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In years to come, Mary Crawford was often to wonder what had surprised her the most on that misty April evening. Was it the sharp-clawed creature who had abducted her, or her strange clear-eyed rescuer? Neither had formed the least part of her experience to that night; both were frightening in their own separate ways. Indeed, it was the sum of both, shattering her world into glittering pieces and presenting her with another, that had effected the transformation of her life beyond all reckoning.
Before the creature vaulted the garden wall that night, Mary had been enjoying a moment’s respite in the cool evening air. No doubt she would have been pursued in short measure, for the absence of a beautiful woman commanding some twenty thousand pounds will always be speedily noticed by those young men wishing to fix an interest with her. Many a match has been settled in moonlight, and the hope of claiming Miss Crawford’s hand must have sped a half-dozen hearts in the ballroom of her bosom friend the Lady S-.
Mary had no intention of gratifying those hopes. She had been recently disappointed in love; the man she had come to esteem had not only stubbornly held to his object of taking orders, despite her dislike of the profession and all her remonstrances, but had indeed rejected her, for the sin of being clear-headed about a painful affair that touched them both. Well! His sister and her brother might have run away together, disregarding both the lady’s marriage and the gentleman’s near-betrothal to one of Mary’s closest friends, but Mary could not see why this should have precipitated her into an agony of moralistic, fluttery distress. If that was what he had wanted, then it was fortunate he had left off his suit at once! Mary could perhaps have reconciled herself to becoming a clergyman’s wife, if the clergyman in question had been possessed of his brother’s consequence and fortune, but she could never have aped the devout. She had deplored Henry and Maria’s actions and called them folly, but if Edmund had wanted her to consign them to hellfire and weep for their souls, he had mistaken her character entirely.
Despite the memory of the revulsion with which Edmund had gazed at her, however, Mary had no desire to soon replace his regard with another’s. It was agreeable to be admired, and praised, and diverted with flirtations and entertainments; she had not the least desire to retire blue-devilled to the country, there to nurse a broken heart. And in time she would have to chuse another suitor to replace him, for she was determined to make an advantageous marriage and secure a comfortable future for herself. Such was the only path open to her, if she did not want to live the lonely life of a spinster. Yet there was no need to hurry the matter. She was a handsome woman possessed of an agreeable fortune; it would be some years still before the attractions of either began to fade. She need not accept an offer beforetimes simply because she had received a letter that morning from her sister Mrs Grant to tell her that Edmund Bertram had married Fanny Price.
It was a misty evening, and the mist stung Mary’s eyes.
“There you are, Mary!” came the voice of one of her admirers. “It is indeed pleasant tonight, is it not? I could not have wished for a more beautiful moon, or indeed,” he said, proffering a gallant smile, “a more beautiful prospect.”
Sir Charles was a young man, and his compliments yet retained the awkwardness of careful study, not the burnish of easy confidence. Still, Mary smiled at him. “It is the influence of the moon that makes you speak so,” she began, teasingly.
That was when the creature came over the garden wall.
It was a tall London wall, built for privacy, and Mary would not have thought it possible to be surmounted. Yet the creature came over it easily, all in a bound, and was upon them before she could have drawn breath to scream.
“What the devil – ” Sir Charles began, his voice cracking, and the creature slashed at him. He went down without another word, and there was red on his shirtfront.
Sharp claws were at her throat the next second. Mary stared into the mad eyes of the creature, and time slowed to a crawl. It seemed to her that she knew what it wanted; when it seized her hand and pulled her after it, she went as if in a daze, her thoughts whirling sickeningly. How was she not dead? How did the creature have her in its power, chaining her mind to his? What did it want with her? She knew not.
All was the matter of a moment only. Then she was being thrown up and over the wall, and they were running, running, running. Mary would not have thought she could run, not in her gown, not like this – but run they did, Mary’s body having ceased to answer to her. The creature still had her hand, its claws raking long gouges in it; it still had her mind, somehow, just as surely.
They were nearly to the river, running by the light of the moon, when the voice rang out. “Stop!”
The creature halted, its breath ragged. Mary’s mind became more her own again, and she gasped as pain and shock rushed in to fill it.
“Let your hostage go and surrender.”
The creature hissed.
Mary gazed into the shadows of the trees, and then the woman stepped out.
Woman she was, and no creature – but such a woman! Mary had never seen her like. She wore trousers, as no woman would dare to do, yet the tailored waistcoat that surmounted her white cambric shirt showed that she was no man. More than that, Mary had not the time to notice, for the creature had begun to speak, its voice a rasp.
“I will kill her.”
