Vive la Révolution

6

The shadowy façade of the Tuileries loomed above them as they stood far beneath it on the northern riverbank of the Seine. It hadn't been a long journey to get there, some of them relegated to walking alongside the carriage Dubois and Vermette had retrieved because it wasn't nearly big enough for all of them, but had involved them crossing the Place de la Révolution and seeing the guillotine illuminated by the moonlight. The only good thing was that nobody would suspect they had the Queen in their midst because she had been publicly executed hours ago. It was a miracle that no Jacobin soldiers stopped them to see inside.

"Sorry, but, how is hanging out by the river supposed to get us into the palace up there?" Matilda asked. She'd gotten progressively less freaked out, getting used to the walking corpse in their company, now the Royalists had stopped actively threatening to kill her. Not that Clara would let them get close; she was trying to avoid using her powers, as she always did, but all bets were off if they went anywhere near Matilda. She hoped Mattie knew that.

"Such little imagination in this girl. Perhaps she should have waited with the carriage as well," the Queen made a joke that didn't land very well with anybody. Namely, because the people who had been left to protect the carriage and horses, pre-empting their need to make a quick getaway, were Vermette and Guillaume, the two Clara trusted the least out of all the Royalists. This left them with just Dubois, Leclerc and Beaulieu. The Queen was the one carrying the Right Glove now, keeping it tightly in her hand but not putting it on.

Antoinette stopped on the edge of the riverbank, moon and stars in the sky, and approached the large, stone wall that made up the flood defences. The second miracle of the night was that her head hadn't fallen off again after Clara's botched sewing job, though the black thread was gruesomely visible, and it did wobble on its perch.

"Don't tell me there's a secret-" the Doctor began to speak but stopped when Antoinette pushed down on a particular brick in the wall, and it began to rumble. "There's a secret door… of course there is…" She lingered very close to Clara now, and in turn so did Mattie, though it was worth noting Clara hadn't yet begun to feel her head getting very slowly chopped off. The secret door built into the Seine bank opened on a lumbering, clockwork mechanism, and Beaulieu and Dubois had to give it a helping hand and push to get it fully open. It was pitch black inside.

"Dubois, stay here and guard this entrance. You're the most competent," Antoinette told him, "Do not shut the door, and if any Jacobins approach, you are to defend this passageway to the death.

"Oui, Madame la Reine. To the death, bien sûr," he nodded and stood aside to guard the entrance.

Also under Antoinette's instruction, Leclerc retrieved a lantern and a tinderbox from the ground within the passage, quickly striking the flint to get enough of a spark to light the candle inside the rusty lantern. It was him who took the lead, Antoinette at his side and the time travellers all clumped together behind them. Jenny lingered closest to the back.

"Thérèse used to hide in this tunnel on occasion," Antoinette commented as they walked through the passage, full of dust and cobwebs.

"Who?" Clara asked.

"The Princesse de Lamballe," the Doctor explained, "Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy."

"I see you know your French nobles," said Antoinette.

"I don't get it, why is every woman in France called 'Marie'?" asked Mattie. A fair question.

"Catholicism, that's why," said the Doctor.

"And she used to call me Antonia," said Antoinette.

"Um, could I just ask-" Clara began.

"Not again with this…" the Doctor complained, "What do you care so much? It's not like you can tell Sarah what you've heard. You can't cite your sources."

"-were you sleeping with the Princesse de Lamballe?" Clara ignored her completely.

Marie Antoinette stopped in the passageway and Leclerc held up the lantern, Beaulieu lingering in the gloom just ahead.

"Mais oui," she said, "I thought all of France knew about that."

"I'm English," said Clara.

"Oh. That weakens my opinion of you, I must admit. But I suppose it isn't quite as bad as being Gallifreyan."

"I don't know if you got the memo, but the Gallifreyans were never very fond of me," said the Doctor, "What with them putting me into exile more than once."

"What does this word mean – 'Gallifreyan'? It's like nothing I've ever heard," said Leclerc.

"Keep up, Fabien. Gallifrey is a planet," said Antoinette.

"A… planet?"

