Acting upon this conclusion, Sunderland sent out his kinsman, Lord Julian Wade, with some commissions made out in blank, and full directions as to the course which the Secretary considered it desirable to pursue and yet full discretion in the matter of pursuing them.  The crafty Sunderland, master of all labyrinths of intrigue, advised his kinsman that in the event of his finding Blood intractable, or judging for other reasons that it was not desirable to enlist him in the King’s service, he should turn his attention to the officers serving under him, and by seducing them away from him leave him so weakened that he must fall an easy victim to Colonel Bishop’s fleet.

The Royal Mary — the vessel bearing that ingenious, tolerably accomplished, mildly dissolute, entirely elegant envoy of my Lord Sunderland’s — made a good passage to St. Nicholas, her last port of call before Jamaica.  It was understood that as a preliminary Lord Julian should report himself to the Deputy-Governor at Port Royal, whence at need he might have himself conveyed to Tortuga.  Now it happened that the Deputy-Governor’s niece had come to St. Nicholas some months earlier on a visit to some relatives, and so that she might escape the insufferable heat of Jamaica in that season.  The time for her return being now at hand, a passage was sought for her aboard the Royal Mary, and in view of her uncle’s rank and position promptly accorded.

Lord Julian hailed her advent with satisfaction.  It gave a voyage that had been full of interest for him just the spice that it required to achieve perfection as an experience.  His lordship was one of your gallants to whom existence that is not graced by womankind is more or less of a stagnation.  Miss Arabella Bishop — this straight up and down slip of a girl with her rather boyish voice and her almost boyish ease of movement — was not perhaps a lady who in England would have commanded much notice in my lord’s discerning eyes.  His very sophisticated, carefully educated tastes in such matters inclined him towards the plump, the languishing, and the quite helplessly feminine.  Miss Bishop’s charms were undeniable.  But they were such that it would take a delicate-minded man to appreciate them; and my Lord Julian, whilst of a mind that was very far from gross, did not possess the necessary degree of delicacy.  I must not by this be understood to imply anything against him.

It remained, however, that Miss Bishop was a young woman and a lady; and in the latitude into which Lord Julian had strayed this was a phenomenon sufficiently rare to command attention.  On his side, with his title and position, his personal grace and the charm of a practised courtier, he bore about him the atmosphere of the great world in which normally he had his being — a world that was little more than a name to her, who had spent most of her life in the Antilles.  It is not therefore wonderful that they should have been attracted to each other before the Royal Mary was warped out of St. Nicholas.  Each could tell the other much upon which the other desired information.  He could regale her imagination with stories of St. James’s — in many of which he assigned himself a heroic, or at least a distinguished part — and she could enrich his mind with information concerning this new world to which he had come.