The Stranger House

2 a turbulent priest

Sam Flood and Miguel Madero saw each other for the first time in a motorway service café to the west of Manchester but neither would ever recall the encounter.

Sam was sitting at a table with a double espresso and a chocolate muffin which was far too sweet but she ate it anyway. She glanced up to see Madero passing with a cappuccino and a cream doughnut. Though he wore no clerical collar, there was something about him—his black clothing, the ascetic thinness of his face—which put her in mind of a Catholic priest, and she looked away. For his part all he registered was an unaccompanied child whose exuberance of red hair could have done with a visit to the barber, but most of his attention was focused on maintaining the delicate relationship between an unreliable left knee and an overfull cup of coffee.

She left five minutes before he did and they spent the next hour only a couple of miles apart in heavy traffic. Then a van blew a tyre a hundred yards behind her and spun into a truck. Miraculously no one was seriously hurt, but as Sam’s Focus sped merrily north, Madero and his Mercedes SLK fumed gently in the accident’s tailback.

From having time to spare for his two o’clock appointment in Kendal, he was already half an hour late as he reached the town’s southern approaches.

On the map Kendal looked to be a quiet little market town on the eastern edge of the English Lake District, but there seemed to be some local law requiring all traffic in Cumbria to pass along its main street, which meant it was after three when he drew up before the chambers of Messrs Tenderley, Gray, Groyne, and Southwell, solicitors.

Knowing how highly lawyers price their time, he was full of apology as he was shown into the office of Andrew Southwell.

‘Not at all, not at all, think nothing of it,’ said Southwell, a small round man in his early thirties who pumped his hand with painful enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Dr Coldstream speaks very warmly of you. Very warmly indeed.’

‘And of you too,’ said Madero.

In fact what Max Coldstream had said when he mentioned Kendal was, ‘You’re in luck there, Mig. Chap called Southwell, Kendal solicitor, and mad keen local historian. OK, so he’s an amateur, but that can be an advantage. Professional historians on the whole are a deceitful, distrusting, conniving and secretive bunch of bastards who would direct a blind man up a blind alley rather than risk giving him an advantage. Enthusiastic amateurs on the other hand may lack scholarship but they often have bucketloads of information which they are eager to share. Painfully eager, if you’re in a hurry!’

It only took a couple of minutes for Madero to appreciate Coldstream’s warning.

‘That’s fascinating, Mr Southwell,’ he said, interrupting a potted history of the chambers building. ‘Now, you will recall from my letter I’m on my way to talk to the Woollass family of Illthwaite Hall in connection with my thesis on the personal experience of English Catholics during the Reformation. By chance I came across a reference to a Jesuit priest, Father Simeon Woollass, the son of a cadet branch of the family residing here in Kendal. I thought it might be worth diverting to see what I could find out about him. A priest in the family must have made the problems of recusancy even greater, as perhaps your researches have already discovered.’

This was the right trigger to pull.

Southwell nodded vigorously and said, ‘How very true, Mr Madero. But I know you chaps, hands-on whenever possible, so let’s take a walk and see what we can find.’

Next moment Madero found himself being whizzed down the stairs, past the receptionist who desperately shouted something about not forgetting the partners’ meeting, and out into the damp afternoon air, where he was taken on a whirlwind tour.

‘It’s curious,’ said Southwell as they raced from the library to the church. ‘What really got me interested in Father Simeon wasn’t you, but this other researcher who was asking questions, must be ten years ago now. Irish chap, name of Molloy. Poor fellow.’

‘I don’t recognize the name. Did he publish? And why do you say “poor fellow”?’

‘He did a few things, pop articles mainly. Not a serious scholar like you, more of a journalist. But nothing on Father Simeon. Never had the chance really. He was something of a rock climber, took the chance to do a bit while he was up here, by himself, very silly, and he had this terrible accident…are you all right, Mr Madero?’

‘Yes, fine,’ lied Mig. Twinges in his still unreliable left knee he was used to, but the other injuries he’d suffered in his own fall rarely troubled him now. This lightning jag of pain across his head and down his spine had to be some kind of sympathetic echo. In fact during his own fall he couldn’t even remember the pain of contact…

‘You sure?’ said Southwell.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mig impatiently as the pain faded. ‘And he was killed, was he?’

‘Died as the Mountain Rescue carried him back. He wasn’t so much interested in the background as in what happened when Father Simeon got captured. The book he was writing was actually about Richard Topcliffe—you know about him, of course?’

‘Elizabeth’s chief priest-hunter, homo sordidissimus. Oh yes, I know about him.’

