Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [31]
The window creaked open, and Jude held her breath for a moment – but no one was coming up the stairs. Indeed, it sounded as if her mother was still moving about in the kitchen, tidying away the remains of the small meal they had shared together while father spoke in low tones about the rabbits he’d got for the feast at Petr’s house.
There was a great, knotted vine growing up at the back of the house. It pushed its tendrils into wood and slate and stone and now appeared almost part of the structure, though these days it rarely managed to sprout any glossy orange leaves. Perhaps this was because Jude used it so often for escape – anyone looking closely at the ground beneath her bedroom window would have seen stripped bark and a scattering of frayed leaves.
But no one looked at the back of Jude’s home, because no one knew that Jude ever escaped this way.
Jude lowered herself out of the window – each bend and swelling of the vine absolutely familiar to her – and began to descend towards the ground, pushing the window shut behind her. She wished sometimes her father had built a smaller house – most of the buildings in the village were simple, single-storey dwellings, but her father had always said that his traps and hunting equipment required a lot of space. Indeed, there were rooms that Jude had never even glanced into, though she imagined them piled from floor to ceiling with trophies of his prowess. Stuffed and mounted heads of bears and wolves, no doubt – and maybe even the remains of the monsters that he sometimes talked about when he’d had a drop of ale. Jude’s mother always told Saul to be quiet at those moments, and he’d refuse to elaborate when Jude questioned him later, so the beasts in the outermost forest had for a long time lived only in Jude’s mind, as great monsters in the darkness and mementoes in mysterious, locked chambers. Now, of course, she knew them to be real – the Doctor’s friend Martha had seen them. Worse still, she’d said they were coming closer to the village.
Jude stepped down onto the ground and began to walk towards the green at the heart of the village, hugging the shadows and the edges of the houses. Once or twice, she was passed by men talking in low tones – patrols or just fathers returning home after an evening in the inn, she wasn’t quite sure – but she simply stopped each time and pressed further back into the darkness, and they moved on soon enough.
From the green she skirted around the bakery – it smelt luxuriously of wheat and yeast even when the ovens were cool, as they were now-and then ducked into a small, ornate garden of cultivated plants and hanging lanterns. Moments later she was outside her uncle’s impressive home. Light poured from the dining room window. It always reminded her of the great feasting chamber at the heart of the village hall, though in truth it was a good deal smaller. Whereas the whole village came together in the great hall to commemorate the passing of the seasons and successful harvests, Petr and Kristine’s dining room was often used for family events – an obscure uncle’s first child, a cousin’s unexpected marriage. Jude couldn’t help but wonder how much longer it would be before Petr and Kristine accepted the inevitable and marked the loss of their son.
Hearing voices, Jude crept under the window. Everyone was talking – it sounded like her father had been drinking a little and was louder than usual, making some bad joke at Petr’s expense – and the Doctor and his friend Martha were using this as the backdrop to another one of their whispered conversations.
‘You said you’d tell me why the name of this place was important,’ said Martha.
‘Just a vague echo in the name of this place, that’s all,