Part 5 (2/2)

They looked around uneasily, and set off again at a run, as if by doing so they might startle something in the village into showing some signs of life. Moving at the double they came to a T-junction, turned left, and arrived at a ford, where a river ran across the road in a sparkling watersplash.

They stopped here to get their breath back. And it was only then, when they were making no noise themselves, that they heard the horses behind them. They looked round and saw Joseph Willow and a pair of troopers come cantering out of a side road. As soon as they spotted the two companions, they shouted and spurred their horses into a gallop.

'Oh, no,' Tegan sighed.

'Split up!' Turlough shouted. He ran back up the lane they had just come down, while Tegan bolted forward into the river. She splashed through the ford, and the sudden sensation of cold water das.h.i.+ng against her skin made her shudder.

But their ruse had confused the troopers, who had stopped, uncertain which of them to pursue. After a moment's hesitation, Willow sent his men to chase Turlough, and went after Tegan himself As she raced out of the ford Tegan looked back over her shoulder and stumbled into the arms of Ben Wolsey. The big Gumer, who had stepped out of the cover of a narrow alley, caught her as she came running past, and although Tegan struggled and screamed she was helpless in his strong grip. He held her writhing body without effort.

'Let me go!' she shouted, as Willow came riding up.

The Sergeant reined his horse and leaned down towards her. 'Not yet, my dear,' he leered His pleasure it her predicament made Tegan's skin crawl.

Wolsey sensed it too, and frowned. 'Do you have to enjoy this sort of thing quite so much!' he asked.

Willow tugged angrily at the reins; his horse reared, aid clashed its hooves down on the road. 'Just obeying orders, Colonel!' he shouted.

'That's what they all say,' Wolsey commented wryly.

The Sergeant was furious. 'Hah!' he shouted, and savagely spurred his horse back across the ford.

Tegan sensed that the friction between these two was close to breaking out into open hostility; since they were on opposite sides in the war game they would soon have ample excuse to work it out. But for the moment she herself was unable to exploit their quarrel.

There was nothing she could do at all, except accompany Colonel Ben Wolsey in whatever direction he decided to take her.

Ever since Willow had locked her into Wolsey's seventeenth-century parlour, Jane Hampden had been trying to escape. But there was no way out; the windows were securely fastened, Willow had barred the door, and nothing she could do would free either. Wearily she began another round of the room, in case she had missed something.

This time her eyes alighted on an old fighting axe, half-hidden among a display of Civil War weapons on the wall above the fireplace. She cursed herself for failing to realise its potential earlier with an axe she might be able to smash her way out! She hurried across to the fire, reached up to take the axe and saw the hunting tapestry move beside her face. It hung near the weapons; now it s.h.i.+fted slightly, as though tugged by a draught of air.

Jane forgot the axe. Excited, she hurried towards a heavy curtain which draped from ceiling to floor at the other side of the tapestry. She tugged at this and disrovered that a section of the wooden wall panelling behind it had moved away from the rest. A draught of air was rus.h.i.+ng through the gap. Jane pushed the panel; it moved open, like a door. At the other side, a stone pa.s.sage led away into darkness.

Up to now, Jane had been acting slowly, with the greatest wariness and care. There was no way of telling what she had discovered, or where it might lead. But now she was forced into precipitate action. She heard boots approaching rapidly outside. A voice was raised in anger, then a key turned in the lock. The voice was Sir George Hutchinson's and Jane panicked.

There was only the one way to escape, and no time for caution, so she pushed the panel wide and ran through the opening into the gloomy pa.s.sage. She came almost immediately to a spiral staircase; very slowly she began to grope her way down, into almost total darkness.

Behind her, in the room, the key turned in the lock, the bolt was unbarred and the door opened. Followed by two armed troopers, Sir George came in with his mouth open ready to speak to Jane, and for a moment he paused uncertainly, looking around the room with a goldfish expression. Then his eyes alighted on the long curtain blowing back from the wide open panel.

'The fool!' he fumed a spark of anger which quickly blazed into a full-throated shout of rage at his men. 'After her!' he screamed, adding as they broke into a run, 'We'll need some light! Get a candle!'

The troopers s.n.a.t.c.hed candles from the silver candelabra on the mantelpiece and bent down to light them at the burning logs in the hearth. Then they s.h.i.+elded the guttering flames and followed Sir George into the pa.s.sage. in pursuit of the schoolteacher.

The Doctor and Will Chandler were also underground, bent almost double to move along the low, narrow pa.s.sage from the vestry.

