Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [134]
The preparations for the wedding ceremony had begun early that morning. At around nine o’clock, Scarlette had been found asleep on the edge of the forest, curled up next to the reassuring mass of the TARDIS. From dawn onwards, witnesses had seen her lying slumped against the device, according to one source ‘with her hands spread across its surface as she slept… as if drawing power from its presence’. But at nine she’d awoken, to find the man with the blue-and‐white rosette standing over her. The man had helped her to her feet, so the journal says, and had led her off to one of the boardinghouses in the town.
At around eleven the bells had started to chime, and that was when the people of St Belique had begun to withdraw into their own homes. Something of importance was about to happen here, and nobody within a hundred miles could have failed to notice it. The two main participants in the wedding must have felt as if the world were ending. Scarlette was still in an upstairs room at the boarding house as the procession headed for the Church, watching from the window, by this point fully dressed. It was Anji who’d helped Scarlette with her gown, insisting that in her condition Scarlette needed help… although Scarlette grumpily insisted that she was quite capable of fixing a corset, whatever the hangover. Anji’s role, as the closest thing Scarlette had to a bridesmaid, is ironic given that she still didn’t trust Scarlette and thought this whole wedding was a bad idea (‘the Doctor doesn’t even know where he is, let alone what he’s doing,’ she reportedly said at one point).
But it was Anji who helped Scarlette with her final preparations, in that old, damp room of rotting timber. It was Anji who reassured Scarlette that she looked fine, and Anji who ran through the checklist of ritual items which Scarlette had to take to the altar. Something old: Scarlette’s glass totem, the one link to the glory days of 1762. Something new: the dress, by definition. Scarlette had already ordered the servants at the boardinghouse to take away Juliette’s red dress and have it burned, and some days previously Dr Who had somehow managed to produce a new dress at short notice. Something borrowed: the key to the TARDIS. Anji and Fitz had become joint guardians of this most powerful totem, and Scarlette had admired this ritual of safekeeping. There in the room overlooking the street, Anji took the key from around her own neck and after some struggling hung it on the same chain as the glass totem.
Which just left something blue. The island’s most mysterious visitor had thoughtfully left behind a gift, when he’d escorted Scarlette to the guesthouse. It was a flower, but a fake one, an intricate rose of blue and white satin. The petals were in a curious pattern, so that it resembled no known genus on Earth, and Scarlette balked at first as it so closely resembled the man’s own Whig rosette, But the guest had explained that this was the whole point of the marriage. Traditions would be mixed: new bindings would be made. Scarlette had accepted this with a nod (she must have known it anyway), and allowed the man to pin the bloom to her dress even though it clashed horribly with the red velvet. It was, the man had insisted, what the Doctor would have wanted.
Thus armed, and meeting Anji’s approval, Scarlette left the room and made her way downstairs. When she walked out into the street and headed up the slope to the Church, those who saw her noted that despite her dress she walked like a warrior on the way to a duel. Typically, for Scarlette even her own wedding was a great battle.
And then there was the Doctor. Since his illness had