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That afternoon, goes the story, she looked up from the floor and caught sight of a figure in the street outside, standing across the cobbled street from the window of the salon. The figure was female, dressed all in black, and although the newcomer was wearing a veil Rebecca knew at a glance who she was.

Rebecca wasn’t at all put out, says the tale. She simply stood and went to the door of the House. There on the step, she met the girl in black and greeted her. They talked for a few minutes, the girl seeming surprised at the state of the House, and concerned when Rebecca casually told her what had happened to the Doctor. The girl asked if there was anything she could do, within reason, but Rebecca said that it was unlikely considering the circumstances. At this the girl nodded, and made to move away, although before she left she pressed something into Rebecca’s hand. Rebecca’s last words to the girl in black were that she probably shouldn’t show herself in public again: there were forces gathering, especially on St Belique, and should they discover the truth about her then she might find herself hunted to the end of the Earth. The girl acknowledged that this was the case.

The next day Rebecca met with Scarlette, and gave Scarlette her missing glass totem, the shard which had cut the throat of Mary Culver in 1762. Scarlette must have known there was no point asking where it had come from.

* * *

9

The Threshold

Thirty Days

It was called ‘the Bloody Code’, so once again blood was an important symbol. It was a system of justice which, though not quite so ruthless as that practised in France, did everything it could to remind the convicted that the British were still under a King and that the King was a representative of total authority. In Britain, all crimes of property were still theoretically capital crimes. Prostitutes could find themselves on the end of a rope for pickpocketing their sleeping clients, servants could be executed for short-changing their masters, and as for counterfeiters… counterfeiters were not only thieves but making false images of the King himself, and George III was quite convinced that there should be no mercy for such vermin. By the end of the 1780s the doomed were being shipped to the penal colonies as often as they were being executed, but everybody knew that Australia was just a rationalist version of hell.

On the first day of November – All Saints’ Day – a girl was hanged until dead at Tyburn, the most fashionable place of execution in England. The exact charges against the girl on All Saints’ Day were unspecified, but she was said to have been a prostitute and so pickpocketing and/or ‘coin clipping’ were generally thought to have been her crimes.

The hanging was unusual in many respects. First, it wasn’t officially entered in the public criminal records. This wasn’t unknown, however, and generally meant that there was something potentially embarrassing about the case and that monies had been spent to stop anybody paying attention. Secondly, the condemned was taken to the gallows in a hood, her face covered with a cowl of leather. She appeared quite calm as she was led to the noose, with her skinny wrists bound behind her back and her long red hair braided at her neck at the lip of the hood. A tiny white-armed figure under the gallows-tree, she looked little more than a child, but there was a quiet poise in her manner which must have struck the crowd as odd. When the floor was taken out from under her and the rope snapped her neck, she only jerked once, and her body barely struggled as she died. It was said that the corpse was to be given over for medical dissection, a relatively recent horror created by the Code. All but the hardest rationalists held the sneaking suspicion that if their bodies went under the knife then they’d arrive in Heaven in pieces.

By the day of the execution, Scarlette was on St Belique. With exactly thirty days to the wedding, and the wedding guests growing restless