Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [55]
‘So many changes,’ mused the man with the blue-and‐white rosette, in the end. ‘So many unforeseen circumstances.’ They both drank to that, while the violence went on around them.
It was an oddly tranquil scene, but then, it may not really have happened. It’s not that Scarlette lied in her journal: it’s that she used a language just as obscure as the irritating alchemical code of the Masons. Even the name of the tavern is suspicious. No ‘White Hart’ is known to have existed in that part of Manchester described by Scarlette, so either she got the name wrong or simply changed it to something she felt more fitting. ‘Hunting the White Hart’ is a familiar mythic ritual in folklore, and may have an alchemical significance. (Certainly, later in the year one of Sabbath’s agents would write of his ‘need for the Black Hart’, suggesting a more sinister version of the same ceremony… opposites were common in alchemical thinking, so, for example, it was said that when the Duc de Richelieu performed his dark ceremonies his ‘evil monks’ would sacrifice one white goat and one black.) Was Scarlette, in this story of unexpected friendship in the White Hart, saying something in code? And if so, then what?
The meeting seems especially odd given the events unfolding at the docks. The next account that should be related comes from Fitz, but the stories he later told the House make even less sense than those told by Rebecca. Unwilling to be left out of the action, Fitz left the side street as soon as he felt himself able to, and instead of returning to his lodgings cautiously headed back towards the shipyard.
He found nobody there, although he spent a few moments calling out for the Doctor. He was on the verge of leaving, or so the story goes, when he heard the noise. It’s described as being much like the noise Rebecca noticed on the ship, a dirty, heavy, mechanical rumbling, which ‘shook the very boards under Mr. K’s feet’. It was at this point that his attention was drawn to the large expanse of water in the middle of the covered area, which presumably led out to the canal. Fitz later described the way the water began sinking, but only in the middle, as if some great force were pushing on it from above and (bizarrely) making a dent in the water itself. As the rumbling grew louder, Fitz considered leaving, but before he could act…
…and this is where accounts don’t merely differ, but become so horribly jumbled as to render them meaningless. Based on Fitz’s claims, Scarlette writes that at this point ‘it flickered into being, its grand and ugly body guttering like the light from a newly-lit oil lamp’. Other claims are wilder still, and involve the stopping of time; a blazing, electrical light; even a multitude of visions and hallucinations. Lisa-Beth puts things in purely tantric terms when she describes the arrival of the ship as ‘a rendering [of Shaktyanda?] like none ever seen… I can only think that so much wanton lust had been built up in the world that even something on this scale could manifest itself.
So what, precisely, happened? One moment there was nothing: the next, the ship seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Fitz believed that the ship had been magically transported to the dock, but this is scarcely feasible even by the tortured logic of elementals. Bearing in mind Rebecca’s comment that the Doctor could see something in the dock that Fitz couldn’t – bearing in mind, also, that the Doctor deliberately brought Rebecca with him, a woman known for her unusual states of perception – it’s easier to believe that the ship had been there all the time, but that something had prevented Fitz from noticing it. That would certainly explain