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Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [174]

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exists after 1789, so perhaps she joined Scarlette on the barricades during the French Revolution… unlikely as it may seem. Rebecca’s known history is longer, but vague. Like Lisa-Beth she worked in the House until at least 1789, and after that she seems to have found employment in central Europe as an agent of a government agency which saw a certain potential in her unusual talents. There’s no reliable record of her death. The House eventually closed down in the women’s absence, having served its purpose admirably.

THE MAN WITH THE ROSETTE: Nothing more is known about him, although at least one of those individuals claiming to be the Doctor in later years stated that the strange black-clad man had returned ‘in a most unexpected capacity’. There’s room for plenty of speculation here.

KATCHKA (‘KATYA’) NAKHOVA: Tragically, Katya died in September 1783. She was evidently the victim of a homicidal client, although the details were kept from the city watch on the orders of Scarlette. Scarlette’s journal, in one of its last entries before the departure from Britain, records that the killer was ‘dealt with in a reasonable fashion’.

DR NIE WHO: His shop in Soho was open until at least 1796. No explanation has ever been given as to what happened to him between the wedding ceremony of 1782 and the funeral in 1783: there’s no record of oriental pagodas being part of the Kingdom of Beasts, so possibly his Chinese sense of ‘no-time’ protected him from the attentions of the King and the apes. Though Who doesn’t appear to have been an important figure in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century occultism, the stereotype of the ‘oriental wise-man’ would live on long after his own era. It’s interesting to note that the name ‘Dr Who’ later entered twentieth-century culture in a suitably exotic context: it was the name given to the mad scientist in the 1967 Japanese movie, King Kong Escapes.

SABBATH: The best guess is that he was seen on Earth only once more after 1783, at least during his own lifetime… but as with the Doctor, sightings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were common. Understandably, legends that someone is looking out for the safety of history itself are still popular today. Perhaps the most telling myth comes from the early twentieth century, when Sabbath was rumoured to have arrived in Europe in the years leading up to the Second World War. Typically, he was described as being utterly indifferent to the massive conflict which was to come.

SCARLETTE, THE ADVENTURESS OF HENRIETTA STREET: What can be said about Scarlette, most legendary of all the presences of London, except perhaps for the Doctor himself? Stories are often told in ritualistic circles about the original ‘woman in scarlet’, most of them horribly distorted by time. She’s said to have visited America after the Siege, despite the obvious risks, and to have confronted General Washington himself; to have been in Paris during the uprising of 1789, presenting herself as a Mistress of the Revolution; to have visited Egypt during the occupation of Napoleon; even to have witnessed the Battle of Trafalgar. All that can be said for sure, from the records which survive, is that she spent the months after the Doctor’s departure finding herself a new ‘apprentice’ who had more than a little of Juliette’s blood in her veins. Apart from that, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that the stories are too numerous to recount here.

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Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd

Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT

First published 2001

Copyright © Lawrence Miles 2001

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format © BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

ISBN 0 563 53842 2

Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2001

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham

Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton

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