Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [49]
Scarlette simply asked who was going to pay for all of this. It must have occurred to her that if Fitz and Juliette really had found a lead to Sabbath then Sabbath would know they were coming.
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4
The Kingdom and its Environs
Bees
There was another ape attack in June. This time it took place on board a mercantile ship en route from Dover to Ostend, curiously in the same part of the ocean where, a year later, the Great Fireball would explode into sparks and vanish beneath the waves. The Service tried to maintain the nation’s dignity, as ever, by claiming that the ‘cannibal ape’ story was just an exaggerated folk tale put about by sailors. And true enough, the only evidence that an attack occurred on the ship at all comes from the friend-of a friend anecdotes of the seamen. The crewman who allegedly had his heart torn out inside a closed and bolted officer’s cabin was never named, so it’s impossible to say what he might have done to attract the ape-gods’ attention, although there were the usual whispers that the ship had been carrying ‘unholy relics’ in a secret smuggler’s compartment below decks.
By the summer, the authorities had more than enough to think about already. The King had reportedly stated that he wished he were ‘eighty, or ninety, or dead’. He looked haunted, and, he wasn’t the only one. Some gentlemen of the civil service even began to whisper that a conspiracy was afoot, that the tales of monstrous beasts were part of an elaborate conspiracy to weaken the resolve of the state. One of the busiest centres of business, they might have argued, was Manchester… and a new group of women, with more than a whiff of the occult about them, had in recent weeks been noticed frequenting the Manchester docks. There was a feeling in some circles that these women were the ones spreading the horror stories amongst the merchant seamen.
This ‘cult’ was, of course, the Doctor’s army. The women of Henrietta Street arrived in Manchester in early June, and in the weeks that followed they were often seen stalking the streets near the shipyards after dark, patronising the taverns where the dock-workers hung out. The intrigued gentlemen of Manchester couldn’t fail to notice these curious females, all of whom wore the same colours as if they were in uniform. But not all the attention was welcome.
Manchester already had more than enough prostitutes of its own, although, unlike the Covent Garden breed, they’d never been objects of fashion and were coldly, aggressively practical about their work. After all, Manchester was about to become the most industrialised city in Europe, even the world. Within a few years, the machines would be moving into the factories by the thousand; the skyline would be choking with great black towers and devious machines; families would begin to live underground, in dark, damp, crowded spaces without ventilation or highly-taxed windows; the canals would become the black, pulsing arteries of the industrial age; and as a result, Manchester would be the cradle of some of the greatest technological progress in history. By 1782, even the prostitutes were becoming part of the machine.
The first fight occurred two days after the arrival of Scarlette’s party, and predictably it was Katya who was the cause of it. In a tavern Scarlette calls ‘The White Hart’ (ironic, in such a pitch-black city), one of the local women turned her back on a potential gentleman customer for two minutes in order to relieve herself in a back-alley. When she returned, she found Katya sitting on the man’s knee making what Scarlette calls ‘a great show of her fat chest’ and using the red tassels on her dress in a most improper fashion. Needless to say, the local woman wasn’t happy. There was ill-feeling towards the London set anyway, the Mancunians