The Stranger House

1. The last prime number

Next morning Sam woke to sunlight, the first she’d seen since dropping through the clouds over Heathrow four days earlier.

She opened her window wide. What she could see of Illthwaite looked a lot more attractive in the sunshine. In front of her across the Skad the ground rose unrelentingly to a range of hills which looked so close in the clear air that she felt she could trot up there before breakfast. But a glance at her map told her they were four miles away.

She found Winander’s house, the Forge, marked on the map. It was on a narrow road, presumably Stanebank, snaking uphill from the humpback bridge almost opposite the pub. Half a mile further on Illthwaite Hall was marked. She raised her eyes again and finally managed to spot an outcrop of chimneys. Their size gave her a proper sense of scale and put paid to any residual notion she might have of a quick walk up to the ridge.

Of the Forge she could see nothing, but a column of smoke rising into the morning air seemed likely to mark its presence.

In the bright light of morning, her discovery of the churchyard inscription felt far less sinister and significant. There was probably a simple explanation and all she had to do was ask. She’d start with Winander. Did his invitation have a more than commercial motive? Then there was the impish little Mr. Melton who’d hinted he might be able to assist her with her inquiries. Finally there was Rev. Pete who’d looked ripe to have any hidden info shaken out of him.

She leaned out of the window and took a deep breath. The air still retained its night coolness, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and things would surely warm up as the sun got higher. She backed her judgment by putting on shorts. She thought of topping them with her skimpiest halter but decided maybe Illthwaite wasn’t ready for that. Also she didn’t want to flaunt her bruised shoulder, so she opted for a green-and-gold T-shirt. Might as well fly the colors!

She picked up the Guide and ran lightly down the narrow stairs which nonetheless squeaked their tuneless tune, reminding her that she hadn’t heard a thing when her mysterious neighbor ascended the previous night. Perhaps he was a ghost after all.

If so, he was a ghost with a good appetite. She found him sitting in the bar tucking into the breakfast version of last night’s supper.

She gave him a nod but he didn’t even look up.

Mrs. Appledore appeared almost instantly with coffee, cornflakes, and a mountain of thick-cut toast alongside half a churnful of butter and a pint of marmalade.

“Round here, even foxes get hungry,” she said, smiling. “It’s a grand morning.”

“Yeah, a real beaut,” said Sam.

She glanced again at the stranger, giving him a last chance to join the human race, and surprised a moue of distaste. Something in his breakfast? Or something in the way she spoke, more like. Well, stuff him!

“So what are you planning to do?” asked the landlady.

Her decision to be more upfront didn’t mean she had to lay out her plans, so she answered, “Thought I’d stroll down to the post office and buy some cards to send home.”

And dig for a bit of info as well as stocking up on chocolate supplies.

“You’ll be lucky. It’s shut,” said Mrs. Appledore.

“All day, you mean?”

“No. I mean permanent. Since last year. It’s happening all over. Government!”

She uttered the word with a weary disdain that was more telling than ferocity.

“Don’t like the government then?” said Sam. “Shouldn’t have thought you’d have been much bothered up here.”

“Once maybe, but not anymore. Now you need to move fast as our Dark Man to keep ahead of them. Difference is, if they catch up, it’s likely you that dies. Just shout when you want more toast. How are you doing, Mr. Madero?”

She was still careful with the pronunciation.

Mathero, thought Sam. More than just a mysterious stranger, a mysterious foreigner, which somehow made his response to her accent even more offensive.

But his voice when he replied was pure English, purer than hers anyway!

“I’m doing very well, Mrs. Appledore,” he said with grave courtesy.

“Good lad. We’ll soon get you fattened up.”

She left. Sam glanced at Mr. Madero once more and this time caught his eye. She gave the small sympathetic smile of one who was often herself the object of other people’s fattening-up ambitions. He returned her gaze steadily but not her smile.

Determined not to risk another rebuff, Sam opened the Guide at random and began to read a passage about Illthwaite Hall and the Woollass family. The Reverend Peter K. clearly enjoyed the benefits of their influence and their board and was at pains to stress that, though they were Roman Catholics, this in no wise interfered with the pursuit of their many social and charitable duties as the chief family of the area.

Sam read at her usual rapid pace, her eye devouring the pages as fast as her mouth devoured toast, until her reaching hand encountered emptiness.

She raised her head and became aware of two mysteries. One was that Madero had somehow moved from his table to a stance by her left shoulder without attracting her attention. The second, equally unobserved and therefore far more worrying, was that the mountain of toast had somehow moved from the plate, presumably into her stomach.

“Help you?” she said.

He said, “Mrs. Appledore mentioned the Guide to me and I wondered if I could have a look at it, when you’re finished, of course.”

“Sure,” she said. “When I’m finished.”

She stood up and, tucking the book firmly beneath her arm, went through the door. In the hallway she met Mrs. Appledore.

“All done, my dear? Sure you don’t want something hot? Always start the day with a hot breakfast, my mam used to say. Never know when you’ll need your strength.”

“I’ll just have to take my chances, I guess,” she said. “Anyway, your other guest looks like he’s eating enough for two.”

“Mr. Madero? Well, he needs feeding up. I think he’s been ill, poor chap. And I doubt if they feed them much solid grub in them foreign seminaries.”

“Seminaries?”

“Oh yes. He was training to be a priest or something afore he got ill. Left-footer, like the squire,” said Mrs. Appledore confidentially.

“Catholic, you mean?”

“That’s right. You’re not one, are you, dear? I mean no offense.”

“No I’m not. And you can mean all the offense you like,” said Sam.

“All I’m saying is, them drafty cloisters and all that kneeling on cold stones can’t do a man much good. At least in the C. of E. they appreciate a bit of comfort. Even old Reverend Paul – that’s our Rev. Pete’s dad, who was big on prayer and fasting, and salvation through suffering – kept the vicarage larder well stocked and the boilers well stoked. Rev. Pete likes his grub and his coal fire too.”

So, thought Sam. A wannabe priest. No wonder she hadn’t liked the look of him.

“Will you be leaving today, dear?” Mrs. Appledore went on.

“Not sure,” said Sam. “Can I let you know later? Or do you need the room?”

The woman hesitated, then said, “No, not yet. But if you could let me know soon, in case someone turns up. I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” said Sam. “That’s great.”

She went outside. A black Mercedes SLK with a small crucifix and a St. Christopher medallion dangling from the rearview mirror was parked alongside her Focus. No prizes for guessing whose it was. She looked across the bridge to Stanebank. That track looked pretty steep. Best to take some provisions in case she walked off the toast too quickly.

She went to her car, unlocked the door and took her last Cherry Ripe out of the glove compartment. Her Ray-Ban Predators with the red mirror lenses were there too. These were a present from Martie which Sam had accepted with the ungraciousness permitted between friends, saying, “Thanks, but it’s Cambridge, England, I’m going to and they say you’ve more chance of seeing the sun in a rain forest.” To which Martie had replied, “It’s not the sun I’m worried about, girl, it’s those basilisk eyes of yours. How’re you going to try out the Pom talent when a single glance from you reminds most men they’ve got an urgent dental appointment?”

What the hell? she thought. This may be the only time I really need shades.

She put them on and straightened up to discover that once again the pussyfooted Madero had contrived to follow her without making any noise. He was carrying a black briefcase and standing by the Merc, looking dubiously toward the humpback bridge.

Very fond of black, our Mr. Madero, thought Sam. Or perhaps he’d just made a big investment in the color when he was trying for the priesthood.

She strolled across the road on to the bridge where she paused to peer over the parapet. The Skad was no longer tumbling along like brown coffee flecked with milky foam, but moving much more smoothly with nothing but sun starts breaking its surface. She watched for a moment then turned to walk on. There he was again, right behind her.

“You following me, or something?” she said.

“No,” he said, surprised. “This is Stanebank, I believe, which I’m reliably informed I need to ascend to reach my destination. It doesn’t look a sensible road to take my car up, even if it got over this bridge without scraping the exhaust.”

“Why’d you want to drive anyway?” said Sam. “It’s only a step.”

“So I’ve been told.”

He nodded at her rather curtly and set off. After a few moments, Sam followed, already nibbling her chocolate. He was moving quite quickly but she didn’t doubt her ability to overtake him. Bleeding townie, probably doesn’t feel safe being more than a few yards from his car, she thought.

But as the track steepened and she came up close behind him, she detected a slight unevenness in his gait. Mrs. Appledore said he’d been ill and the poor bastard was definitely favoring his left leg. Her own bruised hip gave a twinge as if in sympathy. She saw him switch the briefcase, which looked quite heavy, from one hand to the other as if to adjust his balance. All at once her plan to move smoothly by him, offering a nod as curt as his own, seemed pretty mean-spirited.

She fell into step alongside him and said, “Great to see the sun, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” he said.

He spoke evenly but she thought she detected an effort not to let her see he was breathing hard.

She said, “Like a bit of choc?”

He glanced at the bar and said, “You did not get enough toast for breakfast?”

“Yeah, plenty. You were counting?”

“I tried but I lost count,” he said gravely.

The bastard was taking the piss! At least it meant he was human.

As if regretting the lapse, he went on quickly, “But thank you, no. It looks too dark for me. I prefer milk, English style.”

“You do? I’d have guessed you’d have gone for black and bitter.”

“Why so?”

“I don’t know. The car. The gear you wear.”

“I see. By the same token you should perhaps be eating a half-ripe lemon.”

Another joke?

Before she could pick her response he went on, “I’m sorry. I did not mean to imply your garments are anything other than attractive. Perhaps however we both err toward the episematic.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“A zoological term referring to the use of color or markings to enable recognition within a species.”

“Like I’m telling the world I’m Australian? Why not? And what are you telling the world? That you run errands for God?”

She’s been talking to our landlady, he guessed.

“There are worse jobs. I understand you are trying to track down some ancestor here in Illthwaite, Miss Flood. That must be fascinating, discovering your origins.”

Letting her know that he’d been brought up to speed too.

“More frustrating than fascinating so far,” she said.

“Things not going well? Will it trouble you a lot if your quest comes to nothing?”

“No chance of that,” she declared.

“You’re very confident. It’s not given to us to know everything.”

“You reckon?” she said, detecting a sermonizing note in his voice. “Why not? There’s no such word as unknowable. We must know, we shall know.”

“That sounds suspiciously like a quotation.”

“You’re right. David Hilbert, German mathematician.”

“Interesting. I prefer, for now we know in part, but then we shall know even as we are known. St. Paul.”

“How was his math?”

“Better than mine, I suspect,” he said. “He did say, Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good. How’s that for a mathematician?”

She considered then said, “I like it. And there was a mathematical Paul who said that God’s got a special book in which He records all the most elegant proofs.”

“There you are then,” he said, with a pleased smile. “It’s good to know our two Pauls had God in common.”

“Not so sure about that,” she said. “Mine was a Hungarian called Erdos. He usually called God SF, which stood for the Supreme Fascist.”

That wiped the smile from his face.

“You don’t sound as if you approve of God, Miss Flood,” he said.

“I approve of mine. Don’t have a lot of time for yours,” she said.

He looked taken aback by her frankness.

He said, “What form does your God take, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Why should I mind? If you really want to know something, asking’s the only way to find out. So let’s see. I’d say my God is the last prime number.”

He did not respond to her definition, perhaps because he was pondering it, more likely she thought complacently because he didn’t want to reveal he didn’t know what she was talking about. Or maybe, she thought with a bit more compassion, it was merely because he needed all his breath to maintain an even pace up the hill whose steepening gradient was testing her bruises. But she didn’t have far to go. A long low whitewashed house had come into view. At right angles to it stood a taller building, unpainted and windowless, with a broad chimney at the furthermost end from which issued the column of smoke Sam had observed earlier. Presumably this was the forge or smithy which gave the house its name.

A rough driveway to the house curved off the road. There was no formal gateway but the entrance was marked by a huge slab of sandstone on which was carved THE FORGE with underneath it in smaller letters Lasciate ogni ricchezza voi ch’entrate.

“What’s that all about?” wondered Sam.

“Its English version is usually ‘all hope abandon ye who enter here,’” said Madero. “In Dante’s Inferno it’s part of the inscription above the entrance to the Underworld. But here ricchezza, wealth, has been substituted for speranza, hope. I don’t know why.”

He sounded like a schoolteacher passing on information to a pupil.

“I’ll ask,” said Sam. “This is where I get off. You going much further?”

“Up to the Hall, which cannot be all that far.”

Sam glanced dubiously at the road ahead which looked to get even steeper.

“Why not rest your bones here a couple of minutes? I’m sure Mr. Winander will be good for a cup of tea.”

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then said again with the polite formality of an adult explaining the grown-up world to a child, “Thank you, but I must go on. I have an appointment, you see.”

She opened her mouth, probably to say something rude, but was saved from herself by the sound of an engine. A Range Rover came bowling up the hill. It drew up alongside them. The driver was Gerry Woollass. Beside him sat a woman in a nun’s headdress. There was another woman in the back but Sam couldn’t see her properly.

Woollass got out and came toward them.

“Señor Madero, is it?” he asked, getting the pronunciation right.

“Mr. Madero in England,” corrected Sam’s walking companion.

“You’re on your hour, I’ll give you that. I’m Gerald Woollass.”

They shook hands, then Woollass’s gaze moved to Sam.

“Miss Flood, good morning,” he said. “And how are you this morning?”

“Fit as a butcher’s dog,” she said.

“You and Mr. Madero are acquainted?”

Odd question, she thought. Maybe he’s worried I’m on my way to the Hall too, and doesn’t like the idea of an awkward Colonial falling over his priceless antiques.

“Nah, we just met,” she said. “I’m on my way to see Mr. Winander, and Mr. Madero was kind enough to translate this inscription for me, but I still don’t get it.”

Woollass smiled. This was a first. He looked a bit more like the kind, well-meaning man that Edie Appledore had described.

He said, “It means that if you’re so foolhardy as to step into Mr. Winander’s workshop, you will be lucky to emerge with any money left in your pocket. Mr. Madero, why don’t you climb in? You might as well join us for the last bit of your journey.”

“Or if you prefer to walk, I’ll be glad to stretch my legs and join you,” said the nun, stepping nimbly out of the car. She was lean and athletic, in her thirties, with a narrow intelligent face. The headdress apart, she was conventionally dressed.

“Sister Angelica,” she said, holding out her hand.

Madero shook it. Sam was amused to see how he dealt with this dilemma. She guessed he’d much prefer to accept the lift, but the nun had put him on the spot.

Then she was faced with a dilemma of her own as the nun turned from Madero to herself and thrust out her hand again and tried another friendly smile. It didn’t fade as Sam let her own fingertips barely brush the nun’s and said shortly, “Sam Flood. G’day.”

She caught Madero regarding her with disapproval and thought, what’s with him? Just because she’s a nun doesn’t mean I’ve got to give her the kiss of peace.

Sister Angelica’s smile didn’t even flicker and her voice was warm as she said, “It’s good to meet you, Miss Flood. Mr. Madero, on second thoughts I think maybe we should ride, if you don’t mind. I just felt a small twinge of my rheumatism.”

Liar, thought Sam. You’ve sussed out that the poor bastard’s knackered and this is your good deed for the day.

“As you wish,” said Madero.

He held the door to let the nun back into the front passenger seat, then opened the rear door and put his briefcase inside. The woman sitting there leaned over to pull it further in and Sam got a good view of her for the first time.

She was in her late twenties, with a long fine-boned face, beautiful if you liked that sort of thing. She had straight jet-black hair falling sheer below her shoulders. She was wearing shorts and a sun-top, but the flesh exposed showed little sign of the onslaught of weather. Her face had an almost lilial pallor which against her black hair could easily have produced a vampirical effect, yet far from being cadaverous, she somehow seemed to shimmer with life. She had a full well-rounded figure and the kind of long legs which would have graced a fashion house catwalk. Her eyes moved over Sam with the measured indifference of a security scan. They were a bluey gray that was familiar – like the driver’s, that was it, but unlike his showing neither the potential for benevolence nor the presence of trouble. Her gaze held Sam’s for a moment, a smile which had something of mockery in it and something of inquiry too, touched her mouth briefly, then she sat back as Madero hauled himself in beside her.

“My daughter, Frek,” said Woollass. “That’s idiot-speak for Frederika.”

Madero shook her hand. At the same time a thunderous voice echoed out:

“Morning, Gerry. Window shopping, are we? Why not bring your friends in? You never know, you might see something that takes your fancy.”

She turned to see that Thor Winander had appeared round the end of his house. Stripped to the waist and with a longhandled hammer resting on one shoulder, he looked more like the god of the Wolf-Head Cross than ever.

“Morning, Thor. Another time,” called Woollass. “If you’re ready, Mr. Madero…”

As Madero pulled his door shut, he frowned at Sam as if she were an attendant footman he was wondering if he should tip. Then the car drew away.

You’re really making new friends this morning, girl, Sam mocked herself as she watched it go.

“You waiting for a red carpet or something?” called Winander.

He didn’t wait for an answer but disappeared toward the smithy.

Sam looked up at the sandstone block once more and jostled the few coins she had in the pocket of her shorts.

“Wonder if he takes credit cards?” she said to a passing raven.

Caw! replied the raven.

Or, as this was Illthwaite where they crucified boys and ghosts searched your room, it might have been, Cash!

2. Inquisition

Mig Madero was more relieved than he cared to admit to be in the car. Physiotherapy routines got you mobile, but the last half-hour had proved yet again the old hiking adage that the only thing that gets you fit for walking steeply uphill is walking steeply uphill.

The drive to the Hall took less than a minute and the woman next to him showed no inclination to talk. The wide rear seat removed any risk of physical contact, but he found her closeness vaguely disturbing. Despite her icy pallor, warmth came off her and with it a scent composed of whatever perfume she used underpinned by faint traces from her own skin and flesh. She was beautiful, no argument about that, with a fine delicate bone structure that reminded him of the angels in the murals in the seminary chapel, but with flesh enough on her to turn the careless mind from the sacred to the profane.

Frek. The English loved their diminutives. It was his mother who started calling him Mig. Frederika was a lovely name, but Frek had intimacy.

The car came to a halt, rather to his relief, and he turned his attention to the less troublesome attractions of Illthwaite Hall.

His first impression was of an extremely appealing house with little sign of that self-consciousness which comes from a desire to impress one’s neighbors. The tall twisting chimneys belonged to the architecture of fairy tales, and the timbering too he had seen often in the children’s books in his mother’s house.

He stared up at an ornately carved stone set above the lintel of the brass-studded oak front door. On its left side was a coat of arms with three roses: one red, one white, one golden. On the right stood an angel with a sword, its robes white, its weapon silver with a smear of scarlet along its edge. Between, picked out in red and green, were some words, crushed so close together that reading them wasn’t easy but he’d had plenty of practice at deciphering ornate and obscure scripts.

Edwin Woollass Esquire and Alice

His Wife made this house to be built

in the Year of Our Lord 1535

Cruce Fido

“‘I trust in the cross,’” Madero translated.

“Our dog’s a crook,” said Frek Woollass as she went by him and opened the door.

“Family joke,” said Woollass. “Usually left behind with childhood. Come in.”

A good three inches shorter than his daughter, he moved with the determined gait of a man who anticipates obstacles but doesn’t intend walking round them.

“It’s a lovely spot, isn’t it?” said Sister Angelica. Her voice was gruff without being masculine, and it had a fairly broad accent which Madero, who had early recognized the importance of the way you talked in his maternal milieu, identified as Lancastrian. “Very welcoming. Pity about the knocker, though.”

The cast-iron door knocker, shaped like a wolf’s head with mouth agape and teeth bared, looked as if it were keen to bite the hand that raised it.

They followed Woollass into a broad entrance hall, so dimly lit that Madero got little impression of it other than lots of wood paneling and a few wall-mounted animal heads as they passed quickly along, down a little corridor and through another door which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a dungeon.

The room it opened into had a flagged floor with at its center a vaguely oriental-looking circular carpet whose yellow-and-umber design stood out boldly against the gray granite. On it stood four wooden armchairs around a low oak table. The effect was rather theatrical, as though a single spot were lighting up the action area of an open stage. A huge fireplace almost filled one wall. No fire was needed today, but a tall vase full of multicolored dahlias burnt on the hearth and above the fireplace was the same coat of arms he’d seen over the entrance door.

As he took the chair Woollass indicated, Madero began to feel the past crowding in and sense other shadowy presences in the room which if he relaxed and admitted them might let themselves become more visible. But for the moment, he wanted to concentrate on his host and this unexpected nun who’d sat down on his left.

As if he’d asked for an explanation out loud, Woollass said, “I invited Sister Angelica along this morning because she is an old friend of the family as well as being something of an expert on matters historical, procedural and legal.”

“You’re overselling me as usual, Gerry,” said the nun, smiling at Madero.

Woollass took the chair opposite Madero and leaned forward slightly.

“So let me look at you,” he said, fixing him with his keen gray-blue eyes. “Your letter was interesting, but letters tell us only what their writer wants us to know. Forgive my directness, but I’ve never been a round-the-houses man. If you want to know something, ask it, that’s the best way for simple uncomplicated souls like me.”

Was that a faint sigh of disbelief from his left? Madero didn’t look but fixed his attention wholly on Woollass.

“I quite understand, Mr. Woollass,” he said. “It’s no small thing to open up family records to a stranger. I’m happy to answer any questions and, of course, you have probably already contacted my referees, Dr. Max Coldstream of Southampton University, and Father Dominic Terrega of the San Antonio Seminary in Seville.”

“Indeed. Let’s have some coffee while we’re talking.”

On cue, the door opened and his daughter came in carrying a tray. It was a delight simply to see her walk across the room and set the tray down.

She took the remaining seat to his right and began to pour the coffee.

Woollass said, “The floor is yours, Mr. Madero.”

So Mrs. Appledore’s word had been apt. He wasn’t going to get near the Woollass papers without an inquisition. The nun was here to cast a properly religious eye over him. And the daughter…?

He glanced at her as she raised her coffee to her lips and he had to force his gaze away as he found himself transfixed by the gentle tremor of the upper visible portion of her pallid breasts as the hot liquor slid down her throat. He had a sudden vision of her stretched naked, her bush burning like black fire against the snow of her body. It was his first truly erotic fancy since the illness that had marked the change of his life direction, which meant the first since sixteen that didn’t crash up against a vocational imperative. Perhaps that was her function, to see how easily distracted he was! Well, they’d be disappointed. Old habits die hard and the mental screen slid easily into place. The troublesome image was still there behind the screen, but he was back in control and with luck a little dry conversation could prove as effective as prayer and cold showers.

He fixed his gaze on the man and said, “As I explained in my letter, I’m doing a doctorate thesis on the Reformation, but I do not want to retread the old ground of power struggle, of political intrigue, of wars and treaties, of saints and martyrs. I want to approach it through the personal experience of ordinary men and women here in England who lived through – or in some cases died because of – these changes. I want…”

“Why England?” interrupted Woollass.

“I’m half English. Through my maternal family history I became aware that not too long ago there were still laws which discriminated against Catholicism in public life. The more I learned of English history the more fascinated I became by the survival of such a strong Catholic presence, especially here in the north, despite long periods of highly organized and legally imposed repression. Eventually I formalized my interest into a thesis proposal in which I stressed that I wanted to base my researches not on the great families who figure in the public records, but on ordinary families like my own.”

Woollass nodded and said, “That answers, why England? Now, why Woollass?”

“A simple reductive technique, I fear,” said Madero. “I wrote to all the surviving families who figured in Walsingham’s record of recusants.”

“Hmm. So it was little more than a disguised circular we got,” said Woollass. “I usually dump those straight in the waste bin. So you’re saying your interest in my family is purely because I replied affirmatively, Mr. Madero? If I hadn’t bothered, or if my reply had been negative, you would have crossed us off your list?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “A disappointment, but one of many.”

Woollass looked at him doubtfully, then glanced at the nun, who leaned forward so that she could look directly into Madero’s face and said, “But it would surely have been an especially big disappointment, considering the family had a close relative who was a Jesuit priest working on the English Mission?”

Damn, thought Madero. Here it was. They were concerned that his real interest might be Father Simeon. He hadn’t anticipated such sensitivity. Too late now for explanation. Mention of his stop-off in Kendal would simply confirm Woollass’s doubts.

But for a serious historical researcher to claim complete ignorance of the man would also look very suspicious.

He said, “Certainly, knowing that the family’s problems must have been compounded by such a relative added a little to my interest. But the Woollasses were far from unique in this. And, had the priest been a son rather than just a nephew…”

He gave a Latin shrug. Make them feel superior, remind them you’re a foreigner.

Sister Angelica nodded in agreement, then in a brusque matter-of-fact tone she said, “I gather you were yourself studying for the priesthood, Mr. Madero. Would it distress you too much to tell us what made you change your mind?”

Her source was Father Dominic, he guessed. Perhaps others also. The great Catholic world could sometimes be very small.

“No, it doesn’t distress me. I discovered that my sense of vocation had vanished.”

“And that didn’t distress you?” she asked on a rising note of concern.

“I said my sense of vocation had vanished, not my faith,” said Madero. “I thought it was God’s will that I should be a priest, then I realized it was His will that I should do something else. Why should that trouble me?”

“But you have been distressed, I understand, physically if not mentally?”

Edie Appledore’s knowledge of his background had prepared him for this.

He said, “I had a climbing accident. I damaged my skull, my left leg and my spine. Happily after many months’ convalescence I am completely recovered.”

His left knee gave him an admonitory twinge and, feeling Sister Angelica’s keen eye upon him, he added, “Except for my knee, which will take a little longer.”

The nun smiled and said, “So you’re untroubled by doubts, Mr. Madero?”

“Completely,” he said. “Though occasionally by certainties.”

She let out a snort of amusement and nodded again, this time at Woollass, who said, “Thank you, Mr. Madero. If you’d give us a few moments…? Perhaps you might care to see some more of the house? My daughter would be pleased to give you a short tour.”

“That would be delightful,” said Madero.

He stood up and followed Frek out of the room.

“So,” he said. “You pour the coffee but you don’t actually get a vote.”

She said, “What makes you think I haven’t voted already, Mr. Madero?”

His name in her mouth was like being caressed by her tongue…

He said hastily, “It would be, let me see, Henry the Eighth on the throne when the Hall was built?”

“That’s right,” she said with a faint knowing smile as if well aware of the subject he was changing. “But I’m afraid that unlike most houses of such antiquity, no one of royal blood or indeed of any particular distinction has slept here.”

“Not even Father Simeon,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the home of close relatives of acknowledged Catholic sympathies must have seemed very attractive in times of need.”

“By the same token, when the hunt was up for him, it must have been one of the places most likely to be searched.”

“No doubt a hiding place had been prepared. Is there a priest-hole?”

She said, “If there is, who better than an expert like yourself to discover it?”

She spoke seriously, but he thought he could detect mischief in her eyes.

She led him back into the main hall. By now his eyes had adjusted to the dim light and he was able to take in more detail.

