Doctor Who: Black Orchid (2 page)

‘Smutty’ was always as good as his word.

The Marquess of Cranleigh tripped lightly up the pavilion steps on his way to the dressing room to change.

The steam locomotive chuffed and clanked its way through the lush Oxfordshire countryside pulling the four coaches into and beyond the small, deserted station. Few trains serviced this line and even fewer stopped at Cranleigh Halt. Trains halted here on request... on the request of the handful of local inhabitants who were all known to the drivers and the guards. The station was not staffed. There was no booking office; passengers travelled on trust. In summer a railwayman came from Bicester to tend the tiny garden and in winter a fire was laid in the open grate of the small waiting room but no passenger was ever there long enough to light it. The fire was laid as a courtesy and accepted as such by the tramps - the gentlemen of the road

- who reciprocated by keeping their temporary shelter tidy.

Cranleigh was a good touch. You could always rely on a generous hand-out from people on this estate. All that was needed was politeness and a tug at the cap.

The train pulled away from the station and chugged into the distance returning barely stirred peace to the foraging birds and the multitudinous insects in the pocket handkerchief garden. The station rejoined the sleeping afternoon. But not for long.

The TARDIS materialised on the eastbound platform.

The Doctor and his three companions watched the time rotor settle to a stop and the Doctor activated the scanner.

The screen displayed the platform and the warm red brick that surrounded the name,
Cranleigh Halt
. The Doctor patted the console.

‘What’s the matter, old girl? Why this compulsion for planet Earth?’

‘Where?’ asked Tegan eagerly.

‘Cranleigh Halt?’ echoed Adric.

‘A railway station,’ replied the Doctor.

Tegan prodded Adric out of the way as she moved for a closer look at the scanner.

‘That’s promising.’

A sigh escaped Nyssa, and Tegan looked at her companion’s pretty face, marred by a glum look. ‘Cheer up, Nyssa! Your turn will come.’ Tegan turned to the Doctor who was adjusting the chronometer and tapping the casing of the tachograph. ‘When?’

‘Half past one o’clock on June the eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-five,’ he announced.

It was Tegan’s turn to look glum. ‘But I haven’t been born yet.’

The Doctor looked at her consolingly. ‘And no jet lag.’

He turned back to the console and thumped the red knob.

‘Come on! Let’s take a look.’

The Doctor led the way out of the TARDIS and the others followed with a prudence that must have attended disembarkation from the Ark. Which was just as well because the TARDIS had come to Earth very close to the edge of the platform: The Doctor steered Adric from danger with a touch on his arm.

‘What’s a railway station?’ asked the Alzarian.

‘A place where one embarks or disembarks from compartments on wheels pulled along those rails by a steam engine.’ The Doctor looked along the shimmering rails with nostalgic eyes. ‘Rarely on time,’ he added.

‘What a very silly activity,’ said Nyssa with disdain.

The Doctor turned to her with eyes still wistful from looking along the diminishing track of his past, to a time when he, too, was yourng: a mere five hundred and sixty years. ‘Think so?’ he murmured. ‘There was a time when I wanted to be an engine driver...’

Tegan smiled. She was the only one of the Doctor’s companions who could possibly understand what he was on about.

The Doctor strode down the platform to a gate in a low wood fence passing a number of posters fixed to the station wall. One of these was a picture of an angelic-looking boy dressed in blue and blowing soap bubbles, and another depicted two blissfully happy but badly-dressed children apparently in the act of sniffing at a graphical smell issuing from a tasty-looking meat pie. Adric stopped for a closer look at the pie and Nyssa was checked by his consuming interest.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I could do with some of that.’

‘Some of what?’

‘That Bisto,’ said a hungry Adric.

The liveried chauffeur had succumbed to the slumbrous warmth of the afternoon and fallen asleep behind the wheel of the imposing Rolls-Royce parked in the station forecourt. He’d forced open heavy lids to watch the twelve-fifteen from Bedford dawdle through the station a quarter of an hour late, but he was waiting for a train coming the other way, the one-twenty from Oxford, and had dozed off again. This was his second call at the station that day. His passenger had not been on the ten-twenty and, since only two trains came through on Saturdays, it would be a poor look out for his Lordship’s eleven if his passenger wasn’t on this one.

