Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [90]
But when news of world events reached America, when sailors brought tales of the horrors in Saint-Domingue and London, it was in Virginia that most notice was taken. Because it was in Virginia that Matthew Crane himself had set up his chambers, after the end of the struggle with the British there. General Washington himself had set Crane the task of ensuring that the Shaktyanda of America was defended, just as Washington himself intended to defend the country’s physical borders: as Jefferson once said, the Americans had no wish to see themselves ‘going to eat each other, as they do in Europe’, thus beginning an absolute rejection of foreign culture which would become the central policy of American society in the years to come. When the American lodges took notice of the rumours from abroad, they must have discussed things over scotch in their drawing rooms as if it were any other business matter. It was in such a drawing room that the red envelope from England would have eventually arrived.
It seems likely that the Americans began taking an interest in the Doctor after his visit to Hispaniola. After all, anyone connected with a negro revolt had to be considered a threat. According to Lucien Malpertuis’s later memoirs, the ‘ship with no sails’ was last seen at dock in Hispaniola on the first day of September, its captain/s having delivered a red envelope to the children of Mackandal. Yet Scarlette’s journal makes it clear that the ship had returned to England by the second. Even given the inaccuracy of dating in this period, any ship that could cover such a distance in under a day must have been remarkable indeed. But although it was rumoured in the House that the Jonah could simply vanish from the world at will, even Sabbath seems to have had his limits. In a rare letter to one of his own agents, he notes:
There remains no place on the Earth that is out of bounds to me. But I have to admit that the more freedom I have over the globe, the less the globe interests me… my purpose is to protect, and knowing the things I have to protect this territory from I am aware that the globe is not enough. The Jonah must be able to explore the further realms, in much the same way as the vehicles of the extinct elementals. Only the corrupted realm of the apes is currently open to me. Yet to go further without loss of my own integrity will require great work…
Interesting to note that he openly describes his mission as one of protection, and by ‘this territory’ he presumably means the world itself.
On September 2 the Jonah arrived back in England, coining to a halt a short distance off the coast of Brighthelmstone, a spa town which – under the more convenient name ‘Brighton’ – was rapidly becoming fashionable as a place of health and healing: so fashionable, in fact, that in the following years the Prince of Wales would allegedly be getting women pregnant there on a regular basis. Despite the late season, the grey skies, the drizzle and the painfully hard pebbles on Brighton beach, when Scarlette arrived in the town it was full of bathers. The bathers had come to follow the advice of the famous Dr Russell, who’d recommended the site just as keenly as he’d recommended blood-letting and the ingestion of viper’s flesh. Some of those paddling in the waters on that rocky shore must surely have noticed the woman in red who often stood on the beach, staring out to sea with an unreadable expression… not to mention her young Indian companion.
Scarlette and Sabbath still had yet to meet face-to‐face. It was for her sake that the Doctor had asked Sabbath not to harbour his ship, and Sabbath had complied. In that time at Brighton, once Anji had reported the latest news from London, the two men would stand on the rain-spattered deck and talk. The Doctor would watch the beach from a position sixty yards out to sea,