Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [44]
The two women also visited the bookshop in Windsor, itself often frequented by the King. Literacy was probably the strongest bond between them. It was during such a visit, while browsing through the latest publications, that Scarlette first brought up the topic she’d brought Lisa-Beth here to discuss.
In their journals, neither Scarlette nor Lisa-Beth overtly state what this matter was. But it’s not hard to guess. As early as April, there were certain rumours circulating in the House, rumours about Juliette’s past and pedigree. After all, Juliette had been brought to London – some might have said ‘summoned’ – by Scarlette, who’d never given any indication of where this girl had come from or why she was important. Lisa-Beth’s own notes suggest that when Lisa-Beth first visited the House, she recognised Juliette at once. Was Lisa-Beth the source of these rumours, then? And if so, then what were they?
And in Cambridge, Fitz was already forming his own opinion of Juliette. When the Professor left them alone to investigate Sabbath’s rooms, Juliette suggested to him that they should hold some form of ritual to look towards the horizon and divine the answers they needed. Fitz quite rightly felt that such a ritual wouldn’t be practical (and besides, having seen Scarlette’s idea of a ‘ritual’ he must have been worried about what they’d actually have to do in the room). But he was struck by the matter-of‐fact way in which Juliette suggested the idea, a trait which, he wrote to the Doctor, ‘reminds me of you’.
In retrospect, he might have been closer to the truth than he thought. Throughout his stay at the House the Doctor had been starting to change his usual routine, as if he felt that the limits of his old life needed redefinition, although it’s ironic that this wish to expand himself should result in the wedding (an act that would permanently ‘root’ him to the House). Though he might not have consciously realised it, there was a sense that Juliette, Scarlette and their kind were taking on the mantle of his own people, the mantle of the Doctor himself. In short, he was beginning to think of Juliette as the next generation of elemental, the inheritor of a legacy with which he no longer felt comfortable.
It’s no surprise, then, that when Fitz and Anji had arrived at the House the Doctor had decided that Anji – another elemental influence – should share Juliette’s room. Juliette had accepted this, even though the cohabitation doesn’t seem to have been very successful. Juliette found the Doctor’s companion to be snappish, overbearing and impatient, but in fairness this was probably only because the two of them came from such different lifestyles that Juliette interpreted Anji’s somewhat sarcastic wit as actual aggression. Certainly Anji would shake her head disbelievingly whenever a ‘client’ visited the House, a kind of contempt that Juliette hadn’t seen even in Lisa-Beth.
Also, although Anji’s history was uncertain, she was obviously of Indian descent. Juliette seems to have had difficulty with this, although the reasons hadn’t become apparent and Anji must have (wrongly) believed it was down to blind prejudice. The other women in the House still tended to think of Anji as a force of nature, and on more than one occasion Katya sat at the feet of Anji to ask her worried questions about the future, as if Anji were a kind of prophet. (The women must have seen Fitz as an