The Stranger House

He stared up at an ornately carved stone set above the lintel of the brass-studded oak front door. On its left side was a coat of arms with three roses: one red, one white, one golden. On the right stood an angel with a sword, its robes white, its weapon silver with a smear of scarlet along its edge. Between, picked out in red and green, were some words, crushed so close together that reading them wasn’t easy but he’d had plenty of practice at deciphering ornate and obscure scripts.

Edwin Woollass Esquire and Alice

His Wife made this house to be built

in the Dear of Our Lord 1535

Cruce Fido

‘“I trust in the cross”,’ Madero translated.

‘Our dog’s a crook,’ said Frek Woollass as she went by him and opened the door.

‘Family joke,’ said Woollass. ‘Usually left behind with childhood. Come in.’

A good three inches shorter than his daughter, he moved with the determined gait of a man who anticipates obstacles but doesn’t intend walking round them.

‘It’s a lovely spot, isn’t it?’ said Sister Angelica. Her voice was gruff without being masculine, and it had a fairly broad accent which Madero, who had early recognized the importance of the way you talked in his maternal milieu, identified as Lancastrian. ‘Very welcoming. Pity about the knocker, though.’

The cast-iron door knocker, shaped like a wolf’s head with mouth agape and teeth bared, looked as if it were keen to bite the hand that raised it.

They followed Woollass into a broad entrance hall, so dimly lit that Madero got little impression of it other than lots of wood panelling and a few wall-mounted animal heads as they passed quickly along, down a little corridor and through another door which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a dungeon.

The room it opened into had a flagged floor with at its centre a vaguely oriental-looking circular carpet whose yellow-and-umber design stood out boldly against the grey granite. On it stood four wooden armchairs around a low oak table. The effect was rather theatrical, as though a single spot were lighting up the action area of an open stage. A huge fireplace almost filled one wall. No fire was needed today, but a tall vase full of multi-coloured dahlias burnt on the hearth and above the fireplace was the same coat of arms he’d seen over the entrance door.

As he took the chair Woollass indicated, Madero began to feel the past crowding in and sense other shadowy presences in the room which if he relaxed and admitted them might let themselves become more visible. But for the moment, he wanted to concentrate on his host and this unexpected nun who’d sat down on his left.