Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [0]
Lawrence Miles
On February 9, 1783, a funeral was held in the tunnels at the dead heart of London. It was the funeral of a warrior and a conjuror, a paladin and an oracle, the last of an ancient breed who’d once stood between the Earth and the bloodiest of its nightmares.
Her name was Scarlette. Part courtesan, part sorceress, this is her history: the part she played in the siege of Henrietta Street, and the sacrifice she made in the defence of her world.
In the year leading up to that funeral, something raw and primal ate its way through human society, from the streets of pre-Revolutionary Paris to the slave-states of America. Something that only the eighteenth century could have summoned, and against which the only line of defence was a bordello in Covent Garden.
And then there was Scarlette’s accomplice, the ‘elemental champion’ who stood alongside her in the final battle.
The one they called the Doctor.
This another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth Doctor.
* * *
FICTION
The Prologue
HISTORY
1: The House
The March Snow
Master of This House
Blood, Fire and Time
A Certain Kind of Warfare
2: London
Young Emily
Political Animals
Acts of Magic
The Countess and the Lord
3: England
A Night Out
Ways to Avoid Drowning
Visits
The Masonic Account
4: The Kingdom and its Environs
Bees
It Awakens
Sabbath
Questions of Importance
5: Europe
Nightmares and Ghost Stories
The City of Love
Getting Somewhere, Going Nowhere
A Death in the Family
6: The Colonies
Burning Wishes
Love
The Cross
The Sensibility of Mistress Juliette
7: The World
The Blackest of Hearts and the Coldest of Feet
No Return
The House of Who
Nature
8: The World and Other Places
Dear John
In Sickness and in Health
Sacrifice Means Giving Up
Tales from the White Room
9: The Threshold
Thirty Days
No Peace
Mixed Blessings
Re-Engagement
10: The Kingdom of Beasts
Last Rites
Calvary
Upside-Down
‘Look On My Works, Ye Mighty…’
11: The Universe
The Neck in the Noose
Cannibalism In All Its Glory
Earthbound
Black
12: The House
The Doctor, as Himself
The Siege of Henrietta Street
The River
…Till Death, and Perhaps a Few Days More
FICTION
Chapter 13
Addendum: The Future
* * *
FICTION
‘The secret springs of events are seldom known. But when they are, they become particularly instructive and entertaining… the greatest actions have often proceeded from the intrigues of a handsome woman or a fashionable man, and of course whilst the memoires of those events are instructive by opening the secret workings of the human mind, they likewise attract by the interest and events of a novel… [I intend to be a] faithful historian of the secret history of the times.’
– Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1782.
‘Our Revolution has made me feel the full force of the maxim that history is fiction.’
– Citizen Robespierre, ten years later.
* * *
The Prologue
This is true:
Halfway along the Strand, half an hour and a dozen streets from the dead heart of London, there used to be a zoo. This in itself might have been something of a surprise – for a zoo to exist so far from any park, so close to the polite decadence of Covent Garden and the daily business of Holborn or Fleet Street – but the truly notable thing about the London menagerie was that it was located inside a building. A perfectly ordinary building, as well, which (if you could overlook the gaudy pictures on its outer walls, of the roaring great cats and the Barbary apes with their dangerous red eyes) could have passed for any other house or shop in the shadow of Charing Cross. Not only that, but the animals themselves were housed on the first and second floors up, prowling in cages little more than three times the size of their own bodies, some of them stacked on top of each other like cargo-crates in a tea warehouse. An elephant – an elephant – had been winched into the building by some