"Like Earth, here, is a planet. A very fun one, full of little amusements. Gallifrey is stifling by comparison. I suppose that's why you left, Doctor?" The Doctor didn't answer her.

"How is that possible?"

"Planets exist in distant star systems with similar configurations to Earth," the Doctor told Leclerc, "Life develops on them like it developed here."

"By the hand of God, you mean?"

"By the-? No, not by… I don't have time to explain evolution right now… whatever reason you want, there are people who grow and live on completely different worlds. Like your Queen, who won't tell me where she's from."

"Vienna is hardly a different world, though I don't understand the language," he said.

"Don't confuse the poor boy," said Antoinette, "He has a good heart. What did they say when they discovered you'd married a human? A very beautiful human, but nonetheless, a human." Clara, again, was uncomfortable with this statement.

"She's not the first."

"Thanks," said Clara dryly. The Doctor made a start.

"I don't mean – I've lived a long time! I love you." Clara had been kidding, but the Doctor wasn't in the mood for jokes with the threat of the Glove hanging over their head. "I don't care what they think of me. I never have."

"Do you see, Fabien? Class doesn't mean anything," said Antoinette.

"Yes, yes…" he mumbled, "I don't see what you expect me to do. Unless you want me to leave for St. Germain right now to find Esmée?"

"Well, no, there's no need for that," she said, "We're almost at the exit now. Clara's pretty head will be rescued in hardly any time at all."

"What a relief," said Clara sarcastically, "Here I was getting worried about my head falling off."

"The girl is amusing, Doctor," said Antoinette, "An excellent choice."

"I don't care what you think. I don't know who or what you are, and until I do, I don't care about a thing that comes out of your mouth. But you mark my words, I'll pull your head back off myself if anything happens to Clara, and no amount of swords will stop me." Clara touched her arm gently in a meagre gesture of comfort, but until they recovered the Left Glove and prevented the life-drain, it wasn't going to amount to much.

"The door is just ahead. Don't make a sound," Antoinette warned all of them. The passageway ended with a wall covered in more clockwork mechanisms, and she leant close to it to listen. Clara wondered whether her ears actually worked properly. As the Doctor had said, the Tuileries was being used as the main seat of the French government, occupied by more angry revolutionaries than you could shake a stick at. And they were sneaking inside as the entourage of the Queen's reanimated corpse.

Antoinette blew out the candle in Leclerc's lantern, satisfied that nobody was going to witness the door opening from inside the palace, and twisted a crank.

Slowly, the door creaked open – a little too loud for comfort – and they entered an opulently furnished boudoir. Cream and gold with dark green upholstery; a glistening chandelier suspended in front of a four-poster bed; plush, gilded chairs sitting at shimmering tables and desks. Renaissance paintings still hung on the walls; it looked untouched by the revolutionaries.

"Hm. I thought they would have ransacked it," Antoinette commented, scrutinising their surroundings.

"Not until the Paris Commune comes along," the Doctor muttered, looking around at the room, which symbolised the height of decadence. "Should've fled France with the rest of the aristocrats, years ago. Gone to Bavaria like he says," she indicated Beaulieu.

"Watch the door," Antoinette ordered him, pointing to the door that led out into the rest of the palace. She motioned for Leclerc to do the same thing, and he set the lantern on the floor and joined Beaulieu, both of them ready to draw their swords at a moment's notice were they discovered. "Why have they not destroyed it?"

"They hate the Royals, they don't hate history," said the Doctor, "I assume Max wants to preserve it. They do the same thing to Versailles and the Louvre, after all." The Doctor knew that Marie Antoinette's cell in the Conciergerie remained preserved through the coming centuries, as did her private rooms in Versailles. Not to mention the death mask fashioned by Madame Tussaud. "So? Where's the Glove? Le Gant gauche?"

"Yeah, um, could we hurry up and grab that, please?" Clara entreated, "Before we're caught and taken to the guillotine." Time Lords wouldn't survive the guillotine, and she wouldn't survive much longer without recovering the other Glove. Antoinette smiled, looking like a ghost in the moonlight spilling through the ornate windows of the bedroom, and turned to approach one of the large paintings fixed to the wall.

