I set my chisel down real slow, because when I pulled that one mortared stone free and reached into the dry chamber behind it, it was not the cold thing my gut was bracing for. It was a small niche, careful and dry, and set inside it was a tin box and a slate with words cut into it by hand.
No horror. A hidden chamber built back into a dry-stone wall, with one mortared stone as its only door.
The tin held photographs and a childs christening cup, and the slate, carved slow and even, was a small memorial.
The mason who built that chamber into the wall had not been hiding anything terrible, he had carved a resting place for a baby the family lost long ago, in a time and place with no money for a proper stone, and he set that memorial into the strongest wall on the land so the child would always have a marker even when a headstone was out of reach.
A folded paper in the tin told it. Generations back, the family lost an infant in a hard winter and could not afford a churchyard stone. The grandfather, a stonemason, could not bear his grandchild lying unmarked. So he cut the babys name into slate with his own hands and built it a chamber in the retaining wall he was raising anyway, a marker that would outlast them all, sealed behind a single stone only another mason would ever think to pull.
The note read: Here we remember our little one, since we could not buy her a stone. Whoever finds her, she was loved. Do not throw her name away.
The man who hired me stood there a long while. Then he did the right thing. There were names and dates enough to trace, and we found the familys descendants, who had a family story about a baby lost long ago but had never known where she was remembered.
They came out, and this fall that child finally got her churchyard stone, more than a century late, cut to match the slate her great-great-grandfather carved by hand. The slate went with her, and the tin came home to the family.
Twenty-five years laying stone and I never found the like. A single mortared stone in a dry wall turned out to be a masons memorial to a baby the family could not afford to bury properly, and I got to pull the stone and help give that child, at last, a name in the churchyard.
This one holds an old grief. However a family keeps the ones they could not lay to rest, it is love.