The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [51]
This was getting worse. He was talking about the fiends and the ghosts. Vilmius was going to sus him out at any minute!
The man himself was clearly going to challenge the Doctor in some way. His normally pale face was a livid red; he was gripping the edge of the table as if he were having to force himself to keep control; and he was leaning forward so that he could fix the Doctor with his eye.
‘Where do you come from, Doctor?’ he said hoarsely.
‘Why do you come here, here to this little island, today of all days?’
The Doctor did not answer in words. Silently, he took from his pocket the little leather-bound book Sarah had seen before. He opened it and took out the scrap of vellum Jeremy had found.
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Be so good as to pass this to Signor Vilmius.’
Convinced that she was colluding in the inevitable precipitation of discovery and disaster, Sarah took the piece of parchment over.
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Vilmius took it without looking at it. For a long moment he kept his eyes on the Doctor’s face. Then he looked slowly down.
The effect was extraordinary – as if he were reading his death sentence, thought Sarah. His face, so far from being red, turned to the waxen white of a new corpse, the enormous hand which held the vellum was trembling like an old man’s, his mouth was opening and closing like a gasping fish as he fought to speak.
‘Where – where did you get this?’ he managed to breathe at last.
Before the Doctor could answer, there was a sudden commotion at the end of the hall. The main door crashed open and an elderly man, an outdoor servant from his weatherworn face and his clothes, paused for a moment to catch his breath before running up between the tables towards his lord.
‘Signore! Signore!’ he was calling. The whole assembly had fallen to silence.
‘What is it?’ said the Barone, in some consternation, rising to his feet. But the old man could do nothing but wave his arm back towards the doorway. All eyes followed his gesture.
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Through the door appeared a man in his middle thirties, dark, tanned, good-looking. For a moment, Sarah had the strange sensation that she had seen his face before.
The Barone and his wife both rose to their feet as he walked down the middle of the silent hall. Then, with a quiet moan and a gasp, the Baronessa buckled at the knees and slid to the floor.
Sarah ran to her, pulling away the chair she had been sitting on, but even as she knelt by her, she was joined on the other side by the young man himself.
‘Mother,’ he said.
She opened her eyes. ‘Guido,’ she said. ‘Is it really you?’
Guido? The long-lost son? The son who was killed twelve years ago?
‘Yes, Mother,’ he replied. ‘I’ve come home.’
Helping his mother to her chair, his arm round her as though to enfold her in his loving care, he was seized in turn by his father in an enveloping hug. He tried to speak but his father stopped him and, taking him by the hand, proclaimed his return to the company in the words of the parable:
‘Behold my son, who was dead and is alive again; who was lost and is found!’
Oh, what a hustling and a bustling there was then! All feudal discipline was lost. Chaotic cheering and laughing 182
filled the air as all who had known Guido – and many others
– swarmed forward to greet him as he stood by his mother, who lifted his hand in the two of hers and covered it with kisses and tears.
Sarah was quite cut off. It was well-nigh impossible for her to move in any direction or to see what was going on.
But one thing she did see: Maximilian Vilmius taking advantage of the hubbub to slip away, the scrap of parchment still in his hand; and the Doctor following after.
‘…and so the harbour-master sent a boat out and they towed us in.’
The Brigadier felt ashamed of himself. He’d quite made up his mind that Jeremy had got sick of the whole business and sloped off on the first available ferry. After all, why shouldn’t he? No affair of his, after all.
But here he was, bruised and battered, with the bonny lass from