The Stranger House Read online

  Cristina (née Christine) Madero’s elder son now sat on the edge of his bed and contemplated his future. For years the only ambition he’d nursed which ran counter to his preordained lot of running the family business had been to sign on as a striker with, first of all, Sevilla FC and ultimately Man United. At first these strange physical symptoms had only concerned him as possible obstacles to his athletic ambitions. But there seemed to be no long-term effect, and what made him abandon his hoped-for sporting career was the gradual realization that, though he was good, he would never be Best. Anything less had no appeal, and he set aside his football boots with no regrets.

  Now it seemed to him that perhaps he had been denied that ultimate sporting edge because another purpose was written for him. To have interpreted this intermittent irritation in his hands and feet as a form of stigmata would have been blasphemously arrogant. But the blood today had changed all that. The blood and the second manifestation of the young priest. The first time the vision had invited him to follow. Now, ten years later, it had offered him a gift. The symbolism of the eggs was not hard to read. In form perfection; in content life. Was not that the essence of a priest’s existence, to strive to be perfect and so reveal life’s true meaning?

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him clear that this was the message he had been receiving for all his short years.

  Yet he was in many ways what is called an old-fashioned child, and he knew that getting other important people to accept his sense of vocation was not going to be easy.

  Problem one was his own family.

  The Maderos were in the eyes of their bishop the very model of a good devout Catholic family — generous in charity, regular attenders at Mass, both their sons serving as altar boys — but never in the five hundred years since they started to make their name in the wine business had a single man of the family offered himself for the priesthood.

  Problem two was their family priest.

  Father Adolfo was a hardheaded Catalonian who regarded what he called hysterical religiosity with a cold and cynical eye. His reaction to any suggestion that Mig was specially chosen by God as evidenced by the stigmata was likely to be a cuff round the ear, followed by a recommendation to the family that they seek a good child psychiatrist to nip this childish delusion in the bud.

  So when Mig sought an interview with him, he limited himself to the unadorned statement that he felt he might have a vocation. He was glad of his discretion when Father Adolfo’s reaction was to throw back his head and let out a long booming laugh.

  When the echoes had faded, the priest said, “Have you talked to your father about this?”

  “No, Father,” said Mig.

  “Then let’s go and see him now. I’m not having a decent generous man like Miguel Madero saying I’ve been sneaking behind his back, subverting his son and heir.”

  Miguel Madero’s reaction had been one of amazement, which he showed, and horror, which, out of deference to the priest, he tried to conceal. But the shock was too great and it was apparent both to Mig and the priest that Madero Senior could hardly have been more distressed if told his son had ambitions to be a fundamentalist suicide-bomber.

  Father Adolfo, though having no desire to appear to encourage what he suspected was an adolescent fancy, was not about to let the dignity of his calling be traduced.

  “To be called to the service of God is the greatest honor that can befall a true Catholic,” he said sternly.

  “Yes, of course… I was selfishly thinking of the business…”

  “The Church’s business comes first. You have another son to look after yours,” said the priest shortly. “You will want to speak further to Mig. So shall I. Let us both pray to discover the truth of God’s purpose.”

  The next few months saw Mig’s infant sense of vocation tested to the full.

  His father’s motives for opposition were practical and genealogical. Mig had shown a peculiar aptitude for all aspects of the family business, commercial and vinicultural. His flirtation with football apart, he had never seemed likely to divert from his preordained role as head of the firm, the sixteenth Miguel in an unbroken line since the fifteenth century. Sherry is a sensitive creature. It likes calm and continuity. Miguel Senior was so upset that he hardly dared go into the bodega during this period.

  His mother’s objections were English and social. Behind every great man there is a great woman, telling him he’s driving too fast. This was Cristina Madero’s role in the family, and she found it hard to accept that her control of her husband did not extend to her son. She also felt things would have been managed better back home. The rich Catholic families of Hampshire provided the Church with money, congregation, and voluntary workers, but saw no reason to provide priests, not when the poor Catholic families of Ireland needed the work.

