Vive la Révolution

2

The TARDIS sank into the muddy silt of the Seine's northern bank, a dusky orange sun beating down on it and the wooden, portside structures it had appeared in the midst of. The Doctor stepped out and took a deep breath of Parisian air, before getting a smell of something unpleasant; probably the river nearby or some of the mud and fish that had been pulled from it. Clara, Mattie and Jenny followed in her wake but were not particularly impressed by the vision of Paris presented to them. Well, Mattie wasn't; Clara and Jenny had both been many times before and some of the mystique was always going to be lost on them. Mattie, however, appeared to have very lofty standards of what she expected from a capital city, despite the fact she – unlike her parents – wasn't from a big city at all. She'd spent most of her life shuffled from one village to another, Brighton was the biggest place she'd lived in, and she'd only spent a handful of days in London visiting relatives. And yet there they were in the centre of Paris, and she remained indifferent.

"Well?" the Doctor prompted her, "Take it all."

"Take what in? It's just some boats and wooden houses."

"What? No! Look over there," she pointed, but there was a thin layer of fog hanging in the air, "Notre Dame is right there."

"Okay?" said Mattie, squinting. Notre Dame was visible on the opposite side of the Seine, its distinctive architecture peering over the tops of the houses on the Ile de la Cité, all spires and archways. They were much too far away to see the gargoyles. "If Notre Dame is over there, why are we over here? Where's the Eiffel Tower?"

"Over there somewhere," the Doctor waved her hand in a vague direction, sort of to the right of Notre Dame, "It's not as central as they'd have you believe, it's way off at the Champ de Mars."

"There are literally two things to do in Paris and we're nowhere near either of them."

"Not true," said the Doctor, "The Louvre is on this side of the river."

"Yeah," said Clara, "We can go see the Mona Lisa."

"There are other things in the Louvre apart from the Mona Lisa, Oswald," said the Doctor. Clara just shrugged.

"I just want a sandwich," said Jenny.

"See? Why can't you two be more like Jenny? Happy with a sandwich?"

"Erm, I wouldn't say no to a sandwich either," Clara argued.

"Where is everybody?" Mattie asked, "Shouldn't there be people here?" In the few minutes they had been there, the Doctor hadn't quite noticed that the bank was deserted. Mattie was right, there probably should be people there. She could definitely hear people when she focused, quite a lot of people and quite nearby. She spotted a narrow staircase behind them against the large wall of the river bank and headed towards it, stepping carefully over the mud and the reeds so that she didn't ruin her shoes. It was probably just tourists; Paris was full of tourists throughout the entire year, and it wasn't beyond comprehension that there would be some event on in the city to attract even more.

"Careful on these stairs, there aren't any railings or anything," the Doctor warned. The steps were slippery and a little rotten from when the Seine bulged in the rain, and just ascending them was somewhat treacherous. Nowhere near as treacherous as the scene that awaited her when she reached the top, however.

Suffice it to say, Paris had not been mysteriously abandoned of all life, and there certainly was an event on. But it wasn't an event tourists would have any business attending, no matter how exciting the people found it. The Doctor stopped dead and stared when she climbed over the top of the riverbank onto a cobblestone street. Even with the fog, it was an unmistakable scene. They had emerged onto the square directly in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the otherwise ornate building playing witness to a ghastly state of affairs. A baying mob brandishing pikes, effigies, and homemade tricolore flags was gathered and fervent at the base of Madame la Guillotine, raised on a platform above the rabid crowd with a coating of fresh blood shimmering on its slanted blade. The Doctor had clearly made a grave error with her coordinates.

"What's that? Is it like, a re-enactment?" Mattie asked, eyes on the guillotine at the centre of the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Turning back towards the south, the Doctor strained to try and make out the familiar shape of the Eiffel Tower, but even without the fog, she was sure it wasn't there at all. Too many people were dressed too authentically as French peasants to be anything except the genuine article, there was no trace that she could see of the fire damage on Notre Dame's central spire, and the lamps littered around the square were still lit by flickering candle flames. They hadn't even moved on to gas yet.

"I think we should go," said the Doctor, "You know, we can, uh… they've got those things on display in museums back home, so…" For all her fondness of French history and even French revolutionary history, she still had nothing but contempt for public executions – or any executions. Perhaps she agreed with the motivations in this case and knew the many crimes of the French aristocracy, but she did not want to witness the guillotine at work.

