So she kept quiet about her condition and after a short period craved his permission to return to her family in Eskdale, which he gave most willingly, glad to see this reminder of his brother removed from Foulgate.

In Eskdale as her condition became increasingly more difficult to hide she had turned to her first cousin, Michael, five years her senior and the man everyone thought she would marry till the eyes of her more distant and much more powerful Skaddale cousin had fixed upon her. A quiet, thoughtful man, he had listened to her story, then proposed that they should marry and he would declare the child his own.

News of the intended marriage only two months into her widowhood had necessarily been sent to Illthwaite. Andrew had turned up at the wedding, ostensibly to offer his blessing, but Jenny had felt his sharp piggy eyes fixed on her waistline.

And news of her labor at the end of November, barely seven months after the marriage, must have set the dreadful machinery of his Gowder mind clanking to a dire conclusion.

He waited a couple of weeks. Infant mortality rate in the first few days was high. With premature births it was near one hundred percent.

But the child was flourishing and now Andrew was coming to see for himself.

The baby has finished feeding. Softly she croons it to sleep. But she does not set it in its cradle, holding it close in her arms as she hears the noise of a horse outside.

A few moments later Andrew comes through the door.

“Give you good day, sister,” he says. “And this is the child.”

“It is, brother Andrew,” she says.

He stoops to look closer, then seizes a brand from the fire and holds it over her head so that the flickering light falls full on the baby, waking it.

Already the features are becoming individualized. Full, dark eyes, a fine rather sharp nose, well-defined cheekbones, a light golden skin, and Jenny’s own bright red hair, though still sparse, promises a rich harvest on the noble head.

There is no resemblance in even the smallest detail to the solid brutal face that squints down at it.

Satisfied, Andrew stands upright as a thin, slightly built man comes into the hut.

“Give you good day, cousin,” he says softly.

“And you too, cousin,” says Andrew. “I have been admiring your fine child. And what will you call him?”

It is Jenny who answers.

“Michael,” she says. “After his father. Michael Galley.”

Most of what I know about the incredible scandal of the estimated 150,000 child migrants shipped from Britain to the furthermost corners of its Empire derives from Margaret Humphrey’s moving exposé, Empty Cradles (Doubleday, 1994; Corgi, 1995), which I recommend unreservedly. But no character in my book is based on any individual involved in any capacity in that sorry tale of abuse of persons and of power.

Australia figures in my story and anything I have got right about matters Australian is almost certainly down to Mel Cain and Christine Farmer of HarperCollins, who organized my only visit to their lovely country and made sure I had a great time. By the same token, anything I’ve got wrong is down to me, so let me put my hand up now and save you the bother of writing!

But most of the action of The Stranger House takes place in Cumbria, England, which is the powsowdy the politicians made thirty years ago of the grand old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, with segments of Lancashire and Yorkshire stapled on to straighten the boundaries and make it fit more easily into a filing cabinet.

This was the setting of my formative and is the setting of my degenerative years and I feel some natural unease at locating on my own doorstep a story which is full of eccentric people often behaving badly. So let me state without reservation that the valley of Skaddale and its village of Illthwaite are entirely figments of my imagination. Their names, population, history and topography are invented, and they bear no relation other than the most basically generic to any real places.

This means that my dear friends, my excellent neighbors, and indeed all occupants, native or new-come, of this loveliest of landscapes can rest peacefully in their beds.

And so can their lawyers.

My heroine’s terms of reference are mathematical, my hero’s religious.

No theologian or mathematician I have met provides a model here.

Yet, despite the above disclaimers, it should be remembered that just as theologians and mathematicians use impossibilities, such as the square root of minus one or the transubstantiation of wine into blood, to express their eternal verities, so it is with writers and their fictions.

In other words, just because I’ve made it all up doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

REGINALD HILL has been widely published in both England and the United States. He received Britain ’s most coveted mystery writers’ prize, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, as well as the Golden Dagger for his Dalziel/Pascoe series. He lives with his wife in Cumbria, England.