  Only Mig’s young brother, Cristo, inspired by a vision of his future which did not involve being perpetually second-in-command, encouraged him.

  Father Adolfo was the one who most vigorously questioned his vocation. “It means a calling,” he mocked. “Are you sure it’s not just an echo of your own vanity?”

  Often Mig was tempted to silence him with the revelation of his experience of the stigmata, but a natural reluctance to make such an enormous claim kept him quiet.

  But one day when Father Adolfo sneered that he had so far seen precious little evidence of that special spirituality he looked for in a postulant, Mig could not resist the temptation to put him in his place by revealing his other special gift.

  Far from being impressed, the priest reacted as if he’d confessed a mortal sin.

  “You foolish child!” he cried. “Such trafficking with the alleged spirits of the departed is a common trick of the devil to seduce susceptible minds. Remember Faustus. The Helen he saw was no more than a succuba, a demon that comes in the guise of a naked woman and steals men’s seed. Be not deceived, my child. These fancies of yours are the first steps toward the mouth of hell which gapes wide to receive errant souls.”

  Mig was horrified. Adolfo’s words quite literally put the fear of God into him, though he couldn’t repress a small regret that so far the demons hadn’t come after his seed. For he was already wrestling with that more common danger to a young man with a sense of religious vocation, the tendency for images of naked girls to invade his devotions.

  There was no question which was the stronger urge, and after Adolfo’s terrifying admonition, there were times when he allowed the lesser sin to divert him from the greater. Lying in bed, he would sometimes feel one of these perilous ghostly presences forming in the darkness, but all he had to do was conjure up an image of some girl of his acquaintance spreading herself before him lasciviously, and it was goodbye ghost!

  But this was mere equivocation. In his heart he knew he had to learn to deal with all temptation, great and small.

  How he wrestled with his adolescent lust! He mortified the flesh by running till exhausted and he spent so much time under icy showers that he had a permanent cold.

  In the end he found less dramatic strategies to master his own body. At the first hint of arousal, he would turn to certain spiritual exercises which sublimated carnal longings into Marian devotion, and if he felt himself backsliding, he would reinforce the sublimation process by adopting positions of great physical discomfort, such as kneeling across the sharp edge of a doorstep. But gradually the need for this reinforcement diminished. The grace of God and his strong human will was enough. And enough also, so it seemed, to save him from that other tendency which had so disturbed Adolfo.

  Girls and ghosts. By the end of his teens he believed he had them both under control. His sense of vocation felt strong and real. But still, in deference to his parents who urged him to be absolutely certain before taking the final step, he tested it further. He enrolled at Seville University to study history and laid himself open to all the temptations of student life. With these successfully resisted and a degree in his pocket, he demonstrat
ed that his inner strength was not merely self-denial, which can be a self-congratulatory and ultimately sterile form of virtue, by joining one of the Church’s missions to South America as a voluntary helper. Here he spent eighteen months in the rain forest, facing up to the best and the worst in his fellow men, and in himself.

  Finally he was ready. His vocation felt powerful and permanent. Every year in the spring the pain returned as strong as ever, though the stigmata had shrunk now to a few spots of blood. Still he kept silent about the experience. When all else failed, this was God’s private earnest of the rightness of his choice.

  So he entered the seminary in Seville at the age of twenty-three at the same time as eighteen-year-old Sam Flood entered Melbourne University, both convinced they knew exactly who they were and what they were doing and where the paths of their lives were leading them.

  And neither yet understanding that a path is not a prospectus and that it may, in the instant it takes for a word to be spoken or a fingerhold to be lost, slip right off your map and lead you somewhere unimagined in all your certainties.

  In the cases of Sam Flood and Miguel Madero, this place was situated far to the north.

  In a county called Cumbria.

  In a valley called Skaddale.

  In a village called Illthwaite.

  PART TWO

  THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

  Lady, it’s madness to venture alone

  Into that darkness the dwelling of ghosts.