Mary was at first surprised to hear intelligible words, and then her blood ran cold as their meaning penetrated. But then, after Sir Charles had fallen where he stood, could she have expected anything else? Her mind had been numbed as they ran, for somehow the creature had gained control of it; now that she was in possession of her senses again, she knew her fate must surely follow his.
“Leave me in peace,” the creature said, raising its other claw to Mary’s neck, “or I will cut her throat.”
Another woman might have closed her eyes, shutting out the horror, but Mary intended to see every last moment before her world went blank. She kept them open.
The strange woman shook her head, and reached into her trouser pocket. “Kill her, and you will live to regret it,” she said. When her hand reappeared, it held a wand that blinked with light and made strange noises, which she extended before her. “Free her and surrender, and I will be merciful.”
“Mercy at the hands of the Doctor?” the creature said, and laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.
The woman’s voice was steady, and her wand did not falter. “If you know me, then you know that I don’t make idle threats.”
The creature hissed again. Its claws were sharp against Mary’s neck. She could feel the blood trickling down where it had cut her; one move and she was dead.
Mary could not make sense of this night, neither the creature nor the woman. To die so soon, so young, like this! She felt an intense pang of formless regret, for all the futures she would never see, all the dreams yet undreamed, unrealised. If this was how the world ended for her, how little had she experienced, how small her life!
Then she was being suddenly shoved forward, away from the tearing claws. She stumbled and fell, the creature’s powerful shove sending her bodily into the woman, who perforce had to catch her or be knocked over. There were running footsteps, followed by a splash.
The woman swore. Mary did not recognise the words, but she knew an oath when she heard one.
“Pardon me,” she said, and extricated herself from the woman’s arms. She certainly felt like a human woman, which was more than could have been said for the creature.
The woman glanced at her, startled, as if she saw her for the first time. “Are you hurt?”
“Rather less than I had expected to be,” Mary said, striving for lightness. She was bleeding, and her head pounded; she would have liked to have been sick, or at least sat down to recover her breath. But under such circumstances to show weakness would have been unpardonable. “You saved my life, madam. To whom am I indebted?”
The woman waved a hand, as if this were inconsequential, as if she threatened inhuman creatures as a matter of course. Perhaps she did. “I’m the Doctor.”
Mary had never met a female doctor before, but neither had she had met a woman who wore such clothes, wielded a magic wand, or saved her from throat-slitting creatures before. “My name is Mary Crawford.”
The Doctor’s wand was making strange noises, and she frowned at it. “It won’t bother you again,” she said, seeming to be only half attending. “You were only a convenient hostage when I chased it through your garden. It’s safe for you to return home.”
Mary was not at all sure she could retrace her steps, and in any event she did not wish to, for a number of pertinent reasons. When the Doctor began to stride quickly away, she hurried to keep pace. “What was that creature?”
The Doctor was still frowning at her wand, then held it up to her ear, listening. “Er. I suppose you would call it a vampire,” she said. “Though that’s not exactly correct. But close enough.”
Mary was not as abandoned a novel reader as other young women of her acquaintance, but even she had heard such stories. One of her bosom friends had been used to spin tales of a dead lover who would steal into his beloved’s bedchamber at night and drink her blood to maintain his living corpse; Mary had laughed at such fancy, but her skin had prickled nonetheless.
“German fairy tales,” she protested now. “That thing was as real as you or I.”
The Doctor walked quickly, her clothing and footwear far more suited to it than Mary’s, and Mary had to run to keep up. “Certainly. And if I don’t stop it and its friends, half of London will find that out. Ah.”
The last was said as they turned a corner, and Mary saw an odd blue box standing on the side of the street. The Doctor made for it, so she followed.
At the door, however, the Doctor turned. “Go home, Mary,” she said. Her face was remote, though not unkind. “I told you, the creature won’t return for you.”
The next moment she had opened the door and stepped inside, leaving Mary outside in the cold, forever to wonder what had transpired on that strange April night.
Or she would have done, if Mary had not leaped forward and stuck her foot in the door to prevent it from closing behind her.
When Mary pushed the door open again and stepped inside the box, it took her breath away. She had never seen anything to compare to it, not when she had been presented at Court, not when she had danced at Almack’s, not ever. It was far bigger on the inside of the box than it had been outside; a vast prospect of metal and light spread before her. Handles and levers and buttons and strange tools of arcane description stretched as far as the eye could see. Not only was it alien to anything Mary had ever known, it was beyond what even her most fanciful imagination could have conjured. Surely it was of a piece with the Doctor’s magic wand.
