The Tintern Treasure

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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.

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