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behind him.
    Enough light filtered through the rear shutters toallow the Doctor to make out his surroundings. The room appeared to be an abandoned laboratory with bottles, jars, phials and jugs stacked on several shelves around the walls.
    In the middle of the room there was a table, covered with dust with mortars and pestles and measuring instruments lying on it. There was a door which the Doctor decided led to the shop so he opened it and went into the short corridor which lay beyond.
     
    On his right was a narrow staircase winding up to the floors above. The Doctor stood still and listened. He could hear no sounds. ‘Monsieur Preslin,’ he called out and waited. There was no reply. ‘Charles Preslin,’ he repeated but again there was only silence. He sighed and opened the door in front of him. He was right. It led to the shop with its dust-covered counter and cobwebbed shelves. He went back into the corridor and mounted the stairs. He looked into both rooms on the first floor. One of them was a bedroom and the other appeared to be a library. He went up to the second floor and opened the door of the room with the open shutter. A man sat at a desk by the window.
    He was writing with a quill pen in a ledger and several sheets of paper lay on the desk. The man did not look up as the Doctor came into the room.
    ‘Is that you, David?’ he asked, his pen still scratching on the parchment.
    ‘No, it’s not,’ the Doctor replied and waited as the man carefully laid down his pen on the desk and then slowly, as if preparing himself for a shock, turned around as he removed the small half-spectacles from the tip of his nose.
    ‘And who may you be, sir?’ he asked quietly and politely.
    ‘A doctor,’ the Doctor replied.
    ‘There are many such,’ the man replied as he stood up,
    ‘with clothes of different cuts, medicine, philosophy, the sciences, even the arts.’ He studied the Doctor’s cape for a moment before asking what lay under it. The Doctor flicked it back off his shoulders and the man stared at him for a while before speaking. ‘A strange attire,’ he observed finally.
    The Doctor smiled. ‘Of my own design,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot and cannot abide discomfort.’ Then he hesitated fractionally before asking, ‘You are Charles Preslin, I presume?’
    ‘A doctor of what, did you say?’ the man said as the Doctor took stock of him. He was in his fifties, of average height, slim, balding with shoulder-length straggling grey hair and with intelligent eyes in a careworn race.
    ‘Actually, I didn’t say,’ the Doctor replied and then smiled, ‘a bit of everything, really, a doctor of dabbling, I suppose, who’s looking for an apothecary named Charles Preslin.’
    ‘To what end?’ the man asked.
    ‘It refers to a footnote I read in a scientific journal,’ the Doctor explained and the man smiled wryly.
    ‘Oh, that,’ he said and, admitting that he was Preslin, continued, ‘it dates back to ’66 when a few colleagues and I were engaged in some research. It was just before the certificate of Catholicisation was brought into force. And that, of course, put paid to our work.’
    ‘Which was?’ the Doctor asked innocently.
    Preslin’s eyes darkened with suspicion and, stretching his left arm out, he raised his forefinger and waved it like a metronome in front of the Doctor’s face. ‘Tch-tch-tch,’ he clicked with his tongue, ‘you do not catch me out like that, sir. I am too old and wily to confess conveniently to heresy.’
    ‘I assure you, Monsieur Preslin, that was far from my intention.’ The Doctor’s indignation was suddenly broken by the sound of feet hurrying up the stairs. An armed, heavily-set man barged breathlessly into the room.
    ‘The ferrets are abroad, Charles,’ he gasped before he saw the Doctor. ‘Who’s he?’ he demanded, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword.
    ‘A weasel, perhaps, I don’t know. But he’s been asking questions,’ Preslin replied.
    The man