The crunching of feet on the gravel of the forecourt brought the chauffeur fully to his senses. He blinked at the approach of the Doctor and company. He could have sworn the train was going the other way and hadn’t stopped. He must have been dreaming. He got quickly out of the car and saluted.

‘Good afternoon, sir. I’m Tanner, Lord Cranleigh’s chauffeur.’

‘Lord Cranleigh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The Doctor always entered warmly into this sort of situation. Mistaken identity it may be, but his insatiable curiosity was aided and abetted by a certain immaturity: that part of the Doctor that had never quite grown up, the part that had wanted to drive a steam engine, the part that sometimes drove Tegan to distraction.

‘We’re expected?’

Tanner hesitated. He hadn’t expected four, and all strangely got up at that. But when was he ever told everything?

‘Oh, yes, sir. You are the Doctor?’

Tegan frowned, Nyssa pouted, Adric giggled and the Doctor smiled.

‘Indeed.’

‘Well then, Doctor...’ Tanner broke off as he glanced past the Doctor at his three companions. He stared hard at Nyssa and the intensity of the disbelieving stare made Nyssa acutely uncomfortable. Had she a smut on her nose, or something?

‘May I ask what you’re staring at?’ she inquired tartly.

It was Tanner’s turn to feel embarrassed. There couldn’t be two such people so alike in the whole world, but it wasn’t his place to tell the young lady that.

‘I’m sorry, miss,’ he said.

The chauffeur opened a rear door of the Rolls briskly and spoke with respectful urgency. ‘Please, Doctor, if you don’t mind. The game started on time. His Lordship won the toss and decided to bat first to give you time to get here.’

The Doctor’s boundless curiosity crossed fresh frontiers in a rush. Not only, it seemed, was he expected but he was also involved with a game of cricket. He responded with reserve.

‘That’s very thoughtful of his Lordship.’

‘Yes, sir, but I think we should hurry. We took luncheon early...’ Tanner glanced at the clock in the rose-wood dashboard of the Rolls... ‘but we will have started again by now. His Lordship’s a first class bat but we don’t know how strong his support is this year.’

The Doctor reflected that the chauffeur’s complete identification with his employer’s activities was proof positive that paternal feudalism in England had extended well into the twentieth century. He further pondered that, to many people hereabouts, his Lordship would be known as the master and the thought caused in him a mental wince that returned his attention to the chauffeur’s concerned face. The Doctor had been made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mistaken identity notwithstanding, how could he possibly turn his back on a game of cricket?

‘Come on, you lot,’ he said, ‘in you get.’

Nyssa led the way into the Rolls’s capacious interior, conscious that the chauffeur was again fixing her with that curious stare. Instinctively she rubbed her hand surreptitiously over her face. The four passengers sank into the luxurious soft leather upholstery as Tanner closed the car door and took his place behind the wheel without once taking his eyes from Nyssa. She turned an anxious face to Tegan.

‘What’s he staring at?’ she muttered.

‘Search me,’ came the reply from the Bronx via Queensland. The Doctor winced. Tegan picked up the reaction. ‘Now what?’

The Doctor turned a pair of mildly enquiring eyebrows.

‘Where are we going?’ persisted Tegan.

‘To a cricket match.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’ returned the Doctor blithely. ‘And in style too.’

Tegan had no quarrel with that. The aristocrat of automobiles left the station and purred its way through three miles of verdant highways and byways until it reached the gates of Cranleigh Park. The Rolls turned in past the lodge and made its sedate way along the manicured drive for another half mile before the Jacobean pile of Cranleigh Hall came into view.

‘What is this place?’ Adric wanted to know.

‘One of the stately homes of England,’ came the Doctor’s ready reply.

As the driveway forked, Tanner turned the car to the right between low cliffs of rhododendron until the distant cricket field burgeoned. Spectators fringed the field and bunched about the marquee and the pavilion. In spite of the need for haste Tanner brought the Rolls to a dignified halt and left his place to open the door for his passengers.

A figure detached itself from the knot of white-clad players on the pavilion’s verandah and hurried towards the car. The Doctor’s eyes wandered from the players dotted about the green arena to the scoreboard at the pavilion which telegraphed the grave information that CRANLEIGH XI had scored one hundred and twenty-seven runs for the loss of eight wickets with the last player out for an unlucky thirteen.

