Read Online The Tinner's Corpse by Bernard Knight - Free Book Online

the size of Devon,’ grunted the priest, hacking some more flesh from the fowl to lay on the widow’s side of the trencher.
    The sharp eyes of his mother-in-law turned to Knapman. ‘What’s he like, this new crowner? I heard he’s a man of war, an old Crusader.’
    After another uneasy sideways look at his silent wife, Knapman took a mouthful of wine before replying. ‘I’ve not met him, but they say he’s fair-minded, not like the bloody sheriff, who I’d trust no further than I could throw my horse. De Wolfe’s a real King’s man, I hear. He was part of Richard’s bodyguard both in the Holy Land and when he was captured in Vienna.’
    ‘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 Of late she had become more withdrawn and these long silences were becoming too common for his liking.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