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Thirteen envelopes had been sent out, and most of the groups invited had already arrived on St Belique. The one invitation to which there’d been no response was the one marked ‘Family’. The painting had been a poor proxy, but now the Doctor was apparently sure that the genuine article had materialised.

Was there indeed another elemental on the island? Scarlette’s journal is typically vague on the matter, and although she went straight to the Church it’s not clear who she met there. However, a new guest did indeed arrive that day. Every single account of the November Revels mentions him, and yet all of them fail to give him a name.

Assembling a picture out of all the accounts, he’s described as a clean-shaved, dark-haired man in distinguished middle age, handsome in some respects even though to some of the British witnesses he came across as ‘swarthy and difficult to place’. He was slim and well turned out, and he made an impression on the island by always dressing in tight, straightforward clothing of prim black… apart from the rosette of blue and white which he wore on his lapel. He would often be seen simply standing in the vicinity of the other guests, hands folded behind his back, observing intently without becoming involved in any of the visitors’ many disputes. Whenever people would ask each other about him, in muted whispers, the dark-haired gentleman would simply bow his head to them. His accent was English, although some said they detected a little Latin in his features.

In the wedding invitations Scarlette had insisted that House colours were to be observed wherever possible, but this newcomer deliberately flew in the face of this tradition by wearing his rosette at every opportunity. Strangely, Scarlette doesn’t seem to have cared, and in the first two or three days they were often seem walking together in the town as if they were ‘of one lodge’. A remarkable sight indeed.

The wedding guests were allowed into the vault of the Church en masse on November 27, the first time there’d been a large assembly there. The atmosphere was excited, even aggressive. There’d been almost no apes to kill over the previous days. As a result, the bored guests had begun speaking of the wedding again, now only four days away. As they arrived in the red-decked vault, Nie Who showed them to their allocated seats around the great thirteen-sided table, one guest from each delegation. They sat there in their masks, giving away as little as possible while hoping that the others would give away everything, from the skull-headed priest of Hispaniola to the Russian visitor who’d chosen a rather rude Venetian-style carnival mask with a suggestively long and erect nose.

Just after eleven o’clock the man with the blue-and‐white rosette entered, unmasked, and was watched by all as he slid into his own seat (the one reserved for ‘family’?). But there was no introduction. He was closely followed by Scarlette, who immediately moved to the chair allocated to the Hellfire Set. It was clear, even before she spoke, that a great announcement was going to be made. The rat-catcher had wagered the Frenchman twenty points from his killing-tally that the wedding would be called off, so Scarlette’s announcement must have come as something of a surprise.

Scarlette’s speech survives in full, and it’s worth repeating.

Gentleman. Ladies. I hope that you have all been entertained for this last fortnight, and I trust that although a few of you have lost colleagues in this sport you will have considered the experience a worthwhile one. I have showed you, I hope, that we have nothing to fear from the babewyns except the consequences of our own vision. I have also showed you that no enemy is beyond defeat, not even if that enemy has a King next to which, I fear, even the monarch of all England appears of good temper.

Most of you will have heard of my friend, whom we call Doctor. You will have heard of the miracles he has been known to work, the great feats of alchemy and of learning that he is said to