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 so 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, with 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.
Up to Podcast Index
