The great front doors stood open and the Doctor was first through them to see Cranleigh and the creature still facing each other. Cranleigh took no notice of the Doctor’s arrival but lifted his hands to the creature demonstrating that he meant no harm. ‘All right, old chap,’ he whispered again.
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you.’
The Doctor heard sharp intakes of breath from his companions and a blasphemous expression of horror from the Sergeant at the sight of what faced them on the stairs.
Suddenly everything fell into place for the Doctor. All the questions that had tormented him were answered at a stroke.
The creature on the stairs, still burdened with the Indian, had been the part missing from the composite, but now that this part had come to light the whole picture could be understood. Such monstrous deformity was no accident of birth; this disfigurement was man-made.
Certain tribes of Indian in the rain forests of South America (explored by the ninth Marquess of Cranleigh) perpetrated such bestialities, visiting on their victims the demands of vengeful gods. A terrible irony, thought the Doctor, that most of man’s inhumanity to man was at the invocation of jealous gods in all their many seductive guises.
This mutilated victim, cared for in comfort and in secret, was no stranger to the Cranleigh household. This mockery of God’s image crouched so grotesquely on the stairs had to be held in high regard by the woman who had perjured herself so shamelessly to protect him. Both reason and instinct told the Doctor that the creature on the stairs was none other then George Beauchamp, ninth Marquess of Cranleigh.
It was a deduction confirmed by the dowager Marchioness who now stood at the open doors to the drawing room. ‘George,’ she said quietly. ‘No, George.’ It was the unmistakable tone of a mother rebuking a son. It drew a gasp from Nyssa who clutched at Tegan’s arm.
George’s inflamed eye had taken in the alert Doctor, his tense younger brother, the gawping Sergeant, and his mother, statuesque in her private hell, her public agony.
The eye now concentrated on Nyssa.
Slowly the ninth Marquess shifted the weight of Latoni from his shoulders and allowed the Indian to slip to the stair treads. Anticipating his brother’s intention, Cranleigh stepped into his path as he advanced from the stairs. A lumpen hand swept up from inertia like the thong of a whip and sent the younger brother sprawling. Adric, nearer Nyssa and quicker off the mark than the Doctor, sprang to the girl’s defence, only to be lifted clear of the floor by the monstrous and maniacal arms and hurled at the lunging Doctor. A mitten-like hand clamped on Nyssa’s slender arm and she was dragged, screaming, to the stairs. As Markham lumbered to the rescue George secured the fragile girl about the waist and used the other deformed extremity to threaten her throat. From the floor Cranleigh thrust out an arm.
‘No, Sergeant! Get back! He’s killed twice!’
Nyssa’s voice gurgled to a breathless choking at the onset of revulsion and horror as she was borne inexorably up the stairs from the top of which eddies of smoke now appeared. Disregarding Cranleigh, the Doctor leapt to the stairs. ‘No, Doctor!’ cried Lady Cranleigh. ‘He’ll not harm her. He thinks she’s Ann.’
The Doctor turned back. ‘And when he finds she’s not?’
‘He won’t. My son is out of his mind. Dittar, here, is the only one who can influence him.’
Cranleigh had moved to examine the unconscious Indian.
‘An influence we’ve no time to wait for!’ called back the Doctor as he bounded up the stairs into the thickening smoke. Cranleigh straightened from his examination of Latoni.
‘He’ll be all right, but get him outside!’ He rushed up the stairs hard on the heels of the Doctor yelling, ‘Get everybody outside and telephone the fire brigade.’ He, too, disappeared into the smoke as Markham lumbered towards a telephone and Adric and Tegan began to tug Latoni to safety. Lady Cranleigh closed her eyes and her lips began to move in silent prayer.
When the Doctor reached the second floor Cranleigh was behind him. Both breathed through handkerchiefs clamped over nose and mouth, leaving blinking eyes to smart painfully. The wall containing the main secret panel had already surrendered to the greedily licking tongues of flame.
‘It’s no use,’ came the muffled voice of Cranleigh. ‘It’s got too much of a hold.’ But the Doctor was not to be stopped. Nyssa was in dreadful danger and neither fire nor high water would hold back the Doctor. He raced through the smoke to his room. ‘No, Doctor!’ called Cranleigh, before he was forced back to the head of the stairs. His mother was still standing where he’d left her when he regained the hall.