Yet the magic of the glittering metal was not all the box presented to her, for it was not only Mary’s sight that was arrested. The box sang. It was bright and alive; the air hummed around her with music both perceptible and inaudible, and Mary nearly folded up where she stood. She had always been musical, always loved to play the harp or the piano, and not only for the admiration it brought her, but for the joy of the music itself. Now she heard song layered upon song, melody and harmony and counterpoint glittering in the air, and felt tears of wonder well up in her eyes.
“Doctor,” another woman said, from a balcony. “Who is that?”
The Doctor, who had bounded to the centre of the room and was busily at work, looked up. “I told you to go home,” she said. There was steel in her voice that hadn’t been there before, and if Mary hadn’t heard the music she might have quailed.
But she had heard the music. She blinked hard and straightened her spine. “I cannot go home,” she said. “Sir Charles is likely dead. I was abducted. If I come home hours later, bleeding, my dress ripped and torn, I will be ruined. My reputation will be lost forever.”
Not that a lost reputation seemed of the highest consequence when she might have been lying dead on the cobblestones of London, but it was a fate scarce more to be desired. Maria Rushworth had been sent abroad in disgrace, to live in seclusion for the rest of her days with only Mrs Norris to keep her company. True, Mary would be pitied for her ruin, unlike Maria, for it had not been of her own choosing; but a woman abducted for any length of time was presumed to have suffered an injury worse than death, and could never resume her place in society. The prospect made Mary’s throat close up.
“Oh, Christ,” the woman on the balcony said. “Are we in one of those eras?”
The casualness of the oath prickled across Mary’s skin, but it was not only that. Those eras?
The Doctor sighed. “I don’t have time for this,” she said. “The vampire went into the Thames to confuse the trail, but if we follow the path it was taking and extrapolate from where we first picked it up, we may be able to narrow down the search parameters.”
“Then you’ll go out into the street again and wave that contraption around,” the woman said, with a long-suffering air. “And I quote, ‘It goes ding when there’s stuff’. Do you hear yourself sometimes?”
“Time-traveling vampires from space,” the Doctor said, smiling up at her. “I promised you a good one this time, didn’t I?”
The woman cast her eyes to the ceiling. She wasn’t a young woman. Her hair and complexion were dark, and she wore male clothes as well. She was as alien as the Doctor, and as formidable. “You did.”
“Then stop making fun of the timey-wimey detector and help me trace the Haemovores,” the Doctor said, still smiling. “You’re supposed to be a scientist, aren’t you?”
“Geologist, not time scientist,” the woman said, but she came down the stairs. As she passed Mary, she stopped and held out her hand. “Nasreen Chaudry.”
Mary had never heard of a name like Nasreen, but there were a great many things that had happened that night which she had never dreamed of, and this was only one more. “Mary Crawford,” she said, and gave Nasreen her hand, which was briskly shook.
“You’re a mess,” Nasreen said. “There’s a first-aid kit in the cabinet over the toilet. Down there, first right, second left.”
Mary followed her instructions, Nasreen and the Doctor’s voices carrying on above her. Everything was so bright, so much gleaming metal. She had fallen out of her world and into a dream, and she seemed to be no closer to waking up.
If Mary had been a different sort of young woman, if she had perhaps been anything like her shy, reserved friend Fanny Price, the experience would have been too much for her long before. She would have been found bleeding and swooning on the dirty London streets, and she would never have discovered the truth behind the Doctor’s strange mien. But Mary was not that sort of young woman; she had a strength that belied her small size, and she was finding a reservoir of steel inside her that inspired a fierce pride.
Suiting action to thought, Mary bared her teeth at the mirror fixed on the wall of the water closet Nasreen had directed her to. She looked like some wild thing; her throat was bleeding, and there were spatters of blood on her face. Her eyes were huge, and her hair had come down. Never had she seen her complexion so pale, nor her cheeks so flushed. And her gown was utterly beyond saving, torn in a dozen places and covered in dirt and grime from where she must have fetched up against things as they ran. Her left wrist was ringed in claw marks and that sleeve was bloody.
Mary had never felt so alive.
There were bandages in the cabinet. She washed her wrist, biting her lip against the pain, and bound it, then washed the blood off her neck. What hairpins she still possessed she restored to their places, and smoothed her bedraggled clothing as best she could.
Then she remounted the stairs to that bright room of wonder.
“Found them!” the Doctor was saying, her voice full of satisfaction. “There must be a nest of them in West Ham – that’s where the signal’s strongest.” Even as she spoke, she was flying around the structure in the middle of the room, her hands pushing buttons and pulling levers. The room shook, and Mary felt as if they were in motion, which could hardly be right; yet she had seen so many wonders that night, that perhaps it might be.