‘Well, it was Topcliffe’s northern agent, Francis Tyrwhitt, who captured Simeon and took him off to Jolley Castle near Leeds to be interrogated. That was Molloy’s main interest, torture, that kind of stuff. Ah, here’s the church. Note the Victorian porch.’

It was clear that, despite his conviction that academics preferred to do their own research, Southwell had already dug up everything there was to dig up about Simeon and recorded it in the folder he carried. Madero was tempted but too polite to suggest that a lot of time could be saved if he simply handed it over. Happily after a couple of hours the man’s mobile rang. He listened, then said, ‘Good Lord, is it that time already?’

To Madero he said, ‘Sorry. Meeting. Lot of nothing, but old Joe Tenderley, our senior partner, tends to get his knickers in a twist. Look, why don’t we meet up later? Better still, have dinner, stay the night. Meanwhile you might care to browse through my notes, see if there are any gaps you’d like me to fill.’

Madero waited till he’d got the folder firmly in his grip before thanking the man profusely but refusing his kind offer on the grounds that he was already engaged in Illthwaite, which if a bed-and-breakfast booking could be called an engagement was true.

Back in his car, he rejoined the tidal bore of traffic, intending to retrace his approach to the town and take the road which Sam Flood had followed some hours earlier around the southern edge of the county, but somehow he found himself swept away towards somewhere called Windermere. He stopped at a roadside inn, brought up a map of Cumbria on his laptop and saw he could get across to the west just as easily this way. Feeling hungry, he entered the pub and ordered a pint of shandy (England’s main contribution to alcoholic refinement, according to his father) and a jumbo haddock. As he waited for his food, he took a long draught of his drink and opened Southwell’s folder.

Out of reach of the solicitor’s voice and with the evidence of the man’s hard work before him, he felt a pang of guilt at his sense of relief at parting company. For every sin there is a fitting penance, that’s what he’d learned at the seminary. It would serve him right if his haddock turned out stale and his chips soggy.

It had been a stroke of luck that the man he was interested in had been closely linked to one of Kendal’s foremost merchant families during the great period of the town’s importance in the field of woollen manufacture which was Southwell’s special interest.

Simeon Woollass had been the son of Will Woollass, younger brother of Edwin Woollass of Illthwaite Hall. Will’s early history (later a matter of public record in Kendal) showed him to be a wild and dissolute youth who narrowly escaped execution in 1537 after the Catholic uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. His age (fifteen) and the influence of his brother won his release with a heavy fine and a stern warning.

Undeterred, Will continued to earn his reputation as the Woollass wild man till 1552 when he surprised everyone by wooing Margaret, the only child of John Millgrove, wool merchant of Kendal, and settling down to the life of an honest hardworking burgher.

In 1556 Margaret gave birth to Simeon, and once the child had survived the perils of a Tudor infancy, all looked set fair for the Kendal Woollasses. John Millgrove’s commercial acumen meant that business both domestic and export was booming, and with wealth came status. Nor did he let a little thing like religion interfere with his commercial and civil ambitions, and when Catholic Mary was succeeded by Protestant Elizabeth, he readily bowed with the prevailing wind and, like many others, straightened up from his obeisance as a strong pillar of the English Church.

Will, now firmly established as heir apparent of the Millgrove business, was happy to go along with this, which strained his relationship with his firmly recusant brother Edwin. Simeon, however, stayed close to his Illthwaite cousins and it was probably to put him out of their sphere of influence that Will sent his son, aged eighteen, down to Portsmouth to act as the firm’s continental shipping agent. He did so well that a year later when a problem arose with their Spanish agent in Cadiz, Simeon, who had a natural gift for languages, seemed the obvious person to sort it out.

Alas for a parent’s efforts to protect his child!

Simeon found life in Spain much to his taste. He liked the people and the climate, became fluent in the principal dialects, and presented good commercial arguments for extending his stay. A year passed. Will, suspecting his son had been seduced by hot sun, strong wine and dusky señoritas, and recalling his own youthful excesses, was exasperated rather than angered by Simeon’s delaying tactics. Finally however he sent a direct command, which elicited a revelation far more shocking than mere dissipation.

Simeon had been formally received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Missives flew across the Bay of Biscay, threatening from the father, pleading from the mother. In return all they got was news that progressed from bad to worse.

In 1577 Simeon had travelled north into France, ending up at the notorious English College at Douai in Flanders. In 1579 he was ordained deacon and the following year undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, whence in 1582 came the devastating news that he had joined the Jesuit Order and been ordained priest.

