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Matthias. General Monck has won Cromwell's old army over to it, and General Montagu brings his navy to Scheveningen to take King Charles over. You have a country and a home again, my brother.' Thus ended England's eleven-year interregnum, and we exiles who had thronged every town of the Netherlands and Spanish Flanders could rejoice at our own, very personal, restorations.
    Two years later, at table in Ravensden Abbey, the same Cornelis van der Eide nodded slowly. I continued, 'Even if the king had enough Cavalier officers for all his ships, most of them would be men like me, young gentleman captains who barely know one end of a ship from the other. If he wants experience, he has to turn to Noll Cromwell's men, who are now Monck's and Montagu's. You know better than I how good some of them are, brother.'
    Cornelis nodded gravely, but said nothing. The first of the great wars between the Dutch and the English had begun ten years before, born of the perverse refusal of the Dutch to agree that English goods (plentiful) should be carried in English ships (few and expensive) rather than in Dutch hulls (many, and quite preposterously cheap). This war proved to be a very Armageddon on the North Sea, and after a few early Dutch successes, the Commonwealth's navy smashed their vaunted fleet almost into oblivion. Cornelis van der Eide had then been lieutenant on a forty-gun Zeeland ship, but in the middle of the ferocious Battle of the Gabbard Shoal, a cannon ball took off his captain's head and gave him instant and unexpected promotion. Although Cornelis had fought his ship out of danger with skill and courage, fifty of his men had died at the hands of a fleet under the same General Monck who now strutted the corridors of Whitehall as Duke of Albemarle: the man to whom the king owed his throne and who proclaimed loudly that he desired nothing more than a new war against the Dutch, thus finishing the job he had begun.
    My good-brother and I were silent for a minute or more, perhaps both thinking of the men we had commanded who were now only memories, even for the fish who had consumed them. Then my mother turned back to us from a discussion with Barcock, coughed and clapped. 'Now, Cornelis,' she said, 'what were you saying about your father becoming burgomaster?'

    We were eating suspiciously green cheese, and Cornelis was once more regaling us with the town politics of Veere, when Barcock's daughter slipped into the hall and whispered something to her father. She was the youngest of the fourteen Barcock children, and with foreknowledge of her nature, her parents might have thought twice before naming her Chastity. She was about my age, and had been in love with me since we were infants. As she turned to leave she caught my eye, winked, and smiled wantonly. Her father, happily unaware of her ill-concealed lust, and of the fact that she was known to amuse herself with a steadily rising number of swarthy lads from the valley villages, patted her fondly on the head. Then he turned and began staggering slowly over to the table.
    Reaching my mother's side, Barcock coughed loudly. 'The man Phineas Musk is here, my lady. He has a message from the earl for Captain Quinton. I commanded him to remain in the antechamber, but he has made his way to the library.' He gave another dry cough and muttered under his breath, 'I anticipate there will be several books fewer after he leaves.'
    Barcock detested Musk, the steward of my brother's town house in London. Where Barcock was every inch the dour old Puritan, Musk was a crafty, carousing rogue with a suspiciously vague past. Cornelia was convinced he had once been a highwayman on the Canterbury road, albeit on no good evidence.
    I made over-hasty apologies to my wife, my mother, and, with blessed relief, my brother-in-law, and almost sprang from my chair, such was my joy at this unexpected liberation. The library of Ravensden Abbey was a short walk away, down the corridor that had once been the east