The Stranger House (32 page)

“But she was so sure,” said Sam, thoroughly bewildered, “She said she was born in 1950 and she was ten when she came to Australia.”

“She was ten when she got on the boat, all right,” said Betty, “But she’d turned eleven by the time we landed. Not that we had birthday parties, anything like that. No, it was hard for any of us to keep track, even if you had a mind for it. We lost a whole summer on that trip. But it was definitely 1961. Poor Gracie. Don’t be too hard on her. We all need to find our own way to deal with things, and from the sound of it Gracie’s way was just to get even vaguer about things than she was when I knew her.”

“She wasn’t so vague she didn’t remember about Sammy,” protested Sam, still reluctant to accept this radical rearrangement of all her timings.

“No, but then the combination of your hair and your name is a pretty strong nudge! Look, dear, I don’t know if it matters, but one thing you can be sure of is that poor little Sammy was definitely already knocked up when she got on the boat. Them nuns at St Rum’s didn’t do a lot for us, but they certainly kept us virtuous.”

Sam’s face registered shock and bewilderment as she tried to take in this new information. Betty regarded her with shrewd compassion and leaned forward to pat her knee.

“Don’t take it so hard, dear,” she said, “Does it really matter? It was a long time ago and little Sammy’s dead. At least it means your grandfather wasn’t one of them bastard priests. As to who the bastard really was, some things you’re better off not knowing. What my mum told me about my father didn’t make me want to rush off and find the rotten bugger even if he is still alive, which don’t seem likely.”

She watched Sam as she spoke and she could see her words were falling on deaf ears.

She leaned forward again and said, “Listen, Sam, if you’re really determined to find out more about her, you should talk to the people at the Trust. They know the ropes. They’ll keep you straight. And even if they can’t help you find out any more, they understand how important it is to help you let go.”

With a great effort Sam got herself together. Now it was more important than ever that she asked the right questions, set out the right equations.

“Yes, thank you very much. I’ll remember that,” she said, “Just one thing more, Betty. That bit of paper with her name on it—Gracie thought there was an address on it too. She tried to remember but all she could come up
with was that the town name ended in
thwaite,
and she wasn’t too sure about that.”

“No?” Betty laughed, “Well, for once, Gracie got it right. Nowhere I’d ever heard of. Illthwaite, that was it. In Cumberland.”

“Cumberland? That’s the same as Cumbria, right? Was that on the paper too?”

“I don’t recollect. I don’t think so. Sam Flood, the Vicarage, Illthwaite, is what I remember.”

“The vicarage?” said Sam through dry lips, “Gracie didn’t say that.”

“Not surprising. I’ve just recalled it myself. Yeah, it definitely said the vicarage.”

“But not Cumberland? So why did you say Cumberland?”

“Because that’s where Sam said she came from,” said Betty.

“You talked with her about her background?” said Sam eagerly, “What else did she tell you?”

“Not much. You’ve got to understand that talking to Sam was a bit like talking to a frightened kitten. If you kept at it, you might get it to give a little purr, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to start talking back. So it was me who did most of the talking when we got a chance to talk, which wasn’t all that often. If them nuns could have cut our tongues out and sewn on extra ears to pour their talk of hellfire into, that’s what they’d have done.”

“But she did tell you something about her background?” pressed Sam, desperate for every scrap.

“Nothing much, apart from living in Cumberland. Nothing about parents, but that wasn’t surprising. Lot of the kids knew next to nothing about where they came from. Like I say, she didn’t say much and what she did
didn’t make much sense. Sometimes it was hard to make out if she was talking about herself or someone else called Sam. She’d say something about Sam being warm in bed, Sam taking care of her. She answered to Sam, but that could have been because none of us ever called her anything else. For all I know, this name Sam Flood on her piece of paper referred to someone else entirely. It’s just a possibility, but worth keeping in mind if you are going to carry on looking.”

It’s strange, thought Sam. People could say things that changed the shape of your universe without them ever realizing it.

She stood up abruptly. She needed to be away and by herself.

“Yes, I’ll definitely keep it in mind. Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” she said formally.

Betty was looking surprised. And concerned.

“Don’t rush off,” she said, “I’ve got to hang on here till they come for the furniture. Let’s just sit and yack, OK? Tell me about your family. And Gracie—tell me about old Gracie.”

“My family’s fine, Gracie’s fine, I’m fine. But I’ve got to go. I’ve got things to do. Thanks a lot. Really. Thanks.”

She headed for the door. She knew she was being rude. There was nothing but sympathy and kindness on offer here.

She stopped and turned back and said, “Betty, thanks a million. It’s been really kind of you to take time to see me, especially with your ma just dying. I’m real sorry about that.”

Betty’s arms came round her and drew her into her ample bosom. Feeling that strength, that warmth, hearing soothing words being murmured in that home-evoking
accent, it would have been easy to let go, relax, let the tears come.

But beneath her pain there was anger and hate. She didn’t want them to be assuaged, she didn’t want their edge to be blunted.

Still dry-eyed, she began to disengage.

Betty said, “Now you take care of yourself. Keep in touch, won’t you? I’d really like to get to know you better. Maybe your pa would like to talk to me …”

Sam kissed her and broke loose.

