Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [41]
Throughout this period Scarlette spent several afternoons at the site of Newgate prison. Scarlette had been there, in 1780, when the most notorious and dungeon-like prison in London had been razed to the ground. In 1782 the authorities began rebuilding Newgate, and Scarlette would stand there for hours, watching as the ghost of the building was summoned up out of the city’s dead flesh. Another portent. The once-mad Lord Gordon himself was publicly stating that the King was risking revolution here just as in America, while blood and fire were expected in Ireland in the not-too‐distant future.
Once, the Doctor found Scarlette there at the Newgate construction. He stood with her a while and talked, though what they talked about is anybody’s guess. Maybe Juliette was discussed: Scarlette was beginning to worry, that much is known, starting to wonder if what they were doing was only a step away from pimping and/or child slavery.
Juliette was definitely disturbed throughout the month, and it’s a pity she didn’t record her own thoughts. It was around this time that she started wearing red, Scarlette having presented her with a gift of a new dress on the same day as the Great Companion Summoning. According to Scarlette, it was a way of affirming her synchronisation with the House, if not with the Earth itself. The biological rhythms so important to the tantrists were being applied on a massive scale, almost as if Juliette were being primed to become one with the world around her.
Naturally, the red dress (matching her hair) drew attention to her in the House, not all of it good. In mid-May she overheard Katya making a loud criticism of Scarlette and her ‘elemental lothario’, and leapt to Scarlette’s defence, insisting that the Doctor’s plans were vital for the well-being of all the world. At this point Katya turned on Juliette, screaming at her for refusing to face the facts and ‘doing everything that vyedma tells you’. She also repeated certain rumours about Juliette which she’d allegedly heard from Lisa-Beth. Juliette must have been shocked when it seemed that Katya was about to assault her physically, but the fight was prevented by the other women. (In fairness to Katya, she herself had been attacked on the street by this time. Furthermore, Katya herself had been given an offer of money to leave Scarlette and head into Marylebone: to Katya’s credit she stayed at the House, at one point even asking her ‘friends’ at the Russian embassy whether this would inconvenience their own plans for her.)
It must have come as something of a relief when the time came for Juliette to leave the House with Fitz. They were to work together in their search for Sabbath. On the night before their departure from London, Scarlette blessed Juliette in a manner which was described as ‘unusually solemn, for her’. Scarlette made a particularly big show of taking the glass totem from around her own neck and hanging it over Juliette’s. If she’d known that Juliette had already used the glass in the bedroom experiments, of course, she might have been less willing to part with it. But clearly she felt that Juliette would need luck, even if the Doctor had given Fitz instructions just to find Sabbath, not to engage him in battle. The Doctor’s own goodbye was wordless but touching, nodding to Fitz in a manner that suggested they’d gone through this sort of thing before, and kissing Juliette affectionately on the nose.
The next morning, most of the women from the House were on the pavement of Henrietta Street to wave the hackney cab off, a cab that was to take Fitz and Juliette on the first leg of a journey north. By this time Fitz and Juliette were already well-acquainted, but it’s interesting to speculate on what they might have talked about on the trip. It seems to be at this time that Juliette first learned something of the Doctor’s Tardis – which Fitz, a few days before, had told Lisa-Beth should be written TARDIS (it must have seemed like mere effect to Lisa-Beth, as acronyms weren’t