"Wait, this is the French Revolution?" Mattie asked eagerly, "The actual, real French Revolution?"

"Yes, but this was a mistake," the Doctor reiterated, "Probably the telepathic circuits getting involved where they shouldn't be, taking us to what smells like the 1790s. So, the three of us should just – no!" Unfortunately, Matilda loved blood and guts more than she disliked France and was overcome with excitement at the sight of the contraption. She took off towards the crowd, the Doctor not able to grab her and stop her in her tracks.

"Mattie!" Clara shouted after her, but she didn't listen, "Shit! Bloody teenagers, come on." She, Jenny and the Doctor gave pursuit very quickly towards the guillotine. Already the mob was overrun with people brandishing severed heads on sticks and angry flags, though; Mattie disappeared into the throng. Clara didn't like this one bit and immediately resorted to intangibility to slip through the people. Jenny and the Doctor weren't that lucky and were inevitably slowed. In the distance, bells began to chime; Notre Dame was signalling the time. The bells rang five times in all and finished just as Clara got to the front of the group and seized hold of Matilda's arm. "Do not run off like that," she hissed, "It's dangerous here."

"Shh, I'm trying to watch this."

"It's not a spectacle," Clara told her, though the cheering crowds around them, elbowing them to get a better view, begged to differ. There were soldiers lined up at the base of the guillotine platform brandishing rifles at the crowd to keep them from storming it.

"What's he being executed for?" Mattie asked. A young man was marched onto the platform and forced to kneel by two more guards, the executioner waiting at the guillotine's handle. He had his head placed in the stock and the wood was closed around him, locked with a bolt by the executioner.

"No idea," said Clara, "Don't watch this, let's go."

"Why?"

"Because public executions are cruel," she said as quietly as she could while still being heard; no doubt the crowd wouldn't take too kindly to her sympathising with whomever they were killing. But there was a reason public executions weren't the done thing in the future, and why France had stopped using the guillotines decades ago.

What alarmed Clara most of all was the sheer speed and lack of warning that was given. She supposed after so many executions people weren't there to be talked at or forced to wait. There was no announcement of his name, no request for last words, not even an explanation of his crime. The executioner pulled the handle to release the blade, ten feet above the man's neck, and it came sharply down to raucous, deafening cheers. Clara didn't even have a chance to try in vain to cover Mattie's eyes. Blood sprayed across the spectators as they shrieked and jeered.

"Voila!" yelled another official who had been standing on the other side of the guillotine to the executioner; he lifted the still-bleeding head of the man out of the bucket and brandished it by its hair above the crowd, "The head of the traitor!" The Doctor and Jenny pushed their way to the front but were quite a few feet away from Mattie and Clara and unable to come much closer because of the guns. "This Royalist crétin was discovered smuggling letters from Marie Antoinette to Austrian conspirators! His fellows are being hunted by the Comité de salut public as we speak, but never fear, Antoinette dies tonight in the Place de la Révolution! Mort à la reine! Vive la France!" The crowd screamed their support.

A trio of men, more soldiers, ascended the platform and took the head from the official shouting whatever violent, patriotic phrases he could think of. The body was thrown in a wooden cart at the side of the guillotine with about half a dozen others, covered in blood left out in the sun. Carrying the head, smirking and muttering to each other, one of the soldiers bumped right into Jenny as he went past. Clara was much too far away to hear what had happened, and the Doctor looked deep in thought, but Jenny certainly seemed disturbed. She turned to see where the soldiers were heading and then got her mother's attention. They exchanged words and then motioned for Clara and Mattie to follow them.

"Come on," said Clara, pulling Mattie back through the crowd by her elbow, phasing them both as she went. Matilda's brief excitement for seeing a real, working guillotine had died as soon as reality had hit. It was one thing to talk about that sort of stuff, it was another to see it and be part of the crowds out for blood. The crowd had already begun to disperse as soon as the execution and calls to support whatever regime was in charge had gotten repetitive. It didn't take them long to find their way out, slightly disoriented, at the foot of the looming and grandiose Hôtel de Ville. The Doctor and Jenny found them shortly thereafter. "Well?" Clara prompted, "Are we leaving now?"

"I don't know, this is all wrong," said the Doctor, "This is October 16th, 1793, it's the date of Marie Antoinette's execution."

"Yes, so? He did say they were going to kill her later tonight."