Then it stopped, and the Doctor was bounding past her. “Stay here,” she said, over her shoulder. “The TARDIS will keep an eye on you. Don’t touch anything. Nasreen, with me.”
Then the door shut behind them, and Mary was alone.
After a moment, she sat in a chair. Surely the Doctor’s strictures about touching things did not extend to chairs. And the music in the room still sounded friendly; she felt, in some way she did not understand, that if she acted wrongly the music would change. It was not only music that one could hear, it was music one felt, and that was surely magic. Did Mary believe in magic? Before tonight she would have laughed, and yet now she could not.
What Edmund would say if he saw this place! He would pray, she thought. He would drop to his knees and abjure the Devil, he would beseech the Lord’s protection and then he would run. He would leave behind this place of wonder and call it an abomination. She had loved him, yet in some ways they had been so very unalike.
But let her not think of Edmund, Mary thought. Let him and Fanny be happy in their quiet, strict, reserved country parsonage, scrimping to make their living meet their costs. She did not begrudge them their happiness; indeed, she wished them joy. They had no part in this. They had not seen what she had seen, they had not heard what she had heard. This was hers and hers alone.
Thrusting them from her mind, she rose to her feet again, dusting her hands briskly. The Doctor had told her not to touch anything. She had not said not to explore.
Mary was soon hopelessly lost. Every room she entered was more astonishing than the last. A library, filled with endless shelves of books. An indoor lake, with steps down into it. A conservatory, with the most beautiful piano Mary had ever seen; she dared to sit down at it and run her fingers across the keys, and when nothing exploded, she played a Bach sonata, thrilling to the reverberations of the notes. The music filled the room, and she fancied the air seemed more contented, somehow.
Then she came to what must be the dressing room, a vast expanse filled with clothes as far as the eye could see, and she clapped her hands in delight.
Mary was not that most thrilling of young women, an arbiter of fashion. While she had always dressed well, and been accounted very prettily-attired, she had followed rather than led the styles of the day. Her pleasures lay elsewhere. Yet now, seeing a dizzying expanse of possibilities laid out before her, she felt a daring elation come over her. Her gown had been ruined beyond repair in the struggle with the creature, and surely the Doctor would not grudge her a replacement, not when she owned all this wealth of riches. And if Mary was to choose from it, well! There was no one here to censure her or to judge.
There was a thoughtfulness to the hum in the air, and when Mary turned, she found a row of dresses in much the same fashion as her own. “Thank you!” she said to the air, with her prettiest manners, for she had come to suspect that it was alive. Air that was alive seemed no stranger than anything else that had happened that night. She reached out her hand to the first of the dresses.
And then Mary stopped.
She stood as if frozen for a minute, her brow creased in thought, before a smile crept over her face, slowly and then all at once.
“Yes,” she said, softly.
❧
When the Doctor and Nasreen returned, looking more than a little bedraggled themselves, Mary was sitting in the central room once more. The inaudible music of the air had guided her there; she and it were well on the way to being good friends, she thought. She had played it another piece on the piano before she had retraced her steps, and she could tell that it had liked it.
Had it only been that evening when she had stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, trying to see the stars through the mist? Had it only been that evening when the creature had climbed over the wall? It seemed years ago now.
“Did you find the creatures?” Mary asked, rising to greet the Doctor and Nasreen.
Nasreen looked at her, a smile creeping across her face. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Mary had never felt so undressed in all her life. She had never worn trousers before. If either of the women had been a man, perhaps she would not have had the courage; but now that she had assumed their manner of clothing, she felt wickedly free. Also half-naked, but free.
“If you and the Doctor are wearing trousers, you cannot fault me,” she said, a little primness stealing into her voice. But she was too amiable a woman for it to last for long, and she found herself smiling at Nasreen the next moment.
“Not faulting you at all,” Nasreen said, clapping her on the shoulder as her brother might have done with one of his friends. “Though you might have some explaining to do to your mother when she sees you.”
“I have no mother,” Mary said, but Nasreen had gone to the Doctor’s side and did not hear her. And I am not going back. “Did you defeat the vampires?” she repeated, since her question had not been answered the first time.
This time the Doctor looked up from her controls. “That lot, at least,” she said, smiling. Her face was transformed when she smiled; she had a pleasant face, when it was not austere and forbidding, and her eyes danced. “I’m afraid there’s probably two more dens. They usually come in threes.”
Mary stiffened her backbone and raised her chin. “If I can be of use, I would like to be.”
The Doctor looked at her as if for the first time, really looked.
Mary met her eyes without flinching. The music in the air seemed to hold its breath right along with her. This was the sticking point. This was where Mary would either find a place in this bright new universe or be thrown back out on the cobblestones, to go back to what suddenly seemed a dismal, drab everyday life. This was it.
