A Place of Hiding

Paul took Deborah round the back of the manor house, and at first she thought he was heading for the stables. But he didn’t give these a second glance. Instead, he continued across the yard that separated the stables from the house and gave way to some shrubbery, which he plunged through as well.

Following him, she found herself on a wide expanse of lawn beyond which a woodland of elms stood. Paul ducked into these and Deborah increased her pace so as not to lose him. When she got to the trees, she saw there was an easy path to follow, the ground made spongy by the heavy fall of leaves that lay upon it. She wound along this until ahead of her in the distance she caught a glimpse of a rough stone wall. She saw Paul clambering up. She thought she might lose him for good at this point, but when he reached the top, he paused. He glanced back as if to see if she was still following him, and he waited until she’d reached the bottom of the wall herself, at which point he extended his hand to her and helped her over to the other side.

There Deborah saw that the careful forms and details of Le Reposoir gave way to a large but disused paddock, where weeds, bushes, and brambles grew rampant nearly to waist height and a path beaten through them led to a curious mound of earth. She wasn’t surprised when Paul dropped from the wall and scurried along this path. At the mound of earth, he headed right and skirted its base. She hastened to follow. She was wondering how an odd lump of land could hide a painting, when she saw the carefully placed stones that ran along the bottom of the mound. She realised then that she was looking at no natural hillock, but, rather, something that had been built by man in prehistory. The path to the right was as beaten down as had been the access from the wall, and a short distance round the perimeter of the mound, she found Paul Fielder working the combination on a lock that held closed a worn and crooked oak door, which would allow them inside. He appeared to hear her, for he used his shoulder to shelter the lock’s combination from her view. With a click and a snap he had it off, and he used his foot to shove the door open while he carefully put the lock in his pocket. The resulting opening into the mound was no more than three and a half feet high. Paul crouched, crab-walked through it, and quickly disappeared into the darkness.

There was nothing for it but to run off and report back to Simon like a dutiful little wife or to follow the boy. Deborah did the latter. Inside the door, a narrow and musty passage pressed down on her, less than five feet from stone floor to stone ceiling. But after some six yards the passage opened and heightened to a central vault, dimly illuminated from the daylight outside. Deborah stood upright, blinked, and waited for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she realised she was within a large chamber. It was tightly constructed entirely of granite—floor, walls, and ceiling— with what looked like a sentry stone at one side in which one’s imagination could almost see the ancient carving of a warrior with his weapon ready to ward off interlopers. An additional piece of granite raised off the floor some four inches seemed to serve as a form of altar. A candle stood near it, but this was not lit. Nor was the boy anywhere inside. Deborah had a bad moment. She pictured herself locked up in this place with no one knowing exactly where she was. She allowed herself a fervent curse for having blithely followed Paul Fielder, but then she stilled her nerves and she called Paul’s name. In reply she heard the scratch of a match. Light flared from a fissure to her right in a misshapen stone wall. She saw that it indicated the presence of yet another chamber, and she went in this direction.

The aperture that she found was not more than ten inches wide. She slid through it, brushing close to the damp coolness of the exterior stone wall, and saw that this secondary chamber had been fitted out with plenty of candles and a small folding camp bed. At its head was a pillow; at its foot was a carved wooden box; in the middle Paul Fielder was sitting with a book of matches in one hand and a lit candle in the other. This he set about fixing into a niche formed by two of the stones in the external wall. When he’d managed this, he lit a second candle and dripped wax from it to fix it to the floor.

“Is this your secret place?” Deborah asked him quietly. “Is this where you found the picture, Paul?”