“A most precious place,” she said. “George, Regina herself built this, fifteen centuries ago. It has been rebuilt several times since—this level didn’t even exist for centuries after Regina’s death—but always exactly as she had intended it. And what it contains, she brought from home . . . Take a look inside.”

I crouched and peered. I saw three little statues, standing in a row. They looked like grumpy old women wearing duffel coats. The statues were poorly made, lumpy and with grotesque faces; they weren’t even identical. But they were very ancient, I saw, worn by much handling.

Rosa said, “The Romans used to believe that each household had its own gods. And these were Regina’s family gods—our gods. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here the matres have stayed ever since, as have Regina’s descendants. So you see, this is our home, mine and yours. Not Manchester, not even Britain. This is why we belong here, because this is where our deepest roots go down into the earth. This is where our family gods are . . .”

All part of the sales pitch, I told myself. And yet I was impressed, even touched. Rosa made a kind of genuflection before moving on.

A way farther on, we came to a doorway.

It was a big room—I strained to see—but it had the atmosphere of an old people’s rest home. A series of large chairs had been set out in the musty dark. The chairs looked elaborate, as if packed with medical equipment. Figures reclined in the chairs. Attendants moved silently back and forth, nurses perhaps, but wearing the bland smock uniforms of the Order. Most of the “patients” wore blankets over their legs, or over their whole bodies, and drips had been set up beside two of them. The faces of the women in the chairs looked caved in, old. But I could see bulges over the bellies of several of them, bulges that looked like nothing so much as pregnancy.

In one of the chairs, far from the door, a woman was sitting up. She looked younger, and her hair looked blond, not gray. Something about the shape of her face reminded me of Lucia. But she was too far away for me to see clearly, and an attendant came to her and pressed something to her neck, and the woman subsided back into silence.

“A hundred years old, and still fertile . . .” Rosa murmured.

It was all just as Peter and I had put together from the garbled accounts of Lucia and Daniel. But even so, standing here, confronted by the almost absurd reality of it, it was all but impossible to believe.

She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.