As I rounded the corner into the lane, something hurled itself at me, a dark shape exploding from a dark corner so that instinctively I threw up my arms to protect myself. The next minute I was flat on my back in the dirt and a shaggy, smelly creature was half on top of me, alternately whining and licking me.
‘Rikki!’ I said, trying to sit up. I put my arms around his warm familiar shape. Unaccountably I found myself crying into his shoulder. His rough tongue set to work again.
‘Good lad,’ I said, managing at last to lift myself part way off the ground.
I ran my hands over his sides and back. His fur was matted and beneath it he was thinner than I remembered. I could feel the knobs of his backbone.
‘Rikki! Why are you so thin?’
His only response was to sit on my feet and pant lovingly into my face. He was still wearing his collar, but otherwise, as far as I could judge in the growing dusk, he was in poor shape.
‘Has Joan been ill-treating you?’ I frowned. Joan had been annoyed when I had brought the dog back from the Low Countries and tried to throw him out into the street, but my father and I had always insisted that she must treat him with kindness.
‘Come on, lad.’ I managed to heave him off my feet and scramble up. ‘We both need a good meal and a wash. And I can see that I’ll have to spend hours combing the tangles from your fur.’
He leaned against my leg and pressed a wet nose into my palm. I rubbed my damp face with my ragged sleeve. My heart ached with the joy of seeing him again, the dog who had followed me halfway across the Low Countries from love and loyalty, at a time when I had barely known him. I owed my life to him.
We started up the lane together. Outside our house, a woman I had never seen before was sweeping the front step and scolding a boy of five or six back indoors. She was lit from behind by the light from the doorway, and I could see clearly that it was not Joan. Had my father taken on a new servant? But the woman looked too well dressed to be a servant. I approached her cautiously, for the past months had taught me to be even more distrustful of strangers than I had been before.
‘Is Dr Alvarez at home?’ I asked her.
The woman stopped her sweeping and stared at me. Then she leaned on her broom and frowned. ‘Are you his son? We were told his son had sailed on the Portugal venture.’
‘Aye,’ I said cautiously. Something was wrong.
‘I am his son, Christoval Alvarez.’ I frowned at her, suddenly full of mistrust. There was no Inquisition here. Surely my father was safe in London. Why was he not coming out to greet me?
‘Where is he?’ I demanded harshly. ‘Where is Dr Alvarez?’
‘You had better come inside,’ she said.
More by This Author
The Anniversary
The Travellers
A Running Tide
The Testament of Mariam
Flood
The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez
The Enterprise of England
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendinning
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.
Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, the second is The Enterprise of England and the third is The Portuguese Affair.
She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.
http://www.annswinfen.com