‘Outside, mother!’ he said firmly.
‘The servants must be warned,’ was all she replied, with a quiet calm.
‘I’ll do that.’
He took her by the elbow and began to steer her towards the entrance doors as Markham came from the study.
‘Sergeant, may I ask you to look after my mother?’
‘Yes, milord,’ was the ready response.
‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, Sergeant,’
said Lady Cranleigh succinctly, detaching herself from her son. She walked erect and without haste to the entrance of the Hall, respectfully followed by Markham, as Cranleigh made his way swiftly to the back stairs.
The Doctor had gambled on the maxim that fortune favours the brave and hoped that it extended to the foolhardy. He was not disappointed. In his room the secret panel eventually yielded to his probing fingers and the door pivoted open, but this time he took the precaution of wedging it open with the bedspread before venturing into the recess between the walls. He remembered the exact position of the opposing panel and was soon in the parallel corridor already redolent of incipient fumes. In a moment he was at the end of the corridor and stamping on the floor of the cupboard. As the back slid aside he had again to defend himself with the handkerchief against the billowing smoke. The heat from the blaze at the far end of the corridor was as from a furnace and long tongues of flame, which had already engulfed the bathroom, were fast feeling their way along the floor and both walls.
A table had been dragged from Digby’s room and stood in the centre of the corridor directly under an open skylight. The Doctor climbed onto the table, reached up and took hold of the wood frame above and hauled himself to the roof.
Charles Beauchamp, no longer the tenth Marquess of Cranleigh, marshalled the last of the servants from the Hall and moved along the terrace, looking up at the pall of smoke that rose straight in the still evening air. He ran to the wall beyond the windows and began to climb the thick stems of the centuries-old ivy. Adric rushed to follow his example but the not over-agile Markham was quick to hold him back.
‘No, lad, not you!’
Tegan took over from the Sergeant with an arm round the boy which suggested she was more in need of his support than the climbing nobleman. Lady Cranleigh watched her younger son reach beyond the level of the first floor windows and then walked with dignity to where Sir Robert still comforted the distraught Ann. ‘Robert, I’ve done something terribly wrong,’ she said simply.
‘I know,’ he responded with a glance at Ann. ‘But why, Madge, why?’
‘It was the black orchid. To the Butiu Indians it’s sacred. They cut out his tongue and hung him by the heels over a very slow fire. It was done every day for a week.’ She looked at Latoni, now recovered and kneeling on the grass in prayer. ‘There’s the man who rescued him. Dittar thinks George was insane from the first hour. It would have been more merciful to let him die.’
Sir Robert had let the suffering woman finish but he now repeated his question. ‘Why here?’
‘Oh, Robert! Mindless? Misshapen? Locked up, without care, in a loveless institution?’ The tears came freely now but the head was still held high. Ann slowly detached herself from Sir Robert and came forward to offer her arms. The two women combined in a fierce embrace.
‘The blame’s all mine,’ said Lady Cranleigh softly. ‘I should never have insisted on engaging the male nurse.
Poor, poor fellow. But Dittar was becoming ill with coping single-handed. There has to be some limit to devotion.’
‘No! Don’t blame yourself!’ whispered Ann. ‘Don’t blame yourself!
‘
There!
’
The shout was from Henry, the footman, pointing upwards. The ninth Marquess appeared beyond a low parapet at the edge of the roof one arm locked about Nyssa and the other flailing at the smouldering hem of her dress.
The younger brother halted his climb just short of the roof and tried to gauge from the pointing below where his quarry might be.
The Doctor, following the only path possible for Nyssa’s captor, had fetched up behind a chimney stack from where, unseen, he could watch George’s progress along the parapet. From here he saw Charles climb onto the roof some twelve feet beyond his brother and saw him hold out a hand pleadingly.
‘George! Please, George!’
George stopped with a suddenness which almost toppled him. There was a gasp from the watchers below, repeated as Nyssa was held deliberately close to the edge. Nyssa, terror-stricken to the point of inertia, screamed as she saw the terrace beneath her. The sound of Charles’s voice and the resurgence of hope of rescue made her renew the pummelling and scratching at the nerveless, shapeless head and shoulders. Charles held his ground, not daring to risk aid to the threatened Nyssa.