  “The Poem of Heldi Hundingsbani (2)” Poetic Edda

  1

  Hilbert’s Hotel

  “SO WHY’S IT CALLED ILLTHWAITE?” asked Sam Flood.

  She thought the bar was empty except for herself and Mrs. Appledore but the answer came from behind her.

  “Illthwaite. An ill name for an ill place. Isn’t that what they say, Mrs. Appledore?”

  She turned to see a man emerging from the shady corner on the far side of the chimney breast.

  Almost as skinny as she was and not much taller, with a pallid wrinkled face swelling from a pointed chin to a bulbous brow above which a few sad last gray hairs clung like sea grass on a sand dune, he had the look of a superannuated leprechaun, a similitude underlined by the garish green-and-orange checked waistcoat he wore under a dark gray suit jacket, shiny with age. His voice was high-pitched without being squeaky. He could have been anything from seventy to ninety. But his eyes were bright and keen.

  “And where do they say that, Mr. Melton? Down at the Powderham, is it, where they’ve got more tongue than brain?” said the landlady. “If you think silly gossip’s worth an extra ten p on your pint, maybe you should drink there more often.”

  She spoke with a mock menace that wasn’t altogether mock.

  The old man was unfazed.

  “I’ll take it under advisement, Mrs. Appledore,” he said. “Though we shouldn’t forget that the Powderham also offers Thai cuisine and live entertainment, not large incentives to a poor old pensioner, but strong attractions perhaps for a swinging young tourist. None of my business, you say. Quite right. Good day to you both.”

  He saluted them with an old peaked cap which matched his waistcoat, set it precisely on his head and went out.

  “Pay him no heed, Miss Flood,” said the landlady. “Ill’s nowt to do with sick or nasty. It comes from St. Ylf’s, our church, and thwaite’s an old Viking word for a bit of land that’s been cleared.”

  “So how come the old boy bad-mouths his own village?”

  “Old Noddy Melton’s not local,” said Mrs. Appledore, as if this explained everything. “He retired here a few years back to follow his hobby, which is getting up people’s noses. Poor old pensioner indeed! What he gets now is more than most ordinary folk take home while they’re still working. And you need plenty to pay the Powderham’s fancy prices, believe me!”

  Sam had noticed the Powderham Arms Hotel as she turned into Skaddale. In fact, not knowing what Illthwaite might offer by way of accommodation, she’d tried to get a room there but found it was booked up. The Stranger House on the other hand, despite its unfancy prices, had been able to give her a choice of its two guest rooms, though not before she and her passport had been subjected to the same kind of scrutiny she’d got from Heathrow Immigration who had broken open five of her Cherry Ripes before being persuaded they weren’t stuffed with crack.

  She must have passed some kind of test because Mrs. Appledore had become quite voluble as she led the way upstairs. Wayfarers had been stopping here at the Stranger for more than five hundred years, she’d proclaimed proudly. Its curious name derived from the fact that it had once been the Stranger House of Illthwaite Priory, meaning the building where travelers could enjoy the monks’ hospitality for a night or two.

  “That’s fascinating,” said Sam without conviction as she inspected the bedroom. For once she was glad she wasn’t any bigger. Even at her height, if she’d been wearing her Saturday-night heels, the central low black beam would have been a real danger.

  “It’s a bit spooky, though,” she went on, looking out at the mist-shrouded landscape through the one small window.

  “Well, it would be, seeing that we’ve got our own spook,” said the landlady. “But nowt to be afraid of, just this dark fellow, likely an old monk, wandering around still. You’ll only ever catch a glimpse of him passing through a slightly open door and you can never catch up with him no matter how fast you move. Go after him, and there he’ll be, passing through another door.”

  “What if you follow him into a room like this, with only one door?”

  “They say once you start following the Dark Man, there’s always another door, no matter how long you keep chasing.”

  “Bit like Hilbert’s Hotel then,” said Sam, trying to lighten things.