“This is the original Tudor hall, somewhat modified,” said Frek. “Purists would probably say it’s been ruined, but my ancestors were rather selfishly more concerned with their own convenience than Heritage. When something wore out, they replaced it.”

“Like the staircase,” said Madero.

At the far end of the hall, an ornate staircase of a design he didn’t recognize but which certainly wasn’t Tudor curved up to the first-floor landing.

“You noticed. Just as well, or I might have started thinking you were a fake, Mr. Madero. Yes, originally there was a stone spiral, great for sword fights but a little perilous for the old or infirm. Some eighteenth-century Woollass doing the Grand Tour spotted this one in France and brought it back with him. If you’re interested you can see the old stone treads out in the garden. They were used in the construction of a summer house. Waste not, want not, is the Woollass motto.”

“I thought it was our dog’s a crook.”

“Hardly in the house two minutes and already quoting our jokes,” interrupted a high, rather nasal voice. “The mark of a true researcher or an investigative journalist. Good morning, my dear.”

A tall, slender man was coming down the staircase. Clad in a long silk dressing gown of cardinal red, he might indeed have been an old Prince of the Church, come to give audience. He certainly had the features for it – wide brow, deep-set eyes, high cheeks, aquiline nose, and a mane of white hair so fine it gave the impression of an aureole.

“Good morning, Granpa,” said Frek, standing on tiptoe to kiss his inclined cheek as he paused on the penultimate step. “How are you today?”

Madero could see a resemblance here, much more than he could detect between either of them and Gerald Woollass. Perhaps the short plump genes and the long slender ones leapfrogged each other down the generations.

“I am well, surprisingly so, for which I give due thanks. And you I take it are Mr. Madero. I’m Dunstan Woollass,” said the old man, offering his hand which had a large ruby ring on the index finger. “Welcome to Illthwaite Hall.”

Resisting the Spanish half of his blood which tempted him to kiss the ring, Madero shook hands. Dunstan Woollass didn’t release his hand but kept a hold of it as he completed his descent, and now Madero had to resist his more frivolous English blood which tempted him to break into “Hello, Dolly!”

To restore the balance of sobriety he said, “I believe you are a historian yourself, Mr. Woollass. My supervisor, Max Coldstream, edits Catholic History and he recalled with pleasure several excellent articles you had submitted to the journal.”

What Max had said was, “Woollass… There was a Dunstan Woollass. Don’t know if he’s still alive, but he was a man of some influence in northern Church circles. In fact, I’m pretty sure he got one of those decorations the Vatican dishes out from time to time. Used to write a bit in Catholic journals, more a polemicist than a historian, though he did submit the occasional article to CH. Euphuistic in style and rather fanciful in content, I recall. But occasionally there were shafts of light and wit.”

There was light and wit in the old man’s eyes now. The same bright blue-gray eyes as his granddaughter. And the same faintly mocking expression.

“Indeed? I wish I could recall his frequent rejection slips with equal pleasure,” he said. “Yes, I have dabbled a little, but I have never been more than a dilettante. It is a pleasure to welcome a real scholar to Illthwaite. Not that I am dressed to suit the occasion. You must forgive my dishabille. These days I emerge by slow degrees from the pupal state of sleep. I need nourishment to give me the strength to dress, yet I have never been able to master the complex geometry of breakfast in bed which inevitably leaves me sticky with marmalade, itchy with crumbs and scalded by coffee. So I descend to the kitchen where no doubt the divine Pepi is even now pouring my orange juice and creaming my eggs. Ah, speak of angels and they shall materialize before our eyes.”

The woman who’d appeared in a doorway at the left end of the hall was handsome enough but hardly angelic. In her forties with dark brown hair pulled tight in a bun above a wide forehead, big gray-blue eyes and a generous mouth, she wore a nylon housecoat which strained across her large breasts and broad hips.

“Pepi, this is Mr. Madero, the famous scholar. Madero, this is Mistress Collipepper, our invaluable housekeeper, the third of that name to have taken care of us poor feckless Woollasses. We’re terribly hierarchical in Illthwaite.”

The eyes registered Madero without any interest then moved on to the old man.

“Come on, Mr. Dunny, afore you catch your death standing there in the draft,” she commanded.

“Audio, obsequor. Good luck to you, Madero. Incidentally, my grandfather, Anthony Woollass, wrote a short history of the parish. Like me he was very much an amateur – the book was privately printed – but you’ll find a copy in the study bookcase if you care to spare it a glance. À bientôt, or should I say hasta luego?”

He released Madero’s hand and followed the housekeeper through the doorway.

“He is… remarkable,” said Madero. “And I noticed he seems to anticipate the Star Chamber will find in my favor. Does he, like yourself, cast a vote in absentia?”

“You mustn’t probe our secrets before you have clearance, Mr. Madero,” she said. “Now, what next? Are you interested in pargetting?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never pargetted,” he replied, his English blood still in ascendancy.

Before she could respond to his frivolity, Gerald Woollass appeared.

“There you are, Mr. Madero. I’m pleased to tell you that I’ve decided that your application to be allowed access to some of our early family records should be approved.”

Frek clapped her hands together once, not so much a gesture of spontaneous joy as a formal signal of accord.

Madero said, “I’m honored and grateful. Thank you very much, sir.”

“Yes yes,” said Woollass, flapping his hand as if to dislodge a persistent fly. “A condition is that you sign a note of agreement giving me the right to see, emend or veto any passage in your thesis which refers to my family. I have had such a note made out in anticipation of a successful outcome to your interview. Is this agreeable to you?”

Just in case I do try to sneak in something he doesn’t like about Father Simeon! thought Madero as he said, “Naturally, sir.”

“Good. I presume you’d like to start right away? You will find the note of agreement on the desk in the study. Be so good as to sign it and give it to Frek. Lunch is at one. No documents to be removed. No photography. Presumably you’d like this. Its weight suggests you have come well prepared, but not, I hope, with cameras.”

He handed over the briefcase which Madero had left by the side of his chair.

“No, sir,” said Madero, opening the case. “Just a laptop, plus pen and paper as a failsafe. Oh, and there’s this, which I hope you will accept as a token of my gratitude.”

He produced a bottle of what an expert eye would have recognized instantly as the rarest and most expensive fino in the Madero Bastardo range.

Woollass took it and said, “Ah yes. Sherry. Thank you,” then walked away, swinging the bottle by his side.

“Sorry,” said Frek. “We’re not really a sherry family.”

“De gustibus non est disputandum,” murmured Madero.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Frek. “This way.”

She set off up the stairs, her hair flowing down her back like a black torrent into which he felt an almost irresistible impulse to plunge his hands.

On the landing she paused and said, “The study’s that way but you might like a quick glance first at our Long Gallery which gets a para to itself in Pevsner.”

“By all means,” said Madero.

In fact the Long Gallery wasn’t all that long but it had some interesting stonework and a fretted ceiling in need of restoration. A line of round arched windows admitted the morning sunlight to illumine the row of family portraits on the opposing wall. He paused before one of a handsome young man, looking very dashing in modern military uniform.

“My grandfather,” said Frek.

“I thought it might be. He has medals.”

“Indeed. One of them is the Military Cross. He was just old enough for the last couple of years of the war, but typically he seems to have made up for lost time. Afterward, I think he wanted to forget it. He says it was his father’s idea to have him painted in uniform. It can be an uncomfortable thing, trying to keep a proud father happy.”

“Indeed it can,” said Madero rather sadly. “But a good man will always try.”

He walked slowly down the gallery, feeling himself watched by all those slatey eyes, living and dead, till he came to the portrait which had caught his attention as soon as he entered, partly because it had pride of place on the cross wall at the end of the room, partly because it was the only one to show two people.

As he had guessed, they were Edwin and Alice Woollass, depicted full length, almost life size, when they were both into middle age. She was a sturdy woman with lively intelligent features, he much taller with a serious ascetic face.

“Interesting,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Frek. “If only because she was the first and the last woman the Woollasses thought it worthwhile having a portrait of.”

“Perhaps you will change their minds,” said Madero with an effort at gallantry.

“I think I may change more than that,” murmured Frek. “Have you seen enough?”

Something in her voice made him look more closely, then he said, “Ah. The priest-hole.”

“You’ve spotted it then?”

“Now I look more closely,” he said, “I see there’s a certain asymmetry about the room. There should be another meter of wall after this end window.”

She stepped forward and ran her hand down behind the portrait. There was a click and the whole picture swung out of the wall to reveal an opening.

“Clever,” he said. “Clearly constructed as an afterthought, hence the asymmetry.”

“There was no need of priest-holes in 1535.”

“Of course not,” he said, stepping through the aperture.

He’d seen far worse hiding places. A man could stand upright in here. There was a faintly musty smell. With the picture back in place it would of course be pitch-black. He stretched out his hands and leaned with his palms against the wall. Then he closed his eyes and stood stock-still for a good half-minute before stepping back out.

“Was that a prayer you were saying?” she asked.

“No. I was just trying to get a sense of what it must have been like.”

“And did you?”

“Oddly, no.”

“Why oddly?”

He hesitated then said, “I’m usually quite sensitive to… that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps terror, hunger, thirst, angry voices, metal-shod feet tramping, mailed fists banging, are necessary for a true appreciation of that sort of thing,” she said.

“True,” he said. “So is it recorded that Father Simeon ever took refuge here?”

“It’s recorded that the house was searched at least twice, including this chamber, and no trace of him was found,” she said. “Why so interested in Father Simeon?”

“I’m not really. But your father seemed a little sensitive on the subject.”

“Not without cause. A priest in a Catholic family is often as much a cause for concern as pride, as perhaps your own family discovered.”

She was sharp.

“But you must be impatient to get a start,” she went on. “Follow me, please.”

She walked away with an effortless almost gliding motion he found so much more effective than any seductive hipwaggling could have been.

The study was on the same floor as the gallery, a broad high room though with only one window. Against the side walls stood a pair of matching bookcases in dark oak. From the window he could see the plume of smoke still rising above the Forge, and further below, across the river, the stubby chimneys of the Stranger House. But Madero only spared the view a passing glance. His main attention was focused on the desk.

Here was God’s plenty. Half a dozen octavo volumes, cased in leather. Three folio ledgers. An abundance of loose sheets of varying sizes in two open box files.

For a moment he felt disturbed by such liberal cooperation, as perhaps a bright mouse might scenting the ripe cheese so generously scattered over the floor of the trap.

But in some things mice and men, bright or not, have no choice.

“Here’s the letter of agreement,” said Frek. “Sorry.”

“No need to be. Your father’s a wise man,” he said, scribbling his signature.

“Have you read it properly?” she asked doubtfully.

“I heard what your father said it contained. To study it would be both redundant and offensive,” he said, handing her the paper.

Their fingers touched. To prolong the contact, he did not let go immediately.

“I’m grateful for your help,” he said.

“How do you know you’ve had it?” she said, pulling the paper from his hand. “If you turn left out of here then left again into a short corridor, you’ll find a bathroom first on the right. I think that’s all, unless you have any questions?”

“No. You have given me all that I want. I shall have no excuse for not getting down to some good productive work, unless I let myself be distracted by the view.”

It was not consciously intended as a clumsy compliment but he realized that was how it sounded even before her eyebrows arched. He felt himself flushing under that amused gaze and turned to look out of the window at the panorama of valley and hills which was what he had consciously been referring to anyway.

“Yes, it is lovely countryside, beautiful and brutal by turns,” said Frek, as if she valued both qualities equally.

The window was slightly open and he heard voices below. Looking down, he saw directly below him the Range Rover parked outside the front door. Gerald and Sister Angelica were getting into it. A moment later, the engine started and the car pulled away.

“Now that’s interesting,” said Madero.

Where the car had been standing was a mosaic in the form of an eight-pointed star with at its center a circle of gold infilled with white. There were letters printed both in the white and on the gold margin.

“You recognize it, of course?”

A test? He closed his eyes, remembered what Max had told him, ran his mental eye over the possibilities and said, “The Order of Pius IX. Virtuti et Merito.”

“Well done. My grandfather received it years ago, long before I was born. My great-grandfather, the one who insisted on the portrait in uniform, again wanted to mark the distinction with another painting. Grandfather refused, but finally compromised on a permanent reproduction of the award itself. Even here he insisted that the commemorative design should be set at ground level where people would tread on it and only see it if humble enough to lower their gaze. In fact this room gives the best view. It’s a pebble mosaic, using stones from local Irish Sea beaches. You saw the designer briefly when we first met. Thor Winander, down at the Forge.”

“A talented man.”

“Oh yes. Thor has many talents,” she said with her secretive little smile. “Now I’ll leave you to get down to work or admire the view as you please. Till lunch, then.”

She left. It would have been easy to indulge his fantasies a little longer, but at the seminary he’d been famous for his concentration. Before the door closed, he was riffling through the loose sheets. Builder’s plans, household accounts, letters in various hands.

He put them to one side and opened the first of the leather-bound volumes. The page before him was covered in a minuscule scrawl. He took a powerful magnifying glass out of his briefcase and began to read.

Within a very few minutes all residual thought of Frek and her lily-white flesh had vanished from his mind.

3. Wolf head, angel face

Sam stood at the open end of the smithy and removed her Ray-Bans to let her eyes adjust to the change of light.

The scene before her was like an old painting, all heavy shadow and lurid glow. Winander was shoveling coals on to a forge. The air was heavy with the pungent smell of fire and hot metal.

“There you are,” said Winander. “Just as well that wanked-out priest got a lift. He looked fit to collapse.”

He dropped the shovel with a clatter that made Sam start. She tried to conceal the movement but he grinned to let her know he’d noticed, then went to a cool-box on a trestle at the back of the smithy and took out a can of beer.

“Need to keep your liquor level up in here,” he said. “Catch.”

He tossed her the can which she caught with one-handed ease. It was ice cold and the label boasted it was the strongest Australian lager you could buy.

“You trying to stereotype me, Mr. Winander?” she said.

“No. I’m not that subtle. The stuff was on offer last time I got into a supermarket. Never pass up on a bargain, Miss Flood.”

He raised his eyebrows comically as he spoke. His eyes had a distinctly flirtatious twinkle. How did he get it there? she asked herself. With an eyedropper?

“Bit hard on Mr. Madero, aren’t you? Calling him a ‘wanked-out priest?’” she said.

“Did I say wanked-out? I meant dropped-out,” he said. “Decided there were better ways of spending his life than wearing a skirt and pretending he never got horny. Perhaps I did mean wanked-out.”

He ripped the ring-pull off a can, raised it high and let the beer arc into his mouth. Some of it ran down his cheeks and jaw on to his body. He was sucking his belly in, she noticed. Did he really think he was impressing her?

As if sensing a challenge, he set down his can and moved back to the forge where he put his right foot on a set of foot-bellows and began to pump the dull red coals to a white-hot heat.

It was a pretty effective performance, she had to admit. His skin was almost as brown as her own, his torso still slab muscled despite the waistline sag. His plentiful body hair was rejuvenated from gray to ruddy gold by the reflected fire. With each bend of the knee she could see the contours of his huge thigh muscle outlined against his trousers before he drove his foot down in a rhythmic movement which a susceptible woman might find erotically mesmeric.

And where, she wondered, sucking at her lager, did these mesmerized women pay the price of their susceptibilities? Did he take them here in the heat of the forge, creating Thor-like thunder by beating his hammer against the huge anvil as he grappled them close, then mocking their ecstatic cries as he entered by plunging a length of glowing metal into the cooling trough? Or did the great god carry them up to his god-size bed?

Or was he past all that and just enjoying talking the talk even though he could no longer walk the walk? Geriatric sexuality wasn’t an area she had much experience of. Unlike Martie, she hadn’t had to fight the dirty old dons off. Sometimes basilisk eyes came in useful.

She yawned widely, then said, “Is that good for your heart with the extra weight you’re carrying? I’d really like to hear what you can tell me about my namesake before you drop dead.”

He stopped straightaway. To do him justice he didn’t seem out of breath. Also he smiled as if acknowledging a telling stroke and let his belly bulge over his waistband.

“Let’s get to it then,” he said. “You look ready for a refill.”

He tossed her another can. Rather to her surprise she realized he was right and the first one was empty. He led her out of a door at the back of the smithy into a cobbled courtyard. Here she could see the rear of the main house and alongside it what had probably been a barn but which now had wide plate-glass windows to admit light into what looked like an artist’s workshop.

The yard itself was scattered with the materials of his trade, or rather his trades. Lumps of wood, chunks of rock, a tubful of seashells, another of polished stones, some wrought-iron garden tables and chairs, and a small menagerie of delicate and detailed wildlife in various metals. But the thing which caught the eye was a tree stump standing upright on the cobbles and leaning back against the smithy wall.

The barkless and sun-bleached surface of the bole curved and twisted with a kind of monumental muscularity, as if some huge beast were trying to escape from the confining wood, an impression confirmed by the topmost section which was in the process of being carved into a gaping-jawed wolf’s head. It was both repellent and compulsively attractive.

Sam went close and ran her hands over the sinuous undulations, feeling the grain against her skin.

“Irresistible, isn’t it? Not a gender thing either. Men and women both the same,” said Winander close behind her.

“It’s the Wolf-Head Cross, isn’t it? The other one I read about in Peter K.’s Guide.”

“Now why should you think that?”

She peered at the residual branches which formed an irregular stubby crossbar.

“The nail holes are a bit of a giveaway,” she said. “Did you put them there?”

“Nail holes? What an imagination you have! A few beetle holes perhaps. It’s exactly as it was when we dragged it out of the Moss, except a bit drier.”

“The Moss? Mecklin Moss, would that be?”

“You’re remarkably well informed for a stranger,” said Winander. “If you stay another couple of days, we’ll have to elect you queen. Yes, it was Mecklin. I was helping a neighbor haul out a beast of his that had got bogged down when we chanced upon this. Something in that bit of bog must have preserved it, I don’t know how. I hauled it out, cleaned it up and left it standing here till it told me what it wanted to be.”

“And it told you, wolf?”

“Not really. In fact it was Frek Woollass who came up with that idea. She saw something lupine in the twist of the grain. She offered to commission me. I said I didn’t want her money just her body so we shook hands on that. As many hours modeling for me as I took on the wolf head.”

“So you’ve been dragging your feet,” suggested Sam.

“Perish the unprofessional thought!” said Winander, twinkling. “I’ve had to prepare a site too. She wants her grandfather to have a view of it from his window. Gerry, her dad, isn’t keen on having a view of it from anywhere. Too pagan for his taste. But like most young women of my acquaintance, it’s Frek who calls the tune. So it will be in place as promised before she goes back to Cambridge which is this coming weekend.”

“ Cambridge? You mean the university?”

“That’s the one. Our Frek is a real-life don. Eddas and sagas and Nordic mythology’s her thing, hence maybe her fancy for the wolf. You don’t seem impressed?”

“Seems a waste of good money teaching that stuff at university,” she said.

“An opinion I’d keep to yourself if Frek’s around,” he said. “Anyway, this is promised, but if anything else takes your fancy, we’ll see if we can work out a deal.”

Another twinkle. He was irrepressible, she thought, as he flung open the double barn door and led her into the workshop. This was relatively tidy after the yard. Bang in the middle, lit by the rectangle of light falling in through the open door was a wide-eyed marble angel brooding over a headstone. Sam stood before it, struck by a sense of familiarity stopping short of recognition. She lowered her gaze to read the inscription:

BILLY KNIPP

taken in his 17th year

sadly missed by his grieving mother

“Think what a present thou to God hast sent”

“This the boy they buried yesterday?” she said.

“Yes. Almost done. I’ll be setting it up later.”

“Nice inscription,” she said.

“ Milton. If you knew Billy, you might think it a touch ironical.”

He gave her a twinkle as if expecting curiosity about the boy.

Instead she asked, “So what are you, Mr. Winander – international artist or village jobbing craftsman, like your ancestors, according to Peter K.?”

He was hard to put down.

“From the stuff I see winning the Turner Prize year after year, the latter is the nobler designation. I am proud of the fact that once upon a time round here the Winanders did everything that needed to be done with hammer and chisel and saw and adze. First Winander son was the blacksmith, second the mason, third the carpenter.”

“What did they do with daughters? Stake them out on a hillside?”

“You’ve definitely been reading up on us,” he laughed.

“So what number son are you?”

“I was unique,” he said. “So I had to do it all.”

“Including the wild pranks I read about in the Guide?”

“Especially the pranks. Seen enough?”

“I reckon.”

As she turned from the memorial she noticed something on the floor concealed by a piece of sacking. She pulled it aside and found herself looking at a reclining nude, half life-size, in some kind of creamy, almost white wood. It was a piece full of energy with the violent chisel marks clearly visible and nothing classical in the pose. It was blatantly sexual, legs splayed, vulva boldly gouged. Yet it had the same pensive features as the marble angel. And suddenly she knew whose they were.

“Miss Woollass certainly keeps her side of a bargain,” she said.

If she hoped to surprise him, she failed.

“Yes, you know where you are with Frek,” he said.

“You can even see where you’ve been,” she said ironically. To her surprise her response made him roar with far more laughter than it deserved.

He led her from the workshop now into the house.

“Find yourself a seat in there if you can,” he said. “Won’t be a second.”

Chaos resumed in the room he left her in. The only chair with space enough to sit on looked as if it had been cleared by natural slippage and her feet rested on a slew of books. The floor was littered with artifacts ranging from a Valkyrie bust in sandstone to a giant wrought-iron corkscrew twisted into a granite cork. The main ceiling beam was covered with hooks from which depended a row of grotesque and sexually explicit corn-dollies which dangled there like Execution Dock on a bad day.

The only conventional piece on show was a portrait enjoying sole occupancy of the broad chimney breast. Its subject was a smiling young man with tousled blond hair standing beside an apple tree just beginning to blossom. He was leaning forward with his outstretched hands cupping a nest in which half a dozen chicks had just broken out of sky-blue eggs. Around his feet were primroses, cowslips, wood anemones, all the flowers of spring, while the hills behind were bright with the yellow of gorse. Yet nothing in this exuberance of vernal color reduced the brightness radiating from the youth. On the contrary, he seemed its center if not its source.

“Ready for another?” said Winander.

He’d pulled on a T-shirt with the inscription Love is an extra. She checked the can in her hand, found once more it was empty. Beer and toast just vanished in Illthwaite.

She caught the new can he sent flying toward her, crushed the old one in her hand and looked for somewhere to deposit it.

“Chuck it in the corner,” he said. “I’ll probably be able to sell it to some rich Yank. Now, Miss Flood, as you’ve made it pretty clear you’re not interested in either my art or my body, what is it you’ve come for?”

“I told you before. I want to hear about my namesake. Look, let’s not pussyfoot, you saw me find the inscription on the church wall. You were up the tower, right?”

It was a guess but he didn’t even argue.

“Yes, I went up the ladder, partly because I don’t attend religious ceremonies, also to check to see if there were any evidence of your claim to have heard someone up there.”

“Why didn’t you just ask your Neanderthal chum? I was convinced I’d just made a mistake till I realized in the pub there were two of them.”

“I did wonder. But you don’t get far asking Laal questions he doesn’t want to answer.”

“Laal? That’s what you called the one digging the grave, wasn’t it? It can’t have been him up there, must have been the other. What’s his name?”

Winander took a suck of lager and said, “Laal.”

“They’ve got the same name? Isn’t it hard enough telling them apart anyway?”

“Impossible. That’s the point. But here in Skaddale we find a way of dealing with impossibilities. So the rule is, whichever one you’re talking to is Laal, which incidentally means little. The other one’s Girt, meaning big. But as you never talk to him, to all intent and purposes, he doesn’t exist.”

He cocked his head on one side as if expecting bewilderment, or at least dissent.

Instead, after a moment’s thought, she nodded vigorously.

“I like it,” she said. “It’s algebraic. And, paradoxically, even though it’s a device to counter the problem of differentiation, I presume they go along with it because to object would be to allow themselves to be differentiated?”

He shook his head and said, “Too subtle for me, Miss Flood. I’m just a simple Cumbrian marra.”

“Don’t know what that means exactly, but I know it’s a load of bull. You saw me read your inscription, Mr. Winander – ”

“My inscription?” he interrupted.

“Come on!” she said. “I recognized the style. It looks like half the inscriptions in the graveyard, and that fancy Italian stuff on your gatepost was the clincher. You saw me, and you decided you’d better check me out, to see if I was going to kick up a blue about it or go quietly. Well, now you know. I’m not going anywhere, and the only reason I’m going to be quiet is so you can tell me what the hell this is all about. So start talking, Mr. Thor Winander, or I start yelling!”

4. Alice’s journal

Miguel Madero was deep in the past.

He was a fast worker and within a very short time he’d seen enough to make him feel enormously privileged to be allowed access to this material. There was stuff here which a lot of TV historians would have given their research assistant’s right hand for.

The octavo volumes were a combination of day-book and journal written over many years by that Alice Woollass whose name appeared on the date stone over the door. They required careful handling, the sheets having been sewn together, perhaps by Alice herself, and in many cases already either the thread had snapped or turned the hole in the dry paper to a tear. The leather cases were simply that, rectangles of animal skin cut to the size of the octavo sheets and folded round them for protection. Over the centuries the creases had become permanent. Part of Madero’s mind deplored that nobody had ever thought to have the books properly bound, but another part was thrilled to be in contact with material exactly as its creator had left it. As he brushed his fingers over the sheets, he felt that his spirit was brushing against the spirit of the woman who’d written them.

And it soon became clear she was a woman worth knowing.

The journal element was not continuous, for there were many periods of their life, such as childbirth (frequent), sickness (her own or a child’s, also frequent), and other emergencies or periods of intense activity when the opportunity and/or energy for writing was not available. Often it consisted of little more than an aide-mémoire account of domestic events. But from time to time Alice found leisure to indulge in longer, more reflective passages which allowed insight into her thoughts and concerns and personality.

She was, Madero worked out, only eighteen when the house was built and she lived another sixty-two years, during which time she saw first her son, then her grandson become master of Illthwaite Hall, on each occasion relinquishing just sufficient of her domestic responsibilities to her daughter-in-law and grand-daughter-in-law to affirm their status without noticeably diluting her own overall authority.

The first journal started with the arrival of the Woollasses in their new house. From what Alice wrote it was clear that, her youth notwithstanding, she’d been determined that her wishes and opinions about the layout of the building should be heard. In the journal she expressed her pleasure when she felt her desires had been met, but where they’d been ignored, she was vehement in complaint which she did not hesitate to pass on to her husband.

Yet she was no termagant bride, such as might make a man regret his folly in ever marrying. She was clearly proud of Edwin’s standing in the community, she admired the way he managed his affairs and his estate, she praised and joined in his many acts of charity, and, though this was no confessional diary, recording and analyzing the intimate details of a physical relationship, an early entry – to our chamber betimes Jub. Deo – suggested that she took as much pleasure as she gave in the marriage bed. Jub. Deo, which Madero read as a reference to the hundredth psalm which begins Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, was subsequently shortened to JD in its frequent appearances, the last of which was dated only a couple of days before Edwin’s death in April 1588.