"That's my point," she reiterated, "Marie Antoinette was supposed to die at noon today, five hours ago. And I've never heard anything about her smuggling letters out to her Austrian relatives to conspire, or any kind of Royalist plot like this. Plus – tell them what you heard the soldier say," she prompted Jenny.

"He walked right into me while he was saying something to the others about wanting to know what secrets the head will tell them. Those were his exact words."

"Maybe it was a metaphor," said Clara, not liking where this was going.

"Coo, I promise I set the date correctly, I triple-checked. If we're here, this means the TARDIS has taken us here on purpose. It's too much to be a coincidence. And talking heads?"

"Maybe they're really into New York post-punk." The Doctor made a face. "What do you want us to do? We don't even know where they're taking the head."

"What are you talking about? Of course we do, they're right over there, going towards Pont Notre-Dame." They were dressed in bright blue, so they weren't particularly difficult to see, and there was the fact they were waving a human head around. "Madame Tussaud's workshop is on the Ile de la Cité, just over that bridge. She's working for the National Convention making death masks."

"So, let me understand this – you want to go and talk to the actual Madame Tussaud about severed heads, based on something offhand a random soldier said?" Clara questioned.

"Well, I've never met her," said the Doctor.

"You alright, Matts?" Jenny asked Matilda quite seriously.

"I'm fine," she said somewhat unconvincingly. They would have to keep an eye on her. "What was that guy talking about? Why was he executed?" They set off walking, keeping a safe distance between themselves and the trio of soldiers.

"Marie Antoinette is Viennese, she's part of the Hapsburg Empire; if he was smuggling letters for her to Austria it could be part of a plot to remove her from France and take her home. She and Louis XVI tried to escape the Tuileries to go to Varennes but didn't manage it. Anyway, we're totally in the middle of the Reign of Terror right now, which means you can get sentenced to death for basically anything. And that's not even a retrospective name, they literally named it that themselves."

"And people are fine with that?" Mattie asked.

"Oh, no. One of the times I was here happened to coincide with the Thermidorian Reaction, next July, where they finally got sick of the Reign of Terror, broke into the Hôtel de Ville back there and sent Robespierre and his buddies to the guillotine instead. But you know, that's interesting, because Ian ran off to try and actually stop Robespierre from being overthrown," the Doctor continued, "Which he didn't manage to do because that's all a fixed point in time. I had to bust Susan and Barbara out of the Conciergerie."

"Why were they imprisoned?"

"Hardly any reason at all," she said, "But listen, for all intents and purposes, just act like we support the Revolution at this point in time, but be kinda vague about it. It's not just Revolutionaries versus Royalists – I wish it was that simple. I mean, nice as it would be to visit Notre Dame," again she indicated the vast cathedral towering over the rooftops ahead, "It's being occupied at the moment by this extreme atheist group called the Cult of Reason who are trying to dismantle Catholicism's hold on France. They were so extreme the Reign of Terror dudes disavowed them."

"Wait, you've met Robespierre?" Clara asked.

"Yeah. He liked me. At the time I was an old white man, so maybe that had something to do with it. Looking back, it does worry me that he wanted to be bros…" she mused, "Like, I'm all in favour of revolution, but not executing forty-thousand people in the space of one year, that's kind of whack."

"Just 'kind of'?" Clara jibed.

"Anyway. Madame Tussaud. We better be careful… Let me know if anything starts to bother you, by the way," she added hastily to Jenny.

"What do you mean?" Jenny asked, focused on the soldiers.

"Susan got sick when I was last here, couldn't do anything about it because we were separated at the time… the first place we went on Earth was the Revolution, you know," the Doctor reminisced, "She always loved it, too."

"What did happen to her…?" Jenny asked slowly. Jenny had never met Susan but didn't know if she had perished in the Time War with the rest of the Gallifreyans.

"Oh. She… well, she actually fell in love with a human and left the TARDIS to go live on Earth," the Doctor cast no small glance at Clara when she said that, then smiled to herself, "If she could see me now I haven't a clue what she'd say. She'd probably laugh. I'm sure we'll cross paths again someday."

"Who's that? Susan, I mean." Mattie interrupted.

"My granddaughter, first person I travelled on the TARDIS with," the Doctor explained, "She was around your age, but she was always terrible at passing for human. Though, to be honest, I think that runs in the family."

