Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [114]
So it was Scarlette who took the best care of the Doctor. It was Scarlette who eventually dragged a red leather chair into the room, positioned it by the Doctor’s pillow, and sat there with him hour after hour after hour. She would claim it was her duty to do such a thing for him, although it was often commented that the concern she showed went some way beyond duty. Sometimes she’d read to him, as if hoping the Doctor would find inspiration to regain his health and continue his fight. Sometimes she’d be found simply sitting and squeezing his hand, although she’d primly let go whenever anyone else entered. She’d wash the sweat from his torso, or try to wipe the bile from his mouth, or even feed him when it seemed necessary (though it hardly ever did).
Occasionally, he’d regain his senses and speak to her. The short conversations between the Doctor and Scarlette would tend to occur when they were alone together, although on the Doctor’s request his painting of his ‘grandfather’ was hung on the wall, in the middle of a great white expanse, facing the bed. There are stories that he’d mutter to the painting when he thought nobody was around to hear him, but these may be apocryphal. Occasionally Lisa-Beth would visit, ‘visit’ being the operative word as by late October she was no longer to be found at the House and perhaps no longer considered herself part of Scarlette’s coterie. Unusually for her, she didn’t seem to blame anyone in the ‘coven’ for her financial problems. Normally she’d stand at the Doctor’s side, alone or with Scarlette, and self-consciously tell him about goings-on at the Shakespeare’s Head tavern or the increasingly odd rumours about the Prince of Wales.
But on the afternoon of the last day of October – All Hallow’s Eve, though the date had very little significance in the witch-tradition of southern England – the Doctor suddenly awoke from his semiconscious state. He turned his head, and looked into Lisa-Beth’s eyes, and Lisa-Beth records that she felt ‘almost like leaping backwards’.
‘I won’t be here for long,’ the Doctor told her. ‘One way or another.’
Lisa-Beth hardly knew how to respond to this, but the Doctor continued. It was vital, he said, that their work should go on. He’d been aware of what the apes were planning, if indeed they could plan, ever since the recovery of the TARDIS. He was convinced that the House would be vital in the final battle, although he confessed that he had no idea whether he’d be there to witness it. Then he asked Lisa-Beth a question. Scarlette, he said, would be busy with other affairs from now on. Would Lisa-Beth like to take over the running of the House? Would she, with her flair for resource, like to become its guardian and mistress before the great struggle came?
Warily, Lisa-Beth told him that she’d have no objection to such a thing. In her journals she admits to herself that she didn’t know whether the Doctor’s query had been simple delusion, a belief that the House was still open and continuing its business as usual. Or perhaps it was something in the nature of the House itself that he saw as vital, something in the way the very structure of the building ‘bled’. Later that day the Doctor was attended by both Scarlette and Fitz, but by then he’d slipped back into his daze. This is perhaps a shame, as it was on this very day that Fitz decided to finally share the conclusions he’d drawn.
The Countess of Jersey had refused to grant Fitz an audience, but while he’d been following up the lead he’d begun to notice something about the stories he’d heard, the rumours that the Countess had met a ‘King of Beasts’ in the broken city. Anji had also become lost in that city, of course. Though she rarely agreed to speak of it, Anji ostensibly recalled running through endless bleached, wasted streets, occasionally calling out to blank-faced