Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [146]
At least one version attests that once the rope had been loosened, the Doctor engaged her in ‘the deepest of kisses’, although in retrospect this was probably just an attempt to get air back into her lungs. Many hold that there were great red welts on Juliette’s neck for some time afterwards, where the rope had cut into her skin. The kiss of life may well have been the last thing the Doctor did, before he lost consciousness after his sudden burst of activity. Did Juliette recover, even as he slipped away? Did she awake to find herself in his arms, and if so, then how must she have felt?
However, that’s perhaps not the real question. The legends as they’re told imply that Juliette was lynched by the apes… but this particular Beast was hardly civilised. Claws were its usual method of attack, not the noose. Even given that the apes tended to parody human activity, even given that the hanging seems to reflect the ‘symbolic’ execution at Tyburn, it seems odd that the creatures should adopt this elaborate method and be so unconcerned about its outcome.
Maybe it’s best to look at things from Juliette’s point of view. She was a girl who’d had nothing, when she’d arrived in England. She’d been adopted by Scarlette, and introduced to a lifestyle in which she’d had no control over her own fate at all. She’d been betrothed, then forced to confront the fact that her husband-to‐be was part of a plan no native of Earth could have fully understood and who (arguably) wasn’t even a human being. She’d been taken away from this questionable destiny, but her new ‘keeper’ had made it clear that in order to go on she had to go through a symbolic death-rite designed to demonstrate that whatever identity she’d had in the past, it was now well and truly gone. She was young, she was vulnerable, she was juggling several different identities, and everything she’d been told in the last year had led her to the conclusion that death was no big thing.
It’s fair to say that Sabbath wasn’t on board the Jonah, when the apes crawled on to its decks that day. So nobody had been around to watch what Juliette did. It might be wise to dwell a little longer, then, on the question of who’d tied the knot in that noose.
Cannibalism In All Its Glory
In Westminster the politicians of the two major parties were biting into each other’s flanks, factions and counter-factions greedily consuming each other’s flesh, storing up the energy they needed for the Corporation Age to come and the Industrial Revolution that was to follow. In Saint-Domingue the French did their best to suppress the uprisings of the Maroons, while simultaneously holding their breaths to see how the American War would be resolved. But even these events seem like nothing next to the grand, mythic stories of the Kingdom of Beasts.
The Masonic version is typically lurid, typically Old Testament in its vision of death and apocalypse.
The Emperor of Beasts did sit on his throne, wrought from the bones and skulls of victims. The other animals did dance around his seat, in a procession as grandiose as it was repulsive… standing, the Emperor did raise the crown of thorns from above his head as to display the sign of his strength to those about him. With that he did turn his back on them and look to the sky, where his blasphemous Godhead stared down upon his triumph… and when the apes did bring him news in their senseless tongue of the men [and women) who had come to the. Empire to oppose them. Thus did the Emperor give his devotions to his God, and thus did they all prepare war against the men who had fought them and eaten of their flesh.
The ‘men’ were the guests at the wedding. To refer to them as guests somehow weakens them, though. These were representatives of some of the most powerful witch-lodges of the world, and in the weeks before their abduction