The Pyrates. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ was rumoured that the King himself had intervened, having seen her in Newgate and done a quick double-take before observing that they couldn’t hang a female who looked like that, it would be criminal, etc., etc. But as she heard the sentence Black Sheba screamed with rage, and clashed her fetters at the bar.

      “Damn your mercy!” she snarled. “I’ve been a slave! I’d rather die, you foul shrivelled bastard, you!”

      At which Jeffreys, with commendable restraint, had hurled himself frothing about the bench, bawling at her:

      “Why, so ye shall, ye vile black bitch – so ye shall, in God’s good time! And I trust they’ll have lashed every inch of hide off your foul carcase first, thou wanton, smelly, perverse slut, thou! Take her down, take her out, take her anywheres so she be away!” And he had thrown his wig at her in his passion, calling her beldame, whore, slattern, harlot and jigaboo, but since Sheba had given him back cuckold, honky, pimp, snake, and faggot, the spectators decided it was a draw, and ought to be replayed. Sheba was dragged back to her cell, and there she was, pacing and snarling, waiting to be haled off to East Indian bondage, while …

      Colonel Blood reluctantly tore his eyes away from the cleavage of the buxom serving-wench who was hanging admiringly over the back of his chair, considered his cards, and glanced, sighing, at the fat, ugly, gloating, richly-dressed gull who sat across the table in the taproom of The Prospect of Whitby. Blood was looking slightly better than when we last saw him, having shaved, found a clean shirt, and apparently spent his last five pence on a shampoo and set. He had also acquired a lace jabot, an embroidered red coat with a sword worn modishly through the pocket, and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. (Spectacles? What have we here?)

      “Come on, come on, sir!” cried the fat man. “Ya’ play, damme!”

      Blood sighed again and played the king of spades; the fat man played the queen and gleefully nudged his crony, another podgy vulgarian. They eyed the pile of guineas on the table; money for jam, they were thinking.

      “Ya’ last card, sir! Hey?” cried Fatso. “What, sir? Come, sir! Eh, sir?”

      “Just the seven o’ clubs,” said Blood innocently, and faced what is usually the duddest card you can hold at picquet. The fat man and his friend gaped, and swore, and the fat man dashed down his useless king of diamonds. Blood raked in the cash almost apologetically, removed his spectacles and tucked them in his sleeve, rose, kissing the serving-wench lightly on the cheek, and flipped a guinea down her ample frontage.

      “Blast me vitals!” cried the fat chap. “How – how, sir, did ye guess I’d sloughed the ace o’ clubs? What? Hey?”

      “Irish instinct, me old joy,” said Blood, winking at the wench. “My mother was frightened by a knave of hearts.”

      “The fiend’s own luck!” groaned the fat man.

      “Devil a bit,” said Blood. “All my luck’s reserved for love, eh, sweetheart?” And he squeezed the wench again, bade his opponents an affable good day, and sauntered upstairs whistling “Come lasses and lads”, jingling his winnings. There he turned into a bedroom, where a dark and languid lady, slightly past her prime, extended a plump hand to him from the froth of lace which surrounded her as she reclined among the pillows, purring amorously.

      “Dah-ling!” she breathed, and Blood gallantly slipped on to the bed, kissing ardently up her arm to her buxom shoulders and bosom, at which she reproved him coyly, and then began to eat his ear, murmuring hungrily: “I vow ye’ve been away from me so long, I thought ye had forgot your dear little pigeon,” and she tried to drag him under the sheets.

      “A mere half-hour, ye fascinating 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, СКАЧАТЬ