The Stranger House (5 page)

“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 hanging 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.

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 brown-foaming 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.

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.