Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [18]
It’s even more tempting to think that, after such a distressing affair; the Doctor was Scarlette’s attempt at finding the right kind of man.
From her journals, it’s easy to see how Scarlette remembered the Gordon Riots. That was the time when she first saw the world the way the tantrists saw it, in patterns of blood, fire and time. Those who entered the Shaktyanda state, like Lisa-Beth, often spoke of seeing the world around them as a spectrum of time and space, in which the traumas of the past could make their way up through the skin of the world and be ‘physically remembered’. This is in effect what happened to London in 1780. Every burning, hateful impulse the city had ever pushed down beneath its surface had been summoned out into the moonlight. As far as Scarlette was concerned, when the creatures Lisa-Beth called babewyns began to appear in 1782 it was just an extension of the process that had started two years earlier. Though the details are maddeningly vague, Scarlette speaks of the way the Doctor ‘walked’ through Shaktyanda (through the ‘wall’, or time itself?) to arrive in her company. Tantrist lore holds that Shaktyanda was occupied by godlike, elemental creatures called Vidyeshwaras – best translated as ‘Lords of Wisdom’ – so perhaps Scarlette saw the Doctor as such a being.
She also records his first words to her, when they met on a street in Marylebone: ‘Hello. Are you a magician, by any chance?’
Within days the Doctor had settled into the House, where he soon set up his own study (Lisa-Beth uses the word ‘laboratory’) in the cellar and where he took an immediate interest in the other women of the House, though for reasons that seem to have been entirely at odds with what one would normally expect. He took a particular interest in Juliette and Rebecca, it seems, but no apparent interest in Katya at all despite her numerous attempts to bed him. Rebecca’s supposed ability to predict future events was obviously of interest, though what fascinated him about Juliette is harder to define. Much later, Juliette would write (in personal correspondence with a typical absence of punctuation):
He perceived in me something which despite all my learning since I find difficult to properly describe… it was as if some fragment of himself or of his own heritage had become caught up in my blood. I felt they [the Doctor and Scarlette] wished me to become something and I felt they were in some accord as to what.
(Note the mention of blood, a theme that reoccurs throughout the surviving documents: it’s significant that traditions like Scarlette’s often place great importance on the menstrual cycle and describe a female’s first true sexual act as a ‘blooding’. Although Juliette sadly kept no journal of her own, from what’s known of her it’s fair to say that she’d already begun to develop something of a talent, one which she can hardly have understood in depth. The Doctor and Scarlette may both have wanted to develop – or exploit? – this.)
What were the Doctor’s intentions in the House, then? All accounts agree that the work of the women disturbed him a little, possibly a result of his reported travels through more restrained lands, but he always made an effort to judge people by their own standards and never interfered in the primary business of the House. It was Scarlette who looked after the practical day-to‐day concerns of the seraglio. The Doctor repeatedly stated that his mission was simply to solve the mystery of the