"I'm a very convincing human," Jenny argued, correctly spotting that this was a dig at her, "I'm two-hundred-and-fifty years old, I think I know how to pretend to be a human by now, mother."

"And yet here you are, yelling about your age while we're halfway across the Pont Notre-Dame following a bunch of Jacobin soldiers and a severed head."

"We're gonna lose them, come on," Mattie said, speeding off again. Clara was keeping a closer eye on Matilda than the men with the head as they pushed through the crowds going in the opposite of direction, many of them heading into northern Paris, perhaps for the executions. "I want to meet Madame Tussaud and see how she makes death masks. Do you know, CPR dummies' faces are modelled on the death mask of a girl who drowned in the river here?"

"I had no idea," Clara lied. She had known that but didn't want to curb Mattie's enthusiasm for everything morbid. They had yet to decide if it was a good or bad thing if the girl was pursuing a career in medicine, but Clara supposed Dr Cohen was quite a big fan of everything to do with death and was a very celebrated pathologist. She seemed to have recovered from seeing a man have his head cut off just minutes ago, at any rate. "CPR dummies are disgusting, anyway."

"That's a bit mean to the girl who drowned," said Mattie, Jenny and the Doctor now taking the lead while they bickered about which one of them was a better fake human – Clara thought they were both terrible.

"You should see the state of the one they keep at school. The spit alone is… eurgh."

"Mouth-to-mouth hasn't been an official part of CPR for decades," Mattie said.

"I think that dummy's been in the cupboard gathering dust for decades."

"I wonder what you'd find if you swabbed it."

"Honestly, sweetheart, I dread to think."

"Hold up a second – try to look inconspicuous," said the Doctor, going to lean on a wall as the soldiers up ahead stopped in front of a house and started to bang aggressively on the door.

"Darling, we're the least inconspicuous people here," said Clara, "We're not in period clothes at all."

"She has a point, maybe we should go back to the TARDIS and find something to wear?" said Jenny.

"Shh, shh," said the Doctor, squinting at the soldiers as the door was opened they started arguing with whoever was in the doorway. Was it Madame Tussaud? Clara didn't know what she looked like, and it was too dark inside to tell. They shouted for a few minutes until the soldiers were let inside. "Come on."

"What? We can't go in there, there are soldiers," Clara hissed as she walked towards the building.

"I've got a cover story."

"You've-!? No, this is a terrible – urgh!" But Clara was forced to follow because if her wife was going to get herself arrested by Robespierre's foot soldiers, she'd rather be there too.

The Doctor, Jenny in tow, walked right up and knocked at the door after the soldiers had disappeared inside. They could still hear talking inside, which turned into shouting.

"I don't only offer my services to le Tribunal révolutionnaire. I have customers," they heard a woman say from within. The door opened and a woman greeted them, the soldiers with their head lurking behind. "Oui?"

"Bonjour, nous excusons pour la gêne occasionnée, we're a group of envoys from an art gallery in London – we've heard about the work you're doing here in Paris and are interested," the Doctor introduced them and flashed her psychic paper, which the woman – who Clara realised must be Madame Tussaud if the Doctor was greeting her like that – read over, and then smiled.

"Bien sûr! Bienvenue; bienvenue à Paris," she held open the door to just let them in.

"Nobody is allowed in here," one of the soldiers ordered.

"This is my workshop, these foreigners have nothing to do with your revolution, and if they actually appreciate my work unlike Robespierre they're perfectly welcome," Madame Tussaud said. Clara was struck by how young she was – barely thirty, and already well on her way to building her lasting legacy of creepy wax figures.

"Monseigneur Robespierre saved you from the guillotine," one of the soldiers warned her, "You don't want to get on his bad side."

"He has no other side to get on," she snapped, then prompted them, "Well? Are you going to take it to the cellar so I can hurry up and get on with my work?" The soldiers, grimacing, did just this, going behind the wooden staircase's slats and descending to another level below them. They were still carrying the head. What were they doing down there with it? Wasn't it to go straight to Tussaud so she could make her death masks? "Which gallery are you from?"

"Hm?" the Doctor asked, forgetting her story for a second, "Oh, a new one. Your models are very… contemporary. The interest is new. We can't guarantee any fame, but we'd love to get to grips with your process." Of course, it didn't matter what the Doctor said about her fame, because the truth was she was going to become very a famous indeed – a household name, in fact, because of her uncanny valley creations.

