Read Doctor Who: The Massacre Online

Authors: John Lucarotti

Tags: #Science-Fiction:Doctor Who

Doctor Who: The Massacre (16 page)

BOOK: Doctor Who: The Massacre
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‘And you claim you don’t meddle!’ he said, grinning.

‘Don’t be impertinent, Steven,’ the Doctor replied with the trace of a smile and pressed the dematerialisation button.

 

Epilogue

He sat in the garden and waited for them to return as he knew they would.

‘Doctor,’ they intoned together.

He looked up and raised an index finger. ‘One voice will suffice.’

‘There are some questions which still remain unanswered,’ a single voice continued.


Sans doute,
’ the Doctor replied, speaking French for the first time in centuries.

‘We shall deal with the apothecary Preslin first,’ a second voice announced. ‘You sent him and his colleagues to Germany.’


Pas moi,
gentlemen,’ the Doctor replied. ‘The Abbot’s seal took them there.’

‘Which
you
had purloined,’ a third voice accused.

‘You have proof of that, I trust?’ the Doctor retorted sharply. ‘Witnesses, for example?’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Let us consider the issue of the Chaplet girl and her relatives,’ a fourth voice said eventually.

‘I hardly knew her,’ the Doctor replied.

‘Yet you sent her and her family to Picardy,’ the first voice stated. ‘Why?’

‘It was too dangerous for them to return to their home,’

the Doctor explained.

‘Did they reach their destination?’ the second voice asked.

‘I haven’t the foggiest notion,’ the Doctor said.

‘Yet, in another time on the planet Earth you welcomed aboard the TARDIS a young woman of French origins named Dodo Chaplet... ’ The third voice was menacing.

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

‘No. Why should it?’ the Doctor half-chuckled. ‘Chaplet is to Dubois in France as Smith is to Jones in England. All good common family names. I see no necessary connection,’ he concluded, remembering that Dodo was the spitting image of Anne.

There was another pause before the fourth Time Lord spoke. ‘We have before us a contemporary woodcut by a witness to the assassination attempt on the life of the Admiral de Coligny,’ he said. ‘It clearly shows the presence of a cleric in an open doorway. Can you explain that?’

‘May I see it?’ The Doctor was fascinated and held out his hands into which the woodcut materialised. He studied it carefully and thought to himself that the artist who had made it had had a prodigious memory. Everything was exactly as it had happened. ‘I think, gentlemen, we must assume that the cleric is the Abbot of Amboise observing the failure of the Admiral’s murder.’

He held out the woodcut which disappeared from his hands. If only de Coligny had taken one half step further towards me, he thought wryly, Maurevert’s shot would have missed and I would be guilty as charged of changing history, for better or for worse.

There was a long silence and he knew they were gone.

He picked up Pepys’s diary beside him on the bench, opened it at random and tried to read. But his mind was elsewhere.

He was back in the tunnels reliving the exhilaration of those helter-skelter dashes through the darkness.

 

Document Outline
  • Front cover
  • Rear cover
  • Title page
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Author�s Note
  • Dramatis Personae
  • Prologue
  • 1 The Roman Bridge Auberge
  • 2 Echoes of Wassy
  • 3 The Apothecary
  • 4 Double Trouble
  • 5 The Proposition
  • 6 Beds for a Night
  • 7 Admiral de Coligny
  • 8 The Escape
  • 9 A Change of Clothes
  • 10 The Hotel Lut�ce
  • 11 The Royal Audience
  • 12 Burnt at the Stake
  • 13 The Phoenix
  • 14 Talk of War
  • 15 Face to Face
  • 16 A Rescue
  • 17 Good Company All
  • Epilogue
BOOK: Doctor Who: The Massacre
13.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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