Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [119]
Then came the masterstroke.
She said that there would be revels, in celebration of the joining that was to come… much like the great games called by Emperors of old to mark any state occasion. Mistress S. left all assembled parties in no doubt that we were all to take part in this pursuit beginning the following week… her intention being that we should make sport with these apes just as they had made sport with ladies of her profession.
Suddenly, then, Scarlette was determined that somehow the marriage should succeed… in spite of the fact that she was still reluctant to even speak Juliette’s name. And had the TARDIS brought her the stories from Tyburn, that a young, red-headed girl had been executed for petty crimes associated with prostitution? If so, then she probably wouldn’t have believed that Juliette had died on the gallows. She would have interpreted it as a message, perhaps even a perverse warning. In France, for example, it wasn’t unknown for a condemned man – if he had money and therefore influence – to be beheaded in effigy rather than in reality, the law’s way of saying that the victim was socially dead even if he’d bought his way out of a true execution. Was the peculiar death at Tyburn, with its rumours that the body had never been displayed after the hanging, someone’s way of letting Scarlette know that the old Juliette no longer existed? Or was there another explanation?
It’s unclear whether the Doctor knew about Scarlette’s address to the Conclave. The following day he was said to be more at peace than before. He no longer clutched at his chest, or woke himself with bilious coughing-fits. Scarlette says in her journals that he appeared almost serene, something she took as a sign that things would go well from now on. Even so, it’s interesting to note that the language she uses to describe him makes him sound as if he were a corpse already. Perhaps this was the point when he knew he was going to die, and no longer cared. Perhaps he had found peace. And, as later events were to suggest, perhaps he felt that Juliette had found a kind of peace also.
No Peace
To Juliette, my friend, I leave the screwdriver sonique. It doesn’t work properly, and in her own time I doubt there’s much she could use it for anyway… [but] she might like to think of it as a totem, like the glass of Scarlette’s that she used so well. I have so much bric a brac to get rid of but somehow there’s so little I can give her.
The document arrived on board the Jonah on November 8. Information on the movements of Sabbath is difficult to come by, but there are enough fragments of correspondence from his agents and informers – Emily Hart chief among them – to build up a rough outline.
It was inevitable that the Doctor would make a will. His TARDIS was said to be overflowing with the things he’d collected on his travels, many of them valuable. The will document, which only survives in part, seems more concerned with dividing up those things that were of symbolic value as if they were parts of his own flesh. The document contained thirteen articles on thirteen separate pages, dividing the Doctor’s estate into thirteen portions: some pages listed reams of items, others single gifts. Once he’d recovered his senses enough to complete the will, the Doctor instructed that his companions should lay out thirteen boxes on the floor around him (these boxes aren’t accurately described, but they seem to have come from somewhere in the TARDIS). Then, with the last of his flagging strength, the Doctor ceremonially tore apart the will and asked that each