The man who could not be bought

Naples, October 1616. Alexander Donné is nineteen, a bookbinder's apprentice, and he has just done the impossible: a hundred and sixty-eight escudos raised in eight weeks, and a man bought out of the galleys of Barbary.

His other friend is still there.

Miguel de Castro can read, write and keep accounts, so he was never put to an oar. He was put in the customs house, and once a port's paperwork is in a man's head, no government sells him at any price. There is no number. There is no door that money opens.

Alexander raises sixty-one escudos anyway, from twelve people who cannot spare it. It buys nothing at all.

So he has to learn the second thing: who may sign, what they are buying, and what they are afraid of. His sister Aya comes out from Hasselt and starts checking the books. A Spanish lawyer with a cough takes rooms up the lane, comes down the three steps with a broken book and asks why five cords and not four — the first man since Alexander's master to treat him as a workman rather than a boy.

He has also come to Naples to find the man who killed his sister.

A novel about the year you find out that what is worth having is not handed out according to what anybody deserves.