Princess of the Blood: A Pirate Tale

By Roxana Malaventura

Captain Roxana Malaventura is a dangerous woman, a condemned pirate and an unreliable narrator. Vengeful, ruthless, capricious and possibly quite mad, she dines and dresses superbly while pursuing the most evil man alive and accidentally rescuing an actual Princess. The Spanish Main is littered with human flotsam – the battered remnants of the 17th Century's European wars – and from the wreckage Captain Malaventura has assembled the extraordinary crew that sails her extraordinary vessel, the Hecate, a copper-bottomed brigantine of fourteen guns.
She invites the Reader to sail with her, scarcely aware of her own desperate need of a companion, one she may trust with her dark and startling secrets, but beware – her deck is no place for the faint-hearted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649692795

Book preview

I   The Governor’s Study

What manner of man was he, Milord? Let me tell you.

Corpulent he was, and given neither to washing nor grooming. Lice were in his hair, gravy in his beard, rum on his breath, mildew in his fingernails, blasphemy on his tongue and lechery in his heart. His weskit was mis-buttoned, his breeches ill-fitting and his linen decaying. His breath was foul; his manners worse; his wig was putrid, powdered with flour and infested with vermin.

In such state, Milord, the wretch thought to board me. I, alone, having neither father nor brother, nor any gentleman to defend me, found myself in the most vexing dilemma. Submission to him I could not contemplate, so must need choose betwixt leaping over the gunwale to trust to whatever mercy the greasy waters of the port might offer, or, pitting a woman’s strength against a monstrous assailant, endeavour somehow to defend myself.

Frozen by terror and indecision, alone on the deck I stood as the filthy villain lurched towards me, muttering obscenities modesty forbids me to recount. One grubby hand clasped a bottle of rum, while the other, fumbling inside his greasy breeches, produced from therein the organ, bloated and monstrous, which is ever a virtuous woman’s deepest dread.

Closer and closer he came, so close that the very stink of him filled my terrified nostrils – I longed to fly from him, Milord, but my petrified limbs would not obey my mind’s command. Scarcely could I breathe, Milord, and as his shadow fell across me, my knees began to fail. Stooping to set his bottle on the deck, he unsheathed his cutlass. At that very instant, the swell (which must have been rising, though it had escaped my notice), caused Orion to pitch quite suddenly. At this unexpected motion, the villain staggered backward a pace and my nerves recovered their sense. With renewed energy I turned and ran for my life, and more.

As I fled, the hem of my skirts entangled itself in the ‘midships pinrail-post, pitching me headlong on the deck. Vainly I struggled against the enclosing masses of fabric, to no avail. Planting upon my back a naked and noisome foot, so long unshod it felt as hard and weathered as the hoof of Satan himself, the brute pinned me to the deck and with the point of his cutlass began to saw at the ribbons lacing my bodice.

Pity! Pity! I sobbed.

Aye, pretty’s the word, and no mistake, was his slurred reply, adding deficiency of hearing to the faults earlier enumerated.

With the mad strength that only desperation lends, and with the easing of the laces wrought by his notched and rusting blade, a final effort, a terrible rending of taffeta and a frenzied lunge released me from my encumbering gown. With hot tears of shame stinging my cheeks, one last dash brought me to the door of the Great Cabin – I flung myself within and bolted the door, leaving the vile cur to scratch and rage impotently against it.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I searched about the cabin, illuminated only by a few slanting shafts of pale moonlight, and caught sight of my reflection in the looking glass that Commodore Barnet kept there for the purpose (I could only presume) of admiring himself in his uniform. With what dismay, Milord, did I view the mirror’s image. Naked but for my torselette and drawers, with one shoe gone I knew not whither, and my hair, my hair so carefully dressed by dear Polly only hours before, looking like a madwoman’s. Desperately I cast about the cabin for some garment wherewith to clothe myself, but none could I find.

Only, in a corner, were the Commodore’s black top-boots. He is, as Milord knows, a man of no great stature, and it struck me that his foot and mine might be almost of a size. Kicking off my remaining slipper (a precious little thing, green and scarlet brocade, kitten-heeled with a dainty gilt rosette at the toe), I pulled on the Commodore’s boots. I cannot readily describe the relief afforded by the sensation of glossy leather about my limbs, but I beg Milord to understand that, shod thus, I seemed almost clothed, was sensible of an Amazon’s prowess, and felt the terror inspired by the assailant still beating at the portal, much diminished.