"You have an unusual accent to be from London."

"Oh, I'm not – fresh from the colonies," she said, "You come to Europe to get away from violent revolutions and whaddaya know – France just has to descend into chaos. Typical."

"I think your revolution has gone better than this one," said Tussaud.

"Well, I mean, depends who you ask. Like, I guess being ruled by the British isn't something anybody wants, but who've they put in charge now? Some guy with over a hundred slaves to his name and really bad teeth."

"They were wooden, weren't they?" Mattie asked, "George Washington's teeth."

"Actually, no," said the Doctor, "They're mostly carved from the teeth of other humans and some animals. Which, to be honest, is kind of worse… and here they say the English don't do dental hygiene. Then again, I am married to an English person completely incapable of using a toothbrush correctly." Clara glared at her.

"I hate those things," said Tussaud.

"English people or toothbrushes?"

She laughed, "Both. Unless they want to let me exhibit my models."

"You hate toothbrushes?" Mattie asked.

"They're horrible, made of pig hair."

"They're what?"

"1793," Jenny hissed at her. Clara didn't know what was worse, not brushing teeth at all or brushing them with pig hair bristles and sugar-paste.

"Anyway," said the Doctor, "We're here to talk about your work, not about teeth; why don't you tell us what those soldiers are doing with the head downstairs? Is that a part of your process?"

"Playing ridiculous games, I should think. I'm not privy to the details, and if I ask too many questions I could be sent to the guillotine again. I don't care enough about what they're doing to risk that. Robespierre wouldn't spare me twice, the wretch."

"Yeah, Max can be a jerk like that," the Doctor mused. Max, Clara thought? "Where do you do the work, then? I can't help but notice there aren't a lot of severed heads in here."

"They're upstairs, they're too easy to steal at street level, and I always have people at the windows looking at them," she said. Clara glanced at the ceiling and saw a few dark stains on the floorboards – she would like to think those stains weren't human blood, but they undoubtedly were. It was Madame Tussaud's workshop, after all.

"Do people steal them?" Mattie asked, enthralled.

"Some have been stolen before, luckily only after I made the masks, so I can't say it matters."

"Are they worth a lot?" asked Clara.

"No, but they like to stick them on pikes and take them to the guillotines."

"Of course they do…"

Without warning, people started yelling downstairs. They were bombarded with a whole slew of aggressive, French swear words that were borderline incoherent, and even Tussaud seemed surprised at their volume. She also cursed, but under her breath, displeased at her workplace being taken over by the revolution's goons.

"Mon Dieu, these men are horrid," she grumbled.

"What are they shouting about?" Clara asked, a question directed mostly at her wife but open to anybody who wanted to answer.

"They're not," said the Doctor, "They're just shouting." The shouting got worse, imbued with a few screams, and then there was one last shout that was almost a frenzied roar and a piercing, male scream, then all sound stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Tussaud moved out of the way of the door as thumping footsteps came marching back up towards them. The cellar door was kicked open and the highest-ranked soldier brandished the severed head towards Tussaud, only now it had a long candle rammed into its eye socket. Tussaud shrieked upon seeing it.

"How am I supposed to get a good likeness of the traitor when you do this!?" she demanded.

"You can just mould a new eye," the soldier snapped at her, "Isn't that what makes you so special? It can't be that hard to dump a head into a barrel of wax." She glowered at him, absolutely seething, and he dumped the head, its face now contorted in horror, on a table covered in papers.

"You're going to get blood on my ledger!" Tussaud continued to argue, going and moving the head immediately; there were a few blots of blood on the pages, though. She swore once again. "You people are brutes. You tell Monseigneur Robespierre what you've done, that this is your fault. Or are you scared that it will be your head in my lap if you do?"

"Nobody wants to put their head in your lap, Madame," one of the other soldiers jeered, and his two friends laughed cruelly. Tussaud grew even more enraged, then made a frustrated sound and pushed straight through the soldiers, taking her head and carrying it away upstairs. The soldiers then took their leave, ignoring the four observers who had watched this entire scene play out, making more glib remarks about Madame Tussaud as they left. They didn't even shut the door.

"…What just happened?" Mattie asked eventually.

"I suppose they didn't like whatever that head had to say," said the Doctor, thinking. "Okay, Jenny and I will go take a look in the basement, you two go upstairs and keep her distracted talking about her process, or whatever. Keep up the art gallery act for the moment." Clara nodded and Mattie bounded away to follow Madame Tussaud, apparently thrilled to learn all about how she made her grisly death masks.

