Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [25]
The Doctor was there, in the crowd. So was Juliette. So was Rebecca. Scarlette wasn’t, and it’s not hard to see why. The Whigs chose blue-and‐buff as their colours because they’d been the colours of General Washington’s army in America, and for Scarlette that would only have brought back memories of the curse of Matthew Crane. Also, the shops had started selling fashionable fans painted with the Duchess of Devonshire’s likeness – sex appeal brought to politics for the first time – and Scarlette, who later admitted that her kind’s need for secrecy was a major irritation, would only have been jealous that another great would-be adventuress was getting all the attention. She may not have been a royalist, but Scarlette wore the red and black of the Hellfire set. On April 3, she would have found herself chronically out of fashion.
There were many women of the streets at work in that crowd, either looking for custom (even in broad daylight) or picking pockets. And there was the Doctor, with his own little coterie of demi-reps, albeit with a very different purpose. The Doctor was anxious that day, as he later confided to Scarlette. Rebecca was, as ever, distracted and unconcerned, content to watch as the dumpy little form of Fox himself appeared on the podium above the cheering heads of the crowd. Juliette was typically quiet, taking in the scene around her whenever she took her eyes off the Doctor. It’s easy to imagine the Doctor himself urgently scanning the crowd, looking for the disturbance which he knew was inevitable.
At around four o’clock in the afternoon, Rebecca nudged the Doctor’s arm and nodded through the crowd, towards a woman – her name never recorded – leading a well-dressed gentlemen out of the throng and in the direction of a well-known Coffee-Shop. The Doctor agreed that the three of them should follow, and Juliette’s initiation into his ’war’ truly began.
It was a good month for political initiations. Some time later, on April 20, the King held court at St James’s Palace to meet with the Whigs who’d pushed their way into the government. It was supposed to be a ‘Drawing Room’, one of those events at which the King and Queen would regularly meet with the lords and ladies of society, but the King was so thoroughly dejected at the thought of handing over power to ugly little men like Fox that instead of holding the usual ceremony he just sat grumpily in his chair while the Whigs filed into the hall looking smug. Tradition held that any lady or gentleman was welcome at such a meeting, and somehow both Scarlette and Lisa-Beth were there to witness the new political age being clumsily born. Perhaps the sorcerors of the Service gave them leave to enter.
The reason for the visit was clear, however. Scarlette, already in the process of uniting the more dubious elements of high society, wanted to show Lisa-Beth the battlefield on which they were now playing. Like the Doctor, Scarlette knew how important it was for all the ‘soldiers’ of the House to be of one mind. There was a tradition, in seraglios run by women, that after a while the biological cycles of all the women in the House would synchronise: that when ‘the Prince’ came every lunar month, it was as if the House itself were bleeding. This was what occurred on Henrietta Street that April. The House was getting into the rhythm of a new and terrible world order. The question is, was