THE LOVESICK COBBLER OF PADLUCK

Chapter Two

The Doctor's legs are a lot longer than ours; Tegan is not tall and she has an inch of height over mine. By the time we once more caught up with the Doctor, he was standing in his red-stockinged feet, handing a second shoe to the cobbler, who was already holding the other one.

I didn't want to go in. Once Tegan had pointed out that the cobbler was staring at me, I felt as uncomfortable as if he had somehow touched me. I stood outside looking through the window and watched him talk to the Doctor. He rarely looked the Doctor in the eye, I noticed. Shy, maybe? Guilty… of what? Staring at me? Tegan once said, "A cat may look at a king." I suppose I might have been overreacting. But Tegan felt it too! Now the Doctor was dancing around in his socks, and the cobbler was laughing. Tegan was dancing as she came out. "He has to wait again," she said. "We can wait with him, keep him company, or we can go do something. He says he'll wait here for us this time so we don't have to run after him. He seems happy enough. Mister Mishmorlaksi is going to take apart a perfectly good shoe to make it match the repaired one. The Doctor will probably ask him a million questions and that will make the job take longer. Didn't we pass a spa?"

"Oh, I don't want to… you know, maybe we should just wait." Something was bothering me but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, maybe I misjudged him. What kind of name is Mishmo… Mish… what did you say his name was?"

"Mishmorlaksi. I have no idea. I don't even know if these people are human, not that it matters. I mean you're not human and the Doctor's not human and I love you both to pieces!"

I blushed and was about to tell her I felt the same way when I realized what had been at the back of my mind. "Look," I said, pointing at the window.

"What?"

"Those sparkly boots. They're gone."

"Someone must have come and bought them. Why, did you want them?"

"I don't know. I thought they were beautiful. I didn't try them on. They seemed a bit large but sometimes you can't tell without trying something on. Now I'll never have the chance to do that."

It never occurred to me to mention that the window itself, and even the building itself, had changed shape. In Salfra, that was a given.

We decided to wait for the Doctor so we both went in. I sat down on a low sofa across from the counter and it seemed that Mr. Mishmorlaksi diligently avoided looking at me at all. He didn't spend much time in the front room with us; he disappeared into the back room, came out to show the Doctor a shoe, returned to the back room, never glanced my way, not even surreptitiously. "You hurt his feelings," whispered Tegan, and then I felt really bad. What had I done? Maybe the poor man just thought he knew me from somewhere. After all, the Cranleighs, too, had stared at me in a manner I'd found rude… until they revealed that I was a… what was the term? Bellringer? I resolved to ask Tegan about that. I was a lookalike, identical to their future daughter-in-law, Ann Talbot. Once I understood that, I was no longer offended. Perhaps the cobbler had a perfectly innocent reason for staring at me, and for not wanting me to know he was staring at me.

I found myself almost staring at him. He was not unpleasant to look at: humanoid, not substantially taller than I (which means he was quite short, maybe 155 centimeters), slender except for his broad shoulders and slightly overdeveloped arms, with black shoulder-length curls and bright green eyes. He wore little wire half-moon glasses just as the Doctor sometimes does, except that the cobbler's were slightly twisted. His face was rather long, not precisely symmetrical and somewhat wrinkled with worry, although after the initial impression he gave of age, he seemed young, after all, perhaps even in his twenties. That was a disconcerting illusion, particularly since the Doctor himself looked like a young man (not in his twenties, of course) but claimed to be impossibly old. Maybe, in Salfra, faces as well as buildings shifted.

The Doctor and Tegan had been chattering away while I was thinking all of this. I was not paying any attention to their conversation, which continued after each brief interruption as Mr. Mishmorlaksi returned to show the Doctor something. Come to think of it, I found that odd. How often did he need to consult with the Doctor once matching eyelets had been agreed upon? Yet he kept returning to show the Doctor something. I wondered what. Then the cobbler caught me looking at him and his reaction was all out of proportion to my merely watching him talk to the Doctor. He let out a little cry, quickly took off his glasses and polished their lenses on his shirt sleeve (he was wearing a sleeveless leather apron over a blue-and-white pinstriped blouse), tried to pop them back onto his face but missed and dropped them on the floor, disappeared behind the counter as he threw himself down after them, and emerged red-faced and somewhat sweaty, stared (again!) open-mouthed at me for a full ten seconds, tried once more to put his glasses back on and dropped them again! I felt sorry for him but I was also quite annoyed; what had I done? Why was he behaving this way? I stood up and left the shop.

This time the Doctor came out to check on me. "What's wrong, Nyssa?"

"What's wrong? What's wrong with that man? Every time he sees me he acts so strangely, he frightens me!"

"Does he? Are you sure? He seems a perfectly nice fellow. Why should he frighten you?"

"I don't know! He just does."

"Not discounting intuition and instinct," mused the Doctor, "that isn't logical. He hasn't done anything frightening."

"Just because you don't find him frightening," I retorted, "that doesn't mean he isn't frightening to me!"

"All right, all right. Well, he is doing a good job on my trainers, I must say, and, not that I am all that familiar with the national economy, his prices do seem reasonable. Tell you what: when we're done here, let's go look at the museum of time, space and spectacle! You're not afraid of clowns, are you?"

I laughed. "No, I don't think so!"

"All right, then! It shouldn't be much longer. Are you going to wait out here?"

"Yes, Doctor. I think I should. I think I upset him as much as he upsets me."