The Tavern in the Morning

This is the first Hawkenlye Mystery I have read and I am not even sure yet why they are called "Hawkenlye Mysteries". The hero is Sir Josse d'Aquin, who, we learn at the outset, is a veteran of King Richard (the Lionheart)'s wars and a friend of the King's mother, Queen Eleanor (widow of Henry II).

'Ah.' There was a pause. Then Eleanor said, 'Given the aforementioned weather, Sir Josse, would we be right in concluding that you have not ventured all the way from Kent purely to kiss our hand?'

Josse looked up and met her amused eyes. 'My lady, it would be worth the journey,' he began, gallantly, only to be interrupted by her burst of laughter.

'In May, perhaps, but in February? What nonsense, sir knight!' she said. Smiling - really, Josse thought, she was still the most beautiful woman, despite her seventy-odd years - she said, kindly, 'Now let us waste no more time. Tell me how I may help you.'

Josse seems to be something of a knight errant. He has a talent for coming across - and charming - members of the fair sex in distress and (if he doesn't actually slay dragons) he does at least solve the various mysteries in which the distressed have become entangled.

There is, however, an abbess, the abbess of Hawkenlye Abbey, one Helewise, who seems to be Josse's guide, mentor and friend, and I assume that she is the link between the novels. I will find out, for I enjoyed this book and intend to read the others as I get hold of them.

The story opens with the death by food-poisoning of a guest at Goody Anne's tavern in Tonbridge for which Goody Anne, quite naturally, is blamed. It soon becomes evident, though, to Josse at least, that that particular portion of the offending pie had been tampered with; not only that but it had been eaten by the wrong man, and the intended victim was still at large: at large, yes, for the intended victim was the real villain and the attempt to kill him an act of desperation.

But who actually made this attempt? Was it the woman hiding with her son in the Forest, the Lady Joanna, to whose defence Josse rushes (and with whom he soon finds himself falling passionately in love)? Or was it the old Wise Woman, Mag, who had suffered so much at the hands of men, and especially of priests: "they shunned her, cast her out, turned her into someone who had to hide herself away, so that people who genuinely needed her help had to sneak out to see her in the middle of the night," cries Joanna.

Then another murder occurs; again only Sir Josse believes it is a murder, for the Sheriff once more dismisses it as an accident.

Next, the murderer turns his attention to Josse himself.

Well written, with real twelfth-century atmosphere: at the top of the heap Richard the Lionheart (son of King Henry), away on Crusade in the Holy Land and not heard of for months, and his brother John Lackland, itching to take over; at the bottom the masses scheming and starving, and suffering from corruption and injustice, and struggling to survive. While in the middle a few like Sir Josse attempt to do what King and Church so singularly fail to do: right the wrongs done to people like Joanna and her son, and Goody Anne and old Mag.