Buccaneer Read Free Page B

will try to arrest you and a few others before going on to attack Spanish possessions with men pressed in the islands. As you have your Griffin sloop with you I know you can escape.
    “Estates can be recovered in time – these scoundrels with their long faces, constant hymn-singing and hatred of laughter and happiness, concerned only with destroying what is beautiful, worthwhile or cheerful, cannot stay in power for ever. So remember, the important thing is to stay alive, even if it means fleeing now, to fight them on another day. The people of England will eventually throw out this tyranny.
    “I do not wish to give you orders, merely to beg you not to take risks in trying to keep the plantation: orders have been given for General Venables to detain you and bring you back to England. I can give you no address and I presume you will have none for a year or two, but we have mutual friends with whom we can correspond. My prayers are for you.”
    For a few moments Ned felt like a man standing on a high wall watching his ladder crashing to the ground. Henry Sydney Broughton Yorke, sixth Earl of Ilex, and his heir George were fugitives and Ned himself was to be “detained”. What his father had euphemistically called the “northern estate”, which stretched from Godmersham to Molash, in the shadow of the North Downs, and the “southern estate”, rich sheep country also in Kent surrounding Saltwood, and including the remains of the castle in which the three knights had slept the night on their way from France to Canterbury to murder Thomas à Becket, were abandoned to Cromwell. Cromwell, the Lord Protector, Parliament, the Roundheads, the Commonwealth: the hydra had many heads.
    Where his father once sat at the head of his table at Godmersham, a Parliamentary favourite now claimed ownership: at Saltwood, a man and wife struggled with a thousand acres… And the small estate house at Ilex, across the county boundary in Sussex, was not even mentioned.
    For a few moments he pictured the Godmersham house, with its tall, patterned red brick chimneys, where he had spent much of his childhood. If he relied on his memory, it was always either spring or autumn because the great beech trees protecting the house from the west and north, and scattered over the hills and valleys forming the estate, were bright green with fresh life or like beaten copper as autumn came. And he remembered the church in which (by coincidence) there was the oldest known image of St Thomas à Becket.
    Then Saltwood came to his memory. He preferred it to Godmersham because the old castle had been his playground and as a child he frightened himself into hearing the clatter of hooves and clanking of armour as the knights rode off for Canterbury, to murder Becket at what they thought was the King’s wish. When King Edward later claimed that he had been misunderstood, the Earl of Ilex was blamed for sheltering the knights, but the Earl replied indignantly. When three knights riding directly from the Court, then in France, banged on his door and demanded food and shelter “in the King’s name”, was he to refuse them entry and be accused of treason?
    Now owls skimmed silently round the ruined walls of Saltwood castle, and no one cared about the house. No doubt the great flocks of sheep had been stolen, and Roundhead troops were probably living there and, unless exceptional men, using choice furniture for firewood and family portraits as pistol targets.
    He refused to think of the house at Ilex. The estate was small, only a few hundred acres, but it had been a favourite home for the Yorke family. He and his brother had been born there, and his mother had used it during her last few years, dying in time to avoid seeing a civil war exile her family.
    “Bad news?” Alston asked, and Yorke realized he must have been staring at the letter for a quarter of an hour or more.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “No news from England can be good these days. My father tells me