Buccaneer Read Free

owners and servants, boots, spades and linen, silk and lace for the wives. Holland was the next choice – but Cromwell went to war with the Dutch for two years.
    Swiftly the balance of power in the Barbados Assembly had changed: the Roundhead planters were bitter and resentful, but backed by renegade Royalists. Reinforced with Parliament’s orders, they set out to break the Royalists. Some of them, like Wilson, saw it as a perfect opportunity to repair at practically no cost early mistakes in the choice of plantations or to buy, for next to nothing, well-run Royalist estates to replace or extend their own.
    Now, Yorke thought bitterly, the island was divided: Cavalier and Roundhead clung to what they had. He was still standing in the heat of the sun and the indentured servant was beginning to look uncomfortable, thinking that the master was checking on his work.
    He walked back to the house, glancing at the bronze sundial on its plinth in front of the stone steps leading up to the front door. Eight o’clock, and the sun strengthening.
    “Henry,” he called, “I’ll have my horse!”
    He walked through to his bedroom and went to the pewter handbasin which still held the water he had used for washing and shaving: the present drought made water as precious as imported brandy and it had to be used over and over again, until it stank. He wiped his face and washed his hands with soapberry, the flesh of the fruit sliced into a dish of water and making suds. He felt his chin and cheeks, although he had shaved carefully, as if knowing that eventually he would go into town. Then he straightened his hose, saw that the toes of his shoes were scratched and changed them for a newer pair.
    Suddenly in the distance he heard hoofbeats drumming on the parched earth, as though on cobblestones, and Henry called:
    “Mist’ Alston sir, on his way from town.”
    It was easy to guess: John came along a lane from the south if calling on his return from Bridgetown; he rode along an opposite lane if coming from his own plantation to the north in St Lucy’s Parish, surrounding Six Men Fort.
    “Be ready to take his horse,” Yorke said, less as an order than an indication he had heard, and went out to meet him.
    His closest friend on the island, John Alston, was hot and angry, sliding off his horse with only a perfunctory nod to Henry. “’Lo Ned, I’ve just come from town.” He waved a worn leather satchel. “A single letter for you. Damned hot, this sun; let’s go inside.”
    Alston was a slim, sallow-faced bachelor who seemed never to be affected by the heat. Certainly he was not a man to gallop eight miles unnecessarily on a hot day, having more respect for his horse. The all-too-casual “Let’s go inside” hinted that his news from Bridgetown was private; not to be spoken aloud in front of the servants who would later gossip far into the night, talking in a dozen different accents from Irish to Welsh, Scots to the quick twang of the city of London.
    Yorke led the way into the house. It was large but sparsely furnished: back in England it would have been likened to a series of large cells fit for monks, but here in Barbados it was a bachelor’s house, to become a married man’s home with the addition of more chairs, extra shelves, a larger bed and perhaps some additional work in the kitchen.
    Apart from that, it was a regular high-ceilinged plantation house with thick outer walls of coral stone, the inner walls being simply light wooden partitions seven feet high and leaving a space above so that a cooling wind from the windows blew through the house and into every room. The heavy double shutters, now clipped back, were made of bullet wood, fine-grained, heavy and tough, proof against musket balls and favoured for fiddle bows. Each half had a loophole cut in it, useful if the house was ever attacked by an enemy, and if it rained a source of a breeze, because the windows were not fitted with glass. The thick coral stone walls, the