The Stranger House (54 page)

The fire was moving laterally at a steady speed, but in its natural direction, which was upward, it went like a rocket. Dunstan’s bedroom was almost directly above the kitchen. Already there was fire there, banked high in the hearth to keep his old bones warm. And according to Mrs Collipepper, as the coils of smoke started coming up through the floorboards, the old man stretched his hands out to them as if welcoming the extra heat.

She tried to lead him out of the room but he pushed her away. Now Frek burst in and attempted to add her strength to the effort. Dunstan resisted them both, showing remarkable strength.

Then he said to the housekeeper, “For God’s sake, Pepi, if you want to help me, get her out of here. Quickly. No point in us all dying.”

So Mrs Collipepper had turned her attention to Frek and dragged her out of the room, just as Thor and Mig and Sam came round the corner from the landing.

It was clear at once there was no hope of getting to the old man. The room was a maelstrom of fire and smoke. It was incredible that Dunstan still had anywhere to stand, but when the curtain of flame opened a fraction, Sam saw him quite clearly, upright by the window, as if taking one last look at the landscape he so loved.

She heard herself crying his name. He couldn’t have heard her, but he turned his head.

She never knew if it was an optical illusion, or maybe a created memory, but she always recalled that he seemed to smile as if in recognition and mouthed something. The smile and the mouthing were probably both simply a rictus of pain as the heat began to melt the flesh from his bones. But in her memory she read his lips, and this was what persuaded her the memory was real. For surely a created memory would have had old Dunstan uttering some sort of confession, perhaps begging for forgiveness?

Instead, which she never told anyone except Mig, what she saw him saying was, “Sorry about the tea.”

Then she felt herself pushed aside roughly by a figure it took her a moment to identify.

Scorched, smoke-blackened, with a huge gash across his temple which the heat had cauterized, it was Gerry.

He screamed, “Dad!” and would have rushed into the room if Thor hadn’t flung his strong arms around him and grappled him back.

At the same moment the floor collapsed, Dunstan vanished, and there was no room left to rush into.

With the vibrant urgency of one who had been learning the line for years, Thor said, “Let’s get out of here.”

He hauled Gerry along by main force. Frek seemed close to collapse and Mig followed Thor’s example and dragged her along the corridor. At last he’s got his hands on her, thought Sam. And she’s the nearest she’ll ever get to being hot stuff!

It seemed to her that she might have spoken these wild words aloud and she glanced at Mrs Collipepper as they hurried along behind the others. Their eyes met for a moment, blue grey looking into grey blue.

Oh God, thought Sam, remembering there’d been three generations of Collipeppers housekeeping at the Hall. Not another Woollass by-blow!

At the head of the stairs they could see the hall below was full of smoke. Thor yelled something at Mig, who grabbed hold of what remained of Gerry’s jacket while hanging on to Frek with his other hand. Mrs Collipepper thrust Sam forward into contact with Frek, herself seizing Sam’s trailing hand.

Then they dragged what air they could into their lungs and, with Thor leading what felt like a crazy conga, they plunged down the stairway.

Heat on the skin; smoke in the nostrils, the eyes, the lungs; staggering, falling, recovering; all the time fighting
the urge to lie down and simply let it be over; if this was the kind of hell Mig truly believed in, thought Sam, how did he manage to get out of bed in the morning?

Then she died.

She knew it was death because she’d burst into that heaven she didn’t believe in. She felt cool air playing on her face and when she breathed it was the same nectar that poured down her throat, flushing out all the ashy filth in a bout of lung-racking coughing which was the sweetest pain she’d ever felt.

She released her grip on Frek, collapsed to her knees in a parody of thanksgiving which wasn’t altogether parody, and opened her eyes.

The action hero had done it. They were in the middle of the lawn in front of the house.

The others lay about her, coughing, gasping, retching. Gerry looked the worst affected. The rest were already like herself recovering enough to pay heed to each other. She caught Mig’s eye. He mouthed “You OK?” and she nodded and they smiled at each other.

