A Place of Hiding

“But if I’d known, I never would have even suggested, let alone insisted...Adrian, for the love of God. Why didn’t you tell me this happened?”


“Because I decided to use it,” he said. “If reason couldn’t get him to make me the loan I needed, then I thought guilt could. Only, I forgot Dad was immune to guilt. He was immune to everything.” Then he smiled. And at the moment, the chill-turned-frost went to ice in Margaret’s blood when her son next said, “Well, practically everything, as things turned out.”




Chapter 9


Deborah St. James followed the adolescent boy at a distance. She wasn’t at her best striking up conversations with strangers, but she wasn’t about to leave the scene without at least putting her fingers into the situation. She knew that her reluctance did nothing more than confirm her husband’s earlier trepidation about her coming to Guernsey by herself to look into China’s difficulties, Cherokee’s presence apparently not counting with Simon. So she was doubly determined that her natural reticence wouldn’t defeat her in the present circumstance.

The boy didn’t know she was behind him. He didn’t appear to have any particular destination in mind. He forced his way out of the crowd in the sculpture garden first and then headed across a crisp oval lawn that lay beyond an ornate conservatory at one end of the house. At the side of this lawn, he leaped between two tall rhododendrons and scooped up a thin bough from a chestnut tree growing near a group of three outbuildings. At these, he veered suddenly to the east where, in the distance and through the trees, Deborah could see a stone wall giving on to fields and meadows. But instead of heading in that direction—the surest way to leave behind him the funeral and everything that went with the funeral—he began to trudge along the pebbly road that led back towards the house again. As he walked, he roughly used his bough like a switch against the shrubbery that grew lushly along the drive. This bordered a series of meticulously kept gardens to the east of the house, but he didn’t enter any of these either. Instead, he forged off through the trees beyond the shrubbery and picked up his pace when he apparently heard someone approaching one of the cars that were parked in this area.

Deborah lost him momentarily there. It was gloomy near the trees and he was wearing dark brown from head to toe, so he was difficult to see. But she hurried forward in the general direction she’d seen him take, and she caught him up on a path that dipped down to a meadow. In the middle of this, the tiled roof of what looked like a Japanese teahouse rose behind both a stand of delicate maples and an ornamental wooden fence that was oiled to maintain its original rich colour and brightly accented in red and black. It was, she saw, yet another garden on the estate. The boy crossed a dainty wooden bridge which curved above a depression in the land. He tossed his branch aside, picked his way along some stepping stones, and strode up to a scalloped gate in the fence. He shoved this open and disappeared inside. The gate swung silently shut behind him. Deborah quickly followed, crossing over the bridge that spanned a little gully in which grey stones had been placed with careful attention to what grew round them. She approached the gate and saw what she hadn’t seen before: a bronze plaque set into the wood. à la mémoire de Miriam etBenjamin Brouard, assassinés par les Nazis à Auschwitz. Nous n’oublierons ja-mais. Deborah read the words and recognised enough of them to know that the garden was one of remembrance.

She pushed open the gate upon a world that was different to what she’d seen so far on the ground of Le Reposoir. The lush and exuberant growth of plants and trees had been disciplined here. An austere order had been imposed upon it with much of the foliage stripped away from the trees and the shrubbery trimmed into formal shapes. These were pleasing to the eye and they melded one into the other in a pattern that directed one’s gaze round the perimeter of the garden to yet another arched bridge, this one extending over a large meandering pond on which lily pads grew. Just beyond this pond stood the teahouse whose roof Deborah had glimpsed from the other side of the fence. It had parchment doors in the manner of private Japanese buildings, and one of these doors had been slid open.