This and other details he noted with a scholar’s eye as he did a rapid preliminary scan through the books. There was much material here for his thesis in the form of a vivid contemporary response, sometimes at a distance, sometimes uncomfortably close up, to the see-saw rise and fall of Catholic fortunes in the sixteenth century. Alice ’s delight in taking possession of her new home was clouded by news of the destruction of the county’s monastic centers. The Priory at Illthwaite, like Calder Abbey to the west, was an offshoot of the great Cistercian Abbey of Furness. Its main claim to distinction was that it had in its keeping certain alleged relics of St. Ylf which were associated with several instances of miraculous healing. When news of Calder’s destruction reached the Hall, Alice prayed that Illthwaite, being much smaller, might be overlooked, but a few weeks later she recorded that Thomas Cromwell’s men had appeared, the Priory had been pillaged, its treasures destroyed or stolen, and its buildings razed to the ground save for the Stranger House, which the dissolvers had used as their lodging and stables.

Nor was there better news elsewhere. The dismantling of the great and powerful Abbey of Furness stone by stone was recorded with horror. A small cause for rejoicing was the news that the prayers of the locals in Cartmel had been answered and the church of the priory there was to be spared though the rest of the site was leveled. But generally it was a tale of woe and destruction.

He skipped over the early pages which recorded the Woollass men’s participation in the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace which had nearly cost Alice ’s brother-in-law, young Will, his head. She gave thanks to God when Mary came to the throne in 1553, but it said much for her humanity that she reacted to news of Protestants being burned at the stake with the same revulsion she had shown at assaults on her coreligionists.

Then in 1558, Elizabeth inherited the crown and the screws began to turn again. The anti-recusancy laws, first introduced during the brief reign of Edward, were reinforced and much more rigorously applied. And soon there began that great priest-hunt which was eventually to have such significance for the Woollass family.

Alice had few illusions about her wild young brother-in-law, describing him at the time of her marriage as a railing, mery rogue, fit for little save drinking and laiking; yet I cannot find it in my heart to dislike him!

Her delight in his marriage to Margaret Millgrove was unreserved. Her husband, however, had mixed feelings. It was in his eyes a low and unsuitable connection for a Woollass. Cloth merchants, he proclaimed, were little more than plebeian leeches feeding off the real work done by shepherds, shearers, landowners. On the other hand to get Will settled was much, and Edwin allowed his wife to persuade him into acceptance.

However, as the Millgroves prospered and rose in social status, their enthusiastic embracing of the Protestant faith soon provided another source of contention. The story he’d heard from Southwell was all here, but from a much more personal perspective.

Alice deplored the growing rift between her husband and Will, and was active in encouraging the friendship between Simeon and her own sons, till Will accused the Illthwaite Woollasses of filling his boy’s head with treasonable matter and forbade the visits. Simeon obeyed, and Will eventually added distance to duty by sending his son as the firm’s agent first to Portsmouth, then to Spain.

Alice ’s journals now took Madero where Southwell’s researches had not been able to go.

When Will finally severed relations with Simeon, he commanded his wife to have no more correspondence with her son. Dutifully, she obeyed. But she had not been formally forbidden from communicating with her Illthwaite in-laws and through Alice she obtained news of Simeon, who had kept in close touch with his cousins.

Alice was very careful never to record anything in terms which could incriminate herself or her family if read by a third party. Indeed, as Madero did his first rapid scan through all of the volumes which continued until just a day before Alice ’s death in 1597, he had a sense of gaps which closer examination confirmed, with sentences half-finished at the foot of one sheet not resuming at the top of the next. Perhaps the dilapidation of the primitive binding had allowed some pages to be lost over the centuries. Or perhaps Alice herself on a rereading had decided that some entries were potentially too revealing.

Nevertheless, with Mr. Southwell’s neat record in his hand, Madero was able to reconstruct various events.

The search of Will’s house in Kendal had taken place on a December morning in 1587. On the same day, Alice had noted that a traveler from Kendal en route for the port of Ravenglass had stopped at the hall briefly for refreshment.

Her next entry recorded, almost casually, that an officer of the North Lancashire Yeomanry, a gentleman of a family known to her husband, had called with a small troop of soldiers and asked permission to search the house and outbuildings for a fugitive priest. The search proving fruitless, the officer had apologized for disturbing them, then accepted their invitation to sit down with them and take supper.

It was clear to Madero what had happened. As the searchers departed from Will’s house, Margaret had guessed that they were now heading for Illthwaite. She had then revealed to Will that she knew Simeon was in regular communication with his Illthwaite relations. Will would have flown into a fury but Margaret’s fears for her son were far stronger than her fear of her husband. Again and again she would have protested, “But think! What if our son is at the Hall and they discover him?”

Finally Will’s anger had faded as he contemplated the likely result of his son’s capture. He had probably seen a heretic’s execution. Memory of those brutalities would be enough to drive even the strongest anger out of a father’s head. A trusted messenger must have been despatched to Illthwaite with orders not to spare his mount in his efforts to overtake the soldiers and warn his brother of the imminent search.

Then he and his wife sat silent to endure the long hours till the messenger returned.

Miguel Madero sat back from his work and let his creative imagination loose to roam this ancient house. He heard the soldiers arrive, registered Edwin and Alice’s indignant reaction, watched the men trample through the chambers in their vain search. The officer sounded like a man who would direct the searchers conscientiously but without fervor. As for his men, probably most of them were indifferent as to whether they were ruled by a Catholic monarch or a Protestant so long as they got paid. So poke about, make a bit of noise, goose the maidservants, but don’t do anything that might really piss off the family and make them chintzy with the victuals.

Had Simeon been here? he wondered. Alice was too wise to give even a hint in her journals.

The house had been searched at least once more after 1587. The second search in February 1589, conducted by the Yorkshire pursuivant Francis Tyrwhitt, seemed to have been a much more thorough job. Alice saw no reason to let discretion get in the way of setting down her typically forthright reaction to Tyrwhitt, describing him as having the fawning maner of a Welsh dealer trying to sel a spavind nag at a horse-fayre.

It was during this search that the concealed room in the Long Gallery had been discovered.

Typically Alice made no written admission that it was a priest-hole, saying only that They made grate commotion when they chanced on that privy closet which my late husband had caused to be created for the more secure storage of our precious goods in the event, which Godde forbid, that Civill Strife or foreign invasion disturb the peace of our beloved countrie.

Clever old Alice to have a good cover story ready in case the authorities ever found the hiding place, though, of course, like a trout in the milk, a priest in the hole would be more difficult to explain away.

You have e-mail.

It was the voice of his laptop, dragging him forward four centuries.

It was from Max Coldstream.

Hi, Mig

Glad to hear Southwell was a help. Nothing useful from Yorkshire yet. Tim Lilleywhite says he’s unearthed a fair-sized portfolio of Tyrwhitt’s personal records, but nothing on Simeon other than a bare reference to his admission to Jolley.

I passed your query about Molloy on to our library IT wiz who dug up some stuff. First name Liam. Seems to have been a competent freelance journalist who from time to time cobbled together books on topics he thought might titillate the debased palate of hoi polloi. Topcliffe and torture sounds very much his style. Our wiz came across a ref to a website which presumably went defunct with its creator, but evidently these things can have a kind of immortality of their own which may assist the Recording Angel in his work. The lad in the library seemed keen to try to track it down, so I said go ahead.

Good luck at Illthwaite. Be careful. Not sure how far the laws of God or man apply in those remote places!

Best, Max

Mig smiled. Coldstream was very much an urban animal, a small cuddly hamster of a man who loved the cozy nest he’d created for himself in Southampton but had somehow contrived to have connections and influence all over the world. In Max all that the view out of the study window would have provoked was a shudder.

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps other laws than those of God or man applied in this place.

He dismissed the speculation and turned to another, almost as troublesome. Had Father Simeon visited the Hall during those turbulent years of his work on the English Mission? Madero felt sure he must have done. Yet it was strange, that lack of vibration he had experienced as he stood in the hiding place in the Long Gallery. He had been a touch disingenuous when he told Frek he had a certain sensitivity to that sort of thing. It went a little further than that. If he closed his eyes now and emptied his mind of all distractive thought, he could get a sense of…

A strong human presence!

“I’m sorry you find our family records so soporific, Mr. Madero.”

He opened his eyes and sat upright. Frek was standing behind him.

He reached forward and removed Max’s message from the laptop screen. Had she had time to read it? Did it matter?

“Sorry, I was just…”

“…communing with the spirits?” she completed. “Of course. Well, I’m sorry to drag your mind from the spirit to the flesh, but it’s time for lunch.”

If only you knew how easily you can drag my mind from the spirit to the flesh, he thought.

He stood up.

“Lead on,” he said. “I have built up quite an appetite.”

5. An amicable pair

Sam Flood and Thor Winander sat facing each other. He had picked up a wooden chair, tipped its contents on to the floor and set it down a couple of feet in front of her so that their knees almost touched.

He leaned forward. At this distance the whites of his eyes were bloodshot and she could see a network of tiny veins on his strong nose.

He said, “Let’s get one thing out of the way so you don’t build up too many expectations. You say it was the spring of 1960 your grandmother sailed?”

“That’s right.”

He said, “Our Sam Flood didn’t come to live here till the summer of 1960. A year later he was dead. So that seems to cut out any possible connection with your gran.”

His tone was brusque, his expression blank, as if he were merely stating facts too abstract to be involving. But the stillness of his body gave this the lie. It was the stillness not of relaxation but of control.

Sam said, “You said you’d tell me about him anyway.”

“Did I? So I did. But I’m not always to be relied on, Miss Flood. I said I’d take care of Sam too, and look what happened to him.”

He was trying to maintain a calm tone but she detected an undercurrent of savage self-reproach. For the first time it occurred to her that maybe people might be reluctant to talk about her mysterious namesake, not because there was something to hide but because there was something to hide from.

But she’d come too far to back off now.

“Look, I’m sorry if this is painful…”

“Are you?” he said savagely. “Know about pain, do you?”

“A bit.”

“Yeah, yeah. The young know a bit about everything. OK. Let’s get this done.”

He sat back and his gaze focused away from her.

“Sam Flood,” he said softly. “Like I say, I don’t see any way you can be connected to Sam, but if you had been, then you’d have been very lucky. He was the best person I ever met. Absolutely. In every respect. The very best.”

Suddenly he smiled directly at her. Or was it the other Sam Flood he was smiling at in his memory?

“So how did a notorious reprobate like me meet up with such a paragon? By blind chance, as I would put it. Or by the grace of God, as Sam would have put it. For he wasn’t only naturally good, he was good by profession and vocation.”

He paused while Sam worked this out.

“You mean he was some kind of priest?” she said.

“Indeed. You don’t look impressed by the information. Not your favorite people, perhaps? Mine neither, but that’s what Sam was, curate of this parish, no less, back in the days when the C of E could afford curates. Nowadays it’s only the fact that Pete Swinebank is virtually self-supporting that means Illthwaite still has a vicar of its own. Of course, in Pete’s case, the hereditary principle applies too, but he looks set to be last of his line, unless he’s been ploughing fields and scattering the good seed in places we don’t know about.”

“Tell me about Sam Flood,” insisted Sam, sensing evasion.

“That’s what I’m doing,” he said. “I met Sam when I was doing my art course in Leeds. That surprises you? Me with qualifications, not just a natural genius. My father saw there wasn’t much future in shoeing horses so he started to diversify. Even traveled abroad, which no self-respecting Illthwaitean did, met a Norwegian girl and married her. That’s how I got to be Thor. Fitted somehow, as Winander is a Viking name anyway. Windermere means the lake belonging to Vinandr. I sometimes think I’ll put in a claim.”

For some reason this information put Sam in mind of her visit to the churchyard, but she brushed the irrelevancy aside.

“So you met this guy when you were a student,” she prompted.

“That’s right. He was at some vicars’ training college close by. There was this chap making some interesting furniture in the same neck of the woods. I rode out there on my motorbike one day to take a look round his workshop. The bike spluttered a bit when I set off back to town and I was just passing the college gate when it gave up the ghost. Also it started to rain. In a few minutes it was a deluge. A bus stopped close by and some young guys, students from the college, got out. Most of them sprinted through the gates, but one of them came over. He said, ‘Having trouble?’ I answered something like, ‘Who the fuck are you? The Good Samaritan?’ You know, really gracious.”

“Nothing’s changed then,” said Sam.

Winander grinned. He had a nice grin when it was spontaneous.

He said, “Wrong. Nowadays I’d recognize this guy was my best chance of getting out of the wet and come over all pathetic. Fortunately, as you’ve guessed, this was Sam Flood, and ill-mannered crap like mine just bounced off him.”

He paused, then repeated, “Bounced off him. When I said that to Frek Woollass, she said he sounded like Balder. You ever heard of Balder?”

Sam shook her head.

“Me neither, till then. Seems he was one of the Norse gods, the loveliest of them all both in appearance and in personality. He was goodness personified and everybody loved him so much that his mother Frigg had no problem getting everything that existed, animal, vegetable and mineral, to swear an oath that they would never cause Balder any harm. Eventually it became a favorite after-dinner game of the gods to hurl plates and spears and furniture and boiling oil at him, just for the fun of seeing it bounce off while he sat there laughing at them.”

“Sounds more like the Pom upper classes than gods. I guess they didn’t have any videos to watch in those days. We’re drifting away from the story again.”

“Not really. The only thing Frigg didn’t get a promise from was the mistletoe, which she reckoned was too young and slight to pose any danger. Another god called Loki, who got his kicks out of making mischief, took a sprig of mistletoe, sharpened it into a dart and gave it to Balder’s brother, Hod, who happened to be blind. Joining in the fun, Hod, guided by Loki, hurled the mistletoe and it pierced Balder right through the heart.”

He fell silent. Sam had a feeling there was stuff here it might be dangerous to stir up. But all she wanted at this time were the straight facts.

“So Sam the Samaritan helped you,” she prompted.

“That’s right. Invited me to come and shelter inside. I did. We drank coffee and talked till the rain stopped. Then we went back out to the bike and got it to start. I said thanks to Sam. He was a genuine Christian with a real faith in human goodness. Not many around. Also he was a trainee parson, a Bible puncher, an idiot who felt called by God to waste his life standing around a drafty church, preaching to six old ladies on a good Sunday. Too many of them around. But Sam was different. I really liked the guy. He said he enjoyed football, so I gave him my address in Leeds and invited him to drop in next time he came to see United play. In fact I said if he came before the match, we could go together, and if there’s anything I hate more than religion, it’s football!”

“He sounds a real winning character,” said Sam.

“Indeed. And before your brutish antipodean mind starts getting the wrong end of the stick, let me emphasize the attraction was queer only in the sense of odd. I had no desire to fondle his bum. I’ll admit to enjoying the sight of him when we swam together in the buff, but it was an artist’s enjoyment in beauty, the same that I might possibly get if you were to strip off, my dear, but without any of the concomitant carnal stirrings.”

He leered at her unconvincingly.

She said with some irritation, “OK, you weren’t after his body. What was it he was after? Your soul?”

“Certainly not my arse’ole,” said Winander. “He was so straight you could have drawn lines with him. No, we just got on somehow, despite all the obvious oppositions. An elective affinity, I think the scientists call it.”

“Or an amicable pair,” said Sam.

“Sorry?”

“In math, that’s what we call two numbers each of which is equal to the sum of the divisors of the other. The smallest ones, 220 and 284, were regarded by the Pythagoreans as symbols of true friendship.”

“Well now, for a plain-speaking wysiwyg Aussie, you’re full of surprises. Anyway, whatever the cause, we became good friends. I invited him to stay with me in the hols. He loved Illthwaite and of course Illthwaite loved him. Naturally he went to St. Ylf’s during his visits. Surprisingly he and old Paul – that’s Rev. Pete’s father – seemed to get on well. Paul was old school, hellfire and damnation. Perhaps what he saw in Sam was all those parts of Christianity like compassion and forgiveness which his own leathery heart couldn’t reach. Also that same leathery heart had been diagnosed as dodgy and he probably wanted someone he could rely on to keep the place ticking over till his own boy, our Rev. Pete, was old enough to follow the family tradition and rule at St. Ylf’s. When he twisted his superiors’ arms into providing him with a curate, and made sure Sam got appointed, even the ranks of infamy could scarce forbear to cheer.”

“And Sam jumped at the chance to come here, did he?”

Winander shook his head.

“In fact, no. He agonized over it.”

“But why, if he liked the place so much?”

“That was the trouble. He really felt it was too easy coming somewhere like this, to work in an area he adored among people he knew and liked. He thought he would be more needed elsewhere. He even asked what I thought. Big mistake.”

“Why’s that?”

“It was a bit like Eve asking the serpent whether he thought apples or pears were better for her teeth. I was at my subtle best. I didn’t take the piss out of his desire for poverty and adversity. Instead I told him he could find that here if he cared to look. And I said maybe this yearning to fight the good fight in some godforsaken hole where everyone would know he was a hero was in itself a form of indulgence. Oh, I was persuasive because I was sincere. I wanted him to come here. And in the end I prevailed.”

He fell silent for a moment then said flatly, “I sometimes think it was the worst day’s work I’ve done in my life.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Sam.

“Because if he hadn’t come here, he might still be alive today.”

Then he laughed without much humor and said, “On the other hand, if he were, he’d probably be a broken-down old nag like me.”

“Comes to us all, I guess,” said Sam. “But even avoiding that fate’s not much consolation for dying at… how old would he be? Early twenties?”

“Yes.”

“So how’d he die?”

And when he didn’t reply she went on, “Killed himself, did he? Is that why he doesn’t have a proper headstone?”

“You’re a real little detective, aren’t you?” he said. “Wondered why you seemed to get on so well with Noddy Melton.”

She put that aside for future consideration and said, “So why did your friend who was such a great guy that everybody loved him, a guy who was so religious he became a parson, why did someone like that top himself?”

“Despair,” he said shortly.

“Despair? What the hell’s that mean?”

“God, you are young, aren’t you? How can you be expected to get your head round the notion of grim-visag’d comfortless Despair?”

“From the sound of it your chum was just my age when he died, so try me.”

He shook his head.

“No details. They’re nothing to do with you. All I’ll say is that the very essence of Sam Flood, the source of all his strength and the basis of his faith, was a belief in human goodness. Confronted by something that seemed to give the lie to this in a direct incontrovertible and personal way, he lost his whole raison d’être.”

That his grief was genuine and deep was beyond all doubt. His body seemed to fold in on itself, and with the light of mischief and mockery switched off, his face became the face of despair, of a man condemned as much as of a man mourning.

Then he took a deep breath as if consciously reinflating himself and stood up so abruptly he knocked his chair over.

“End of stories, his and mine,” he proclaimed. “And that’s it, my young friend. I’m sorry if the sad coincidence of your name has caused you inconvenience or distress, but I’m sure it will quickly pass. For us who live here it’s different. We had a young god living with us for a while, but we weren’t good enough to keep him. If we don’t talk about him, it’s simply because nobody wants to talk about their shame. Please excuse me now. I have a headstone to finish and move down to the church.”

“Couple more questions,” Sam said peremptorily. “Tell me about the inscription.”

He said, “Back in 1961 suicide was still a criminal offense and very much the unforgivable sin in the eyes of church traditionalists, and they didn’t come any more traditional than old Paul Swinebank. Church burial was out of the question, so Sam was cremated, and you couldn’t get near the crem. chapel for mourners. Then some of us scattered the ashes at St. Ylf’s, around the Wolf-Head Cross. Someone said, “The cross will have to do for his memorial. Pity we can’t carve his name, though.” And I thought, right, we’ll see about that. And I went into the churchyard one Sunday morning and carved my little tribute on the wall.”

He grinned and said, “They could hear the sound of my chisel during the quiet moments in the service. Chip chip chip. I thought old Paul might try to get the inscription erased, but to his credit he didn’t. He just let the nettles and briar grow over it. I didn’t mind about that. Everyone who mattered knew it was there. They still do.”

“And still keep their mouths shut more than four decades later.”

“We’re close and private people, us Cumbrians. We go to bed with gags on in case we talk in our sleep. And we don’t trust strangers till they show us they can be trusted.”

“No? Well, that works both ways, mister,” said Sam, growing angry. “First time we met, I’d just been knocked off a ladder, remember? And I’m still not sure it was an accident. And last night in the bar when I asked for help, all I got was some crap about a guy who won a competition for pulling faces. So why should I trust you? What kind of place is it anyway where you get prizes for looking ugly? I’m not surprised that your chum couldn’t take it.”

She was ashamed of the crack even as it came out. It was a bad habit, going over the top. It made it that much harder to drive home your legitimate grievance.

But Winander was looking at her as if he understood, or at least as if he didn’t resent what she’d said. It began to dawn on her that there was a pain here which nothing she might say could add to. Time for truce.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was out of order. I’m just disappointed. Your friend sounds like he was real special.”

“Oh yes, he was,” said Winander.

He was standing looking away from her with a faint reminiscent smile.

She followed his gaze. It took her to the painting on the wall.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” she said.

It was obvious. Now she looked again she could see the affection which had gone into creating the portrait. She studied it closely – the smiling mouth, the tousled blond hair, the bright blue eyes – looking for any resemblance with herself or her father.

There was none.

“He looks a nice guy,” she said. “A real spunk. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“And I’m sorry for your disappointment. But with your evident detective talent, I’m sure you’ll track your family origins down in the end.”

Her mind went back to his earlier comment and, glad now to move away from the dead curate, she said, “What did you mean about me getting on with old Mr. Melton?”

“Noddy? You don’t know? He was a policeman. Started as the village bobby here years ago when I was just a kid. Moved on, but came back when he retired.”

“Must have missed the place,” said Sam, recalling the old man’s reaction to the name Illthwaite.

“Funny way of showing it if he does,” said Winander. “He’s a nosy old sod, always stirring it.”

“Why do you call him Noddy?”

“Enid Blyton. Gets a bad press these days but used to be like a set text way back. We called him PC Plod to start with, but that didn’t really fit till one of us kids said he looked more like Noddy the Elf, and that stuck. Like another beer?”

“No thanks. Time to go. Thanks for being so open with me.”

“I’m sorry we gave you the runaround,” he said. “I’ll see you out. Sure there’s nothing you want to buy?”

“Not on my budget,” she said, laughing.

“You never said what you’re doing here in the UK. Holiday, is it? The grand tour, backpacking round the world?”

They’d reached the front door and she was saved from answering by the appearance of an old pickup which came bumping down the driveway. In it were the Gowder twins. As it moved slowly by, Sam felt their eyes hold her in their sights.

“My helpers,” said Winander.

“They work for you?”

“And for anyone who’ll employ them,” said Winander. “The Gowders used to be important people round here, but even with the slow rate of progress we admit in these parts, they still managed to get left behind. Jim, the twins’ father, after his wife died he spent more time and money pissing up against walls than mending them. By the time the twins came into the farm there wasn’t enough stock or land left to make it a going concern. They’d have lost the house too if Dunstan Woollass hadn’t stepped in.”

“The squire?”

“The same. And old Dunny takes his squirely responsibilities seriously. When Foulgate, that’s the Gowder house, came on the market to settle their debts, he bought it and let them stay on at a peppercorn rent and saw to it that they can make a fair living odd-jobbing.”

“Very community-hearted of him. I gather Gerry takes after him.”

“Outdoes him in general do-gooding, but when it comes to the Gowders they’re miles apart. He hates their guts. I think they must have bullied him at primary school.”

“But you like them?”

“Good Lord, no,” he laughed. “But they’re part of Skaddale, like the rocks and the moss. And if you need brute force, send for a Gowder. Got to watch them, though. Because they can carry a tup under either arm, they think nothing’s beyond them. Block and tackle’s for wimps. We’re taking Billy’s angel down to the church later. Left to themselves they’d try to pick it up bodily and toss it into the back of the pickup. Eternal vigilance is the price of employing a Gowder.”

“I’ll leave you to it then,” said Sam. “See you later, maybe.”

At the gateless gateway she glanced back. Winander waved. The Gowders had halted their vehicle by the smithy and got out. She felt the intensity of their gaze like a gun leveled at her. And she knew with a certainty beyond the scope of mathematical logic that this was the same gaze she’d felt in that split second before the trap slammed shut on the church tower.

Suddenly her heart ached with a longing for home.

And I’ve eaten my last Cherry Ripe, too! she thought.

6. Ejection

Mig Madero sat in the kitchen of Illthwaite Hall and felt happy.

He and Frek Woollass were to eat alone. On the landing they’d met Mrs. Collipepper, carrying a tray. Dunstan, Frek explained, usually returned to his bed after the exertion of descending for breakfast. He lunched off a tray, then reemerged for tea.

The housekeeper passed without a word. Madero smiled at her but she didn’t return the smile. He wasn’t bothered. He had other things on his mind. Frek had set off down the stairs and as he followed, despite all his efforts at diversion, he found his gaze and his fancy focused on the point, occasionally visible as her T-shirt rode up from her hipster shorts, where that arrow-straight spine split the apple of her buttocks.

In the kitchen she completed his happiness by apologizing for the absence of her father who along with Sister Angelica had gone to a meeting of an educational charity whose committee they both sat on.

He’d expected something like the room in the Stranger House where he’d drunk cognac with Mrs. Appledore the previous night, but this was completely different. Contemporary wall units and electrical apparatus all looked perfectly at home against a background of golden-tiled walls. The broad windows let in plenty of light and looked out on a rising bank of grass and heather out of which some kind of platform seemed to have been carved about ten feet up. In the middle of the kitchen was a pine table of generous dimensions but a mere dwarf by comparison with that in the Stranger. On it stood a cheese board, a fresh cottage loaf and a bowl of fruit.

Frek shook her head when Madero pushed the bread toward her. Instead she took an apple and cut it in two. As the demiorbs fell apart, Madero’s thoughts went back to his lubricious imaginings as he descended the stairs. Apple was wrong with its golds and reds. Frek would be white, two smooth scoops of ice cream with the promise of hot plum sauce hidden somewhere beneath…

“Are you all right, Mr. Madero? Not off with the spirits again?”

He realized he was sitting completely still with the cheese knife raised in his hand.

“I’m fine. But I wonder if I might have some water? It’s a bit warm in here.”

“Sorry. It’s the Aga. Pepi always keeps the temperature up high for Grandfather’s sake. Would you like a glass of wine? There should be a bottle… yes, there we are…”

She glanced around as she spoke. Like a sky-watcher who has found a new star, he kept his eyes fixed on her, and he saw discovery turn to recognition then to dismay.

He let his gaze drift along the line of her sight till it reached the looked-for bottle. It was his gift of El Bastardo standing already open next to a large crystal bowl through whose sides it was possible to see a layer of red topped by a layer of yellow.

