Knowing how highly lawyers price their time, he was full of apology as he was shown into the office of Andrew Southwell.

“Not at all, not at all, think nothing of it,” said Southwell, a small round man in his early thirties who pumped his hand with painful enthusiasm. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Professor Coldstream speaks very warmly of you. Very warmly indeed.”

“And of you too,” said Madero.

In fact what Max Coldstream had said when he mentioned Kendal was, “You’re in luck there, Mig. Chap called Southwell, Kendal solicitor, and mad keen local historian. OK, so he’s an amateur, but that can be an advantage. Professional historians on the whole are a deceitful, distrusting, conniving and secretive bunch of bastards who would direct a blind man up a blind alley rather than risk giving him an advantage. Enthusiastic amateurs on the other hand may lack scholarship but they often have bucketloads of information which they are eager to share. Painfully eager, if you’re in a hurry!”

It only took a couple of minutes for Madero to appreciate Coldstream’s warning.

“That’s fascinating, Mr. Southwell,” he said, interrupting a potted history of the chambers building. “Now, you will recall from my letter I’m on my way to talk to the Woollass family of Illthwaite Hall in connection with my thesis on the personal experience of English Catholics during the Reformation. By chance I came across a reference to a Jesuit priest, Father Simeon Woollass, the son of a cadet branch of the family residing here in Kendal. I thought it might be worth diverting to see what I could find out about him. A priest in the family must have made the problems of recusancy even greater, as perhaps your researches have already discovered.”