Then she turned her head to look at the Hall.

They had made it out just in time. The kitchen end of the house was sending tongues of fire licking up at the low storm clouds which were boiling overhead. Behind windows along the whole length of the rest of the building they could see flames dancing like guests at a wild party.

Some blast of air—or perhaps Mrs Collipepper acting like a good housekeeper to the end—had closed the front door behind them. Inside it must already be burning. They could see the paint bubbling off the woodwork as they watched, and now the wolf-head knocker was snarling at them out of a corona of fire.

Frek used Sam to lever herself upright as if to get a better view. Sam reached up and took the hand on her shoulder and held it there. Mig rose too and stood beside Frek.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“The house … your grandfather … Look, the way it happened, it was unforeseeable, I’m sure …”

Frek coughed a laugh.

“You think I’m worried because he died unshriven, with all his many sins, carnal and otherwise, upon him? Forget it. He died in flames like a Viking, with his most precious belongings burning around him, as Odin himself ordained. No forgiveness necessary in that belief system. A man is judged by his best, not his worst, and a hero’s welcome awaits heroes.”

She squeezed Sam’s shoulder as if in acknowledgement, then went to kneel by her father, who was being tended by Thor and Mrs Collipepper.

Sam rose to stand beside Mig.

Above them the clouds gobbled up the last morsel of clear sky and met in an almost simultaneous flash of lightning and clap of thunder. The front door of Illthwaite Hall fell out on to the pebble mosaic and a blast of fire-bright air strong enough for Sam to feel its heat shot out and upward to be absorbed by the mighty storm raging above.

“There he goes, the old bastard,” said Sam, flip as always in face of irrational fear.

“Yes, I think he probably does,” murmured Mig, putting his arm round her shoulder. She noticed that with his other hand he was crossing himself. A mocking quip began to form in her mind but aborted long before it got anywhere near its term.

Above them, the clouds finally opened and the rain began to fall, in fat intermittent drops to start with, then in hissing torrents, and, though Sam would never admit it even to Mig, it felt like a blessing on her shorn and scarred and heat-scoured head.

So what is there left to tell?

It would be nice to say that Sam and Mig walked off into the sunset and lived happily ever after, but while Mig’s fondness for Hollywood movies might have made him dream of such an ending, Sam had other agendas, mainly mathematical, in which sunsets didn’t figure.

First, however, she had to work things out between herself and her new relatives.

Gerry Woollass was the only one of the survivors of the Illthwaite Hall conflagration who needed extended hospital treatment. It was a couple of weeks before he and Sam had their face-to-face. Prior to it, Mig had gone on about the healing power of forgiveness, which she thought was a bit rich coming from the native of a country which had practically made revenge a national dish. Anyway, she said, forgiveness wasn’t really in her gift, coming third in the queue behind her father and little Pam herself.

The meeting itself was strangely unsatisfactory. What was the point, Sam asked, in going after a guy like one of the Furies when everything you laid on him he’d already laid on himself with an even bigger shovel? Not only that, he now blamed himself for his father’s death and the loss of the Hall.

In the end, following the specific advice of her ma and the tacit advice of her pa, she moved on, and might even have developed some kind of warmer relationship with Gerry if his guilt hadn’t been such a bar. On the whole she felt she would probably have got on better with Dunstan if he’d been the survivor. Ruthless, arrogant, passionate in belief, coldly rational in execution, there had been something in him that appealed to something in herself. It wasn’t an altogether comfortable notion, but at least his death had meant she could lay to sleep her theories about his part in the curate’s death.

She did, however, share them with Thor and Edie. She stressed she had absolutely no proof, but strong probability was enough for this ghost-tortured pair. Finally they could acknowledge the powerful natural attraction they felt for each other, but having reached years of discretion, they took such care in the planning of their first (which is to say their second) sexual encounter that it was at least two hours before the whole of Skaddale rejoiced in the news that Thor and Edie were at it.

