Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [130]
For some time she’d been pacing the forest, with her red uniform-dress stained by the dirt of the wilderness, and those who saw her admitted that they had no idea how she’d managed to navigate the tangled undergrowth without falling flat on her face. By two o’clock she’d made her way back to the TARDIS, on the cusp of the forest and the town. The last guest to pass her by saw her leaning against the faded blue paintwork of the box, caressing it in a way that ‘displayed a form of affection’. Scarlette saluted to the onlooker as he walked past, and the guest swore that although he at first assumed that Scarlette was greeting him, she was in fact talking to the Device.
‘You’ll understand, of course,’ she’s said to have told the TARDIS. ‘You’ve been through all this with him before.’ (The TARDIS, incidentally, had by this point acquired a special significance for just about everybody on the island. Fitz had said that it was a pity there wouldn’t be room for it in the vault during the wedding, as it would have qualified as old, new, borrowed and blue.)
The accounts make it sound as if Scarlette were losing her mind. But of course, the accounts are biased: most of the lodges still wanted to believe that this entire affair was a colossal joke. Still, it’s clear that she was under a great deal of stress. Though Scarlette was no artist, she often liked to ‘doodle’ in the endpages of her diaries – mostly grotesque, badly-scrawled caricatures of public figures like the King, or Charles Fox, or the multi-headed dragon that was Washington-Crane‐Jefferson – and in the back of her journal for this period is a picture that’s hard to ignore. Sketched in pencil, it’s a scene depicting a decadent, lascivious jungle-scene which wouldn’t have been out-of‐place in a Victorian penny-dreadful. We see a throne, surrounded by thick foliage, as though we’re looking at the Empire of some great African chieftain. We see hastily-drawn stone idols all around, like baboon-faced totem poles. Yet on the throne sits a huge, fat, bloated human figure, pale and with massive jowls, so corpulent that he almost seems to sink into the chair. His eyes are black blotches, making him look drunken and idiotic, and his sweaty bulk is squeezed into the clothes of an English gentleman.
It’s clearly supposed to be Sabbath. The size of the figure is massively exaggerated, certainly, and the other features of the drawing tell the viewer exactly what was on Scarlette’s mind. Because sitting at the foot of the throne, naked and chained around the throat like a slave-girl, is a slight female figure who must surely be Juliette. She looks up adoringly at her master, while on either side drooling apes hold up enormous fern-leaves, fanning their Emperor and his concubine.
It’s notable that Sabbath is shown in exactly the same surroundings that were associated with the King of Beasts, even if Sabbath was quite plainly as keen on destroying the ape empire as the Doctor himself. It’s also very tough on Juliette, which wasn’t untypical.
On the evening of November 30, Scarlette held what in modern terms might be called her ‘hen night’, although the celebration was open to men and women, with both sexes believing it was largely staged for their benefit. The event was held in a tavern in the harbour-town, where, beginning at eleven o’clock, a Cyprian Auction was held.
‘Cyprian’ was yet another eighteenth-century word for ‘prostitute’, one that Scarlette particularly liked as it suggested an ancient tradition, a kind of sisterhood-cum‐guild. In London, Auctions were often held in the more notorious taverns, where the greatest of the city’s courtesans would parade themselves before the clientele – the rich clientele – and the men would engage in a kind of primal contest by bidding against each other for the affections of society’s most sought-after celebrity coquettes. Now Scarlette brought the practice to St Belique, for one night only. Tables were set up at the back of the tavern, and along this stage (the modern expression would probably be ‘catwalk’) would promenade