This story takes place before the Amazons are given Amazon but one or two years after the events of "Why there is no Beckfoot cat." Perhaps it happens in 1926.
Monster
The days were just beginning to get noticeably shorter and visitors seemed to be everywhere about the Lake but it was still warm enough, and light enough for Nancy and Peggy to have their tea on Wild Cat Island every afternoon that they were allowed to. As the summer had progressed they were allowed more afternoons of piracy – or as Mother still insisted on calling it, "Playing outside".
Mother had not, to her daughters' regret, become more lenient on the matter of lessons, but she had realised that matters went much more smoothly if she required a certain number of tasks to be done before lessons were finished for the day rather than keeping her sometimes reluctant pupils in the study for a set number of hours. As Nancy had pointed out, the quicker the pupils worked, the more time the teacher had for her own leisure too. Under the new regime, lesson time at Beckfoot had started earlier and earlier, until Cook had finally put her foot down and stated that a quarter to eight was the absolute earliest that she would be putting breakfast on the table. That still left plenty of time to get all lessons and the bare minimum of piano practice finished before lunch. Cook was really very amenable to the idea of an early lunch, and Mother didn't mind either, so the Amazon pirates rowed out from the mouth of the river into the Lake by a few minutes past one on most days.
Building a fireplace, and finding a way into the secret harbour and marking it had kept them busy for a great many pleasant afternoons. They had rowed Mother over to the island to entertain her to tea one afternoon in early August.
"It's easily the best one on the whole Lake." said Nancy.
"Well, I'm very glad you think so." Mother had said, and the corners of her mouth had quirked in a not quite smile. Both girls has learned that there was no use at all in trying to get any explanations from Mother when her expression was like that, and the next moment the expression turned into a proper smile when Peggy added, "It's even better now we've improved it."
"So show me what you've done then, little Miss Modesty." was all Mother said, however.
At the end of the afternoon, they still had not managed to convince Mother that they could camp on the island – "Not this year, we'll see about next year when it is next year – and that isn't a promise you two!" but she did agree that they were certainly sensible enough to be trusted to make their own fires for boiling kettles, tactfully ignoring the small amount of charcoal and ash left in the fireplace.
…
"We should have been more careful about burying it Mister Mate." Nancy said the next day. "Everyone makes mistakes though."
"Barbequed bilberries." Nancy added, rather self-consciously.
"The barbequed bit is good." Peggy said thoughtfully, popping another bilberry in her mouth as they sat in a convenient bilberry patch, watching visitors plodding up the path to the Matterhorn. "I'm not sure about the bilberries though."
"They're perfectly ripe." Nancy said licking stained fingers, "But I'm quite happy to eat them all if you don't want them. It would be a waste to leave them when they're just right."
"Not the actual berries, the word." said Peggy. "You want something a bit fiercer."
"Billygoats."
"Where?" Peggy looked about across the corrie with its tiny tarn. Was that just a movement over there by that outcropping of tumbled rocks? "There?" she pointed. "You can't possible know if they are all billygoats – except that they'd probably not be so close to each other."
"Never saw them at all – you do have jolly decent eyesight, Peg. I meant as a word."
Peggy considered.
"It's a good word." she said finally.
…..
Bilberries were over until next year. The great aunt had stayed at Beckfoot, driving Mother, Cook and Ada the housemaid to near distraction, replacing piracy with piano practice and insisting on everyone's must uncomfortable clothes. The visitors were mostly gone too, leaves were turning and evenings were drawing in. The days after the departure of the great aunt were clear and bright after misty mornings.
"It's alright for us." said Peggy as they dried themselves after swimming in Horseshoe Cove, "but it's pretty tough on people who have visitors. Who need them, I mean."
"We should do something to make more people come here. Something that doesn't depend on the weather."
"The railway company has plenty of advertisements."
"Something they'll want to come and look at."
"Neither of us paint or draw at all well. Miss Hetty and Miss Letty paint much better and they say they hardly sell anything once September is over."
"I don't mean that sort of look at, I mean some sort of mystery where people just have to see for themselves."
"If it's mysterious enough, Uncle Jim will probably come home to find out what all the fuss is about. You've already got a plan, haven't you?"
"Sort of." Nancy said. "We need to work out a few details. Look at that rock there. If you didn't know it was a rock, what might you think it was? A dinosaur? A seal?"
"A rock." Peggy said firmly. "It looks like a rock, and it isn't moving. Also you don't get seals here, although I wish we did, and you don't get dinosaurs any more. And it's next to a whole lot of other rocks. People don't come just to look at rocks, unless it's the Grand Canyon or something."
"But if it was moving, and you couldn't see it very well because it was misty, and if it was out in the middle of the Lake where everyone knew there wasn't a rock, and if there wasn't a rock when you rowed over to look."
"Rocks don't float."
"Wood can, and tyres and things might. Anything will, really, if we get enough air inside it. There are all sorts of things in the old stable. No one will miss them. It probably counts as tidying up, even."
"Let's try it." Peggy said.
A/N: the Amazon pirates are eating Vaccinium myrtillus, called bilberries in much of England and North Wales, blueberries/ blaeberries (I believe) in Scotland and whinberries or Whortleberries in some other places. They are not then same species as the Blueberries I've seen sold in shops which are, I understand, a North America species in the same genus. Bilberries have a richer, sharper taste and an incredible ability to stain just about everything and I've always been rather puzzled by their absence from the August-set books of the series, or at least the ones set by the Lake.