Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [173]
You had to see things on the grandest possible scale. Just as she intended to see her own lifetime, stretched out before her, as soon as the ship finally took them away from the world.
She became aware that Sabbath was behind her. Not close enough to touch her, but close enough that she could feel his breath on the side of her face, close enough that he could have put his arms around her if he’d wanted to do such a thing. They stood there together, watching the sky beyond the prow, the air around them full of the smell of salt and the light of elementals and the beating of three hearts.
‘_____,’ said Sabbath.
And in the very last moment that could be said to have been spent on Earth, Juliette thought of the Doctor.
* * *
Addendum
The Future
THE DOCTOR: It’s impossible to give a definitive account of the Doctor’s travels after 1783, mainly because he himself refused to let it be possible. He was, according to his admirers, a nigh-immortal being who could walk through time and even (occasionally) change his appearance: therefore, anybody could impersonate him with impunity. People claiming to be eighteenth-century occult ‘charlatans’ like Cagliostro or the Comte de Germain were crawling out of the woodwork as late as the twentieth century, so it’s hard to know what to make of the numerous individuals who’ve claimed to be the Doctor since the Siege of Henrietta Street. Perhaps it’s best just to say that he remains one of modern man’s truly mythic figures, and leave it at that.
EMILY HART: After Sabbath’s apparent departure from Earth, Emily (who later returned to her given name of Emma) settled down in Naples with the British Envoy Extraordinary. She eventually became the talk of her native country in 1798, as the mistress of one of Britain’s most noted Admirals, one of the new breed of naval heroes produced by the Napoleonic wars. It was exactly the lifestyle she might have hoped for, in her youth. Appropriately, one English newspaper satirised this scandalous affair in a cartoon called The Nightmare of the Nile – another parody of Fuseli’s Nightmare, its title inspired by the fact that Emma’s lover had recently won a victory at Aboukir Bay – in which the Admiral was depicted as the little nightmare-goblin, sitting on Emma’s chest and peeking under her nightdress.
THE COUNTESS OF JERSEY, ‘THE INFERNAL’: History doesn’t remember her as a great ritualist, but as a great manipulator and seductress. She campaigned for the Whig party in the great London elections of 1784, became the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV), and may have been party to any number of diabolical Whig schemes throughout the 1780s and 1790s. As expected.
FITZ KREINER and ANJI KAPOOR: Neither of them reappear in historical archives… at least, not in the eighteenth century. There is a record of one of them dying in the twenty-first century, but as records are notoriously bad at keeping track of elementals it may have been a different individual altogether.
JULIETTE: Unlike Sabbath she did return to her own place and time, though as something of a changed woman. She’s known to have spent some time on Hispaniola, perhaps consulting with Émondeur and his brood. The last known record of her activities places her at Charenton Asylum in 1805, where she visited one of the inmates and witnessed one of the bizarre plays often staged by the lunatics for the benefit of society guests. She vanishes from history altogether after that date.
LISA-BETH LACHLAN and REBECCA MACARDLE: Lisa-Beth did indeed go on to handle the practical matters of the House. When Scarlette turned her mind to other interests in late 1783, Lisa-Beth ran the business almost single-handed. No record of Lisa-Beth