All this Andrew Southwell had been able to discover because of the effect it was to have on the Millgrove family’s fortunes. John had come close to achieving his great ambition of being elected chief burgess of the town when the smallpox carried him off. It was, however, generally confided that Will Woollass, now head of the firm, would eventually achieve that high civic dignity his father-in-law had aspired to.

But a son and heir who was a Catholic priest was heavy baggage for an upwardly mobile man to carry.

So long as Simeon remained abroad it was easy enough to dismiss rumours. In Kendal they took stories from south of Lancashire with a very large pinch of salt. But the salt rapidly lost its savour when it emerged that Simeon Woollass had joined the English Mission, that band of Catholic priests sent to spread subversion in their native land.

Once sightings of him were reported first in Lancashire then in Westmorland and Cumberland, Will felt obliged to affirm his complete loyalty to the Protestant Church by publicly disowning his son. Despite this the Woollasses suffered the indignity of having their Kendal house searched for signs of the renegade’s presence. Will’s civic rivals, under guise of protecting the interests of loyal burghers, now made sure that every aspect of his wild youth and his son’s treacherous apostasy went on the record.

The inevitable result of such an unremitting bad press was that Will never achieved that eminence in the township of Kendal which had once seemed in his grasp and, with the passing of himself and his wife, the Millgrove firm also died.

‘Is there any record that Simeon did ever return to Kendal?’ Madero had enquired.

‘None, though that of course means nothing,’ said Southwell. ‘His father had publicly threatened to turn him in if ever he showed up, but that was probably just PR. When news came of his capture in Chester in ‘89, Will had a seizure. Understandable reaction when you consider what capture usually meant for a Catholic priest.’

Very understandable, thought Madero. Torture, trial, condemnation, the broken body hanged till point of death, then taken down while life was still extant and eviscerated, the bowels thrown to the dogs, the finally lifeless corpse hacked into pieces to be hurled into the river, except for the head which would be stuck on a spike in a prominent place till time and the crows had reduced it to a grinning skull.

No, it was hard to believe a father could do anything which would condemn his own child to such a fate, though in this case Simeon had escaped the ultimate rigours and eventually returned to the Continent in one piece physically if not mentally.

What did it all mean? How could God tolerate a world where men could rip and tear at each other in the name of religion, where such abominations seemed destined to continue as long as mankind survived? Even now as he sat here in this peaceful inn, such horrors were happening somewhere within a few hours’ flying distance.

He bowed his head and said a prayer. It was hard to keep an accusatory note out of it, but he tried.

When he looked up his jumbo haddock had appeared.

It was excellent.

Which probably meant his penance was yet to come.

3 hymn books and hassocks

Mrs Appledore was clearly not to be trusted. Even making allowance for the fact that her legs might be two or three inches longer than Sam’s, the distance to St Ylf’s was not what any honest woman could call a step.

When she’d first tracked Illthwaite down to Cumbria, Sam had pictured a cluster of whitewashed cottages around a village green, their tiny gardens rich with hollyhocks and roses, the whole backed by misty mountains and fronted by a sunlit lake. No cluster here, just an endless straggle with no discernible centre. And no whitewash either. Most of the scattered buildings were coated in a dirty grey pebble dash. Garden vegetation consisted mainly of dense dank evergreens with never a hollyhock in sight, though maybe early autumn wasn’t the hollyhock season. There was no lake either, sunlit or sombre, just the brownfoaming river Skad tracking the road.

The Tourist Board leaflet told her the name Skaddale probably meant the Valley of the Shadow, deriving from the fact that, as winter approached, the high surrounding fells stopped the sun from reaching a good proportion of the land. An alternative theory was that the river got its name from Scadde, an ancient dialect word for corpse, referring to its reputation for drowning travellers who tried to ford it downstream at its estuary.

Shadow or corpse, its denizens received the remnants of Sam’s caustic cob as soon as the pub was out of sight, and in its place she began to chew on her Cherry Ripe.

The rest of the leaflet confirmed Mrs Appledore’s dismissive judgment. It did its best with the church (old), the Cross (Viking), the pub (haunted), the Hall (not open to visitors) and the village post office (postcards and provisions). But its underlying message to the passing driver seemed to be Glance out, change up, move on.

Turning her attention to the chunky Guide, she recalled from her school days a hymn beginning There is a book who runs may read. Well, this certainly wasn’t it. Even trudging, it wasn’t easy, and she only managed a glance at the opening page of the lengthy chapter on the church before a stumble in a pothole on the uneven road persuaded her that a twisted ankle was too high a price to pay for the Rev. Peter K’s lucubration.

