Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [16]
This isn’t all that Lisa-Beth records about her first meeting with the ‘elemental’ known as the Doctor. But it’s the first time, in any written form, that the philosophy of Scarlette’s House becomes obvious. Not only did Scarlette believe herself to be upholding an ancient tradition – not only did she see herself, like the original Hellfire set, to be using her grasp of tantra and arcane law to defend certain principles – she saw the Doctor as a kind of sign. An omen, much like the later Great Fireball, a messenger sent to help her run the Henrietta Street seraglio as the last refuge when the babewyns came to rip apart all those women who saw, knew and did too much.
When Lisa-Beth heard all this, two things seem to have struck her particularly. The first was the thought that the Doctor didn’t look anything like any other brothel-keeper she’d ever met. The second was the Doctor’s response when she asked him exactly what the babewyns were, and why they were suddenly capable of being summoned into the world.
‘I don’t know,’ this apparently all-wise magus admitted. ‘I think it’s actually going to be quite important.’
As far as can be gathered from any of the surviving accounts, the Doctor himself never made a public appearance at the ball, though his presence was discussed by (among others) Lady Jersey. But it was shortly after the meeting with Lisa-Beth that Scarlette made her own, typically dramatic, entrance. The Doctor probably remained in the office while she handed out the envelopes, which made Scarlette’s plans for the future quite clear, to those who knew how to read between the lines. Or perhaps he retired to the House’s cellar, where most of his work was done during his time on Henrietta Street, at least before he fell sick and became bed-bound in October.
It’s unquestionably true, though, that he was alone for most of that evening. Which is why, when one of the ‘guests’ made a devastating assault on him, nobody else was there to witness the attack.
Blood, Fire and Time
‘He walked here.’ That was all Scarlette would ever say, when anybody asked her how the Doctor had come to be staying at Henrietta Street.
Only one portrait of Scarlette exists, and even this was painted much earlier in her life, when she herself was an ‘apprentice’. Even given that eighteenth-century portraits tended to flatter the subject – witness the traditional image of a sober Prince of Wales – the woman it depicts is unquestionably striking. It’s not so much that she appears beautiful, although with her almond-shaped eyes, her fashionably pale skin and her vaguely aristocratic looks she certainly must have been far more appealing than most demi-reps. The most notable thing is that she clearly has the face of an actress. In the portrait, her hair is a mane of black pulled back to the nape of her neck, almost a halo of mystery and intrigue (but then, Romney was always a romantic when painting society portraits). There’s the trace of a smile on her lips, a suggestion that the smile is the only real part of her face on display, the look of someone who knows nobody’s ever going to penetrate the mask. Some of the great actresses-cum‐mistresses of Drury Lane have similar expressions in their portraits, and it’s hard to believe that Scarlette can’t have been more than seventeen when the picture was painted.
But then, her age was always something of an enigma. Like any good actress, she hid the truth well, although – remarkably – it was generally believed that during the crisis of 1782, she was still only in her early twenties (it has to be remembered that women grew up faster then, that there was no such word in the English language as ‘teenager’ and that many girls began working in seraglios at the age of twelve). All Scarlette herself would ever say was that she’d been born in the same year in which Mary Culver, the last of the great London ‘witch-mistresses