Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [118]
Though all the foreigners had lodgings around the harbour-town, the focus of their attention was the Church. The guests had arrived at a mutual agreement, perhaps an unspoken one, that nobody who represented one of the lodges would set foot inside the Church without a mask. As everybody knew who everybody else on the island was, this was a question of decorum rather than secrecy. The vault was closed to them now, but the main body of the Church (a seventeenth-century building, with stained glass windows depicting a local Christ-figure whose skin was not quite dark enough for him to be considered a Mulatto) was used as a meeting-point. Often, one of the hooded Masonic guests would be seen standing before the altar alongside a well-dressed man in a masquerade domino, wearing the face of a medieval Satan, discussing lodge politics. Guests tended to wear masks which befitted their own tradition, although it was another unspoken rule that anyone who dared to wear the face of one particular animal would be considered to be in bad taste and sent to Coventry.
A month before the mythical wedding day, at least eight of the thirteen factions invited by Scarlette had arrived on St Belique, and it was on November 3 that for the first time a large mass of the guests found themselves in the Church at once. It was hardly a party. Almost everyone present was wary, particularly as Mr Van Burgh of Virginia refused to wear a mask, in breach of all etiquette. The supposedly immortal Frenchman also came unmasked, though this was less surprising as everyone believed he was permanently in character. In the body of the Church, the guests ended up bunching together in small groups and throwing dark glances at those they felt were beneath them. There were grim rumours that the wedding was a sham, that at best this was a waste of time and at worst it was an elaborate trap. Hardly the union of spirits the Doctor had intended.
Yet it happened again the next day, and the next, when a total of sixteen masked and muttering Individuals found themselves gathered together. Almost certainly, most had come just to get a look at the others, to find out who was talking to whom and what kind of alliances or conspiracies were being forged. But on that third day of the Accidental Conclave, the meeting wouldn’t go quite as peacefully. This time, Scarlette was to get involved.
The guests were arranged in their usual groupings when Scarlette entered the Church. Mrs Gallacher, procuress of a London House of Flagellation who believed (like many medieval monks) that whipping could induce altered states of consciousness, had struck up a quiet friendship with the spider-faced man in the kilt: and the only individual who’d spoken to all the others was the Frenchman, who was generally considered harmless. Perhaps surprisingly, the only big argument was between the rat-catcher and one of the red-hooded European Masons. Having worked alongside each other for so long, tempers were fraying and the Mason’s suggestion that Sabbath be offered an amnesty was the final straw.
The consequent shouting-match was interrupted when, without warning, the big oak double-doors of the Church were thrown open by the local priest (who had, it seems, been paid a healthy sum for the ‘rental’ of his House of God). When those assembled saw Scarlette stride into the building – the first time she’d ever set foot in the Church – even the arguing Europeans were cowed into silence. And even the Masonic archive admits that she looked spectacular that day. She strode into the Church ‘like a colossus in red’, it’s said, with her boots hammering on the stone floor, her red tails sweeping all about her and her dark hair flowing from the braid of roses at her neck. She entered like the Queen of Time, and barely seemed to register those around her until she came to a halt before the altar.
So it was that Scarlette made her first address to the Accidental