Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [103]
She had seen six children shot as suspected pétroleuses, their bodies left with all the others to rot in the street. She had shot the Versaillais soldier who did it before he could turn his gun on a seventh.
She had huddled behind a barrel full of sand, taking turns with a terrified young man to shoot at the enemy, holding them back while a crowd of women and children got to safety.
She had wrestled a can of petrol out of the arms of a crazed Communard who was heading for a maternity hospital.
She had seen a Versaillais Marquis picking out prisoners whose faces he didn’t like and having them gunned down in the street.
Now she was huddled on a barricade in the Rue Ramponneau. It was morning, and the air was full of smoke. Everyone else was dead.
A trooper sprang from a hiding place, rifle at the ready. She put a bullet through his arm almost without thinking about it, and ducked back down.
Five minutes.
The Communards had lost perhaps three thousand troops in the fighting so far. That meant that another twenty-two thousand people were going to be killed in the next few days.
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She shot over the head of another Versaillais. When he didn’t take the hint, she squeezed off a shot that knocked his hat off. She who hesitates under fire usually doesn’t end up getting shot.
She’d fought with the Women’s Battalion, slowly forced back along the Boulevard de Clichy, back and back until most of the survivors had surrendered at the Place Pigalle.
Ten minutes.
They’d slowed the advance of the troops, given people time to go into hiding, to get out of the city. She’d never know how many lives she had saved.
The numbers would be tiny in the face of the massacre that was about to start. There’d be God knew how many orphans and widows to take care of, how much rebuilding to do. It was going to be a difficult decade.
Fifteen minutes.
She fired off a last shot and realized she was out of ammunition. She’d done everything she could.
The last defender of the Paris Commune got down from the barricade and calmly walked away.
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Afterword
by Sophie Aldred
Last things last . . .
I’ll let you get your breath back: time travelling Kate Orman style is a won-derfully exhausting business. So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll finish.
Doesn’t time have a habit of doing peculiar things? It’s five years since the Doctor and Ace walked off the screen to that great cup of tea in the sky; four years since the TARDIS materialized in print in Mesopotamia, and John Peel asked me to write the foreword for the first New Adventures novel.
I felt then that I should never be allowed to leave the Doctor Who family, and although here we are now, with Ace adventured out on videotape and now in ink, I feel more than ever before that this Doctor Who thing is for life.
I can’t get away from Ace even if I wanted to, and I don’t.
People have asked me what it’s like to read about Ace in the New Adventures. It’s been like standing on a crowded tube station platform, and catching a glimpse of someone who was once very dear to me, in the flickering half-light of a through train. Mind the gap, that ever widening gap. For now it’s time to move on again.
There’s a part of me that hates goodbyes, and it’s my second goodbye to Ace. Which reminds me of that day back in October 1990 when the phone rang for me at the BBC North Acton rehearsal rooms and Sylvester was on the other end of the line.
‘Are you sitting down?’ he suggested. ‘I’ve got some bad news – they’ve cancelled Doctor Who.’ He may as well have told me they’d cancelled next year. I put a brave face over the hurt one and went back to the all-singing, all-laughing Corners rehearsals, saving my tears of disappointment for a more private moment.
And now it’s goodbye, and I should be used to it by now. Kate has done us proud. Here’s an Ace I would love to have played on screen: older, wiser, battle-scarred and feisty as ever. And the lump in my throat this time is for the end of the relationship between the Doctor and Ace, so touchingly portrayed here and just as I