"Maybe she will get passionate about French from this," Clara quipped before she left, too.

If they had been wondering why the ground floor wasn't dirty, the first floor answered all of those questions. Clara now understood why Madame Tussaud's had once been nicknamed a house of horror because that was certainly what they found. Immediately she locked eyes with the milky, vacant stare of one of a dozen or so severed heads lined up on a shelf.

"Cool!" said Mattie, spotting the heads, "It looks like pre-production for a horror movie."

"Yeah…" said Clara, unconvinced. Tussaud dumped her newest head on a table covered in bloody rags and went over to a fireplace that was smouldering away with two pots on top. All over the place were buckets and barrels filled with this or that, bloodstains everywhere. Mattie was thrilled. "I do worry about you, Matts…"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Just… you've seen a lot of dead people at quite a young age," said Clara.

"Young age?" Mattie questioned, a subtle way to challenge Clara's perception of her. It was impossible to tell where the teenage Matilda ended and the fifty-year-old one began. "You know, there's a kid in Year 10 who does taxidermy." Clara knew which boy she was talking about.

"That's because it's his family business, he's been surrounded by it his whole life."

"Yeah, and my mum's a doctor."

"She didn't bring dead bodies home, though," Clara pointed out.

"Dr Cohen does."

"When have you ever seen where Cohen lives?"

"Well, I haven't, but I hear what people say."

"Eavesdrop, more like…" she muttered. Tussaud took one of the pots off the stove and Clara saw it was only full of water, which she poured carefully into a bowl of white powder – she was making plaster.

"Did I hear correctly? Your mother is a doctor?" Tussaud questioned as she mixed her plaster. Now who was eavesdropping?

"Well, yeah," said Matilda, not correcting her tense.

"I've never heard anything of the sort, even in London. How remarkable. Not just a woman, but a woman of your-"

"Why don't you tell us about your process?" Clara interrupted because god forbid they hear Madame Tussaud say something casually racist. They had been remarkably lucky so far where that was concerned, considering they were in the 18th century.

"You can help if you like. I doubt you can do any more damage than those soldiers. And the girl is more than old enough – how old is she?"

"Fifteen," said Clara.

"I was her age when I started sculpting because Monsieur Curtius was kind enough to tutor me when he took care of my mother and me. He'd be ashamed if I didn't return the favour," Tussaud said. It was absolutely going to come back to bite them if they let Matilda be taught how to make accurate death masks by Madame Tussaud. Clara didn't know when, but she knew it would happen one day.

"Help how?" Clara asked carefully.

"You can pull the candle out," she nodded at the head, "I can melt it and use it in the mould."

"Really!?" Mattie exclaimed.

"No," said Clara, "I'll do it. You stay over there."

"That's not fair!" she protested.

"I mean it," said Clara firmly, doing her teacher voice. Mattie was irritated and crossed her arms in a sulk, but at least she gave up, while Clara was forced to deal with the head. Oh well, it wasn't the worst thing she'd done, or the worst foreign object she'd pulled out of a human body. She had to give that award to herself a dozen times over, distinctly remembering both the time she'd fallen out of an escape pod and found herself impaled on a branch in an alien jungle, and the time she'd ripped a crossbow bolt out of her own face. At least the candle wasn't stuck in her eye socket.

It was wedged in there, though, right through and buried in freshly deceased brain matter, and she did struggle to free it without using telekinesis. Eventually, she did manage to dislodge it after wrestling with the severed head for a few seconds, and she pulled it out slowly and found it covered in dark pink gunk and blood.

"Just wipe it down with one of the rags, then drop it in the pot of wax over the fire," Tussaud instructed her. Clara did just this, lifting the lid on the second, larger pot and finding it full of pale, melted wax. She dropped the candle in, and it slid underneath the surface. She wondered if the wick would damage the mould at all. Lucky she had a pack of tissues and some antibacterial hand gel in her pocket. It wasn't as good as getting to actually wash her hands with soap, but it would have to do. "I didn't catch your names."

"I'm Clara, this is Matilda."

"And the others?"

"The Doctor and Jenny."

"Another female doctor?"

"Well, she's American," said Clara. Not necessarily an explanation, but she said it like it was meant to be, and Tussaud didn't quite care enough to question her.

