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Ben sat up, crossed-legged beside him. Nice view.
‘Where? Oh, God, don’t tell me. Siberia?’
Aleksey made a face, which made Ben laugh. ‘Cornwall.’
‘Cornwall?’ Ben twiddled with the sheet for a moment. ‘Do you think she could be having you on? Revenge? About the second-hand book and me...?’
‘What!’ This had genuinely not occurred to Aleksey, and he didn’t like it, both because it was suggested by Ben, and because if it were true then he’d been taken in—hook, line, and sinker. Which was an appalling thought.
‘No. It’s all official.’
‘But Cornwall doesn’t have any islands, Nik!’
Oh, God, where did you start?
‘The Scillies?’
Ben snorted. Then he began to laugh. ‘There you are! Jesus, Nik, I can’t believe you fell for it. She pretended to sell you an island, and they were actually called the sillies, and you didn’t get it? Maybe it’s the language thing. In English, silly means—’
‘Sometimes, Benjamin, having a conversation with you is like having one with your daughter, who, if you have forgotten, frequently uses that word in my proximity. I do know what it means. There is a string of islands at the very end of Cornwall called The Scillies. With a c.Heowns them all, of course, except this one, which was given to his younger brother. But something has to be sold to pay off some minor indiscretion, of which I was not informed, by this princely nonentity whom I had the distinct misfortune to meet once. He made the older one seem somewhat intelligent. So, we now own an island. I ask again, what do you think?’
Ben did something Aleksey could only describe as a small…bounce. ‘When can we go see it?’
Aleksey grinned and rolled over onto his side, conspiratorially close. He and Nikolas had lain like this in their childhood bed, his twin wide-eyed and listening, him spinning plans for adventures and schemes.
‘He needs to move his belongings—’
‘There’s stuff on it? Oh, my, God, I thought you’d just bought a kind of rock or something.’
‘No, there’s a house, some other buildings related to that, I suppose—staff cottages maybe?—and a lighthouse that—’
‘What!’ Ben flung himself down to lie alongside him, staring up at the ceiling. ‘A lighthouse. We own a…wow.Wow.’
Aleksey thought about it for a moment, then grinned and rolled onto his back too, murmuring, ‘Yes,wow.’
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
They were very late rising the next day because vital research on a phone held above the head in the warmth of entangled limbs took a long time and they had subsequently not fallen asleep until the early hours. Ben, at Aleksey’s apparent lack of knowledge about what he’d actually bought, had suggested Googling it.La Luz Island. There hadn’t been much information available, but they had managed to find it on a satellite image. Possibly. It hadn’t been named on the map, but it had seemed to be the only visible mass from the nearly two hundred that made up the chain of the tiny archipelago that was at all possible, being large enough and the farthest west. This little nugget of information theyhaddiscovered: the lighthouse it supported was there because its job was to warn all ships coming to England from the west that these were dangerous waters. Only a dozen or so of the hundreds of formations were actually habitable islands; the rest were rocks and islets, lethal to shipping.
They hadn’t been able to enlarge the map enough to see a house or the lighthouse, but they’d both been convinced that this wastheirisland.
When they were enjoying a late breakfast, Ben finally asked something he clearly hadn’t wanted to but apparently felt needed to be aired. ‘What did it cost?’
Aleksey smirked. ‘A lot less than it is worth. I have them over a barrel, as they cannot sell it publicly.’
‘I wonder what the crime is they’re coving up.’
‘Hmm. So do I. I’m hoping Peyton can discover it for me.’
‘Must be bad, or they’d bluff it out.’
‘They would. Infidelity and divorce are apparently now fully accepted.’
‘Murder?’
‘Possibly. That does not bring down rulers in other countries, however. You can keep the remains of your enemies in your fridge to snack on, and still not be kicked out.’