"Don't tell me there's a safe hidden behind a painting…" the Doctor began. But of course, there was a safe hidden behind a painting. To open this safe wasn't as easy as pushing the right brick on a wall, however, it required Antoinette to place her thumb on a crest at the base of the picture frame, at which point they heard a humming sound and then a distinctly electronic beep. Biometrics. "Well that certainly doesn't belong in this century." That explained why Robespierre hadn't been able to access it, even if they knew what biometric locks and fingerprint scanners were, without the hand of the Queen, they couldn't get in. Then again, he apparently hadn't been able to find the giant door built into the wall leading to an escape route, either – maybe she was giving him too much credit.

"Why didn't you take your stuff and leave ages ago?" Clara asked her, "If there's a secret passage right here."

"We did try. I was only just able to salvage these possessions and bring them from Versailles," she explained, "Of course, the king is mostly to blame for that failure."

"What failure?"

"The Flight to Varennes," the Doctor leant over to explain, "The Convention moved them from Versailles to the Tuileries, and they tried to escape but got caught because, I don't know, I guess they're idiots."

"I said, the king is to blame," Antoinette insisted. She drew out a handful of objects from within her hidden safe, including the promised Left Glove they so desperately needed. "I miss him, but he was useless. My treasures thankfully haven't met the same fate as the Armoire de fer."

"What's that?" asked Mattie.

"Incriminating letters the king wrote that were discovered a year ago," said the Doctor.

"That's a vortex manipulator!" Jenny exclaimed. She was immediately shushed by everybody else in the room. But she was right, it was a vortex manipulator clear as day, the only other thing she drew out.

"Hang on," Clara began, "If you've had a vortex manipulator right there in the Tuileries all this time, why didn't you use it to leave France months ago!? Years ago!? Leave the whole planet, even! You could have avoided this entire escapade and saved yourself from getting executed!"

"How was I to know they would execute me?"

"Because-! Because this is the French Revolution! And you're Marie Antoinette! How do you not know!?"

"I've always found history to be very dull," she said. Clara couldn't believe what she was hearing. "They didn't give me any warning before they stormed in here to drag me to the Conciergerie, and I couldn't open my safe with the National Guard in the room."

"You could have opened the safe and just grabbed the vortex manipulator and left straight away!"

"They surrounded the bed, with swords," she reiterated, like she was somehow the most logical of them, "Besides, with the Gloves, death isn't the obstacle it would otherwise be. There was no reason to take such a risk. I can't let Robespierre have both Gloves."

"Yes, the Gloves, go on," the Doctor said, "Do that so Clara will be okay."

"As you wish," said Antoinette, holding out the Left Glove to Clara herself, who took it unsurely.

"And… what do I do with this?" she asked, "You're already back to life."

"The same as before, it should respond to you. They've taken to you quite well, they often don't with humans. They're not designed for them." Antoinette sat down in one of her fancy chairs, leaving Clara to slide on the glove. She'd been right, it did respond to her easily; Clara felt the flow of energy pulse through it. The Doctor took a few steps closer but still maintained a distance, Jenny and Mattie staying closer to the secret passage. Clara placed her hand as carefully as she could on the back of Marie Antoinette's precarious head.

Her soul, or consciousness, or essence, or whatever the best word was, had already been dragged back from beyond death by the earlier ceremony with the Right Glove. The Left Glove didn't have as much work to do to. After only a few seconds elapsed there was what felt like an explosion of energy, raw power of some kind, at the tips of Clara's fingers. This was accompanied by the veins snaking beneath Marie Antoinette's dead skin glowing vividly white, and then the bones followed and a strange mesh of internal organs that even the Doctor couldn't recognise when the illumination only lasted for a split-second. It was like the flash of a camera, and when they were plunged back into darkness with the moon pouring into the room Clara felt faint on her feet and collapsed. The Glove dropped from her hand as she fell, but the Doctor was close enough to catch her in time. She wasn't unconscious, only a little woozy.

