Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [104]
In fact, it was just about the only furnishing left there. In Covent Garden, everybody knew that it was all over for Scarlette. Her women had left her. Lisa-Beth and Rebecca still lived at the House, for the time being, but nobody did business. Even Katya had vanished. When the afternoon sun shone through the salon windows, it would illuminate great empty spaces, blank walls and floorboards stripped of their red-and‐black decorations. The windows had no curtains, so curious men-about‐town would stare in at the listless women inside with fish-eyed faces.
The Doctor would usually be inside his miraculous TARDIS, and in the void that remained Fitz and Anji would simply sit around the House, bored and restless. Rebecca would often be found sitting in the middle of the salon floor, laying out her cards in great spirals across the boards. She eventually spent several days working on a pattern of prophecy that nobody else understood, constantly changing the individual cards one by one and pushing the spectacles up the bridge of her nose at regular intervals, apparently trying to create a future she liked the look of. Her behaviour was becoming increasingly obsessive: guilt may have been a factor. Juliette’s room had been emptied of all effects except for Anji’s, and it was rumoured that Scarlette had burned all the girl’s old things, but this is almost certainly untrue. Scarlette herself acted, typically, as if nothing were happening – you don’t become a successful procuress without learning to stash some of the profits away – but the money was running out and…
…and, to be blunt, there was no end in sight. Everyone had expected that when the Doctor recovered his TARDIS, a great adventure would begin which might take their minds off their troubles. It hadn’t. It had simply given the Doctor another place in which to withdraw. Lisa-Beth wrote that she believed the TARDIS hadn’t helped to heal him at all. Even before the end of September, she’d reached the conclusion that he was sleeping inside that box of his, although she was rarely even allowed a glimpse inside. On one occasion she even said that she thought he’d begun talking to the portrait he’d painted of his imaginary grandfather.
It’s not fair to be hard on the Doctor. In the weeks before the arrival of the TARDIS he’d seemed tired, even desperate. He’d claimed that soon the apes would destroy all notion of human progress, yet nothing had been heard of them for a month and the Doctor had apparently done nothing to stop them. It seemed as though the people of the House were simply killing time, waiting for the wedding in December, a wedding which they now knew would almost certainly never happen.
Nobody spoke of Juliette. Neither Scarlette nor Lisa-Beth make any mention of her after mid-September, or explain what happened to her. Because Anji had been quite correct: Juliette had been led astray, pushed in directions about which the Doctor knew nothing. But Anji had, wrongly, believed Scarlette to be the one responsible. In fact, Scarlette would have been horrified if she’d known. It may have taken the members of the House a while to unravel the facts, but surely the final damning evidence was one small detail in Anji’s account of what had happened on ‘the night of the apes’. When she’d run from the Temple region, there’d been a man watching from the shadows. Anji had assumed that he’d been a passer-by, perhaps someone on the lookout for a woman of the streets, incapable of seeing the beasts around him. Yet in her journal, Scarlette records Anji’s description of the man, although – with the frostiness Scarlette usually applied when dealing with bad memories – she doesn’t record the obvious conclusion.
He was a man of some bulk and power, dressed in a coat much