Bideford, 1797. A harvest supper. A jug with a verse nobody ordered. A field that isn't on the map.
The harvest is in at Sallow Barton, on the banks of the Torridge, and the whole farm sits down to supper. In the middle of the table stands the harvest jug, new from the farm's own kiln, with its verse scratched through the white slip as it has been every year for a century.
But this year's jug carries a second verse. It names a field that isn't on the estate map, a night six years gone, and a young potter who cried the neck at the end of harvest and never came home.
The old potter who made the jug has vanished.
Angharad Pryce has come to Bideford to survey Sallow for a wedding. In her pocket is the survey her father made of the same farm in 1791, sealed ever since. On his map the field is there. And somebody has fired the truth into clay, because clay can't be torn out like a page.
The second Field-Book Mystery, following Where the Foxgloves Grow: an atmospheric Georgian mystery of harvest custom, moved boundary stones, white clay and a woman who will not take anybody's word for what she can measure herself.
