"How long, I wonder", murmured Roger, "will she stay content within the walls of Carminowe and keep a guard upon her thoughts from straying?" I wished I knew. Had I been living in his time I would have handed in my resignation as steward to Sir Henry Champernoune and offered my services to Sir Oliver and his lady.

"One mercy for her," replied the other, "she does not have to provide her husband with an heir, with three stout stepsons filling the breach. She can do as she pleases with her time, having produced two daughters whom Sir Oliver can trade and profit by when they reach marriageable age."

So much for woman's value in other days. Goods reared for purchase, then bought and sold in the market-place, or rather manor. Small wonder that, their duty done, they looked round for consolation, either by taking a lover or by playing an active part in the bargaining over their own daughters and sons.

"I tell you one thing," said Roger. "Bodrugan has an eye to her, but while he's under this obligation to Sir John he has to watch where he steps."

"I lay you five denarii to nought she will not look at him."

"Taken. And if she does I'll act as go-between. I play the role often enough between my lady and Sir John."

As eavesdropper in time my role was passive, without commitment or responsibility. I could move about in their world unwatched, knowing that whatever happened I could do nothing to prevent it — comedy, tragedy, or farce — whereas in my twentieth-century existence I must take my share in shaping my own future and that of my family.

The reception appeared over, but the visit was not yet through, for a bell summoned one and all to vespers and the company divided, the more favoured to the Priory chapel, the lesser ranks to the church, which was at the same time part of the chapel, an arched doorway, with a grille, dividing the one from the other.

I thought I might dispense with vespers, though by standing close to the grille I could have watched Isolda; but my inevitable guide, craning his neck with the same thought in mind, decided that he had been idle long enough, and, signalling to his companion with a quick jerk of the head, made his way out of the Priory building and across the quadrangle to the entrance gate. Someone had flung it open once again and a cluster of people, lay brothers and servants, were standing there, laughing, as they watched the Bishop's attendants struggle to turn the clumsy vehicle towards the Priory yard. The wheels were stuck between muddied road and village green, but this was by no means the only fun to be observed, for the green itself was crowded with men, women and children. Some sort of market seemed to be in progress, for there were little booths and stalls set up, some fellow was beating a drum and another squeaked on a fiddle, while a third nearly split my ears with two horns as long as himself which he managed by sleight of hand to play simultaneously.

I followed Roger and his friend across the green. They paused every moment to greet acquaintances, and I realised that this was no sudden jollification put on for the Bishop's benefit but some butcher's paradise, for newly slaughtered sheep and pigs, still dripping blood, were hanging upon posts at every booth. The dwellings bordering the green boasted a like display. Each householder, knife in hand, was hard at work stripping the pelt off some old ewe, or slitting a pig's throat, and one or two fellows, higher perhaps on the feudal ladder, brandished the heads of oxen, the wide-spread horns winning shouts of applause and laughter from the crowd. Torches flared as the light faded, slaughterers and strippers taking on a demonic aspect, working fast and furiously to have their task accomplished before night came, and because of it the excitement mounted, and the musician with the horn in either hand, wandering in and out amongst the crowd, lifted his instruments high to make a greater blast upon the air.

"God willing, they'll have their bellies lined this winter," observed Roger. I had forgotten him in all the tumult, but he was with me still.

"I take it you have every beast counted?" asked his friend.

"Not only counted but inspected before slaughter. Not that Sir Henry would know or care if he was lacking a hundred head of cattle, but my lady would. He's too deep in his prayers to watch his purse, or his belongings."

"She trusts you, then?"

My horseman laughed. "Faith! She's obliged to trust me, knowing what I do of her affairs. The more she leans upon my counsel, the sounder she sleeps at night."

He turned his head as a new commotion fell upon our ears, this time from the Priory stableyard, where the Bishop's equipage had finally been housed, taking the place of smaller vehicles, similarly furnished with wooded canopy and sides, and bearing coats-of-arms. Half-chariot, half-wagonette, they seemed a clumsy method of carrying ladies of rank about the countryside, but this was evidently their purpose, for three of them emerged from the rear premises, creaking and groaning with every turn of the wheel, and stood in line before the Priory entrance. Vespers was over, and the faithful who had attended were emerging from the church, to mingle with the crowd upon the green. Roger made his way into the quadrangle, and so to the Priory building itself where the Prior's guests were gathering before departure. Sir John Carminowe was in the forefront, and beside him Sir Henry's lady, Joanna de Champernoune. As we approached he murmured in her ear, "Will you be alone if I ride to you tomorrow?"

"Perhaps," she said. "Better still, wait until I send word." He bent to kiss her hand, then mounted the horse which a groom was holding, and cantered off. Joanna watched him go, then turned to her steward.

"Sir Oliver and Lady Isolda lodge with us tonight," she said. "See if you can hasten their departure. And find Sir Henry too. I wish to be away."

