Chapter One

By the time she returned to the house, Benny concluded that the Doctor wasn't turn up for at least another day, and had reconciled herself to another day of dozing in the sun. Perhaps later she'd try her hand at sketching: the orchard about a hundred yards to the west looked like a good prospect: recent storms had brought down a couple of the trees, and made the woodland look terribly dramatic. There was a tin of pencils and a drawing pad in the living room. It would give her some more time to think about the letter from Dellah.

When she stepped back onto the flagstones, Benny realised how dirty her feet had become. She put The Mirror down on the garden table, propping it underneath the breakfast tray to stop it blowing away. Then she stepped inside to take a quick shower. The house was vast, but there was only one bathroom, which had been the cause of friction between the Doctor's travelling companions on more than one occasion. She remembered the last time: Roz had stood at the bathroom door, demanding to know how Chris could possibly take an hour and a half in there every day. Benny and ... Jason had ... they had both been woken by the sound of raised voices. They lay curled around each other in the upstairs bedroom, able to listen only to Roz's side of the argument, trying to stop each other giggling, but both their bodies convulsed with laughter at every terse insult that drifted up the short flight of stairs. They'd been pressed so close together that in the end they hadn't been able to distinguish which of them was laughing at which remark. They'd had to part, exhausted, and for the rest of the day, every time they made eye contact they couldn't help sniggering. Benny found herself smiling, even now, despite all that had happened since.

Another source of tension was the minuscule amount of hot water the house would allow every day. It was possible to get more, Benny had discovered, although you had to slap the brass tank that sat on the landing a couple of times to get it. When you heard the glup deep below in the bowels of the house, you'd know that you'd done it. It was the sort of valuable-trivial information that you kept from your housemates, and she'd not told anyone else about the trick. The brass piping, like the electrical wiring, was a little haphazard. Knowing the house's owner, Benny could well imagine how the plumbing had been installed a bit at a time over the centuries, on the basis of need, from junk the Doctor had found in the garage.