What did Mary’s flirtations, her pleasures, her plans for the future matter now? When there were marvels such as this in the world, how could she return to what she had been? All of her dissatisfactions with the ways of this world had been vindicated. No more was there only one path open to her if she wished to have a secure and happy life! She did not know what the Doctor and Nasreen did, precisely, save run around finding trouble and rescuing people, but she knew that they did something. Something more than the circumscribed boundaries she had always known!
“You don’t even know who we are,” the Doctor said.
Mary inclined her head. “You are chasing magical creatures who travel in time and space and wish to destroy humans on this Earth,” she said. “You place yourself in danger in order to save their victims, and you attempt to persuade the creatures to surrender, so that you may show mercy. If they do not surrender, I presume you will destroy them by means of your own magic.”
The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. “And you picked all that up just from listening to us?”
“I am good at listening,” Mary said, because she was. Always she had been able to sense the undercurrents in a room, and put people at their ease.
Seconds ticked by, honey-slow.
“I can put you back,” the Doctor said, abrupt. “Generally I don’t like to cross your own time stream, but it should be harmless in this case. If I return you a moment after you were pulled out of the garden, you can say you broke free of the attacker, and your reputation won’t suffer. You can resume your life as if nothing happened.”
Mary considered her next words very carefully. “I have only begun to comprehend what your life is,” she said, slowly. “Yet already my heart is singing in my breast.” She thought of her bounded life, the pleasures that now seemed so pale and empty. “I have wanted so much more from life than it is willing to give me. I have wanted more than a respectable marriage, the only prospect open to me, a prospect which I have watched bring so much grief to the woman who raised me. You and Nasreen are more than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams, and my heart beats fierce within me!”
Nasreen was watching her too, her face inscrutable. They were both watching her.
Mary pressed on. “The life you lead may be dangerous. So may mine be! Any number of diseases may carry me away, or I may die in childbed, like many a woman before me. Or a creature may slit my throat, it now appears.” She clasped her hands together in front of her, to keep them from shaking. “I have no right to ask to join you, but I will ask it anyway. I have twenty thousand pounds. You may have it all, if you will but accept me.”
It sounded a grand offer, though Mary knew not how she might accomplish such a transfer. But then, it was clear that the Doctor and Nasreen had abilities far beyond any she had ever known; they might be able to accept her offer and claim her fortune without straining a muscle or speaking to a single banker.
Her fate trembled in the balance, and both she and the air about her hung suspended.
After a moment, the Doctor broke their gaze, and looked at Nasreen. Nasreen looked back at her, and something passed between them.
Mary waited.
“Well,” the Doctor said, returning her gaze to Mary, “the TARDIS likes you, and that’s a point in your favour. And you didn’t lose your head when the vampire had you. That’s more than most.”
Mary read her answer in the Doctor’s smile. “I can stay?”
“You can stay,” the Doctor said. “But fewer grand speeches. We have vampires to catch.”
“You’re the one to talk about grand speeches,” Nasreen said, under her breath, and the Doctor threw her a grin.
Mary stood in the middle of the TARDIS – what a beautiful word for a beautiful thing – and let the incandescence of her joy wash over her, limitless.
❧
The vampires were defeated, and sent back to their planet.
Sir Charles recovered. It was a near thing, and he bore a nasty scar to the end of his days, but he lived to tell the tale a thousand times over, and always to shed a tear for his first love, the lovely Mary Crawford. Her memory was evergreen, frozen forever in time.
Mary Crawford died, abducted by a villain half-glimpsed in the mist. Her body was never recovered. Those who had known her grieved for her; she had been the most pleasant of women, ever kind to her friends and always full of good humour. The world was lesser for her leaving it.
Mary Crawford lived, across galaxies and centuries, her world open and free, unbound. She fought side by side with Ice Warriors, survived a Dalek onslaught, helped prevent the extinction of eighteen separate species, created the myth of the Eternal Night, and saved the life of the Ageless Emperor of Xia Five. Everywhere she went she learned music, and some of her songs endure across the stars.
It is a matter of debate where she at last met her end. Some say she sacrificed her life to save her friend Nasreen, after they had travelled together for ten years. Some say she married at last after twenty years of travelling, married an alien woman with fire in her bones and a song in her eyes, and settled down to a life of wedded bliss on a planet full of flowers. Some say she ascended to a higher plane of existence, and lives on beyond mortal understanding. Some say that she still travels with the Doctor to this day.
However that might be, this is how it was:
Mary Crawford lived.
❧