Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [120]
‘If we never open the boxes, we’ll never know whether the pages are still there,’ he allegedly explained. The same method, perhaps, that he used when he sent the ‘family’ envelope at Tyburn. Yet the next day, a message did arrive on board the Jonah, where it was read by Juliette. Shortly afterwards the Doctor’s legacy arrived as well, somewhat prematurely as he was still alive. It’s doubtful that Juliette found any use for it, though Sabbath may have found it interesting.
Juliette’s circumstances at this point are unclear. She hadn’t been executed, that much is clear. When she’d still kept a dream diary she’d often had visions of herself as a body in a grave, or as a specimen to be opened by the dissection-men, like one of the apes in the Doctor’s basement laboratory And all ritual initiation revolves around the symbolic death, or sacrifice, of the initiate. Sabbath himself had apparently learned his ‘magic word’ on the brink of death at the bottom of the Thames, but initiations were usually designed with the individual in mind, so possibly the hanging at Tyburn had been Juliette’s own final test (though there’s no record of the body vanishing from the end of the rope in front of the audience). If so, then it must almost have been a kind of grim counterpart to the Doctor’s wedding ritual. It’s not clear whether Sabbath actually, seduced Juliette, whether he took her as his sacrificial ‘bride’ even for a short while. Perhaps for Sabbath, the public hanging was a much quicker way of getting the same result.
One thing is for certain. When she received the message, and understood what it meant, Juliette cried for the only time in recorded history.
(Incidentally the Doctor’s legacy to Juliette was a curious device which he’d created during his early days at Henrietta Street, before the arrival of the TARDIS. The ‘screwdriver’ was a narrow tube of glass, mounted on a steel handle and run through with a complicated arrangement of wire, which when activated lit up with what Scarlette called ‘hoops of lightning’ and produced an alarming warbling sound. The construction of the device had kept the Doctor happy for some weeks, although he’d frequently said that it was only a mock-up – metal would have been preferable to glass, he’d claimed, although the correct alloys weren’t available even in London – and when it had been completed he’d found very little use for it anyway.)
Back on St Belique, the excitement was building. Though the guests still murmured to themselves that the wedding was doomed, all were curious about Scarlette’s promise of revels. They were more curious still when, in the following days, she hired a number of local men to begin moving certain items around the island. Most remarkable was the blue wooden box, which Scarlette had transported to the thick forest not fifty yards from the harbour-town. The ‘jungle’ skirted the town in every inland direction, and the TARDIS was carefully placed at precisely the point where the settlement seemed to meet the wilderness. Furthermore, the natives were becoming less and less visible. Locals were beginning to steer clear of the foreigners, to shy away from the jungle’s edge, to shut themselves securely indoors when it wasn’t absolutely necessary for them to be outside. Obeah‐Christian religious symbols began to appear, hanging from doors by the dozen.
Finally, on November 10, Scarlette called a meeting of the Accidental Conclave. It was the first time such a meeting had actually been called. She instructed the guests not to gather at the Church, but at the TARDIS on the edge of the forest, and gather they did. It was a hot day on the island – ‘November’ meant little there – so by the time the visitors came together they were sticky with sweat under their masks, grunting and complaining in such a way that the differences between the lodges were all but forgotten. Waiting for them at the TARDIS was Scarlette herself, as majestic (some would say ‘superior