“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.
The Stranger House Page 12
