Some distance from the dump, Steven saw the crowd and, with a sinking heart and in spite of his feet, increased his pace towards it. He knew what had happened. Someone had opened the door to the rubbish dump and had seen the TARDIS.
Steven forced his way through to the front of the crowd.
The door had been knocked down as well as most of the front wall and the rubbish cleared away. The TARDIS was surrounded by halberdiers and over it were three stout tree trunks strapped together to form a triangular support for the pulleys and ropes which made up the primitive crane that was secured to the TARDIS and hoisting it, centimetre by centimetre, into the air so that the horse drawn cart waiting to one side could be backed in under it and take it away.
The Hotel Lutèce
Lerans was angry and perplexed when Muss told him that both Anne and Steven had disappeared. He wanted to know how and why.
‘The how I can answer,’ Muss replied. ‘She must’ve shown him the rubbish tunnel which was unguarded.’
‘So, he’s gone looking for his friend, the Doctor, but why did he take the girl with him?’ Lerans demanded.
‘Surely, he knew the risks they’d be running’
‘I’d’ve thought so,’ Muss poured some water from a pitcher on his desk into a glass and sipped it. ‘Both sides are out looking, let’s hope we find them first. But what do we tell the Doctor?’
Lerans stood up and leant on the desk with his fists to face Muss. ‘Nothing. Not a word until the royal audience is over, until we know what’s proposed as de Coligny’s fate.’
‘When will Catherine receive
our
Abbot?’ Muss asked.
Lerans turned away from the desk and spread out his arms as he walked over to the window. ‘When I know
their
Abbot’s plans for tomorrow, then I’ll prepare ours. But count on it for tomorrow.’
Steven and Anne mingled with the crowd following the cart with the TARDIS loaded on it.
‘Is that something to do with you?’ Anne asked. ‘Is that why you took me there?’ Steven nodded. ‘But what is it?’
she continued.
‘A special type of carriage.’ He kept his voice down.
‘Where are the wheels?’ Anne’s curiosity was aroused.
‘As you can see. it doesn’t have any,’ he replied.
‘So it has to be pulled around like that,’ Anne said, sounding derisory. ‘Not very fast, more funny, I’d say...’
‘It’s... different,’ Steven conceded and wonder where the TARDIS was being taken to.
An hour later the motley procession entered a Iarge square with a forbidding fortress in the middle of it.
‘Where are we?’ Steven asked.
Anne looked at him in surprise. ‘You are a stranger to Paris,’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s the Bastille prison and very few who go in alive come out in the same condition, I can tell you.’
Steven stared in horror as the horse-drawn cart reached two huge wooden doors which opened to receive the TARDIS and then closed behind it as the crowd dispersed.
‘I’m hungry, Steven, aren’t you?’ Anne asked perkily.
‘Yes, yes, I suppose we should eat something,’ Steven mumbled, his mind elsewhere.
‘We’ve got to think about the curfew,’ Anne reminded him, bringing up yet another problem.
They found a small inn near the square and ordered wine, fruit juice, bread and cheese. Anne drank the juice and munched her food with pleasure whilst Steven barely touched his wine and nibbled distractedly at the wedge she had prepared for him. Finally, she reached out with a hand and touched his arm.
‘Don’t look so worried, Steven’, she said gently.
‘There are questions to he answered,’ he replied, ‘where my friend, the Doctor, is and, when I find him, how we’ll reach the carriage, but most immediately, where you and I can spend the night without being arrested.’
‘That’s no problem, at all,’ Anne replied. ‘There are some very good hotels in Paris.’
‘You need papers to stay in one,’ Steven protested,
‘believe me, I know.’
‘Not in these ones you don’t,’ Anne insisted. ‘Though sometimes, if you leave it too late, finding rooms can be difficult. So, eat up, we’ll have a good night’s sleep and see what we can do about the other answers tomorrow.’
Steven studied Anne’s face fist a few moments. Her fresh complexion was surrounded by a shoulder-length tangle of auburn curls, her nose
retroussé
, and under it a mouth which frequently twitched at the corners as though she were about to burst out laughing, or giggling, at any moment although her pale blue eyes were shrewd and knowing.
‘How old did you say you were?’ Steven asked.
‘I didn’t – but I’m fifteen,’ she replied.
‘That’s not too young to give good advice,’ Steven said and took a big bite of his bread and cheese.
