Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire Part 16

'I hope to live a great deal more substantially than that,' the Doctor muttered.

From there the discussion moved on. Sherringford tried once again to dissuade us from the journey, whilst K'tcar'ch remained strangely silent.

Mycroft revealed that the Government had been aware that a larger than usual number of people had left the country bound for India, but in their infinite wisdom had decided not to pursue the matter. The Doctor and I debated how Maupertuis had got to hear about the books, but without success. After that I remember little of our packing and making arrangements. Now, as I sat with the Doctor and Holmes in the dining room of the Matilda Briggs, the time in between the revelations in the Library and that moment seemed like a dream, glimpsed but dimly through a gla.s.s.

'We should start planning our itinerary for when we reach Bombay,' Holmes said, breaking into my reverie. 'Maupertuis is on the .S S Soudan, and will have three days' head start on us. Watson, you're something of an expert on matters Indian. How do you suppose we can find the Baron?'

'Well, we'll need to make contact with a local man, preferably one with some influence, to make arrangements over travel and suggest likely places to check hotels and suchlike. Then it's a question of whether Maupertuis is covering his trail or not. If he's not expecting to be followed we should be able to determine his location fairly quickly.' I shook my head.

'If only we had been able to send a message ahead to prepare the way for us.'

'We did,' said the Doctor.

'What do you mean?'

'Didn't I tell you? How remiss of me. I have already been in contact with a friend of mine, who is waiting for us in Bombay. With any luck, she will be able to tell us everything we want to know.'

'And how did you know that you would need someone in Bombay?' Holmes snapped. 'Or was it sheer coincidence?'

The Doctor gazed up at him with an ageless expression on his face, and it was Holmes who looked away first.

'Oh,' said the Doctor finally, 'I have a girl in every port.'

That was the first we heard of Professor Bernice Summerfield, a woman who was to become very dear to my heart in a very short s.p.a.ce of time. As she is to play such an important part in the continuation of this narrative, it is only fair that I should let her introduce herself in her own words, from the diary to which she has so very kindly allowed me access.

Chapter 9.

In which a new voice takes up the story, and the Doctor is picked up in a hotel. hotel.

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield Bombay smells.

Yes, I know I've written the same words every morning for the past two months, but they come from the heart. Bombay smells. It smells like no other place I've ever visited. I mean, I've lived everywhere from the slums of Avernus, where dead bodies are left to rot where they drop, to a squat above a thoat-gelding shop in the mires of Zellen VIII, but I've never come across such an all-pervading, gut-wrenching stench of decay and unwashed flesh. That's what coming home means, if Earth is really home any more. Unwashed aliens just smell exotic, and more often than not rotting alien food tastes better than it does fresh. What I'm trying to say is that even a nasty alien stink has something extraordinary about it, but sheer human squalor just turns the stomach.

Especially when I'm in a city whose people think that the function of a river is to act as a latrine upstream and a launderette downstream. I'd complain, but I'm too polite. I have to be polite. In 1887, on Earth, everybody is polite.

Well, everybody that matters.

But that's the general gripe over with. Onto the specific.

The P&O representative told me yesterday that the Matilda Briggs was due in after lunch. Today, after all the usual guff - sleeping in, being woken up by the mamlet who wanted to clean my room, dressing, having lunch - I wandered through town towards the dock. The route was lined with shops, hotels and offices designed to be impressive, in a gothic sort of way. I had to push my way through crowds of workers, soldiers, beggars, lepers, amputees, bullocks and pariah dogs before I could pa.s.s across the vast open square to where the ocean rolled greasily against the pylons of the dock. A battalion of British Army soldiers was waiting to embark on one of the s.h.i.+ps. Their pennants fluttered limply in the breeze, their brightly coloured uniforms were already soaked in sweat, and one in three was yellow and wasted by malaria. Behind them the Deccan mountains pierced the pure blue membrane of the sky. I could almost believe that the sharp silhouette of their peaks against the sky was actually the coastline poking out into the waters of the Arabian Sea, and I was standing on the mountain tops, looking downwards, far away from where the Doctor would arrive.

Eventually I wandered across to the Ballard Pier, surrounded by eager s.h.i.+pping agents and hara.s.sed representatives from P&O, Bibby's and British India. I was clutching the Doctor's telegram in my hand. Every few minutes I unfolded it and checked again that I hadn't got the name of the s.h.i.+p wrong. Odd thoughts kept chasing their tails around my mind. What if there'd been a problem and the Doctor hadn't boarded in the end? What if I'd misinterpreted his instructions and I was supposed to be somewhere else? What if he was angry at me for wasting my time when I could have presented him with a solution to his problems, all wrapped up with a little pink bow? What if...?

I knew the real problem, of course. I was scared of seeing him again. No reason: just scared.