The door into the chamber was violently and abruptly kicked down. Antoinette jumped from her seat and grabbed the glove from the floor as Leclerc and Beaulieu drew their swords and backed away from the newcomers to defend the Queen. It was a dozen soldiers from the National Guard, clad in blue uniforms all with swords drawn, ready to kill the intruders. Jenny pulled Matilda closer to the secret passage while Clara tried to gather her thoughts. A man pushed through the soldiers to get to the front with a pistol in his hand, pointing it straight at the newly resurrected Queen.

"Max!" the Doctor greeted the leader, "Long time no see!"

"Excuse me? Who are you?" he asked her.

"Oh, we haven't met yet," she said.

"So you are associates of the Tyrant!" Beaulieu gave a start.

"Bonjour, Monseigneur," Marie Antoinette curtseyed mockingly. Beaulieu and Leclerc stood between her and Robespierre's forces, and she was already fidgeting with the vortex manipulator she'd recovered.

"You can't stop us," Beaulieu argued with Robespierre, "Louis-Charles will take the throne of France, and the Queen will assure it. We will get to Vienna."

"Yes, of course, Vienna," said Antoinette unconvincingly. The Doctor kept a grip on Clara and slowly started to edge them both towards the passageway, just like Jenny and Mattie were doing. Struggling with the inputs, Antoinette dropped the Gloves on the chair in front of her.

"Versailles has been turned inside-out, Madame la Reine," said Robespierre, "I knew le Gant gauche was somewhere in the Tuileries, and I knew you would lead us to it eventually."

"Seems like the two of you are made for each other," the Doctor quipped, "Have you ever thought about getting remarried now the king is dead? You could be Mrs Robespierre."

"You disgust me," said Antoinette.

"We must leave, Your Highness," Beaulieu hissed at her.

"There is no escape now," said Robespierre, "We have both Gloves, you can't do this trick twice. The monarchy will fall to the revolution once and for all."

"Ha!" Antoinette exclaimed. The vortex manipulator lit up. "I'm afraid I'll have to cut this short and take my leave."

"You won't get far. I have soldiers approaching the Seine as we speak."

"The Seine? You make me laugh," she said, "I won't be going anywhere near the Seine, and you certainly won't be able to follow me."

"Argh! Seize her! Now!" Robespierre grew too frustrated with her trying to weasel her way out of trouble and motioned for his guards to advance.

"Au revoir, monsieur!" she smiled, then looked at Clara, "À la prochaine, ma chérie," she blew a kiss in Clara's direction and activated the vortex manipulator, disappearing in a flash of blue light. But she did not take the Gloves, they were still sitting on the chair, now in between the National Guard and the TARDIS crew.

"Madame la Reine?" Beaulieu's expression was one of utter betrayal as he stared at the space where Marie Antoinette had been seconds ago.

"Kill the traitors!" Robespierre ordered, enraged by the Queen's disappearing act. Beaulieu was distracted for just long enough that one of the soldiers ran him clean through with his sword, his eyes still fixed on thin air. The soldiers advanced as Robespierre aimed his pistol at the only remaining Royalist, Leclerc, with Beaulieu choking and falling to the floor as the sword was withdrawn from his chest. But Clara, fuelled by adrenaline, decided she wasn't going to let Leclerc get shot. Robespierre pulled the trigger, but a blast of telekinesis sent the gun flying into the wall, the ball-bearing missing Leclerc.

"Run, run!" the Doctor shouted, picking up the two Gloves. Jenny and Mattie were first into the tunnel, then the Doctor and Clara last of all, grabbing Leclerc to bring him with them as Robespierre and the soldiers gave chase.

Clara, now stuck at the back of the group as they fled as quickly as they could, became their last line of defence and occupied herself telekinetically tripping up as many Jacobins as possible. The passage was only wide enough for two people side-by-side, so tripping them impeded their progress enough to give the TARDIS crew and Fabien Leclerc a lead. Robespierre continued to shout orders for their execution, but the cries grew more and more distant.

Running so quickly, it didn't take them long to escape from the Tuileries and burst back out into the moonlight at the Seine riverbank, Dubois still standing guard.

"Leclerc! What happened!?" he demanded.

"The Queen is gone, disappeared-"

"Disappeared?"

"There was a light, I don't understand – Beaulieu is dead, the National Guard and Monseigneur Robespierre are in pursuit!" Leclerc told him, panting and panicking.