Steven paid and as they left the inn he asked where was the nearest hotel they could stay at. Anne replied that there was one very close, only two streets away. As they walked towards it, the tocsin bell began to chime.
‘Only just in time,’ Steven remarked, expecting to find the hotel in front of them as they turned a corner. Instead he was confronted with an old, abandoned cemetery, overgrown with wild flowers and weeds amongst which a number of sepulchres sprouted. ‘Here?’ he asked with some surprise.
‘They say they’re very cool in the summer,’ Anne assured him. ‘Lots of students sleep in them and nobody minds.’ He laughed at her and put his arm around her shoulders.
‘Which would you rather, madame?’ he asked. ‘The southerly aspect, facing west, looking north or to the east?’
They found a tomb with a shelf on either side – and no bones. Crouching, Steven used a branch with some leaves on it to sweep off the dust whilst Anne collected some wild flowers ‘to decorate their apartment’, as she put it. Steven undid his bundle of clothes and made two pillows of them and placed one on each shelf. Anne had been right, it was pleasantly cool inside the tomb even though there was no door.
Later, as they lay on their shelves in the gathering dusk, Steven asked exactly where they were.
‘It’s called the Lutèce cemetery. Lutèce was the old Roman name for Paris,’ Anne murmured sleepily.
‘The Hotel Lutèce,’ Steven mused, ‘I shall recommend it to my friends.’ Chuckling, he fell asleep.
By morning, word of the TARDIS’s discovery had spread throughout Paris with, possibly, the only exception being the apothecaries and the Doctor in the cave. When the King heard of it, he called for a horse and rode with several courtiers, among them de Coligny and Tavannes, to the Bastille to examine it. From a discreet distance Steven and Anne watched them enter the fortress and saw the TARDIS on the ground in the centre of the courtyard before the doors were closed.
‘What do you make of it, de Coligny?’ the King asked as, from what was considered a safe distance, they circled the time-machine.
‘I have no idea, sire,’ the Admiral admitted.
‘An engine of war, perhaps, my Liege?’ Tavannes suggested.
‘But what manner?’ the young King asked. ‘An explosive device? It does not move unless it can fly like a bird.’ He flapped his arms whilst everyone laughed dutifully. ‘And why should it have been set down where it was?’
‘Perhaps, sire, the answers lie inside,’ de Coligny ventured.
‘We shall have it opened,’ the King replied and waved a royal hand at no one in particular. ‘Fetch a locksmith, the best there is to be found.’ He remounted his horse. ‘But none shall enter therein unless we are present.’ The doors opened and they rode back to the palace.
Lerans and Muss’s interest in the find was minimal.
Lerans had gone to the Cardinal’s palace to study the Abbot’s schedule for the day which was posted, as was the custom, on the main gates. Like the previous day, the only opportunity for the Abbot’s substitution appeared to be between three and five in the afternoon when he rested and read his Office but the problem was that Catherine retired to her rooms in the Queen’s Palace during the afternoon and could not be disturbed.
For Muss’s part, his disinterest was due to his concern for the Admiral’s position in the Court and he spent the morning trying to work out, without much success, which Catholic political manoeuvre would be most likely to bring about his master’s downfall.
On the other hand, the Abbot of Amboise was most interested in the bizarre machine but he was too preoccupied with the relative strengths of Catholics and Huguenots in other parts of France to go and look at it himself. So he sent Duval who found the locksmith hard at work trying to prise open the lock whilst being watched by the halberdiers on guard.
‘What progress do you make?’ Duval asked. The locksmith straightened up and scratched the back of his neck.
‘With all the betties that I’ve got, my lord,’ he said, jingling a ring with wires, hooks and odd-shaped needles hanging from it, ‘with all of them there’s not a lock in Paris, no, in all of France, that’ll keep me out.’ He pointed at the keyhole in the TARDIS door. ‘But this one’s made by the devil himself for it’s like none other I’ve ever seen.’
‘The black arts,’ Duval murmured as the locksmith inserted another needle into the keyhole and tried to manoeuvre it. Then he yelped and leapt back. ‘What is it, fellow?’
‘It set my arm on fire inside,’ the locksmith blurted.
‘Show me,’ Duval said and examined the man’s arm. ‘I see no sign of burning.’
‘Inside my arm, like a cramping of the muscles,’ the locksmith wailed and then pointed at the key stuck in the lock. ‘And how will I get that one out?’
‘Touch nothing,’ Duval ordered and turned to the halberdiers. ‘Take this hapless creature and incarcerate him alone for he is possessed by Satan, the Lord of Darkness.’
Bemoaning his miserable fate, the locksmith was taken away and thrown into one of the Bastille’s dungeons whilst Duval made his way back to the Cardinal’s palace as quickly as possible.
Lerans paced nerviously in front of the Doctor.
‘I can think of no better method than to have you wait in the crypt of Notre Dame until a favourable opportunity presents itself to escort you to the Queen Mother,’ he confessed as the Doctor watched him wearily.
‘And if one doesn’t, what then?’ The Doctor had acid in his voice.
‘One will, one
must
.’ Lerans was desperate. ‘But we must be ready to take advantage of it.’
The Doctor sighed. ‘The interview with Catherine and after that we shall leave you,’ he said. ‘How is Steven, by the way?’
‘Fine. Very well,’ Lerans replied almost too quickly.
‘Mystified by your continuing absence, of course, but in good spirits.’
‘Hmm... ‘ the Doctor said noncommitedly.
11
Steven weighed up the alternatives which seemed open to him and came to the conclusion that returning to the auberge was the logical thing to do. The Doctor had said they would meet there so that was where Steven would wait for him.
He would have preferred Anne to return to de Coligny’s house but she argued that Duval’s men were watching it and she would almost certainly be captured by them before being safely inside its walls. Reluctantly, Steven agreed with her and they set off towards the island and Notre Dame.
Once again the day was clear, fine and hot as the mid-morning crowds bustled about their business on the streets. Steven held Anne’s hand as they jostled their way towards the bridge but were forced to one side by an approaching carriage.
Not until it was level with them did Steven realise that the man inside with Duval was the Doctor. Or was he? he wondered and then, taking the risk of drawing Duval’s attention to them both, Steven shouted out the Doctor’s name.
But the Abbot of Amboise ignored him.
‘Where’s he going? To the TARDIS?’ Steven asked aloud.
‘To where?’ Anne was puzzled.
‘The Bastille and the carriage,’ he corrected himself.
‘We’ll go back and see,’ she suggested.
Steven thought for a moment before replying. ‘No, no, we won’t. We’ll go to the auberge as planned.’
But as they reached
le Grand Pont
to cross the river, Steven had an even greater surprise. A carriage came rattling over it and drove of towards the Queen Mother’s palace with one passenger inside, the Abbot of Amboise.
Or was that one the Doctor? Steven broke into a run, dragging Anne along with him. ‘Doctor!’ he shouted several times but the street noises were too loud for the Doctor to hear and the carriage drew away.
‘One of those two men is my friend, the Doctor,’ Steven stopped and gasped in exasperation.
‘But which one?’ Anne asked.
He shook his head. ‘If I knew that our troubles would be over – well, almost over,’ he corrected himself thinking about the TARDIS locked in the Bastille unless, of course, that Abbot was the Doctor, in which case he should have listened to Anne, but if it weren’t the Doctor then – he gave up in confusion and took Anne to the auberge where they mingled with the crowd outside and waited to see what would happen next.
The two Abbots of Amboise arrived at their destinations almost simultaneously, the first at the Bastille and the second at the Queen Mother’s palace where the Doctor was shown into an ante-chamber prior to being announced.
‘My Sovereign Lady,’ the Doctor murmured as he bowed over Catherine’s hand.
‘What would my Lord Abbot with us?’ asked the dumpy, plain, middle-aged woman in widow’s weeds who ruled all of France over her son’s feeble protests.
‘I am concerned, your Majesty, about Admiral de Coligny’s proposed alliance with the Protestant Dutch against Catholic Spain in the Low Countries,’ the Doctor said, ‘and I repeat, Catholic must not fight Catholic.’
‘Nor shall they, my Lord Abbot, there will be no alliance and no war,’ Catherine replied. ‘We shall never permit it and with good reason. Marshall Tavannes is right, France cannot afford a war and moreover, as Henri of Navarre learned to his cost, we are no match for the Spanish force of arms.’
‘But the Admiral has the King’s ear, your Majesty, and argues persuasively,’ the Doctor continued.
‘And I am the Queen Mother, Regent of France,’ she answered.