Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [153]
This deathbed of the Doctor, in the old and echoing debating chamber of the palace, is described as being one of the great tableaux of the age. It’s reminiscent of West’s Death of General Wolfe, or the later Death of Nelson, even though there was nothing heroic about the Doctor’s stance as he wasted away on his back. But the battle was still being fought outside, a fitting backdrop to such an event. No doubt the Doctor would have approved of a death in the middle of such a noble stand, as befitted a champion of Earth. As his very existence hung by a thread, perhaps he clung on to his life just to give his associates time to fight the enemy and prevent the Earth being overrun.
Perhaps it’s the way he would have wanted it.
Black
It’s so easy to see Sabbath as one thing or another, to perceive him as just a fanatic or just a freethinker or just a pirate or just the villain of the piece. He was so adept at playing roles that it’s sometimes hard to see where the character ends and his mission begins. He was a dangerous man, that much is unarguable. Yet although he may have seemed zealous, or arrogant, or even on occasion psychotic (c.f. his determination, some time after 1783, to have the Doctor killed at all costs), he was also both intelligent and driven. The infamous ‘Sabbath Book’ is often too oblique to render any clues, but in this collection of papers, documents and letters, Sabbath himself sets out his goals.
The Service trained me to protect ‘the interests of the State’. Very well. I shall do exactly as they say. Though how could I, one who has been declared a criminal by his own nation and certified a danger to all mankind, believe that by ‘my State’ I mean the Kingdom of Britain? I have become a citizen of the world, for better or worse. The world is my estate. It is part of my given duty to protect that estate, however hostile its tenants are to that purpose… as only I, and Leviathan, have understood what is to become of it. I am a servant of the territory, then. It is not to be left in the hand of amateurs, certainly not to be left to the discretion of failed elementals. This is, as my associates in their Whig circles have told me, a new era. Then so be it. It is for humanity to protect its ‘state’. I offer myself, as humbly as might be necessary as the spokesman for humanity in this matter.
For the modern reader, this eloquent speech can be summed up in one simple phrase. I do what creatures like the Doctor used to do, because his kind have proved themselves inadequate.
A harsh judgement, perhaps, but while the Doctor lay dying in the wrecked palace Sabbath had not been idle. He had for some time been researching the known texts on elementals and their kind. He’d been receiving messages from his contacts, following up the most obscure leads, obtaining the most unlikely tracts from as far afield as the Americas and the Vatican. While the lodges fought the beasts on the enemy’s own home ground, Sabbath had been reaching his own conclusions as to how things would, how things must, proceed.
So, on the ‘day’ that appeared to be the Doctor’s last, Sabbath set out from the Jonah in its harbour and headed for the heart of the Kingdom. Juliette was at his side, dressed in her usual black and bearing the red marks around her neck, but no longer a cowed and obsequious young girl. She walked as though she were Sabbath’s aide de camp, rather than an apprentice.
At the palace itself, things were not proceeding well for Scarlette and her army. It might have been a folly which drove her anyway, the belief that if she held the apes off for long enough then the Doctor would find some miracle solution. By the time Fitz and Anji reached the central chamber, the humans had been driven back into the grand hallways of the palace. They continued to fire on the horde, although ammunition was obviously