But beating at the portal he still was, and I saw that the weathered timber would not long withstand the blows of his cutlass. Even as this thought formed in my head, the panels of the door began to yield to his ignoble blade. At that very instant my eye fell on a pistol, lying amidst the clutter on the chart-table. Snatching it up, I drew back the hammer and saw to my infinite relief that the pan was primed. I was, as Milord knows, raised in the Colonies, so am familiar with the use of firearms, though I had of course never in anger wielded one. Once again, I discovered myself vexed by dilemma: my upbringing told me that I must, to safeguard the virtue that is the irreplaceable gift of heaven, turn the weapon against my own breast, while instinct and outrage made me long to see the life’s blood spurt from him who would rob me of that very gift.

Retreating as far from the door as possible, I pressed the ice-cold muzzle against my bosom and began to pray, even as the cabin door was breached. The pirate’s arm appeared; his fingers fumbled for the latch, and sprang it open. The prayer died upon my lips as I turned the pistol from my own heart and levelled it at his.

Not one step more, hell-spawn! I cried, in a voice I could barely recognise as my own. His slobbering lips distorted by a twisted grin of mockery, the villain replied: D’ye think it right for a lady to be playin’ with fire-arms? Hand it to me, lest ye hurt yerself. With that he began to advance towards me. Not one more step, I said! I will blow your black and shrivelled heart out of your chest and straight to Hell, you vicious, lecherous, misbegotten scum!

At that, he paused for a moment; Ye’d never shoot, yer blood’s too thin and ladyloike for such.

The roar, the blinding flash and belching smoke startled and dazed me as I discharged the weapon, for I expected to see him fall dead the instant the trigger was pulled. Instead, bellowing like a whipped bullock, the blackguard reeled backward through the door and commenced to writhe upon the deck. Inexperience, over-agitation, and unfamiliarity with the weapon had conspired to direct my aim, not through his heart as I had quite profanely hoped, but at the organs of generation, to which part of his anatomy his hands were now clasped.

Snatching up the cutlass from the deck where it fell, I stood over his prostrate form and cried, in a voice echoing through the port, Get off this ship, you scurvy dog, and back to the ditch you were born in! Faint-hearted, craven cur that he is, with pathetic apologies muttered through gritted teeth, like a thrashed mongrel, he slithered to the gang-plank, and away onto the wharf.

I later learned, Milord, that he managed to crawl back to his squalid dwelling, there to be nursed by the evil crone he calls his wife. They say she healed him, not out of kindness, for her flint-like heart would admit no such sentiment, but to prolong the exercise of her remorseless and lingering vengeance.

I am told that his wound was to organs which were vital not to its owner, but to his hope of offspring. My shot had destroyed those fleshy orbs which are at once the origin of life and the seat of the very urge that had propelled him to assault me.

After this adventure, Milord, I resolved henceforth to wear a man’s boots when aboard, and to practise my marksmanship.

His Excellency the Governor of Jamaica sat opposite me at an immense table. Withdrawing from his sleeve a spotless white handkerchief, he sat for a full minute polishing his lorgnette in silence.

Behind him King George peered over us from a coronation portrait, looking distinctly uncomfortable, perched in his Garter robes on the edge of an over-large chair. His majesty was not a handsome man and he seemed to my eye to be a poor copy of a rather pedestrian original.

At last, when the Governor decided that he had sufficiently digested my narrative or that his lorgnette was sufficiently clean, he opened a mahogany writing-case whence he produced some papers.

Signorita Malaventura, he began, I have here two documents. The first is your confession, which you will sign, and which I shall retain as surety against treachery. The second is a Letter of Marque, over His Majesty’s own seal, by which you, your ship and your crew are commissioned to the King’s service as privateers, to prey upon the ships, ports and plantations of the French and Spanish with neither let nor hindrance. How do you say?

Does Your Excellency have a particular objective in mind?

