Customer Trago — Mignon Warner

It is nigh on forty years since the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 and the Cornish are again growing restive to shed the Tudor yoke once and for all. What will be needed, though, is a new leader, and who better to fill this role than a Plantagenet Pretender to the throne, Customer Trago. Customer, however, is a committed coward and wants nothing more than to be acknowledged at the Court of Henry VIII as a minor royal. The role of hero is nevertheless thrust upon Customer, but not by accident, when he rides back into Cornwall to the deeply troubled Augustinian Priory in Launceston to see his ailing tutor and mentor, Brother Emanuel. Emanuel, a former Bodmin civil lawyer, has powerful enemies, both at Court and at the Priory where he raised Customer, an alleged foundling, from Customer's early infancy. Customer seeks from Emanuel that one vital question which has haunted him all of his life. Who am I? Customer fails to reach the Priory. Struck down by an assassin and left for dead on priory land, his life is saved by big-hearted Eber Pendragon, innkeeper and blacksmith of Wynehouse Corner who, along with the sinister wine merchant, Nicholas Allsopp, may or may not be covertly planning to fund a fresh rebellion. Although aware that he is suspected by Eber and old Agnes, Eber's servant, of being a spy of the King, Customer reluctantly agrees to take on Eber's defence of the charge of murder of Rebecca Trelawney, a cruelly facially deformed deaf mute. Unfortunately for Customer, the Trelawneys rule the parish with an iron fist and no one will stand with him against them for fear of the reprisals that will surely follow. Customer's troubles multiply in the form of his beautiful, but devious, former lover, the Countess Anna-Lucrezia Ballini, who seeks him out to dispose of her creakingly ancient, but seriously wealthy Italian husband. And who is the stranger named Malachy Pawley who seeks board and lodging at the inn? What does he want from Customer Trago?