Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [18]
Now Zbrigniev did look sheepish. ‘Don’t know, sir.’
‘And did Lethbridge-Stewart trust this "Doctor"?’
‘With his life, sir.’
The night after they bought the apple tree, Doris dreamt of thunder. She had woken to the sound of wind-driven rain against the window. Lightning flickered in a line under the curtains. The bed was half empty, but still warm from his body. He always rose early, it was an old habit. She lay quietly, listening to the rain and for some hint of his presence in the house.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
Doris had inherited the house from her aunt, a mock Tudor extravagance set in half an acre off the A23 near Pyecombe. It was far too large a house for a single woman on her own, but Doris had kept it all the same. Perhaps fate had ordained it — as Alastair pointed out, a peculiar attitude for an economist.
The television had been on, she remembered, more for company in the empty house than for entertainment. She had been reviewing the proof copy of The Management Crisis in British Industry, when she looked up and saw his face on the screen.
‘ This man knows. ’ said the narrator.
Doris dropped her highlighter pen. A telephoto shot of a tall thickset man with a moustache and an erect military carriage, walking the gravel path in front of a Regency mansion.
‘ Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart once held a senior command in a secret military force which operates free of the control of the British government. ’
She was watching the infamous State Secret documentary; the one delayed while the Special Branch raided television offices in Birmingham and questions were asked in the House of Commons.
Doris’s pen spread a circle of orange on her skirt as she watched.
‘ This man knows. ’
In the morning, Doris was on the Ml , pressing the accelerator on her old diesel saloon until the car shook.
She found him making tea in the converted prefab that served as his home in the school grounds. Her soldier reduced to a maths master. She was terrified he wouldn’t recognize her.
‘Good lord,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘Doris, how marvellous to see you. And I thought it was another of those blasted journalists.’
‘ We may never know what happened at the atomic installation at Wenley Moor, the fate of Mars Probe 7, the Styles Conference on disarmament or the terrible ecological accident at Llanfairfach. But we do know that Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart was a leading agent in the Government’s response to these crises. ’
None of his precision had left him, even when it came to making the tea. The pot warmed. Two cups placed exactly on a tin tray. An open packet of biscuits set neatly in the middle of the plate. Just as she remembered it from long ago in a Brighton hotel overlooking the seafront. The rain fell against the window and the cold grey sea crashed on the shingle.
They were older, but nothing had really changed.
‘Marry me,’ she said as he placed the tray before her.
‘Of course,’ said Alastair and sat down opposite. ‘When term finishes.’
The clink of cups broke her reverie as he returned to the bedroom. Reassured, she snuggled back down under the duvet.
‘Did you hear that infernal racket?’ he said as he placed the tray on the bedside table. ‘Can’t get a thing on the radio.’
‘What racket?’ she muttered.
‘Like all hell breaking loose.’
She snuggled deeper into the warm bed. ‘I must have slept through it.’
‘Extraordinary.’ He climbed back into bed and dozed contentedly while the tea brewed.
The blue box beside the track hummed perceptibly as the Black Knight ran his hand along its carved contours.
Sensors in the mail glove passed the data into the armour’s memory book. Illuminated runescript read out across the inside of the umberere visor. The artefact was unknown.
He pushed up his prattling visor. The thrill that had brought the knight up in his tracks was undiminished.
Here in the tangled woodland, a world away from the world. was an object he knew from tapestries and old tales.
There was little doubt. The past had summoned him and here was its token. And if this was truly Merlin’s