Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(12)

Trent Park was closest to Cockfosters station, no more than a mile’s walk through the red-brick suburban streets creeping outward from London. Extraordinary to think that this had all been a royal chase once, where kings and noblemen rode to hounds over what Major Peabody would doubtless call greensward. Saul wasn’t quite sure how the vision of a mystical, magical, medieval England fit with de Mandeville’s life of sordid betrayal and savagery, but inconvenient reality obviously didn’t worry the Major.

Trent Park was private land, the surrounds of a great house now thrown open to the public. Many landowners were offering their fellows that courtesy in these changed times, attempting to learn from the example made of the Russian aristocracy. Saul appreciated it. He had shinned over plenty of walls but it was easier to stroll through a gate.

He followed a path along a very long drive through a spread of oak trees, none of which caught fire; skirted the impressive Georgian house to cross the bridge over an ornamental lake; and walked along a path up the incline of what a wooden signpost told him was Camlet Hill. At the top of the hill, visible from some distance and standing on a patch of rough, bare grass, was a stone obelisk. It seemed to be a couple of centuries old: a Georgian faux-ancient folly. From its vantage point he had a magnificent view of the house, and the spread of London beyond the park. He couldn’t see anything that looked like it might be Camlet Moat through the foliage, though he did note that there seemed to be a peculiarly lush area, its greens brighter and thicker, in the direction he needed to go. Different planting or soil, perhaps.

He headed down the hill, enjoying the birdsong and the dappled sunlight, and trying to remember anything of the poem that went, Oh, to be in England, Now that April’s here, such as the title, author, or any of its other lines. The trees closed in quickly around the path, and the planting here was gnarled, twiggy hawthorn and mountain ash: lower and less elegant trees than the slender birches and mighty oaks elsewhere. It gave a sense of enclosure.

There were no signposts to Camlet Moat. Saul followed the path as it led him, and was forced to remind himself that the area was actually rather small. It didn’t feel small. It had the atmosphere of a much larger forest, with nothing at all visible through the trees and the green-brown haze of shrubs, ferns and brush. Once it had stretched over mile upon mile, and deer would have stepped through the thickets, unafraid.

Something even greener than the rest a little way away caught his eye, a lurid shade almost too bright to be natural. Saul left the path, pushing through ferns to approach it, and saw a body of still water, some twenty feet wide, densely covered in vivid green algae that looked thick enough to walk on. He’d come to the water as its banks bent sharply in a corner, and it stretched away from him to left and right in near-straight lines.

This was Camlet Moat, a squarish islet surrounded by water, and if he walked around the moat, presumably he’d find a bridge.

Saul would have liked to keep to the water edge, but he didn’t want to cause irreparable damage to his shoes or trousers; he couldn’t afford to be wasteful. He went back to the path and followed it. It appeared to head only away from the moat, and he had to double back on himself twice and walk what seemed a very long and circuitous route before he finally spotted the dark, rough wooden planks sitting low in the algae-coated water that apparently constituted a bridge. Saul had a momentary qualm, wondering how deep the moat was and picturing himself sodden and covered in green slime, before he set a tentative foot on it.

It shifted slightly under his weight, but didn’t tip him into the slimy sea. Saul crossed as quickly as was compatible with care, and found himself on solid ground inside Camlet Moat, Major Peabody’s highly dubious Camelot.

He took a deep breath, and felt the air expand in his lungs. It was fresh and clean here, and it made his heart lift in a way he hadn’t experienced in too long. He came from a small country town, and this woodland spring reminded him of his boyhood, before he’d left for the stink of cities or the unforgiving glare of Mesopotamian sun. He could feel the old remembered hope and exuberance as though it were welling up inside him with every breath, so that he almost laughed aloud, filled with the green joy that pulsed from the ground through his feet, just as it rose through roots out into a flourish of foliage and life. He walked without thinking, ferns brushing against his legs, not looking for anything, enjoying the solitude and the movement and the stillness—

There was no birdsong.

The thought stopped him in his tracks. He stood, listening, but heard nothing. Not a chirrup or a warble, not a rustle of wings, barely a rustle of leaves, because the breeze seemed to have dropped and the air was cool but very still. Still, and absolutely silent except for his own pulse, which seemed somehow to be very loud indeed in his ears. He stood, and the wood stood around him, and quite suddenly he was afraid.

That was absurd. There was no living creature but himself on this tiny island, and nothing to do him harm. He wasn’t lost in a vast and pathless ancient forest; he was in a Cockfosters park, with work to do, and if the birds weren’t singing, well, that was merely...something ornithological, not his field. He made himself walk forward, and not turn and look, because it was ridiculous to feel as though there was a presence around him, watching.

After a few steps, the feeling receded and he could breathe easily once more. He walked with purpose, not because he knew where he was going but simply so as not to stand still again, and after a moment—because this really was a very small overgrown bit of land, and it didn’t stretch out just a little further than a man could walk before his legs failed him—he found himself approaching one corner of the isle, where a flash of colour caught his eye.