It is like, Matthew Slythe had preached, a strong box. When the lid is open a thief in the night will see only an ordinary chest, but the owner knows that there is a secret layer at the bottom of the chest. God is the owner, and he knows what is in the secret part of each person’s life. Campion remembered the story and turned slowly, knowing that her father drew his stories and examples from his own life.

It would not be this chest but his own, and Campion went soft as the night across the floor, like a thief in the darkness, into the room that was strewn with his clothes, pulled the untidy mess out of the huge wooden chest and made a pile of clothes on the floor.

She searched the bare, wooden box, finding nothing, but always hearing the voice across the years from the kitchen garden. “Look, child!”

She tried to lift the chest, but it was impossibly heavy, and she probed at its corners, pushed each knothole in the wood. Nothing moved, nothing gave, yet still she knew she was warm.

In the end it was simple. The base of the chest was surrounded by a thick skirting board of varnished wood which she had tugged and pushed. Then she thought that it might be easier to lift the chest at one end, jam a pair of her father’s great shoes beneath, and thus feel the chest’s base. She shuffled slowly to the right-hand side of the huge chest, moved a pair of her father’s breeches out of the way, and saw something she had missed in the thick darkness of the room. There was a handle cut into the skirting board, presumably to facilitate the lifting of the heavy chest, and she knelt in front of it, gripped the simple handle, and tried once more to lift the chest.

It would not move. It was simply too heavy, but the skirting board moved. Only the smallest fraction, but she knew she had not been deceived, and she hauled on it again, and again she felt the tiny movement.

There was a small window behind her, its wooden shutter open, and she was aware that the sky was lightening. Dawn would come soon.

She frowned, the tiredness heavy on her, as she contemplated the skirting board with its cut-out handle. It had moved, but it revealed nothing, and she tugged it again, knowing the effort to be useless, and trying to think what she should do.

She put her hand into the hole and felt with her fingers at the back of the board. There was something cold there, something made of metal, and her long fingers explored the metal, found a ring, and she tugged on it.

She heard the sound of a bolt sliding open. She froze, half expecting the small sound to bring Goodwife from her room, but the house was still.

Campion’s heart was beating as it did before she went naked into the water.