The Enchantress of Numbers (audio story)

The Enchantress of Numbers
Doctor:	Fourth Doctor
Companion(s):	Ann
Featuring:	Ada
Main enemy:	Finlar contagion, anti-virus force
Main setting:	Newstead Abbey, 1852
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writers:	Simon Barnard, Paul Morris
Director:	Nicholas Briggs
Producer:	David Richardson
Music:	Jamie Robertson
Sound:	Jamie Robertson
Cover by:	Anthony Lamb
Release details
Number of parts:	2
Release number:	8.3
Part of:	The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Series 8: Volume 1
Release date:	16 January 2019
Format:	1 CD Download
Production code:	BFPTOMCD060
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-78703-294-1
The Fourth Doctor Adventures
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The Enchantress of Numbers was the third story in the eighth series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris and featured Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Jane Slavin as Ann Kelso.

Publisher's summary

The TARDIS lands in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, in 1850. Mistaken for a medic and his maid, the Doctor and Ann are brought to meet Ada Lovelace - the mother of computing and daughter of Lord Byron - who has recently fallen ill.

But the travellers are not here by chance. Something odd is happening on Earth, and they’ve determined that this place is the centre of it.

Strange figures are walking the land. Strange figures wearing bird-like masks. What do they want with Ada? And how will it change the future of humanity?

Plot

Part one

The Doctor pilots the TARDIS from 1852 London to Nottinghamshire in the same year, materialising in Newstead Abbey's hedge maze and leaving K9 inside to charge. They attempt to follow a plague doctor and meet Hettie, a maid who denies having seen anybody and is called away by butler Hobhouse, who mistakes the Doctor for a physician and invites him and Ann into the abbey. Colonel Wildman shows them to the unwell Ada Lovelace, for whom the Doctor prescribes rest and Ann fetches a cold compress from the scullery. Whilst Ann is escorted there by Hobhouse and sees Hettie washing Ada's muddy nightgown, the Doctor is given a tour of the grounds by Wildman and learns that Ada believes she is going insane.

The Doctor tasks Ann with keeping an eye on the house and, having suspicions, acquires a map from Wildman. He joins Ada in playing cribbage at the Papplewick Arms, where she has been gambling since Lord King exiled her to Newstead Abbey for landing him in debt with a failed gambling syndicate. On their way back in Wildman's carriage, the horse is spooked by a figure which Ada believes to be the ghost of her father, Lord Byron, whom only she had been able to see until now. They head to Lord Byron's tomb at St Mary's and see him again; he calls out for Ada and beckons her to him, giving her a message in binary and disappearing when plague doctors arrive.

Ann discovers that Ada is missing and looks at her notebooks despite Hobhouse's protestations, finding drawings and numbers which she and Hobhouse have little time to interpret before they are forced to hide in the wardrobe from somebody. Unsure of how Ada left the building and how whoever entered her bedroom got out, Ann finds a secret passageway to the gardens and she and Hobhouse see a woman selling Ada's notebooks to a man with a non-British accent. The Doctor and Ada return soon after, having fled from the plague doctors, and are met by Wildman who accuses the Doctor of leading Ada astray. When the Doctor tells him that they went to St Mary's, both Ada and Wildman claim that there is no such church and it no longer appears on his map.

Part two

The Doctor and Ann are locked up whilst Wildman has Hobhouse fetch the constabulary and explain to Ada that they travelled to London to meet Charles Wheatstone. However, they found that his house and entire streets had vanished after sightings of plague doctors and their investigations led them to Newstead Abbey. Ada does not believe them and departs, but Hobhouse releases them and points them towards Edvard Scheutz, a Swedish rival of Charles Babbage who has been paying Hettie to steal Ada's notebooks for him to gain the upper hand since Ada refused to assist him. The Doctor recognises the content of Ada's notebooks as Block Transfer Computations and Scheutz reads out one of them, summoning a horde of plague doctors to the building.

The plague doctors explain that they have come from the Block Transfer Wars between humanity and computers in 7073 to cure the Finlar contagion, which the Doctor deduces has been sent back to change history by corrupting Ada's code. Escaping from the plague doctors after they make Scheutz disappear, the Doctor, Ann and Hobhouse join Ada, Hettie and Wildman at the races and find everybody fleeing from Lord Byron, who leaves once the plague doctors arrive to cauterise what he, the contagion, has damaged. The plague doctors make Hettie vanish and the Doctor gets Ada to use the Block Transfer Computation placed in her mind by the contagion to create a doorway, allowing them to escape from the plague doctors to the maze which she has inadvertently been altering in her sleep to resemble the atomic structure of the contagion.

When Lord Byron appears, the Doctor sets fire to the maze with his sonic screwdriver and leaves Lord Byron to the plague doctors, correcting the timeline. Everything that the plague doctors took away returns, including Hettie, and Ada and her acquaintances all forget about everything that has happened as a result of the contagion's presence. They watch the TARDIS dematerialise from the maze and discuss what they should have as a centrepiece, with Ada dismissing the idea of a statue of her father as she does not need any more reminders of him.

Cast

• The Doctor - Tom Baker
• Ann Kelso - Jane Slavin
• Ada Lovelace - Finty Williams
• Colonel Wildman - Andrew Havill
• Hettie / Lady Cleverley - Eve Webster
• Mr Hobhouse - Barnaby Edwards
• Edvard Scheutz / Lord Byron / Harry - Glen McCready

Worldbuilding

• Among elements "stolen" from history by the anti-virus are Charles Wheatstone, Wheatstones' residence at 168 Bleak Lane, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, and the whole of Bloomsbury.
• Edvard Scheutz is Charles Babbage's biggest rival. Since Babbage's retirement, Scheutz has been working on his calculation engine, which he feels is an improvement upon Babbage's analytical engine.
• Scheutz has been acquiring Lovelace's private notebooks, stolen and sold to him by Hettie. The Doctor identifies recent pages' apparent "doodles" as Block Transfer Computations.
• The anti-virus software, manifesting as plague doctors, were sent as a temporal expeditionary force from the year 7073, during the time of the Block Transfer Wars.
• The Industrial Revolution took place recently, while the Computer Age is still "decades" away.

Notes

• Many of the minor characters are named for characters in Lord Byron's poetry. (BFX: The Enchantress of Numbers)

Continuity

• The Doctor would meet Ada again at an earlier point in her timeline in his thirteenth incarnation as seen in TV: Spyfall, but Ada's memories of that encounter were wiped.

Cover gallery

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  Textless cover

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  Alternate cover

External links

• Official The Enchantress of Numbers page at bigfinish.com