Lord Cranleigh broke into a run as a shout from the field and a growl from the crowd signified the near escape of the batsman taking strike. His Lordship greeted the Doctor a little out of breath and with his handsome face flushed.

‘There you are, man! Good! I’m Cranleigh. How d’you do? You’re just in time. Didn’t expect four of...’ He trailed off as his eyes settled on Nyssa. ‘Good Lord!’

Again Nyssa found herself the object of an intense stare with, this time, Tanner nodding sagely in agreement, for Cranleigh had turned to the chauffeur as if asking for confirmation of something. The nobleman recovered his manners.

‘I’m so sorry. Do forgive me staring, but you look exactly like my fiancée. It’s quite uncanny.’

Nyssa smiled shyly in relief, smuts and shiny noses banished forever from her mind.

‘This is Nyssa,’ introduced the Doctor.

‘You must meet her,’ said Cranleigh, barely acknowledging the name.

‘And Tegan and Adric,’ went on the Doctor. His lordship took his eyes reluctantly from Nyssa.

‘How d’you do?’ he greeted them absently. ‘You’d better pad up, Doctor. Where’s your gear?’

The Doctor shrugged apologetically. ‘I regret I have none.’

‘No matter. I’ll fix you up. We’re taking a bit of a thrashing. A hundred and twenty-seven for eight. I made a duck.’

Adric exchanged a look with Nyssa. To them a duck was a web-footed, short-legged, broad-beaked water-bird. Did this activity called cricket include making them in some way?

Cranleigh’s eyes had again wandered to Nyssa. He turned to the chauffeur: ‘Tanner, take my guests over to the marquee, will you please?’

‘Yes, milord.’

Cranleigh took in Nyssa once more. ‘I’ll join you as soon as I can. Come along, Doctor, I don’t want to be pessimistic but I don’t think we have a lot of time.’

As if to confirm this a low moan from the spectators succeeded a plangent tock from the centre of the field and Cranleigh hesitated in his stride to watch the ball skied by the striker hovering for a moment before falling into the waiting hands of the fielder in the deep. Cranleigh joined in the applause for the well-held catch and hurried the Doctor onwards towards the pavilion.

‘Good man,’ murmured the Marquess approvingly of the tenth man in the batting order who was waiting for the dismissed batsman to reach the pavilion before setting out on his journey to the wicket. ‘He’s giving you time to get the pads on. You’re now last man in, I’m afraid. Pity, if you happen to be...’ Cranleigh broke off, not wishing to ask a direct question concerning the replacement’s possible prowess. ‘"Smutty" said he’d send us someone useful with the bat.’

‘Smutty?’ queried the Doctor.

‘"Smutty" Handicombe. Don’t you call him "Smutty" at Guys... at the hospital?’

‘No, as a matter of fact,’ said the Doctor truthfully.

‘Always "Smutty" at school,’ murmured Cranleigh before turning to the very serious matter in hand. ‘The wicket’s still a bit green and the ball’s keeping low. The one that got me was unplayable, so watch out.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ promised the Doctor.

In the dressing room Cranleigh briefly introduced those of his side who came readily forward to assist the Doctor accoutre himself in leg pads and batting gloves. The concerned captain of the home side watched his last man in select a bat and make a few promising passes with the left elbow held high. He didn’t think, as last man in, that there was much chance, however good this doctor might be, of adding significantly to his side’s mediocre score. But he could have another useful talent.

‘Any good with the ball?’ he asked.

‘Not bad,’ the Doctor replied with a rare modesty.

‘Good! Spin? Medium pace?’

‘A seamer. Fast.’

‘Top hole!’ declared a delighted lord of the British realm.

Tanner had escorted the Doctor’s three companions to the hospitality of the marquee where the teams had taken luncheon and where Brewster, the regal butler at the Hall, still supervised his staff in the dispensing of light refreshments. Tegan, to whom the surroundings were comfortingly familiar, had mellowed considerably with her second glass of champagne, while Nyssa sipped a lemonade and looked, with distinct disapproval, on Adric as he unself-consciously wolfed into a plateful of delicately cut smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches.

‘How was that?’ came a unified appeal from the centre of the field. The umpire’s finger went firmly up in categorical confirmation that the batsman’s pad had prevented the ball from squarely hitting the stumps.