‘A Western it is, then,’ said the Doctor gently. ‘Rio Bravo. A Fistful of Dollars. Dances With Wolves . . .’ He fell silent as they approached the box office. The kiosk was dark and lifeless. ‘Hang on. This doesn’t look right.’ He fished in his pocket and aimed his sonic screwdriver at the booth. The slender device buzzed, and the door hissed open. He glanced inside and gave a pained groan, returning with a moment later with a sheet of electronic paper in his hand.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Cinema’s closed,’ he replied, showing her the paper. ‘It seems that last week they were having a disaster film festival, using virtual-environment simulators. Apparently, someone set the dial too high when they were screening Earthquake! and, well . . . The floor caved in.’ He sighed. ‘Still. Better that than The Towering Inferno.’
She turned and walked back the way they had come, back toward the TARDIS. ‘It’s OK. Never mind.’ It was odd; after all, it wasn’t as if they were talking about anything serious, right? It was just a movie, wasn’t it? And yet Martha felt cheerless, as if something as simple as being able to watch some creaky old Wild West film was the only way she could feel close to her family, out here in the depths of space-time, so far away from all she knew.
The Doctor trailed behind her, stepping up to unlock the door of the police box as they returned to the alley where it had materialised. He seemed to sense her change of mood. ‘I’m sorry, Martha.’
She tried to make light of it. ‘Oh, who wants stale popcorn and runny ice cream anyway?’ But she couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice.
They entered the wide, domed chamber of the control room, stepping into the thrumming heart of the TARDIS.
All at once, the Doctor’s expression changed. He grinned. ‘You know what? You’re right. And I have a much better idea.’
He bounded past her to the console that ringed the crystalline central column. Without any apparent order to his actions, the Doctor skipped from panel to panel, flipping switches and spinning dials.
He paused, chewing his lip, and then worked a crank handle.
Martha’s momentary melancholy faded before his burst of excitement. She had to smile; the Doctor had a way about him, as if he took each piece of sadness in the universe personally, like he had sole responsibility to banish the gloom from things. ‘What are you up to now?’
He peeked at her from around the column. ‘Why bother watching the Wild West?’ he asked her. ‘Why bother watching it when we can, well . . .’
‘Go there?’ Her smile widened.
The Doctor grabbed the TARDIS’s dematerialisation control. ‘Martha Jones,’ he said, slamming the lever down, ‘Saddle up!’
Jenny hitched up her skirt an inch or two so she could cross main street without getting more than a speck of mud on her. She picked her way around the trestle tables and makeshift chairs set up along the boardwalk outside the Bluebird saloon.
A couple of the bar girls gave her a respectful smile and a wave, pausing in their work. They were putting up some bunting to string along the storefronts, in preparation for the street party that evening. Jenny smiled back and kept on her way, stepping up past Vogel’s General Store. Held in a bundle by a leather belt, the books she carried were an awkward burden, and she had to keep stopping to adjust them so they didn’t fall. They were a precious cargo; there was little enough reading matter hereabouts, and Jenny felt like it was her duty to keep as much of it safe and secure as she could.
As she passed the jail, the sheriff stepped out, taking a draw from a thin cigarillo between his lips. He saw Jenny and tipped his hat. ‘Good morning, Miss Forrest.’
‘Sheriff Blaine,’ she replied, bobbing her head.
‘And how’s the day been treatin’ you, might I inquire?’
She showed him the books. ‘I’ve had a minor windfall. After Mr Toomey’s passing, his widow donated these to the schoolhouse library.’
Blaine nodded. ‘The sour old fella was good for somethin’, then.’ He eyed the books. ‘Myself, I never been blessed with an over-abundance of schoolin’, but I see the merit in it.’
‘His passing was a sad matter.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose we must thank providence that more didn’t follow him.’
‘Toomey was never a fit man,’ Blaine noted. ‘If the sickness was gonna take anyone, I would have wagered it’d be him.’ The lawman took another drag on the cigarillo and blew out smoke. ‘I reckon we’ve been blessed to lose so few.’