“I think,” said Madero carefully, “your housekeeper is preparing a sherry trifle.”

“Yes. I’m sorry… Mrs. Collipepper must have picked it up by accident.”

“Of course. Perhaps we should lead her out of temptation…”

She rose and brought the bottle to the table. It was three-quarters full.

“Would you prefer something else? It hardly seems right, offering you your own drink… and I don’t even know if it goes with bread and cheese.”

“We will call them tapas, in which case the fino is the perfect accompaniment. Your father will not mind us sampling the wine without him?”

He asked the question gravely, saw her seeking a polite way of saying Gerry wouldn’t give a damn if they poured it down the sink, then smiled broadly and said, “Good. Glasses, if you please. Two. It is not polite to drink El Bastardo alone.”

She went to a cupboard and produced two wineglasses, not copitas – that would have been expecting too much – but medium-sized goblets which he half filled.

“Salud!” he said.

“Skaal,” she replied.

“What do you think?” he asked after they’d drunk.

“It’s different from what I expected,” she said.

“Not what you look for at the bottom of a trifle, you mean?”

“I have drunk sherry before, Mr. Madero,” she said. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable… Sorry, that sounds rude. I mean, sometimes…”

“Please, I understand,” he interrupted. “In Hampshire, too, where my mother lives, the famous English sherry party is sometimes unavoidable. Usually served at the wrong temperature in the wrong glasses.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve got it wrong…”

He said, “A bastard has to be robust enough to stand a little abuse. Which is not to say it lacks the refinement you would expect in a wine of such expense.”

“I didn’t imagine you’d brought Daddy a cheap bottle,” she murmured. “But it does seem a strange name to give to an expensive wine.”

“It dates back to a time when the Madero line looked as if it might be cut short,” he said. “Our family have always been merchants. Our business records go back to the conquest of Granada. We were prosperous, and well respected. Then in 1588, for reasons best known to himself, the third Miguel Madero of our records – first sons were always called Miguel – went off to fight the English with the Great Armada, taking with him his only son and heir. They both perished. His widow was a capable and determined woman, but ability and determination were of little use then without a man to channel them through. Happily, just as it seemed that the Madero line and business were doomed, it emerged that her lost son had contrived to impregnate his affianced bride before sailing. The boy was only sixteen and the girl fourteen, but the marriage had been arranged for almost a decade, and it suited the honor of her family and the fortunes of ours to acknowledge and accept the resultant bastard. Indeed, they even contrived to legitimize him by getting papal sanction for a retrospective marriage.”

“They could do that?” said Frek.

“If you knew the right strings to pull. I think perhaps someone like your grandfather might have managed it, or do I read him wrong?”

She smiled and said, “No, you’re right. But finish your story.”

“Until the boy came of age, his grandmother kept the business afloat, quite literally. And he turned out to be a man of such energy that during the eighty-nine years of his life, he laid the foundations of the business as it exists today. Despite his papal legitimization, he was always known as the Bastard, and this name began to be given to the best of the wine he produced and shipped. Much later in the nineteenth century when the true refinement of sherry began, the very best of our finos were accorded the title alone. So I give you the toast. El Bastardo!”

Frek said, “A fine if lengthy story. Here’s to bastards.”

They raised their glasses and drank. He poured a refill and helped himself to some brie. She took a wedge of cheddar and began to eat it with her apple. Watching the golden cheese and the red-and-white apple go into her mouth made him feel dizzy and he took another sip at his wine.

She said, “How is your work going, Mr. Madero?”

“I would like it if you would call me Mig.”

“Like the Russian aeroplane?”

“I do not fly so fast nor am I so deadly.”

“Surely nowadays it’s regarded as rather slow and old-fashioned?”

“Then it fits me very well.”

She smiled. They drank and refilled.

“And may I call you Frek? I like Frek. It sounds Nordic somehow. Like the old goddesses. Freyja, Fulla, Frigg. Yes, it fits you well.”

A nicely turned compliment, he thought complacently.

She laughed and said, “I see you know your Norse myths a little.”

“More than a little, I hope,” he said, slightly piqued.

“But not enough to know that the nearest thing to Frek you’ll find in them is Freki, who wasn’t a goddess but one of Odin’s wolves,” she said. “Thank you all the same. It’s good to know that even in Spain there’s an interest in the Northern myths.”

“I had a tutor who said the first duty of a good priest is to know the opposition.”

“And he considered the Northern pantheon who haven’t been around for a thousand years as opposition? That’s a bit paranoid, isn’t it?”

“Men have always invented the gods they need. Understand the gods and you’ll understand the men. A priest should be able to understand men, shouldn’t he?”

“It would be nice to think he might even be able to understand women,” said Frek dryly. “I take it you don’t include Christian deities in this pragmatic category? There we get into eternal verities, right? All the rest can be demolished euhemeristically.”

“I wasn’t trying to demolish, I was merely suggesting that an understanding of pagan belief systems is an essential sociological tool,” said Madero, wondering how the hell his clever compliment had got him here. “I’m a historian, remember, not a priest.”

“So you say. But to adapt a modern cliché, you can take the man out of the seminary, but can you ever take the seminary out of the man?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at her over the rim of his glass. “How about you? You come from a family willing to take great risks for the Catholic religion. I’d guess you went to a convent school. Your father clearly still adheres closely to the faith he was brought up in. Yet in you I detect at least a separation if not a distinct skepticism.”

She said, “I bet you got full marks on your Father Confessor courses.”

He felt himself flushing and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound…”

“Priestly?” she concluded. “I’ll be charitable and put it down to the historical researcher in you. You’re right. If I have to pick a mythology, I find I much prefer that of the old Norsemen. That’s why I’ve been teaching it at university for the past eight years.”

He adjusted her age upward a little. Her looks were timeless.

“But you’re not saying that you subscribe to their faith system?” he pressed.

“I can understand it. It was a religion for its times. Aren’t they all? I sometimes think Christianity’s time is passing. And just as Christianity cannibalized paganism, so the Next Big Thing will help itself to whatever it fancies from Christianity. It’s already started, hasn’t it? The music, the art. You can get a kick out of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion without giving a toss about the story. And watch the tourists pouring into York Minster, how many of them sit down and say a prayer?”

“And will this Next Big Thing be another divine intervention? Or totally secular?”

“God knows. Or maybe not.”

They both laughed. A shared moment. Then Madero said, “At least in a place like this you’re not likely to be confronted by extreme manifestations of novelty.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Frek. “It’s in places like Illthwaite, which no one in high authority pays much attention to, that changes begin.”

“I think you’ll find that Rome pays more attention than you realize to even its remotest outposts,” said Madero rather smugly.

“I’m not talking about Rome,” she said irritably. “Catholics are completely peripheral here. In the sticks, the C of E rules, OK? Oddly enough it was the Church of England that got me interested in paganism. I used to go to Sunday School at St. Ylf’s. We were ecumenical in Illthwaite before they knew how to spell it in Rome or Canterbury. And in the summer Rev. Pete – that’s Peter Swinebank, the vicar – used to sit us all down in the churchyard around the Wolf-Head Cross. Have you seen it yet?”

“No, but Mrs. Appledore mentioned it.”

“You must let me show it to you if we can find time. It’s a Viking cross full of reference to Nordic myths, all adapted to the Christian message of course. Rev. Pete used to explain it all, never realizing he was proselytizing for paganism! The Christian stuff I found pretty tedious, but that other world of gods and heroes and monsters and magic really turned me on. St. Ylf himself struck me as a boring do-gooder till I discovered his name meant wolf, and in some versions of his legend he took a wolf’s shape when he appeared to lost travelers, and he only led those to safety who showed no fear, the others he drove over a cliff and ate. This stuff doesn’t half make you talk!”

She held up her glass to be refilled. He topped up his own at the same time. The level in the bottle had sunk very low.

“It is one of its many beneficent effects,” he said. “But you sided with your father when your parents separated; not, I presume, on religious grounds?”

For a second he thought this was a familiarity too far, but after a sobering appraisal from those cold blue eyes, she said, “He needed me more. But enough of me. Now it’s your turn in the confessional.”

“What can a man who has led such a sheltered life as me have to confess?”

“You can tell me for a start why you don’t reckon Father Simeon spent much time in the priest-hole. You can tell me why you’re so interested in Simeon, not to mention Liam Molloy and Francis Tyrwhitt. In fact, you might like to give a rather fuller account of yourself than the carefully weighted and meticulously filleted version you offered in your letter and your interview.”

Wow. While he’d been fantasizing about this young woman’s body, she’d been taking notes and doing close analysis.

“I see,” he said, keeping it light. “You want full confession. And in return…?”

“You get absolution, of course.”

He sipped his sherry thoughtfully. It was tempting. There was an intimacy in the confessional which could lead to… what?

He opened his mouth to speak, not yet knowing what he was going to say.

He was prevented from finding out by the sound of footsteps approaching on the flagged floor outside, then the door burst open.

“There you are, Mr. Madero,” said Gerald Woollass. “Enjoying your lunch?”

He sounded angry, and it occurred to Madero that somehow his lustful thoughts about Frek were visible, and he felt himself flushing even as his rational mind told him this was absurd. But there was definitely something bothering the man.

“Yes, very much,” he said.

“Good. And your researches, how are they going?”

“I’ve made a good start.”

“Yes, I know that. A very good start. But you made that yesterday in Kendal, didn’t you, Mr. Madero?”

“Father, what’s going on?” inquired Frek.

“You may well ask. I’ve just attended a committee meeting in Kendal, Mr. Madero. It’s a Catholic educational charity aimed at helping disadvantaged youngsters and inculcating the virtues of piety, application, and a love of the truth. Worthy aims which I had assumed you would approve of, Mr. Madero. Until I got to chatting with our chairman after the meeting. His name is Joe Tenderley. Ring a bell? Tenderley, Gray, Groyne and Southwell. And you know what he told me? He said that his junior partner had turned up late for a meeting yesterday with the excuse he’d been detained by a visiting historian desperate to learn everything that could be dug up about Father Simeon Woollass. Now I knew it couldn’t be you, Mr. Madero, having been assured only a couple of hours earlier that you knew next to nothing about Father Simeon and had only the most peripheral of interests in him. But it’s a strange coincidence, isn’t it?”

The savage sarcasm left no room for denial.

“Mr. Woollass, I’m sorry,” said Madero, conscious of Frek’s speculative gaze. “I should have mentioned I’d spoken with Southwell, but believe me, my interest in Father Simeon is incidental rather than central to my interest in your family. Let me explain…”

“Explain?” exploded Woollass. “You mean you have a backup story ready? What is it, I wonder? I know! You’re really a promotor iustitiae specially appointed by the Holy Father himself to investigate the case of Father Simeon!”

“Of course not. What I’m trying to do…”

“Save your breath. I opened my family’s records to you, Madero. I had doubts from the start, and I was right. Please collect your things from the study and leave. My daughter will accompany you to make sure you remove only what you arrived with.”

“Father!” protested Frek.

“Just do it,” commanded Woollass.

He turned on his heel and strode out of the kitchen.

Madero looked at the woman and waited for her to speak.

She said, “I suppose technically you ought to take the trifle.”

“I can explain…”

“I’m sure you can. But never complain, never explain is a wise saying. Come.”

She rose and made for the door. Together they went up the stairs and into the study. Here he carefully sorted out his notes, laying them to one side of the desk with the journals and household records. On the other side he set his laptop and briefcase.

“Perhaps you would like to check,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

“I doubt if your father would think it silly,” he said. “Besides, if I may, I should like to use your bathroom before I go.”

“Of course. Corridor on the left, the second door on the right.”

He went out. Would she check that he wasn’t taking anything he shouldn’t? Her decision, and at least he had given her the chance.

The left turn took him into a short corridor with two doors on either side.

Just as he made the turn he froze in mid-stride as the second door on the right opened and a figure draped in cardinal red came out. He recognized Dunstan Woollass’s dressing gown but it wasn’t the old man wearing it.

It was Mrs. Collipepper.

She turned down the corridor without glancing in his direction. He watched her move away, registering the oil-pump shift of her heavy buttocks beneath the scarlet silk.

His mind was trying to sort out unvenereal reasons why she should be wearing the garment as she pushed open a door at the end of the corridor and slipped out of sight.

The door clicked shut and he resumed his advance to the bathroom. But he’d only taken a couple of steps when he saw the tail of red silk caught in the bedroom door. The dressing gown, made for a much taller figure than the woman’s, had become trapped. Even as he looked, the door opened again, releasing a blast of warm air. Mrs. Collipepper, stark naked now, stooped to pull the rest of the gown inside. Over her shoulders, Madero glimpsed a four-poster bed with a venerable white-haired head resting on the pillow. The source of the heat was a deep fireplace in which a dome of coals and logs glowed red.

As the housekeeper straightened up, her gaze rose to meet his own. Her face showed no reaction. He lowered his eyes in confusion. She had breasts to match her buttocks with dark nipple-aureoles the size of saucers. He raised his eyes again and mouthed, “Sorry.” Gently she closed the door.

In the bathroom he found his penis slightly engorged and had to wait a moment before he could pee.

As he stood there, a line flashed into his mind from Shakespeare whose works his mother had insisted he should read to balance Cervantes and Calderón.

Who’d have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?

Frek was waiting on the landing. Silently she handed him his briefcase. As they went downstairs, he wondered if she knew about her grandfather and the housekeeper. Of course she must know! Indeed, probably the whole village knew. It was well said that in the countryside a secret is something everyone knows but no one talks about.

Was it an active relationship? he wondered. Or was Mrs. Collipepper merely an Abishag to old King David?

Mig put the prurient speculation out of his mind as Frek opened the front door.

He stood there a moment, taking in the view. The sky was cloudless, the sun warm, the air so clear that he could pick out detail of rock and stream on the hills rising on the far side of the valley. The range of color was tremendous – vegetation all shades of green shot with patches of umber verging on orange where some plant was dying off; rocks black, gray and ochrous; water white falling, dark blue standing; and the land itself, pieced and plotted in the valley, rising to the horizon in pleats and folds like some rich material painted by one of the Old Masters.

“‘The world lay all before them, where to choose their dwelling place, and Providence their guide,’” he said.

His mother’s poetic patriotism had even overcome her religious prejudices.

“That’s more or less what the Norsemen thought when they set out. Many of them chose Cumbria,” said Frek. “Where will Providence guide you now, Mr. Madero?”

“Only as far as the Stranger House initially,” he said.

He stepped across the threshold and turned to face her. His left leg took this opportunity to remind him it wasn’t yet ready for complex maneuvers. He staggered a little and winced as he forced himself to put his full weight on it.

She didn’t seem to notice, but miraculously she said, “Tell you what, I have to go to the village and I promised to show you the Wolf-Head Cross. Let me give you a lift.”

“I doubt if your father would approve.”

“I got over my Elektra complex several years ago,” she said. “Come on.”

She closed the door behind her and went to the parked Range Rover.

Madero headed round to the passenger door. His knee felt fine. He sent it heartfelt thanks for having done its job of getting him the lift.

“What are you smiling at?” she asked.

“At the thought that it’s not so bad being ejected from Paradise so long as Eve goes with you.”

It was by his standards boldly flirtatious, but it didn’t fare much better than his previous attempt.

She said to him rather sadly, “I fear you really are going to find that you and I inhabit different myth systems.”

And then they were speeding down the hill toward Illthwaite.

7. The tale of Noddy

“This used to be the police house,” said Noddy Melton. “I came here back in 1949 I think it was. It was pretty primitive then, but it was my own. I loved it, ghost and all.”

The old man was sitting upright in a tall-backed armchair which dwarfed him. Sam sat in a matching chair on the other side of the fireplace. We must look like a couple of kids who’ve strayed into a giant’s house, she thought.

“You’ve got a ghost of your own?” said Sam.

“Hasn’t everyone? Specially in Illthwaite,” said Melton. “They took great delight in telling me the tale down at the Stranger when I first came. Long time ago the cottage was occupied by a widow who made a living out of making candles, hence the name. Seems one winter night when it was blowing a blizzard she opened the door to an old woman begging for shelter. She brought the visitor in, set her by the fire, and shared her supper with her. As she did so she got more and more worried by various things such as the size of the old woman’s feet, her gruff voice, the hair on the back of her hands.

“But her worry became terror when, after they’d eaten, lulled by the warmth of the fire, the old woman dozed off with her head tipped back, revealing an unmistakable Adam’s Apple. It was a man! Worse still, with the blizzard piling snow up against the windows, the candle maker was trapped, her and her young child sleeping in the corner.”

“So what did she do?” said Sam, eager to short-circuit the story.

“She was desperate at the thought of what he might have in mind for her and her child when he woke. In the hearth there, by the fire, stood the tub of tallow into which she dipped the wicks to form the candles. The man opened his mouth wide to let out a tremendous snore. And without any more ado, the widow picked up the tub and poured the bubbling tallow down his open maw.”

“Jesus,” said Sam, shocked despite herself. “I guess that killed him.”

“Oh yes. Worse, it was three days before a thaw allowed her to get out of the house and call help. Child in arms, she ran across to the church and got the vicar. It was probably a Swinebank. He came with a couple of other men, and one of these recognized the poor devil sitting here with his belly full of candle wax.

“Seems he was a harmless idiot out of Dunnerdale who, since the death of his mother, had taken to traveling around from church to church, dressed in his mother’s shawl and gown, and begging alms.”

“The poor bastard!” exclaimed Sam. “So what did they do when they realized what had happened?”

“That’s what I asked when I first heard the story in the bar of the Stranger. There was a long pause, then Joe Appledore, the landlord, said, ‘The way I heard it was, they took him into St. Ylf’s, someone put a wick in his mouth, they lit it, and he burned lovely for the best part of a year.’ Then they all fell about laughing.”

“You mean it was all a gag?” said Sam indignantly.

“No. Seems likely it’s a true story, except for the last bit. That’s just their way of dealing with things. Now I don’t believe in ghosts, but I learned two lessons from that tale. One was not to jump to conclusions. The other was, if ever I find myself dozing off in front of this fireplace, I get up and go to bed!”

“Wise man,” she said. “So, despite the story, you liked the place so much you asked if you could stay on here after you retired. That’s really nice.”

She heard in her voice the reassuring note she used on small children and nervous dogs. She guessed he heard it too for he smiled and said, “I didn’t spend all my career here. The cottage came on the market just as I was coming up to retirement. Change of policy, village bobbies out, two townies in a Land Rover driving by three times a week in. Progress! So they sold all the old police houses off. I pulled a few strings and got first refusal. Even then it cost more than I made on my place in Penrith.”

“Penrith?” The only Penrith Sam knew was back home in New South Wales.

“Where County Police Headquarters is,” said Melton.

Careful now, Sam said, “So you worked at HQ? That meant promotion?”

“Oh yes. Gradual. Sergeant… Inspector… Super… Chief Super… I ended up as the County’s Head of CID.”

He eyed her mischievously as he slowly went through the ranks.

Oh shit, she thought.

“That’s great,” she enthused. “You must have loved it here to want to come back.”

He frowned and said, “Loved it? Illthwaite?”

He spat the word out with the same force he’d used twenty-four hours earlier.

Illthwaite. An ill name for an ill place.

So what was going on here? wondered Sam, as she sipped the tea he’d made and nibbled a biscuit. He’d offered her bread and cheese as it was getting on for lunchtime, and she’d said no, though if he had anything chocolate, the darker the better… and he’d come up with half-coated milk digestives.

Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers of chocolate, but they could certainly pick their pitch, and she was starting to think this could be a complete waste of time.

Melton said casually, “They’ve probably told you I’m a bit cracked.”

“Something like that,” she said. “But I make up my own mind.”

“That’s the impression I get,” he said. “Which makes me think it might be better if before we get on to your story, I tell you mine.”

“I like a good story,” she said.

He laughed, a high-pitched whinny.

“That’s a perfect cue,” he said. “Do you like a good story? was what my first caller said back in 1949. Farmer called Dick Croft. Big man in these parts, family had been farming here since the Dark Ages. I said, yes I did. He nodded and said, ‘Then get yourself signed up with the traveling library next Monday, because you’ll have plenty of time for reading.’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘The law’s here already, son. There’s God’s Law and there’s Sod’s Law, and they take care of most things, and what they don’t cover, we like to take care of ourselves.’ And then he shook my hand and went.”

“Weird,” said Sam. “And was he right?”

“Mostly he was. I certainly did a lot of reading. But a young man can’t live on books alone, and after three or four years when I began to feel I’d got accepted as one of the community, I picked myself a girl. A local lass. Her name was Mary. Mary Croft.”

“Like in Dick Croft? His daughter?”

“The same. We didn’t make a big public show of things. Not that you needed to in Illthwaite. Break wind in the church and they’ll get a whiff in the Stranger thirty seconds later, that’s what they say. Anyway, I was smitten. I asked her to marry me. Imagine that. I asked Dick Croft’s daughter to marry me, and her only eighteen.”

“So?” said Sam, puzzled.

“Still a minor back in those days. Needed her father’s consent. Her mother had died when Mary was a lass. There was a stepmother, far too young to be a second mother to Mary. Anyway, her father had things worked out for her future. A neighbor’s son. Bring the two landholdings together. But Mary dug her heels in. She and her dad didn’t get on. He was a right hard bastard, but she had a mind of her own too.”

He paused. The sharpness of his eye was misted. It was hard to imagine this aged elf as a young romantic but Sam made the effort.

“So what happened?”

“She vanished,” he said.

He spoke the word flatly, leaving her to grasp at its meaning.

“Vanished? Like… what? She took off? Got abducted? Died…?”

He said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “We used to meet behind St. Ylf’s, by the Wolf-Head Cross. Popular place for courting couples. Well hidden – at least, that’s the theory.”

He rose from his chair and went to stand by the window from which the stumpy church tower was visible over a clump of blood-pearled rowan trees.

“I wanted to talk to her father, but she said it was pointless, he’d rather see her die an old maid than get mixed up with a thick copper. I could see only one way to get Croft to agree to a wedding. That was to get Mary pregnant.”

He turned to face Sam.

“You know what young men are like. I’d have been at it already, but Mary always said she didn’t want to take the risk. But now risk was our best hope. At first she looked at me like I was daft. When she saw I was serious, she said she’d think about it and we arranged to meet three nights later. I said, ‘Come to Candle Cottage if you decide yes. I don’t want our first time to be in a cold and drafty churchyard.’ She kissed me then. A real passionate kiss. It felt like a promise.”

He looked around the room, as if searching for something he had misplaced.

After a while Sam prompted, “So what happened?”

“You can imagine the state I was in for the next couple of days. I kept thinking of that kiss. God, how the time dragged. Then the night came. I couldn’t sit still. I must have walked twenty miles up and down this room. It’s a wonder I didn’t put my hand through the window the number of times I rubbed the pane to see if I could spot her coming.”

Abruptly he sat down once more.

“But she never came. I sat up waiting till I fell asleep in my chair. Early next morning I was woken by knocking. It was Dick Croft, demanding to know where Mary was. He burst in and started searching the cottage. It was the start of a very confusing period. I didn’t know if I was on my arse or my elbow. By the time things got official, the story had settled down to this: Mary had told her stepmother that I’d given her an ultimatum, either we had sex or it was all off between us. She was going to say no and wanted to do it to my face but was a bit scared. And then she’d vanished.”

“I thought you said she didn’t get on with her stepmother?”

“I said she couldn’t be a proper mother to her. Anyway, we’ve only her word for what was said. But the upshot was, suddenly I found myself sitting in front of a DCI hitting me with questions about whether she’d come to the cottage to break things off and I’d got angry and there’d been a fight and maybe there’d been an accident… He thought he was offering me an easy way out. I told him to sod off. God knows how it would have finished, but then things changed. Mary’s stepmother found some clothes were missing. And the following day she took a phone call from Mary. I’m OK. I’ll be in touch when I’m settled. Nothing more. There was no technology in those days to check where the call came from. Or even if it came at all. But it was enough for the CID. Now it was simply another runaway case. No crime, so I was no longer a suspect. Which was ironic, as I was the only policeman in the county who didn’t believe she’d done a runner.”

He shook his head and fell silent for almost a minute, rapt in his memories, till Sam, who had never been long on patience, rattled her teacup.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m talking too much about me. This should be about you.”

“No, no,” said Sam. “I need to know what happened next.”

“That’s simple. I left Illthwaite. It’s funny, if we’d got married I’d have happily spent the rest of my days as the village bobby. As it was, Mary’s disappearance was the making of my career. A year later I transferred to CID. I was a natural. The trick-cyclists say a good detective will always have at least one case he keeps open in his mind long after it’s been closed in the files. I brought mine to the job with me.”

“And you’ve kept it open ever since.”

Sam tried to sound sympathetic but prevarication wasn’t her strong suit.

“You’re thinking that makes me a sad bastard, aren’t you?” he said, smiling. “I could have been, but I met a lass in Penrith. We got married, me and Alison. I never forgot Illthwaite, but it didn’t get in the way of having a life. If we’d had kids, or Alison had survived to share my retirement, I doubt if I’d ever have come back here. But we didn’t, and she didn’t. Cancer. God rest her.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam.

“So am I, every day. She left a gap I filled with work. And when the work stopped, I had to find something else to fill that gap. When I saw the Authority was selling off Candle Cottage, it seemed like a message. So I bought the cottage, and came back here. Me versus Illthwaite, round two. First round Illthwaite won hands down. This time, I thought, it’s going to be different. If that’s sad, I’m sorry. But it’s kept me alive.”

“What about Mary?” asked Sam. “You get any nearer to finding out the truth?”

He smiled rather slyly and said, “Hard to say. Dick Croft died a few years later and the stepmother sold up and moved away. But I’m still here where everyone can see me. There’s two histories of Illthwaite, the official one, the kind that gets printed in books like Peter K.’s Guide. And the true history that only gets written in people’s minds. To read that you need to be around a long time. Passing through, you’ve got no chance.”

“Which is why you asked me here, right? To improve my chances?”

“I don’t know if I can, my dear, but if I can, I will. First you must tell me what it is you are truly seeking for.”

He settled back in his chair, fixed her with a keen unblinking gaze, and said quietly, “In your own time, my dear.”

8. A bag of stones

Nothing had changed, at least nothing you could factorize. But somehow it felt to Sam as if Melton had switched elderly eccentricity off and an interrogation tape on. She was beginning to think this wasn’t a guy to mess with. On the other hand, unless he started after her with a rubber truncheon, she saw no reason to give more detail than she’d already put on public record.

She said, “Like I said in the pub last night, I’m looking for information about my paternal grandmother. All I know is she was called Sam Flood, she came from England to Australia in spring 1960, and she might have some connection with Illthwaite.”

Melton took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and made a note.

He said, “Did she sail with other members of her family?”

“No. She was part of that Child Migrant Scheme there was all that fuss about when the details came out a few years back.”

“I remember,” he said. “Isn’t there a Trust that gives advice and help?”

“Tried them. Nothing positive.”

