Cheng hesitated. "I"m not sure," he admitted.
"I suppose it depends whose side you"re on."
Cheng shook his head. "I don"t know who"s on what side any more."
Anderson frowned.
"There"s something else I want instead," Cheng said.
"And that would be?"
"To talk to Wong Kei-Ying."
2.
Barbara couldn"t get enough of seeing Ian up on his feet, behaving normally. Normalcy wasn"t something people usually considered wonderful, but today she felt that Ian being normal was wonderful. It was wonderful because normalcy meant he wasn"t ill, he wasn"t in pain and his life wasn"t fading before her eyes.
"You look like you"ve won the pools," he had said earlier.
"I did. The jackpot." His face had softened then, and she had held him for a long minute. "I thought -"
"I know. I"ve been there. There and back again."
Barbara chuckled. "That"s a thought, actually. We saw that house last night, but I wonder if -"
"- if it"s still there in the cold light of day?" Ian nodded to himself, rubbing a sore spot on his chin. "I think some fresh air might do me good, actually. And it looks like being a nice day. I"ll just go and tell..." He fell silent with a grimace.
"Trouble?" Barbara asked, seeing the darkness in Ian"s expression. She felt a sudden weakness at the thought that the Doctor"s medicine might be wearing off. What if Ian"s injuries were causing a relapse?
"Are you hurt? Is the Doctor"s medicine wearing off?"
"No," he said with a sigh. "It"s this duel of the Doctor"s. He must be mad."
"I expect he knows what he"s doing, and has some kind of plan," she lied. Ian had had enough to worry about since they arrived here without this as well.
"I hope you"re right."
"You know I am. It"s not the first time he"s got into a sc.r.a.p."
"With an expert?"
"Ian Chesterton," she said in her best cla.s.sroom voice, "I do believe you just like to look for things to worry about. It"s as if you"re addicted to it."
"Believe me," Ian said with a smile, "I"d be only too happy never to find a problem again. It"s not my fault if worries keep finding me."
"Then I"m taking you to somewhere that they won"t find you. Or if they do, at least they might help settle the questions I"ve been asking myself since last night."
"As my lady commands," Ian quipped, with a faintly ridiculous courtly bow that belonged in one of Coal Hill School"s drama group productions. "Actually, maybe we should ask the Doctor to come with us. He seemed to have more ideas about this house of yours than I might have."
Barbara grinned. "He"s on teaching duty, and it"s an extended midterm break for us."
"There is that," he had agreed, and so they had gone.
Ian borrowed a hat to shade his eyes and partly cover his face, so that no-one would recognise him as they pa.s.sed through Canton.
Barbara had been half-afraid - more than half, if truth be told - that the house would be gone. After all, none of them had noticed it on their original journey into Canton the previous morning, and she had an unreasoning suspicion that it had appeared just for last night"s performance.
Her fears were unfounded. The house was still there, its colours muted and dusty, all the paintwork it had ever had faded by long years under the sun.
Ian had been half-expecting something Charles Addams might have drawn, then, remembering where he was, had amended his mental image to a sprawling paG.o.da with lots of dark windows and bats in the rafters.
What Barbara led him to was just a little bungalow, built in a typical Chinese plaster-and-tile fashion. In the daylight the house was rather grimy and run-down, but it didn"t look at all threatening or spooky to him.
"Are you sure this is the place?" he asked.
Barbara nodded. "It looked quite different last night."
"It must have done, from what you and Vicki told us."
There were roses growing around an old bench and table outside. The door was still solid, but it was ajar and Ian pushed experimentally against it. It was stiff, but opened under relatively little pressure and he went into the house.
Although it had rained overnight, the interior didn"t smell damp. Rather, it smelt of warm clay, with the scent of flowers keeping it fresh. It made the air a little thicker than Ian would have liked, but certainly not unpleasant.
The large room was dark even in the morning sunshine.
Moss had taken hold in the walls and there was no sign of furniture. The only footprints in the dust on the bare floorboards were his own. A couple of other smaller rooms were separated from the big one by wooden part.i.tions. Ian went through to the one on the left and found a large, wooden table and empty shelves. It was clearly a kitchen. The other room was as empty as the first, but Ian was fairly sure it must have been a bedroom.
"It doesn"t look like anybody"s lived here for years," Barbara said.
She was standing in the larger, main room, looking around.
Perhaps it was Ian"s imagination, but it seemed unusually quiet in the house. It wasn"t just that the walls blocked the sounds outside, of birds and rustling leaves, but their voices seemed muted in some way.
"No." Ian looked around. It was a nice enough house, but seemed forgotten in its corner of the roadside. He didn"t believe in ghosts, but shivered nonetheless. "Still, it"s a handy place to shelter from some rain."