Young Lady, he replied, leaving his seat and crossing to a credenza made in the style and proportions of a Grecian temple, there is, as it happens, a certain vessel. She flies no flag, and neither her name nor her captain’s is known, though rumours abound. What I can tell you– here the Governor poured two glasses of sack and lowered his voice to a growl –is that this ship arrived in these waters without warning; no man who has laid eyes on her has lived to tell of it, except a few lunatic ravings, and her captain is a bloodthirsty rogue who leaves behind him only a trail of blasted hulks and rotting corpses. Will you take this warrant or not?

"Should I refuse?’

Then you shall hang.

And if I require a few days to consider your proposal?

You shall spend them in my prison, where a great many of your bitterest enemies are housed. Regrettably, as His Majesty’s resources provide no separate accommodation for prisoners of the fair sex, I can neither offer you privacy nor guarantee you safety.

How may I know you are to be trusted? I asked.

Young Lady, the Governor replied, placing a wine-glass beside me and puffing his chest, my family has sat in the House of Lords since the battle of Bosworth Field and no stain upon my name or honour has ever gone unanswered. My word is my bond. While uttering these words, His Excellency returned to his chair, dipped a quill into an ivory inkstand, and offered it across the table.

What of provisions? I asked, "I am a poor woman and Hecate ’s larders are empty, her cordage rotten and her magazine bare. Will this warrant fill them? With what coin may I engage a crew to sail her?"

Withdrawing a small key from within the folds of lace encircling his throat, the Governor opened a brass-bound chest that sat beside his chair. From within it he produced a purse, and, up-ending it upon his desk, poured forth a glittering pile of silver. With this, he said, you may empty half the brothels in Tortuga and thereby procure a crew as good as any in these waters, with plenty left to victual and arm that little vessel of yours, fit to sail against the King’s enemies. Now sign.

With what resource I know not, I took the proffered quill in an untrembling hand, and perused the list of my supposed crimes – the most conspicuous were whoredom, heresy, lechery, piracy, apostasy, murder (conspired at, attempted, and accomplished), pillage and arson. I knew at once that this document was my death-warrant a dozen times over, but at its foot I signed my name. By some spark of bravado I even gave the pen a ladylike flourish and handed the page back across his desk.

Taking the confession, folding and sealing it with black wax, the Governor handed me, as though it were an invitation to his box at the opera, my Letter of Marque, as it is called – a Royal Warrant. Raising his glass and leering salaciously over its rim, His Excellency proposed a toast – to ‘success’. A glimpse into his open writing-case teased my eye, and rising, replied, To the King!

His annoyance almost audible, the Governor rose, turned to face the monarchical portrait and raised his glass obediently while I leaned across the table for a better view of the contents of his writing-case.

Turning back to face me, His Excellency again raised his glass and, with his eyebrows set at an angle he may have imagined to be alluring, asked whether I desired anything further of him. I replaced my glass upon the table untouched (I detest sack and didn’t much fancy the King), made a curtsey and departed.

Having entered his study a pirate and a fugitive, I left it a Privateer in His Majesty’s service.

II   Of My State and Person

Decency forbids narration of the events leading to the interview I have just described, while common sense demands a description of the circumstances enfolding it. But, dear Reader, you are first owed an explanation of my state and person, for if you have taken the trouble to follow this story, even up to this point, you must surely wonder whom you have allowed into your library. If you can bear the company of a person, a subject (though, it must be admitted, seldom a loyal one) of King George the First, a condemned traitress and pirate, then sign on and sail the Spanish Main with me, for I am Captain Roxana Malaventura, scourge of the Spanish Main. If you cannot, cast this book aside and return to your humdrum life, for I am Roxana Malaventura just the same, and my adventure will continue just as well without you.

Tortuga is an island, too small for the English, the French, the Dutch or the Spanish to fight hard for, but too well situated for any of ‘em to leave in the others’ hands. It lies off the coast of Hispaniola, was discovered by Christopher Columbus, or Cristoforo Colón, or Chaim Cohen (he introduced himself under whatever name he seemed to think best suited his company) and started its journey through history with a population of well-fed and contented cannibals. In their good-natured way they helped Columbus build a small colony, one of the very first in the New World (though he still believed he was in India), where dysentery soon broke out. Within years this and other European innovations brought the native people to the brink of extinction, in which awkward position they remain.

