Читать книгу Princess of the Blood - Roxana Malaventura - Страница 5

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.