Part of him felt the need to go and seek out a priest to share his feelings with. But he didn’t even know where the nearest Catholic church was. And what would a priest say anyway? He shuddered at the recollection of his arrogance in thinking for a while that he himself might have been called to act as God’s interpreter and man’s comforter in matters as complex as this.

In the end, like his mother at times of confrontation with the inexplicable, all he had to fall back on was a line from one of her favorite poems: Oh, God He knows! And, God He knows! And, surely God Almighty knows! Which was usually followed by another more prosaic line, probably passed down from some seafaring ancestor – lying around in your hammock’s not going to get you to China.

He rose from his bed and set about translating the script once more, this time from Spanish to English. Others would want to read this, in particular Max Coldstream.

The English translation finished, he wrote an explanatory e-mail to Coldstream and attached the file. He went downstairs. Mrs. Appledore was hoovering the barroom. When he asked about access to her phone point she said, “Go ahead. Them daft bloody policemen wanted to call it a crime scene, but I told them I had a pub to run and a one-eyed idiot could see those bones were far too old to be of any interest to CID. When they checked with their lab they said much the same, the bones were clearly several centuries old and they’d passed them on to the museum services so they could do their own analysis. Do you really think they might be St. Ylf’s like old Noddy was saying? I could do with a miracle the way custom’s fallen off these past few years.”

“We could all do with a few miracles,” said Madero.

He went into the kitchen, connected his laptop and got online.

A message asked him if he wished to locate the download he’d made from Coldstream’s e-mail the previous day. In the excitement of what had transpired thereafter, he’d completely forgotten about it. Now he brought it up.

It was an article by Liam Molloy that had appeared in one of the tabloid supplements. He winced as he read its title:

JOLLEY JINKS!

Jolley Castle. It sounds like something you hire for a kids’ party. In fact you probably could, if you had enough money.

Jolley Castle, 15 miles southwest of Leeds, is a National Trust property now. The posters say You can have a really jolly time at Jolley Castle.

Not if you were a Roman Catholic priest in the sixteenth century, you couldn’t.

Then the family head, Sir Edward Jolley, was a Protestant judge, famous for the swingeing sentences he laid on anyone found guilty under the anti-Catholic Recusancy Laws. But his treatment of Catholics was as nothing compared with that meted out by his cousin, Francis Tyrwhitt. He was a colleague of the infamous Richard Topcliffe, the Queen’s chief pursuivant, or persecutor of those still clinging to Catholicism. Topcliffe was given special permission to build his own torture chamber in his house at Westminster. Tyrwhitt, who worked mainly in the North, did not need to build. The dungeons of Jolley Castle were already equipped with all the basic necessities. Here, by permission of his cousin, Tyrwhitt brought his prisoners, usually priests sent from the Continent on what was known as the English Mission, to bring succor and the Holy Office to beleaguered Catholics.

He kept meticulous records of his interrogation sessions. What is clear from these is that, while he is Topcliffe’s match in brutality, he outguns his master in subtlety. He understood not only the application of pain, but the psychology of torture also.

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

There followed a selection of what Molloy obviously regarded as juicy samples of Tyrwhitt’s torturing technique, with explanatory notes to ensure the reader knew what was going on. Names were mentioned, but nowhere did Father Simeon’s name appear.

The piece ended with an enjoinder to readers on their next family outing to Jolley Castle to remember as they ate their cream teas in the café what had once gone on not very far beneath their feet, the implication being that it would put an edge on their appetites.

A final note gave the information that Liam Molloy was currently working on a book called Topcliffe and Friends, An Illustrated History of Torture in the Age of Elizabeth, with a tentative publication date the following year.

Man proposes, God disposes, thought Madero with more satisfaction than piety, for which he reproved himself.

He deleted the article, brought up the e-mail he’d already written to Max and added a postscript:

Thanks for yours. You’ll see how wrong you were about Simeon when you read my attachment! By the way, could you get Tim L. to check if there’s any record of anyone from the Woollass family accessing the archive?

Best,

Mig

Back upstairs in his room he leaned on the low sill and peered out through the tiny window. Above the sun-gilt fells he could see a sky as blue as any he’d seen in Andalusia. He lowered his gaze till he picked out the twisted chimney pots of Illthwaite Hall. Frek was up there. And maybe the answer to his questions was up there too, but getting close to either wasn’t going to be easy.

He turned to look down at the fragile sheets containing the neat ciphers of Simeon Woollass, so very different from the crazed and crazy scribblings through which he’d first encountered the man.

The longer he kept quiet about his removal of the coded journal, the harder it was going to be to reestablish relations with the Woollasses.

It was no good telling himself he’d only done what any other scholar worth his salt would have done.

This wasn’t just a question of scholarly standards and historical research. This was personal, this was where God had been directing him for months, years, perhaps all his life. Max had called it a red herring. He was wrong. Mig felt he knew all about red herrings. Hadn’t he spent many years of his life following one?

And no matter what the cost, he wasn’t about to risk going astray a second time.

He sat on the bed with his laptop and settled down once more to read what he feared were the last words of his namesake and distant ancestor.

My name is Miguel Madero son and heir of Miguel Madero of… no, not heir, for he is dead… I saw him die, most foully slain… oh my father, my father.

On my sixteenth birthday my father (whose soul now flies high over the treacherous oceans with the angels) let me sail with him in our lovely ship, La Gaviota, for the first time. To Cyprus we voyaged and Crete and beyond. Our trade went well, our fine wine was much appreciated and highly valued, we took payment in gold and goods, and the sky was blue, the wind fair, the hold richly laden, and dolphins danced beneath our bow as La Gaviota flew homeward across that friendly sea. Everyone said I had quitted myself well and I could hardly wait for landfall so that I could show my mother and my sisters that I was a boy no longer. Never in my short life had I felt so perfectly happy. The world lay before me, a sunlit happy place. I sang a joyous hymn of thanks to the Blessed Virgin for the goodness and mercy she had poured upon me with such a generous and unstinting hand. There was nowhere in the most hidden corner of my being for even the shadow of a dream of such a terrible place as this northern wilderness, with its cold rain, its biting gales, its vile customs and its cruel and savage people…

Father, I know I should forgive – I pray you, show me how.

When we landed at our home port of Cadiz, there were soldiers waiting for us on the quay under the command of a boy not much older than myself, who waved a scented handkerchief to keep the smell of unwashed sailors from his nostrils and told my father he was Bernardo de Bellvis, nephew of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, commander by His Majesty’s command of the great fleet which was soon to set sail for England and bring that errant nation back to the fold of the True Church. Merchant ships were being commandeered for service in the Armada. My father had thought himself lucky in the spring of the previous year when La Gaviota had put to sea only days before the foul pirate Drake so treacherously attacked Cadiz, sinking many vessels and making off with much good wine. But now he felt he was paying for his luck when de Bellvis produced papers giving him authority to take over the ship and sail her to Lisbon to join the others.