Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [80]
Then, she claims, she realised there was someone standing next to her. A figure ‘garbed for the most part in black’ had appeared with the same suddenness as the ship itself, and like Scarlette he watched the Doctor’s boat shrink into a tiny black speck.
Scarlette doesn’t name the man at the docks, but her description exactly matches the curious clean-shaven, Saturnine individual with the blue-and‐white rosette from the Manchester tavern. Once again, the man with the Whig colours on his lapel was pleasant and witty, and Scarlette seems to have enjoyed his company… if, indeed, he wasn’t simply part of Scarlette’s invention. On watching the Jonah vanish, the man told Scarlette that ‘he’s taken up the position rather nicely’, although whether he was referring to the Doctor or Sabbath is unclear. And this time, there was physical evidence of his existence. He gave Scarlette a gift, ‘to take back to your House… whoever might need it’.
The gift was a pair of rings, each one crafted in fine polished silver. Scarlette would later present them to the Doctor, so it’s feasible that she only made up the story of meeting the man at the harbour to cover up a more dubious provenance for the jewellery.
The Doctor spent much of this period on Sabbath’s ship. What the two of them talked about is anybody’s guess, but it’s doubtful the Doctor spent much time consoling Sabbath on his bereavement (the death of Tula Lui apparently upset Scarlette more than the Doctor, and on her return to England Scarlette insisted on visiting the last known Mayakai in Europe – now an old woman, residing in St James’s and considered by many in society a great curiosity – to ‘bury’ the girl in the manner of her own people). What’s certain is that two days later, the warship departed for Hispaniola.
On the night before Lisa-Beth was to follow Scarlette back to London, she and the Doctor spent the evening together in Paris, watching the magic-lantern shows and strolling players at an open-air establishment owned by the Duc de Chartres. The Doctor was ‘excited’, Lisa-Beth later recorded, although she noted that he was still looking pale. The Doctor’s enthusiasm was perhaps fuelled by the very atmosphere of France at the time. Even apart from suspected cranks like Mesmer, science was the order of the day. The Montgolfier brothers were on the cusp of sending the first prototype hot air balloon soaring into the sky over the Champs de Mars, and it was commonly believed that men would take to the air within the year. While the intellectuals of France debated the possibility of airborne warfare (much in the ‘we can drop things on the heads of the English, and we won’t need their damn treaty’ mould), the Doctor was planning similar excursions in another dimension altogether.
From his garbled words, Lisa-Beth established that Sabbath was engaged in the feat of actually leaving Earth’s entire demesne, using to his advantage the same weakness of space which had let the babewyns in… but that Scarlette’s old flame had, as yet, not found a way of doing this without himself and his passengers losing their ‘integrity’. When Lisa-Beth asked what Sabbath was lacking, the Doctor cheerfully tapped himself on the chest and replied: ‘Me.’
But Lisa-Beth, like Scarlette, was wary of Sabbath even now that he’d supposedly been cowed.
So much had been said about Sabbath in the House that the main threat, the threat of the apes, had been somewhat neglected. Yet in her dream diary, Juliette repeatedly makes mention of the black-eyed sun, that mysterious dark god of the ape-world. There’s a definite sense that she felt it was watching her. Although the eye she saw in her dreams was nothing but a nightmare, her paranoia wasn’t unique. Rebecca, like Juliette, would frequently suffer bad dreams. Though she only spoke of them occasionally, it’s known that she suffered nightmares about her experiences in America. She more than once dreamed of Mistress Deerfield, the ‘Queen of New York State’ and the last true American tantrist before Crane and Washington’s Revolution, hanging from a crucifix