Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [15]
‘The one that insulted me,’ Fitz finally said, reluctantly, ‘knew about the Doctor and the TARDIS.’
‘And the First World War,’ said Anji.
‘You think she’s one of those time sensitives we’ve been on the lookout for, or did she just read our minds about the future?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’d be nice to find one at last, after all the bores and nutters we’ve talked to and all those other nonsense seances.’
‘Except that finding one means there’s something wrong. According to the Doctor anyway.’
‘Yeah,’ he sighed. ‘There’s that.’
The Doctor came in. ‘Any coffee left?’
Fitz passed him the pot. ‘What’s up, then?’
‘I think – hello, what’s this?’ The Doctor paused, coffeepot in hand, and picked up a letter from beside his plate.
‘Morning post,’ said Anji.
He tore open the envelope and scanned the contents. ‘It’s from Chiltern. He’d appreciate it if I’d come up and take a look at Miss Jane. How convenient.’ He went into the hall. ‘Exactly what I had in mind.’
‘Should we come too?’ Anji asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ The Doctor shrugged into his coat. ‘It might be a good idea if you paid a visit to our hostess of last night, see what information she has about the seance participants.’ He hurried down the stairs.
‘When are you going to tell us what the hell’s going on?’ Fitz called, but the only answer was the slam of the door.
* * *
Mrs Hemming lived in a pleasant house off Kensington Church Street, not a short walk from their quarters but not a terribly long one either, and they could go through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Anji found walking through the streets of nineteenth-century London a complicated experience. On the one hand, she was fascinated to see the streets and buildings that were yet to be destroyed by the Blitz, as well as by the different look and deportment of the people and – since no fires were burning in the warm weather – the relative cleanliness of the air, which the Doctor had said was choked with coat dust in the colder months, a fact obvious from the blackened bricks of the buildings. She realised she had always associated London with exhaust fumes, an odour now replaced by horse dung and occasional whiffs of sewage or rubbish, of beer and frying food and human sweat, plus an odd, indefinable stony smell, impersonal and very old.
To her surprise, the pavements were frequently as crowded as they would be a century in the future, and the streets were often ludicrously congested in the more commercial districts, where teams of horses pulling huge wagons faced off while their drivers yelled at each other, omnibuses sided with ads for baking powder and chocolate edged around them, bicyclists wove past, men rolled barrels by, street urchins cut among the cart wheels, boys in red uniforms darted about collecting shovels of horse dung and depositing them in kerbside bins, pedestrians dodged across, and, near the markets, occasional small groups of sheep or pigs appeared, herded along by a farmer in country clothes.
She was amazed at the noise. She had expected a London without cars to be much quieter. But the clatter of the cart and cab wheels, particularly on the more roughly paved streets, was a constant din. Though Oxford Street, along which the first part of their journey lay, was much less rowdy, she was still relieved when she and Fitz finally reached the park, with its stately pedestrian paths and soothing green, though even here they had to make way for cyclists.
Even in the less-populated park, she remained self-conscious. It felt strange to stand out so boldly. Anji had hardly been unmindful of being a dark-skinned citizen of a mostly white country in the late twentieth century, but at least there were other Indians around. Here she saw almost nothing but white faces, the occasional exception – a Jewish businessman, an Italian costermonger, a Chinese man on some undeterminable errand – stood out startlingly. She hadn’t seen a single African or West Indian. At least the glances given her were curious or, in the cases of some of the men, admiring, and not hostile. She looked exotic