Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [106]
Nobody can say for certain what happened inside the ‘Black House’, where Juliette would go to meet Emily in the early hours of the morning. Maybe Sabbath himself was waiting for her there. But in the Black House Juliette was given a new dress, a black dress, an alternative to the fate which Scarlette’s House had imposed on her… an alternative she desperately wanted (no wonder Emily had instructed her to keep a dream diary). After all, Juliette was experiencing puberty on top of everything else. In truth, Sabbath merely continued the process which the Doctor had already begun, but allowed Juliette to experiment at will and observed at a distance rather than keeping her on a short leash as Scarlette had done.
The turning point had been that night in September, when Juliette had stepped in to save Anji from the babewyns. It was as if, by that action, Juliette was finally acknowledging that she was ready to face the consequences of the path she’d chosen. She was ready to use her kind of craft, the craft of the Black House, against the enemy. Only then did Sabbath step out of the shadows and take her away from the House for good. In the story of Anji and the Temple apes, the beasts seem remarkably quiet and subdued, ignoring most passers-by to concentrate on Anji herself. Almost as if they’d been trained to.
Which only leaves the question of why Sabbath wanted Juliette, why she, more than anyone else, struck him as good material to be his new right hand. It’s likely that he knew how much she’d already been influenced by the Doctor. Long before the Doctor had known the truth about the apes, he’d instinctively understood the ‘elemental’ truth, that the Earth required a form of protector: an elemental anchor, so to speak, that would hold time still around the planet. By the symbolic marriage ceremony, the alchemical wedding of the Doctor (representing the elemental) and Juliette (representing the Earth), the Doctor hoped to bring a new security to the troubled world. And also, perhaps, to give himself roots in a universe where he no longer truly belonged. In a sense, what he needed was a kind of ‘green card’ that would give him the right to interfere in the Earth’s affairs, a ceremony which would by its very nature have a stabilising effect on the planet. Or at least, that was the theory.
As later events would prove, Sabbath also wanted to become rooted. As his notes have shown, he knew that to travel into the deeper realms (other times, or other worlds?) he’d first have to connect himself to the Earth. On the one occasion when he tried to pilot the Jonah outside of his normal territories, this is how he wrote of the experience:
A lack of cohesion, a certain lack of integrity. I was reminded of Knox’s maxim that we might cease to exist if ever we were no longer observed by God… though God had little to do with the experience, my sense was that my own world no longer acknowledged me and as a consequence I was ceasing to be. I gave orders to my crew to turn the ship around while I could still speak.
So although there are no stories to explain how the Doctor’s legendary people managed to travel between worlds, there’s an implication (in many of the tales Fitz told Lisa-Beth) that on the Doctor’s homeworld there was indeed a great ‘eye’ which watched the Doctor and his kind wherever they went, which linked the elementals to the place of their creation and ensured that no harm came to them when they moved from realm to realm. This process, perhaps, was intrinsic to the Doctor’s TARDIS… but it was evidently the one secret which Sabbath had yet to incorporate into the Jonah. This was Sabbath’s holy grail, his philosopher’s stone, the ‘Black Hart