"And not leave any footprints?"
Ian could only shrug. "You came in last night, didn"t you?
Yet you didn"t leave any footprints either and we both know you"re not a ghost. This must be a different house. The one you sheltered in must be somewhere else along the road.
Either we"ve missed it already or we haven"t reached it yet."
"And this one?"
"This one would be easy to miss in the dark."
"Ian, it is this house. I recognise it. That little table outside, the rose bush, the well."
"It"s probably the typical layout for a house in this time and place. And even if it was this house, I can guarantee you there"s a more rational explanation than ghosts and ghouls and things that go b.u.mp in the night."
"Such as?"
Ian hesitated, trying to think of a single rational explanation. "I dunno... Perhaps some more dust shook loose from the ceiling after you left and covered up the prints."
"That"s even more far-fetched and you know it, Ian! For one thing it would need the dust to be lying on the ceiling while Vicki and Fei-Hung and I were here. You might be the scientist, Ian, but I think that if anyone had repealed the law of gravity it would have been mentioned in a lot of very important history books."
"I suppose you"re right. Actually, I"m beginning to wonder a little more about this "stone tape" theory of the Doctor"s."
Barbara laughed. "That was rather outlandish, wasn"t it? It was all Greek to me. I don"t suppose you have a better idea of how believable it is?"
Ian had been thinking about it. Earlier he would have said the theory was pure science fiction, but now he wasn"t so sure. He knelt beside a wall and used a penknife to sc.r.a.pe some plaster away from the bricks.
"The Doctor could have a point. Tapes do record and read signals by magnetically affecting particles of iron oxide and the like." He tapped the wall. "And there are iron oxides in bricks like these..." He stood up. "I think I"d like to keep an open mind about it, at least."
Barbara stepped outside the house and went round the corner. Ian stayed where he was, looking for signs of hidden doors or some way out at the back. He didn"t find anything.
"Ian!" Barbara shouted suddenly, "Come quickly!"
Ian was moving at once, crashing through the overgrown garden to the back of the house. Barbara was keeling in a clearing, rubbing at a plank of wood that jutted up from a low rise. She wasn"t in any danger, so he slowed to a walk to cover the rest of the distance.
"What is it?"
"Ian, I think it"s a grave."
Ian looked at the plank. It was carved with Chinese characters that he couldn"t read. "It looks like one, I agree. But what difference does that make?"
"Perhaps it"s hers; the girl from last night, I mean."
Ian suppressed a laugh. "Why should it be? This could be anybody"s grave - if it even is a grave." He pointed to the inscription. "Unless you"ve suddenly developed an ability to read that."
"No, I just have... I don"t know, a feeling."
He was tempted to push the issue further but something about her tone stopped him. She was serious and, while she had no proof, neither did he. It was just a matter of her feeling against his, and he knew she wasn"t really any more superst.i.tious or gullible than he was. Her earnestness also surprised him, and he liked it when this happened. They"d been travelling together in the Ship for two years now, and knew each other pretty well, but moments like this still kept her surprising and fresh.
He realised she was looking at him while he was standing there smiling, and cleared his throat.
"You seem happy," she said.
"I was just thinking about this place. This isn"t too bad an era, Barbara. The height of the British Empire, London the premier city of the world. Not a bad era to live in."
"I suppose not. But what would our children think?
Workhouses? The trenches? The Blitz?"
"You"ve got a point there." He looked back at the house, then at Barbara. ""Our" children?"
The human race"s generally."
"Oh."
Barbara looked at the house again, thoughtfully. "She said something, you know."
"Who? The girl last night?"
"Yes. She said that her only regret was not seizing the day.
Apparently someone she loved said he"d go off to the army if she didn"t want him, and she didn"t talk him out of it. When he got killed she realised her mistake."
Ian had heard this story before, several times. "It"s a tradi-tional ghost story plot, I"ll give you that." He squatted beside the grave, if a grave it was, and patted it. "Perhaps this is his, rather than hers. Maybe she comes up from the city now and again to tend it, and got caught in the rain."
This, Ian felt, would satisfactorily explain Barbara"s encounter without recourse to the supernatural.
"You"re probably right," she admitted. "It"s hard to tell the ages of Chinese girls. I suppose she could have been older than I thought."
Something in her voice sounded different and alerted Ian.
He had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that they had been talking at cross-purposes, and that something was about to hit him out of the blue, but he couldn"t think what. All he knew was that his stomach was suddenly jittery about what it might be.
He realised what was going to happen, just a heartbeat before Barbara kissed him.
"What are you doing?"
"Seizing the day."
"I thought we"d seized this day before."