Not directly anyway, and it seemed best to keep things direct.

“Have you found anything to support this possible connection since you got here?”

“Only the name Sam Flood carved on the churchyard wall.”

He showed no reaction, which must mean he’d known about it too.

“It struck me as odd that no one made any reference to it,” she went on. “But I’ve just been talking to that guy Thor Winander and he filled me in on the story and now I guess I can see why people don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yes, he tells a good tale, Mr. Winander,” murmured Melton. “So now you’re happy it’s just coincidence? Mission accomplished? No link?”

She thought about this then said, “Almost. But once you write stuff on the board you can’t just scrub it off.”

He looked puzzled then said, “Are we talking mathematics here?”

“That’s right. Sometimes you do a calculation on a blackboard. Blackboards are good because it means you can see the whole thing at once. Most calculations aren’t aimed at finding something out but at arriving somewhere you want to be. But you don’t always get there. Maybe you’ve gone wrong. Maybe you started in the wrong place. But even if you wipe the board clean, all that stuff’s still in your mind to go over again and again, maybe for years, maybe forever. Sorry, does that sound crazy?”

“Sounds like good detective work to me,” he said, going to a tall mahogany bureau that occupied almost the whole of one wall. From his pocket he took a bunch of keys attached to his belt by a chain. He used three of the keys to unlock the bureau cupboard doors which swung open to reveal lines of files and a stack of cardboard boxes.

“My blackboards,” he said. “Nowadays it would be disks, but I’m a paper man.”

He removed one of the files then dragged out a box which seemed too heavy to lift. He sat down and opened the file on his knee.

“Samuel Joseph Flood. Appointed curate of St. Ylf’s in August 1960. Found drowned in Mecklin Moss in March 1961. Inquest held in April… Here we are.”

He took out a folder which held some typewritten A4 sheets stapled together.

“What is that stuff?” demanded Sam, impressed.

“Record of the inquest.”

Jesus, when he said he had connections, he meant connections.

“How’d you get a hold of that?”

He said, “I told you. I was Head of CID for fifteen years. All cases of sudden death came under my remit. Any linked to Illthwaite I took a personal interest in.”

She was starting to think there was something just a bit scary about Noddy Melton. Not the scariness of insanity, maybe, though it might have something to do with its near cousin, obsession. But if it prompted him to help her, why knock it?

“Now, what do we have?” he asked, studying the report. “Canceled Bible class that afternoon. It was a Sunday. At two o’clock the vicar, Mr. Swinebank, took Sunday School with the younger kids in church while at three Flood held a Bible class for the eleven-pluses in the church room attached to the vicarage. That day the kids found a notice on the door saying the class was canceled… no one much bothered till he failed to turn up for evensong… the vicar might have got worried a bit sooner but he was distracted by a family emergency… checked Mr. Flood’s room in the vicarage after the evening service… no sign… reported his concern to PC Greenwood circa 7.30 P.M… Greenwood mounted a search but soon had to call it off because of darkness and foul weather…”

“PC Greenwood? Your successor?”

“Next but one. The one that followed me didn’t take, so they got him moved.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The power brokers – Woollasses, the vicar, Joe Appledore at the Stranger – ”

“You mentioned him before. What’s his relationship to Mrs. Appledore?”

“Joe was her father.”

“Then why’s she called Mrs.?”

“It seems she went off to catering college in Lancashire. Did her course, fell for one of her tutors, they got wed and set up in business down there. When her dad died she and her man – Buckle was his name – came and took over the Stranger. I gather Buckle didn’t like it round here. He wanted to sell up and move back south. That can’t have gone down well. There’s been Appledores running the Stranger for centuries and they don’t like change in Illthwaite. But, to general relief, he died before anything was decided. Heart attack. They said. So Edie stayed put. Pretty soon folk were back to calling her Appledore, with the Mrs. tagged on in acknowledgment she was a widow.”

“Weird,” said Sam. “What about her mother?”

“Died when Edie was fourteen. After that she ran the house and helped out in the pub.”

“With all that hands-on experience, why did she need to go to catering college?”

“Good question,” said Melton approvingly. “Story is she had a disappointment. Round here that can mean anything from cut out of a will to crossed in love. Anyway, same result, she almost got away, but the tendrils snaked out and pulled her back in.”

Like you, thought Sam.

“You were telling me about the local power brokers?” she prompted him.

“Oh yes. A lot of voices, but ultimately it’s the Woollasses who really make things happen. Local power’s nothing unless you’ve a line to the big power sources outside. Committees, dinners, charities, old-boy networks, that sort of thing. Upshot was that in the end they got the kind of policeman they wanted. Sandy Greenwood. Stayed here for nigh on twenty years till they pulled the plug on village bobbies.”

“So he’d know the patch pretty well?”

“He’d know which farm would dish up the best tatie-pot and how many free pints he could sup after hours at the Stranger and still be able to cycle home,” said Melton scornfully. “Likely if they’d told him not to worry about the curate going missing he’d have done nothing. But people were worried. The missing man was very popular. It was established that there’d been three sightings. One as he came out of the vicarage gate, the next along the main road through the village, the third and last on Stanebank, the track that leads up by the Forge and the Hall. If you keep going where the track bends round to Foulgate, you get to Mecklin Moss. First thing next morning the search was concentrated up there, and about nine o’clock a cross belonging to Flood was found. They kept on looking and the body was recovered at quarter to eleven.”

“Poor bastard,” said Sam. “And he’d definitely drowned himself?”

“Didn’t seem any doubt. No note, but they found that Flood’s pockets were filled with stones. I’ve got them here.”

Out of the box he pulled a Hessian sack which he opened to let Sam see inside. It was filled with smooth rounded stones, black and white and gold and ruddy brown.

Jesus! she thought. What else had he got in there? Skulls and body parts?

“About four kilos, I’d say,” said Melton. “Enough to counter the natural buoyancy of his clothes. No point hanging about when you’ve made up your mind. No marks of violence on the body, evidence of an agitated state of mind… Hard to make it accidental death, so the coroner reluctantly brought in a suicide verdict.”

“Why was he reluctant?” said Sam, dragging her gaze away from the sack.

“Serious business in those days, suicide. You could go to jail for it.”

An old police joke, she guessed. Maybe it had once been funny.

He went on, “In addition, Flood was a Man of the Cloth. Farmers can top themselves in droves and it’s regarded as a risk of the job, but vicars are expected to show a better example. Also everyone who gave evidence went out of their way to say what a splendid young man he was… beloved by everyone… a picture of perfection…”

“Balder,” said Sam, recalling Winander’s story.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. Any explanation of this agitation?”

“None offered formally. Law says all relevant information has got to be supplied to the coroner. What’s relevant is up to the investigating officer. In this case it was an old boss of mine, DI Jackson. Good man, Jacko. Not much got past his beady gaze. Dead now. His missus told me after the funeral, take anything you want, Noddy. As a souvenir. I had a ratch around. Jacko was a bit of a trophy man. Liked something positive to remind him of his cases. His wife was going to junk it. Don’t blame her. Some of the stuff…”

He shuddered. Pot calling the kettle black, thought Sam.

“That’s where you got the stones?” she said.

“That’s right. The Illthwaite connection. But what I really wanted was this – ”

He delved in the box again and produced a battered notebook which he opened.

“You can learn a lot from a good cop’s notebook. Jacko might have had his little quirks, but he was good. Now, let’s see. The vicar, Mr. Paul Swinebank, that’s Rev. Pete’s dad, gave a glowing testimonial. His explanation was that maybe his curate felt the woes of others too intensely. In some ways – his words – he was too good for his own good.”

“Much good it did him,” said Sam.

“Eh? Oh yes. The inscription. The anticlerical Mr. Winander. Took a nonbeliever to get really indignant that they wouldn’t give him a church burial.”

“What did the vicar say about the way Flood was acting the day he died?”

“He appeared quite normal during the morning services and at lunch. The vicar left shortly before two o’clock to go to the church in preparation for the Sunday School. He was accompanied by his housekeeper, Mrs. Thomson. He was a widower, by the way. Mrs. Thomson’s duties included acting as monitor at Sunday School. I gather some of the kids used to get restless during his analysis of the Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles.”

He uttered his ironies deadpan in a neutral monotone.

“Any suggestion he was screwing her?” asked Sam.

The old man looked at her blankly for a moment, then grinned.

“Jacko did write Query jig-a-jig alongside their names, which I wasn’t going to mention out of delicacy but I see I needn’t have bothered. Who knows what goes on under a cassock? But I doubt it. Rev. Paul was old school. St. Ylf’s didn’t need central heating. His description of hell could get you sweating on the coldest winter day.”

“You knew him?”

“Oh yes. He was in charge when I arrived. Not a comfortable man. To him pastoral care meant getting your Sunday roast carved before the gravy went cold. His son’s a different kettle of fish, like he’s trying to compensate. Real helpful to everybody.”

Not to Aussie visitors asking awkward questions, thought Sam.

“To continue,” said Melton. “On their return shortly after three, he and Mrs. Thomson were surprised to find a note canceling the Bible class pinned to the vicarage door. About fifteen minutes earlier, the curate had been seen coming through the vicarage gate by two boys on their way to Bible class. Silas and Ephraim Gowder.”

“The Gowder twins?” exclaimed Sam. “Jeez, no wonder they don’t bother with names. Which is which?”

“How would I tell you?” said Melton. “You’ve obviously met them.”

“I saw one of them digging a grave when I visited the church yesterday. And I’ve got a feeling the other was up on the church tower.”

“Before your accident? Which I heard was caused by the wind blowing the trap shut. But you suspect a human agency?”

“I’m probably wrong. Why should a Gowder want to harm me?”

“The thought processes of the Gowders are mazy and hazy,” said Melton. “They strike me as a throwback to some race which preceded man. They are not brutes, they are not malevolent, but they act and react instinctively, which means that sometimes their actions can appear both brutish and malevolent. I shouldn’t care to provoke them.”

“Which I did by climbing up the ladder?” said Sam incredulously.

“Hard to credit, but not impossible for a Gowder. I doubt he meant to harm you.”

“Then he shinned down the ladder and left me for dead? Sounds like harm to me.”

“All he would see was trouble for himself if he tried to help you or summoned aid. But to return to their evidence: they declared that Mr. Flood stopped when he saw them and told them the class was canceled. They didn’t notice anything odd.”

“Would they, being the Gowders?” said Sam.

He said, “Oh, they’re sharp enough, believe me. Next witness was Miss Clegg, district nurse. At five past three she passed Flood walking down the main road. They spoke briefly, a conventional exchange, she said, but he seemed rather agitated.”

“That’s two down,” said Sam. “Who was it who saw him going up Stanebank?”

“That was Dunstan Woollass from the Hall. He was driving down the Bank about three-thirty when he spotted Flood. He wound down the window to say hello. The curate just nodded and went on by. He looked very pale, the squire thought. On his return that evening when he learned that Flood was missing, Mr. Woollass contacted the police and that’s why they concentrated the search on Mecklin Moss.”

Sam ran her eye along a mental blackboard, checking the equations so far and trying to compute where they might lead.

She said, “And the verdict was suicide, so something happened early that afternoon to push him off his trolley.”

“True. Though as I once heard the police trick-cyclist say, we shouldn’t forget that an event can take place in the mind with no apparent external cause.”

“Nothing happens without cause,” said Sam with the certainty of one to whom the concept of infinity was a working tool. “Any lunch guests? Any visitors after lunch?”

“No guest. No visitors that came forward.”

“What about the son, Pete? He’d just be a boy then. Was he at home?”

Melton smiled approval, and said, “Jacko asked that too. Yes, he was there.”

“And did Jacko interview the boy?”

“Ultimately. This was the emergency I mentioned before. Pete was eleven. When he found Bible class was canceled, he bunked off before his dad got back and headed up the valley with the Gowder lads. They were in the same class at school and quite matey. They were scrambling around on some rocks when he slipped. Only fell about six feet or so, but he managed to bruise himself badly, twist an ankle and break his wrist.”

“Poor kid. No wonder his dad was distracted!”

“Distracted… yes. And probably hopping mad his son had been breaking the Sabbath. The boy had to go to hospital, of course. They kept him in for observation. The Rev. Paul got back just before evening service was due to start. He expected that his curate would have shown up by now and have everything in train, so I daresay he wasn’t best pleased to find he had to head straight into church himself and do the business.”

“So when Jacko got to see the kid, what did he say?”

“Nothing helpful. Yes, he’d spoken briefly with Sam after lunch – he called him Sam, Jacko noted. He said he’d been in his bedroom getting ready for Bible class when the curate called up the stairs that it was canceled. Then he went out.”

Sam thought for a while, then said, “So what it’s all down to is a crisis of faith. Suddenly starts wondering if there really is a God, so kills himself to find out. Is that it?”

“Balance of mind disturbed, it says here. I think your version sums it up better.”

“What about DI Jackson? What did he think? You said he had his own ideas.”

“Maybe. But nothing to bother the coroner with.”

“I don’t reckon you’ve kept hold of his notebook out of sentiment, Mr. Melton.”

“You’re right there,” said Melton. “Get sentimental about the past, you stop seeing it properly. OK. Jacko did have a working hypothesis, nothing he could prove, so it stayed in his head with a few hints in his notebook. It ran something like this. Sam Flood got on well with kids. Both sexes. Maybe too well. When pressed, Greenwood admitted he’d heard a rumor about the curate and some underage kid, but no names and nothing substantial enough to make him dust his magnifying glass off. Mind you, Jack the Ripper would have been on his sixth victim before Greenwood began to get suspicious.”

“But your Jacko found nothing to confirm this?”

“Not a jot. The more questions he asked, the more they clammed up. Pride themselves on taking care of their own here in Illthwaite. So all Jacko could do was speculate. Suppose Mr. Flood found he had a taste for young flesh? Suppose he even found himself fancying young Pete Swinebank? Jacko got a sense the boy was holding something back. Maybe something happened after lunch when they were alone.”

“Like?”

“Like he went to the boy’s room and saw him naked and was horrified to realize just how much he fancied him. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the boy. Maybe he got a phone call. Or made a call and heard something that really threw him…”

Sam shifted in her chair. It was time to go. As an exercise in mathematical logic all this might be of some interest, but from a personal point of view all Melton had done was confirm what Winander had told her. But the old cop had been very kind.

She said, “Thanks for going to all this bother.”

“No bother. It’s always good to entertain a pretty young stranger. Sorry I’ve not been able to help much, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

“How do you work that out?” asked Sam.

“Your gran left England in spring 1960, the Reverend Sam Flood didn’t arrive here till summer 1960. Conclusion, there’s no connection, which has to be good news because, believe me, Illthwaite’s the last place on earth you want to be looking for something the locals don’t want you to find. Ask them the time of day and they’ll likely say they’ll let you know as soon as their sundial comes back from the menders.”

Sam laughed and said, “Does that include everybody? I mean, when the vicar said I couldn’t look at the parish records because they’d been stolen in a recent burglary at the church, was he telling the truth or just trying to stop me spotting Sam Flood’s name?”

Melton went to his bureau and produced another folder.

“Silver chalice, paten, two collection plates, candlesticks, poor box – nothing about records. Would surprise me. Billy was no Einstein, but in his own line of business he knew enough never to steal anything he couldn’t sell.”

“Billy? You mean the police know who did the break-in? Has he been arrested?”

“Not by the police,” said Melton. “Didn’t even figure on their list of suspects till I told them. Even then they could find no evidence. But everyone round here knew it was Billy, like they knew it was him did the Stranger last summer, and the Post Office too just before it closed down. He probably got fair warning. But kids like Billy don’t listen.”

“He must be really scary if the locals let him get away with robbing their own church,” said Sam.

“I think most of them felt they could leave it to God to take care of his own business. Which, it would appear, He did. Billy had a motorbike. There was an accident. His full name was William Knipp. Illthwaite’s teenage tearaway. They buried him yesterday.”

9. Interpretations

Mig Madero stood before the Wolf-Head Cross. He felt no impulse to kneel.

“I’ve seen a lot of Christian antiquities,” he said slowly. “But never one that felt as alien as this.”

“You feel that too?” said Frek. “Usually Viking crosses are interpreted as showing how the new religion took over from the old. This one makes me look at things the other way round, as if the old religion were getting a burst of energy from the new.”

“So let my lesson begin,” said Madero. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“If you like. Right, let’s start at the bottom panel here at the front,” said Frek.

She took him through the cross’s Viking elements, speaking quickly and not dwelling overlong on any one feature, but this was no mere tour guide’s rote recitation. Everything she said was shot through with real enthusiasm.

“And this panel here is really interesting,” she said finally. “As you can see, it’s badly eroded. In fact I think there’s more damage here than even ten centuries of Cumbrian weather can account for. I’d say at some point someone took a hammer to it.”

Madero stared at the panel on which he could scarcely make out anything.

“Christian orthodox backlash, you mean?” he said. “Some pagan linkup that went too far for even the Illthwaiteans to stomach?”

“Maybe. I’ve looked at it very closely over the years. Made rubbings, taken photographs. I think it’s something to do with Balder. You know the Balder legend?”

“Yes. Killed by a dart of mistletoe. But why should he attract special attention?”

“Think about it. The legend is clearly a version of the same nature regeneration myth we see in the cults of figures like Adonis and Thamuz and Attis. Balder, son of Odin, is slain. Later he rises from the dead to take his place in the reconstituted creation that emerges from Ragnarok, the Nordic version of apocalypse. Remind you of anyone?”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “I have read a little.”

She seemed amused rather than annoyed by his sharpness.

“Sorry to be teaching my grandmother,” she murmured. “Then you’ll have no problem seeing that using Balder as an unsophisticated prefiguration of Christ was a pretty obvious move for the clever old priests reworking the ancient myths. But suppose a mason somehow managed to insinuate that Christ was merely a pale imitation of Balder who is the real regenerative spirit?”

A movement caught Madero’s attention and to his annoyance he saw a figure coming round the corner of the church. It was the strange Australian child, her mane of red hair awash with sunlight. Not child. Woman, he corrected himself. But with a childish indifference to interrupting the adult intimacy he hoped was springing up between himself and Frek.

She made straight for them, responding to his discouraging glance with a mouthed Hi.

Frek, showing no sign of having noticed Sam’s arrival, went on, “In addition, some scholars have detected the presence of two figures on the defaced panel. The other could be Hod, Balder’s blind brother, who was tricked into throwing the fatal dart. Hod too rises after Ragnarok and takes his place alongside Balder in the new pantheon. That would be like elevating Judas alongside Jesus in Christian terms. You can see how this might be too much for some true believers to swallow, hence the defacement.”

Sam said, “Everyone round here seems pretty taken with this Balder guy.”

Frek looked at her as if one of the attendant sheep had spoken.

“Everyone?” she said with polite incredulity.

“Thor Winander anyway,” said Sam. “Said you thought my namesake, the guy who topped himself, sounded a bit like him.”

Mig understood none of this but it seemed to make some sense to Frek, who was regarding Sam with rather more interest.

“So I did. It was well before I was born, of course, but some stories enter into local legend. In the poor fellow’s reputation for goodness, charisma and beauty, I felt there was a parallel with Balder. Is there a possible link with your family, Miss Flood?”

She made it sound as if she hardly thought it likely.

“Doesn’t seem to be anything I can find and the dates don’t check,” said Sam.

“A pity. Or perhaps not. Now here’s something which is really interesting, Mig.”

She stooped to indicate the inscription on the lowest step of the cross’s base, obliging Madero to stoop also, physically reinforcing her verbal exclusion of the Australian. He felt quite sorry for the girl.

Frek continued, “The carving is clear, but the meaning is completely obscure. Could be Runic with a bit of Ogam, maybe. One more than usually nutty Oxford professor claims to have proved it was a version of the ancient Cypriotic syllabary. It’s been variously interpreted as a prayer, an epitaph, and a biblical quotation. Take your pick.”

“How about the maker’s name?” said that by now unmistakable voice.

Frek turned her head this way and that with the faint puzzlement of a saint hearing voices in the bells. Then she rose to her full height, at the same time lowering her gaze to take in the little Australian.

“I’m sorry?”

“Sort of a label,” said Sam. “I wondered about it when I saw it yesterday. I had this hunch the symbols could be semagrams maybe forming a rebus. And the crossed lines could be a date. Thought I’d like another look.”

“You are an expert on archaeological decipherment?” said Frek incredulously.

Sam laughed.

“Hell, no. But I did go out with this guy who thought that encryption/decryption was the be-all and end-all of mathematics and I read some of his books so we’d have something to talk about. There was a lot of language stuff in there, the Rosetta Stone, Linear B and so on. I guess you need to be a mathematician as well as a linguist to really get to grips with that gobbledegook.”

“Is that so?” said Frek, in a voice so coolly polite you could have served caviar on it. “And has this strangely acquired wisdom produced any positive interpretation you care to share with us? The date perhaps?”

The Australian frowned slightly as if for the first time detecting antagonism, but replied relatively mildly, “Let’s see. If it’s a simple pentadic system, it would be 1589. Yeah, that would be it.”

Frek laughed out loud.

“Only five or six centuries out,” she said. “Or the mason couldn’t count?”

Sam removed her sunglasses and turned her unblinking slatey gaze on Frek who, rather to Madero’s surprise, let herself be faced down.

“Sorry,” said Sam. “I should have said. I didn’t mean the original maker’s name but the repairer’s. It came to me when I was talking to Thor Winander this morning and he told me his name was the same as some old Viking who got a lake named after him.”

“Thor’s been playing that little game with you, has he? My ancestor who owned Windermere,” said Frek, smiling. “But it’s true that it figures on old maps as Winandermere, meaning the lake of a man called Vinandr.”

“There we go then,” said Sam. “This oval here with the wavy line in it, that’s this Winander lake.”

“And these earlier symbols, you’re saying they’re semagrams too?” said Frek, clearly still doubtful but now, Madero observed, genuinely interested.

“Yeah. Difference is they form a rebus. This one here, the triangle like a roof, I think that’s a barn. And this one with the little cross on top, I reckon that’s an abbey. All the other stuff is just a bit of ornamentation to confuse matters.”

“And this gives you…?”

“Barn abbey Winandermere,” said Sam slowly. “Barnaby Winander who, according to Peter K.’s Guide, restored the cross in 1589. And from what I’ve read about the family and seen of this Thor guy, that’s exactly the kind of daft trick he’d get up to!”

“Well, well,” said Frek softly. “You are a surprisingly clever little thing.”

Madero could see that the Australian didn’t care to be patronized.

“Nice of you to say so,” she said, looking up at Frek as if seeing her for the first time.

Then her eyes widened in what looked to Madero like a parody of recognition and she exclaimed, “Hey, I thought you looked familiar.”

“I saw you briefly this morning outside the Forge,” admitted Frek grudgingly.

“No. Not outside the Forge. Inside. You must have been the model for that carving Mr. Winander did. It’s a real close likeness.”

She let her gaze slide down the other woman’s body and grinned as she added, “So far as I can see, that is.”

A tiny smudge of color touched Frek’s cheeks.

Madero, intrigued, said, “What’s this then?”

Sam said, “Hang around and I daresay you’ll get the chance to check it out for yourself.”

She paused long enough to see the smudge spread into an angry flush before adding, “Yeah, Mr. Winander said he’d be bringing it down here this afternoon. It’s the headstone for Billy Knipp’s grave. Miss Woollass modeled the angel. Right?”

Their gazes locked. The flush subsided. Then surprisingly there was the suspicion of a smile and Frek said, “I may have provided the features, the form was Thor’s idea. It’s been nice to meet you again, Miss Flood. You’ve given me food for thought.”

She offered her hand to Sam who took it, surprised rather than reluctant.

Frek brought her other hand up and held Sam’s enclosed in both her own as she continued, “I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday. You too, Mr. Madero. I need to be off now. No need for you to rush. You must be dying to see the inside of the church. Perhaps Miss Flood, who knows so much, can give you the tour. Unless you don’t feel up to walking and really need a lift back to the Stranger…?”

Nice twist, thought Sam approvingly. She had spotted that the woman had taken Madero by surprise. Would he play the poor invalid or take it on the chin like a hero?

He said, “I’m fine.”

“Then I’ll say goodbye. I’m sorry things didn’t work out.”

She gave Sam’s hand one last squeeze, let go, turned and walked swiftly away.

Together they watched her out of sight round the side of the church.

“Lovely mover,” said Sam. “Things didn’t go so well then?”

He didn’t try to deny it.

“No,” he said. “Does your fund of arcane knowledge in fact extend to showing me round the church?”

“I’d rather not,” she said. “Someone in there doesn’t like me. Anyway, I need to get my gear together. I’m moving on today. See you around maybe.”

She moved forward past the cross to the churchyard wall and stooped down to push aside the veiling weeds.

“Well, Sam Flood,” she murmured softly. “What are you? Mr. Perfect, or Mr. Pervert? And have you got anything at all to do with me? God knows, and maybe it’s best I stop trying to get in on the secret.”

She released the vegetation, stood up and turned round to find herself face to face, or rather face to neck, with Madero whose curiosity had made him follow her.

“Talk about creeping Jesus!” she said angrily.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But that name on the wall, isn’t it yours? Sam Flood?”

“That’s right. So what?”

“I’ve no idea. Is this what you and Miss Woollass were referring to just now?”

“Why don’t you ask her? No, sorry, I forgot. It doesn’t sound like you two will be getting much chance of talking again.”

“Doesn’t it?” he said, slightly taken aback by the sharpness of her riposte. “Well, they say fortitude is the virtue of adversity, don’t they?”

“Not where I come from. Kick against the pricks till the pricks stop kicking back, that’s what my pa says.”

He surprised her by laughing out loud, knocking a decade off his age.

“A natural philosopher by the sound of him. But my morning hasn’t been altogether wasted. As for meeting Miss Woollass again, I daresay God will provide an excuse, such as, for instance, my need to retrieve my briefcase from the back of her car.”

He smiled at her, and she found herself smiling back. When he smiled you could almost forget he was a wanked-out priest.

They walked together round the side of the church. She noticed that he was moving much more easily than when last she’d seen him laboring up Stanebank.

As they came in sight of the churchyard gate, they saw it was wedged fully open and Pete Swinebank was helping the driver of a pickup to reverse in. On the back was Billy Knipp’s memorial stone. Supporting it on either side, like a pair of pet apes positioned to emphasize the angel’s brooding beauty, stood the Gowders.

Safely through the gate, the vehicle came to a halt as near as it could get to the young man’s grave. As Sam and Madero approached, Rev. Pete turned and saw them. He looked distinctly uneasy.

Not without cause, thought Sam grimly. Not mentioning my name being carved on his wall and all that crap about stolen records. I could probably get him defrocked!

She had a flash image of ripping off his cassock and seeing him standing there in frilly undies. This, plus the almost comically abject guilt of his expression, softened her heart toward him a little and when he said uncertainly, “Hello again, Miss Flood. How are you today?” all she replied was, “What do you think, Vicar?”