But, as always, a brief glance was enough to imprint the page on her mind.

St Ylf, according to local tradition, was a hermit dwelling in a cave under Scafell who on numerous occasions emerged from mists and blizzards to guide lost travellers to safety. One of these, a footpad whose profession was to prey upon unwary strangers rather than help them, was so grateful for Ylf’s help that on reaching the safety of Skaddale, he vowed to abandon his evil life and raise a church here. By the time the church was finished, stories of Ylf’s virtue and miraculous rescues had resulted in his canonization and it seemed only fitting that the church be dedicated in his name.

Architecturally, St Ylf’s has few conventional attractions, yet it has the beauty of the unique. It was built for one place, yet for all times, providing a rare opportunity for the modern Christian to make contact with the simple faith of his distant ancestors and marvel how their hard and often brutish lives did not prevent them from celebrating God’s glory and affirming their deep trust in His mercy.

Sam’s first thought when some twenty minutes later she rounded a bend and at last saw the church was that it wasn’t deep trust in God’s mercy it affirmed so much as serious doubts about His weather, particularly the wind which was suddenly buffeting her back like congratulation from an over-enthusiastic friend. But it would need more than enthusiasm to move this broad squat building which clung grimly to the ground, its low blunt tower rising from a shallow pitched roof of dull grey slate like the head of an animal at bay, growling defiance. Its muddy brown side walls were pierced by three narrow windows more suited to shooting arrows out than letting light in.

The extensive churchyard was surrounded by a high wall constructed of irregular blocks of stone, or rather roughly shaped boulders bound together by flaking mortar in whose cracks a scurfy ivy had taken hold. To one side of the wall stood a large ugly house, presumably the vicarage. She walked up to the huge wrought-iron gate which looked as if it had come from a Victorian workhouse closing-down sale. It bore a sign inviting visitors to show due reverence on entering the church and due generosity on leaving it, a message reinforced by a peacock screech from the hinges as she pushed it open and stepped into the churchyard.

A forest of headstones rose from close-trimmed turf, and the gardeners were here too, half a dozen sheep, not the snowy Merinos of home, but small sturdy beasts with fleece as grey as the sky they grazed under.

She strolled among the memorials, examining the inscriptions. Infant deaths abounded in the earlier centuries but began to diminish in the twentieth. There were plenty of family groupings, some going back forever, including a long roll-call of Swinebanks with at least one priest of this parish every half-century. This got pretty close to the kind of hereditary priestship they had at some of the old pagan shrines. Lots of Peters alternating with lots of Pauls. Peter K., the author of the Guide, had made it to 1939, so he got one war in but missed the other. The next priest (this one a Paul) had died in 1969. Was the present guy yet another Swinebank? Real cosy.

The most elegant headstones in every century belonged to a family called Winander, but when it came to size they had to give best to what looked like a small fortress of black marble, as if someone had felt the peace of the grave was literally worth defending. It marked what must be the very crowded tomb of the Woollass family, the local squires mentioned by Mrs Appledore, whose own name figured frequently, though Sam couldn’t spot a Buckle.

And no sign anywhere of a Flood.

But there was evidence that this was an active graveyard. As she rounded the black fortress she saw ahead of her, near the left-hand wall, a pile of earth as if some giant mole had been at work. A few more steps brought into view the angle of an open grave, sharp and black against the green turf.

Then her heart contracted and she stopped in her tracks as a figure rose out of the dank earth.

It took only a moment to recognize the obvious, that this was the grave-digger who’d been stooping low to remove a large stone which he now deposited on the side.

This done, he straightened up to wipe his brow and looked straight at her.

If his appearance had given her a start, hers seemed to return the shock with interest. He froze with the back of his hand at his forehead, giving the impression of a mariner shading his eyes from the sun as he peered over the bow in search of land. But the expression on his face suggested it was a fearsome reef he saw.

She gave him what she intended as a reassuring smile and moved on towards the church door. Here she glanced his way again and saw he was still staring at her. He was a man in his fifties, square-built and muscular, with a leathery face that looked as if a drunken taxidermist had been stuffing an English bulldog and then given up. But that unblinking gaze belonged to some creature far less cosy than a mere bulldog.

Sam didn’t bother with another smile. Why waste it? This felt like the kind of place where not only did they stare at strangers, they probably pointed at the sky whenever a plane flew overhead.

She raised the old-fashioned latch and pushed the door open. Like the gate, its opening was accompanied by a sound effect, this time a groan straight out of a horror movie. Hadn’t oil reached Illthwaite yet?