‘George. She’s done you no harm.’
The Doctor came out quickly from the shelter of the stack and found foot and finger holds in the wall beneath the level of the parapet. Slowly but surely he forced his way along the wall to find a vantage point to the rear of the deranged man and his hysterical hostage. Within six feet of them he heaved himself onto the parapet and said as quietly as his pounding pulses would let him. ‘Be still, Nyssa!’
George whirled on the Doctor and Nyssa screamed again, feeling herself flung to the very edge. Charles jumped to the advantage of the distraction but the insane lack no cunning. George used Nyssa like a flail and her feet took Charles full in the face. The younger brother went down like a sack and wedged in the narrow gulley between the parapet and the steeply rising tiles of the roof.
George turned back to the Doctor and opened his mouth in a ghastly, toothless, welcoming smile of triumph.
The Doctor gambled again. He had put more pieces of the picture together. The Beauchamp brothers had been rivals for the hand of Ann Talbot and the older had won her. Won her, only to lose her again in circumstances of unimaginable horror. The arrival of Nyssa on this tragic scene had given the tormented man a double image of his lost love and had proved intolerable to his fevered mind. It was transparently clear that if George was denied Ann, Charles would be also.
The Doctor was close enough to the now more controlled Nyssa to reach out a hand and touch her, but he restrained himself. He looked directly, searchingly, into the inflamed eye.
‘Lord Cranleigh,’ he said gently, ‘that isn’t Miss Talbot.
Miss Talbot is down there. Look!’
The red eye looked down at the people grouped below, searching among them in the fading light. Ann stepped forward, separating herself from those about her. The eye lingered on the distant girl and then moved to refocus on Nyssa whose eyes returned the look in abject terror. George lifted his mangled hand from which Nyssa shrank. Gently he moved the shoulder strap of her dress. There was no mole.
‘Lord Cranleigh,’ went on the Doctor as before, ‘you are a man of science and a man of honour whose skill and courage are already legend. I beg you, sir, to do nothing that will change the memory of you in the minds of your many admirers the world over.’
The eye turned from the fainting Nyssa to search out the Doctor’s face. For those on the ground the suspense reduced breathing to the bare minimum. The only sounds to break in on the unearthly silence came from the voracious appetite of the lengthening flames and the bell of a faraway fire engine. Then what remained of a once noble head lifted in dignity and George Beauchamp, ninth Marquess of Cranleigh, held out Nyssa to the waiting arms of the Doctor.
The sigh of relief that rose from below was suddenly stifled as the unburdened nobleman stepped up onto the parapet and held out his empty arms to Ann down below.
‘George, no!’ shouted his brother.
George jerked towards the sound, lost his balance, and plummeted to the terrace.
Nyssa smothered her face and her feelings in the Doctor’s breast and Charles forced himself back onto his feet. Below on the terrace the shocked group watched Sir Robert and Markham stoop by the body.
A weeping Tegan was clumsily comforted by Adric whose grief at what had happened was expressed in embarrassment at the quality of the suffering he saw all about him. He looked in open admiration at the controlled Lady Cranleigh as she accepted the sad shaking of Sir Robert’s head as confirmation of the death of the son she had protected from a cruel world for two long, arduous years.
Upon the roof the Doctor held out his hand to the dead man’s brother and it was taken warmly, gratefully. ‘I’m so deeply sorry, Doctor. What must you think of us?’
‘It’s not for me to make such judgements,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘But for the grace of God there goes any of us.’
Three days later the Doctor and his companions stood by the TARDIS as they prepared to bid farewell to Cranleigh Hall. The public response to the truth about George Beauchamp, botanist and explorer, had been overwhelming, the deaths of two innocent men being indirectly attributed to the barbaric depths of the South American rain forests: the barbaric depths of man’s inhumanity to man, thought the Doctor.
‘Thank you all for staying for the funeral,’ said Lady Cranleigh, a statement endorsed by her younger son and his fiancée with nods and smiles, for all the words had been said. ‘And we’d like you to have this.’
The Doctor took the Morocco-bound book from her extended hand and opened it. On the fly leaf was a print of the portrait that hung at the Hall: the author as he was before his fateful return to the Orinoco. The title page read: