Kate Sedley: The Tintern Treasure

I would never have been involved in the affair if the handle of Adela’s best iron cooking pot hadn’t come loose. Or if the travelling tinker hadn’t knocked so opportunely at our door the following morning. Or if the said tinker hadn’t passed through Hereford some months earlier and performed a similar repair for a certain Goody Harker. On such trivial chances does the course of my life depend. As I frequently observe to myself, it may not be other people’s fault, but it’s all too often my misfortune.

To begin with, the conversation was all between the tinker and myself. As he settled at our kitchen table to begin mending the damaged pot, he enquired what we both thought of the summer’s dramatic events. There was, of course, no need to ask what he was referring to: the bastardizing of the late King Edward IV’s children and Parliament’s subsequent offer of the crown to his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, thus deposing the boy king, Edward V, had been the talk of every ale-house, of every home, in the country and beyond.

‘Folk don’t care for it, you know,’ the man said as he opened his satchel and took out the tools of his trade, laying them in a neat row in front of him. ‘They don’t like seeing a child done out of his rights.’

‘He hasn’t been done out of his rights,’ I retorted irritably. ‘The late King Edward was already betrothed to Lady Eleanor Butler when he married Elizabeth Woodville. The Bishop of Bath and Wells has testified to the fact and he should know. He officiated at the handfasting. And in the eyes of the Church, a promise to wed is the same as a marriage, so the children are illegitimate.’

‘All right! All right!’ the tinker said with a grin. ‘No offence, I’m sure. Our new king seems to have found a partisan in you, at any rate. And I must admit I liked the look of him, myself.’

‘You’ve seen King Richard?’ Adela asked eagerly. Anything to do with royalty always commanded her attention.

‘Saw him at Oxford back in July, when he started on his progress up north. Outside Magdalen College, it were. He was being given a right enthusiastic welcome by an old fellow someone told me was the college chancellor, whatever that is. Said he’d founded the place and all. I was close enough to overhear what they were saying.’

‘And what were they saying?’

‘Dunno. They were talking in Latin. It was all Greek to me.’ The tinker guffawed loudly. (I hate people who laugh at their own jokes.) When he found we weren’t inclined to share his mirth, he continued hastily, ‘Saw him again a few days later, at Gloucester. The king, that is. There was no getting near him that time, though. That other one was there.’

‘What other one?’ I asked, although I had a good idea.

The tinker raised his head from his task and thought for a moment. ‘Some duke or other. They say he was the one what helped King Richard to his throne. But if you’d seen him and the way he was carrying on, the airs and graces he was giving himself, you could’ve been forgiven for thinking he was the one what was wearing the crown. Such importance! You’ve never seen the like!’

‘The Duke of Buckingham,’ I said, recalling uneasily my sight of the duke in King Richard’s coronation procession and the same impression I had received of a man growing rapidly too big for his breeches; a man who was perhaps wondering why, as another Plantagenet prince, he hadn’t seized power for himself. If I read the situation right, it had been no part of Buckingham’s plan to put his cousin on the throne, merely to bolster the duke’s position as lord protector and thwart his own wife’s family, the Woodvilles, from wielding too much influence. ‘Has he accompanied the king on progress?’

The tinker cursed as he dropped a rivet, then shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Talk was that His High and Mightiness was going home to his estates in Wales. Brecon way. Taking some prelate who’d been plotting against the king with him, under house arrest. Anyway, that were the story I heard.’

‘The Bishop of Ely. The prelate who’d been plotting against King Richard,’ I elucidated. ‘He was a party to Lord Hastings’ plot.’

The tinker eyed me curiously. ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘Like yourself, only what I hear as I go about my business.’ I excused myself hurriedly, and made the mistake of adding, ‘I’m a chapman by trade.’

Our guest paused yet again, this time glancing significantly around him.‘Big house for a pedlar and his wife.’

I didn’t enlighten him as to how we came by it. It was none of his business. Besides, he’d only have to ask his next customer about us and he would learn more of our affairs than we knew ourselves. Bristol was a hotbed of gossip.

‘We have three children,’ Adela told him cheerfully, as if this explained everything. My wife then proceeded to add some totally unnecessary detail (if only she hadn’t!). ‘My son, Nicholas, from my first marriage, when I lived in Hereford, Roger’s daughter from his first marriage and our son, Adam.’

‘You say you lived in Hereford?’ The tinker looked up from boring a fresh hole in the pot to take the new rivet for the handle. ‘I was there back in the spring. Or early summer. It’s not important. I did a similar job to this for a Goody Harker. Did it for nothing, too,’ he added virtuously. ‘Poor old soul, she’s fallen on hard times.’

‘Whereabouts did she live in Hereford?’ my wife asked sharply. ‘Was it in the Butchery, towards the market end?’

The tinker chewed a thumbnail.

‘I rather think it was.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, now you mention it, I’m certain of it. D’you know her?’

‘She and Goodman Harker were very kind to me after Owen, my first husband, died. I lived next to them.’

‘Well, if it’s the same goody, she’s a widow woman now. Husband died a good few years back, she told me, and she’s not found things easy since then, I reckon. Fair poverty-stricken, she is — which is why I wouldn’t take no payment for mending her pot. There! That’s done.’ He straightened his back and regarded the mazer of ale I was offering him with a glistening eye.

Adela had her purse at the ready. ‘And you must let me pay you for Goody Harker’s pot, as well,’ she offered before I could stop her. ‘You mustn’t be out of pocket for an act of kindness. No, no! I insist!’ This after the tinker had made a half-hearted — very half-hearted — attempt at refusal.

‘You’re a fool,’ I told her roundly when he had finally departed with two lots of money in his pouch. ‘Who is this woman, anyway?’

‘I’ve told you! Well, I told the tinker and I’m sure you were listening. Anne and Goodman Harker were our neighbours in the Butchery. Gerald was indeed a butcher and owned the cottage that Owen and I rented. Things must have gone terribly wrong since he died for Anne to be in such poverty now.’

Adela said no more at the time, but she was very quiet for the rest of the day — when I was at home, that is — and throughout the evening. She was also short-tempered with the children, which was unlike her, but even so, idiot that I was, I failed to see the request coming, and was completely taken aback when it did.

We had finished making love — something Adela had permitted rather than actively encouraged — and I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and feeling, as always, quite unjustifiably pleased with myself, when a quiet voice beside me asked, ‘Would you do something for me, Roger?’

I turned my head on the pillow to smile at her. ‘Of course, sweetheart. Anything.’

Rash fool that I was!