The Stranger House

by Reginald Hill

  On that boat, there’d been three main bunches of kids from different orphanages in the Liverpool area, but Sam Flood didn’t seem to belong to any group.

  “I don’t know where she came from and, when we landed, we all got sent off to different places and I never saw her again. It was all confused. It was spring when we left and autumn when we got here. They took the summer from us. They took everything. I couldn’t make sense of it. It was very confused…”

  Confused. That sums up what life had done to Gracie. I suppose everyone finds a different way to cope with shit. Gracie’s way had been to walk away from it when she got to be old enough to take care of herself. But when there was all that publicity in the nineties, her husband persuaded her to get in touch with the new Child Migrants Trust. Turned out Gracie was right. There was nothing in it for her, she really was an orphan, so no happy reunions there. But one good thing came out of it from my point of view.

  There was this other girl from the same orphanage as Gracie. Betty Stanton. Sounds like the kind of kid who gets by taking lame dogs under her wing.

  Sorry, that doesn’t sound right, you know what I mean.

  Well, Gracie must have been a natural candidate. And Sam Flood was another.

  Betty kept an eye on her, Gracie told me. And she thought they got taken off to the same place on arrival. It sounds as if this Betty was one of the Trust’s success stories. They’d tracked down her mother who was still alive in the UK and the two of them had been reunited. And when they realized Gracie was from the same Liverpool orphanage and had been part of the same consignment, they put them in touch.

  At least they put Betty, who lived over in Perth, in touch with Gracie. Gracie really didn’t want to know. The past was outback to her. You could get lost there. So after a few letters, Betty gave up and settled for being on Gracie’s Christmas card list.

  And Gracie gave me her address. Betty McKillop her married name is.

  I dropped her a line, told her who I was, asked if we could meet and talk. I got a letter back from her daughter saying Betty was in the UK, place called Newcastle, where her own mother was very ill. But the daughter said she’d spoken on the phone and Betty remembered my gran very well and would love to talk with me when she got back. Naturally I said I was on the way to England myself very shortly and maybe we could meet up there. And she came back to me with a phone number to ring when I got here.

  I rang a few days ago but it was a bad time. The old lady had just died. The funeral’s today and Betty’s flying home tomorrow night. I said I was sorry and maybe we could just fix a time to talk on the phone, but she said no, she’d rather see me. She said she’d be through by lunchtime tomorrow, so if I could get up to see her early afternoon before she set off for the airport, that would be fine. When I checked the map, I saw that it wasn’t that far over from Cumbria. And I recalled the last thing Gracie had said to me.

  She’d gone into a kind of trance, and I was feeling real shitty for making her go back somewhere she didn’t want to be. So I got up to leave. Then she looked up at me and said, “I’ve been racking my brains for anything else I can recall. Most of us had these labels to start with, like we were bits of luggage, with our names and the address of the orphanage we came from. Sam didn’t have one of these, just a bit of paper which she kept folded up in her pocket. If anyone spoke to her, she was so shy she’d just bring out this bit of paper. That’s how we knew her name. But there was an address on it too.”

  “An address?” I said. “Gracie, can you remember what it was?”

  She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I only ever saw it once and it was all creased and hard to read. I think the place was Ill something. Maybe Illthwaite, but I can’t be sure. I’m sorry, the harder I try to remember, the vaguer it becomes.”

  She was almost in tears. I calmed her down and told her she’d been great, which she had. And when I got home, I dug out my old world atlas and looked in the index.

  The only thing which came close in the whole world was where we are now, Illthwaite in Cumbria, England.

  Of course Aunt Gracie might have got it completely wrong. In fact, if you met Gracie, you’d put odds on it. Betty sounds a much safer bet.

  But I was impatient to be doing something. I’d spent a few nights in London, crashing out on the couch of some Melbourne Uni mates in Earl’s Court, getting over the jet lag. Now I was ready to be off. I thought, I’ve got to go to Newcastle to talk with Betty McKillop, why not check out this Illthwaite place en route?

  So I rented a car and set out.

  And here I am. It’s been a complete waste of time. Not only that, it’s got me sitting in a hole in the ground, which terrifies me, making my confession to a priest.

  OK, I know you’re not, but that’s what it feels like. Pa would have a fit!

  And you were right about one thing at least.

  I think it has made me feel a bit better.

  Anyway, that’s me done and dusted. Now it’s your turn in the box.

  13

  Mig

  MY FULL NAME IS MIGUEL Ramos Elkington Madero, though in England I am known as Michael Madero. In both countries my friends call me Mig.

  So I have two names. And two passports.

  Sometimes I think that in fact I am divided into two people, except that when you put the halves together you do not get a whole.

  I am the elder son of Christine, née Elkington, of Hampshire, England, and Miguel Madero of Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, Spain. Jerez is where the English word sherry derives from. For five centuries the Maderos have been in the wine business, a little longer than the Floods, I think. You may have encountered our rarest fino, El Bastardo? No? Ah well. Australasia has never been one of our strongest markets.