"Merde!" Dubois cursed, "We must get to Guillaume and Vermette!"

"No, come with us," said the Doctor, "If they haven't been caught already, they're about to me." She made to go east, back towards the Pont Notre Dame and the Hôtel de Ville where they had been that morning, where the TARDIS was, but Dubois wanted to go west towards the carriage waiting for them at the bottom of the Jardin des Tuileries.

"We don't have time for this!" Dubois, ever the pragmatist, abandoned his post as sounds of the pursuing revolutionaries came through the tunnel.

"Come with us or you'll never see Esmée again," said Clara. That was all she needed to say to persuade Leclerc to abandon Dubois and the other Royalists, who were certainly going to be arrested and executed by the Committee of Public Safety, and come with them, as they continued their escape down the Seine.

The revolutionaries burst from the tunnel behind them, splitting off with some following Dubois and some coming after Leclerc.

"There! A boat!" Leclerc shouted, pointing at a small rowboat tied to the riverbank by an old rope. It was empty, derelict, and Clara didn't think much of its ability to function as a boat, but the National Guard was surely surrounding the Tuileries from all sides. They could easily be cut off from ahead. But there were no other boats immediately in sight, so Leclerc's plan was jumped upon.

"In the boat, in the boat!" the Doctor shouted. Mattie and the Doctor got in first, keeping the gloves safe, while Leclerc untied it and Clara sent another telekinetic blast at the approaching soldiers. Leclerc barely made the jump into the boat, but then they were off, Jenny taking the oar and pushing them out into the water. Clara gave a helping hand with telekinesis, aiming them towards the other bank of the river where they'd be out of range of the National Guard's pistols. The soldiers aimed and fired at them from the shore, Clara again protecting them and their flimsy boat from the barrage, but they very quickly got too far away for the men to aim accurately.

"Who are you!?" Leclerc demanded.

"The Doctor, I told you."

"But who!?"

"We're travellers, passing through Paris," she explained, "I have a machine."

"What kind of machine?"

"One that travels through time." The boat sped up and up, moving much faster than the soldiers would be able to keep up with on foot and disappearing into the horizon of the Seine. They approached the next bridge. All they had to do was get back to the dockyard by the Hôtel de Ville and they could escape. "Go to the other shore."

"Why?" Clara and Jenny asked together.

"Because St. Germain is south of the river and that's where his girl is," said the Doctor, then continued talking to Leclerc, "You need to take Esmée and leave Paris, leave France if you can - just get out of here. The chaos isn't going to stop for almost a hundred years, I swear."

"I can't leave France and betray my country," he said.

"You need to if you're going to survive. The revolutionaries won't win and the royalists won't win, things are only going to get worse. If you can't leave France, you have to leave Paris. Go to Toulouse! It's nice there!"

"Leave the greatest city in the world?"

"Do it for love," the Doctor implored him, "Do it for Esmée. I know what happens to France in the future, and it's nothing but chaos for as long as you'll live. Tyrant after tyrant and uprising after uprising – but you can get out, and lay low, and escape the guillotine. None of the temporary politics here are worth dying for, I promise." They approached the southern bank, drawing close enough for Leclerc to stand, balancing precariously. "Please, Leclerc – Fabien – take her and get out of here."

"…Alright. Only because I've seen so many extraordinary things, and you are the only one willing to explain, and my Queen has abandoned me."

"Loyalty to her won't get you anywhere," said the Doctor. Leclerc nodded and made the short jump from the boat to the southern side of the Seine.

"Au revoir, Doctor. Clara," he nodded. Clara smiled at him, "I'm going to go to St. Germain directly and make Esmée my wife or die trying. Toulouse is nice this time of year."

"It is!" the Doctor beamed, "But seriously, go! They'll be right on you! Just grab a horse, go south, and don't look back until you're far away!" He saluted her, which made her groan, and then ran for the nearest flight of steps to get back to street level. Jenny pushed them away from the bank with the oar again and continued to row, Leclerc disappearing from view.

"That was nice," said Mattie, "Saving him."

"If he listens," said the Doctor, picking up the Gloves again.