"I suppose if Britain's colonies can revolt, they can do all sorts of other, unheard-of things, too. Tell me, Matilda – what kind of spectacles are you wearing? I've never seen any like it." They were relatively standard, white, rectangular frames.

"Do you not have glasses in the past?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean – in France."

"No," Clara interrupted, then to Tussaud, "I told you, we're from London, we're from an art gallery. They're experimental, they sit behind your ears instead of having to hold them or wear a monocle."

"How remarkable. And what are they in aid of?"

"Um, just eye stuff," said Mattie. Tussaud glanced up from her plaster and waited for Mattie to elaborate. "I have a squint, and I'm short-sighted."

"She had surgery when she was a baby," said Clara.

"Eye surgery? And you didn't lose sight?" she returned her attention to the plaster.

"She got very lucky."

"Who are you to her?" Tussaud inquired, perplexed by Clara's habit of answering on Mattie's behalf.

"My wife and I are her legal guardians." There was a pause and Tussaud scrutinised her. Clara realised what she'd said. "I mean – my platonic, um, companion, who I'm friends with, in a completely platonic and friendly way." Another pause, and for good measure she very awkwardly repeated, "We're friends."

Tussaud laughed, "C'est Paris, mademoiselle. Is that sort of thing recognised by the church in London?"

"Um… no. Maybe one day. It's more symbolic." Mattie shook her head at Clara, evidently making fun of her for now making rookie mistakes when she was supposed to be the experienced time traveller.

Entirely different events were unfolding downstairs, however. Jenny and the Doctor had slipped away into the basement as soon as Clara and Matilda had vanished up the stairs. They didn't have a light source, irritatingly, but the soldiers had left a few candles down there lit. It was incredibly dim and smelled unpleasant, but they just about managed to navigate their way down the creaky, wooden stairs.

Madame Tussaud's cellar was just as ghastly as her first floor, full of botched wax statues. Mangled arms, distorted faces, broken legs; it was littered with these bits and pieces. It was also where she kept most of her wax, a few barrels full of it ready to be scraped out and taken to melt elsewhere. They could see where the candle had been stolen from, a circle of melted wax lying on a wooden table on the far side of the room, but it wasn't initially clear what they had been up to.

"What's that?" Jenny asked, pointing out an object on the table. It was dirty and scuffed, but some sort of gauntlet. It looked like a glove from a piece of medieval armour, belonging to the right hand.

"Maybe she was sculpting a chevalier," the Doctor quipped, going to look at the gauntlet. It had blood on it and so did the table, some of it fresh and shiny – it must belong to the head of the alleged traitor. "Do you know what this room makes me think of?"

"Madame Tussaud's museums?" Jenny suggested.

"No – I mean, yeah – but no, it makes me think of Autons."

"Autons are plastic though, aren't they?"

"Yeah, thank god. Although, their heads can sometimes talk when disconnected from the body. I once pulled off Mickey's head when he was an Auton clone."

"Best not mention that around Mattie."

"I don't know, maybe she'd think it was cool. Maybe he already told her about it – it was the day he met me, after all. Do you know he got eaten by a bin?"

"Well, anyway," Jenny ignored most of that, "If they were Autons, they wouldn't bleed underneath the guillotine."

"That's true. And the Nestene Consciousness wouldn't be here, they don't even have plastic yet. Speaking of reminiscing, though, do you know I learnt to cook here?"

"In this cellar?"

"In Paris, in the 18th century. That's where you get it from, after all."

"Not true, I learnt to cook in Venice in the 25th century. I was Jenny Aloisi."

"We both know you're naturally gifted at cooking-"

"I'm naturally gifted at everything."

"-because I put in the hard work."

"Then why am I a better chef than you, if that's true? You just can't stand that I'm better than you are. Parents always hate when their children exceed them."

"I'm actually very proud of you."

Jenny didn't know what to say, and ended up clearing her throat awkwardly and nodding at the table, "What's the glove, then?"

"I don't know, but I don't like it. Something about it is unnerving." Jenny reached out to touch it, but the Doctor held out her own hand to stop her, then took out her sonic screwdriver. She felt like she'd seen something like this glove somewhere before and decided to scan it. She was surprised when the sonic stuttered while it worked. "Weird…"

"What is it?"

