Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [7]
A polished brass telescope pointed out of one of the windows. On the table beside it lay a wooden box on a stand with a conical mouthpiece, an earpiece on a wire and a bell on the top. This was more like it, thought Ace. She poked hopefully at the archaic telephone. The absurd notion that what she needed was a Victorian phonecard passed through her mind.
‘Did you know that Darwin suffered from seasickness?’
mused the Doctor, his head back in the book. ‘Odd that, considering his Origins.’
‘How do I ring out on this thing?’
Brought back from the Beagle with a bump, he saw Ace fiddling with the telephone. She was liable to land them back in trouble at any second! He made a dive for the telephone.
‘Ace! Put that down!’
She darted back, holding it out of his reach.
‘It’s called initiative, remember?’ she retorted. ‘All I want is the operator.’
The Doctor grappled hopelessly for possession of the telephone.
‘You’ll give us away! These days trespassers land up in Newgate!’
‘The prison?’
‘And it took me three weeks to tunnel out last time. Just give me the thing!’
He managed to snatch the telephone away from Ace, but his relief was cut short as a scratchy voice emerged from the earpiece.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Sorry, wrong number,’ replied the Doctor, before slamming down the receiver.
Ace bit her lip and waited for the inevitable lecture.
In the depths of the house, in a room darkened by heavy curtains, white-gloved hands replaced a receiver on its telephone stand. The owner crouched brooding over his desk, lit by the embers of a dying fire, muttering to himself: he was, after all, the best conversationalist he had so far encountered.
This event had not been anticipated in the plan of tonight’s work: surely the Reverend Ernest Matthews could not be at large in the house. Besides which, he was undoubtedly too fastidious a creature to be using such demonic apparatus as a telephone.
It was almost six o’clock; the sun was gone. Elsewhere in the house the lamps were alight. Drowsy eyelids would soon be opening again.
Nevertheless, the matter of an errant Oxford dean needed immediate attention. The dusty figure bent over the eyepiece of a brass microscope and started to adjust the flywheel.
In the hall, the two young maids gave audible sighs of relief as Mrs Grose emerged from the drawing room, having torn herself away from Ernest Matthews’ incessant questions. It was three minutes to six. Mrs Grose closed the door behind her and almost ran across the hall. She ran past the watchful eyes of the grizzly bear in an alcove to place the house-keys on a side table for the night staff’s overseer.
Dinner was in the oven and their day was done. There was no time now to check that all the other duties were complete. Pulling on her shawl, the housekeeper bustled the girls to the front door and out into the safety of the gathering twilight.
The door closed behind her; the key turned in the lock.
Heaven help anyone still in the place after dark, she thought.
At two minutes to six Ernest Matthews consulted his gold hunter. He had already taken in the displays of mounted insects that vied with family portraits on the walls of the drawing room. Pride of place went to Queen Victoria whose picture hung above the mantelpiece, curtained like a shrine. There was a stuffed dodo in the corner of the room, its eyes headily lifelike. From the framed photographs on the pianoforte, he picked out one face that he recognized: a young girl whose large, haunted eyes gazed from the sepia print — eyes which he knew to be the colour of sapphire.
He had discussed Josiah Smith’s published papers on evolution with several university colleagues and with other Fellows of the Royal Society. They had been prone to dismiss Smith’s treatise as the ranting of an unknown eccentric. Even Darwin had coined a reputation to precede him, although as an expert on barnacles. Ernest, however, was incensed. In the hope of some contact, he had written to Smith through his publisher’s