In the frail light from the Doctor's torch Will could see only indistinctly its rough, damp sides and roof. They were growing more vague by the minute for the Doctor was moving very fast and Will was lagging further and further behind. It had been like this since their first step from the vestry: the Doctor almost running, swept onward by his eagerness for discovery, while Will, breathless and aching in this constant crouching scuttle, struggled to keep up with him.

Without warning the Doctor stopped suddenly and listened. He beckoned to Will to come nearer, raising a finger for silence. 'Stay close, Will,' he whispered.

Will paused at his side, thankful to have a breather. In the wavering torchlight he could see that the pa.s.sage broadened just ahead and then opened to a wider area that was like a room hewn out of the rock. At one side of it a spiral staircase led upwards; apart from that the place seemed to be featureless an empty, eerie cavern in the bowels of the earth.

Then Will heard them: feet scuffing the floor above their heads and then moving slowly and hollowly down the stairs. While he was still translating the sound into words in his mind, the Doctor was diving forward and dragging him into the dark area underneath the stairs. They crouched down there and pressed back against the chill, oozing wall, while the stairs above their heads creaked softly.

Will held his breath and hoped the person would never reach the bottom. But the Doctor was impatient, eager to see who it might be. Suddenly there was another, more distant sound a voice raised in anger far above them.

Then more footsteps scuffed a far-off floor.

Jane Hampden heard the voice while she was still on the stairs. In a panic she looked back towards the pa.s.sage above, and the last faint spread of light from the parlour, expecting Sir George and his troopers to appear at any second. Not daring to take her eyes off the entrance to the pa.s.sage, she came down the last stairs backwards.

'Through here!' she heard Sir George shout in a voice brittle with irritation. Another, deeper voice muttered something in reply, then suddenly their footsteps were much closer. Jane s.h.i.+vered. She reached the bottom stair and looked apprehensively around, squinting through the gloom at what seemed to be a room cut out of solid rock.

She almost collapsed with fright when a voice hissed from the darkness beside her: 'Sshh! In here!'

A hand touched her shoulder and she spun round with a choking cry. Then she saw the Doctor and a youth under the stairs and nearly shouted with relief. The Doctor beckoned and she dived into their hiding place; she was just in time, for Sir George was already coming down the stairs, with the troopers lumbering heavily behind him.

Their candles cast distorted, s.h.i.+fting shadows on the walls and roof. 'Keep that light near!' Sir George snarled.

And then, 'We'll catch her before the church.' He stopped at the foot of the staircase and looked back up at the troopers' clumsy descent. 'Move yourselves,' he shouted, 'I don't want this to take all day!'

They hurried across the open area and disappeared into the pa.s.sage leading to the vestry. Soon the sounds of their footsteps faded away.

Jane let out the breath she had been holding ever since Sir George appeared, and relaxed enough to look curiously at the dirty, queerly-dressed youth who was ducked down beside her. For his part, Will was staring open-mouthed after the running men. He was disturbed and excited by their clothing. 'Them be troopers!' he cried.

The Doctor regretted having to disillusion him. 'No, Will,' he said softly. 'Those are just twentieth-century men, playing a particularly nasty game.'

The small, square box-room high up in Ben Wolsey's farmhouse was bare of furnis.h.i.+ngs, except for a single chair which stood like a sentinel in the middle of the rough, h.o.a.rded floor. Light glared in through an uncurtained window.

Willow pushed Tegan into this featureless prison so violently that she staggered clear across the room to the window. He stormed in after her, carrying a green and white, old-fas.h.i.+oned dress over his arm.

'Change into that,' he growled, and threw the dress over the chair.

Tegan turned round and faced him squarely. She was fed up with being pushed around, and her face expressed her anger. But it showed fear, too, because there was something extremely nasty about Willow, a viciousness which showed itself especially strongly when he was dealing with people weaker than himself. He had all the hallmarks of an out and out bully.

'Why?' Tegan demanded. She looked at the dress with distaste, hoping to talk him out of it, but Willow was in no mood for a discussion. He marched back to the door. 'Just do as you're told,' he snarled. 'Unless...' he paused in the doorway and leered at her: 'you want me to do it for you?'

Leaving that possibility hanging like a threat in the still air of the room, he went out and locked the door.

Attempting to escape, Tegan realised, was a non-starter: one glance out of the window at the distance to the ground was enough to convince her that the only way she was going to get out of here was when Willow decided to let her out. He would only do that if she put on this ridiculous garment.

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