"What are you going to do with those?" Jenny asked carefully.

"I don't know yet… just get us back to the TARDIS for now. I think we'll be giving the Louvre a miss, after all…"

"Well?" Clara asked, sitting down with a glass of water in her hand, freshly showered and changed into more comfortable clothes, "What are they?" she prompted.

"Hm… I could be wrong about this, but I think they're gloves."

"…You're an arsehole," she muttered. Oswin smiled at her, looking up from the Gloves she was scrutinising, the gauntlets standing upright on the table in front of her.

"I don't know what they are."

"Do you know how they work?"

"No, but they sound remarkable. Reanimating a severed head? Full motor function preserved even after the brain is completely disconnected from the body? Observable in both human specimens and whatever your French consort was?"

"Austrian," Clara corrected.

"Same thing," Oswin shrugged.

"Not really," said Jenny, sitting nearby. It was only the three of them in Oswin's laboratory on the TARDIS, waiting to gather their allies and have a meeting about the Glove. Though by allies, it was only Jack, and the Doctor had gone to fetch him. Adam Mitchell was watching Matilda elsewhere and trying to help her wrap her head around French grammatical rules since she still hadn't managed to do her homework.

The electronic door slid open and the Doctor returned, still agitated, with Captain Jack hurrying in behind her. He stopped dead when he saw the Gloves in the lab, surrounded by wires and other equipment Oswin was using to study them and work out what they were.

"What are the medical results? Did you get them yet?" the Doctor asked Oswin.

"Yes, all fine, for both of them. Clara isn't being drained of her life, Jenny hasn't rebroken her ribs – though, with my limited medical expertise I'd say some of the soft tissue damage has been exacerbated. Expect some more bruises. Have fun telling your wife about that." Jenny stuck her tongue out at Oswin. Ravenwood wasn't present, she was in London hanging around with Sally Sparrow.

"You're sure?"

"About the bruises?" Oswin asked.

"No, about Clara, about her not dying."

"I feel fine, sweetheart," Clara said again, "Really."

"You should destroy them," said Jack, "When Suzie Costello pulled the same stunt on Gwen, the only way to sever the connection was to destroy the Glove. You can't mess with this sort of technology."

"Tell me about that," said the Doctor, thinking.

"What do you want to know?"

"Did she feel pain? Suzie, when you woke her up."

"Yeah. She was conscious but had a bullet wound in her head. She got more lucid as it started to heal, but I can't say it was pleasant for her at the beginning – not that I have a lot of sympathy." The Doctor frowned.

"The head the soldiers were talking to, Couture's head, was screaming," she remembered, "They couldn't get a word out of it. Stabbed it in the eye. Must be an intense kind of pain, decapitation; in humans, loss of consciousness doesn't occur for a handful of seconds. It's far from instantaneous. Even Jack still feels pain when he heals."

"So what?" asked Clara.

"So Marie Antoinette back there didn't look like she was in any pain at all. A fully conscious, intelligent humanoid, capable of coming back from a decapitation without experiencing extreme pain? What kind of creature is that? I've never seen anything like it. Even the Great Vampires can't survive a beheading."

"Could be a chicken," said Oswin. They all looked at her. "What? Chickens can survive for over a year without their heads."

"…Anyway," Jenny cleared her throat and sat up a little, "I couldn't find anything on the TARDIS about what the Gloves are, at all. Nothing digital. Although, I did manage to get a look at the church records of Toulouse which have all been digitised as far back as 1720 and found a marriage record of one Monsieur Fabien Leclerc to Mademoiselle Esmée Desmarais, dated to the summer of 1794. So they did leave and go to Toulouse. Had four kids."

"Well, that's nice. That's something," said the Doctor, "We should go. I love making wedding cameos. What do you think?" she directed this question at Clara.

"You know I like a good wedding, but maybe not for a while." She nodded, thinking. Jenny began to speak again about her efforts to search for information about the Gloves.

"There could be something on them in the TARDIS library?" she suggested.

"Impossible," said the Doctor, "I've read every book on this ship. If there was anything about these Gloves, I'd know."