Mig insisted that Rev. Pete should be given the full story too. His argument that the restoration of Sam Flood to his true place in the annals of St Ylf’s was the main purpose of what he called their summoning to Illthwaite cut little ice with Sam. But Thor and Edie were in enthusiastic accord with his proposal, and so it was on the next anniversary of the curate’s death, a proper memorial stone, carved by Thor, was consecrated to his memory in the aisle of St Ylf’s.

It took Sam a little time to accept Frek’s repeated invitation to tea at Cambridge, but when she did she found she rather enjoyed it, especially once she realized that Frek’s introduction of her as “my Australian cousin who
happens to be a mathematical genius” sprang as much from genuine pride as it did from a desire to take the piss. She was helped to this conclusion by reasoning that Frek was hardly going to risk offending someone who could cut the ground from under her feet at any time by saying, “Actually, she’s not my cousin, she’s my auntie.”

Anything else? Oh yes. Laal Gowder was presumed to have died in the fire, and some ashes were found which were probably his. But Illthwaite being Illthwaite, a legend soon grew that he had in fact escaped and was living a solitary, half-animal life on the high fells where there were soon plenty of locals ready to claim they’d glimpsed him trudging through the mist, with his axe over one shoulder and half a slaughtered sheep over the other. Eventually this story was conflated with the legend of St Ylf, but that was much further into the future than this brief rounding-up and winding-down cares to venture.

As for Mig, it took him some time to be persuaded that there was no place for him in Sam’s immediate plans. Even then he did not give up hope, but kept in constant touch. His thesis never got finished, which Max Coldstream said was a shame. But with the destruction of so many original documents in the Illthwaite Hall fire, it would have been a sadly diluted affair.

Eventually he got involved once more in the family business, taking on overseas marketing, which Cristo thought was great so long as it kept his brother overseas and a long way from Jerez.

Mig’s hopes for a romantic future were nurtured by Sam’s rather surprised discovery of just how reluctant she herself was to let the relationship fade into nothingness. Though there was much about him that still exasperated her, she felt a closeness to him that not even
mere sexual attraction could explain. So they stayed friends—occasionally, if the moon was full, the air balmy and the wine red, passionate friends.

Noddy Melton went to Spain on holiday, and had a snack in a certain
taberna
on the Costa Brava, and let the grossly overweight chain-smoking English
patrona
buy him a drink. When she asked about his background, he told her he was a retired insurance salesman from Slough, paid for his food by cash, and returned to Illthwaite in such a mellow frame of mind the locals opined he should go on holiday more often.

Talking of travel, when Sam went back to Vinada during the long vacation, Mig invented a necessary business trip which took him to Australia at the same time. Exasperated, flattered and amused in equal proportion, Sam finally introduced him to her parents. Lu took to him at once, saying she could feel the spirits liked him. Sam’s pa greeted him with, “You the bastard who makes the Bastard? You’ll not sell a lot out here. Too thin and sharp.” But even he, after a while, had to admit that, in spite of all the contra-indications, there was something about Mig that drew him to him, though God alone knew what it might be, and He wasn’t telling.

But if you know where to look He may drop hints.

It is Christmas 1589.

In a smoke-filled hut in Eskdale in Cumberland, Jenny, widow of Thomas Gowder of Illthwaite, sits and nurses her infant child.

She is expecting a visit from her brother-in-law, Andrew, and she is not expecting him to come laden with gold and frankincense.

As the baby sucks greedily at her breast, she recalls her last sight of Miguel, the waif boy, after she had cut him down from the tree. As he staggered away on his make-shift crutches, he had looked back at her once in the corpse-light of dawn, and she had felt a huge shame that she was not brave enough to stay with him. But she knew that it would almost certainly mean death not only for herself but for the child she had only just become aware she was carrying.

Whose it was, she did not know. Had Thomas in one of his brutal sexual assaults finally planted a fertile seed? Or was it the fruit of those joyous escapes from her daily miseries in the arms of the foreign boy?

Even her return to Foulgate and her acquiescence with Andrew’s version of the night’s events did not guarantee safety.