"You've all been looking at this wrong," I said seriously. You've been asking whether things that happened centuries ago could affect things now. The real question is whether things that never happened at all could affect things now.
"This book," I picked up Rev. Robert Kilbride's book, "is a work of fiction from beginning to end. I checked - which is very easy to do these days. There are no records of a Dentree Priory before 1847..."
"But there wasn't a house here before that," Victoria objected.
"There was. Dentree House, a very boring, very ordinary house. Not open ground strewn with bits of priory the way Kilbride tells it. And before Dentree House was built in the 17th Century there was a Medieval fortified house."
"And the Priory?"
"THIS is the Priory, the only building called the Priory there's ever been on this site."
"What about the ruins?"
"Fake, follies. That was what disturbed poor Connie. There was no order to the ruins, no ground-plan. And the carved stonework was a hodge-podge of periods, pieces taken from real Medieval sites. I checked one of the old walls. It hasn't enough foundation to stand much higher than it is, but it's supposed to have been part of an incredibly rich priory. There never was a real priory here, there never were any monks here, so there was no concealed treasure, no Prior and his faithful monks to torture. It was all a story made up when the house was built. Robert Kilbride and his friend Sir Archibald Broun were Romantics. It was fashionable to call houses 'castle' or 'priory' back then. That didn't mean it was on a real monastic site, and Kilbride's original readers would have understood this. Look at the book, it's got acres of dialogue, details of the sort of things that were unlikely to have been recorded, and no details at all of the things that would have been in real histories. It's a conceit, an invented history for an invented house.
"The monasteries in this part of Scotland weren't destroyed in the Reformation at all, they were destroyed by English troops BEFORE the Reformation, when Henry VIII wanted to force the infant Mary Queen of Scots to marry his infant son Edward. What's more, small monastic foundations in Scotland weren't rich then, they were usually very poor. Local nobles used them as slush funds. Kilbride's story isn't a real story of the Reformation, it's a 19th century Romantic's story of the Reformation.
"The bit about the Jesuit torture-chamber is another piece of fiction. In England Bloody Mary had protestants burned, but Mary Queen of Scots never had the authority to arrest protestants - and she never tried to. Her 'counter reformation' was a charm offensive. She was young and pretty and charming, and she could make the Catholic Church look attractive. These stories about torture reflect a Victorian, not a 16th century, mind.
"As for 'The Devil Pit', the idea of the Jesuits being in league with the Devil is a Protestant one. No Roman Catholic would say such a thing..."
"But the Roman Catholic Church burned all those people..." Victoria began. I shook my head.
"No, Victoria, the Roman Catholic Church never burned anyone. Medieval society was very ordered, a place for everyone and everyone in his place. The Church didn't kill, it handed people over to the state to be killed. The story of the Devil Pit by James Broun is just imitation Edgar Allen Poe. It never happened in Scotland, it never happened in England - it never happened anywhere. But a Protestant public was eager for stories about the wickedness of Rome and wasn't soo concerned whether or not they were true. Broun was writing an alternative fake history to Kilbride's of a generation before."
"But the pit..."
"A Medieval well that the killer specially adapted," I replied. "The pointing in the walls of the pit was new, not centuries old. The equipment was in perfect working order - things like that only stay working without being maintained in the movies."
"How did you escape?"
"Brains. The killer was pretty clever too, but made two mistakes. The first was believing eveything they read in Victorian histories, the second was trying to kill ME in the pit."
"Who did it?" Victoria asked in wonder.
"Don't give me that, Victoria Hoffmann. YOU did it!"
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