Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [19]
To answer this, we should consider the thirteen envelopes distributed by Scarlette from the night of the ball onwards. Though it’s not possible to give the personal names of those who received them, it is possible to list the ‘orders’ to which they were sent. The following inventory is taken directly from Scarlette’s documents. In some places the handwriting is illegible, which is unsurprising. Given that it was a rule of society that educating girls was a waste of time, and that only a clerk would be vulgar enough to need good handwriting anyway, it’s something of a miracle she was literate at all (and in at least two languages, too).
– The Order of Saint Francis of Medmenham [i.e. the Hellfire Club, still technically in existence but quiet since 1770].
– The Grand Lodge of British Freemasonry, 33rd Degree or Higher
– The Church [some disdain here, possibly].
– The Ereticy [Russian witch-cult, ostensibly patronised by the Empress Catherine herself].
– The Personal Attention of Cardinal de Rohan [French nobleman, known for both his gullibility and his interest in the occult].
– Family [this item written in the Doctor’s hand].
– The Grand Lodge Temple of St Andrew’s Trust [the American movement: curious, as the Lodge should have been Scarlette’s worst enemy].
– The Mayakai.
– Mrs Gallacher’s House of Flagellation [another London establishment, opened in 1778 to much acclaim].
– ??? [this item represented by a Chinese pictogram].
– The Followers or Family of Mr Mackandal of Saint-Domingue [religious/political guerilla movement in the French West Indies].
– ??? [the handwriting on this item is unreadable].
– The Attention of the Service [more on this later].
Not exactly a ‘Who’s Who’ of high society, then. But if Lisa-Beth’s account is accurate, with the Doctor describing pieces of an ancient lore scattered throughout humanity, then possibly the list represents a directory of those groups whom he believed had kept part of that lore… though the reference to Mrs Gallacher is admittedly puzzling. So was it true, as Lisa-Beth suspected, that the Doctor and Scarlette wished to unite all these factions? Pooling the ‘ancient wisdom’, in order to revive the traditions of the Doctor’s people and therefore defend London (or Britain, or even the world) against the babewyns, whatever they might have been?
If so, then it would have been quite a task. Even apart from the differences between these groups – it’s difficult to imagine, for example, the followers of Mackandal fighting alongside the French slavemasters responsible for culling so many of their people – it mustn’t be forgotten that the House of Scarlette was largely considered an oddity. Even with Lisa-Beth on board, girls like Katya were beginning to grow restless with Scarlette’s running of the establishment, and Katya was presumably the envoy by which the Doctor hoped to convey a red envelope to the Russian Ereticy and thereby to Catherine the Great.
Two other points should be considered in understanding the plans of the House. First, the time the Doctor had spent with Rebecca on his arrival in London. It’s already been explained that Rebecca spent some time preparing a card-reading for the Doctor, but in the same amused section of the ‘Sabbath Book’ it’s also claimed that once, the women of the House found the Doctor and Rebecca surrounded by several entire decks of cards, as if attempting to inspect the fate of an entire world.
‘A very very bad place,’ the Doctor says, in the story, as he grimly examines the future. ‘The question is, is it where we’ve got to go, or where we are now after things go wrong?’
Secondly, there’s the visit the Doctor received on the night of the ball. For the most part the Doctor never kept a journal either, which means that the exact events are lost to time; but the basics are clear enough. While Scarlette was making her big entrance in the hall, the Doctor was physically