The Stranger House (27 page)

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 towards women, mocked by some advanced feminist thinkers of his acquaintance, but nothing they ever said could provoke him into behaviour 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 upwards, 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 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 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 enquired why he had never been given the formal acknowledgement 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 worth 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.

As I studied the Reformation, I found my interest shifting from the experience of priests to that of ordinary people. I was particularly intrigued by the problems of recusancy, the refusal by many ordinary Catholics to attend Church of England services. It was a dangerous path to tread. The penalties could be severe, ranging from fines through confiscation of land to imprisonment and even death. Much depended on which part of the country they lived in, what kind of influence they had …

But I suspect I have passed the point where I have even the smallest hold on your interest. Let me press on.

During Elizabeth’s reign, security was overseen by her Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham, whose network of agents and informants was a potent weapon against Catholic conspiracies, both real and imagined. One of his lieutenants collated details of every recusant family in the country and, through the good offices of Dr Coldstream and Father Dominic, I obtained access to these papers.

There was much fascinating information and the more I read, the more I resolved that here was my most rewarding line of research. The great noble families mentioned had doubtless been well trawled over during the last couple of centuries, but there could still be a treasure trove of journals and records lying undisturbed in those of the lesser houses which were still occupied by the same families four centuries on.

I set about discovering which fell into this category, approaching my task alphabetically so it was almost done when I came across a name which rang familiarly.

Woollass.

I had quite forgotten Father Simeon Woollass and the odd coincidence of my own scrawled name in his papers. Now I quickly established that the Woollass family still occupied Illthwaite Hall. A little further digging confirmed that Father Simeon was indeed a member of the family, the son of a cadet branch then residing in Kendal, now defunct. Walsingham’s records of the pursuit and capture of priests on the English Mission told me only that his presence was known from the 1580s and he was taken up in 1589 by Francis Tyrwhitt, a lieutenant of the notorious pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe.