Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [167]
The coffin was carried by the women, by Lisa-Beth, Rebecca, Katya and Anji. The two doctor-men dragged behind, heads bowed, though in the Doctor’s case it was probably more than just a mark of respect. Fitz Kreiner walked at the very rear of the group, alongside a man referred to in Lisa-Beth’s journals only as ‘Mr. Small-Bear’. The man was a representative of the Service, the only one of the other lodges which had sent a member to the funeral. Though ‘Small-Bear’ himself may have been a minor player in events, the Doctor welcomed his presence. The rest of the lodges were basking in their victory, no doubt, gloating at the defeat of the apes and turning their attention back to their own ambitions. Only this one man had acknowledged the importance of Scarlette, this adventuress and sorceress, this woman who’d stood astride the underworld and made the victory possible in the first place.
It was Rebecca and Lisa-Beth who’d arranged the last rites. Lisa-Beth had insisted that Scarlette had left instructions as to how the ceremony should be conducted, though she neglected to say exactly when or where Scarlette had done this. The Doctor hadn’t argued. When it had come to planning the funeral ceremony itself, Rebecca had drawn a card from her augur’s deck, to determine whether the funeral would be conducted by earth, fire, air or water. The result had been The Queen of Cups or Queen of Hearts, the suit of water, which was why the procession was making its way to the Tyburn river.
In twelve months there’d been four rituals, one for each of the elements that Scarlette had held so dear. The March Ball of 1782; the summoning of the TARDIS; the wedding ceremony itself; and now there was her own funeral. How could it have ended any other way?
The Tyburn river was a stretch of water at the very heart of London. It ran from Haverstock Hill right into the Thames, but since the seventeenth century onwards it had officially been used as a sewer and by the 1780s it had already been covered over. It was (and still is) one of London’s ‘secret rivers’, one of those streams which runs quietly beneath the feet of the city’s inhabitants, black and invisible. Perhaps because it shared its name with such a prominent place of execution, in Scarlette’s time those who knew about the hidden paths of London often referred to it as the Black River.
There was an entrance to the river’s sewer-passage just north of Mayfair, and that was the destination of the funeral procession. The entrance to the tunnel was subterranean, a heavy but largely unused wooden door at the bottom of a damp, moss-covered stone stairwell. There was silence when the Henrietta Street coven arrived at the door, apart from the occasional echo of horse’s hooves from the nearby streets. It was the Doctor who moved down those big stone steps to open the door, forcing it open despite the mould which had grown around the frame. The four pallbearers stood looking down at their shoes, coffin supported between them. There’d been mutterings on the way here, but to the eighteenth-century mind it would have been tasteless to speak at the gateway to the underworld itself.
The sewer was a circular passage, wrought out of stained yellow brick. The river itself ran down the centre of the shaft, a great wide stream of black in the half-light of the passage, but even those who stood on the narrow ‘platforms’ on either side of the water found themselves knee-deep as the river ran towards its ultimate destination. Fitz was carrying a lamp, as was the Serviceman. It wouldn’t have been much light, to brighten the gloomy, cavernous interior of the sewer. According to Rebecca, Scarlette herself had expressed a preference for the site, in the event of a funeral by water. Perhaps Scarlette had intended it as a final grim joke, a ‘burial at sea’ conducted not only in the bowels of the city but in the cloying darkness of the sewers. She can hardly have expected there to have been such a reverent