Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [37]
It’s worth stopping here to consider the nature of the two newcomers, Mr Kreiner and Miss Kapoor. They’d arrived at the House on the first day of May, one of the most important dates in the calendar of ritual, coming as it does straight after the mass wenching-and‐exorcism ceremonies of Beltane. And it’s true that according to Scarlette the newcomers had been ‘summoned’, though by her own admission the charms and totems used to call them had been the curious devices in the Doctor’s study. Even so, May 1 was one of the House’s ‘bleeding days’, and it was due to this (said Scarlette) that the Doctor’s more mechanical experiments had succeeded.
The stories of the summoning are varied and contradictory. It’s clear that something happened, and the one recurring theme is that of a ‘great light’, like ‘an indoor comet’ or even ‘the great opening of a door’. There must surely have been much electrical crackling from the Doctor’s study before the Doctor himself ran out of the door at the top of the stairs and excitedly warned everyone in the salon to take cover behind the furnishings. A lot of the women later described the experience in surprisingly biological terms, as if the energy came from within their own bodies. Juliette was one of those who saw ‘blood before her eyes… and a series of visions’. She later claimed she’d seen the future, not just the world of the Shaktyanda but an actual future, in which she’d glimpsed a great metallic war-machine and realised that such things were inescapable. Scarlette herself could only comment that ‘the horizon had opened’ for a moment.
The end result was agreed on by everyone. Two human figures emerged from the doorway to the study, both of them stark naked and somewhat bewildered, the woman more put out by this than the man. Born out of the blood, fire and time so recurrent in the accounts, the House immediately identified them as elementals. Their nudity was described by the Doctor as a ‘teething problem’. (There is, of course, the possibility of some chicanery here. If the Doctor did indeed have something of Cagliostro’s showmanship in him, then it’s only fair to mention that Cagliostro himself used elaborate pyrotechnic trickery and weird alchemical fumes to work his ‘miracles’.)
It’s hardly surprising that Scarlette and her kin should so readily have accepted Fitz and Anji as elementals, or at least people from elsewhere. The previous year, Herschel had discovered a seventh planet orbiting the sun, which he’d named Georgium Sidius (George’s Star) in honour of the King: Herschel was never one to let politics temper his judgement, or he might have called it Washington’s Star instead. Herschel had made it quite clear that he expected the new world to be inhabited, but then, he expected all worlds to be inhabited, and this most famed of Royal Astronomers believed he was just a step away from categorically proving the existence of people on the lush and verdant grasslands of the moon. He also made a point that the sun was almost certainly occupied, under the hot surface (‘we need not hesitate to say that the Sun is richly stored with inhabitants,’ quoth he). The people of the new Seventh Planet were a recurring theme in theatre and literature, though mostly these aliens were of the man-in‐the-moon variety. Next to the speculations of Herschel, the arrival of the Doctor’s associates from some other realm of being would have seemed almost mundane.
The summoning of the elementals on May 1 must have been a welcome omen, because the mood was worsening by the day. Although the Service had ceased its press campaign, Scarlette was starting to become aware that the women under her were being tempted