She stood there in the doorway, foot tapping impatiently upon the ground, the full brown eyes surely brooding upon some scheme which would further her own ends. Sir John must be hard-pressed to keep her sweet. Roger entered the Priory, and I followed him. Voices came from the direction of the refectory, and, enquiring from a monk who was standing by, he was told that Sir Oliver Carminowe was taking refreshment with others of the company, but that his lady was in the chapel still. Roger paused a moment, then turned towards the chapel. I thought at first that it was empty. The candles on the altar had been extinguished, and the light was dim. Two figures stood near to the grille, a man and a woman. As we came closer I saw that they were Otto Bodrugan and Isolda Carminowe. They were speaking low and I could not hear what they said, but the weariness had gone from her face, and the boredom too, and suddenly she looked up at him and smiled. Roger tapped me on the shoulder. "It's much too dark to see. Shall I switch on the lights?"

It was not his voice. He had gone, and so had they. I was standing in the southern aisle of the church, and a man wearing a dog-collar under his tweed jacket was by my side.

"I saw you just now in the churchyard," he said, "looking as if you couldn't make up your mind whether to come in out of the rain. Well, now you have, let me show you round. I'm the vicar of Saint Andrew's. It's a fine old church, and we're very proud of it." He put his hand on a switch and turned on all the lights. I glanced down at my watch, without nausea, without vertigo. It was exactly half-past three.

CHAPTER FOUR

THERE HAD BEEN no perceptible transition. I had passed from one world to the other instantaneously, without the physical side-effects of yesterday. The only difficulty was mental readjustment, requiring an almost intolerable degree of concentration. Luckily the vicar preceded me up the aisle, chatting as we went, and if there was anything strange in my expression he was too polite to comment.

"We get a fair number of visitors in the summer," he said, "people staying at Par, or they come over from Fowey. But you must be an enthusiast, hanging about the churchyard in the rain." I made a supreme effort to pull myself together. "In point of fact," I said, surprised to find that I could even speak, "it was not really the church itself or the graves that interested me. Someone told me there had been a Priory here in former days."

"Ah, yes, the Priory," he said. "That's been gone a long time, no trace of it left, unfortunately. The buildings all fell in after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. Some say the site was where Newhouse Farm is now, just below us in the valley, and others that it occupied the present churchyard itself south of the porch, but nobody really knows."

He led me to the north transept and showed me the tombstone of the last Prior, who had been buried before the altar in 1538, and pointed out the pulpit and some pew-ends, and all that was left of the original rood screen. Nothing of what I observed bore any resemblance to the small church I had so lately seen, with the grille in the wall dividing it from the Priory chapel; nor, as I stood here now beside the vicar, could I reconstruct from memory anything of an older transept, an older aisle.

"Everything's changed," I said.

"Changed?" he repeated, puzzled. "Oh, no doubt. The church was largely restored in 1880, possibly not altogether successfully. Are you disappointed?"

"No," I assured him hastily, "not at all. It's only that… Well, as I was saying, my interest goes back to very early days, long before the dissolution of the monasteries."

"I understand." He smiled in sympathy. "I've often wondered myself what it all looked like in former times, with the Priory close by. It was a French house, you know, attached to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Sergius and Bacchus in Angers, and I believe most of the monks were French. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I've only been here a few years, and I'm afrald I'm no historian."

"Neither am I," I told him, and we retraced our steps towards the porch.

"Do you know anything", I asked, "about the lords of the manor in early times?"

He paused to switch off the lights. "Only what I have read in the Parochial History," he sald. "The manor is mentioned in Domesday as Tiwardrai — the House on the Strand — and it belonged to the great family of Cardinham until the last heiress Isolda sold it to the Champernounes, in the thirteenth century, and when they died out it passed to other hands."

"Isolda?"

"Yes, Isolda de Cardinham. She married someone called William Ferrers of Bere in Devon, but I'm afraid I don't remember the details. You would find out more about it in the Saint Austell public library than from me. He smiled again, and we passed through the door to the churchyard. Are you staying in the neighbourhood or passing through?" he asked.

"Staying. Professor Lane has lent me his house for the summer."

"Kilmarth? I know it, of course, but I've never been inside. I don't think Professor Lane gets down very often, and he doesn't come to church."

"No," I replied, "probably not."

"Well," he said, as we parted at the gate, "if you feel like coming, either to a service or just to wander around, it will be nice to see you."

We shook hands, and I walked up the road to where I had parked the car. I wondered whether I had been impossibly rude. I had not even thanked him for his courtesy, or introduced myself. Doubtless he considered me just another summer visitor, more boorish than usual, and a crank into the bargain. I got into the car, lit a cigarette, and sat there to collect my thoughts. The fact that there had been no physical reaction to the drug whatsoever was an astonishing relief. Not a suspicion of dizziness or nausea, and my limbs did not ache as they had done the day before, nor was I sweating.

I wound down the car window and looked up the street, then back again to the church. None of it fitted. The green where the people had so lately crowded must have covered all the present area, and beyond it too, where the modern road turned uphill. The Priory yard, where the bishop's equipage nearly came to grief would have been in that hollow below the gents hairdresser, boundering the east wall of the churchyard, and the Priory itself according to one theory mentioned by the vicar, filled the entire space that the southern portion of the churchyard held today. I closed my eyes. I saw the entrance, the quadrangle, the long narrow building forming kitchens and refectory, monks dormitory, chapter-house, where the reception had been held, and the Prior's chamber above. Then I opened them again, but the pieces did not fit, and the church tower threw my jigsaw puzzle out of balance. It was no good — nothing tallied save the lie of the land.