Jenny shifted uncomfortably. ‘That is one way to see things, I suppose.’
Blaine showed a crack-toothed smile. ‘Heh. If you’ll pardon me sayin’ so, Miss Forrest, but I’ve never been clear why it is a woman as fair and as educated as yourself finds it so hard to see the good in things.’
She frowned. ‘I’m just . . . just cautious, is all.’
‘Well, I hope that won’t stop you comin’ along to the festival tonight. Gonna be a talent contest outside the Bluebird, a potluck and singin’. Just what folks need, after what happened.’
Jenny moved on. ‘Perhaps I will,’ she told him. ‘I have some work to prepare for the children’s lessons tomorrow. Perhaps, if I get finished in time.’
Blaine tipped his hat again and walked off. ‘Hold you to that, ma’am.’
She left him behind, turned the corner and ventured down the side street; and for a brief instant a peculiar noise came to her on the breeze. Jenny couldn’t place the sound at all. It was like, oh, the grating of a pair of giant bellows, or the rasping of a winter wind through the trees. It seemed to be issuing from the alleyway behind the Assay Office.
The schoolteacher hesitated for a moment, her caution warring with her curiosity. But as usual, caution won. She shook her head, dismissing the moment, and carried on her way.
The Doctor closed the TARDIS door behind him and took a lungful of the morning air. ‘Smell that?’ he asked. ‘That’s history!’ He sniffed. ‘Ooh. And someone frying grits, if I’m not mistaken.’
Martha wandered up to the mouth of the alley, and she smiled broadly as a man rode past her on a black mare. ‘You know, every time we land somewhere I think I’ll get used to it, I’ll be blasé about the whole thing . . .’ She turned back and laughed. ‘But I’m not. I can’t be. This is it. We’re really here!’
He shared her smile. ‘We really are.’
There were clapboard buildings on either side of the road, shallow single-storey stores and offices made of rough-hewn wooden planks, some with grassy sod on their roof, others with heavy shingles. She saw an uneven sidewalk made of cut logs, horses at hitching posts outside, and men and women in period costume going about their business. But they’re not in costume, are they? Martha shook her head, answering her own question. This isn’t like some Disneyland-type theme park playing at being the Wild West, this is the real thing.
The Doctor joined her, licking his thumb and holding it up to the air. ‘This is 1880-something, I reckon. A Monday. Just after breakfast.’
‘How can you tell that?’
He gave an offhand shrug. ‘Ah, you know. It’s a talent.’ He nodded at the street. ‘C’mon. Let’s have a wander.’
The town had an unfinished look to it, with tents here and there, houses that were half-built and others that were clearly brand new and unweathered by the elements. Martha saw signs for a bakery, stables and a tannery. There was even a post office, with a telegraph cable looping away from a tall pole outside the building. She glanced left and right, taking it all in. ‘Look at me. I feel like such a tourist. I wish I’d brought a camera.’
The Doctor chuckled. ‘Really? And what would you tell people when you showed them the pictures?’
Martha caught sight of a storefront with a sign that read ‘Undertaker’; outside there were four pine caskets, each one propped up and open with a shrouded body visible inside. She looked away. ‘I’d tell them it’s not like it is in the John Wayne movies.’
TWO
THE TEACHER ADJUSTED the b
onnet on her head and picked up her pace, still turning Blaine’s words over in her mind. In all honesty, Jenny Forrest wasn’t much for dancing, although she enjoyed the playing of a piano when the mood struck her; but, try as she might, she found it hard to conjure an upbeat mood in the wake of what had happened in the township. It seemed like she was the only one who dared to dwell on it. Everyone else was going about their business as if nothing had happened, afraid to talk about it.
Jenny shook off the moment of introspection and became aware of a couple walking ahead of her, talking animatedly. It was their accents that immediately took her attention; English, the pair of them.
One was a tall, wiry man in a long brown coat, without a hat upon his head, wandering along the street with his hands buried in his pockets. At his side was a dark-skinned girl in an oxblood jacket with a wild shock of hair. Jenny couldn’t place it, but there was something about the clothes that struck her as odd. New styles from the East Coast, perhaps?
