Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [76]
The Doctor didn’t see Scarlette again for another week, when they finally met at Calais, the port from which England could most easily be reached from the French coast. By that stage the Doctor had made an agreement with Sabbath which he knew Scarlette would find uncomfortable, yet which he believed was necessary if he were to recover his TARDIS. But perhaps it’s for the best that he had something to confess to Scarlette, because Scarlette also had something to confess to him.
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6
The Colonies
Burning Wishes
In 1758, on the West Indian island of Hispaniola, a man named Mackandal was tied to a stake and publicly burned by the authority of France and the colony’s governors. Negro slaves had been escaping into Hispaniola’s jungle interior ever since the 1730s, and the French slavemasters expected to have to burn the occasional popular figurehead, but Mackandal was a special case. Because Mackandal had been establishing schools for the rebel leaders – much to the surprise of both the French authorities and the pro-slavery Catholic Church, who’d assumed that ‘schooling’ was impossible even for the majority of their own kind, let alone the Negroes – and out of this organised campaign had emerged an intelligence-cum‐terrorist network which had spread across the whole of the island. It must have particularly galled the Church that Mackandal had stolen much of their mythology, and that his followers had made dedications to all manner of Saints as they’d poisoned the French wells and ceremonially disembowelled their old overlords.
Mackandal always claimed that no European authority could hold him, of course, so when the French finally caught up with him it was widely believed that he’d find a way to escape. As it happened he was burned, although when the stake broke halfway through the execution many of those present took it as a sign that Mackandal had somehow escaped his own skin at the point of his death. Really, the French should have known better than create that kind of martyr. Perhaps they felt the slaves were too primitive to understand the power of symbols. Which is one of the reasons that, by the 1780s, the Hispaniolan colony of Saint-Domingue was entering a phase of bloody guerrilla warfare which would see the dark, sweaty jungle interior run with the blood of a thousand ritually-severed limbs, both white and black.
It was in 1782, as summer began to roll into autumn, that the ‘silver ship’ was sighted off the shore of the island. If any of the rebels saw it, they must have taken it as a sign.
What must Sabbath have been thinking, after the brutal death of Tula Lui? Events must have shaken him, as much as events ever did. Yet even if his infamous half-smile had vanished from his face, he certainly hadn’t been diverted from his self-appointed mission. And the Doctor, with his almost childlike optimism and his insistence on making friends with everybody while holding grudges against nobody… easy to see how the Doctor could start to work his way into Sabbath’s confidence. What’s ironic is that by this time, thanks to Sabbath’s meddling, the House back in London was on the verge of closing its doors for good.
Between July and September, several members of the House spent time abroad. But Juliette remained back at Henrietta Street, where business had almost run dry. With Scarlette concerned with other matters, the House had lost both its star attraction and its infamous protector. Those ‘gentlemen’ who called to see Katya and company were generally drunkards, stumbling into the nearest seraglio they could find. At one point Katya is known to have argued with Juliette again – implying, perhaps, that she felt Juliette should ‘help out’ in the most physical way – until Fitz stepped in to separate them (Katya seems to have been easily