The Weaver's Tale - Hardcover

Sedley, Kate

4.04

599 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031210474X ISBN 13: 9780312104740

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

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New Year's 1474 finds Roger the Chapman collapsed with fever after wandering the roads of Western England peddling his wares amidst December's snow and freezing rain. Sheer exhaustion forces him to rest in the home of the widow Margaret Walker and her daughter, Lillis, in the ancient trading port of Bristol.
Roger awakens, weakened but on the road to recovery, to find himself in the middle of yet another mystery. His kind hostesses, who have nursed him gently back to health, will not hear of him leaving the comfort of their modest cottage until spring. But Roger's keen senses soon detect the shadow of tragedy looming over the house: The two women seem mistrusted by villagers and uneasy even at home.
Coaxing the story from them, he learns that Margaret's father vanished last year, and was presumed dead. A man was hanged for his murder, but not two months later the old man wandered back into town, unable to account for his disappearance.
Prompted either by his own grateful (and restless) nature or by the importance of keeping busy under the amorous eyes of Lillis, Roger vows to root out the evil at work in the Walker home. He puts his God-given talent for solving mysteries to good use, once more unravelling the complex web before him: a town plagued by secret allegiances and rivalries among its merchants, churchmen, and ruling family.

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From Publishers Weekly:

During the bitterly icy January of 1474, in the English river port of Bristol, Roger the Chapman falls desperately ill with the ague. In his third absorbing appearance, after The Plymouth Cloak , Roger is taken in and nursed by weaver's widow Margaret Walker and her fiesty daughter Lillis. While recuperating, he learns that a handsome young rakehell had been hanged for murdering Margaret's father, although several months later the alleged victim had wandered home, injured, ill and slightly amnesiac, and subsequently died. Many townspeople, doubting the older man's probity and suspecting his family of criminal activity, are harassing Margaret and Lillis. Roger, who has forsaken monastery life for the carefree existence of an intinerant peddler, believes God has placed him in Bristol to untangle the affair. The paths of his investigation lead him to Irish slavers who raid the English coast; the Lollards, whose "heretical" religious reform movement foreshadows Henry VIII's break with Rome; Welsh tin miners living in the dense forest; and wealthy Bristol burghers. An attempt on Roger's life comes before he resolves the mystery--and finds himself happily wed. Rich detail and a satisfyingly concluded plot make this series a continuing pleasure.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Five months after he's killed (in March 1473) by whoever stole the money his employer, Edward Herepath, had briefly lodged with him, and two months after Edward's ne'er-do-well younger brother Robert has been hanged for his murder, Edward's debt collector, William Woodward, limps back into Bristol, a great deal the worse for wear (he's been badly beaten and has lost most of his memory) but incontestably alive. Woodward insists he was sold into slavery in Ireland, but itinerant peddler/investigator Roger the Chapman (The Plymouth Cloak, 1993, etc.), laid up in Bristol a month after Woodward's second death, can't find any corroboration of his story when he investigates for Woodward's family (his hospitable daughter Margaret and his predatory granddaughter Lillis). What he does find is heresy, fraud, sexual jealousy--and, sadly, an unsurprising solution. Despite its promise, the mystery turns out to be little more than an anecdote. The reward here is the continuing modernity lurking under the shifts and doublets of Sedley's medieval figures. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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