Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [161]
Both reliable accounts say that shortly after the Doctor’s recovery, there was a knock on the door. Given the happily-ever‐after feel of the occasion, all those gathered must have expected a hundred other old friends to be standing on the doorstep. Rebecca went to answer it – it had always been her duty to greet new clients at the door – while Fitz and Anji tentatively asked the Doctor how he was feeling.
The Doctor brightly replied that he was well, although he added, somewhat cryptically, that he was ‘only one and fifteen-sixteenths the man he used to be’. He absent-mindedly scratched at his chest while he said it. Scarlette smiled at this, and reached out for his hand, squeezing it affectionately. The two of them regarded each other for some moments there in the boudoir. Fitz and Anji didn’t interrupt this little reunion,although for once they weren’t embarrassed by it either. It was, as they must have realised, the first time since the wedding that the two of them had been able to speak to each other.
The conversation didn’t last long. Scarlette had barely asked whether the battle was over, and the Doctor had barely replied that the final steps were yet to be taken, when the cry came from downstairs.
Both Scarlette and Lisa-Beth believed that they were the first to the door of the bedroom. Whatever the truth, most of those gathered around the bed jumped to their feet and scrambled to the entrance of the room. Scarlette’s chamber was on the first floor up, and the door led straight on to a wooden-railed balcony, which oversaw the salon below and therefore the front door of the House. So as Scarlette, Lisa-Beth and the others crowded on to that balcony, they would have seen Rebecca down below, pushing the whole of her weight against the door. It was dark outside, the only light being from the lamps, so nobody would have seen anything of the creatures on the doorstep: except, that is, for their claws. There were hands pushing at the door, grey-black fingers forcing themselves between the wood and the frame. Rebecca was doing her best to hold them back, but she was hardly built for the job.
Scarlette immediately called out to her, telling her to move away. The final part of the Siege had begun, the apes converging on the House at last. The Doctor had challenged the King of Beasts to combat, and the House was the venue. It had, as the Doctor had always intended, become the bridgehead to all the Earth.
Did the people of the outside world see it? It seems insane to think that the apes could enter the House from Henrietta Street itself without being noticed. There’s no record of any passers-by seeing animals in such a busy London thoroughfare, beating and scratching at the black-lacquered door (it’s worth noting that the animals only came through the door, not the windows, perhaps suggesting that the door was their only possible entrance into the bridgehead). Then again, Lisa-Beth’s version of events claims that there was a very human screaming from outside, and the very fact that the battle became known as the Siege of Henrietta Street implies that the outside world noticed something. Either way, Rebecca did as Scarlette told her and moved from the door, bolting up the staircase without hesitation. The door flew open at once, and the hairy, scrabbling bodies of the apes tumbled through into the hall. There were too many of them to count, but all of them were shamans, wrapped up in their blubbery robes. They were evidently the ones who’d stayed loyal to the King, when the other, lesser, creatures had backed down in deference