Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [24]
Lisa-Beth’s journal tells the story best. On the first day of April, Lisa-Beth met with an agent of the Service at the Shakespeare’s Head. Posing as a libertine with an interest in black coffee, the agent paid Lisa-Beth in hard cash for information regarding operations at Scarlette’s House. The Service had read the contents of its red envelope, and had been suspicious. The Doctor and Juliette, rather than Scarlette, were the most important subjects of discussion. Lisa-Beth informed the agent (whom she simply called ‘R_____’) that some magical/symbolic ceremony was certainly being prepared, in which Juliette’s heritage and virtue – for ‘virtue’ read ‘virginity’ – were both important considerations. Lisa-Beth then suggested to R_____ that if he had a personal interest in black coffee, she could show him a thing or two that would make more sense of events at the House. She also suggested that she knew things about Juliette which neither the Doctor nor Scarlette had discovered.
The term black coffee is an interesting one. ‘Coffee-house’ was an established euphemism for ‘brothel’, especially in Covent Garden, but only those of Scarlette’s tradition seemed to have used the word ‘coffee’ as a codeword in itself. White coffee was their name for the standard form of business practised across the city. Black coffee, on the other hand, was the name given to those somewhat arcane special services in which both Lisa-Beth and Scarlette were so well trained. What’s most interesting is that the term black coffee hadn’t yet entered the common parlance as meaning ‘coffee without milk’, so it’s possible that like so many other things – the song ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, for example – the phrase originated amongst the prostitutes of London and then spread to the rest of society.
But the fact remains that within weeks of arriving at the House, Lisa-Beth was already selling information on Scarlette’s activities to those parties whom the Doctor hoped to recruit. Her reasons for doing this were far more acute than anyone might at first assume.
Political Animals
Whenever there was a change in the government, it was customary for Members of Parliament to re-offer themselves for election. The old administration had fallen, the King had felt the rug being pulled out from under him, and the men of the Opposition were moving in for the kill: but many saw the Opposition as untrustworthy, as libertines and gamblers and revolutionaries, so it was important in those first few weeks for the new blood to make a good impression. They did this by staging rallies in London which, in retrospect, come across as the first truly modern political campaigns. (It’s difficult defining eighteenth-century party politics, mainly because, by today’s standards, both sides were right-wing. It’s enough to say that the Opposition was made up of Whigs, those who opposed the divine right of the King and advocated strength through free trade, while the King’s followers were known – disparagingly – as Tories. Odd as it may seem, the blasphemous, depraved, church-baiting occultists of the Hellfire set were all Tories… even the Earl of Bute, the hero and mentor of the King as a child, was a covert member of the Hellfire Club. But then, you’d hardly expect a group of wenching black magicians to be democratic.)
The first rally was held in London at the start of April, in support of the infamous Whig and Westminster MP Charles Fox: a fat, gargoyle-faced man with bushy eyebrows, much-loved by opponents of the government despite his habits of playing cards for twenty-four hours straight and spitting on the carpet in polite company. It was almost as if a grand society ball had been somehow poured out on