But it didn’t stop. For the rest of the day I could hear them, making little whinnies and clip-clops. It turned out that the auction the girl was talking about was the big deal for the students. Being selected to sell your work at Lucie’s was a prestigious achievement for the best pupils at the school. At the end of term, only the superstars of the Paris School would make the cut and be picked. Needless to say, after today I wasn’t thinking that short list was going to include me. At the end of class Augustin had looked at my drawing and hadn’t uttered a single word.

He hated my work – I could sense it. And the students hated me. So that was it. I had come all the way to Paris to be teased – just as I had been back home – for drawing horses!

***

There was a bath in my private rooms. I love baths and we don’t have one at home. That night, I lay back in the tub with my eyes shut tight, and I heard the laughter of Antoinette and her friends in my head and I felt like no matter what Nicole had said, I was never, ever going to be a real artist. I didn’t belong here. I lay there and listened to the tap drip, and then I stretched my hand back to grab the soap and I felt my knuckles rap against the wood panelling of the bathroom wall. It was a hollow sound, an empty clonk. The wall panel wasn’t solid. I tested the other panels. The sound was solid. The hollow panel was different from the rest. I knocked my knuckles against it again and this time, the panel twisted and pivoted away. I panicked, thinking I had somehow broken the wall! Then I realised it wasn’t broken at all. I had somehow uncovered a secret hidden chamber. A hidey-hole, just big enough to put personal items. I peered in but I couldn’t see anything.

I got out of the bath, towelled myself down and went and got my phone. I turned on the torch function and squinted inside the hidey-hole. At first I thought there was nothing inside at all – it looked entirely empty. But then I saw something sitting on the bottom of the cupboard. I picked it up and dusted it off. It was a book, wrapped in an ancient cloth-cover. Inside, where time hadn’t faded it, the cloth was dark brown but the exterior had been bleached like bone to grey, and on the front it was imprinted with three dark blood-red gilded letters – MRB. Later, I would discover that they were initials and the M stood for Marie. It was her first name, although no one knew her as Marie; everyone always called her Rose. Rose Bonifait. And the book I had just discovered in the secret chamber that day was her diary.