  There is little you need to know about my childhood except that from time to time, usually in the spring, I felt a certain discomfort in my hands and feet which in my teens became unmistakably, so I thought, the stigmata, which as I’m sure you know means the appearance of wounds equivalent to those inflicted by crucifixion. Not quickly, but perhaps inevitably, I decided that their message was that I should enter the priesthood.

  Oh, and there’s something else which I am reluctant to mention in our present circumstances, but it is relevant to my story.

  I seem to be able to conjure ghosts, a talent incidentally which I was surprised to find not much valued in would-be priests.

  Be reassured. I shall try to keep it in check.

  Anyway, after overcoming many doubts, internal and external, I began my formal studies for the priesthood. I was still troubled by ghosts, and by girls too, but that’s a problem shared by most ordinands. And whenever my doubts returned, I reassured myself by thinking of my stigmatic experience. What else could it mean?

  Then, for me as for you, a family loss proved a turning point. On New Year’s Day last year my father died unexpectedly.

  After the funeral I sat alone in the twilight on the veranda of our family house and let memories of Father sweep over me. His kindness and his care, also his strong discipline. His old-fashioned courtesy toward women, mocked by some advanced feminist thinkers of his acquaintance, but nothing they ever said could provoke him into behavior he would have felt unbecoming in an hidalgo. His pride in the family business and his narration of episodes from family history which were the fairy tales of my childhood. His delight when I grew to share his passion for exploring remote regions and for mountain climbing. His love for my mother and for all things English, except their ignorance of the true glories of sherry wine.

  And I also recalled his unconcealable disappointment when I told him I definitely wanted to enter the priesthood. I felt I had let him down and nothing I told myself of God’s will could bring consolation.

  I felt my father so close, it seemed easy to bring him before me visibly. But at the seminary I had come to accept that such traffickings with the afterworld were perilous, so I rose and went downstairs and found company and broke the spell.


  The head of my seminary, Father Dominic, a good man and a good friend, told me to take time off to come to terms with my loss. I went into the Sierra Nevada, to an area where I spent many happy holidays climbing with my father. Solo climbing is dangerous sport at the best of times, but now it was the middle of winter and the weather was foul. Yet one morning I found myself attempting a climb we had once done together, not a difficult ascent for two experienced climbers in decent conditions, but folly for a man alone in a disturbed mental condition.

  I should have turned back as the weather worsened, but something drove me on. The wind grew stronger, driving flurries of snow into my face and seemingly trying to rip me off the cliff face which was covered in ice. I could see no way to advance. But going down wasn’t going to be easy either.

  Needs must when the devil drives, and I began to descend. I had only managed a few feet when I slipped. Desperately I scrabbled for foot-and finger-holds. Somehow I managed to arrest my descent, but every single point of contact with the cliff face was minimal and temporary and deteriorating. A few more seconds and I would fall.

  I was too terrified even to pray.

  Then I saw another climber, a snow-spattered figure on a broad ledge a little above me and to my right. I called to him. He turned and reached out a hand. All I had to do was grab it and lunge sideways and upward, and his strength and my momentum should see me safely on to the ledge. I took my hand off the cliff and reached out. At the same time I saw his face.

  It was my father who had taught me all I knew about climbing.

  Can you catch the hand of a ghost?

  I believe you can. I think that if our hands had met, he would have taken the weight of his foolish son on his arm and borne me up to safety.

  But in the second before contact I felt the pain of the stigmata shoot through my palms and my ankles, worse than I had ever known it before.

  And I fell.

  You see the significance of this? This stigmata which I had taken to be a sign of vocation had prevented me from accepting help from my father’s spirit, which surely could not have been offered without the grace of God.

  I did not of course reach this conclusion then. I was too busy being terrified.

  Down I went through the snow-filled air. For what seemed an eternity, I could still see my father above me, his hand outstretched. Then he was absorbed in the whiteness of the blizzard and I hit the side of the mountain for the first time. The first of several times. I broke both legs, one arm, most of my ribs, punctured a lung, and fractured my skull, though in what order I cannot be sure.

  Finally the whiteness turned to blackness. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the hospital. Fortunately the people I was staying with had been more concerned about my safety than I myself.

  There was none of that mnemonic vagueness which often seems to follow accidents. My mind was as clear as a bell. I remembered everything up to the last impact.

  I gave thanks to God for my rescue.

  And I knew with absolute certainty that my sense of vocation was fallacious, the foolish misinterpretation of a vain and immature mind. Whatever message was being sent to me all these years via the stigmata, it had nothing to do with becoming a priest.

  I informed Father Dominic of my change of heart when he came to see me. He said, “No hurry. As you recover, you will have plenty of time to think and pray.”

  I tried to explain to him that this was no simple intrusion of doubt, no mere stage fright as the moment of commitment got nearer. This was knowledge so positive it made my previous sense of vocation seem a whim. It had nothing to do with loss of faith.

  He simply smiled as if he had heard all this before. In the end I saw that just as he believed time would make all clear to me, so must I leave time to do its work on him.

