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Sabbath knew all about the Doctor’s proposed marriage. In a fragment of conversation which occurred towards the end of the encounter, the men even discussed the matter:

SABBATH: I see. And you believe, I presume, that this ritual can help you?

DOCTOR: It might not help me. But it’ll help.

SABBATH: And does the young lady understand the consequences of what she’s doing?

DOCTOR: I’m trying to teach her. Do you really care?

SABBATH: Oh, I have a certain casual interest in these things. Of course, you realise… this isn’t going to change my opinion of you.

DOCTOR: Mmm. You’re the one trying to shut our House down, then?

SABBATH: The machinery’s already in operation. What happens next is hardly my concern.

Unsurprisingly, Rebecca understood little of this exchange. She might have been expecting a battle, not a polite (if vaguely menacing) conversation. She was certainly surprised when the Doctor, after asking one more simple question, wished Sabbath a good day and turned to leave the room. Sabbath’s response was simply to nod back.

So it was that the two of them left the warship, not in a fury of action but with a mere goodbye. The apes continued to spit at them on their way out, but this time they left by a steel stairway, arriving on the ship’s deck rather than crawling back out through the side of the vessel.

When they emerged into the dim light of the covered shipyard, they found they weren’t alone. On the jetty by the warship, Scarlette was waiting for them, along with Fitz, Juliette, Anji, Lisa-Beth and the rest. Dressed in their clothes of red and black, they must have looked something like a guard of honour, but their faces were grim. They were carrying lanterns, as if the affair were a vigil. The Doctor had made contact with the enemy: even the Doctor himself must have been expecting some kind of conflict, which was presumably why his army had accompanied him here. Legend has it that Scarlette’s face, lit by the dull yellow glow of her lantern, was so fixed and calm that she hardly seemed human at all. As if she knew how close she was to her old enemy-cum‐suitor, and knew she couldn’t allow herself to even acknowledge it. This time, legend is probably correct.

It wasn’t until the long journey home to London that Scarlette discovered the truth, and found out exactly what the Doctor had said to Sabbath. One can only guess how she must have felt, when she learned that the Doctor had asked Sabbath to be his best man.

* * *

5

Europe

Nightmares and Ghost Stories

It was a year of great literary note. Or at least, it was a year of literary note: whether the literature qualified as ‘great’ is a matter of taste.

It was in summer that a French nobleman, incarcerated in the dungeons of Vincennes (second only in reputation to the Bastille), began work on the rough notes of what later generations would regard as his masterpiece. For political reasons, the governor of the prison insisted that the nobleman’s real name should never be spoken: in another of those quirks which modern readers often believe to be some kind of obscure joke, the prisoner was known only as ‘monsieur le 6’. His book, The 120 Days of Sodom, would come to be reviled by many as the most blasphemous, bloodthirsty work of pornography ever written… its true significance would only become clear centuries later, when historians would realise that ‘Number Six’ had written – in his own, admittedly vitriolic, style – the first work of clinical psychosexuality. ‘Six’ had set out to record every imaginable perversion that might be enjoyed by the corrupt ruling powers of France, in a style that bordered on the horrific.

On the other hand, the second important work to be started that year was written by the Doctor.

What inspired the Doctor to sit down and write a book remains unclear. It could have been that he wanted to further expand his horizons, or that the conversation with Sabbath had been playing on his mind and he needed a way to exorcise his doubts. It could have been that he