The sudden silence was gut-wrenchingly terrible.

Then Donna was across the room, hugging her sobbing mother, holding her, squeezing her, mumbling apologies and soothing words, telling her that it was all right, that she was there.

But one thought ran through her mind. Tomorrow, she’d be gone again. With the Doctor. Because that’s what she wanted.

But did she have the right to? Had she really earned the right to go off again if this was what her mum thought?

All those times she and Sylvia had fought, argued, yelled. As a teenager (and frankly, most of her spoilt twenties), Donna had just put it down to ‘that’s my mum’.

But Donna wasn’t that person now, and she could see that her widowed mum, one year on, needed her daughter more than ever before.

 

And Donna was crying too now.

Crying for her mum’s pain, her dad’s loss, remembering that knock on the door. The policeman standing there.

‘He was supposed to die here, in my arms, with his family,’ Sylvia was saying. ‘Not in a bloody filling station.

Alone.’

At which point, with timing for which both the words ‘impeccable’ and ‘inconvenient’ were invented, the doorbell rang.

Wordlessly, Wilf went to answer it, and Donna heard him say ‘Ah, not a good time.’ Donna knew, without hearing the response, exactly who was on the doorstep.

And so did Sylvia.

She looked with red, teary eyes at her daughter.

And, for the first time that Donna could remember, Sylvia Noble stroked Donna’s face, a soft caress of pure maternal love. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Then she called, ‘Come in, Doctor.’

A moment later, the Doctor’s face popped round the sitting room door, brainy specs in place, hair madder than normal.

‘Hullo,’ he said to all of them. ‘Do you know the Carnes family by any chance? I think they’ve got aliens in the family.’

The tourist trade in Moscatelli was mainly based around olive groves, orangeries, a nice vineyard and the annual motorcycle race that started thirteen miles away in Florence and ended up the other side of the mountains in

this small but oft-visited little town.

The people who lived in Moscatelli were mostly Italians who had been there for thirty or so generations.

Everyone knew everyone and it was friendly, welcoming and cheerful.

It was also, in the middle of May, the recipient of stunningly good weather, and Jayne Greene thought it brought out the best in the locals. Not least of which was that Tonio was spending most of the day during the dig wearing nothing but a pair of tight denim cut-offs that left very little to the imagination (and Jayne could imagine quite a lot). The Professor had employed Tonio and his family to help them set up the dig a week or so back.

Jayne and her two fellow students, Sean and Ben, had agreed to accompany the Professor there for the summer because it would give them really good marks in the end-of-course assessments, it’d be an adventure to travel to a nice part of Italy and it was a great way to get a tan.

‘Got it!’ Sean yelled excitedly.

‘How much?’ asked Ben, sifting soil a couple of feet away from where the laptop was set up by the food tent.

‘Seventy-eight euro.’

‘Sixty-something quid. Not bad.’ Ben nodded. ‘Well done.’

‘I bloody love eBay,’ Sean smiled at Jayne. ‘Yaay me!’

‘Was it the Egyptian pot?’

Sean looked at her and shook his head, slowly.

‘Not the Iron Age spade?’

More head shaking.

Jayne dropped her own tools and wandered over to the

laptop and looked at what Sean had just committed sixty pounds to.

‘That?’

‘That.’

‘It’s a toy.’

‘Course it’s a toy,’ Ben yelled as Tonio poured some more earth into his sieve. ‘What else does Sean ever buy off eBay?’

Jayne couldn’t understand it. ‘You mean, you spent all that money, and seven days’ frustrated watching the auction, for a mass-produced toy?’

‘Action figure,’ Sean corrected her. ‘Limited edition.

Only five hundred produced, and that was eight years ago.

It’s a variant paint job, y’see, she’s wearing her red Dark Period costume instead of the traditional green one.’

Jayne just looked at Sean. ‘You are an adult. You are a grown man getting excited about a plastic toy. A figure for kids. A…’

‘Don’t say “dolly”,’ Ben muttered to himself.

‘… a dolly?’

Sean slammed the laptop shut. ‘My money, my choice.

You get excited about Roman pins and earthenware.’

‘So do you!’

‘Yeah, cos that’s a job. That’s what I do here and at uni.

But in my spare time, I have other hobbies. I have…’

‘Don’t say “a life”,’ Ben muttered to himself again.

‘… a life,’ Sean finished. ‘You should try getting one before you criticise everyone else.’

Jayne stared at Sean, then across at Ben, who made sure he caught no one’s eye and started to run his finger

pointlessly through the dirt, in an effort to pretend he had something to distract him.

The tension was broken by little Professor Rossi, stumbling back around the tents after a trip to the town for some milk and teabags.

‘Now, now, I could hear you up on the main road.

What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ Sean grunted. ‘Sorry Prof.’

Rossi shook his head, scratching the scar that created a small slash across his cheek. At uni, everyone joked it was a duelling scar he’d got fighting for a woman he loved, but one day someone discovered the truth – that ten years earlier he’d been cut in the car accident that had killed his wife. Everyone lost interest in imagining romantic things about the scar after that.

‘What am I going to do with you three? I bring you out here from university for the mid-term break, to visit the family home, and to give you all the chance to improve your frankly dodgy archaeology marks. And all you do is play with the broadband, flirt with poor Tonio there and embarrass him, or drink too much orange wine. You are here to work, you know. Being sociable is a pleasant side effect but not essential. What is essential, however, is teamwork. Sean and Jayne, I don’t care if you can’t get on, but you will work together. Jayne and Ben, I don’t care if you want to fight over Tonio’s attention, you will work together. Sean and Ben I don’t care if you can drink one another under the table at night, provided you turn up fresh and able the next day. Is all that understood? I am not your parents but I am the man who will mark your

end-of-term papers, and you would do well to remember that keeping me sweet is a positive move.’ Rossi put some cartons of milk on the table next to the laptop. ‘So, whose turn is it to make tea?’

Sean volunteered as Rossi scooped up the laptop.

‘Hopefully the Bursar has forwarded some more funds to us so we can try and trace those tunnels through the hills across to the lake.’

‘How far do your family go back here, Professor?’

Jayne asked.

Rossi shrugged. ‘I’m in the process of finding that out at the library. Certainly my paternal great-grandparents were the ones who moved to Ipswich, but I suspect their roots are here right back to the fifteenth century.’

Ben headed over with his sieve. ‘So we are looking for more than fifteenth-century Italian pots and pans then? I said so! Come on, Professor, what’s the big secret?’