Bernard Knight - The Tinner's corpse

‘Not a very good bodyguard, then,’ sniggered the fat priest.

Walter frowned. ‘You’d better not say that in his hearing. I’m told he’s not well endowed with either patience or good humour.’

After this mild rebuke they carried on eating in silence, Knapman covertly watching his wife. Of late she had become more withdrawn and these long silences were becoming too common for his liking. He was no fool and knew well enough that when a man of forty-three took on a much younger woman, especially one so attractive, he did so at his peril.

Knapman was rich, and he was handsome enough, in his way, a big, powerful man with a clean-shaven, square face topped by rather springy hair of a dark yellow that as yet showed no sign of grey. Yet there was no denying that the age difference between them was an ever-present threat. The old bull was as virile as ever, but he had to be constantly wary of younger ones trying to displace him.

For this past month, he had seen Joan’s mind receding from him, and though she denied any problem or unhappiness, he sensed that the first flush of their new marriage had rapidly faded. When he first wooed her, then made her his bride, she was warm and passionate enough, though she had always been publicly reserved and undemonstrative. Behind their hands other wives said about her that ‘still waters run deep’. But in the past weeks, though she submitted easily enough to him in the bed upstairs in the glazed solar, she gave a passive performance, with none of her previous enthusiasm — although he suspected that even that might often have been feigned. He sighed as he looked at her now, her eyes resolutely downcast. There was nothing he could do either to improve her mood or to squash the wriggling worm of suspicion that increasingly nibbled away at him.

As the silent meal progressed, the possible causes of her disaffection came unbidden to his mind. He over-indulged her, he knew, like a typical older husband with more money than sense. She lacked for nothing in the way of clothes, trinkets or servants, and he had more than enough insight to know that his affluence and generosity had won her to him, not his dashing good looks or noble blood: he had worked his way up from being a mere tinner. The answer that stared him in the face was another man and, for the hundredth time, he went through the possible candidates.

There could not be many, for although Chagford was a busy town, with hundreds of tinners coming for the coinage and merchants from all over England and even the Continent, it was more likely to be some local resident who would have had the opportunity to steal her heart — and her body. Joan was a keen horsewoman and, with her maid and one of their grooms, spent much of her time riding, with the opportunity to meet and visit other people. Her chaperones could undoubtedly be tricked or bribed, and he determined to interrogate his grooms as to whom she met on her many excursions. Though Chagford was small, Exeter was less than three hours away and sometimes she went to stay there for a few days with his twin brother Matthew, who handled the disposal and export of his finished tin.

Sometimes she went back to her old home town of Ashburton, to stay with her aunt and cousins. Even though these places offered the possibility of assignations for her, an inner voice kept insinuating that the problem was likely to be nearer home, and the name of Stephen Acland kept sliding into his mind unbidden.

‘Have you really no idea who may have killed your man?’

The sudden question from the priest jerked Walter back to the present, but before he could marshal his thoughts, his mother-in-law spoke, her head stuck out on her thin neck like an angry gander. ‘That mad Saxon, that’s who it was! I saw him once, here in the town square, at the last coinage, ranting and raving. He’s not fit to be let loose on decent folk.’

‘He wasn’t loose after that, Mother. We had him locked in Lydford gaol for a couple of months, after he threw over the weighing-scales and tried to kick the assay clerk off his stool.’

‘Is he crazy enough to kill?’ asked the priest.

‘Who knows? A maniac like Aethelfrith is unpredictable. He hates all those with Norman blood in their veins, which is a goodly proportion of us even after a century or more. And he especially hates Norman tinners — but apart from that episode at the coinage, he’s never been violent.’

At that moment Harold came in looking troubled, and went to speak softly in his master’s ear. ‘There’s a stranger come to the kitchen door, a huge wild fellow with ginger hair who looks as if he’s just walked through a haystack. Says he has a message for you from the King’s coroner.’

‘Does he want to speak with me?’

‘He says he’ll not disturb you at your table, sir, but wishes to leave a message that Sir John de Wolfe is holding an inquest on Henry of Tunnaford in the morning. He wishes your attendance, as you were the dead man’s master.’

Knapman nodded. ‘Tell him I know of it already, as the parish priest is with me. He can tell the crowner that I will be there without fail.’

As the steward left the room, Walter thought wryly that at least it would take his mind off his wife for a few hours.

Telling the time in a place without a monastic house was an exercise in reading the sun, moon and stars, and was often hampered by the weather. Livestock seemed to have a better appreciation of the hours: the first cock-crow, the restlessness of cows at milking time and the roosting of fowls towards dusk. Cathedrals and abbeys marked off nine Holy Offices by ringing their bells from midnight until evening, but a parish church gave fewer signals. Often irregular and certainly unreliable, they depended on the conscientiousness or even sobriety of the local priest.

However, Chagford’s Paul Smithson was a dependable man. He would not have held his post if it had been otherwise; both Walter Knapman and Hugh Wibbery, who funded much of the local church’s activities, were too astute to have some deadbeat foisted on them by Bishop Marshal in Exeter. Five years ago, the ancient wooden church, dating from Saxon times, had partly collapsed in a storm. Rather than patch it up yet again, Knapman and the lord of the manor had donated sufficient silver to rebuild it in stone and had persuaded most of the tinners in their district to contribute. The result was a larger but still modest building with a low castellated tower over the junction of nave and choir.

Though he was but a paid vicar, employed by an absentee prebendary to look after the living for him, Smithson was conscientious and saw to it that his sexton tolled the bell in Knapman’s new tower. He rang it before morning Mass soon after dawn and for Vespers in the mid-afternoon. On Sundays, there were more services and more bells, but on workdays the population had to make their best guess as to other hours. The nearest clock was in Germany, and the only other timepieces were the graduated candles and sand-glass in the church.

Early on this Thursday morning, within an hour of the sexton’s heaving on his bell-rope, those who had attended the service emerged to join a crowd of people who were thronging into the churchyard, a large corner site just along the high street from the square. Two alehouses and an inn sat on the opposite side of the street to the church, which was in the angle of a bend in one of the tracks leading down towards Moretonhampstead. A few stalls sat along the edge of the street, their owners blessing the new coroner for an unexpected increase in trade, as the jurors, witnesses and curious spectators flocked past and bought fresh bread, pasties and winter-withered apples to sustain them during the coming entertainment.

Chagford was not a typical town in that its prosperity depended more on the minerals dug from the moor than the ubiquitous agriculture that sustained most other hamlets and vills. The metal was mostly tin, but there was also a little silver and lead. Most of its population were freemen and although there were the usual strip-fields around the town and girdling every nearby village, many families owed no fee-service to the various lords. Instead they were employed and paid by the tin-masters, or worked their own solitary claims.