Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [168]
But perhaps there was another reason for Scarlette to have chosen this place. A far more telling one.
The pallbearer-women stood ‘up to their ankles’ in the water, lowering the box so that it touched the surface but keeping it steady. ‘Box’ seems as good a word as any, as the coffin was hardly elaborate. If the House had any interest in the expensive funeral rites practised by London’s morticians, then they had little money to spare now. The coffin was a simple box, in lightweight wood, and there was no inscription on the lid. The ceremony was an epitaph in itself.
Standing over the box, the Doctor began to speak, whispering his own interpretation of the last rites. It was then that the four pallbearers let go of the coffin, Katya giving it a small nudge when it looked as though it might not join the flow of the river. Slowly it slipped away from the curved floor of the passage, entering the black waters in the middle of the stream. It didn’t exactly float, but it didn’t sink to the bottom either. The flow was fast enough to draw the box along, the plain casket picking up speed as it drifted down the passage. Those among the mourners who’d been taught the old myths might have seen the river as a tributary of the Styx, while those familiar with the legends of London would have known the other stories that were told about the Tyburn. Further along its path, the Tyburn forked in two before reaching the Thames, and ancient pre-sewer folklore held that a kind of augury could be performed by dropping an object of value (a ‘sacrifice’ in itself) into the water, divining the future by seeing which of the two paths the object took. Yet there were other, more arcane, legends. It was said in some circles that certain things dropped into the buried river never reached the Thames, that somewhere after Mayfair an object of a precise nature would find itself swept along a third route which even the old Roman geographers hadn’t recorded.
Nobody could say for sure where that third branch of the black river might lead, but if Scarlette had indeed expressed a preference for the site then it’s easy to see why. The third path would take the coffin to places unseen and unknown. As with the old stories about sleeping Kings, about age-old warriors who lay beneath England until the day when they’d be needed again, a burial in that part of the Tyburn was no burial at all. It was an unknown quantity, much like Scarlette herself.
Was that what they felt, the pallbearers and the mourners, the Doctor and the doctor, the elementals and the tantrists? When they saw the coffin slowly drift away from them, to be carried out of reach down the yellow-brick tunnel, did they reflect that nobody had really died at all?
The Doctor himself is described as standing there in the shallow part of the water, with his shoes flooded and his head held low. His beard was as well-trimmed as always, his ruffled shirt as unruffled as ever, but those who knew him well had seen the bandages on his chest and understood what had happened to his heart… figuratively or otherwise. And Lisa-Beth records one more telling detail about the scene, as the Doctor stood in the dankness of the passage. She notes that the Doctor silently touched the ring on his finger, the ring of silver which exactly matched the one he’d slipped on to the hand of Scarlette in December. It was clear to all, says Lisa-Beth, ‘that his intent was to draw off the ring and toss it into the black waters after his friend’.
It was, again, Rebecca who stopped him. It was she who placed a hand over the Doctor’s hand, making sure the ring stayed exactly where it was. Perhaps it was her way of making sure he knew that this wasn’t over, that this was never over. Dead or alive, Scarlette was the element which bound him to this Earth and justified his existence as the creature he was. He may not have loved Scarlette, as human beings understood the term – could a creature