The girl’s head was darting left and right, as if she was trying to take in everything around her. ‘This is amazing,’ she was saying. ‘The Wild West. Wow.’
‘Actually, they don’t start calling it that for a long time yet,’ said the man. ‘Right now it’s known as the “New West”. Because it is. New, I mean.’
‘Think of all the places we could visit!’ enthused the girl. ‘The Alamo!’
‘We’re a few years too late for that.’
‘Deadwood?’
He shrugged. ‘The people there are very rude . . .’
‘How about . . . Tombstone, Arizona? The gunfight at the OK Corral!’
‘Been there, done that.’ He gestured around. ‘Anyway, what’s wrong with this place? What’s wrong with, um . . .’ The man turned and spotted Jenny walking behind them. He gave her a wan smile. ‘Hello there! This might sound like a silly question, but, uh, where are we?’
Jenny coloured a little, feeling slightly embarrassed about listening in on their conversation. ‘This is Redwater. You’re new to the town, then?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the man, grinning. ‘Very new. Brand new, even.’ He offered her his hand and she shook it. ‘Hello! This is my friend Martha Jones, and I’m the Doctor.’
She smiled back. The man’s open manner was infectious. ‘Miss Jenny Forrest, at your service. A pleasure to meet you, Miss Jones, and Doctor, uh—’
‘Just Doctor,’ he replied. ‘Redwater, is it? Splendid! I love the place names in this part of the world!’
Her brow furrowed. ‘I didn’t know we had new arrivals. The stagecoach from Dekkerville isn’t due for another week or so.’
‘We, uh, rode in,’ said the girl. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘Of course.’ She studied the man. ‘Doctor, while it is always stimulating to have someone of learning visit our township, I must confide to you that if you’ve come having heard of our epidemic, your journey has been wasted.’
‘Epidemic?’ Martha’s smile froze.
‘Really?’ replied the Doctor, shooting a quick glance at the girl. ‘And why is that?’
‘The sickness was cured.’
Martha eyed her. ‘What sickness would that be, then?’
Jenny held the books closer to her chest. ‘Why, the smallpox, of course.’
Being a gentleman about things, the Doctor offered to carry Jenny’s books for her and she took them to the clapboard schoolhouse at the far end of the street. The teacher insisted on making them both a cup of tea as a thank-you, and when she was out of earshot Martha leaned close and spoke in an urgent whisper. ‘Smallpox?’ She was all business now, the carefree traveller part of her put away and the trainee medical doctor at the fore. ‘If there’s been an outbreak here, these people could be in serious trouble.’
‘But she said it was cured.’ The Doctor’s doubt was clear in his tone.
Martha shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. Smallpox doesn’t get eradicated for almost another hundred years yet.’ She shuddered. As part of her training, Martha had been educated on how to identify and diagnose infectious diseases, including ones that were technically extinct. She remembered the pictures she had seen of victims of the virus – scarred by lesions all over their bodies, blinded or partly paralysed. And those were the lucky ones, the ones who had survived exposure. ‘Vaccinations weren’t very widespread around now . . .’
‘No,’ agreed the Doctor, thinking. ‘Not at all.’
‘So the disease might not be gone. This could just be a lull, an incubation cycle.’ She thought of the bodies at the undertakers. If the infection was still lurking in them . . .
‘Smallpox was a deadly killer in the nineteenth century,’ he noted. ‘Outbreaks were quite common . . . Sometimes whole communities were wiped out by it.’ He jerked his head toward the schoolhouse’s window and the town beyond. ‘But this place doesn’t look like somewhere in the aftermath of a plague, does it? No funeral pyres, no mass graves or houses burnt down to stop contamination. It’s just . . .’
‘Too normal?’
He nodded ‘Yeah.’ The Doctor’s smile snapped back on as Jenny returned with cups of strong black tea. ‘Oh, thank you.’
The schoolmarm sat with them and untied the bundle of books. ‘It’s the least I can do for visitors. Tell me, do you have lodgings? I can recommend Mrs Lapwing’s boarding house just over yonder.’