"Personally, I'm not sure what studying them will accomplish," said Oswin, "I agree with Jack, they're too dangerous, and I don't want to risk anything happening to Clara either. Plus, they're a bit… dead. None of the machines I'm using are really picking anything substantial up."

"I don't like thinking there's a whole species out there with technology like this and even the Doctor doesn't know what they are," said Jack, crossing his arms, "It's bad news."

"How did you destroy them before?" Oswin asked him. He shrugged.

"Big gun. Toshiko did it. Second one was lost when the base was blown up, buried underneath Cardiff. It brought Gwen back and put Suzie back in the ground. Gwen's never been any worse for wear. Owen was complicated because I was the one who used it."

"Well, she did say you need to use both, so you don't botch the whole process," said Clara, "And she's not human. We don't know what she is."

"If you ask me, it doesn't sound like she's gone for good," said Jenny, "She did look right at you and say, ''til next time, my darling.'"

"Urgh, don't remind me…" Clara mumbled, "She freaks me out."

"Of course Marie Antoinette wants to fuck you…" Oswin quipped, "I suppose it must be very intimate, sharing your life-force like that? You know, I'm struggling to even work out what this life-force, or energy, that the Glove drains is."

"We never found that out either," said Jack.

"Life-force…" Oswin repeated, starring at the Gloves, frowning. But Clara was thinking about something else that Jenny had just said, the words Marie Antoinette had uttered upon departure: À la prochaine, ma chérie… and she had called Clara 'ma chérie' upon waking up, too… And then she remembered where she had heard that before, and jumped to her feet so quickly she knocked over her glass of water. "Hey!" Oswin protested.

"The cake!" she shouted, looking straight at the Doctor.

"What? What cake?"

"At school! In the fridge?"

"The… oh my god, the cake!" the Doctor also shouted.

"Sorry, can someone please explain why we're all so excited about cake?" Oswin asked, looking between them. Everyone else was at a loss.

"We have to go," said the Doctor, holding out her hand to Clara.

"Go where?" asked Jenny, "What about the Gloves?"

"You and Jack take them and throw them into the Eye of Harmony, that should do it," she called on her way out of the room, Clara taking her hand as they left as quickly as they could.

"We'll just adopt Matilda too, shall we?" Oswin asked.

"We'll be back soon! Make sure she's okay!" The door closed behind them and the Doctor bounded down the steps towards the central column in the console room as quickly as she could, Clara at her heels. "I can't believe we didn't see it, didn't think of it at all, all day!" she paced back and forth around the console, flicking switches and hitting buttons to send them into flight. "Pull that lever there and hold it down," she bade Clara, who did just this. The ship jerked. "Well don't hold it down that hard."

"Sorry," said Clara. The cylinder began to thrum, carrying them out of the time vortex as the Doctor steered. She was very focused as she piloted it now, taking them far away from Revolutionary France and back towards Brighton in October of 2064, home for them now. She didn't say a word as the TARDIS flew this time, the ship rocking and veering this way and that, Clara gripping the console tightly for support. Eventually, it landed, thudding as it stopped.

"Don't go out just yet, I'm running interference on the CCTV," she said, "The last thing we need is getting caught on camera landing a spaceship in our place of work in the middle of the night…"

"Mm, hopefully you got the date right this time. And we haven't appeared in the middle of the day."

"Well, check the monitor if you're worried about that." Clara did this, pulling down the monitor and turning it on to see the TARDIS exterior. She saw the staff room of Turing High, dark and empty in the middle of the night.

"All looks good."

"Well, come on, then," the Doctor headed off towards the door and Clara followed. They exited carefully, again checking for people because they absolutely couldn't get caught with a spaceship there. It was definitely empty, so the Doctor hurried over to the fridge as quickly as she could, seeing that the very same cake from earlier that day. It was modest and white, still in its container with its card affixed. Clara took the card while the Doctor very carefully removed the cake itself, and Clara read the words aloud again.

"'À ma chérie Clara, qu'ils mangent de la brioche,'" she said.

"How could I not see this? It's the anniversary of her execution today, I said so this morning…"

"This isn't good," said Clara, "She knows who we are! If she knows where we work, she probably knows where we live."

