out on to a long cobbled wharf thronged with porters, hawkers, fishwives, seamen, loiterers, and all the motley of the waterfront. In an instant the Colonel was lost in the shifting human tide, which bore him along while he got his breath back, straightened his coat, and regretted that he had no hat to complete the appearance of a genteel saunterer slumming.

      A great ship was making ready for sea, and Blood paused by her gangplank to look round for signs of pursuit. All clear behind, and he was about to stroll on when he saw, dead ahead, the breathless figures of the fat gamester and one of the burly minions moving questingly through the crowds in his general direction. The Colonel wheeled smartly about – only to see emerging, from the alley down which he had run, a constable, the other minion, and in the rear the cuckolded husband, buttoning his weskit askew and inquiring thunderously about a black-avised rascal in a red coat. As heads turned and the two sets of pursuers continued to converge at random, Colonel Blood looked desperately for a bolt-hole. The gangway was before him, and as two seamen staggered on to it under the weight of a furled tarpaulin, he hesitated no longer, but used them as a shield to slip swiftly on to the ship’s crowded deck. One quick look back showed him the outraged husband and the fat gamester hailing each other over the heads of the mob; Blood pushed hurriedly past a couple of bare-footed seamen, rounded a pile of casks, and came face to face with a bawling red face in a brass-buttoned coat and cocked hat.

      “Sink an’ be damned!” it roared. “An’ how in thunder do I know where the swab o’ a surgeon should sling his hammock? ’A can sleep i’ the scuppers; ’a’ll be drunk enough not to notice! How now, sir?” it demanded of Blood. “What make ye here? We’re putting to sea, or damme! No, we’re not – not while them tarts an’ trollops are fouling my ship!” And he rolled furiously