Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [165]
One can only guess what results might have been achieved if the Doctor had married Juliette, his intended Virgin of Spring.
When the silence reached the upstairs room, the Doctor’s associates spent some moments staring at the door, probably waiting to see whether Rebecca would re-enter. She didn’t, so for the first minute or so the others might have believed her to be dead. It was in that brief moment of peace that Lisa-Beth saw the weapon, which the Doctor had used to overcome a creature of hair and muscle that had been at least twice his size. Perhaps she expected it to be some elemental device of wonder, but to her it only seemed to be a broken scientific instrument of some kind. It looked like a narrow glass cylinder, although the glass had been shattered so that all that remained were a few sharp and bloody shards protruding from the steel handle. Even as it lay there on the floor, the broken end of the device was crackling with what Lisa-Beth calls ‘blue fire’. Even though she admits that the sparks looked ‘as sharp as razors’, she was unclear as to how such a small instrument could have cut through the beast’s neck so quickly. She also found it hard to say whether it had been the glass edge or the blue fire which had done most of the damage.
As Lisa-Beth hadn’t read the Doctor’s will, she would have had no reason to recognise the legacy he’d left to Juliette. It certainly wouldn’t have crossed her mind to wonder how the Doctor’s miraculous ‘screwdriver’ had come to be there, so long after it had been sent to the Jonah. Lisa-Beth and Rebecca may have redecorated the House, but unless Rebecca had been making her own adjustments in secret then somebody had been moving the props around without any of the Doctor’s coterie noticing.
What’s beyond question is that on February 8, the device became as great a totem of power as Scarlette’s own shard of glass. It was an object of meaning. The King of Beasts might have been a powerful, vicious monster, but could it have even understood the importance of that one small length of glass and metal? Could it have begun to appreciate, as it had died, all the horror, the affection, the heartbreak, the trust, the mistrust and the importance that it represented?
The apes knew all about savagery. Even the strongest of their shamans, however, had no grasp of the strength which was represented by the Doctor or by Scarlette.
The Doctor may have realised this very fact at the time, because once his friends had taken in the scene he turned to them with a look on his face that was more a look of puzzlement than anything else. The previous days, or weeks, or months, had been hard on him. Rebecca had stopped him making an ape of himself, preventing what might have been a nasty slide into savagery. Now he barely seemed to understand what had just happened, or even the fact that the struggle was over. When he looked around the room, taking in the shocked and expectant faces of his peer group, his only question was a simple one:
‘What happened to Scarlette?’
Lisa-Beth records that she and Katya looked at each other, then. Neither of them knew whether they should answer him, or tell their elemental the truth about the fate of the woman he’d married.
The River
British folklore maintains that in the early 1800s, during the Napoleonic wars, a certain French warship – the Chasse Maree – was shipwrecked off the coast of England near the town of Hartlepool. All human hands were lost on the Longscar Rocks,