“Yes, I will. Thanks again, “Bye.”

As she walked from the door, she didn’t look back till she was in her car with the engine started. Then she waved and drove away.

She didn’t feel she could drive far. Round the corner there was a parade of shops with parking spaces in front of them. She brought the car to a halt. She felt something, but didn’t know what it was. She’d felt like this as a kid when she’d run around too long hatless in the midday sun. She didn’t know whether she was going to be sick or faint.

Finally she leaned forward with her head against the steering wheel and, without forewarning, tears came.

After a couple of minutes she sat upright and wiped her eyes. She looked around, half expecting to be a focus of attention, but there weren’t many people about and those that were didn’t show any interest in her.

That was OK. That was how she wanted it. Take care of your own business. That was the way of the world. She certainly planned to take care of hers.

One of the shops in the parade was a hardware store. She got out of the car, went inside and bought a pair of kitchen scissors. Then she returned to the car and drove
away and kept on driving till buildings thinned out and were replaced by fields and trees.

She turned up a quiet side road then parked close against a hawthorn hedge. She pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the small vanity mirror. The slate blue eyes that stared back were like a stranger’s.

Finally she took hold of a tress of her rich red hair, stretched it out to its full length, laid it over the saltire of the scissors, hesitated for a long moment, then brought the blades together with a savage click, and let the long tress fall to the floor.

The first cut was the hardest. Wasn’t it always? After that it was as if the scissors controlled her hand, dancing a mad cancan over her head, blades kicking high and closing hard, hair flying to left and right like sparks from a raging bonfire. From time to time the sharp metal grazed her scalp but she never paused till not a lock of hair longer than half an inch remained to be seen.

Now the woman in the mirror really was a stranger to her. A scary stranger.

Scary was OK.

That’s what she wanted to be, scary.

Back in Illthwaite they prided themselves that they didn’t scare easy.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” said the woman in the mirror.

Miguel Madero had been surprised by his sense of loss as he watched Sam drive away.

He had only known her for a single day, there was a fundamental antagonism between them, yet somehow it felt like losing an ally. Even though he had seen the last of her, he still felt as though they were united by more than just the common drawing together of strangers meeting on unfamiliar territory. But if God had purposed that they should be here together, then He had also decided that it shouldn’t be for long.

At all levels, her work in Illthwaite was done.

On her own behalf she’d followed a false trail laid by coincidence she now regarded as meaningless. He prayed she would find some sort of closure in her conversation with this woman in Newcastle.

But there had also been what he thought of as the real purpose of her visit to Illthwaite. Without her he might not have raised the table and found the hiding place. And certainly without her he wouldn’t be reading the terrible story written in the cramped hand of Simeon Woollass from the fevered ramblings of his own distant ancestor and namesake.

Strictly the journal belonged to the Woollass family.
Or the Catholic Church. Or perhaps to the Crown as treasure trove. That was for lawyers to sort out. But not before he had translated and copied out what was written here.

Using Sam’s key, he started transcribing the words, at first slowly and awkwardly, but then, as he grew familiar with both the cipher and the cryptographer’s own abbreviations, with increasing confidence, till finally he was keying the words into his laptop at full speed. By halfway through the morning he had finished.

He sat there till the screensaver appeared and wiped away the words. Then he went and lay on his bed, looking up at the low-beamed ceiling, as if by will alone he could force his gaze through the stained and cracked plaster up through the roof tiles and after that through the vaulting cerulean itself in search of answers to that oldest of questions—how can such things be?

Part of him felt the need to go and seek out a priest to share his feelings with. But he didn’t even know where the nearest Catholic church was. And what would a priest say anyway? He shuddered at the recollection of his arrogance in thinking for a while that he himself might have been called to act as God’s interpreter and man’s comforter in matters as complex as this.

In the end, like his mother at times of confrontation with the inexplicable, all he had to fall back on was a line from one of her favourite poems:
Oh, God He knows! And, God He knows! And, surely God Almighty knows!
Which was usually followed by another more prosaic line, probably passed down from some seafaring ancestor—
lying around in your hammock’s not going to get you to China.

He rose from his bed and set about translating the script once more, this time from Spanish to English.
Others would want to read this, in particular Max Coldstream.

The English translation finished, he wrote an explanatory e-mail to Coldstream and attached the file. He went downstairs. Mrs Appledore was hoovering the barroom. When he asked about access to her phone point she said, “Go ahead. Them daft bloody policemen wanted to call it a crime scene, but I told them I had a pub to run and a one-eyed idiot could see those bones were far too old to be of any interest to CID. When they checked with their lab they said much the same, the bones were clearly several centuries old and they’d passed them on to the museum services so they could do their own analysis. Do you really think they might be St Ylf’s like old Noddy was saying? I could do with a miracle the way custom’s fallen off these past few years.”

“We could all do with a few miracles,” said Madero.

He went into the kitchen, connected his laptop and got online.

A message asked him if he wished to locate the download he’d made from Coldstream’s e-mail the previous day. In the excitement of what had transpired thereafter, he’d completely forgotten about it. Now he brought it up.

It was an article by Liam Molloy that had appeared in one of the tabloid supplements. He winced as he read its title: