Doctor Who: Big Finish - Short Trips [029] - RE:Collections - The Best of Short Trips by Xanna Eve Chown

Author:Xanna Eve Chown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Big Finish
Published: 2009-05-16T15:36:52+00:00

Simon Guerrier

The Lampblack Wars

Matthew Sweet

An Adventure of the Third Doctor,

with Sarah Jane Smith

It was the corset that bothered Sarah Jane Smith – and not just because it had been a two-person job. She’d expected the Doctor to leave her to it, but no – he hadn’t shown the least sign of embarrassment as he laced the thing around her waist, fussing and flapping and singing Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier in his best Palace-of-Varieties baritone.

‘I suppose you wear a lot of frilly things yourself,’ she’d said, willing herself not to blush.

The Doctor’s appearance had only required the smallest adjustments to comply with the sumptuary codes of nineteenth-century London: the bottle-green smoking jacket, the Adam Adamant cape, the shirt with two strips of embroidered lace escorting the buttons up to his monstrous collar – these alone would have allowed him to pass for a minor Pre-Raphaelite. His physical features – the flurry of Arctic curls, the fuzzy sideburns, the prodigious nose, strong as a dodo’s beak didn’t detract from the image. And now that the TARDIS wardrobe had furnished him with a velvet-lined topper and a silk tie to match his jacket, perhaps, thought Sarah Jane, he looked a bit too Victorian.

Perhaps people would think he was taking the mickey.

The TARDIS had washed up under one of the arches of Covent Garden market. Stallholders were packing away their crates. Boys were sweeping up stray cabbage leaves and spirals of discarded orange peel.

A dog nosed around with a disappointed air, as if he wished he’d gone to Smithfield. Sarah took a lungful of pleasantly frosty air. ‘So what’s there to do on a Saturday night in Victorian London?’ she asked.

‘Besides staying in to read religious tracts and listen to the lady of the house playing Schubert?’

The Doctor closed the police box door behind him. ‘You’ve watched too much costume drama on television, Sarah Jane. Staying-in scenes are cheap. All you need is a pianoforte, a few nice frocks and Nyree Dawn Porter. They never show you what Victorians really got up to at night. How about a trapeze show? Or a play about Derby Day with six live horses on a conveyor belt, galloping away like bllly-o?’

He bowled out over the cobbles, lifted a copy of The Times from the hands of a newspaper vendor, and scanned the front page. Sarah fumbled in her bag for a coin and pressed it into the boy’s hand. The alacrity with which the lad scuttered down the street suggested that she had picked the wrong denomination.

‘What takes your fancy?’ the Doctor demanded. ‘We could go for a curry in Berkeley Square. I think Dean Mohammed’s place is still open – or perhaps he’s downshifted to Brighton by now and become a masseur. We could take the train down to Sydenham and catch Blondin. If we’re lucky we might see him pushing a lion across the highrope in a wheelbarrow. Or the business with the kitchen stove…’

The Doctor’s eyes glazed with pleasure.

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