Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [156]
What I saw next was an act of which the spirits themselves would be proud. He had no charm to protect him, but the Man Sabbath plunged his arm into the chest of the Doctor until his hand had all but gone. Whether he cut the flesh first I cannot say, although the women there [not Scarlette, we can assume] were struck by horror. While he worked in the unfortunate’s chest he spoke, and I was put in mind of those lessons taught here [in Scotland, where Lucien wrote this account] when a doctor will instruct his students as he cuts into a body. The matters he spoke of were matters of the Doctor, his patient, and also the ways of the Doctor’s lodge.
Lucien’s account is garbled here, full of West Indian mysticism, so it’s best to precis it. Sabbath explained to all those present that each elemental, when it left its own world to visit places such as the Earth, had to be rooted in its native soil (the Doctor’s Ruminations suggest as much, and the implication is that this ‘rooting’ was in some way related to the processes of the TARDIS). Yet this faculty was so taken for granted by the Doctor’s kind that they never even considered its exact workings. Buried deep in the body of each elemental, said Sabbath, was a link – a blood-tie, the women of Henrietta Street might have called it – which anchored the elemental to his own realm, which ensured his survival and ‘integrity’ when he left his world of origin. Sabbath, perhaps inspired by his Serviceman’s training, called this link ‘the Great Eye’.
But in the Doctor’s case, there was a problem. Legend had it that the Doctor’s home had been lost many years previously. As a result:
That part of this Doctor which rooted him to his home had become poison to him… the organ through which he was watched by the Great Eye, by which the powers of the elemental world were passed to him, had grown sick and corrupt. It tried to grant him the privileges of a world long since dead… and so had pumped into his body all the disease and darkness of a kingdom reduced to black nothingness.
Nobody could seriously be asked to believe that Sabbath literally opened up the right-hand side of Doctor’s chest, at least not without some instruments of cutting. Yet when they allude to the event at all, the other witnesses acknowledge that some operation was performed, even if it was far more complex than Lucien suggests.
But at the end of it all, his hand removed from the Doctor’s chest, Sabbath turned around to face all those gathered in the chamber. There must have been looks of horror on the faces of everyone there, from Juliette to Fitz, from Scarlette to Anji, from the Maroons to the Masons, if Lucien’s tale is in the least bit true. If Sabbath really did face them, with his gloved hand held out before him, a still-beating heart in its palm. A heart which was as cancerous and as sick as the Doctor himself had been, a heart as black as pitch and pulsing with the same bile which had, apparently, often been seen flecking the Doctor’s beard. Or, as Emily put it in a letter to one of her acquaintances:
Mr. S had at last acqired that devise which he believ’d rooted the elemental to his home and allowed him safe passage between worlds… finally he had found the Black Hart.
It was then, notes Lucien, that the Doctor’s eyes cleared of their black vapour. It was then that he opened his mouth and began the longest of all screams.
* * *
12
The House
The Doctor, as Himself
February 1783. A whole year, to the week, since Scarlette had returned home from an afternoon in Marylebone alongside a curious man in a velvet coat who’d claimed to have something of a heritage.
On February 8, anyone who visited the House on Henrietta Street might have been forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed in those twelve months. The Doctor was there once again, as was Scarlette. So, too, were Lisa-Beth Lachlan and Rebecca Macardle, both of whom were in some way responsible for the Doctor’s return. But it was hardly a happy homecoming. On the evening of February 8 the Doctor lay on one of the old