Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [79]
There are more explicit dreams, but this sums up the mood of them.
If the woman in black was indeed just a part of Juliette’s initiation, then it’s likely that the Doctor knew nothing of it. Although Scarlette was back at the House by August, the Doctor wasn’t. The Doctor had last met Scarlette in Calais, where Scarlette was awaiting the packet-boat that would take her back to England. In one of the journals, Lisa-Beth records that the three of them met ‘as if by chance’ at the docks, where the Doctor was found sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of the harbour on a breezy summer’s afternoon, feeding the gulls while watching the sailors load their ships for the West Indies. Even Scarlette was surprised by the Doctor’s appearance, with his trousers rolled up and his bare feet over the side. It hardly matches the slightly sinister aspect the Doctor had taken on, with his villainous beard and his increasingly sombre clothing.
The three travellers spent the afternoon at the harbour, and it didn’t take long for their conversation to get round to topics more serious than paddling. Once again, the subject of Lisa-Beth’s secret rears its head. This was the conversation in which the Doctor finally admitted how important Sabbath was going to be to their cause, and confronted Scarlette with the fact that she’d have to meet her old nemesis-cum‐lover face-to‐face before this was over. Perhaps because of this, Scarlette felt it was time to tell the Doctor what she’d been withholding.
So what could this mysterious secret have been, which somehow linked Lisa-Beth to Juliette and which was of such concern to the House? What significance was there in the fact that Lisa-Beth constantly referred to Juliette as ‘the Flower’? What was all this really about?
Of course, it’s impossible to say for certain. But many of Lisa-Beth’s journals refer not only to her time at Scarlette’s House, but to her younger days as well, specifically the years she spent in India from the mid-1770s until 1781. Lisa-Beth had been trained by Mother Dutt, a notorious eastern procuress known for both her great wisdom and her utter ruthlessness. So it may be of note that the girl who slept in the bed next to Lisa-Beth at Mother Dutt’s brothel, under a blasphemous painted ceiling depicting the god Hanuman in a lewd posture, was an eleven-year‐old English girl; a girl who had the tantra training forced on her, and who would struggle and cry out as the Mother enforced the discipline of the House; a girl generally referred to as ‘Little Rose’.
If these details were of any relevance, then perhaps that day in Calais the Doctor had to face the fact that Juliette wasn’t quite the girl he’d intended to marry.
Love
Scarlette left Calais for England on August 4, Lisa-Beth following her two days later. It was on her last day in France that Scarlette saw the ‘shining ship’ again, though as yet she’d still managed to avoid meeting Sabbath face-to‐face.
Scarlette’s own description of the event is typically romantic. She describes standing alone at the Calais harbour, but this time at sunset, the orange light burning the walls of the harbour buildings and turning the ships into shadows on the water. She describes the Doctor, rowing himself out to sea in one of the little boats that Sabbath used for transporting his agents to and from the Jonah. She relates that he was forty yards from the dock, little more than a blot in the distance, when he stopped to look up at her and wave. She waved back, and it was at that exact moment that the ship appeared as if from nowhere, a silver gleam on the horizon which made her wince and look away. The Doctor had promised her that on board the ship he’d have everything he needed to complete his work, a host of miraculous scientific paraphernalia which would restore him to his place of power. But as Scarlette describes it, the ship was more a deathtrap than a scientists’ paradise.