Madero gave her the same look he’d given when she’d chilled out the nun, then said with a compensatory if not quite natural heartiness, “Vicar, I’m pleased to meet you. Michael Madero. I’ve just been looking at your splendid cross.”

They shook hands. Thor Winander got out of the cab. Sam walked toward him. As she passed Swinebank he gave her an appealing glance. She ignored it, fixing her gaze on one of the Gowders at random and saying, “Lovely day, Laal.”

He studied the statement and her face for a menacing moment before replying ponderously, “Not si bad, eh?”

It works! she thought.

Winander smiled at her as if appreciating her experiment and said, “Nice to see you again. And in clerical company once more. He seems quite taken with my angel.”

Madero was standing by the pickup, staring up at the angel, rapt, while Swinebank was hurrying toward the church, probably to try a quick prayer for my rapid disappearance, thought Sam.

Winander called, “Good day, Madero. Thor Winander. We met briefly last night.”

The Spaniard wrenched his gaze from the memorial.

“Mr. Winander, pleased to meet you again,” he said.

He advanced to shake hands then glanced back at the statue.

“It’s a fine likeness,” he said.

“You recognize my model then? The lovely Frek is an artist’s dream, her essence redolent through all materials. Wood you can smooth and polish till you can hardly get a grip on it, yet gouge a cut with your chisel and there’s always the risk of a splinter.”

He glanced at Sam as he spoke and did his eyebrow thing.

“As for marble, that’s perfect too.” He reached up and laid his hand on the angel’s breast. “Always cool, even in the sunlight. Oh, by the way, talking of Frek…”

He returned to the cab, reached in and pulled out a briefcase.

“…I met her getting into her car just now and she asked me to give you this – ”

What God gives he can take away, even excuses, thought Sam.

Madero accepted the case with grave thanks, took a last rather sad look at the angel, nodded at Sam and said, “If you’ll excuse me…”

As he walked away Sam saw that his limp had returned.

“I gather he’s been banned from the Hall,” said Winander. “I asked Frek why. She said something about sherry trifle, but I never could get much sense out of her. Or indeed anything else. Don’t suppose our divine dropout gave you a confessional hint?”

“Wouldn’t recognize one of them if it peed against my leg,” said Sam, finding herself surprisingly defensive. “Don’t see that it’s anyone’s business but Mr. Madero’s.”

“Good Lord,” said Winander, looking at her closely. “Is this why you spurned me? Muscular athleticism is démodé. Mediterranean injured boy look is in! Well, my dear, in case you’re dejected at the thought of competition, perhaps I can reassure you there – ”

Sam interrupted what sounded like more tedious innuendo by saying sweetly, “Excuse me, but I think your angel could be about to lose one of her wings.”

Winander turned to follow her gaze. The Gowders, impatient of delay, were maneuvering the statue off the truck by main force. One twin was standing at the tailgate with his arms wrapped round the angel, which looked ready for flight. Only the presence of his brother on the flatbed hanging on to one of the wings stopped the whole weight of the marble from crushing him into the ground.

“Jesus wept!” screamed Winander. “How many times do I have to tell you stupid bastards to wait till I set up the block and tackle!”

They had themselves a real problem, she thought with a certain not very becoming satisfaction. But one which could be solved by a bit of simple math involving critical angles, friction resistance, and dead weight.

She wished all her problems were as easily solved.

10. Knock knock, who’s there?

Once again, as on Stanebank that morning, it didn’t take Sam long to catch up with the Spaniard. As she drew alongside he gave her a not very welcoming glance. Up yours too, she thought, thrusting the Illthwaite Guide at him.

“You might as well have this,” she said. “I’m out of here soon as I get paid up and packed.”

She would have accelerated by him, if he hadn’t snapped out of miserable mode, flashing that rejuvenating smile as he said, “No chocolate on offer this time?”

“I’m right out. Thought you didn’t like it anyway.”

“I feel I could do with an injection of energy from any source. But that’s life. We never want what’s on offer till the offer is no longer there.”

“That from the Bible?” she inquired.

“Oh no. The Bible says Ask and it shall be given you.”

“Handy. So why’s it not raining chocolate?”

“I think the offer predates the product.”

“Pity. Your mob could have done themselves a bit of good if you’d been able to break squares off a choc bar instead of handing out those tasteless little wafer things.”

“You have a problem with religion, I think,” he said gravely.

“Why should I? You don’t have a problem with me, do you?”

He thought about this and then smiled again and said, “No, I don’t think I do. You seem to have made a friend of the famous forger back there.”

“Sorry?” said Sam, puzzled by the shift.

“Mr. Winander. From the Forge. Hence, forger.”

A joke. But a hit too. She had the impression that Winander would get as much pleasure from fooling you with a forged masterpiece as from producing a real one. Maybe the Spaniard felt this too. More probable, she thought, he’s taken against Winander because he’s had Miss Icicle as a model. In which case, he should thank his anti-choc god he didn’t get to see the wood carving!

They walked the rest of the way to the pub in a silence which, surprisingly, was more companionable than combative. In fact, with the sun shining bright and Madero by her side, the distance seemed only half of what it had been the day before.

When they reached the Stranger, they found it locked, and several loud bangs at the door failed to rouse Mrs. Appledore.

“Not to worry,” said Sam. “I’ve got a key.”

She unlocked the door and they stepped inside.

On the landing, Madero said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Miss Flood.”

“You too,” she said.

He offered his hand which she took. Rather gingerly, but he didn’t hold on half as long as the Woollass woman.

In her room Sam found an envelope on the pillow. In it were her bill and a note.

Dear Miss Flood

Dead quiet this lunchtime so I thought I’d shut up early and head off to do some shopping. If you’ve decided to move on, please leave money or check on kitchen table. No credit cards. Sorry. Hope you enjoy the rest of your visit to England.

Best wishes

Edie Appledore

Sam felt some regret that she might not see Edie Appledore again before she went. There was something very likeable about the woman. But there was no reason to hang around. While it seemed a large coincidence that there’d been a bloke here called Sam Flood who’d topped himself, her study of probability theory had taught her to be unimpressed with coincidence. Flood was a common enough name, the dates didn’t fit, and the curate’s sad end explained why the locals wanted to draw a decent veil over the event. So best to ship out. The fact that her appointment in Newcastle wasn’t till the following afternoon gave her the chance to drive at her leisure and enjoy the scenery.

She checked her bill which was fine except that Mrs. Appledore clearly had a problem with VAT at 17.5 percent and had settled for something like 12.3 recurring. Sam adjusted it, wrote a check and put it in the envelope. Then she went down to the kitchen. She pushed the door open, stepped inside and did a little jump as she saw a dark figure standing at the end of the huge table.

It was Madero.

“Jesus!” she exclaimed, annoyed at showing her shock. “How the hell do you get down those stairs without them creaking? That something you learned at the seminary?”

She regretted her rudeness instantly but Madero didn’t show any sign of reacting. Indeed he hardly seemed to have noticed her entrance. He was leaning forward with both hands on the table, his head bowed, like a man about to say grace before dinner.

“You OK, Mr. Madero?” she said, moving toward him.

Now he raised his head slowly. The pupils of his eyes seemed huge, as though expanded in a desperate search for light.

He said, “I felt something in here last night… It was what I expected to feel up at the Hall… but something more… yes, something stronger…”

He started moving down the side of the table, running his fingers along its edge.

Sam went to prop her bill up against the telephone. She noticed the phone was unplugged. The reason for Madero’s presence was made clear by the sight of a laptop connected to the point. Her gaze drifted to the screen. There was an e-mail displayed plus the Download Complete box. She didn’t mean to read it, but even a brief accidental glance was enough to print words and images on her mind.

Hi! Just to say my tec wiz unearthed the old Molloy website. Nothing on it but a self-promoting CV plus a selection of articles he’d written, presumably the best – if so, God help us! But interestingly one of the pieces (which I attach) demonstrates that he’d actually been to Jolley Castle and dug into the archive there. Tim Lilleywhite’s been back on this morning. He’s 99% sure he’s trawled up all the Tyrwhitt stuff now and definitely nothing more on Simeon. Sorry, but this Simeon thing is really a bit of a red herring, isn’t it? The main thing is your recusancy research. Hope that’s going well. Try not to fall into any priest-holes!

Cheers

Max

As she turned away, she found herself thinking, with slightly malicious amusement, old Max isn’t going to be pleased when he hears how his Holiness has cocked things up!

She set off toward the door. Madero was now sitting at the bottom end of the table, his face still rapt. As she passed him his hand snaked out, seized her wrist and forced her hand between his legs.

“Feel this,” he said. “What do you think this is?”

She bunched her other fist preparatory to punching him in the throat, then realized he was pushing her fingers along the table’s under-edge.

About nine inches from the corner there was a groove about two inches long, ending in a deep hollow. When her no longer resisting hand was moved along, she found another one the same distance from the other corner.

“They mean something,” he said. “I feel it as strongly as I didn’t feel it at the Hall.”

“Feel what?” she demanded.

“There was this so-called priest-hole,” he said impatiently, as if expecting her to understand him without explanation. “But I got nothing there. Whereas here…”

So Max, the e-mailer, hadn’t been joking. He really was looking for priest-holes! Which, he might be surprised to discover, she knew a great deal about. Well, a little deal.

One of her teachers used to read her class books she’d enjoyed in her own English childhood. OK, they’d been a bit old-fashioned, but Sam had loved these tales of tomboy girls in remote manor houses and boarding schools who were forever stumbling on secret passages and hidden chambers. Priest-holes were ten a penny in the UK, it seemed to the young Sam, and the land must be so honeycombed with subterranean passages that it was a wonder it didn’t just crumble underfoot.

Madero, like a good failed priest, was looking upward in search of inspiration. Sam looked up in search of clues. Right above her were the cured hams dangling from the hooks beneath the crossbeam. She recalled her reaction when she first noticed the pulley system the previous day.

She said, “What’s a ham weigh? Ten kilos? Wouldn’t have thought you needed such a high-geared ratchet for that.”

Madero’s gaze came slowly back into focus.

“Maybe they had bigger hams back then,” he said.

“Maybe.”

She went to the spindle on the left-hand wall and examined it closely. After a moment she pulled out the brake chock and began to lower the ham.

“Come on!” she said impatiently, looking across at Madero.

He took her meaning instantly and went to the other wall. For a few moments the only sound was the clacking of the ratchets as the hams descended. Hers landed first and, as she started to unhook it, she glanced his way again but this time did not need to speak. Funny how well their thought processes seemed to slot in together when they got beyond their instinctive antagonism. Together they bent down to fit the free hooks into the grooves and hollows beneath the table, then returned to the winding gear and in unison began to turn the handles.

Even with the gearing cogs, it took a good effort to lift the solid table, but slowly the massive legs rose. The hams began to slide down the slope and Sam paused, but Madero kept winding, so she resumed, wincing as the hams crashed to the floor.

When the table reached an angle of about forty degrees, Madero commanded, “Enough,” which was just like a guy. You have the idea, he’s not happy till he’s taken over. Now he dropped to his knees to examine the granite slabs of the floor, in particular the two which bore the circular print left by five centuries of pressure from the table legs. They were both a couple of feet square.

“There is some movement here, I think,” said Madero excitedly.

“So what?” said Sam. “Even if it does lift out, unless all your priests were my build, you’d never get one of them through a hole that size.”

“But it must signify something,” he insisted.

“Maybe. Look, if these old monks were clever enough to devise that lifting gear, they’d probably have something a bit more complicated than a simple trap.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like a counterweight system. Yeah, that could be it. How about if these two small flags are counterweights and when the table legs are resting on them the trap entrance is completely locked. Let’s see…”

She looked around, and finally her gaze came to rest on the greenish rectangular slab with the carving on it.

“This looks a possible. What the hell does this stuff say?”

“It’s from the Bible. Matthew 7:7. Curiously, I quoted part of it as we walked along the road. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

“Knock, and it shall be opened,” she echoed. “OK, let’s try.”

She knelt down and gently tapped the end of the slab.

Nothing happened.

She tapped again, harder.

Still nothing.

He said with a patience worse than mockery, “I think unless there is somebody down there to answer, your knocking theory is a non-starter.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she retorted. “If these guys were as bright as I think, they’d know to the last gram just how much pressure you needed to move the counterweights, and it wouldn’t be much, else what’s the point? You’d want something like this to be swift and smooth and pretty quiet. Know what I think?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“I think it’s got gunged up. Jeez, could be centuries since it’s been used.”

She stood up, reached one foot forward and drove it down on the slab.

Nothing moved.

She did it again.

“Think I felt something there,” she said.

“Sam, be careful,” said Madero.

It was the first time he’d used her given name but it didn’t feel like a step to intimacy, more like a parent admonishing a naughty child.

So her natural adult reaction was to act like one.

She fixed him with her slatey gaze and said, “Knock, knock; who’s there?”

Then, jumping as high as she could into the air, she came down with all her slight weight on the end of the slab.

It was enough. It was more than enough.

With a smooth swiftness which gave her no time at all to react, the slab pivoted away beneath her feet to reveal a black hole into which she vanished like an insect picked out of the air by the tongue of a lizard.

11. Trapped

Sam lay on her back looking up.

It took a lot to frighten her. Snakes and spiders she could react to with clinical efficiency. Heights didn’t faze her and she had been able to swim like a fish since the age of two. But dark confined places found all of her panic buttons.

In one sense, she knew exactly why. She could recite the math of increased blood pressure, diminution of oxygen supply, failure of motor functions and so on in great detail.

But what really pressed these buttons, she didn’t have the faintest idea.

It was a relief therefore to be able to fix her gaze on the distant square of luminosity that marked the heaven of the kitchen. The silhouette of Madero’s head which now appeared should also have been a comfort, but all she could think was that the stupid bastard was blocking the light!

“Sam!” he called. “Are you hurt?”

She didn’t rush to judgment but put things to the test before she replied.

“Don’t think so,” she called back. “Can you get a ladder or a rope or something and get me out of here?”

“Wait,” he called. “I’m coming down.”

“Don’t be so fucking stupid!” she began to yell. Then she realized he didn’t mean he was going to jump down into the pit alongside her, thus trapping them both. Instead he was descending a near vertical set of stairs, really no more than a series of protuberant stones in the cross wall that marked this end of the hidden chamber. If she hadn’t been too frightened to notice them, she could easily have clambered out herself.

He knelt beside her and she had to admit it was a comfort to feel his presence.

“Are you sure you haven’t broken anything?” he asked anxiously.

“Absolutely,” she snapped. In fact her body was sending signals suggesting there’d be new bruises to add to those sustained when she fell off the ladder at St. Ylf’s, but she wasn’t about to invite him to run his priestly hands over her in search of fractures.

“Good,” he said.

“So now can we get out of here?”

“Of course. But don’t you want to take a look round first?”

No, she bloody didn’t, was the true absolute answer, but his arrival having raised her from the depths of utter panic, she found she did not care to let him know just how scared she’d been, so she settled for the conditional.

“Oh yes? And how are we supposed to do that when it’s pitch-black?”

This wasn’t quite true as the light from the kitchen, though not itself very strong, was already diluting what had seemed like an overflow from the Black Lagoon.

Now Madero again proved another of her pa’s maxims, never say maybe when you mean no bloody way!

He reached into his pocket and produced a pencil torch.

“Lux fiat,” he said smugly, sending the thin but strong beam probing the darkness.

She could still have exited, of course, but now that would really be drawing attention to her wimpishness.

She followed the line of light with attempted aplomb. Though little more than five feet wide, in length the chamber seemed in Sam’s prejudiced view to stretch forever.

As usual, she sought refuge in inductive logic.

“There must be cellars,” she said. “Real cellars, one at the front, one at the back, seemingly with a common wall. But in fact there are two walls with this chamber between them. But if this was built at the same time as that priory place that got knocked down, why would they need a priest-hole when you lot were ruling the roost anyway?”

Over his shoulder – the idiot was moving off toward the furthermost still dark area – Madero said, “No, it wouldn’t be built as a priest-hole. I would guess that it was constructed as a safe house for the priory’s valuables in times of strife. But it must have seemed an ideal place to hide Father Simeon later.”

“Who?”

“Sorry, of course, you don’t know anything about him, do you? One of the Woollass family who got persecuted during the sixteenth century. The legend of the Dark Man at the Stranger House must have helped too!”

And I bet it was Alice Woollass’s idea to hide him here, he thought. What an ingenious woman, building a red herring priest-hole at the Hall, which they claimed was a secret storage place for valuables, while all the time using a real secret storage place for valuables to hide Simeon!

“Well, that’s really fascinating,” said Sam brightly. “Look, shouldn’t we report this to someone…”

“You want to get out?” A gent wouldn’t have said it so bluntly, but she made no effort to deny it, and he went on, “OK. Just hang on a minute. Now this is amazing…”

He was just a darker shape against the darkness now. She heard him moving stuff around, what kind of stuff she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to.

Then his voice changed and he muttered something low and fast in what sounded to her to be Latin or maybe Spanish. A prayer perhaps? That was another trouble with priests. They confused praying for things and actually doing the things they were praying for. God looked after those who looked after themselves – one of Pa’s ripostes to any attempt at religious argument. It was time to give God a hand.

“I’m out of here,” she said negligently. “I’m moving on and I need to throw my things together.”

She hadn’t meant to offer a justification which, though true, sounded pretty feeble even in her own ears.

She turned to the stone ladder. Above in the kitchen there was a noise. An indeterminate hard-to-identify kind of noise, not all that loud but to her straining ears as sinister as a leper’s bell.

Silence for a moment, then a kind of scraping, crescendoing to a great crash!

And with a suddenness like death the entrance slab flew back upward, lay flat against the ceiling, and the light was gone.

Now Sam let out the shriek which had been spiraling around inside her head ever since her fall.

Madero was back by her side in a couple of seconds. He caught her with one arm and pulled her close, holding the torch up between them so that it lit both their faces.

“It’s OK,” he said soothingly. “Nothing to worry about. It’s OK.”

“That’s what you think, is it?” She sought solace in anger. “That’s the best that shaven skull of yours can come up with? We’re trapped down here in a dark hole, and you think that it’s OK?”

He seemed to take her question seriously and, after a moment’s thought, nodded and said, “Yes, actually, I do think it’s OK. We can work out what’s happened, which I suspect is that one of the pulleys gave way and the other couldn’t hold the table up alone. And we can work out what’s going to happen, which is that Mrs. Appledore will eventually return and, finding her kitchen in a bit of a mess with knocking sounds coming from beneath the floor, she’ll get help to lift the table and pull us out. Meanwhile we have light, and the air down here is far from fetid, which suggests there is an inlet. So all we need is a little patience.”

She forced herself to track his reasoning and could find no flaw in it, and what made it particularly soothing was the absence of any reference to divine providence.

She took a deep breath and moved away from him but not too far. It seemed a good time to come clean. After that scream, what was there to hide?

She said, “Yeah. Sorry. The thing is, I’m slightly claustrophobic. No, hang about, let me qualify that. No point being coy, not in a situation like this. I’m completely fucking claustrophobic. Put me in a dark place that I can’t get out of and pretty soon I start running around and screaming and tearing my fingernails out on the walls till eventually I hyperventilate and collapse in a fetal ball and die. This I know because I’ve been through the whole process, except the last bit obviously.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Madero. “Anything else I should know about you?”

“Jesus, isn’t that enough?” she said. “How long will your torch battery last? Soon as that light goes, you’d better look for cover else I’m likely to tear your eyes out.”

“That would in the circumstances be taking coals to Newcastle, isn’t that the phrase? It’s a fresh battery so we should be all right. Mrs. Appledore can’t be too long. I am sure the drinkers of Illthwaite expect their pub to open on time. Why don’t we sit down and wait till we hear something from above.”

“OK. As long as you mean in the kitchen.”

This amused him. They sat side by side, the torch between them, leaning against one of the walls. After a while he said, “Tell me about yourself, Sam.”

“What’s this? Occupational therapy, or the confessional?”

“Whatever you want it to be. I just thought talking might pass the time.”

“And stop me throwing another wobbly, you mean?”

“That would be a good result,” he agreed. “But it would help me as well. Darkness holds terrors for me too sometimes. Not the same as yours, but real and devastating nonetheless.”

“That’s supposed to comfort me?” she said. “Look, if we’re going to talk, I need something to call you. What was it Dracula’s daughter from the Hall called you? Mick?”

“Not Mick. Mig. That’s what my friends call me.”

“Then that will have to do, though it doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

“And I shall continue to call you Sam, with the same qualification.”

“I thought you men of God had to be friends with everyone,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “But with some people it’s harder than others.”

She knew what he was trying to do. Get her angry, get her talking, get her doing anything that might keep the darkness from finding its way into the heart of her being.

She said, “I remember my pa sitting with some of his mates having a drink one night and one of them had the toothache real bad. And Pa said to him, ‘Have you tried shoving a banana up your arse?’ And he said, ‘Will that work?’ And Pa said, ‘No, but it’ll give your friends a laugh.’”

Madero laughed and said, “Stoicism Australasian style. You love your father, I think, Sam.”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I did. I miss him greatly.”

“He’s dead? I’m sorry.”

“Me too. My religion says I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

“How come you still go on about your religion even after you gave it up?”

“You’ve been talking about me? I’m flattered. But you are misinformed. It would be truer to say it gave me up, or rather it directed me to another path. But I still need it to tell me who I am. What about you, Sam? Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who are so sure who they are that external help isn’t necessary. So who are you, Sam? Why don’t you tell me who you are, so I’ll know whether I can like you or not?”

She fixed her eyes on the torch and thought, why not? Might as well talk about herself before that self became reduced to a single unit of terror as small as that point of light.

“Why not?” she said. “Seeing I don’t have anything better to do.”

She took a deep breath and began.

12. Sam

Tell you who I am? That’s hard.

You grow up and no one ever tells you who you are. Not even math, which tells you most things, can do that. You’ve got to find out for yourself. Mostly you do it piecemeal, one small new thing following another till, with luck, you get a picture.

Sometimes you get a big piece and don’t recognize it. Not till much later. I got one when I was eleven, but I managed to ignore it for the next ten years.

I was at university by then and I reckoned I was pretty cool. I knew how the world ticked. Life was a game of chance, if you got dealt a decent hand, you’d be mad not to play it. Me, I was good, I’d drawn four to a running flush: I had a loving home, good health, no financial worries, and I was doing a course I loved.

Mathematics.

At school it was dead easy. I’ve got one of those memories, I can scan a page and recall every word of it, even if I don’t understand half of what it means. It wasn’t till I got to university that I began to feel even slightly stretched, and I loved it.

I had great tutors, one in particular, Andy Jamieson, a Pom from Cambridge UK on sabbatical. In my finals year, AJ asked me if I fancied coming to his old college to do my doctorate. My best friend Martie who was at Melbourne with me was sure he wanted to get into my pants. But I knew the truth was both better and worse. AJ hadn’t got the slightest interest in my body. He just knew I was a better mathematician than he was.

That’s not vain, by the way. In math you know these things.

I said yes, why not? It was only later the thought of traveling right across the world began to get to me. When I was eleven I’d seen this TV play about these kids who got shoved on a boat without a by-your-leave and ferried out to Oz to start a new life. It really got to me then, but I hadn’t thought about it for years. Now I recalled those poor kids in the play who’d made the journey the other way, not knowing what awaited them, and I felt really ashamed of feeling scared.

I got my First then came home to work for Pa to earn some bucks to help finance the trip. He’d have coughed up the lot, no problem, but I could see he was pleased. My mate Martie was getting married to some jock with a Greek-god profile whose old man owned half of Victoria. She asked me to join her on a pre-wedding shopping spree, and Pa told me to go and kit myself out with some wet weather gear for Cambridge.

We’d been away three days, having a great time, when my mobile rang. It was Ma, telling me that Gramma Ada, that’s my pa’s ma who lived with us, had collapsed. It was her heart, it was bad.

I headed home straightaway. Gramma had been part of my life for so long that I couldn’t imagine how things could be without her.

Maybe I’d get home and find it had all been a false alarm, I told myself. But when I saw the priest’s car parked outside the house, I knew things must be bad. Your money or your life, that’s all those bastards ever want from you, that’s what my pa used to say.

Sorry.

Gramma was a Catholic. Pa never got in the way of that, but he didn’t even pay lip service. I didn’t know why he took against your lot so much, but I let him set my agenda because he was my pa and knew everything.

When I got to know what he knew, I was glad.

Sometimes Gramma would talk to me about the Church in her easygoing loving way, usually after the priest had paid a visit. I think he must have gone on at her about me. I don’t know if he ever had a go at Pa, but if he did, I’d guess he only tried once.

When I went up to Gramma’s room, I thought I was too late. She lay there like a corpse and for the first time it struck me how very old she was. I knew Pa was only just turned forty. And I knew Gramma was eighty-five. But it wasn’t till I saw her lying there that it occurred to me that she must have been well into her forties when she had Pa.

So much for my mathematical mind.

Ma said, “Here’s Sammy to see you.”

I went and sat down by the bed. On the other side sat the priest, playing with those beads you lot lug around. I once asked Pa about them. He said they were like a holy abacus to help reckon up how much the Church was going to get from someone’s will.

Gramma’s priest looked like he was minded to stay but Ma said, “Let’s go downstairs and brew a pot of tea, Father.” She could be pretty firm herself, Ma.

I took Gramma’s hand and she opened her eyes, recognized me and said, “Sammy, you’re here. That’s OK then,” and closed her eyes again.

For a second I thought that she’d just held on till I got home then decided to give up the ghost. But now she spoke again, so low I had to strain to hear her.

What she said didn’t make much sense.

She said, “I thought not having kids of my own was a curse, but it turned out a blessing. Soon as I saw him I knew your pa was the one, even before I heard his name. And then he gave us you with your lovely red hair. That’s the color I’d have chosen for myself, and now I’d got it in you, and that was even better ’cos I’d got you with it.”

She reached up to touch my hair, but she didn’t have the strength, so I bent over her and let it fall over her hand and her face and when I drew back she was gone.

I didn’t say anything to anyone till after the funeral.

That was a real bash. She’d been well loved. Afterward everyone came back to the house even though it was a hell of a drive for most of them. The priest was there too. He’d given Gramma a good send-off in the church, so I reckon he deserved his throat-easer, and you had to admire the way he downed the stuff like mother’s milk.

When he came to take his leave, he offered Pa his hand, which Pa took like it was a copperhead.

“I’ll be off now, Sam,” he said, real hearty, like they were best mates. “I know how much you’ll miss your ma. I promised her I’d keep an eye on you all and I’ll be back very soon to see how you’re getting on.”

“No, you won’t,” said Pa.

You could have heard a pin drop.

“I’m sorry?” said the priest.

“You heard,” said Pa.

I said he didn’t waste words.

And to give the priest his due, he had the sense not to keep pressing.

He went out of the door. Pa turned to the remaining guests and said, “All this talking makes a man thirsty. Who’s empty?”

