Edmund Palling was a perpetual old man. So it had always seemed to Daniel. Admittedly his strategy of radical hairlessness made it difficult to guess his age. But he'd seemed an old man running around with Drake during the Civil War, and as an old man he had marched in Cromwell's funeral procession. As an old trader he had frequently showed up at Stourbridge Fair peddling this or that, and had walked into Cambridge to inflict startling visitations on Daniel. Old Man Palling had attended the memorial service for Drake, and during his years living in London, Daniel had occasionally bumped into this elderly man on the streets of London.