  “Don’t know it, dear. In Windermere, is it?”

  “No,” said Sam. “It’s a made-up place in math that has an infinity of rooms.”

  “Doing the laundry must be a real pain,” observed Mrs. Appledore. “I’m glad I’ve only got the two to show you. Unless we come across the Dark Man, that is.”

  She spoke so lugubriously that Sam couldn’t help shivering. The pub’s low ceilings, shadowy corners, narrow windows and general air of not having been tarted up in living, or dead, memory didn’t make the prospect of such ghostly company appealing. What am I doing here anyway? she asked herself. Illthwaite would probably turn out to be a pointless diversion, any chance of real fact lay in Newcastle Upon Tyne, some hundred miles further on. Here all she was doing was chasing one phantom at the risk of sharing a room with another.

  Then Mrs. Appledore, a most unspooky lady in her late fifties, with rosy cheeks, broad bosom and matching smile, let out a peal of uninhibited laughter and said, “Don’t worry, miss. I’ve never laid eyes on the bugger and I’ve lived here most of my life. Bathroom’s across the corridor. Come down to the bar when you’ve cleaned up and I’ll make you a sandwich. Or would you like something hot?”

  The assumption that she was staying couched in such a friendly way was irresistible. Suddenly the room seemed less constricting. Also she’d been driving through steady drizzle since not long after dawn, and the thought of setting out once more had little appeal.

  “A sandwich will be fine,” she said.

  Ten minutes later she’d descended to the bar to find herself confronted by something resembling a small cob loaf from which slices of ham dangled like the skirts of a hovercraft.

  Mrs. Appledore had pushed a half-pint of beer toward her, saying, “First on the house, to welcome you to Illthwaite.”

  Which had provoked her question about the origins of the name and the old leprechaun’s disconcerting interruption.

  “Anyway, don’t let old Noddy put you off,” the landlady concluded. “He’s been living by himself too long and that sends you dotty. I should know. Woman on her own running a pub these days, I must be crazy!”

  “You’re saying he’s off his scone?”

  “
If that means daft but not daft enough to lock up, yes,” said Mrs. Appledore cheerfully. “So what are you going to do with yourself while you’re here?”

  Sam bit into her sandwich and nearly went into toxic shock when her tongue discovered that internally the ham had been coated with the kind of mustard you could strip paint with. She grabbed for the beer and took a long cooling pull, using the pause to consider her reply.

  Pa’s advice on communication was, “Tell enough to get told what you want to know.”

  “I’ll see the sights, I guess,” she said. “What do most visitors do?”

  “Most come to go walking on the fells. That’s what we call our hills,” said Mrs. Appledore. “As for sightseeing, there’s not a lot to look at except St. Ylf’s, and the Wolf-Head Cross in the churchyard.”

  “Yeah?” said Sam, carefully chewing at the ham’s mustard-free skirting. “The church would be the place where they keep the parish records, right?”

  “I suppose so,” said Mrs. Appledore. “You interested in that sort of thing?”

  “Could be. I think my gran might come from this part of the world,” said Sam.

  She looked for polite interest and got a blank.

  “Is that right? And what would her name have been?”

  “Flood, same as mine. Are there any Floods round here?”

  “Only in a wet winter when the Skad overflows down the valley. Got in the cellars at the Powderham three years back,” said Mrs. Appledore not without satisfaction. “But there’s definitely no local family called Flood. So when did your gran leave England?”

  “Your spring, 1960. February or March, I think.”

  “Spring 1960?” echoed the woman.

  “Right. Does that mean something?” asked Sam, detecting a note of significance.

  “Only that I turned fifteen in the spring of 1960,” said Mrs. Appledore rather wistfully. “Mam died the year before and I’d started helping Dad in the pub. Against the law, but I was big for my age, so strangers didn’t notice and locals weren’t going to complain. Point is, I knew everyone in the valley then. Definitely no local family called Flood. Sorry, dear. You sure it’s Illthwaite you’re after?”