Hartland, 1797. A surveyor's daughter. A dead bride. A well that takes what it is owed.
In the winter of 1796 the surveyor Rhys Pryce fell from the cliffs at Hartland, and the inquest called it an accident. In the summer of 1797 his daughter crosses the Bristol Channel to finish his map.
Angharad Pryce has her father's chain, his compass and his field-book, with six pages cut cleanly from the back. The steward would rather she went home, and the parish thinks a woman with a measuring chain is either a joke or a witch.
Then, on the morning after St Nectan's Day, a young bride is found dead at the saint's well with foxgloves folded in her hands. Hartland knows the old story: the foxgloves grow where the saint's blood fell. But Dr Elias Boyle has read Withering on the foxglove, and he knows what it does to a heart.
Angharad measures things for a living. Now she means to measure this.
The first of the Field-Book Mysteries: an atmospheric Georgian mystery of old leases, holy wells, cliff paths and a woman who will not take the parish's word for anything she can measure herself.
