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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