A Place of Hiding

If I show you this, it says something, Paul. Something larger than words. Something bigger than thoughts.

Paul reckoned there was enough room for the grenade within the cache. He’d placed his hand in there before, guided by Mr. Guy’s own hand with Mr. Guy’s reassuring words spoken softly into his ear: There’s nothing in there at the moment, I wouldn’t play a nasty trick on you, Prince. Thus he knew there was space for one fist clasped over another, and that was more than enough space for a grenade to occupy. And the depth of the cache was more than sufficient. For Paul hadn’t been able to feel the end of it no matter how far he’d managed to stretch his arm. He moved the camp bed to one side and he set the wooden box with its candle in the middle of the alcove floor. Taboo whined at this alteration in his environment, but Paul patted his head and fondly touched the tip of his nose. Nothing to worry about, his gesture told the dog. We’re safe in this place. No one knows about it now but you and me. Carefully clutching the grenade, he lay on the cold stone floor. He squirreled his arm into the narrow fissure. It widened six or so inches from the opening, and even though he couldn’t see far into the interior of the hiding spot, he knew where the second opening was by feel, so he anticipated no problem in depositing the hand grenade there. But there was a problem. Not four inches inside the fissure was something else. He felt his knuckles press against it first, something firm and unmoving and entirely unexpected. Paul gasped and withdrew his hand, but it was only a moment before he realised that whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t alive, so there was no reason to be afraid of it. He set the grenade carefully on the camp bed, and he brought the candle closer to the opening of the fissure. Problem was, he couldn’t illuminate the fissure and see inside it at the same time. So he resumed his former position on his stomach and slid his hand, then his arm, back into the hiding place.

His fingers found it, something firm but giving. Not hard. Smooth. Shaped like a cylinder. He grasped it and began to pull it out. This is a special place, a place of secrets, and it’s our secret now. Yours and mine. Can you keep secrets, Paul?

He could. Oh, he could. He could better than could. Because as he pulled it towards him, Paul understood exactly what it was that Mr. Guy had hidden within the dolmen.

The island, after all, was a landscape of secrets and the dolmen itself was a secret place within that larger landscape of things buried, other things unspoken, and memories people wished to forget. It was no wonder to Paul that deep within the ages of an earth that could still yield medals, sabres, bullets, and other items more than half a century old lay buried somewhere something even more valuable, something from the time of the privateers or even further back, but something precious. And what he was pulling from the fissure was the key to finding that long-ago-buried something.

He’d found a final gift from Mr. Guy, who had already given him so very much.

“énne rouelle dé fa?tot,” Ruth Brouard said in answer to Margaret Chamberlain’s question. “It’s used for barns, Margaret.”

Margaret thought this reply was deliberately obtuse, so typical of Ruth, whom she’d never particularly come to like despite having had to live with Guy’s sister for the entirety of her marriage to the man. She’d clung too much to Guy, Ruth had, and too great a devotion between siblings was unseemly. It smacked of...Well, Margaret didn’t even want to think of what it smacked of. Yes, she realised that these specific siblings—

Jewish like herself but European Jewish during World War II, which gave them certain allowances for strange behaviour, she would grant them that—had lost every single relation to the unmitigated evil of the Nazis and thus had been forced to become everything to each other from early childhood. But the fact that Ruth had never developed a life of her own in all these years was not only questionable and pre-Victorian, it was something that made her an incomplete woman in Margaret’s eyes, sort of a lesser creature who’d lived a half life, and that life in the shadows to boot. Margaret decided patience would be in order. She said, “For barns? I don’t quite understand, dear. The stone would have to be quite small, wouldn’t it? To have gone into Guy’s mouth?” She saw her sisterin-law flinch at the last question, as if talking about it awakened her darkest fantasies of how Guy had met his end: writhing on the beach, clawing uselessly at his throat. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Margaret needed information and she meant to have it.