She gave him a grin to let him see she’d noticed, then went into her room.

A glance in the mirror stopped her grinning. As well as the dust, there were cobwebs in her hair, and her shorts looked as if she’d played rugby in them. She grabbed her spongebag and towel and headed out to the bathroom.

But first she tapped on Madero’s door, which swung open.

“OK if I get first stab at the bathroom?” she said.

He looked up, startled, almost guilty.

He was sitting on the bed with some kind of book on his lap. It was quarto size and looked very old and dusty. Dustier than he did. Suddenly she understood his eagerness to get out of the kitchen.

She said, “That’s what you had under your jacket!”

She didn’t mean to sound accusatory but he reacted as if to accusation.

“Why not? I think if anyone’s entitled, it is I.”

“Listen, mate, you do whatever you want, so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,” said Sam, turning away.

He stood up and said, “No, wait. I’m sorry.”

She halted and looked back at him.

He had that haunted look on his face again.

He said in a quick low tone, “It’s just that, what I felt down there, I think Father Simeon hid in that chamber. But I think someone else was with him for part of the time.”

He paused as if unable or at least reluctant to go on.

Sam said, “So? Maybe he had a traveling companion. Must have been a lonely business he was in. A little bit of comfort in the night would have come in handy.”

She hadn’t meant it to come out as a salacious innuendo, but Madero didn’t react. He was still too concerned with his internal debate, which seemed to have less to do with what he was reluctant to tell her than with what he was unwilling to admit to himself.

“Spit it out,” she advised. “Better than choking on it.”

“Your father again?” he said, attempting a smile. “He really does sound like a man of good sense. All right, you already think me weird because of my beliefs. You might as well think I am crazy too. That sense of another presence I had down there in the chamber – a ghostly presence, I mean, in addition to Father Simeon’s, but this one was stronger. It was almost as if I myself had been there five hundred years ago.”

“Jeez, and here’s me thinking you were still this side of fifty,” said Sam. “And the book you lifted?”

“It felt so strongly connected to me that I had to take it,” he said.

“So what’s it say?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read a word of it.”

He managed a rueful smile, then became serious again.

“But it has to mean something, doesn’t it?” he appealed. “All of my life I have felt something trying to speak to me. It sent me down highways and byways, but in the end it’s this place, Illthwaite in the Valley of the Shadow, that it was calling me to. And there’s one more thing I’m starting to feel very strongly. You’re part of it too, Sam. You’re part of it too!”

If it hadn’t been for his attempt to bring her into his crazy equation, Sam might have been more sympathetic. The guy had some good points and despite their obvious differences there was something about him which drew her to him. But trying to fit her up with a role in his superstitious shadow play was going too far.

“So what you’re saying is you’ve been getting like e-mails from God dot com?” she mocked. “How do you know it’s not just spam from the devil like your confessor tried to tell you?”

Her mockery came out rather more vehemently than she intended and she felt a pang of guilt, recognizing this as a reaction to the way her terror of the darkness had caused her to lay herself so bare. She also recalled that he’d done the same, not out of terror but partly in response to her openness and also to keep her mind occupied with matters other than her claustrophobia. Plus there’d been that moment at the end when the old Adam had taken over from the wannabe priest!

Calling truce isn’t as easy as declaring war. He was regarding her coldly as he said, “I thought you claimed to be a mathematician.”

“What’s that mean? ‘Claimed’?”

“Aren’t mathematicians supposed to strive for cool objectivity in their observations? To withhold belief or disbelief until they’ve examined all offered proofs and attempted their own? Any mention of religion to you is like waving a muleta at a bull. Objectivity out, emotion in. It all becomes personal!”

That wasn’t a muleta, that was a banderilla.

“Personal!” she exploded. “What else should it be but personal? But it’s a gender thing as well. Show me a religion which doesn’t rate men as superior and I might take a closer look at it. But that’s not the end of it either. It’s a philosophical thing and a volition thing too. I can’t find any logical or scientific arguments that add up to God, and anyway I really don’t want to believe in a god who could let all the shitty things happen that do happen. All this old stuff you’re into about people torturing each other and ripping each other’s guts out in the name of religion, it’s not history, you know. It’s still going on. The way I see it, women shouldn’t be going down on their knees, begging to be given full rights in your religions, they should be giving thanks for their partial exclusion and taking steps to make it absolute!”

Where had all this stuff come from? she wondered. It was pointless and untimely, and she ought to get out now. But she didn’t believe in turning away from a fight.

They stood glowering at each other for a long moment, but she wasn’t much good at glowering and he wasn’t in the mood for theological debate.

He sat back down on the bed and said rather wearily, “Some interesting points, but can we leave them for another time? Please, I’m not patronizing you. On the contrary, talking about things being personal, this is what this is to me, I freely admit it. What I’m hearing here isn’t a message from God saying I’m especially holy, but the most powerful of voices from my family’s past…”

“You don’t think that skull belonged to this ancestor, do you?” interrupted Sam, looking to get back to concrete evidence, even old bones. “Or this guy Simeon maybe?”

“No. Neither. Though it felt very old, and very holy too somehow. I think it could be some sacred relict which the monks hid with the other treasure. There are experts who will be able to tell the skull’s age and sex. And believe me, I want to find concrete evidence to support what I feel too. Perhaps it will be in this old book. I’m sure there will be experts who can interpret it. Meanwhile, however irrational it seems, I am stuck with this certainty that at some time there was a Madero hiding down in that chamber.”

“But you said that you were the first of your family who ever got close to being a priest,” she objected.

“I am,” he agreed. “No, I don’t think he was a fugitive priest like Father Simeon. The only possibility I can think of is he was one of the two Maderos I told you about, who were lost with the Great Armada. Probably – because the pain I feel is the pain of youth – it was the young man. It means that somehow he came to this part of the country, I do not know how. And while he was here, something terrible happened to him. I don’t know what. But he was here, and he suffered here, in Illthwaite, of that I am sure.”

He paused and looked at Sam as if anticipating another outpouring of scorn.

Instead she said, “Oh shit,” as her instinctive skepticism was joined by something else… words, and an image…

“What?” he said, picking up that this wasn’t a comment on what he’d just said.

“Look,” said Sam. “Probably just coincidence, but there’s something in that old guidebook of Mrs. Appledore’s you maybe should read.”

“Coincidence is the way God talks to us,” said Madero. “Which bit?”

The book was lying on the bedside table. He handed it to her and she opened it at the section on the Other Wolf-Head Cross.