Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [136]
There were those who considered the ceremony to be a great performance and nothing more, but I know there [was] not a single man or woman who did not feel relief when the bride and groom walked towards that stairway which led down into the depths. On their passage there was especial satisfaction on the face of the gentleman with the Whig rose[tte] upon his collar, who had kept his head bowed until the Doctor had passed him by.
As has already been mentioned, there was already a sense of something great and fundamental unfolding, a feeling across the island that the thunderhead was about to break. And even the most sober, serious records maintain that the second both the Doctor and Scarlette were inside the Church, something did indeed happen to the world outside. There was a sensation of closeness reported in the homes of the townspeople, not so much because of the heat but because everyone became aware of a lurking, sweating presence which pressed against their lungs and made their skins prickle.
These reports are at least feasible. The Doctor – the old elemental order – was about to be bound to Scarlette, and thus to the Earth itself. It’s not surprising that the Earth should have noticed, and, indeed, that those forces waiting just beyond the Earth should have noticed too. When the screaming started from the poisonous machineel trees, even those on the island who had no connection to the lodges must have suspected that it was the messengers of the King of Beasts, declaring absolute war.
Before events reached their conclusion, the battle proper would have begun and many of those now inside the Church would be dead.
Upside-Down
It was as the Wrath of God Himself.
That was how the ‘storm’ over St Belique was recorded, by those assembled from the Masonic tradition. A curious choice of words, as by the 1780s ‘God’ was no longer the Big Man of the establishment. British government had broken the back of the Church in the early 1700s, and although it made something of a comeback in the late eighteenth century it did so only as an arm of the state. It was now the Church’s task to lend moral authority to the gentlemen of Westminster and, where necessary, to reinforce the belief that everything was a matter of property. (This included women, incidentally. Perhaps this is where the ‘pimp age’ truly began.)
So it’s hard to know how the Englishmen at the Wedding would have reacted to the priest who’d been chosen to conduct the ceremony. Robert Ashton Kemp had been an Anglican priest in Birmingham before he’d been spirited out of Britain by Scarlette and her coterie. He was a Man of God with something of a reputation, even apart from the fact that he was notorious for turning up at services as drunk as a lord. Tolerated within the Church simply because it would have been too much trouble to shift him, he once gave a sermon, probably while intoxicated, in which he claimed that God was almost certainly a woman or at least a man with certain womanly features, in order to have birthed the universe. (If this claim makes him sound progressive, it should be pointed out that he’d also gone on record as saying that the Garden of Eden had probably been located in the South of France and that Pitt the Younger was actually a mechanical homunculus constructed by Pitt the Elder… Kemp had a flair for making trouble rather than for original thought.)
When the wedding guests filed down the stone steps into the underground chambers of Saint Simone, with the Doctor and Scarlette moving solemnly forward at their head, this alarming priest was already waiting for them. The guests therefore found themselves being led into the undoubtedly cramped vault, where Kemp was standing on the great wooden thirteen-sided table, which Who had transformed into a stage just for this occasion. A series of wooden steps had even been erected, leading up to this new altarstone. As the guests looked on, Scarlette and the Doctor – the former keeping