Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [36]
But these were not normal circumstances.
The Doctor and Ian and Vicki were missing. Presumed dead.
She was completely alone.
As the rather washed-out and pale-looking sun came above the distant horizon and the sky began to lighten in jagged streaks, Barbara observed it from her window.
Somewhere nearby, people were being called to prayer. Had it only been a day since she and Ian had observed the same process with the detached curiosity of travellers about to embark on their way, never to see such a thing again?
It had.
The wailing cry of the priest reminded her of a dog in considerable pain.
She shook her head. Life is too cynical, too critical, she thought angrily to herself. Get over your prejudices and your stupid. outdated twentieth-century ideas of right and wrong and make the best of what you've got.
Now.
`Things must change,' she said in a whisper.
She looked again at the sunrise and found it not to be disappointing, but rather miraculous. Get used to that, too, she noted. It might be the view that you wake to every day for the rest of your life.
From somewhere downstairs she heard voices. Raised and agitated. The Barbara Wright who had taught at Coal Hill School would have cowered under her bedclothes rather than face whatever potentially embarrassing situation she was about to walk into, but Barbara had already changed in the year or more that she and Ian had travelled with the Doctor.
She had grown more assertive, more willing to face whatever life had to offer head-on, and confront its delicious ironies and capricious dangers. So she trooped down the stairs to Hieronymous's living room and found herself in a scene from a particularly melodramatic episode of The Grove Family.
Hieronymous was in the middle of a heated argument with a strikingly beautiful young woman in her early twenties with lengthy jet-black hair and skin like porcelain. The pair seemed not to have seen Barbara who froze at the foot of the stone steps, hardly daring to breathe.
`What treasons can be committed?' Hieronymous asked.
'No wrongdoing shall come to pass within this my house.'
The woman threw up her hands in exasperation. 'You are blinded by a pretty face, good father. And by loneliness. I do not trust this gentile woman. You are breaking each and every one of the very rules that you always instilled in me.'
The priest laughed. ‘You were reticent to learn them, my heart. You only accepted them at the point of a stick.'
`That is as maybe,' said the young woman, with a half-hearted smile. She moved forward and grabbed the old man's hands in her own. Standing next to him. they were almost a comical sight with the woman dwarfed by her father's bulky frame. `Trust no one except family,' she said pointedly. 'Those were the words that you always intoned.
And after a hundred beatings, I firmly believed them. And now, this...’
Ì sense no evil ways in the woman,' Hieronymous noted.
At this point, Barbara decided that valour was the better part of dissection and coughed, loudly. Two heads snapped simultaneously in her direction. 'Good morning,' she said with a practised and charming smile. ‘I think it would be better for all concerned if I leave this house immediately.'
A long silence followed as Barbara waited for some reaction to her dramatic little piece of good manners.
It was broken only by the continued and distant call to prayers.
Finally, it was the woman who spoke. 'No,' she said in a flat, monotonous, almost-rehearsed voice. 'It is I who shall leave. Immediately.'
She turned and headed for the door.
'Gabrielle,' said Hieronymous in a small, cracked, slightly pathetic voice. 'You will return this evening?'
`Perhaps,' she said enigmatically, closing the door behind her.
Òh dear,' Barbara noted. `This is bad, bad, bad...'
Hieronymous didn't