Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [145]
Yet Port Royal had ultimately fallen. Appropriately enough, this Sodom of the modern world, this town built on plunder and excess, had been buried by an earthquake; drowned by the sea; hastily forgotten by the Europeans. Even so, Sabbath was using it as his base of operations at the beginning of 1783. How can anyone explain this? It’s possible that part of Port Royal had somehow been claimed by the Kingdom of Beasts, that the old ways of the pirate-prostitutes had attracted the apes’ attention and that the harbours of the town had become attached to the edge of the grey city. Easy to imagine Sabbath’s metal Leviathan waiting just off the shore, watching the struggle on the mainland. Or it could even be that Sabbath had equipped his vessel to travel underwater – unlikely, technologically speaking, but who can say for sure? – and that he chose to lurk in the sunken ruins of the drowned town. It’s not hard to see how Port Royal would have appealed to him. Sabbath was, in a way, the ultimate pirate. A man prepared to strip down the techniques and devices of both establishment and elementals, taking whatever he needed whenever it was necessary… and of course, the skull and crossbones of the pirate ships had influenced so many occult rituals in the decades since the days of the buccaneers (it was pirates who’d originally settled Hispaniola, and who’d caused the followers of Mackandal to dress their rituals up in the bones of the dead). The capital of the pirates: the home of sponsored terrorists who’d turned their backs on their home nation. Such a fitting locale.
It can be said for sure that by the middle of January, both Sabbath and Juliette could be found on board the Jonah at the ghostly or drowned docks of Port Royal, halfway between one world and another. A letter from Sabbath, dated January 16/17, makes this obvious. In the letter, Sabbath explains to the unfortunate Emily that he can’t directly help her with her financial troubles in London, and he subtly makes it clear that he’s got bigger fish to fry. Noticeably; he goes to great lengths to tell Emily that Juliette is perfectly safe and well.
Emily had reason for concern. Because six weeks earlier, on the day of the wedding – if the word ‘day’ could be applied to the time of the Kingdom – Juliette had been hanged in a noose, near to the point of death, off the side of the ship.
It all comes down to folklore, of course. After his conversation with the man on the hill, the Doctor supposedly spotted Juliette dangling from the rope down at the dock, swinging limply against the side of the Jonah. As he neared the harbour, with his body tearing itself apart from the effort, he saw that Juliette wasn’t alone. There were shapes on the vessel, stinking apes who peered down over the deck and watched Juliette hang, and not those who’d been trained by Sabbath. The Doctor let out a ‘great cry’, by all accounts, waving his arms wildly on his way down the slope to the sea. But the apes just looked up at him lazily, hardly reacting and then turning their attention back down to the dying woman below them.
Juliette, say the tales, wasn’t struggling as she hung from the rope. It can’t have been a proper lynching, seeing as her neck hadn’t been snapped. The suggestion seems to be that the apes had boarded the ship – where was Sabbath? – and found the rope lying around on the metal deck. Discovering Juliette, they’d tied the noose around her neck and lowered her over the railings as a kind of game, watching with bored faces while they let her slowly asphyxiate.
At least, that’s one interpretation.
Evidently Juliette was hanging right next to the hard stone of the dock, because the Doctor could reach her dangling body from dry land. His body must have been suffering, pushed to his limits, when he reached out and dragged Juliette’s limp form towards him. By the time the Doctor reached her Juliette’s face was bleached and contorted, her eyes shut, her lips as dry as