‘Thanks,’ smiled Martha.
The Doctor helped Jenny with the books, sorting through them. ‘Ah, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea!’ He waved a volume in the air. ‘This is a great one.’
The teacher cocked her head. ‘Indeed? I have not read it, but I have found Mr Verne’s other scientific romances to be most thrilling.’
‘Jules took a lot of convincing to cut out the stuff about the Silurians.’ He handed it to her with a wan smile. ‘Still a great romp, though.’
‘Doctor,’ Martha put a little edge in her voice, bringing him back on track. ‘Perhaps Miss Forrest can shed some more light on what we were just talking about?’
‘Oh, call me Jenny, please,’ said the woman. ‘Did you have a question?’
He took a breath. ‘The sickness you talked about. You said it was cured.’
Jenny nodded. ‘That’s quite correct, although the manner of it was beyond me.’ She frowned. ‘Frankly, Doctor, and as a learned man I’m sure you would agree, it has always been my estimation that those who pose as miracle workers are nothing of the sort.’ She got up and walked across to a cabinet on the wall. ‘Every encounter I have had with men who peddle these so-called patent cures, these powders or philtres for what ails you, they have all been nothing more than confidence tricksters . . .’
‘But?’ said the Doctor.
The teacher sighed. ‘He came into town a couple of weeks ago, in a gaudy wagon with an Indian youth as his travelling companion.’ She pointed out into the street. ‘He set up a stand across from the Bluebird saloon. At first he did magic tricks, silly parlour prestidigitation and that sort of thing. He used a lot of long and complicated words to dazzle the less educated members of the community.’
‘You’re talking about a medicine show,’ said Martha. ‘Like a travelling salesman. Con artists, really. Quack doctors with made-up cures that do more harm than good.’
The Doctor glanced at Martha. ‘The Western equivalent of a guy trying to get you to buy rubbish double glazing or knock-off DVDs.’
Martha’s jaw hardened. She took her career as a doctor as the most serious thing in her life, and the thought of people playing at the job, making things worse instead of saving lives, made her quietly furious.
‘On any other day, he would have been run out of town,’ Jenny continued, ‘but the Lesters, they’d come down with a powerful malaise. So this man, who went by the name of Alvin Godlove, he ignored the red flag outside their house and went inside, bold as brass. And that night, the Lesters were up and about, as well as you or I.’
‘Is that so?’ The Doctor threw Martha a look. ‘But th
e Lesters weren’t the only sick ones, were they?’
She shook her head. ‘The contagion had touched a lot of folks, truth be told. But Godlove made them all well again, and pretty soon everyone in Redwater was lining up to buy a bottle of his remedy from the Indian.’
‘That’s . . . quite a story,’ Martha said carefully. ‘An overnight cure for smallpox.’
Jenny took a bottle of liquid from the cabinet. ‘I must confess, despite all my misgivings about the man, in a moment of weakness I purchased a measure of the solution myself. Not that I was infected, mind, but I thought it best to have some in the schoolhouse’s medicine cabinet. Just in case.’
‘Can I see?’ The Doctor took the bottle and examined it. There was a crudely printed label gummed to the outside. Professor Alvin Q. Godlove’s Powerful Dispatulated Incontrovertible Panacea Potion – For All That Ails Man or Beast! Promised to Recover Potency, Aid the Retainment of Hair, Banish Illness and Inoculate Against All Forms of Croup, Grippe and Sickitude. Thin liquid sloshed around inside the container. He took out the cork, sniffed it and made a face. ‘It’s a bit whiffy.’
‘We’ve heard tell that Godlove has worked the same miracle all over the county.’ Jenny sat down across from them. ‘But still I find it difficult to put aside my prejudice about the gentleman.’ She grimaced. ‘He was a lewd sort, if you take my meaning.’
‘Shameful,’ said the Doctor, peering into the bottle. ‘Miss Forrest . . . Jenny. Could I borrow this for a bit? I’d like to give it a closer examination.’
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