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merits, Saxby could read, the only employee on the estate with that ability, and he could cast up accounts, and woe betide any tallyman who accidentally cut too many or too few notches on his tally stick.
    Saxby came to the door and Yorke called him into the room. Seeing the stock books open on the table the foreman assumed there were questions to answer and put his broad-brimmed, high-crowned beaver hat on a chair and pulled open the top of his jerkin, hoping to cool off after his ride.
    “You didn’t go to town then, sorr.”
    “No, but Mr Alston called in with the post on his way back, and brought the news.”
    Saxby glanced up at the intonation Yorke gave the word “news”. He had already seen an opened letter (and thought he recognized the handwriting) and noticed the page torn from the accounts book and covered with what, even viewed upside-down, was obviously a list. He also knew that no ship came from England with good news for Royalists. Worse still, from a plantation’s point of view, the Dutch, becoming wary, were putting up their prices in retaliation for Cromwell’s Navigation Act. Saxby had bargained with Arabs in the bazaars of North Africa and with Levantines at the far end of the Mediterranean; he had haggled in the raucous markets of Bombay and Calcutta, but he had to admit a Dutchman drove the hardest bargain. Yet although the Hollander was clever enough to beat down a price and take every advantage of changing circumstances, he was too full of his own importance (and his own gin) to establish the trust that made him welcome back. Hollanders rarely had old and regular customers, merely new victims.
    Saxby waited for Mr Yorke to speak. The youngster was under some terrible strain, that much was certain, and Saxby, more than twice and nearly three times his age, always thought of him with the same affection he would have for a favourite nephew.
    Although an inch or two taller than himself, Saxby did not rate Mr Yorke as a tall man. He had wide shoulders, shown off to advantage by the jerkin, and his narrow hips were emphasized by the new fashion eagerly adopted out here in the tropics (and not new by now, Saxby realized) for breeches that were not padded.
    The face was thin; Mrs Judd, the cook, always complained that the master did not eat enough and looked half-starved. The high cheekbones emphasized the thinness, of course, and the nose had very little flesh on it, so that the bone was prominent, like a bird’s beak. Not a song bird, Saxby joked to himself; rather the beak of an osprey. The swarthy skin was a great help; it meant the sun turned him a deep golden brown, instead of the half-roasted beef that was the curse of Saxby’s life, with the constant peeling and the nose as red as a pepper.
    Then there was the hair, which any woman might envy: black and curly, though worn shorter than most other young Cavaliers, who liked it to brush their shoulders. Not as short as the Roundheads, though, who looked as though they were wearing basins on their heads – which, of course, was why they were called Roundheads. Pudden heads, it should be!
    As Mrs Judd said, Mr Yorke was a man who walked alone without being lonely. He could be talkative in company and had a quick wit – that alone made him unpopular when he let fly at these dreary Puritans, who regarded laughter as a sin. But he lived out here in the big house and ran this great plantation for his father without apparently needing company of his own class – a cousin, say, or another young gentleman wanting to learn how to manage an estate. The exception was Mr Alston, who must have his own similar troubles.
    Mrs Judd said the master should return to England for a season and bring back a young wife. Well, she’d stopped going on about that, what with the troubles, and she and Saxby now knew that the solution to it all – well, perhaps not the solution, but certainly the reason – was not above five miles away, in the next parish.
    Saxby stopped