It was later that same night after all our visitors had gone and me and Ma and Pa were sitting together nursing mugs of tea that I spoke.

I told them what Gramma had said and asked what it meant.

Pa didn’t hesitate. He said, “They adopted me.”

I said, “Is that it?”

He said, “I’m adopted. You’re not. What’s your problem?”

I could see his point. I mean he was the one who’d found out his ma and pa weren’t his real ma and pa, not me. But I’d still felt my life had taken a little lurch.

I said, “I’ve just seen someone I thought was my grandmother put in the ground, now I find she wasn’t really related to me at all.”

“So you’re going to miss her less?”

“No, of course not!”

“Well then.”

He stood up and ran his fingers through my hair.

“Your ma knows the tale, such as it is. I’ve got some things I need to check.”

I sometimes think Pa will live forever, ’cos whenever death comes for him, he’ll always have something he needs to check.

When he’d gone out, I turned to Ma and said, “Well?”

And she told me what she knew from talking to Gramma over the years and what she’d managed to extract from Pa.

Gramma Flood’s tale was one of sorrow turned to joy.

She’d wanted children and so had Granpa. When she reached her forties and they hadn’t come, their thoughts turned to adoption.

Technically they were a bit old, but they were in good with their priest, who gave them such a red-hot intro to a Catholic adoption agency, they checked out fine.

No shortage, it seemed. Odd thing that about you Catholics; even those ready to risk the sin of fornication still draw the line at contraception.

Gramma loved to tell Ma the tale. Seems Granpa was taken by a strapping boy with lung power to match his physique. Then Gramma spotted this smaller kid, with a stubble of red hair. He lay very quiet, though when you got close you could see his eyes were alert and watchful. When the nun in charge saw her interest, she smiled and said, “Now I think there may be a message here for you, Mrs. Flood. You take this one, you won’t have to change his name because he’s called Flood already. Sam Flood.”

That clinched matters. How could this be simple coincidence? asked Gramma. In her eyes, this baby was gift-wrapped from God. And Sam, my pa, seemed to confirm her judgment by growing up a loving son and taking to wine making like it was in his blood.

In himself he stayed as he was when first she saw him: quiet, watchful, self-contained. Granpa saw no reason to tell him he’d been adopted, but Gramma thought different and when he got to sixteen, she decided it was time to tell him the truth.

Not that there was much to tell. All she knew was that his mother had been a young woman who’d got into trouble, turned to the nuns for help, and died in childbirth. No details known about her origins or the baby’s father.

I can see Pa taking in this news. I bet he said next to nothing, asked a couple of brief questions maybe, showed no emotion. But a couple of days later he vanished.

He was away for a week. He’d gone in search of more information about his real mother. What he discovered seems little enough, but for a boy of sixteen to discover anything was remarkable. Don’t know who’s better at walling up a secret, the government bureaucrats or you Catholic bastards.

Sorry. Maybe things are better now, but this was a decade before that English woman who finally got all this murky stuff out in the open started chipping away. Don’t expect her book was on the curriculum at your seminary, but if you ever get to read it, you’ll see what a hell of a job she had to make progress.

What he discovered was that his mother, Samantha Flood, far from being a young woman who’d got into trouble and sought the help of the nuns, had been little more than a child herself and already in the nuns’ care when she got pregnant.

And she was English, an orphan brought out here for resettlement.

When Ma told me this my mind went hurtling back ten years.

“You mean she was like those kids in that play?” I asked incredulously.

“Looks like it,” said Ma. “Back then no one knew how many of them there were, of course. Somehow your pa got to see her death certificate. It gave her address as St. Rumbald’s Orphanage.”

“This wasn’t where Gramma went to choose Pa then?” I interrupted.

“No, that was the baby unit of the Catholic Hospital. They don’t have facilities for taking care of infants out at St. Rumbald’s. Or anyone, from the sound of it. Your pa hitched a lift out there and asked to see the records but they told him there weren’t any. He got real frustrated. That’s why he decked the priest.”

Told you you wouldn’t like this.

“Pa hit a priest?” I said, surprised without being amazed. “Why?”

“I asked him that,” she said with a bit of a smile. “He said, hitting a nun wouldn’t have looked so good. But when I pressed him, he said he reckoned the tight rein those nuns kept their girls on, the only bastards who’d get close enough to dip their wicks would have to be priests.”

I took this in. My grandmother the child. My grandfather the priest.

The police had got involved, but the decked priest had shown Christian charity, or maybe just didn’t want publicity, and no charges were brought. Pa came home as if nothing had happened, except that from then on in he’d have nothing to do with the Church.

This must have been a trouble to Granpa and Gramma, but even at sixteen I guess they knew where they were with Pa. If they’d made it a stay-or-go issue, he’d have gone.

He doesn’t say much, but Pa never has any trouble getting his message across.

The same when he met Ma four years later. Within a fortnight he’d asked her to marry him. Ma didn’t go into details but I doubt if it involved making flowery speeches from a kneeling position. They were married in another fortnight.

I asked Ma if he ever did anything more about finding out about his real mother.

She said no. After watching that play, Gramma had been very upset and had said to Ma that she hoped Sam’s mother hadn’t been one of those poor kids. This was the first Ma heard anything about Pa being adopted and naturally she hadn’t rested till she got the whole story, such as it was.

“I asked your pa why he hadn’t told me and he said, would it have made a difference? And of course I said no, and he said, well then. I reminded him of all the stuff we’d read about these child migrants and all, and asked if it didn’t bother him. He said he could see why anyone who’d grown up here, not knowing the truth about themselves, would want to dig. But he’d been born here, been brought up by good people, he’d got his own family he loved, what was in the past for him but pain, and wasn’t there enough of that waiting to jump out on you without going looking for it?”

As I listened to Ma I felt all that indignation I’d experienced in front of the telly aged eleven welling up again, only this time it was personal. I had a grandmother who’d been brought over here against her will when she was just a kid. What had happened to her then I didn’t know, but from the stuff that had come out, it wasn’t likely to be good. What was certain was that she’d been placed in some orphanage run by nuns who’d taken so little care of her she’d got pregnant and they’d let her die giving birth to my father.

I went out and found Pa and blazed away at him for ten minutes or more, asking him how he could sleep easy in his bed knowing all this and not trying to find out who his real father was.

He listened in that way he has, not saying anything till he’s quite sure you’ve run out of steam, then he said, “I know who my real pa is. I’ve just buried your gramma alongside him. As for that other bastard, last time I went out looking for answers, I decked a priest. This time, all the stuff that’s come out about those poor migrant kids, I could end up decking the Pope. You going to cancel your career and take care of things here while your pa’s in jail?”

This was a long speech for Pa and, like most of what he said, there was a lot more in it than just the words he used, a lot of stuff about love and responsibilities and options. If Pa précis’d the Bible, he’d get it down to a slim pamphlet.

I simmered down, told myself it was Pa’s call, and I put it to him straight. Was he certain he didn’t want to know the truth? And he said, “Truth’s like a dingo, girl. It’ll run till you get it cornered. Then watch out!”

So I made the rational objective decision and decided to let it be.

Or, put it another way, I made the emotional personal decision that my work came first. Selfish? I admit it. My work means everything to me. Whether it will ever mean anything to anyone else, I’m not sure, but probably even Newton had no idea he was going to change the way folk looked at the universe when he set out. Not that he saw it that way. He ended up saying he felt like he’d been a boy playing on the seashore, occasionally finding a smoother stone or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all around him.

I guess I’ll be lucky if I can get close to picking up even one pretty shell on the beach. But in going to Cambridge I feel like I’m striking out into that great ocean. Maybe if I can hold my breath long enough, I might even get down to some new coral reef.

If I’d said that to Pa, he’d have asked if I’d been on the turps. But that’s how it feels. You said you needed religion to define who you are. I guess I need mathematics.

So I made my decision to let things be.

Then something happened. A way-out coincidence. Maybe you’d call it a divine message. No need to bring God into it. Me, I know that mathematically chance can be illusory. Often if you analyze what seems amazing coincidence, you find it was just as likely to happen as not to happen. Sometimes more likely.

Years before, Martie had upstaged my indignation after I saw that TV play by remarking her family knew all about it as her Aunt Gracie was one of those kids.

I’d completely forgotten that and when I met Gracie at the wedding it didn’t ring a bell. She was in gray. It suited her, she was that kind of woman: wispy gray hair, wide gray eyes that never quite focused in a tiny pale gray face. If the weather had been misty she’d have disappeared. But unfocused or not, I felt those gray eyes scan my face closely. And from time to time during the celebration, I caught her gaze following me.

Later as I was helping Martie get ready for her grand departure, she said, “You made a great impression on Gracie. She said you reminded her of someone. The name too. She asked a lot of questions about your family. Especially dear old Ada. I’m real sorry she’s not still around, Sam. She was a lovely lady.”

“Yeah, she was.”

I hadn’t told Martie about the revelations which had followed Gramma Ada’s death. Some time in the future maybe, not in the run-up to her wedding. But suddenly it came back to me.

“Wasn’t it Gracie you said was one of those migrant kids all the fuss was about?”

“That’s right. Doesn’t like to talk about it though. Just turns vague if it’s mentioned. And when Gracie turns vague, she doesn’t have far to go!”

We laughed, but my mind was racing.

Later, after we’d seen the happy couple off, I went looking for Gracie. Saw no point messing around. Compared with Pa, I’m a pussy-footer, but I can be pretty direct.

I said, “Martie tells me you thought you recognized me.”

She looked embarrassed.

“It was the hair mainly. And the name. But I knew it was just a coincidence when Martie told me about your grandmother. I was sorry to hear she’d died. She sounds like a nice woman. You must miss her.”

“I do,” I said. “Only she wasn’t my real gran. Pa was adopted. His ma was like you. A child migrant from the UK.”

I reckon Pa would have been hard put to be more direct. I thought I’d overdone it. I wouldn’t have thought she could have got any grayer, but she did.

“And her name…?” she sort of croaked.

“Same as mine. And Pa’s. Sam Flood.”

She began to cry. I felt a heel. I was so keen to check out what looked like a real lead that I’d gone plowing in without the least consideration for poor old Gracie.

But I wasn’t going to turn back now. And she proved to be tougher than she looked. I reckon you had to be to survive what those bastards put those kids through.

We sat down together and drank whiskey and she told me what she knew about my grandmother.

To start with it was a huge disappointment, like one of those calculations which starts great then suddenly fizzles out. All Gracie could tell me about little Sam Flood with the flame-red hair was that she’d been on the same boat as her from Liverpool.

I asked her when that was, expecting her to be vague. But this was one thing she was certain of. It was 1960, the year Kennedy became president. She’d looked it up. Seems Kennedy was the first Catholic president and the nuns thought it was like the Second Coming and they made the kids watch it on television, which they didn’t mind as it was about the only television they ever got to see in those days. So, definitely 1960. And Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was top of the pops. That was the other thing she remembered. I think she thought it was dead appropriate.

On that boat, there’d been three main bunches of kids from different orphanages in the Liverpool area, but Sam Flood didn’t seem to belong to any group.

“I don’t know where she came from and, when we landed, we all got sent off to different places and I never saw her again. It was all confused. It was spring when we left and autumn when we got here. They took the summer from us. They took everything. I couldn’t make sense of it. It was very confused…”

Confused. That sums up what life had done to Gracie. I suppose everyone finds a different way to cope with shit. Gracie’s way had been to walk away from it when she got to be old enough to take care of herself. But when there was all that publicity in the nineties, her husband persuaded her to get in touch with the new Child Migrants Trust. Turned out Gracie was right. There was nothing in it for her, she really was an orphan, so no happy reunions there. But one good thing came out of it from my point of view.

There was this other girl from the same orphanage as Gracie. Betty Stanton. Sounds like the kind of kid who gets by taking lame dogs under her wing.

Sorry, that doesn’t sound right, you know what I mean.

Well, Gracie must have been a natural candidate. And Sam Flood was another.

Betty kept an eye on her, Gracie told me. And she thought they got taken off to the same place on arrival. It sounds as if this Betty was one of the Trust’s success stories. They’d tracked down her mother who was still alive in the UK and the two of them had been reunited. And when they realized Gracie was from the same Liverpool orphanage and had been part of the same consignment, they put them in touch.

At least they put Betty, who lived over in Perth, in touch with Gracie. Gracie really didn’t want to know. The past was outback to her. You could get lost there. So after a few letters, Betty gave up and settled for being on Gracie’s Christmas card list.

And Gracie gave me her address. Betty McKillop her married name is.

I dropped her a line, told her who I was, asked if we could meet and talk. I got a letter back from her daughter saying Betty was in the UK, place called Newcastle, where her own mother was very ill. But the daughter said she’d spoken on the phone and Betty remembered my gran very well and would love to talk with me when she got back. Naturally I said I was on the way to England myself very shortly and maybe we could meet up there. And she came back to me with a phone number to ring when I got here.

I rang a few days ago but it was a bad time. The old lady had just died. The funeral’s today and Betty’s flying home tomorrow night. I said I was sorry and maybe we could just fix a time to talk on the phone, but she said no, she’d rather see me. She said she’d be through by lunchtime tomorrow, so if I could get up to see her early afternoon before she set off for the airport, that would be fine. When I checked the map, I saw that it wasn’t that far over from Cumbria. And I recalled the last thing Gracie had said to me.

She’d gone into a kind of trance, and I was feeling real shitty for making her go back somewhere she didn’t want to be. So I got up to leave. Then she looked up at me and said, “I’ve been racking my brains for anything else I can recall. Most of us had these labels to start with, like we were bits of luggage, with our names and the address of the orphanage we came from. Sam didn’t have one of these, just a bit of paper which she kept folded up in her pocket. If anyone spoke to her, she was so shy she’d just bring out this bit of paper. That’s how we knew her name. But there was an address on it too.”

“An address?” I said. “Gracie, can you remember what it was?”

She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I only ever saw it once and it was all creased and hard to read. I think the place was Ill something. Maybe Illthwaite, but I can’t be sure. I’m sorry, the harder I try to remember, the vaguer it becomes.”

She was almost in tears. I calmed her down and told her she’d been great, which she had. And when I got home, I dug out my old world atlas and looked in the index.

The only thing which came close in the whole world was where we are now, Illthwaite in Cumbria, England.

Of course Aunt Gracie might have got it completely wrong. In fact, if you met Gracie, you’d put odds on it. Betty sounds a much safer bet.

But I was impatient to be doing something. I’d spent a few nights in London, crashing out on the couch of some Melbourne Uni mates in Earl’s Court, getting over the jet lag. Now I was ready to be off. I thought, I’ve got to go to Newcastle to talk with Betty McKillop, why not check out this Illthwaite place en route?

So I rented a car and set out.

And here I am. It’s been a complete waste of time. Not only that, it’s got me sitting in a hole in the ground, which terrifies me, making my confession to a priest.

OK, I know you’re not, but that’s what it feels like. Pa would have a fit!

And you were right about one thing at least.

I think it has made me feel a bit better.

Anyway, that’s me done and dusted. Now it’s your turn in the box.

13. Mig

My full name is Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, though in England I am known as Michael Madero. In both countries my friends call me Mig.

So I have two names. And two passports.

Sometimes I think that in fact I am divided into two people, except that when you put the halves together you do not get a whole.

I am the elder son of Christine, née Elkington, of Hampshire, England, and Miguel Madero of Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, Spain. Jerez is where the English word sherry derives from. For five centuries the Maderos have been in the wine business, a little longer than the Floods, I think. You may have encountered our rarest fino, El Bastardo? No? Ah well. Australasia has never been one of our strongest markets.

There is little you need to know about my childhood except that from time to time, usually in the spring, I felt a certain discomfort in my hands and feet which in my teens became unmistakably, so I thought, the stigmata, which as I’m sure you know means the appearance of wounds equivalent to those inflicted by crucifixion. Not quickly, but perhaps inevitably, I decided that their message was that I should enter the priesthood.

Oh, and there’s something else which I am reluctant to mention in our present circumstances, but it is relevant to my story.

I seem to be able to conjure ghosts, a talent incidentally which I was surprised to find not much valued in would-be priests.

Be reassured. I shall try to keep it in check.

Anyway, after overcoming many doubts, internal and external, I began my formal studies for the priesthood. I was still troubled by ghosts, and by girls too, but that’s a problem shared by most ordinands. And whenever my doubts returned, I reassured myself by thinking of my stigmatic experience. What else could it mean?

Then, for me as for you, a family loss proved a turning point. On New Year’s Day last year my father died unexpectedly.

After the funeral I sat alone in the twilight on the veranda of our family house and let memories of Father sweep over me. His kindness and his care, also his strong discipline. His old-fashioned courtesy toward women, mocked by some advanced feminist thinkers of his acquaintance, but nothing they ever said could provoke him into behavior he would have felt unbecoming in an hidalgo. His pride in the family business and his narration of episodes from family history which were the fairy tales of my childhood. His delight when I grew to share his passion for exploring remote regions and for mountain climbing. His love for my mother and for all things English, except their ignorance of the true glories of sherry wine.

And I also recalled his unconcealable disappointment when I told him I definitely wanted to enter the priesthood. I felt I had let him down and nothing I told myself of God’s will could bring consolation.

I felt my father so close, it seemed easy to bring him before me visibly. But at the seminary I had come to accept that such traffickings with the afterworld were perilous, so I rose and went downstairs and found company and broke the spell.

The head of my seminary, Father Dominic, a good man and a good friend, told me to take time off to come to terms with my loss. I went into the Sierra Nevada, to an area where I spent many happy holidays climbing with my father. Solo climbing is dangerous sport at the best of times, but now it was the middle of winter and the weather was foul. Yet one morning I found myself attempting a climb we had once done together, not a difficult ascent for two experienced climbers in decent conditions, but folly for a man alone in a disturbed mental condition.

I should have turned back as the weather worsened, but something drove me on. The wind grew stronger, driving flurries of snow into my face and seemingly trying to rip me off the cliff face which was covered in ice. I could see no way to advance. But going down wasn’t going to be easy either.

Needs must when the devil drives, and I began to descend. I had only managed a few feet when I slipped. Desperately I scrabbled for foot-and finger-holds. Somehow I managed to arrest my descent, but every single point of contact with the cliff face was minimal and temporary and deteriorating. A few more seconds and I would fall.

I was too terrified even to pray.

Then I saw another climber, a snow-spattered figure on a broad ledge a little above me and to my right. I called to him. He turned and reached out a hand. All I had to do was grab it and lunge sideways and upward, and his strength and my momentum should see me safely on to the ledge. I took my hand off the cliff and reached out. At the same time I saw his face.

It was my father who had taught me all I knew about climbing.

Can you catch the hand of a ghost?

I believe you can. I think that if our hands had met, he would have taken the weight of his foolish son on his arm and borne me up to safety.

But in the second before contact I felt the pain of the stigmata shoot through my palms and my ankles, worse than I had ever known it before.

And I fell.

You see the significance of this? This stigmata which I had taken to be a sign of vocation had prevented me from accepting help from my father’s spirit, which surely could not have been offered without the grace of God.

I did not of course reach this conclusion then. I was too busy being terrified.

Down I went through the snow-filled air. For what seemed an eternity, I could still see my father above me, his hand outstretched. Then he was absorbed in the whiteness of the blizzard and I hit the side of the mountain for the first time. The first of several times. I broke both legs, one arm, most of my ribs, punctured a lung, and fractured my skull, though in what order I cannot be sure.

Finally the whiteness turned to blackness. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the hospital. Fortunately the people I was staying with had been more concerned about my safety than I myself.

There was none of that mnemonic vagueness which often seems to follow accidents. My mind was as clear as a bell. I remembered everything up to the last impact.

I gave thanks to God for my rescue.

And I knew with absolute certainty that my sense of vocation was fallacious, the foolish misinterpretation of a vain and immature mind. Whatever message was being sent to me all these years via the stigmata, it had nothing to do with becoming a priest.

I informed Father Dominic of my change of heart when he came to see me. He said, “No hurry. As you recover, you will have plenty of time to think and pray.”

I tried to explain to him that this was no simple intrusion of doubt, no mere stage fright as the moment of commitment got nearer. This was knowledge so positive it made my previous sense of vocation seem a whim. It had nothing to do with loss of faith.

He simply smiled as if he had heard all this before. In the end I saw that just as he believed time would make all clear to me, so must I leave time to do its work on him.

Well, it has done its work, and I am glad to say that, despite my defection, Father Dominic and I have remained good friends. In a way it is because of him that I am here now. He brought me reading matter in the hospital, not the usual magazines and paperbacks, but material which he hoped might rekindle my vocational fires. Because of my English connections, he thought the stories of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales might be particularly inspirational, and wherever possible he supplied me with photocopies of original documents, handwritten and usually in Latin.

There were harrowing stories of the fate of priests who worked undercover in England during the period of proscription and persecution when capture meant long torture and painful death. The more I read these accounts, often written by the priests themselves, the more aware I became how unfit I was to join the company of such men.

When I said this to Father Dominic, he told me that no man could know what he might endure for his faith until put to the test. I could not argue with this, but I knew I was right in my decision.

Among the reading matter Father Dominic brought me were several sheets scrawled over by the wavering hand of someone clearly greatly distressed both in body and mind as he wrote. These turned out to be the scribblings of a Jesuit who had suffered at the hands of one of Elizabeth ’s pursuivants, the officers who tracked down and extracted confessions from Catholic priests.

His name was Father Simeon Woollass.

That’s right. The same name as the family in Illthwaite Hall, though at the time it meant nothing to me. Like yourself, I had never heard of Illthwaite.

There were some notes attached to these scribblings which indicated that they had been subjected to official Church examination. I subsequently learned that the family had at various times inquired why he had never been given the formal acknowledgment received by so many of the priests in the English Mission. The trouble was that, almost uniquely, after his interrogation he had been released and allowed to return to the Continent. No formal accusation of collaboration was ever made, and the Church’s stance was that he didn’t figure among the two hundred Blesseds from whom Pope Paul chose the Forty British Martyrs for canonization in 1970 for the simple reason that he died more or less peacefully in his bed at the English College in Seville.

I do not know the truth of what happened, but much that I read in his scribblings suggested a man racked with guilt and regret. Composed in a strange mix of Latin, Spanish and English, and written in an almost illegible hand, they rambled on, repetitively and incoherently, trembling on the edge of that despair which is the ultimate sin, but always clinging to that trust in God’s mercy which is the ultimate salvation.

I suspected that Father Dominic’s hope was that my own spiritual troubles would pall to insignificance alongside the writhings of this lacerated soul, but repetition can make even the cries of a man in torment tedious, and I was about to give them up when I saw something which reached out and caught my attention with hooks of steel.

Miguel Madero. My own name.

Nothing else, unless the phrase that followed (scored so deep into the paper that at one point the quill had penetrated to the next sheet) was in some way connected:

Padre me perdona…

Father forgive me…

Seeing my name like this felt like receiving a message from another world.

And as I read it, I suddenly had a memory of an early ghostly experience I’d had in the great Gothic cathedral of Seville when I’d been approached by a mad old man, babbling incoherently. I felt certain now that this manifestation had been Father Simeon.

There was a message here, but it wasn’t very clear and, having already shown such a talent for supernatural misinterpretation, I was not about to rush to any conclusion.

I recalled my father telling me, frequently, how two of my forebears, father and son, both called Miguel, had perished in the tragic defeat of the Great Armada in 1588.

Could it be one of these two Miguels the scrawl referred to? It was a possibility, but to my historian mind, it seemed somewhat unlikely. Had either survived to be taken by the English, it would have been apparent to their captors that here was a wealthy member of the hidalgo class worth ransoming. My rationality told me Madero was a not uncommon name. Perhaps after all this was simple coincidence.

I was distracted from further examination of my family history by a more immediate problem. Or rather two problems.

Cristóbal, my brother, was now head of the firm, a job which my defection to the religious life had dropped into his grateful lap. While he is the most loving of brothers, I could see his concern growing that I might now wish to claim my birthright as the elder son.

Matters were not improved by our mother, Christine. After Father’s death, she had decided to return permanently to her family home near Winchester and resume the life of a quiet well-bred English lady. But my brush with death had brought her back to Spain. As Donna Cristina she had always taken a lively interest in the business. But when Cristo took over, I suspect he was not displeased when she decided to move to England.

Now she was back. At first she was entirely preoccupied with my state of health. But as I moved off the critical list, she began to take notice of certain changes Cristo was making in the organization of the firm, and was temperamentally incapable of keeping her objections to herself. Sparks began to fly.

My solution to both problems was simple and elegant enough to please a mathematician. As soon as I could move on crutches, I told my mother it would please me to have a complete change of scenery and continue my convalescence in England.

The prospect of being totally in control of me delighted her, and the prospect of getting both me and Cristina out of his hair delighted Cristo.

Healthwise it turned out to be a good move for me also.

Eventually, feeling the need for intellectual stimulation as well as, I admit, a desire to get out of my mother’s control, I decided to resume my historical studies. I had been reading about the English Reformation and decided, some might say was guided, to focus my attention there. Father Dominic, with whom I kept in touch, was delighted to hear of this. He still has hopes for me. No mean historian himself, he put me in touch with an old friend of his in the History Department at Southampton University, Dr. Max Coldstream, one of the foremost Catholic scholars of our time. We met, liked each other, and soon I was formally signed up as a research student.

As I studied the Reformation, I found my interest shifting from the experience of priests to that of ordinary people. I was particularly intrigued by the problems of recusancy, the refusal by many ordinary Catholics to attend Church of England services. It was a dangerous path to tread. The penalties could be severe, ranging from fines through confiscation of land to imprisonment and even death. Much depended on which part of the country they lived in, what kind of influence they had…

But I suspect I have passed the point where I have even the smallest hold on your interest. Let me press on.

During Elizabeth ’s reign, security was overseen by her Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham, whose network of agents and informants was a potent weapon against Catholic conspiracies, both real and imagined. One of his lieutenants collated details of every recusant family in the country and, through the good offices of Dr. Coldstream and Father Dominic, I obtained access to these papers.

There was much fascinating information and the more I read, the more I resolved that here was my most rewarding line of research. The great noble families mentioned had doubtless been well trawled over during the last couple of centuries, but there could still be a treasure trove of journals and records lying undisturbed in those of the lesser houses which were still occupied by the same families four centuries on.

I set about discovering which fell into this category, approaching my task alphabetically so it was almost done when I came across a name which rang familiarly.

Woollass.

I had quite forgotten Father Simeon Woollass and the odd coincidence of my own scrawled name in his papers. Now I quickly established that the Woollass family still occupied Illthwaite Hall. A little further digging confirmed that Father Simeon was indeed a member of the family, the son of a cadet branch then residing in Kendal, now defunct. Walsingham’s records of the pursuit and capture of priests on the English Mission told me only that his presence was known from the 1580s and he was taken up in 1589 by Francis Tyrwhitt, a lieutenant of the notorious pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe.

