Reginald Hill - The Stranger House

Q. Father, because I am satisfied that you have dealt fairly with me, I have no purpose to question you as to the actions and beliefs of any members of your own family, if only you will answer one last question, which is this. I have it on authoritie that you were in company of a notorious agent of the Hispanic king during your time in Lancashire. Do but say where I might lay hands on this enemy of our noble Queen and all is done between us.

A bargain offered. A real bargain. The safety of his own family weighed against the safety of a foreign fugitive, suspected of murder, and seriously injured already.

Eventually, inevitably, the answer came, that this agent lay in a house in Lancaster, waiting till a ship could be found that would bear him home to Spain.

Mig looked up to find Dunstan’s gaze, benign, compassionate, fixed upon him.

Perhaps, he thought, if that answer had not been given, Miguel Madero might have returned home to see his bastard child, leaving Tyrwhitt to visit his wrath on the Woollasses, whose family line might well have been cut short.

In which case the old man wouldn’t be here, and he himself wouldn’t have needed to come here, and…

It was pointless multiplying possibilities, though Sam would no doubt have an equation to cover all eventualities. He recalled her hand squeezing his thigh as she took her leave.

He said briskly, “And was there anything in the rest of the Jolley records that gave a further account of this so-called agent?”

“A note to the effect that a Spanish emissary of King Philip was taken in Lancaster, that he confessed to having been in touch with certain notorious recusants, but died under examination before he could give details or sign a written deposition. This is almost certainly the same episode which my grandfather refers to in his footnote.”

“And you believe this was probably the fugitive youth your family helped – my ancestor, Miguel Madero?”

“Who else? I would guess that, when Simeon finally left Illthwaite, he took the injured boy with him. He must have been a considerable encumbrance to one who was himself a permanent fugitive. Those who provided refuge on their journey into Lancashire probably had their own theories as to the identity of this wounded foreigner. Rumors grow; eventually Tyrwhitt hears that Father Simeon is traveling in company with an Hispanic agent. When he picks up Simeon alone, he is fired by the prospect of a great coup in using him to capture this important Spaniard who by now had been exaggerated into a member of the nobility and a personal emissary of King Philip.”

“That he was none of these things must have been evident to his interrogator within a very short time,” said Mig.

“Shorter than you think,” said Dunstan. “He was said to have died under examination. It’s clear that Tyrwhitt was far too expert to torture people to death. No, I suspect that the poor lad was almost dead already when he was taken. He’d been crucified, for God’s sake, and the journey to Lancaster had probably undone any progress he’d made while in Alice ’s care. My guess is he died almost immediately, might even have been dead when taken, so Tyrwhitt claimed what kudos he could by fabricating a vague confession, adding weight to the case against other known suspects.”

The old man shook his head as if to dislodge the images crowding in on his imagination, then rose abruptly and went to the window, thrusting it open to admit birdsong and a warm breeze which rustled the papers on the desk.

“Fresh air,” he said, breathing deeply. “Beware drafts, my doctor says. They can blow you to heaven. But what can heaven be, compared to this? How I love this place, especially at this time of year with the whole valley changing beneath me. You can keep your New England tints, they’re for the eye. Old England ’s palette lays its colors on the heart. Change and renewal. Ever changing, ever the same. Sorry, Madero, sometimes sensibility gets the upper hand over sense, even in a dry old stick like me.”

He turned to face into the room and said, “So what do you, the outsider, think of our little valley, now you’ve been here a couple of days?”

“I like some of it very well,” said Madero, wary of this change of direction.

“Good. We have a lot in common. Devotion to the faith. Love of family. Appetite for scholarship. Respect for truth. All most praiseworthy, but when we find two or more of them in opposition, what then? Personally, where my family is concerned, I have too great a sense of pride to want the world picking over our bones. What say you?”

“Let us be precise,” said Madero. “You are suggesting we should repress both these documents?”

“What would suffer if we did? Scholarship? We both know a great portion of the scholar’s life is spent dropping buckets into empty wells and drawing nothing up. So we add a little nothing to the nothing. Where’s the harm?”

“What about truth, respect for which you claimed we hold in common?”

“What is truth?” demanded Dunstan. “That Simeon broke under torture? Or that in fact Tyrwhitt got very little out of him? Turning him loose wasn’t a reward for betrayal but a psychological ploy to make the world think he had utterly betrayed his religion. A priest executed is evidence of the strength of faith. A priest released implies its weakness. It worked, though nothing was ever directly proven against Simeon. It took three centuries for my family to clean away the muck that Tyrwhitt smeared across our name. What will happen now if another hack like Molloy gets hold of this?”

“I hardly think it will make headline news in the national press,” said Mig dryly.

“It will make news in places that matter to me and my family,” said the old man. “Well, another half-century and that will probably matter no longer. The Woollass name will have vanished from the earth. Let them say what they will then, but for the present, I will fight with all my strength against such a manifest injustice.”

“Injustice? He told them where they would find my namesake,” said Mig.

“Who had been saved and succored by my family, by Simeon’s family. Who had been carried down to Lancaster by Simeon at what must have been great risk to himself. Who he probably thought would have been smuggled out of the country long since! It can only have been his increasing debility which made it impossible to move him. There is little to reproach Simeon with here.”

“He reproached himself,” said Mig. “He could not face my family and give them news of their loved one’s fate.”

“He attempted to approach you, according to the story you told Frek,” said Dunstan. “If you truly believe his spirit has been in torment all these years, then let him now at last have his peace, forgiven by you and forgotten by the world.”

It was an appeal which fell on receptive ground. The passionate need to know which had been Mig’s emotional dynamic since his first involvement with Illthwaite seemed to have faded. He had felt its absence yesterday morning up at Mecklin Moss. Was this what all those years of pain and vision and misunderstanding and misdirection had been about? There must have been easier ways for him to be directed toward the truth! And what was he going to do with this truth now he had reached it? There was no one to punish, unless perhaps the Gowders for being descendants of the dreadful Thomas and Andrew. What kind of justice was that? And even if he did feel like visiting the sins of the forefathers on their very distant children, did not that mean that by the same token he should be thanking Dunstan Woollass rather than arguing with him?

He surprised in himself a longing to sit down with Sam and discuss these things. What on earth did that signify? He’d known her in the social sense for just three days and in the biblical sense for a single night, yet here she was, the one person in all the world he wished to share his innermost feelings with! Was this what was meant by sexual obsession? No, there had to be more than that. If he felt himself at sea intellectually, it was in part because his emotional world now had a new center to which all his energies were drawn. Could it be that it was to this that all the signs and portents of his life had been directing him? To his encounter with Sam?