  Well, it has done its work, and I am glad to say that, despite my defection, Father Dominic and I have remained good friends. In a way it is because of him that I am here now. He brought me reading matter in the hospital, not the usual magazines and paperbacks, but material which he hoped might rekindle my vocational fires. Because of my English connections, he thought the stories of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales might be particularly inspirational, and wherever possible he supplied me with photocopies of original documents, handwritten and usually in Latin.

  There were harrowing stories of the fate of priests who worked undercover in England during the period of proscription and persecution when capture meant long torture and painful death. The more I read these accounts, often written by the priests themselves, the more aware I became how unfit I was to join the company of such men.

  When I said this to Father Dominic, he told me that no man could know what he might endure for his faith until put to the test. I could not argue with this, but I knew I was right in my decision.

  Among the reading matter Father Dominic brought me were several sheets scrawled over by the wavering hand of someone clearly greatly distressed both in body and mind as he wrote. These turned out to be the scribblings of a Jesuit who had suffered at the hands of one of Elizabeth’s pursuivants, the officers who tracked down and extracted confessions from Catholic priests.

  His name was Father Simeon Woollass.

  That’s right. The same name as the family in Illthwaite Hall, though at the time it meant nothing to me. Like yourself, I had never heard of Illthwaite.

  There were some notes attached to these scribblings which indicated that they had been subjected to official Church examination. I subsequently learned that the family had at various times inquired why he had never been given the formal acknowledgment received by so many of the priests in the English Mission. The trouble was that, almost uniquely, after his interrogation he had been released and allowed to return to the Continent. No formal accusation of collaboration was ever made, and the Church’s stance was that he didn’t figure among the two hundred Blesseds from whom Pope Paul chose the Forty British Martyrs for canonization in 1970 for the simple reason that he died more or less peacefully in his bed at the English College in Seville.

  I do not know the truth of what happened, but much that I read in his scribblings suggested a man racked with guilt and regret. Composed in a strange mix of Latin, Spanish and English, and written in an almost illegible hand, they rambled on, repetitively and incoherently, trembling on the edge of that despair which is the ultimate sin, but always clinging to that trust in God’s mercy which is the ultimate salvation.

  I suspected that Father Dominic’s hope was that my own spiritual troubles would pall to insignificance alongside the writhings of this lacerated soul, but repetition can make even the cries of a man in torment tedious, and I was about to give them up when I saw something which reached out and caught my attention with hooks of steel.

  Miguel Madero. My own name.

  Nothing else, unless the phrase that followed (scored so deep into the paper that at one point the quill had penetrated to the next sheet) was in some way connected:

  Padre me perdona…

  Father forgive me…

  Seeing my name like this felt like receiving a message from another world.

  And as I read it, I suddenly had a memory of an early ghostly experience I’d had in the great Gothic cathedral of Seville when I’d been approached by a mad old man, babbling incoherently. I felt certain now that this manifestation had been Father Simeon.

  There was a message here, but it wasn’t very clear and, having already shown such a talent for supernatural misinterpretation, I was not about to rush to any conclusion.

  I recalled my father telling me, frequently, how two of my forebears, father and son, both called Miguel, had perished in the tragic defeat of the Great Armada in 1588.

  Could it be one of these two Miguels the scrawl referred to? It was a possibility, but to my historian mind, it seemed somewhat unlikely. Had either survived to be taken by the English, it would have been apparent to their captors that here was a wealthy member of the hidalgo class wo
rth ransoming. My rationality told me Madero was a not uncommon name. Perhaps after all this was simple coincidence.

  I was distracted from further examination of my family history by a more immediate problem. Or rather two problems.

  Cristóbal, my brother, was now head of the firm, a job which my defection to the religious life had dropped into his grateful lap. While he is the most loving of brothers, I could see his concern growing that I might now wish to claim my birthright as the elder son.

  Matters were not improved by our mother, Christine. After Father’s death, she had decided to return permanently to her family home near Winchester and resume the life of a quiet well-bred English lady. But my brush with death had brought her back to Spain. As Donna Cristina she had always taken a lively interest in the business. But when Cristo took over, I suspect he was not displeased when she decided to move to England.

  Now she was back. At first she was entirely preoccupied with my state of health. But as I moved off the critical list, she began to take notice of certain changes Cristo was making in the organization of the firm, and was temperamentally incapable of keeping her objections to herself. Sparks began to fly.

  My solution to both problems was simple and elegant enough to please a mathematician. As soon as I could move on crutches, I told my mother it would please me to have a complete change of scenery and continue my convalescence in England.

  The prospect of being totally in control of me delighted her, and the prospect of getting both me and Cristina out of his hair delighted Cristo.

  Healthwise it turned out to be a good move for me also.

  Eventually, feeling the need for intellectual stimulation as well as, I admit, a desire to get out of my mother’s control, I decided to resume my historical studies. I had been reading about the English Reformation and decided, some might say was guided, to focus my attention there. Father Dominic, with whom I kept in touch, was delighted to hear of this. He still has hopes for me. No mean historian himself, he put me in touch with an old friend of his in the History Department at Southampton University, Dr. Max Coldstream, one of the foremost Catholic scholars of our time. We met, liked each other, and soon I was formally signed up as a research student.