The Stranger House. Reginald Hill

       2 una familia buena y devota

      Twelve thousand miles away and some five months before Sam Flood woke to her eleventh birthday, a boy in Jerez de la Frontera in the Spanish province of Cadiz in the region of Andalusia had woken to his sixteenth.

      His name was Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, known to friends and family as Mig.

      The Elkington came from his English mother, the rest from his father, also Miguel, as had been all elder sons of the Madero family, whose business records outlining their involvement in the Spanish wine trade went back five centuries.

      He and little Sam had absolutely nothing in common.

      Except wine.

      And blood.

      But his was flowing from his hands and his feet.

      He rolled out of bed and padded across the cool tiles to the bathroom. The hour was early and his parents and younger brother, Cristóbal, still slept. He stood under the shower and let the water flow over his upraised hands, down his arms and the length of his golden brown body till it washed over his feet, bearing with it the bright red stain.

      Finally the water ran clear.

      He looked at his palms. Nothing to see, no wound, and the pain had quickly declined to a faint prickling deep beneath the skin. The same with his feet.

      This prickling he had known since infancy, always in the spring around the time of his birthday, steadily growing in strength over the years till it was felt for a few moments as agonizing pain. But never before had there been blood.

      As he dried himself, he felt a presence behind him. He turned, thinking his movements had roused somebody else in the house and expecting to see his young brother, or—worse from the point of view of explanation—his father.

      Instead he saw standing in the doorway a young man in the black robe of a priest. He had the face of a Michelangelo angel and his fair hair was lifted by some unfeelable breeze into a kind of halo. His expression was serious, almost frowning. He stretched his cupped hands towards Mig. In them lay what seemed to be a trio of eggs, slightly bigger than hens’, one white as marble, one slate-blue, the third a sandy red. Then his face relaxed into a smile of great sweetness and he turned and walked away.

      Mig made no effort to follow him. This was a vision and there was no point in pursuing visions. His certainty in this matter arose from another of his childish secrets which some instinct had warned him against sharing with adults.

      He saw ghosts.

      Or rather, in certain places at certain times he felt the presence of departed souls so strongly that it took very little to bring them to the point of materialization. To start with this was a not unpleasant experience, as in the case of his maternal great-grandfather, a jolly old man who used to sit on his bed and talk to him whenever his English mother took him to stay at her family house near Winchester.

      Then a couple of years later on a visit to Seville’s magnificent Gothic cathedral, he had wandered away from his mother who was dealing with an emergency caused by little Cristóbal’s sudden discovery of the pleasures of projectile vomiting. Finding himself in a gloomy and deserted cloister, Mig had become aware of one of what he thought of as his friendly presences. He bent his mind to encouraging it to materialize, which it did, but this time terrifyingly in the form of a wild-eyed and dishevelled old man who had come hobbling towards him with claw-like hands outstretched, an incoherent babble of Latin and Spanish and English spilling from his toothless and drooling mouth.

      Mig had been so afraid he would probably have fled blindly and got himself utterly lost in the vastness of the old cathedral. But when he turned to run, he saw a young priest standing a few yards away. The man had smiled and beckoned. He had followed, trotting fast in an effort to come up close behind his guide but somehow never getting any nearer. Then they had turned a corner and there were his mother and brother who hadn’t even noticed his absence.

      When he looked to thank the priest, he had disappeared. But he’d never forgotten that young face with its sweet smile.

      And now he had seen it again.

      Musing on what this could mean, he returned to his room, where he stripped the stained sheet from the bed, checking that nothing had penetrated to the mattress, then thrust it into the linen basket that stood in the corner. His mother, being English, had been very insistent that her sons were not going to grow up with any hidalgo expectation that the world owed them a living. ‘Noblesse oblige,’ she said. ‘Which means you don’t expect other people to pick up your dirty washing.’

      Cristina (née Christine) Madero’s elder son now sat on the edge of his bed and contemplated his future. For years the only ambition he’d nursed which ran counter to his preordained lot of running the family business had been to sign on as a striker with, first of all, Sevilla FC and ultimately Man United. At first these strange physical symptoms had only concerned him as possible obstacles to his athletic ambitions. But there seemed to be no long-term effect, and what made him abandon his hoped-for sporting career was the gradual realization that, though he was good, he would never be Best. Anything less had no appeal, and he set aside his football boots with no regrets.

      Now it seemed to him that perhaps he had been denied that ultimate sporting edge because another purpose was written for him. To have interpreted this intermittent irritation in his hands and feet as a form of stigmata would have been blasphemously arrogant. But the blood today had changed all that. The blood and the second manifestation of the young priest. The first time the vision had invited him to follow. Now, ten years later, it had offered him a gift. The symbolism of the eggs was not hard to read. In form perfection; in content life. Was not that the essence of a priest’s existence, to strive to be perfect and so reveal life’s true meaning?

      The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him clear that this was the message he had been receiving for all his short years.

      Yet he was in many ways what is called an oldfashioned child, and he knew that getting other important people to accept his sense of vocation was not going to be easy.

      Problem one was his own family.

      The Maderos were in the eyes of their bishop the very model of a good devout Catholic family—generous in charity, regular attenders at Mass, both their sons serving as altar boys—but never in the five hundred years since they started to make their name in the wine business had a single man of the family offered himself for the priesthood.

      Problem two was their family priest.

      Father Adolfo was a hard-headed Catalonian who regarded what he called hysterical religiosity with a cold and cynical eye. His reaction to any