Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [4]
she had served a meal in this fashion; a meal apparently prepared for a guest, but served to a madman. There were always screams, and always she was momentarily unnerved by the brutal anguish of the cries.
Such thoughts were instantly dismissed: Mrs Pritchard had her duties to perform. The maid, thin-faced and almost as gaunt as her mistress, awaited instruction. There would be guests to prepare for — there were always guests, duties, chores, and dinners to be served. But today’s tasks were complete: it was almost first light and time to sleep.
The approach to the house of Gabriel Chase only exacerbated the ill-humour of the Reverend Ernest Matthews. The dogcart in which he had been forced to travel from Ealing railway station — there had been no suitable carriage — was exceedingly rickety and uncomfortable. It was already late afternoon and it had taken him most of the day to get this far from Oxford. The carter seemed to be deliberately driving over every bump in the lanes, but Ernest sat tight and silent, absorbing every jolt and reserving his temper for a more worthy target.
After several miles, the cart passed through the scattering of cottages and a church that made up a village.
The parish of the Reverend C J Hughes recalled Ernest to himself, and this knowledge somehow gave him comfort that civilization was not so far away.
It was only a short distance further on that the cart came to a halt before a pair of iron gates set in a high brick wall.
The carter refused to take his passenger any further. He muttered in surly tones that it was already getting late, all the time casting wary glances up the drive.
Ernest Matthews, his joints aching, clambered down from the cart. He found himself short of change and reluctantly had to give the driver a whole shilling. The carter took the coin with a leer and, urging the horse forward, disappeared up the lane at a pace that threatened to shake the cart to pieces.
The sun was already low in the sky, casting long shadows from the tall poplars that lined the driveway.
Beyond the gates, the breeze dropped immediately and it became hot and sultry. The stifling air closed oppressively in around Ernest, but he resolutely remained encased in his heavy hat and ulster, clutching his large bag. This was not a social call; he meant business.
A proud stone lion, a symbol of the Empire, watched the road from a clump of rhododendrons to his left. The clusters of near luminous mauve flowers were unusual for September; the shrubs in the deanery garden outside Ernest’s study window had finished flowering in June.
It had been a good year for wasps, too. A large, papery nest hung at the stone lion’s throat. One of its inhabitants, drunk on the juice of rotting windfalls, circled the dark figure of Ernest as part of its daily hunt for food. It narrowly avoided the irritated lash of his hand.
As he trudged up the drive, Ernest reviewed the circumstances which had led him to visit Gabriel Chase.
During the past year there had been a series of privately published papers on the inflammatory subject of evolution.
These articles had been written under the name of one Josiah Samuel Smith, a name which was unrecognized in scientific circles and untraceable in any university register.
Smith had endorsed the blasphemous theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace: theories that proclaimed mankind as the culmination of millennia of development. They disclaimed the truth of man’s origins and denied he was created in the image of God. These theories had set the worlds of Victorian science and theology at each others’ throats.
Ernest knew better. He was Dean of Mortarhouse College, Oxford, and his faith was unshakeable; he regularly lectured his students to that effect. Nevertheless, the gospel according to Josiah Samuel Smith was a different matter. Smith did not just oust mankind from the Garden of Eden: he presented man as a corrupter of nature itself. Man was depicted