“It dates back to a time when the Madero line looked as if it might be cut short,” he said. “Our family have always been merchants. Our business records go back to the conquest of Granada. We were prosperous, and well respected. Then in 1588, for reasons best known to himself, the third Miguel Madero of our records – first sons were always called Miguel – went off to fight the English with the Great Armada, taking with him his only son and heir. They both perished. His widow was a capable and determined woman, but ability and determination were of little use then without a man to channel them through. Happily, just as it seemed that the Madero line and business were doomed, it emerged that her lost son had contrived to impregnate his affianced bride before sailing. The boy was only sixteen and the girl fourteen, but the marriage had been arranged for almost a decade, and it suited the honor of her family and the fortunes of ours to acknowledge and accept the resultant bastard. Indeed, they even contrived to legitimize him by getting papal sanction for a retrospective marriage.”

“They could do that?” said Frek.

“If you knew the right strings to pull. I think perhaps someone like your grandfather might have managed it, or do I read him wrong?”

She smiled and said, “No, you’re right. But finish your story.”

“Until the boy came of age, his grandmother kept the business afloat, quite literally. And he turned out to be a man of such energy that during the eighty-nine years of his life, he laid the foundations of the business as it exists today. Despite his papal legitimization, he was always known as the Bastard, and this name began to be given to the best of the wine he produced and shipped. Much later in the nineteenth century when the true refinement of sherry began, the very best of our finos were accorded the title alone. So I give you the toast. El Bastardo!”

Frek said, “A fine if lengthy story. Here’s to bastards.”

They raised their glasses and drank. He poured a refill and helped himself to some brie. She took a wedge of cheddar and began to eat it with her apple. Watching the golden cheese and the red-and-white apple go into her mouth made him feel dizzy and he took another sip at his wine.

She said, “How is your work going, Mr. Madero?”

“I would like it if you would call me Mig.”

“Like the Russian aeroplane?”

“I do not fly so fast nor am I so deadly.”

“Surely nowadays it’s regarded as rather slow and old-fashioned?”

“Then it fits me very well.”

She smiled. They drank and refilled.

“And may I call you Frek? I like Frek. It sounds Nordic somehow. Like the old goddesses. Freyja, Fulla, Frigg. Yes, it fits you well.”

A nicely turned compliment, he thought complacently.

She laughed and said, “I see you know your Norse myths a little.”

“More than a little, I hope,” he said, slightly piqued.

“But not enough to know that the nearest thing to Frek you’ll find in them is Freki, who wasn’t a goddess but one of Odin’s wolves,” she said. “Thank you all the same. It’s good to know that even in Spain there’s an interest in the Northern myths.”

“I had a tutor who said the first duty of a good priest is to know the opposition.”

“And he considered the Northern pantheon who haven’t been around for a thousand years as opposition? That’s a bit paranoid, isn’t it?”

“Men have always invented the gods they need. Understand the gods and you’ll understand the men. A priest should be able to understand men, shouldn’t he?”

“It would be nice to think he might even be able to understand women,” said Frek dryly. “I take it you don’t include Christian deities in this pragmatic category? There we get into eternal verities, right? All the rest can be demolished euhemeristically.”

“I wasn’t trying to demolish, I was merely suggesting that an understanding of pagan belief systems is an essential sociological tool,” said Madero, wondering how the hell his clever compliment had got him here. “I’m a historian, remember, not a priest.”

“So you say. But to adapt a modern cliché, you can take the man out of the seminary, but can you ever take the seminary out of the man?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at her over the rim of his glass. “How about you? You come from a family willing to take great risks for the Catholic religion. I’d guess you went to a convent school. Your father clearly still adheres closely to the faith he was brought up in. Yet in you I detect at least a separation if not a distinct skepticism.”

She said, “I bet you got full marks on your Father Confessor courses.”

He felt himself flushing and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound…”

“Priestly?” she concluded. “I’ll be charitable and put it down to the historical researcher in you. You’re right. If I have to pick a mythology, I find I much prefer that of the old Norsemen. That’s why I’ve been teaching it at university for the past eight years.”

He adjusted her age upward a little. Her looks were timeless.

“But you’re not saying that you subscribe to their faith system?” he pressed.

“I can understand it. It was a religion for its times. Aren’t they all? I sometimes think Christianity’s time is passing. And just as Christianity cannibalized paganism, so the Next Big Thing will help itself to whatever it fancies from Christianity. It’s already started, hasn’t it? The music, the art. You can get a kick out of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion without giving a toss about the story. And watch the tourists pouring into York Minster, how many of them sit down and say a prayer?”

“And will this Next Big Thing be another divine intervention? Or totally secular?”

“God knows. Or maybe not.”

They both laughed. A shared moment. Then Madero said, “At least in a place like this you’re not likely to be confronted by extreme manifestations of novelty.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Frek. “It’s in places like Illthwaite, which no one in high authority pays much attention to, that changes begin.”

“I think you’ll find that Rome pays more attention than you realize to even its remotest outposts,” said Madero rather smugly.

“I’m not talking about Rome,” she said irritably. “Catholics are completely peripheral here. In the sticks, the C of E rules, OK? Oddly enough it was the Church of England that got me interested in paganism. I used to go to Sunday School at St. Ylf’s. We were ecumenical in Illthwaite before they knew how to spell it in Rome or Canterbury. And in the summer Rev. Pete – that’s Peter Swinebank, the vicar – used to sit us all down in the churchyard around the Wolf-Head Cross. Have you seen it yet?”

“No, but Mrs. Appledore mentioned it.”

“You must let me show it to you if we can find time. It’s a Viking cross full of reference to Nordic myths, all adapted to the Christian message of course. Rev. Pete used to explain it all, never realizing he was proselytizing for paganism! The Christian stuff I found pretty tedious, but that other world of gods and heroes and monsters and magic really turned me on. St. Ylf himself struck me as a boring do-gooder till I discovered his name meant wolf, and in some versions of his legend he took a wolf’s shape when he appeared to lost travelers, and he only led those to safety who showed no fear, the others he drove over a cliff and ate. This stuff doesn’t half make you talk!”

She held up her glass to be refilled. He topped up his own at the same time. The level in the bottle had sunk very low.

“It is one of its many beneficent effects,” he said. “But you sided with your father when your parents separated; not, I presume, on religious grounds?”

For a second he thought this was a familiarity too far, but after a sobering appraisal from those cold blue eyes, she said, “He needed me more. But enough of me. Now it’s your turn in the confessional.”

“What can a man who has led such a sheltered life as me have to confess?”