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Stay or go.
Their trial was not yet over.
But apparently it was.
When they hobbled to the boatshed, still undecided between them who would attempt this trip, they discovered the canoes were rotten, holed and useless.
They sat together on the dock, keeping their blistered feet out of the water, sunk in exhaustion, hunger and pain. The dogs, freed from the confines of the house, gambolled on the shore, working off some of the food they’d consumed. PB plunged into the water, apparently over the shock of his first swimming lesson, paddling happily to them. Aleksey watched him for a while. He appeared to be trying to keep his recent puppyhood tamped well down, but was failing badly.
‘Rabbits!’
Aleksey blurted this out so loudly and so suddenly that Ben started as if poked. His eyes widened.
‘This island is covered in rabbits, Ben, remember PB?’
‘I can catch fucking rabbits better than he can. SAS here,remember?’
Aleksey grinned, regretted it, ignored his split lips and began to count on his fingers. ‘Three weeks. Minus three days? Do the maths. When we don’t turn up in Penzance, the cretin will come for us.’
‘Fish! We’re surrounded by fucking fish, Nik!’
Aleksey chuckled. ‘And we have nets…’ He stood up and shook himself a little. ‘Let’s go eat.’
* * *
By the fourth day of their return to the island they were unrecognisable to themselves and often to the dogs, who seemed embarrassed and awed in equal measure that their bipedal charges had turned quite so feral so quickly.
They had both a weeks’ growth of beard, Ben’s black, but with a surprising number of silver threads in it, which fortunately, as they had no mirrors, only Aleksey could see. Their hair was almost permanently set into wild spikes from salt and blood and sweat. And because of this, the effects of the gutting and butchering and exertion, they went mostly naked other than shorts as they had no easy way to wash clothes. Once they gave up on dressing, washing went much the same way.
Ben was far more effective at hunting for four than PB, whose over-exuberant wildness only ever resulted in the occasional catch for himself. Ben laid traps, and these were SAS traps and therefore kept all four of them just above the level of constant hunger.
Aleksey went fishing, but this time just into the sheltered bay by the boathouse. The sea wasn’t calling to him as it once had, not just yet, but he would hear it again he knew. He took the spear and the snorkel equipment they’d found and ignored his sore skin and supplemented their diet spectacularly with spiny lobster, huge brown crabs, and flatfish, all of which were easy to catch.
All of this activity took most of their time, but they had nothing else to do and they had huge appetites. When they wanted to relax they did some mapping, which was really just discovering, as they didn’t have anything to make their spectacular map on.
On the fifth day, therefore, they discovered the structure Ben had seen from Spindrift. It was a wall. Guillemot House had a walled garden in the woods, and when they found the arched entrance, they discovered a large Victorian-style glasshouse. It was huge, with a cental walkway, brick base and raised beds. The plants inside were dead from lack of watering, but outside, strung along the walls of the garden, basking in their sub-tropical sun and warmth, were peach trees and grape vines, and in raised beds, strawberries at their peak of ripeness. They gorged themselves.
Next to this impressive, if neglected structure was a very superior garden shed, surprisingly large, the size of a cricket pavilion. This too was uncared for, for the door was hanging badly and the window frame was rotten. It was full of the usual things: a rusty scythe; a rotary lawn mower; ancient terracotta pots. Mostly it was full of Eric’s relatives, and Ben beat a hasty retreat, brushing out his hair and laughing at PB’s attempts to get the webs off his muzzle.
Aleksey sat in the sun with his back against the wall, scrubbing Radulf’s topknot as Ben and PB paced around the outside of the garden, measuring for their map.
‘Two hundred and ten this way.’
‘So two hundred and ten yards by sixty-two. I leave my budding mathematician to work that out.’
‘Hey, come look at this.’
Aleksey and Radulf groaned at the same time. ‘It had better be something very good or very bad, Ben. I am asleep.’
‘It’s very good. Your sort of thing.’
Aleksey had many interests he considered his sort of thing, but none of them likely to be found behind the wall of a kitchen garden.
Nevertheless, he dragged himself to his feet and followed the sound of Ben’s voice.
Off to the northern side of the garden, down a slope, was a large pond, almost a small lake, with a small island in the middle. This was interesting in itself, but next to the pond was a wall. This was not made of redbrick as the one around the Victorian glasshouse and kitchen garden, but was of a much rougher, older-looking stone. And it was not mortared. There wasn’t much left of it, just an arch, and a section a few yards long, which right angled to another chunk, forming what appeared to be the corner of an ancient building.
But, as Ben had pointed out, it was an interesting find.
