Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [13]
Nimrod was not native to the Victorian world, but he had wit enough to understand even the darkest secrets of Gabriel Chase. He was privy to many of them, but he chose to interpret them in quasi-religious terms, a fact that Josiah used to secure obedience from his superstitious servant.
The power of Nimrod’s god passed all understanding, so Nimrod never argued — he just got on with it with reverence.
The telephone line clicked and a brutish voice, which spoke paradoxically with the impeccable diction of the gentlemen’s gentlemen, enquired, ‘You rang, sir?’
Two maids hurrying on some errand narrowly missed the Doctor and Ace, who were skulking in an alcove with two birds of paradise and a Lady Amherst’s pheasant. The explorer had taken charge of their expedition and gone on ahead to scout, muttering something about the drums getting louder. The Doctor thought he caught the first distant rumble of thunder in the air.
Ace watched the disappearing maids with apprehension.
‘Wouldn’t get me into service,’ she muttered. ‘Look at that uniform.’
‘Housemaids aren’t all curtsies and sugar plums,’
observed the Doctor.
‘Oh, yeah. It’s got so much going for it: drudgery, exploitation, no thanks - no tips!’
‘There speaks the ex-waitress,’ he reminded her.
‘It’s all clear,’ hissed a voice close behind Ace. She spun round to find that the explorer had slipped silently in beside them. His eyes were staring wider now and darting about wildly.
‘This Josiah Samuel Smith of yours,’ said the Doctor unconcernedly, ‘I gather he’s a bit of a troublemaker.’
The explorer held up a hand. ‘Can’t talk here - too many eyes. Follow me.’ He beckoned them along the passageway, talking indignantly at them as he went. ‘Smith’s ignored repeated requests to address the Royal Society on his theories.’
The Doctor tutted.
‘He’s been denounced as more of a heretic than Darwin,’
continued the guide.
The Doctor glowed. ‘Splendid! He sounds right up my street.’
Ace always reckoned that the Doctor was on a different planet, probably one just ahead of her. She was beginning to think the same about the explorer, but then she hit on the solution: he wasn’t on a different planet, just a different continent.
Still clutching his spear, he had halted at a doorway and was directing them inside. ‘We’ll make camp here tonight
,’ he announced.
Ace’s theories were confirmed.
The walls of the room they entered were adorned with animal trophies, the mounted heads of wild beasts which had suddenly and unexpectedly encountered a hunter’s muzzle-loader. Among them, the Doctor recognized warthog, impala, eland, quagga and, almost twenty years before it had a right to be discovered, an okapi.
Scattered on workbenches were further specimens of once living creatures that had found a new vocation as involuntary ornaments: a baby crocodile, the equisitely detailed and macabre skeleton of a South American tree monkey, and the curly horned head of a mountain goat with an inkwell set in the top of its skull.
The explorer surveyed the camp site. He suddenly seemed more at his ease as he leaned over to confide in his two companions. ‘All the same, Smith did invite Redvers Fenn-Cooper here.’
Now he’s back in the house, thought Ace to herself. But the explorer continued, ‘Redvers is his sternest opponent and one of...’
‘One of the finest explorers in the empire,’ Ace butted in.
‘And he hasn’t been seen since,’ added the Doctor, wistfully staring into the sad eyes of a chimpanzee’s head.
‘Perhaps he got lost on the way,’ suggested Ace.
The explorer had opened a cabinet containing a rack of hunting rifles. ‘Henry Stanley found Doctor Livingstone; I shall find Redvers Fenn-Cooper,’ he snapped, fitting his spear into a place beside the guns.
The Doctor moved up behind him and started to run the Geiger counter up and down. It crackled alarmingly, startling the explorer, who began to wave his hand in the air in front of his face.
‘Damn tsetse flies!’ he complained.
Leaving him engrossed in the cabinet’s contents, the Doctor checked the instrument’s