For a century and-a-half, Tortuga roughly managed to support a population, ebbing and flowing like the tide, of European settlers. United only by being generally fugitives from their own countries, immigrants from every sea-port in Europe came to try their luck. Decimation of the indigenous workforce was swiftly rectified by the importation of kidnapped Africans, and soon there bloomed healthy crops of sugar-cane, tobacco, slaves and pirates. The island’s ownership fluctuated according to the fortunes of war – the Thirty Years’ War, the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the Spanish Succession, and so-on down to the War of the Reunions and the Barretinas’ Revolt. For much of the seventeenth century the distractions of their own Civil War kept the English at home, while the French and Spanish busied themselves colouring-in maps of the Known World. Poor little Tortuga was always on the margin, so a succession of Spanish Governors evicted a succession of French settlers, and vice-versa, for decades. At one stage the English got involved; they tried to break the sequence by hanging the Governor’s chain around the neck of someone (I forget his name) who was actually a Frenchman. He soon proved more loyal to his birthplace than his benefactor, and returned the island to the French. Meanwhile, innumerable Royal Decrees, treaties and Acts of Parliament fostered piracy by abolishing it. Royal Navy squadrons and flotillas of French men o’war cruised the Caribbean for years, ostensibly hunting pirates but inevitably broadsiding each other upon encounter. Most of the survivors, fit for no regular profession, of course became pirates. Those who did not found service in the ‘triangular’ trans-Atlantic trade, carrying Africans to the cane-plantations of the West Indies, molasses to the distilleries in the American colonies and rum to the taverns of Europe. Their races and nationalities were as mingled and muddled as the breeds in a pack of stray dogs and I swear I never served on a vessel where a common language was spoken from one deck to the next.

The Bermuda Islands have been held by the English for years, even though they were discovered by a Spanish sailor – a Captain Bermudéz – in about 1500. He claimed them for Spain without ever setting foot ashore, being too lubberly to cross the reef that surrounds ‘em. He must have intended to return, for, as no Spaniard travels far from a slice of jamon, he disembarked a population of pigs. Eventually a meagre population of rogues and misfits took a foothold, subsisting mainly, as far as I can tell, on pork descended from Captain Bermudéz’ original cargo, which they roasted over hearths known locally as boucans, so these villains became known as boucaniers or, in English, buccaneers. Most were sailors deprived of useful employment by the outbreak of peace in the nineties, and an attempt by a Spanish governor to rid himself of them by exterminating the pigs of course provoked them to piracy, a profession for which they were as well inclined as they were qualified.

Sailing almost due South from the Bermudas, about two hundred and fifty leagues, a lucky sailor might make Puerto Rico. This pest-ridden place was discovered only a few years earlier, by Columbus himself. Chris was working for the Queen of Spain at the time so as quick as you could say Inquisition the population of happy natives was exterminated by baptism, typhoid, gunshot and similar European introductions. A flock of Spanish settlers soon arrived to replace the natives, having themselves been cast out of their own lands by the wars against the Moors. Among them, in fact the first Governor, was one of the most deplorable villains I have ever met – a money-grubbing mass-murderer by the name of Juan Ponce de Léon. Acting on a rumour of untold riches, he sailed two hundred and fifty leagues west-by-nor’west from Rico, to a disease-ridden swampland he decided to call Florida. They say he was looking for La Fuente de la Juventud – the Fountain of Youth – but I don’t believe a word of it. La Fuente does not exist – I know this for certain because I am one of the few people to have seen it.

Here’s the interesting thing – if one were to sail another two hundred and fifty leagues north-by-nor’east from Florida, one would find oneself right back in the Bermudas. If one’s chart were marked smartly it would show a nice, neat equilateral triangle – the so-called Bermuda Triangle – that ill-explored zone of inexplicable weather, unreliable wireless reception and temporal anomaly.

The island of Tortuga lies along one leg of that triangle and at the very centre of this tale.

One of the things you were taught at school was that the angles of a triangle always add up to exactly one hundred and eighty degrees. True enough, if you draw your triangle on a flat piece of paper. Draw it on a globe and you will always find a degree or two left over, so the corners of the triangle are just a little bit untidy. In those ragged corners are hidden the leftover fragments of lost times and distances, folded like a butterfly’s wing in its chrysalis.

