“Because anyone who needs to know about it does,” he said, not looking at Gamache, but looking toward the closed door ahead of them. “And anyone who doesn’t need to know should not find it.”
“So it is meant to be hidden,” said Gamache, pressing the point.
“The option is meant to be there,” admitted the abbot. They’d arrived at the locked door to the outside world. He finally turned to look directly at Gamache. “If we need to hide, the room exists.”
“But why would you need to hide?”
The abbot smiled a little. It was just this side of condescending. “I’d have thought you of all people would know why, Chief Inspector. It’s because the world is not always kind. We all need a safe place, sometimes.”
“And yet the threat, finally, didn’t come from the world,” said Gamache.
“True.”
Gamache considered for a moment. “So you concealed the door to your Chapter room in the wall of the chapel?”
“I didn’t put it there. All this was done long before I came. The men who built the monastery did it. It was a different time. A brutal time. When monks really did need to hide.”
Gamache nodded, and looked at the thick wooden door in front of them. The gateway to the outside world. That was still locked, even after the passage of centuries.
He knew the abbot was right. Back when the massive tree was cut down for this door, hundreds of years ago, it wasn’t tradition but necessity that turned the key in the lock. The Reformation, the Inquisition, the internecine battles. It was a dangerous time to be a Catholic. And, as with recent events, the threat often came from within.
And so, in Europe priest’s holes were built into homes. Tunnels dug for escape.
Some had escaped so far they popped up in the New World. And even that wasn’t far enough. The Gilbertines had gone even further. They disappeared into the blank spot on the map.
Vanished.
To reappear more than three hundred years later. On the radio.
The voices of an order everyone had thought was extinct were heard first by a few, then by hundreds, then by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Then, thanks to the Internet, finally millions of people listened to the odd little recording.
Of monks chanting.
The recording had become a sensation. Suddenly their Gregorian chants were everywhere. De rigueur. Deemed a “must listen” by the intelligentsia, by the cognoscenti, and finally, by the masses.
While their voices were everywhere, the monks themselves were nowhere to be seen. Eventually they’d been found. Gamache remembered his own astonishment when it was discovered where the monks lived. He’d assumed it was some remote hilltop in Italy or France or Spain. Some tiny, ancient, crumbling monastery. But no. The recording was made by an order of monks living right there, in Québec. And it wasn’t just any order. The Trappists, the Benedictines, the Dominicans. No. Their discovery seemed to astonish even the Catholic Church. The recording had been made by an order of monks the Church seemed to think had died out. The Gilbertines.
But there they were, in the wilderness, on the shores of this far-flung lake. Very much alive, and singing chants so ancient and so beautiful they awakened something primal in millions worldwide.
The world had come calling. Some curious. Some desperate for the peace these men seemed to have found. But this “gate,” made from trees felled hundreds of years ago, held firm. It did not open for strangers.
Until today.
It had opened to let them in, and now it was about to open again, to let them out.
The portier came forward, the large black key in his hand. At a small sign from the abbot he inserted it in the lock. It turned easily, and the door swung open.
Through the rectangle the men saw the setting sun, its reds and oranges reflected in the calm, fresh lake. The forests now were dark, and birds swooped low over the water, calling to each other.
But by far the most glorious sight was the oil-stained boatman, smoking a cigarette and sitting on the dock. Fishing.
He waved as the door swung open, and the Chief Inspector waved back. Then the boatman struggled to his feet, his considerable bottom all but mooning the monks. Gamache motioned Beauvoir and Charbonneau, with the body, to leave first. Then he and the abbot followed them to the dock.
The rest of the monks stayed inside, clustered around the open door. Craning to see out.
The abbot tipped his head to the red-streaked sky and closed his eyes. Not in prayer, Gamache thought, but in a sort of bliss. Enjoying the meager light on his pale face. Enjoying the pine-scented air. Enjoying his feet on the uneven, unpredictable ground.