Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [144]
Occasionally one of the professional women of London would dare to ask what had happened on December 1, or at least dance around the subject. It had been over six weeks since the mysterious vanishing on the far-off island: surely, there’d be no survivors. But Lisa-Beth, while feigning indifference, would at least try to hint that time wasn’t the same kind of animal in the Kingdom of Beasts. For every day that passed in England, she’d say, either a mere second or an entire century might pass in the other realm. It’s a belief reminiscent of folklore, of old legends that those who visited the faerie worlds would return young while their families and friends had grown old… but it’s also an idea typical of tantrists like Lisa-Beth.
Besides, it might have been true. When Anji had vanished into the ruined city in September, she’d disappeared for a whole day but had later admitted that she’d had no sense of the passage of time. And whatever Lisa-Beth said, nobody was likely to contradict her. Society was more than happy to draw a veil over the whole subject. There’d been numerous apelike visions on December 1 itself, but apart from that nobody had sighted or smelled the creatures in a long time. Even the usually-cautious Servicemen and Masons were ready to believe that the threat had gone, that the apes had threatened them only during the troubled in-between year of 1782, and that the New Year had brought a new start.
And this was undoubtedly the whole rationale between the wedding ceremony itself. When the Doctor and Scarlette had kissed, the Doctor had bound himself to the Earth and ‘officially’ declared himself to be the planet’s champion. By his very existence, he distracted the apes away from the Earth itself. I bear the power of elementals, he might have said. I carry the heritage of those who once kept things like you in check. You will only fight me, and those who carry fragments of my legacy. Almost certainly, he felt that even if he died (and in the days before the wedding, his death was considered inevitable) he’d die drawing the apes away from his new home. So in a sense, the ritualists of Britain were right. The gateway between the Earth and the Kingdom of Beasts had been closed simply by the person of the Doctor himself. It’s interesting to wonder whether any of those gentlemen had paused to think what might happen if (and when) the Doctor died.
But perhaps it’s not true to say that the gateway had been completely closed, because one route to the other Kingdom still existed. As ever, accounts of Sabbath’s activities in this period are sketchy, but thanks to the correspondence with Emily his location can at least be deduced. The Jonah was moored in the harbour of Port Royal, a noteworthy fact as Port Royal hadn’t actually existed since the late 1600s.
Back in the seventeenth century, Port Royal had been a city almost exclusively run by pirates, a harbour on the coast of Jamaica known for its ale-houses, its prostitutes and its fights, and for very little else. Not that the settlement was lawless: it was simply run according to the laws which governed life on board the pirate ships, so both homosexuality and female emancipation were championed in the Port alongside the kind of brutal throat-slitting which left many tavern-goers dead in the gutters. In modern terms it’s tempting to compare Port Royal to Las Vegas, a self-controlled community both built and run by organised crime, except that in the seventeenth century it was debatable whether piracy was actually a crime, as such. Piracy was a political act, the greatest pirates having been sponsored by the British government to loot and destroy the fleets of Catholic nations like Spain. It was only when