A beggar approached, imploring me for alms. His head was covered in running sores. His thick hair rippled gently in the breeze. I looked closer, and recoiled as some of it took flight, buzzing briefly around his head before settling again to feed. Flies - the ever-present curse of India. I waved him away, feeling a sudden knife-stab of guilt. There were tens of thousands of people in Bombay. I couldn't help all of them. That was the true evil. Not Daleks, not Hoothi.

Poverty and powerlessness.

From the dock I gazed out across the Arabian Sea, out to where the heat haze and the waves merged to form an ambiguous boundary, neither sea nor sky, half in this universe and half somewhere else. I was hypnotized by it. My mind blurred like the landscape. The Matilda Briggs had grown into a cloud the size of a man's hand before I woke up. Within an hour it was a metal leviathan, belching steam as it wallowed up to the dock.

And there he was, on deck, waving his umbrella to attract my attention. He was exactly as I had remembered. I felt my breath catch in my throat. He was small and he was trouble, but I'd missed him.

Ropes were flung back and forth, and there was a lot of jostling and bustling, most of it unproductive. Eventually a gangplank was in place.

After he disembarked he scurried up as if to give me a great big hug, but skidded to a halt inches from me and raised his hat instead.

'Doctor Livingstone, I presume?' he said.

'Doctor Doctor, I presume?' I replied.

He gazed at me for a while, checking me out from head to toe and from side to side. Around us, disembarking families wandered like ducklings.

'There's something different about you. He frowned, and looked me over again. 'Don't tell me. Let me guess.'

'Doctor, I . .'

'It's the hair, isn't it? You've had your hair done.'

'No, I...'

'I know! You've lost weight'

I sighed.

'No Doctor, I'm disguised as a man.'

He checked again.

'Are you? How very Shakespearian. Well, I'm sure you've got a good reason.'

'I have,' I said. 'Have you got any idea how they treat women in this era?

You asked me to pretend to be one of the girls who comes out looking for a husband. It was so demeaning. Do you know what the men call those girls?

'The fis.h.i.+ng fleet'. The ones who can't find husbands are called 'returned empties'. It's disgusting. I was going mad!'

He scowled.

'You were supposed to remain inconspicuous.'

'I knocked a man out in the hotel bar one night. After that, I decided I was more inconspicuous disguised as a man than as a woman.'

The Doctor winced.

'I'm sure I don't want to know,' he said, 'but I know you're going to tell me anyway'

'I'd just popped in for a drink when a cigar-chomping moron tried to feel me up. I politely told him to go away, but he persisted. So I told him not so politely. I think he's out of the hospital now.'

The s.h.i.+p's horn suddenly blasted out a sound like a dras.h.i.+g's mating call.

The Doctor winced.

'I did tell you-that women are decorative, rather than productive, in this society,' he said, scrunching his hat up in his hands. 'They do not drink alone in bars, and they most emphatically do not get involved in unseemly brawls.'

'They don't do anything! I checked out of the hotel that night, and checked into another one the next day dressed like this.'

'Where did you get the clothes?'

'From my erstwhile admirer's room. I figured he wouldn't be needing them for a while, not with his ribs in that state. So I liberated them.'

The Doctor grinned slightly, and so did I. His eyes twinkled. I couldn't match that, so I waggled my ears instead. And that's how Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson found us, grinning like loons and performing tricks with bits of our anatomy.

I knew there was something familiar about them when they approached, gazing around at the spectacle that was Bombay, sweat glossing their faces and a bevy of Indian porters hauling their trunks after them. Watson could have been anyone - he was handsome, in a reserved sort of way, but he wouldn't stand out in a crowd - but Holmes's aquiline profile and incisive, penetrating gaze hit some deep vein of memory in me.

They were both wearing lightweight tropical suits and those topees that make people look like mushrooms. The Doctor (who once took me to a planet where mushrooms look like people, but that's another story) was dressed in his usual linen suit and white hat, and somehow looked less out of place here than usual. I could tell from the way that Holmes and Watson were standing that they were wearing those bizarre spinal pads that were supposed to protect your spine from the sun and facilitate the circulation of air, but ended up making you feel even more uncomfortable and just as hot.

'Professor Bernice Summerfield, Mr Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson,' the Doctor announced.

Holmes nodded coolly at me. Watson was fl.u.s.tered. I wondered why for a second, then remembered that I was dressed as a man. He didn't know whether to shake my hand or kiss it.

'Professor Summerfield,' he said finally, clasping his hands behind his back. 'I'm enchanted.'

By his expression he had me figured for a lesbian. Normally it wouldn't bother me - bis.e.xuality is the norm in my era - but I knew from my researches that the eighteen eighties weren't quite as enlightened. Ask Oscar Wilde.

'I'm working undercover,' I confided, 'and call me Bennie.' He smiled, relieved.

'Where do we go from here?' he asked.

'I've booked rooms for you in my hotel,' I replied. 'I suggest that you wash and brush up, then we'll meet for dinner.'

