The Stranger House Page 11

  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 yo
u 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.”