Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [10]
‘Only someone who knew her well,’ Scarlette wrote of the night, with typical verve, ‘could have looked into the green fields of her eyes and known the apprehension.’
But there are other factors that might explain Juliette’s unease, which Scarlette would never have let herself acknowledge. There were, quite clearly, ill murmurings in the House on that evening. Though many of the guests moved in the same circles as Scarlette – the Freemasons, the witch-cults, even a representative of the Roman Catholic Church if Scarlette’s own journals are to be believed – and though Scarlette had persuaded them all to at least attend the ball, there was a general feeling that the whole thing was a waste of time. Scarlette had only come into possession of the House in January, and the ball was in many ways her housewarming party. In the days of high fashion the local watch might have turned a blind eye to such a blatant bordello being opened in the shadow of the Drury Lane Theatre, but to open such an establishment now… and in Henrietta Street, of all places…
The feeling was that Scarlette had become out of touch with the times, despite being barely into her twenties. She’d been poisoned, said the whispers, by stories of the good old days: the days of the Hellfire Club, the days when Casanova could take a rich old aristocrat for all she was worth by pretending to be able to transfer her mind into somebody else’s body just through a kiss. The haut ton was terribly bored by that sort of thing now, at least in England, although word had it the French were still gullible enough to make the two-thousand‐year-old Count Cagliostro the talk of Paris. Did Scarlette really believe that by dressing the House up in her old-fashioned Hellfire mysticism, by presenting her women as half-sorceress and half-prostitute, she could impress anyone?
It was over, the rumours said, and Juliette must have been troubled by that. A ‘stray’ with nobody to turn to outside the House, she must have secretly wondered whether she had any more future now than she’d had when she’d first arrived in London as a twelve-year‐old. Katya, the alleged Russian spy, was so involved with various members of the foreign office that it seemed unlikely she’d stay at the House for long: always one for self-expansion, in every sense, she was seen leading the ‘Marquis of H_____’ to an upstairs room at the ball even though Scarlette had instructed that no business was to be conducted that night. One of the guests, the Countess of Jersey – nicknamed ‘the Infernal’ in society circles, partly because of her occult pedigree, partly because she was regarded by many as an infernal nuisance – was loudly scornful of both the House and its crimson-and‐black decor that evening, although observers noticed that she quietened down considerably when Scarlette herself finally made an entrance. Did Juliette hear the Countess’s loud, vulgar criticisms? Did she begin to wonder, even as she held up her chin and did her duty as hostess, whether she’d be in the gutters before long?
In fact, the only woman in the House who seems to have remained loyal to Scarlette was Rebecca. And this is odd, because – to begin with, at least – Scarlette didn’t trust her in return. A handsome, literate, bespectacled demi-rep, Rebecca had