He nodded.

'I've been looking forward to tasting Indian food again for the entire voyage,'

he confided as I gestured to the nearest group of tikka-gharis - four wheeled horse-drawn carriages similar to hansom cabs. After a brief argument, one of them headed towards us. Watson made to take my arm, but caught himself just in time.

'You've been here before?' I asked.

'Indeed. I pa.s.sed through here on my way to Afghanistan. I fought in the Second Afghan Campaign, you know?'

'How brave.' I was being mildly sarcastic, but he didn't seem to notice.

'I was wounded in the shoulder with a jezail bullet. Still gives me gyp. Nasty things.'

'Jezail?'

'It's a sort of long-barrelled musket, fired from a rest.'

The carriage pulled up beside us and the driver busied himself fighting with Holmes and Watson's bearers for possession of the bags. Like all lower-caste Indians, they wore turbans and dhotis - long lengths of cloth wound around their midriffs - and little else. It had taken me a month to stop regarding them as unfortunate accident victims. Still it could be worse. The Ook of the Crallis Sector wear clothes made out of small mammals, still alive but st.i.tched together.

Eventually, after I was satisfied that our luggage was all present and correct, I gave the driver the name of my hotel and made him repeat it.

Then we set off. Watson, after fussing about trying to order the men around and failing, had bagged the seat beside me.

'You speak Hindi?' he asked, miffed, as I settled into the seat and we moved off.

'Hindustani, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Sontaran,' I said. 'I speak them all. It's a gift.'

'Oh.'

He turned to gaze out at the sun-baked streets. I refrained from telling him that I hadn't had to learn a word: somehow my a.s.sociation with the Doctor had enabled me to understand any language I came across. If only he could bottle it and sell it.

I met the three of them in the hotel bar after they had unpacked. I had a couple of minutes alone amid the bamboo furniture and bra.s.s fittings before they turned up. A large sheet of woven bamboo strips swung back and forth from a hinge on the ceiling, twitched by a rope which pa.s.sed through a hole in the wall to where some hapless punkah-wallah sat outside. There was a piano in one corner, its legs sitting in saucers of water to stop white ants from climbing up and eating their way through the instrument. A couple of florid ex-Army types with huge walrus moustaches were sitting over by it, balancing their G&Ts on the lid, to the obvious displeasure of the splendidly turbaned and uniformed khitmagar behind the bar. They nodded at me in a companionable way. If only they knew, I thought.

The Doctor arrived first. I suspect that he didn't even go inside his room. I'd never seen him sleep, or carry a spare set of clothes, or brush his teeth, or do any of those things that we all take for granted. I also suspect that when the rest of humanity go to bed the Doctor is either out wandering the streets or standing in a corner of his room until sunrise.

'So, what do you think of India, then?' he asked, settling himself cross-legged into a cane chair.

'I've been all over the universe with you, Doctor, and Earth in the nineteenth century is the most alien place I've ever seen.'

He smiled.

'I've always had a soft spot for it,' he confided. 'There's such a sense of infinite possibility. You feel that almost anything could evolve from this mora.s.s of science and superst.i.tion. It showcases humanity at its best, and at its worst. What about India? What have you found out?'

'I thought from the histories that it was all fairly simple. The Mughal dynasty ruled the continent for some three centuries until 1756, when their last emperor was dethroned by the British. After that, the British East India Company was allowed to run the country on behalf of the British Government for the lucrative jute, indigo and spice trade. Just like IMC and Lucifer, I guess. There was a native revolt in 1857. You know why?'

He nodded, but I continued anyway. 'It was so stupid: the sepoy troops believed that a new type of cartridge case was coated with either beef fat or pork fat. Of course, the Hindus couldn't touch pork and the Muslims couldn't touch beef. So they revolted -literally. After the mutiny the British Army was sent in to oversee the place, the British East India Company was abolished and the Indian Civil Service was set up. Lots of young British lads were sent out to keep the place running for the next century, and then India achieved dominion status in 1947.'

He nodded.

'You seem to have grasped the basics.'

'But that's too simplistic!' I protested. 'This place is a jigsaw. At the moment there are fourteen British-run provinces like Baluchistan, Sind, Madras, Bombay and Bengal, each with its own distinct character and geography, divided into a total of two hundred and fifty-six districts. Alongside that, there are five hundred and sixty-two native states like Rajputana, Mysore and Hyderabad, lorded over by an a.s.sortment of Nizams, Walis, Jams, Rajahs, Maharajahs, Ackonds, Ranas, Raos and Mehtars. Across both the British-run and the native areas, there are over two thousand three hundred castes, sects, and creeds, each with its own distinctive customs and religious injunctions. This isn't a country, it's a universe in its own right,'

He grinned.

'I've always thought of India as a microcosm,' he said.

'Of what?'

'If I ever find out, I'll be a wiser man than I am now.'