"It's…" she was about to say it was something bad when she realised that she did know what it was, more or less, and she was right in her assessment. But she didn't get the chance to explain this to Jenny when the front door above them was kicked in and they heard the loud, angry voices of the Jacobin soldiers. Jenny grabbed her elbow and dragged her into the shadows behind the slatted stairs and among the wax horrors. They barely had time to get out of sight when the soldiers, not even waiting for Tussaud to give permission, forced their way into the cellar arguing with each other.

"We don't have time for a party, Jacques," one argued with the leader, "We need to get the Gant droit back to Robespierre."

"I'm not wasting time I could be spending at the Palais de l'Égalité reporting back. He can wait for a few hours," the leader, Jacques, persisted. With him, he'd now brought a chest just the right size to fit the glove on the table, and he picked it up and dropped it in with little care. The Doctor and Jenny watched from the gaps between the steps.

"He won't like this. Not with the rumours about the Queen-"

"She's no queen of ours," Jacques snapped.

"Oui, bien sûr, but if someone really is going to break her out like the traitor's letters suggested – and Robespierre will already be furious that we didn't get any information from the head – then everyone is needed at the Conciergerie."

"I don't care. I'm not missing another party. Her execution is scheduled in less than an hour, they can't break her out in that time…" They began walking up the stairs again, Jenny and the Doctor ducking back down into the shadows and listening as they discussed the details of this party and how desperate Jacques was to attend, in spite of his duty to the revolution and assuring the Queen was executed at seven o'clock that evening.

Upstairs more shouting began as Tussaud returned to scream at her intruders, but they dismissed her after a few crass comments and left.

"Well?" Jenny prompted as they crept back out, "What was it?"

"It's something Jack calls a Resurrection Gauntlet," the Doctor explained quietly, "He once asked me if I knew anything about them, but I didn't – I only know what it is because I recognise it from his story. Unless I'm wrong, I could be." The door was forced open again, slamming into the wall, and Clara practically fell down the stairs in her rush to check on them.

"Are you okay!? The soldiers came back!"

"I'm fine," said the Doctor, "We just hid, they weren't paying much attention. And if they saw us, we could've just said we were looking at these freaky, botched waxworks."

"What did they want?" Clara asked. Mattie and Tussaud remained upstairs, the former bothering the latter with all sorts of questions about how she made the death masks.

"The Right Glove, that's what they called it," said Jenny.

"It's a device that can bring people back from the dead, but only for about thirty seconds to a minute," said the Doctor, "I don't know who built them or why, or if that's the same one Torchwood Three had or a different one. I guess they were using it to interrogate the dead guy and he mustn't have said anything useful because they stuck him in the eye with a candle."

"I don't think that's the sort of technology Robespierre should have at his disposal," said Clara.

"No, me either… I've got an idea…" she left them both to ascend back to the ground floor, the pair of them following in her wake, so she could ask Tussaud some more questions. "Hey – do you know anything about a party at the Palais-Royal tonight?"

"When isn't there a party at the Palais-Royal? Tonight is the execution of the Queen, I'm sure they have lots to celebrate. Then again, I have heard rumours about Royalists attending those parties. I suppose they can't hold parties of their own without le Comité de salut public sending them to their deaths."

"What time is the Queen being executed?"

"Seven o'clock or so. It depends if there are any more delays so that Robespierre can interrogate her more. I doubt she's planning anything; I remember the Fuite à Varennes, Madame Élisabeth told me about it."

"Who's that?" Mattie asked.

"The king's sister," the Doctor added. "Okay. Clara and I will go to the Palais-Royal to look for the Glove and see about these Royalist rumours. Mattie and Jenny will go to the Place de la Révolution and see if anybody does try to break out the Queen or if she ends up executed. See if anything fishy happens."

"Alright," Jenny nodded.

"Aren't you here to see my work?" Tussaud asked.

"Well – you're making the death mask of the Queen, aren't you?" the Doctor asked.

"Presumably."

"So, we're very interested in that. If she doesn't get executed you can't make the mask." This certainly wasn't airtight reasoning. "Look, this is kind of a mini-break for us, and what better things to do in Paris than go see the Queen eat the guillotine and hang out at an aristocratic party? We'll be back to watch you make the Queen's death mask and talk about touring England. But, um, do you have any clothes we might borrow?" Tussaud frowned. "We're just… dressed for London."

"The way you talk about London, it sounds like another planet."

She laughed awkwardly, "Yeah. Funny, that…"