Publisher's Synopsis
"I am a fraud. My title, my power, my very name are not my own. How I came to be the most damned of men is set down here as my final confession. In these pages I will tell how I broke bread with Vampires and shared their friendship. In my confession I hope to explain the Great London Fire of 1666, the proliferation of plague deaths in the city, and how I came to murder an Archduke." -An excerpt of the manuscript discovered in 1967 within the false bottom of a rotten sea chest belonging to a Captain C. Johnson.In the year of our lord 1658, the Albatross was lost with all hands during a hurricane. Stories from merchant sailors describing a shadowy pirate vessel that preyed upon the ill-advised and unlucky have never been confirmed. But in this extraordinary manuscript we have the first proof of its existence, if we are to believe the adventures written by a Tom Hawkins, known to the world as the Marquis de Maintenon.