Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [3]
The trooper, after he had passed her by the first time, had raised the lance and turned it back into a banner, and galloped to the far side of the farmyard. Roughly he wheeled his horse around and steadied it, and himself.
Then he yelled, lowered the banner and charged again.
The bewilderment and distress Jane was feeling chilled suddenly to the realisation that this man really was trying to harm her. The hooves thundered and once more the fiercely pointed lance thrust through the air of the farmyard towards her. Drawing in her breath sharply, Jane ran again. This time she threw herself into the open doorway of a barn. She dived inside just as lance, horse and rider swept over the spot where she had been standing.
It was cool in the barn. It was dark, too, after the brilliant sunshine outside, although there were shafts of light where the sun pierced through cracks in roof and wall. It smelt cool and musty, with that peculiar sour-sweet smell that old barns have, where animals have lain and produce has been stored for hundreds of years.
It was indeed a very old barn, so old it was beginning to crumble The interior was ramshackle in the extreme: the stone-flagged floor was strewn with barrels, fodder, oddments of machinery, bales of hay, drums of oil, cabbages, turnips and potatoes and all the bits and pieces of tackle that a farmer had found useful once and might do so again one day. Jane had often thought that Ben Wolsey knew less than half of what was stored in this barn, either strewn across the broad, dark floor or stacked on the upper level, an unsafe gallery reached by a set of open, rickety wooden steps.
Now, as the trooper charged past the door and she tumbled inside, that thick, musty smell made her nose itch and the instant darkness blinded her eyes. Bewildered and trembling, she staggered over to a spot where some sacks were strewn on the floor beside at heap of vegetables. She sat down on the sacks, in a narrow pool of sunlight. Here she propped her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands and tried to gather her senses together. Outside she could hear the heavy prancing and scraping of horses’
hooves, which meant that her assailants were still around.
They world come in here at any moment. She tried to think what to do, but before any constructive idea occurred to her a black shadow reached out of the darkness and swooped over her body. Startled again, Jane looked up –
and gasped at the sight of a huge man striding across the barn towards her. This man, too, was equipped for war, dressed in a Roundhead uniform which had turned him into one of Oliver Cromwell’s dreaded Ironshirts. An orange sash lent it vivid splash of colour to the predominantly grey appearance of his leather doublet, steel breastplate and great knee boots; his head was enclosed in a heavy steel helmet and his face obscured by the frame of his visor. He reached Jane before she could move, an armoured giant stooping over her out of the darkness of the barn.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she gasped.
Her body tensed. She tried to back away from those long arms, but there was no escaping their reach and she felt herself being lifted into the air as effortlessly as if she had been made of thistledown.
‘Get off me!’ she shouted.
To her surprise, the man put her down lightly on her feet, stepped back, removed his helmet and tucked it under his arrn. A red, burly lace smiled benignly at her. ‘It’s only me,’ he said.
His voice was gentle, his eyes were mild, and a smile creased his face. Jane had found Ben Wolsey at last.
‘Ben!’ She almost sobbed with relief But the sight of his uniform shocked her. It meant that he too had joined the general insanity, and it was hard for her to reconcile the soft-mannered, pleasant farmer she thought she knew, with this seventeenth-century killer. There was no sense in it.
‘Ben,’ she said, ‘you’re mad.’
The farmer