Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [124]
The Mayakai wasn’t the only new arrival to make her presence felt that week. For days the other wedding guests had told their spies to keep watch on the coast, making sure that none of their kind arrived unexpectedly. In theory the spies were watching all incoming boats, but amongst the British lodges it was silently acknowledged that there was one vessel in particular to look out for. They knew full well that Sabbath had already been invited to the wedding, and as it wasn’t common knowledge that he’d stolen the bride there was still some debate about whether the Monster would show himself on December 1.
As it happened, Sabbath’s ship was never sighted. But for certain people, the situation became clearer in the third week of November.
At this point, the women from the House were still on the island. Following the closure of the House, Rebecca, Lisa-Beth and Katya had all intended to return to Britain and go their separate ways. They’d been brought to the island to say their last goodbyes to the Doctor, and now they were having difficulty escaping. Not having the money for passage home, the only way they could return to England was via the TARDIS… and that meant asking Scarlette. But either Scarlette refused to send them or, more likely, they were reluctant to ask. There seems to have been an agreement between the women that they’d present Scarlette with an ultimatum on December 1, once the wedding had failed to occur. (Even so, there were efforts to leave before this date. Lisa-Beth records that two days after the Mayakai’s arrival, she and Katya attempted to seduce Fitz simultaneously in an attempt to get him to spirit them away. Sadly, Lisa-Beth doesn’t record the outcome.)
It must have been particularly hard on Rebecca, who clearly felt guilty about abandoning Scarlette anyway. In the period between 13 and 19 November, she would often take walks in the forest, observing the Revels as the masked wedding guests – the British in their full livery, the Maroons in their coats of blood and feathers, the clownish French envoy of the Cardinal de Rohan on his fat grey stallion – slashed their way through the undergrowth in search of their prey. As Rebecca carried no weapons, this must have been a hazardous practice. Fortunately she never stumbled across any of the apes, although on November 18 she was very nearly cut down by one of the hunting-parties who mistook her for another kind of prey altogether.
As with any sport, the hunt had generated a culture of its own, and the culture had sprouted its own legends in mere weeks. One of the Masons had already claimed that he’d come face to face with the King of Beasts himself, sitting hunched and slavering on a throne of human skulls, though this was commonly held to be a ‘fish story’. Another popular legend held that there was a far more dangerous animal on the loose. It was like one of the beasts, said the tales, but it could take on the form of a beautiful maiden and entice unwary huntsmen to drop their guard. The myth maintained that one hunting-party (whose, nobody was quite sure) had pursued this succubus into the dark heart of the island, until the creature had cast a spell and vanished into thin air.
It’s a matter of debate whether any of this was based on real events. But on November 20, Rebecca was to meet a ‘succubus’ of her own.
As Rebecca later related the story, it happened near sunset on the eleventh day of the Revels. The hunt would have been winding down for the evening, and Rebecca