Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [91]
It was later said that the Doctor once asked Sabbath, in a quiet moment on that deck, how he felt about Scarlette. Meaning, perhaps, whether Sabbath had any regrets about his attempted ‘seduction’ of 1780. The story-goes that a grave look appeared on Sabbath’s face before he replied: ‘I did what was necessary.’
If all this is true, then it can hardly have made the Doctor feel comfortable. It mirrored his own philosophy so well. Anji had only volunteered to meet the Doctor in Brighton because she wanted to tell him the real news about events at the House, involving Juliette and Emily, and the dressmaker’s shop off Leicester Place.
Anji was reportedly ‘distressed’ that the Doctor had greeted this news so calmly. She later told Lisa-Beth that she felt ‘he was so obsessed with the hunt for his TARDIS that he failed to focus on the matter at hand’. When Lisa-Beth suggested that Anji’s concern about Juliette may have been fuelled by jealousy, Anji snapped back at her with such force that Lisa-Beth immediately concluded she’d been right.
More questions present themselves. Anji believed that Juliette was being taught things the Doctor knew nothing about, that Scarlette was trying to initiate the Doctor’s bride-to‐be in ‘black magic’ as well as ‘red magic’, possibly using Emily as a cat’s paw. This is undoubtedly what she told the Doctor. Did the Doctor confront Scarlette, then? They spent at least one afternoon together, visiting the markets in the narrow, wind-blown streets of Brighton. Or did they understand each other so well by now, the fallen demigod and the courtesan, that he thought no words were necessary?
Perhaps the Doctor believed that Juliette was capable of making her own decisions. Scarlette and Anji left Brighton a day before the Doctor and Sabbath, but when Anji departed for London the Doctor gave her a letter. The letter was addressed to Juliette, sealed with a wax emblem of a bee, and the Doctor made Anji promise not to open it herself.
It’s not known whether Juliette ever read the letter. Given later events, it’s possible Anji never found the right time to hand it over. The contents prove that the Doctor was not only distracted by the thought of his TARDIS, he was also having ‘second thoughts’ about the wedding itself. The English is decidedly modern:
…I know it’s never easy, making a decision that might affect the rest of your life. Especially not when you feel the whole world’s waiting to see what’s going to happen. And I know I might not have told you everything at once… [but] you can never be sure whether people are going to understand you properly (I’m sure you know that by now).
I’m telling you this because I think it’s only fair for us all to have a choice. I know you understand what I’m trying to tell you. My only worry is that you might understand me too well.
A last chance to back out of the wedding? A final, thinly-disguised, request for Juliette to share any doubts she might have? If so, then it was hardly necessary. As her dream diary records, by the time the letter was written she already felt she’d reached the point of no return.
Anji was right in thinking that the Doctor was becoming distracted. He wanted to recover his TARDIS because it was his ‘lodestone’, and perhaps because he felt it was the only possible cure to the sickness which had increasingly been affecting him. But Sabbath knew, and would constantly remind him, that the TARDIS was a weapon. By September they’d worked out how its summoning might be performed, but they still needed a venue where they could feel safe from the attentions of the enemy.
Fortunately, as the Doctor had already learned from Scarlette, there was one man in London who could help them.