"Unless… it's a coincidence?"

"It can't be a coincidence. It's got her thing on it, 'let them eat cake.'"

"She never actually said that."

"No, because she wrote it on a card and sent it to me," Clara hissed, "Why send me a cake?" The Doctor paused to think about this and seemed to get an idea, carefully removing the plastic top to expose the cake. She lifted it up by its base and pulled out as large a chunk as she could manage. Whatever hunch she had was evidently correct, because it wasn't just a cake at all; there was something inside it. The Doctor continued to pull the cake apart, making quite the mess, until she could draw out an object: an ornate, diamond necklace. She was absolutely stunned by it, lifting it up carefully and pulling off some of the crumbs and bits of icing. "What is it?"

"A diamond necklace," she said, "Well, not a diamond necklace, the diamond necklace, from the scandal that completely ruined Marie Antoinette's reputation with the French public. It was commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, but she didn't want it, so the royal jewellers tried to sell it to Louis XVI for Antoinette, and they didn't want it either. And then it was stolen as part of an elaborate scheme where some people posed as the Queen to buy it, but historically it's considered that the Queen didn't have anything to do with it herself. It disappeared in 1785, never to be seen again…"

"Is it real?"

"I think so… I guess she did steal it? Or acquired it from the thieves?"

"And then sent it to me?"

"Maybe it's a thank you gift. For bringing her back from the dead." Clara stared at it. The Doctor set it down and took out her sonic screwdriver, getting that covered in bits of cake as well, using it to scan the necklace. Her eyes widened. "It's definitely real… Coo, this necklace is worth hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars. And she sent it to you."

"…I suppose I've one-upped you with Madame de Pompadour, then? I raise your Reinette by my Marie Antoinette." The Doctor scowled. "Look, it's not like we can do anything with it. We can't sell it. They'd want to know where we found it. And what would we even do with that money? We don't need it."

"I don't want it in the house or on the ship, I don't trust it," said the Doctor, looking at it suspiciously, "It could have cameras, trackers, microphones in it."

"Well, then we do what any honourable person who's just discovered a missing necklace worth a billion dollars would do. We should anonymously donate it to the Louvre. That's where it should be. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to France, and certainly not to us."

"Potentially the most valuable piece of jewellery in human history, and you want to donate it to a museum?" the Doctor asked her, beginning to smile.

"It's the right thing to do," said Clara.

"I really love you, you know."

"I do know."

"I was so scared you were going to…" she couldn't bring herself to say it. Clara pulled her into a hug.

"I know," she said quietly, "I was scared, too. I'm fine, though. Especially if they destroy the Gloves." The Doctor let her go and smiled slightly, still upset about the prospect of Clara's death.

"Destroying the Gloves, donating the necklace – I do find your integrity very exciting."

Clara laughed, "Well, I'll show you just how much integrity I have once you clean that necklace and make it a bit less cakey. Then we can drop it at the Louvre and go back home as quickly as possible. I am absolutely sick of France."

"You're telling me - and I've got to teach it. How am I supposed to tell a bunch of kids about Marie Antoinette, now I know she's an alien infatuated with my wife?"

"You managed to teach them the Tudors without too much trouble."

"It was actually remarkably difficult trying to keep a straight face while calling her 'the virgin queen,'" she said, picking up the necklace in one hand and the remains of the cake in the other, which she took straight to the bin. It was a good call, Clara didn't trust that the cake was good to eat.

"Y'know, Orpheus's head kept singing after it was cut off," said Clara. "De Born carries his own head around when they meet him in the Inferno."

"Consciousness resides in the head, it's hardly surprising."

"They had different ideas about consciousness and anatomy before the Enlightenment," said Clara, "But it is interesting… I'll look into it more. There might be a clue. You know how folklore can be." The occult was Clara's speciality, after all. "Do you really not have any ideas about what she is? And there's nothing in the TARDIS?"

"No. But I'll find out. Believe me, I will…"

AN: Marie Antoinette WILL return as a recurring villain and does have an interesting backstory and origin, and is the focus of the next over-arcing plot (the previous one was X-Boost and Prometheus).