Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [50]
The distinction between ‘whore’ and ‘courtesan’ was always a fine one – generally it depended on how rich your clientele was – so although it might have been a compliment to Scarlette’s crew in London, here it was a reminder that Manchester was built on sweat and cotton, not on class. Even in the north of England, people had heard of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, that most fashionable guide to the bordellos of London, and the women of Manchester would have known by reputation the kind of threat Scarlette’s crowd presented to business. In the end, it was actually a fairly muted Doctor who ended the squabble in the tavern.
There was actually another reason for the women’s animosity, and that was soon to become clear.
So why had the Doctor insisted on coming here? The answer lies with Fitz. Fitz was also spending time at the docks, although (thankfully) for very different reasons. On June 15, after some weeks of chasing leads, he and Juliette finally found a location at the docks which, he was convinced, was the next step on the trail to Sabbath. The site was a building which no longer exists, but which was later described as:
Enormos… it was part of the shipyards, tho while most of the grand vesels of Manchester were built at dock this place of construction had been covered by a truly giant ceiling of canvas and struts of what I took to be iron. There was a reserve [i.e. reservoir] of water at the hart of the bilding with wooden platforms all around for the workers, so I took it that the waterways themselves had been bent in there course to fill the place. There were workman on every platform that worked in metal with fiery tools, and there were small boats tied to posts for perhaps rowing out to the rest of the river. The whole of the construction smelt of burning things, [but] I did not see any ship in the water there tho there was sertainly room for one.
This ‘indoor shipyard’, then, was more reminiscent of one of the new factories than a normal dockyard. To Fitz, who seems to have had no difficulty infiltrating the building and observing the workmen cutting steel and hammering metal plate, it was confirmation that his theory had been correct. Sabbath was an engineer; Sabbath seemed to stick to water, whenever possible (perhaps a compulsion left over from his initiation); Sabbath had seen, or believed he’d seen, a Leviathan in the Thames; and one of the key images in Juliette’s visions was of metallic war machines. Fitz’s conclusion was simple. Sabbath would be found on a ship. Indeed, given the man’s propensity for finding resources, Sabbath would almost certainly have his own ship.
Of course the Service had never reached this conclusion: they, unlike Fitz, were victims of their own age. In the 1780s, the majority of ships were still uneasy, wooden things, lethal in naval war but hardly a place in which anyone would choose to reside. Nobody in the eighteenth century would ever have considered a ship as a headquarters. But things were different, Fitz would no doubt have claimed, in the world of elementals. To him, a ship could be something as solid as pig-iron. And you couldn’t build your own battleship without someone noticing. In their last weeks at Cambridge, Fitz and Juliette had dispatched subtle missives to exactly the kind of suppliers, administrators and engineers Sabbath would have needed to create his own metal Leviathan. The trail had led here.
In modern times, in an age when metal battleships are exclusively owned by governments, the idea of one man building his own ship might seem odd. But in this era, it wasn’t unusual for ships to be built by public subscription. Indeed, in 1782 the Duchess of Devonshire herself – a recurring name in this story – announced that she wished to start a subscription to construct her own battleship, just as the fashionable adventuress-women of France had done during the American war. Curiously, nothing officially came of these plans… as the Duchess was