Do you know of Topcliffe? No? Why should you? He was Elizabeth ’s chief priest-hunter, a monster. His devotion to his work was such that he applied for a license to set up a torture chamber in his own home, which meant that he could pursue his interrogations with minimal disruption to his domestic life. When the dinner gong rang, he could toss another shovelful of coke on to the hotbed under the griddle on which his latest victim lay, then pop upstairs for his well-done sirloin.

By all accounts, Tyrwhitt was the right servant for such a master. He was a cousin of Sir Edward Jolley, a Protestant judge whose sentences, especially against Catholics, were infamous for their severity. He allowed Tyrwhitt to use the dungeons of Jolley Castle, near Leeds in Yorkshire, as his interrogation center and it is alleged that in those airless depths he matched Topcliffe in zeal, and outdid him in brutality.

It was into this monster’s hands that God placed Father Simeon.

And it was this same monster who let him go.

So what happened?

As we know from the annals of World War II, officially sanctioned psychopaths are usually meticulous in their records, so I was fairly optimistic when I began to investigate, but all I could find was a reference in the Walsingham archive to Simeon’s arrest, followed by a bald statement that he was put to the test, and subsequently released.

I shared my difficulty with my supervisor, Max Coldstream, who is hugely experienced in the complex detective work of research. He knew all about the Woollass family’s obsession with proving Simeon innocent of crimes he’d never been formally accused of. This seemed to have been resolved about forty years ago when Dunstan Woollass received a papal honor. In the accompanying encomium listing his merits and those of his family, particular reference was made to the noble part played by Father Simeon in the English Mission of the sixteenth century.

So it seemed the slate was clean. Max warned me that the Woollasses might not take kindly to anyone trying to scribble on it once more, but as my interest was personal rather than scholarly, I asked him to see if he could dig anything up.

He immediately suggested it might be worth looking at the archives of the Jolley family. A few days later he rang me to say that we were in luck. Jolley Castle is now a National Trust property and the family’s somewhat chaotic records are being cataloged. An archivist called Tim Lilleywhite, a former pupil of Max’s, had undertaken the task, and he confirmed that there were references to Tyrwhitt and also some personal records the man made of his interrogations. He promised to look out for any mention of Simeon.

Meanwhile I put all this to the back of my mind and set about contacting the dozen families I hoped might be able to help with my researches. Within a week I had received three downright refusals and four expressions of regret that time, accident, or carelessness had destroyed any papers the family might have had.

I was beginning to think my bright idea might not have been so bright after all.

And then I got Woollass’s reply.

I am not a fatalist but I heard the voice of fate in this.

I wrote back at once accepting his invitation to come for an interview.

My mother was pleased I had found an occupation, less pleased when she saw the car I bought myself for my trip up to Cumbria. She described my lovely Mercedes SLK as a teutonic sardine tin, totally unsuitable for bumpy mountain roads, and with internal dimensions that would put my recovery back by months every time I squeezed into it.

I retorted that I needed things to help me conquer my disability, not things to help me be comfortable with it. And I tried not to limp as I strode away into the house.

She apologized later and said of course I was quite right, it was my choice.

But as I slipped into the car to start my journey north a couple of days later, I noticed she had put my walking stick on to the passenger seat. I waited till I was out of sight of the house before I picked it up and hurled it into the hedge!

I did not know what lay ahead of me in this strange place called Illthwaite but, whatever it was, I was determined to meet it standing erect on my own two feet.

Alas, I have to admit that, as usual, my mother was absolutely right!

Max Coldstream was right too in warning me to tread carefully as far as Father Simeon was concerned. I did some research into his family in Kendal on my way here, which I thought wise to keep under my hat, but Cumbria it seems is a very small world, and Gerry Woollass, Frek’s father, got wind of it. My diplomacy must have looked like sheer deviousness. Which is why I was given my marching orders.

But felix culpa, had I not been summarily ejected from the Hall, I might never have found my way into this chamber where I feel so very strongly the presence of…

14. A real live woman

Whose spirit Madero felt the presence of Sam was saved from discovering.

At that moment the torch battery gave up its ghost and the light, already diminished to a pinprick, went out.

She screamed.

She didn’t want to but she knew no way not to.

Then she felt his arms being wrapped around her and he drew her close, almost on to his lap.

“It’s OK,” he murmured. “It’s OK. We’ll soon be out of here. There, there. Be calm. Be calm.”

He was talking to her like a child again, but she didn’t mind it. Like a child, what she wanted in this predicament was adult comfort and reassurance.

Madero, on the other hand, as he hugged her close and felt the warmth of that lithe body reach him through the thin cloth of her skimpy T-shirt, found to his dismay that, however his eyes might have deceived him as to her age, after a few moments his own frail flesh was telling him he had a real live woman in his arms. He tried to twist away to conceal his arousal but if anything the movement only drew attention to it. He sent his mind in search of all the antaphrodisiac stratagems he’d developed in the seminary only to discover that, effective though they’d once been against the fancy’s images, they had no potency against the physical reality.

“I’m sorry,” he began to say, but Sam interrupted him.

“Listen!” she said.

He listened.

There was noise above them. A footfall. Then an exclamation.

With one accord they began to cry, “Help!”

It took another fifteen minutes for Edie Appledore to round up the three strong men necessary to raise the heavy table and release the entrance slab.

The three strong men in question turned out to be the Gowders and Thor Winander, whom she’d flagged down as they drove past from St. Ylf’s.

Pushed from behind by Mig and pulled from above by Winander, Sam scrambled out into the light of the kitchen which fell on her like a glorious dawn.

“Nice to see you again, Miss Flood,” boomed Thor. “Trying to find a shortcut home, were you?”

“Ignore him, dear,” said Mrs. Appledore. “Drink this. You look a bit shook up.”

She handed Sam a glass of brandy which she downed in one and did not resist when offered a refill.

The Gowders had propped the table up with cast-iron chairs brought in from the beer garden. Winander now offered his hand to Madero, who was standing with his head appearing through the gap in the kitchen floor.

“No. Thank you, all the same,” he said with a formality that set Sam, still light-headed with relief, giggling. “Mrs. Appledore, do you have such a thing as a flashlight?”

Shaking her head at the stupidity of men, the landlady found one. Winander took it from her but instead of handing it down, he dropped into the underground chamber himself, provoking more head-shaking from Mrs. Appledore. Now the two men vanished, presumably to continue the exploration which the collapse of the slab had interrupted.

The reason why the table had fallen back to the floor was clear.

There must have been some dry rot in the crossbeam and under the weight of the table one of the pulleys had pulled loose. The sudden extra pressure on the other had snapped the rope, allowing the table to fall back on the counterweight slabs, bringing the entry slab crashing down.

“So what’s been going on?” inquired Mrs. Appledore when she was satisfied that Sam had recovered sufficiently to be questioned.

Sam told her, finishing with an apology for her part in what had been effectively an act of trespass resulting in physical damage to the kitchen.

“Never mind that,” said the landlady. “All these years I’ve spent sitting over yon hole, never knowing a thing about it. God knows what’s down there. Could be anything!”

She shuddered at the thought, then her expression brightened.

“Or it could be valuable. Come on, you two! What have you found? And don’t forget, whatever it is must belong to me!”

“Is that so, Edie?” came Winander’s voice. “In that case, here’s a down payment.”

So saying, he reached his arm out of the aperture and placed a human skull and a couple of bones on the floor.

Mrs. Appledore let out a gasp of distaste without seeming too bothered by the grinning relic. Sam recalled Madero’s muttered prayer. He’d known all the time they were sharing that dark chamber with a skeleton. But, probably wisely, he’d said nothing.

His voice came from the ground now.

“I really think we should leave the remains in place,” he said sharply. “The police will want to look at them.”

There was an anger in his words which went beyond mere procedural objection.

“This is archaeology, not crime,” said Winander. “Let’s have a look at the stuff before the experts get their grubby little hands on it.”

The next thing to appear was a cross, about four feet in length. It seemed to have been bound round with sacking, the dusty remnants of which still clung to it. One of the Gowders picked it up and started to brush it off with his great red paw. As the detritus was cleared, the cross began to glow with the dullness of old gold and the brightness of polished gems. He set it down hastily, as though it were hot.

“Oh my God,” said Mrs. Appledore.

More items were handed out of the hole, some chalices, a pair of candlesticks, a chrismatory and a pyx – but, much to Sam’s relief, there were no more bones.

Finally the two men clambered out.

“Haven’t you done well, Edie?” said Winander. “If you can claim this lot, they’ll crown you Most Desirable Widow at the Skaddale Show. What do you think, Madero?”

Madero shrugged.

“I do not know the English law,” he said. “My guess is that this was the place where the monks of the Priory stored their treasures in time of need. A good spot, belonging to the Priory without actually being in the Priory. When word of the king’s men came, they must have decided the time had come to hide what they could. Not everything, because if they found the place stripped of all valuables, the destroyers wouldn’t have rested till they got someone to tell where they had gone. I’ve no doubt they found a cross in place. But not one like this.”

He regarded the jeweled crucifix with reverence.

“So who does it belong to?” said Winander. “The Church? Or finders keepers?”

“Ultimately it belongs to God,” said Madero. “But then so does everything. Miss Flood, are you all right?”

“Fit as a butcher’s dog,” said Sam, glaring at Madero and challenging him to make any further reference to her recent debility.

“Good. Perhaps you and I should clean up. We will need to make statements to the police.”

Sam looked at him in surprise. Perhaps it was a Spanish convention that you looked your best when communicating with the police. True, he was a bit dusty, but not too bad. If anything, the way he was holding his jacket tight around his body as if the chill of the nether chamber had struck into his bones, what he really needed was some of Mrs. Appledore’s brandy. But he was already at the door, where he paused.

“Mrs. Appledore, you’ll phone the authorities?”

The landlady glanced at Winander who shrugged and said, “He’s right. They like to know about bones, even ancient ones.”

“Right then,” said the woman.

Sam was now recovered sufficiently to glance down at her limbs. For some reason she seemed to have gathered twice as much dust as Madero. God knows what was in it!

She stood up and followed the Spaniard up the stairs.

As he opened the door of his room, she said, “Thanks.”

“For what, Miss Flood?”

“For helping me get through that. And what’s with this Miss Flood stuff? Or do you only use first names when you’ve got a girl up close and intimate?”

She gave him a grin to let him see she’d noticed, then went into her room.

A glance in the mirror stopped her grinning. As well as the dust, there were cobwebs in her hair, and her shorts looked as if she’d played rugby in them. She grabbed her spongebag and towel and headed out to the bathroom.

But first she tapped on Madero’s door, which swung open.

“OK if I get first stab at the bathroom?” she said.

He looked up, startled, almost guilty.

He was sitting on the bed with some kind of book on his lap. It was quarto size and looked very old and dusty. Dustier than he did. Suddenly she understood his eagerness to get out of the kitchen.

She said, “That’s what you had under your jacket!”

She didn’t mean to sound accusatory but he reacted as if to accusation.

“Why not? I think if anyone’s entitled, it is I.”

“Listen, mate, you do whatever you want, so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,” said Sam, turning away.

He stood up and said, “No, wait. I’m sorry.”

She halted and looked back at him.

He had that haunted look on his face again.

He said in a quick low tone, “It’s just that, what I felt down there, I think Father Simeon hid in that chamber. But I think someone else was with him for part of the time.”

He paused as if unable or at least reluctant to go on.

Sam said, “So? Maybe he had a traveling companion. Must have been a lonely business he was in. A little bit of comfort in the night would have come in handy.”

She hadn’t meant it to come out as a salacious innuendo, but Madero didn’t react. He was still too concerned with his internal debate, which seemed to have less to do with what he was reluctant to tell her than with what he was unwilling to admit to himself.

“Spit it out,” she advised. “Better than choking on it.”

“Your father again?” he said, attempting a smile. “He really does sound like a man of good sense. All right, you already think me weird because of my beliefs. You might as well think I am crazy too. That sense of another presence I had down there in the chamber – a ghostly presence, I mean, in addition to Father Simeon’s, but this one was stronger. It was almost as if I myself had been there five hundred years ago.”

“Jeez, and here’s me thinking you were still this side of fifty,” said Sam. “And the book you lifted?”

“It felt so strongly connected to me that I had to take it,” he said.

“So what’s it say?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read a word of it.”

He managed a rueful smile, then became serious again.

“But it has to mean something, doesn’t it?” he appealed. “All of my life I have felt something trying to speak to me. It sent me down highways and byways, but in the end it’s this place, Illthwaite in the Valley of the Shadow, that it was calling me to. And there’s one more thing I’m starting to feel very strongly. You’re part of it too, Sam. You’re part of it too!”

15. God.com

If it hadn’t been for his attempt to bring her into his crazy equation, Sam might have been more sympathetic. The guy had some good points and despite their obvious differences there was something about him which drew her to him. But trying to fit her up with a role in his superstitious shadow play was going too far.

“So what you’re saying is you’ve been getting like e-mails from God dot com?” she mocked. “How do you know it’s not just spam from the devil like your confessor tried to tell you?”

Her mockery came out rather more vehemently than she intended and she felt a pang of guilt, recognizing this as a reaction to the way her terror of the darkness had caused her to lay herself so bare. She also recalled that he’d done the same, not out of terror but partly in response to her openness and also to keep her mind occupied with matters other than her claustrophobia. Plus there’d been that moment at the end when the old Adam had taken over from the wannabe priest!

Calling truce isn’t as easy as declaring war. He was regarding her coldly as he said, “I thought you claimed to be a mathematician.”

“What’s that mean? ‘Claimed’?”

“Aren’t mathematicians supposed to strive for cool objectivity in their observations? To withhold belief or disbelief until they’ve examined all offered proofs and attempted their own? Any mention of religion to you is like waving a muleta at a bull. Objectivity out, emotion in. It all becomes personal!”

That wasn’t a muleta, that was a banderilla.

“Personal!” she exploded. “What else should it be but personal? But it’s a gender thing as well. Show me a religion which doesn’t rate men as superior and I might take a closer look at it. But that’s not the end of it either. It’s a philosophical thing and a volition thing too. I can’t find any logical or scientific arguments that add up to God, and anyway I really don’t want to believe in a god who could let all the shitty things happen that do happen. All this old stuff you’re into about people torturing each other and ripping each other’s guts out in the name of religion, it’s not history, you know. It’s still going on. The way I see it, women shouldn’t be going down on their knees, begging to be given full rights in your religions, they should be giving thanks for their partial exclusion and taking steps to make it absolute!”

Where had all this stuff come from? she wondered. It was pointless and untimely, and she ought to get out now. But she didn’t believe in turning away from a fight.

They stood glowering at each other for a long moment, but she wasn’t much good at glowering and he wasn’t in the mood for theological debate.

He sat back down on the bed and said rather wearily, “Some interesting points, but can we leave them for another time? Please, I’m not patronizing you. On the contrary, talking about things being personal, this is what this is to me, I freely admit it. What I’m hearing here isn’t a message from God saying I’m especially holy, but the most powerful of voices from my family’s past…”

“You don’t think that skull belonged to this ancestor, do you?” interrupted Sam, looking to get back to concrete evidence, even old bones. “Or this guy Simeon maybe?”

“No. Neither. Though it felt very old, and very holy too somehow. I think it could be some sacred relict which the monks hid with the other treasure. There are experts who will be able to tell the skull’s age and sex. And believe me, I want to find concrete evidence to support what I feel too. Perhaps it will be in this old book. I’m sure there will be experts who can interpret it. Meanwhile, however irrational it seems, I am stuck with this certainty that at some time there was a Madero hiding down in that chamber.”

“But you said that you were the first of your family who ever got close to being a priest,” she objected.

“I am,” he agreed. “No, I don’t think he was a fugitive priest like Father Simeon. The only possibility I can think of is he was one of the two Maderos I told you about, who were lost with the Great Armada. Probably – because the pain I feel is the pain of youth – it was the young man. It means that somehow he came to this part of the country, I do not know how. And while he was here, something terrible happened to him. I don’t know what. But he was here, and he suffered here, in Illthwaite, of that I am sure.”

He paused and looked at Sam as if anticipating another outpouring of scorn.

Instead she said, “Oh shit,” as her instinctive skepticism was joined by something else… words, and an image…

“What?” he said, picking up that this wasn’t a comment on what he’d just said.

“Look,” said Sam. “Probably just coincidence, but there’s something in that old guidebook of Mrs. Appledore’s you maybe should read.”

“Coincidence is the way God talks to us,” said Madero. “Which bit?”

The book was lying on the bedside table. He handed it to her and she opened it at the section on the Other Wolf-Head Cross.

“Here,” she said, handing it back.

He took it and started reading.

Curious to get his reaction, she didn’t leave but glanced down at the collection of dusty pages he’d laid on the coverlet. They looked as if they’d been loosely bound together but the binding material had decayed and snapped. The leaves, however, were in a relatively good state of preservation. They were covered in tiny close-packed writing, not in any recognizable language but in symbols, some bearing a strong resemblance to letters of the Greek alphabet, others resembling numbers or simple geometric shapes.

Sam studied the first page, frowning with concentration.

Madero meanwhile had run his eyes over the story of Thomas Gowder’s murder and the mysterious fate of his assailant.

After a while he said savagely, “This cannot be.”

Then he got control of himself with a visible effort and said, “These are merely the scribblings of some amateur historian based on little more than local folklore. The truth needs more scholarly sifting than this.”

What was it he found so hard to take in? wondered Sam. That his ancestor suffered a terrible fate? Or that he might have been a cold-blooded killer?

“And you’ve got one of your funny feelings you could find the truth in this book you stole, right?” she said.

“I haven’t stolen anything,” he said wearily. “It will be replaced with all the other material from the chamber before the police arrive. I wouldn’t like to feel I’ll be a trouble to your conscience when you come to make your statement.”

His sarcasm struck her as both uncalled for and unjust.

“Maybe it’s your own conscience that’s bothering you,” she retorted. “As for these pages, could be you’re right to hang on to them. After all, they’ve got your name in them.”

It took him a moment to work out what she was saying.

“You can read them?” he burst out incredulously.

“No problem,” she said airily and made as if to move through the door.

“Wait!” he commanded.

This got him one of her slate-eye looks and he quickly added, “Please. You must explain… I mean, I would appreciate it if…”

“Glad to see you’ve not forgotten your manners,” she said briskly. “Yes, I can read it. First bit at least, then it goes a bit weird. I recognize the code. Strictly speaking it’s a nomenclator – that’s a combination of cipher and code using a symbolic alphabet indicating letters and also some common words. Like I said in the churchyard, I had this boyfriend who was into encryption in a big way. The math end of it’s quite interesting actually, but I read something about the history of encryption too which is where I came across these symbols. Surprised you didn’t recognize them yourself.”

She regarded him with mocking challenge.

He said, “There is something familiar… but I do not know how…”

“Perhaps you came across it when you were reading about that guy Walsingham, Elizabeth ’s spook-master. That’s right. This is the cipher used by Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic conspirators when they were plotting to assassinate Elizabeth. They were the good guys in your book, I’d guess.”

Madero said doubtfully, “And how can you be sure this is the same code?”

“I told you, dummy. Because I can read some of it. I suppose these undercover priests liked to use some kind of secret writing in case they got caught. Good thinking, but this Father Simeon can’t have been all that bright, using a code that must have been broken to get the evidence to convict Mary. When did she get the chop?”

“In 1587,” said Madero.

“And the Armada?”

“ 1588.”

“Like I say, not very bright, even for a priest.”

He said, “So what does it say?”

She picked up the page and studied it then said, “After three days the fever has broken for which be thanks. His wounds though I keep them clean as I am able are yet livid and pustular. He woke and was in great fear till I calmed him, telling him what I was, and where we lay, and hearing me speak in his own tongue he grew calm and fell into a deep sleep, though not before telling me his name was Miguel Madero.”

Sam stopped and looked up at the Spaniard who said impatiently, “Go on!”

“I think he jumps a few hours then he says that the young man is awake once more and is keen to tell his story which he wishes Father Simeon to take down so that he may let his family know his fate if, as he fears, he does not return to Spain, but Simeon does. There’s a hell of a lot more but you’ll need to sort that out for yourself.”

“Please, I beg you. You must go on,” he said desperately.

“I’m not playing hard to get,” she said patiently. “It’s just that after this it gets into some lingo I don’t speak. If this is your boy, it could be Spanish, yeah?”

“Which Father Simeon spoke fluently,” said Madero.

He opened his dressing-table drawer and took out a writing pad and a ballpoint.

“I’ll need you to write out the code. Please.”

The tone was peremptory, the please again an afterthought.

He’s still talking to me like some schoolmaster to a kid, thought Sam. But I felt you getting a hard-on, you bastard!

“Glad to,” she said, smiling sweetly. “But first I’m going to get cleaned up. I won’t be long, then you can have the bathroom. The cops will be here soon, I expect.”

She turned and went out. He’d waited over four hundred years for this, he could wait a few minutes longer!

Madero glared after her in frustration then turned his gaze back on the book. That he’d been led here to uncover the mystery of his ancestor’s fate he could not doubt. That he had come by such a roundabout route was his own fault, caused by his hubristic misinterpretation of the message.

And here he was being prevented from God’s purpose by the mocking whim of this Australian child! Who of course wasn’t a child, he admonished himself. Which was just as well, else the way his body had reacted as he held her close in the chamber would be cause for serious concern. No, she was a bright intelligent adult woman only a few years younger than himself, and it was time he started treating her like one.

He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. Those years in the seminary had left their mark, not so much outwardly as on the man inside. Preparation for the most serious job a man could undertake, a job in which people twice your age would call you Father, made you strive for a maturity beyond your years. At the same time the turning away from worldly things and in particular that control and denial of the sexual impulse which in his case had begun years earlier had left him a mere boy in his relationship with women. He was still in his twenties. He had to learn again what it was to be a young man. Then perhaps he would be able to engage with Frek Woollass on level terms.

As for Sam, his arousal there had been a mere coincidence of proximity and long frustration. There was something about her which, despite all the negatives between them, formed a positive bond. But its roots, he assured himself, had nothing to do with sexual attraction. Rather it was a correspondence of purpose. She was on a quest too. Like his, it seemed to have been delayed by misinterpretation and misunderstanding, with her visit to Illthwaite turning out to be what the English called a red herring.

Yet, if she hadn’t come here, it was doubtful if he would be trembling on the brink of solving his family mystery. This made him think that perhaps her error was part of God’s purpose too…

“Mr. Madero! Are you there?”

Mrs. Appledore’s voice from the foot of the stairs broke in on his meditation.

He went out to the landing and said, “Yes?”

“Police are here.”

He was surprised. He’d expected a gap of at least half an hour, probably longer.

He said, “I’m coming,” then returned to his room, and tucked the purloined papers gently under his pillow.

Downstairs he solved the mystery of the rapid police response. This was no high-powered investigatory team but a single constable who had got the call in the Powderham Arms where he’d been checking security, which everyone knew was a euphemism for chatting up one of the waitresses. A comfortably built young man, he seemed both excited to be first cop on the scene and uncertain what he actually ought to do. But he was soon helped by the arrival of a strange little man in a garish waistcoat who spoke in his ear, and rapidly thereafter everyone was ushered out of the kitchen into the bar.

When Mrs. Appledore protested at being ordered around in her own home, the constable said in the stilted tone of a newly conned part, “We need to keep the crime scene uncontaminated till SOCO get here, ma’am.”

The mystery of this new authority was solved when Madero asked Winander, “Who is that old man? Is he too a policeman?”

“Was. Noddy Melton, Head of CID, retired. At least he knows the ropes, which is just as well as this bugger doesn’t seem to know his whistle from his whatsit.”

Now there was a further diversion as a handful of early drinkers came into the bar only to be told the pub wasn’t open and probably wouldn’t be for some time.

During the debate which ensued, Madero noticed the old man slip out. He followed and found him in the kitchen, examining the skull.

“What are you doing?” asked Madero. “I thought this place was to be kept clear.”

“Not of me,” said the old man mildly. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Madero. I would say this is pretty old, wouldn’t you? A man. Pre-dentist, by the look of it. There is a story that some relicts of St. Ylf were kept at the Priory. Didn’t find a silver bullet, did you?”

“I am sorry?”

“The legend says he turned into a wolf to show travelers the way, which makes him a werewolf, and the best way to kill them was a silver bullet.”

“Mr. Melton, are you OK?”

Sam Flood, smelling of scented soap and changed into lowcut jeans and a sweatshirt, came in. She shot Madero what he felt was a quite undeserved admonitory glance.

“Hello again, Miss Flood,” said the old man. “Yes, I’m fine. I happened to have my radio tuned to the police frequency and when I heard them put this shout out…”

“And they mentioned bones, did they?” said Sam anxiously. “But I think you’ll find these are pretty old, isn’t that right, Mr. Madero?”

“I think we’ve established that,” said Mig, wondering why she felt it necessary to reassure the old man who looked perfectly in control of himself and the situation.

“Great,” said Sam, taking the skull out of Melton’s hands and laying it on the table. “Why don’t we head outside and see if Mrs. Appledore can rustle you up a drink?”

She led the old man into the hallway where they saw the landlady coming out of the barroom, which still sounded a scene of lively protest. She looked hot and flustered.

“There you are, Noddy,” she said. “I’d appreciate it if you could have another word with young Starsky back there before he starts a riot.”

“Mr. Melton was looking at the bones we found under the kitchen,” said Sam significantly. “I think a drink might help.”

“Do you now? All right, but not before you get that lot sorted. They see you getting a drink, they’ll all want one.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Melton. Then to Sam he added, “You have been most kind. I hope I can return the favor.”

There was a surge of noise from the bar. He smiled and went through the door.

“I think he thought they might be his Mary’s,” said Sam.

“Told you about that, did he?” said Mrs. Appledore. “Looks spry enough to me. See what a hornet’s nest you two have stirred up! And I’m losing money because of it.”

Sam realized that Madero had made another of his silent sorties and was standing beside her. He looked ready to be contrite in the face of the landlady’s remonstrance, but Sam retorted, “Tell you what, Mrs. Appledore. I’ll give you a night’s takings for your share of whatever the loot back there brings in. Could be nothing, of course…”

A slow grin spread across Mrs. Appledore’s face.

“Think I’ll take my chances, dear. Sounds like things are quietening down.”

She turned and reentered the bar.

“So what was that all about with the old man?” asked Madero.

Quickly Sam filled him in on Melton’s background.

“You seem to have learned a great deal about the locals in a short time,” he said.

“A trick I picked up at uni,” said Sam. “It’s called listening. You should try it.”

They stood in the shady hallway and looked at each other.

He thought, when she is being kind and thoughtful instead of brash and boisterous, she is not unattractive.

She thought, when he is being natural and unguarded instead of pompous and priestly, he’s a bit of a spunk.

Then the bar door opened and the thwarted drinkers spilled out, still protesting in colorful terms about this breach of their native rights, and the moment was past.