Another thing they taught you, if you had any sort of education at all, was the so-called Coriolis effect. It’s a figment of the Earth’s rotation that makes winds and ocean currents go round in spirals, clockwise south of the Line, anticlockwise north of it. There are a couple of other things they probably neglected to teach you: the Coriolis effect is really all about frames of reference – it’s about apparent motion relative to an observer, and it is not only the winds and waves that feel its effects – everything that moves feels 'em. Yes, dear Reader, there are tides in Space and storms in Time. If you want all the details, go and look them up in another book; for the purposes of this one, all you need to know is that lines on a chart are never as straight as they seem. A Navigator with the proper gift can predict the path of a pea rolling across a gramophone record or the resting-place of a marble on a roulette-wheel. With the right wind, the right ship and the right kind of compass, he can steer through the frayed corners of the Bermuda Triangle into places that no chart shows, and times no history records.

A really clever Navigator, maybe one in a thousand, can steer out of ‘em again, but the conjuncture of points of arrival and departure is somewhat arbitrary.

My name is Roxana Malaventura. ‘Tis not the name I was born with, but it has served well and because I made it up myself I can change it whenever I need. My mother was a pirate; they say the most ruthless cut-throats in the Caribbean would cross themselves at the very mention of her name. She was a strapping big red-haired Irish lass who went to the Colonies as a girl; hard times led her into what you might call undesirable company. She also happened to be a crack shot and pretty handy with a cutlass. She sailed with Captain Jack Rackham, Calico Jack, that is, aboard the Revenge , until they were ambushed by one of Queen Anne’s ships when Jack was asleep and the crew were drunk. As Calico Jack was being led off to the gallows, Mother said to him, Sorry to see you away, but had ye fought like a man ye’d not now be hang’d like a dog.

She was sentenced too, but like any sensible woman she said she was pregnant – pleading her belly, they call it – and they locked her away in a Jamaican prison until her time came so the Queen would have no innocent blood on Her Britannic Conscience.

The history books will tell you there is no record, neither of her release nor her execution – it’s as though she just disappeared.

My father was an engineer of sorts; he worked for Rutherford at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. It was my father’s hands that made the apparatus for Rutherford’s famous Gold Foil Experiment– Geiger and Marsden got all the credit, of course. This was the gadget that disproved the old-fashioned idea that atoms were like plum-puddings, by shooting alpha-particles through them and watching them scatter. Ordinary folk could make no sense of the results, but ‘tis all about frames of reference relative to the observer, and my father was one who could predict the path of a pea rolling across a gramophone record aboard a rowboat in a gale.

The discerning Reader will at this point, I do not doubt, be considering the circumstances of my mother and father finding each other on the same page somewhat puzzling. Does the Reader not recall my earlier mention of temporal anomaly? No-one can walk through a prison wall, but a gifted Navigator, with the right kind of compass, can steer a course through a slice of time when the wall is not there. I am at this moment at my writing desk in the great cabin of the good ship Hecate ; as I dip my pen into the ink, I pause to consider in what order I shall set down the events I now relate. I, I alone, choose whether cause follows effect or precedes it, for the world is only as each of us perceives it, though each may perceive it differently. I make no excuse and will offer no explanation; strict chronology is ever relative and though I have sailed seven seas in search of one, I have found no boundary betwixt fact and fiction. This story is as true as any, truer than most, and I have not changed a single name because no-one is innocent.

III    The Brigantine Hecate

I had lied to the Governor. My ship, Hecate, was fairly provisioned, her rigging in good order, her magazine stocked and her crew well-trained; 'well-found' is the proper expression. I beg the Reader’s forgiveness for having lied about a few other details – the man I had neutered was no stranger – he was John Cockson, a criminal of the commonest sort, available for hire and capable of the blackest infamy. Who had sent him against me I did not know, but against whomever it was I now swear the deadliest enmity. I had earlier persuaded Cockson that I might buy him off – whether in coin or in bed I allowed him to wonder. The black-hearted cur was neither the first nor, by a long way, the best to make the mistake of thinking he might have me, my blood and his reward as well.

I must also assure you that had I aimed my pistol at his heart, it is his heart I would have struck. My unique resources provide me access to firearms of every sort, but because I had chosen to enact these events in the early eighteenth century, the only ammunition in ready supply made the flintlock pistol the best choice. With only one shot available, a woman’s marksmanship ought to be precise, and I am ever diligent in rehearsing mine.