Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [21]
In retrospect, the reason for Scarlette’s silence begins to make sense. The Doctor knew, right from the start, who his attacker had been and why the assault had occurred, although all he’d say at the time was that he’d evidently ‘attracted the attention’ of hostile forces. Following his recovery, a conversation took place between him and Scarlette, a comparing of notes which Scarlette didn’t wish to record. Partially, this may have been because the Doctor had recognised the attacker as one of the Mayakai, whom Scarlette had previously considered to be friends and allies. But there was another reason. Recording the rumours in the House, Lisa-Beth states that Scarlette asked Juliette to leave the room during her conversation with the Doctor, which Juliette dutifully did. Yet one word Juliette heard the Doctor say, the word which had caused Scarlette to ask for privacy, was: ‘Sabbath’.
This word had a particularly bad resonance for Scarlette. The reason will become obvious soon enough.
It’s best to pause here and look over the facts. We will assume the Doctor’s intention at the House was to marry together those secretive factions which had somehow retained a ‘lost knowledge’, but one of them seems to have sent a representative whose mission was to physically intimidate him, as if to warn him off. Add to this the fact that a name from Scarlette’s own past was in some way involved, and the word ‘politics’ hardly seems big enough. ‘Intrigues’ might be more accurate.
But there’s something here that’s easy to miss. The fact is that the attacker was easily capable of overpowering the Doctor and rendering him unconscious. The Doctor was no helpless, foppish aristocrat. Apart from his obvious ability at swordplay, he was (to varying degrees) an adventurer, an escapologist, an athlete, a pugilist and an amateur inventor. It’s hard not to think of Lisa-Beth’s claim, that during the fencing practice with Scarlette the Doctor’s blade ‘hung in the air’ as if suspended by its own private kind of time. From all reports, the Doctor seems to have been able to face down the greatest dangers by this remarkable awareness of the space and time around him. Yet his assailant apparently had no difficulty in rendering him helpless, the marks on his face (according to Lisa-Beth) ‘like little lumps of red tar’.
Of course, the Doctor was known to be sick when he arrived in London, an unexplained distemper which he claimed he’d been suffering for some years and which had recently been worsening. But he was by no means incapable. Was it the Mayakai’s special awareness of time, an awareness perhaps much like the Doctor’s, that allowed the attacker to do such damage with so little effort?
The question would become more important later on, when it would be revealed that the assailant had indeed been a Mayakai warrior (one of few to survive the great plague devastation of 1773), who’d entered the House robed in pure black and quickly been spirited away again, by persons unseen. It was this warrior who’d mentioned the word ‘Sabbath’ to the Doctor, and who’d caused him such damage.
But for now, that information was only known to the Doctor and Scarlette. It was hidden from the other women of the House, for obvious reasons. Already anxious about Scarlette’s over-ambitious plans, how would they have felt if they’d been told that the Polynesian warrior who’d defeated their ‘elemental’ had been a sixteen-year‐old girl?
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2
London
Young Emily
On March 20, 1782, the government fell and a new era of