She stepped inside.

When God said let there be light, He must have forgotten St Ylf’s. It was so gloomy in here she had to pause a moment to let her eyes adapt. When murk began to coalesce into form, she found herself standing by a font consisting of a granite block out of which a basin had been scooped deep enough for an infant to drown in. Around its rough-hewn sides a not incompetent artist had carved a frieze of spasmodic dancers doing a conga behind a hooded figure carrying a scythe.

You live in the valley of the shadow, must seem like a good idea to let your kids see early what lies in wait for them, thought Sam. To her left was the space beneath the tower which seemed to be used as a kind of storeroom. The back wall was lined with dusty stacks of hassocks and hymn books, perhaps a reminder of days when the vicar expected a full house at every service. A rickety-looking ladder led up to a trapdoor which stood open, revealing the scudding clouds and admitting just enough light to make the shadowy church even more sinister.

She turned away to face down the aisle where the Gothic experience continued.

At the far end within the chancel on a pair of wooden trestles stood a coffin.

She set off towards it, trainers slapping against the granite floor. As she got nearer, she slowed. This was getting to be too much.

The coffin lid was drawn back to reveal the face of the corpse within.

It was a young face, pretty well de-sexed by death. She looked at the brass plate on the lid. It read William Knipp—in the seventeenth year of his age.

Poor sod. He died young.

She thought she heard a noise behind her and turned abruptly.

Nothing.

But there was the sound again. Her keen ear tracked it to the porch, or rather the store space beyond, beneath the tower. She walked back down the aisle and looked up at the open trap. The sky didn’t seem quite so dark now.

She called, ‘Hello! Anyone there?’

Though there was no reply, it felt like there was someone up there, listening.

‘Hi,’ she called. ‘Sorry to trouble you, but I could do with some help.’

Still nothing. She was beginning to feel irritated. While she didn’t have much time for priests and such, wasn’t it part of their job description that they should be there for you when you needed them?

‘OK,’ she called. ‘If you’re too busy to come down, I’ll come up.’

Setting the Guide on the floor, she grasped the rough wood of the old ladder and began to climb.

She was a good climber, light, supple and nimble. Watching her rapid ascent of the big blue gum overshading the north side of the house at Vinada, her pa had said, ‘If I’d bought a monkey, I’d sell it.’

It only took a few seconds to get to the top of the ladder, though it felt longer. The higher she got, the more rickety it felt. She glanced down and the floor seemed further away than she would have guessed. Thank God I don’t suffer from vertigo, she thought.

Unless vertigo began with a sudden petrifying sense of being watched!

The sooner she was off this ladder, the better. She reached her left hand up to get a grip on the floor of the tower.

And next moment the trap came crashing down.

She whipped her hand away, felt the frame graze her finger ends, lost her right hand’s grip on the topmost rung of the ladder, and suddenly the floor which had seemed so far away was getting closer far too quickly.

As she fell she had a sense of a darker shadow against the cloudy grey square. Or rather, later she had a sense that she’d had a sense, but for the brief time being all she was registering was her fervent desire not to crash head first on to the unyielding granite slabs.

She knew about falling. She’d always been good on the trampoline. In fact they’d persuaded her to try competitive gymnastics at school, but she’d left the team when it got too serious. Even then she’d known the medals she wanted from life weren’t to be got by bouncing. Now, however, all that twisting and turning looked like it might be useful.

First off, she tried a backward somersault to straighten herself up, but all it did halfway through was bring her in violent collision with the back wall.

This however turned out to be her salvation. Instead of sliding down it at great speed to make contact with the floor, she hit the stack of hassocks and hymn books piled there in anticipation of some future full house sell-out. The hands of angels might have done a better job at bearing her up, but maybe this kind of divine intercession was the best an Aussie atheist could look for.

This was her last absurd thought before she hit the ground with sufficient force to drive all the breath out of her lungs but not to kill her. An avalanche of hassocks and hymn books swept down after her, filling the air with swirling dust. She twisted round to protect her face from the holy debris and cried out as it clattered and bounced against her back. Fear of heights she didn’t have, but most of her childhood nightmares had been associated with fear of being trapped in a constricted dark place.

The downslide seemed to go on forever. She felt as if she were being buried alive under a mountain of dusty books and cushions. And even when they stopped crashing upon her, through the roar of terrified blood rushing along her veins she seemed still to hear noises: creaking wood, steps, doors opening and shutting.

Till finally these too, whether imagined or real, died away, leaving her to something more frightening than any sound.

The silence of the dark.