Beauvallet

Sir Nicholas Beauvallet

Sir Nicholas Beauvallet — 'Mad Nick' to his crew — is a sea-captain of legendary nerve, heir to a line of reckless Beauvallets, and the terror of Spanish galleons. Capturing the Governor's daughter Doña Dominica, he loses his heart in a single voyage and vows to win her despite every law and border between them. His delight in danger and his refusal to admit impossibility drive the whole reckless enterprise, making him both the engine and the hazard of the tale.

Doña Dominica de Rada y Sylva

Doña Dominica de Rada y Sylva moves through the Spanish court under her aunt's watchful eye, expected to marry her oily cousin Diego and never to speak of the English corsair who once held her ship. Her pride and her honesty war with a growing, inadmissible fascination for a man her world calls a heretic and a thief. Her refusal to lie — even to protect herself from the Inquisition's suspicion — makes her the still point around which Beauvallet's dangerous courtship turns.

Joshua Dimmock

Joshua Dimmock follows Sir Nicholas into Spain with the resigned devotion of a man who has long since stopped being surprised by his master's escapades. Voluble, resourceful, and never short of an improvised tale — brigands, sumpters, a lady's shot horse — he smooths the way for Dominica when Beauvallet cannot. His unshakeable assumption that his master will walk free of any prison gives the anxious heroine, and the reader, a steadying comic counterweight.

Doña Beatrice de Carvalho

Doña Beatrice de Carvalho presides over Madrid society with an imperturbable smile, arranging her niece's marriage and observing the scandal of El Beauvallet with more amusement than alarm. She is no fool: she reads the danger of the Inquisition clearly and moves to spirit Dominica out of Madrid before suspicion hardens. Her tolerant, calculating affection for her niece makes her the one adult in the Spanish chapters who can be trusted to see the truth — and to act on it.

Don Diego de Carvalho

Don Diego de Carvalho dresses in white to match his cousin, presses roses on her, and hovers at her elbow with possessive fury, convinced that the Chevalier de Guise is no Frenchman at all. His jealousy sharpens into open accusation, and it is his reckless charge of heresy that threatens to drag Dominica before the Inquisition. Petty, proud, and dangerous in his wounded vanity, he is the domestic menace that makes Beauvallet's Spanish adventure so perilous.

Don Manuel de Rada y Sylva

Don Manuel de Rada y Sylva, broken by West Indian fever and stripped of his governorship, shields his daughter aboard the captured galleon with the last dignity of a Spanish grandee. His infirmity and diminished fortune leave Dominica exposed to the marriage market and to the Inquisition's suspicion. His presence gives the Spanish chapters their weight of fallen honour and quiet grief, and makes Dominica's loyalty to her family a real cost rather than a formality.