Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [26]
Mere yards from the body of the King himself, the two courtesans stood in the select crowd of spectators and respectfully bowed as the King grudgingly passed the symbolic garter to the senior Whigs. Scarlette noted that Lisa-Beth acted with great decorum, not scowling, swearing or even shuffling her feet. It’s reasonable to say that Lisa-Beth knew at least as much as Scarlette did about how to behave around the upper classes. In fact, Scarlette must have been far more uncomfortable than Lisa-Beth was. To see the friends of America given such power… it can hardly have helped that the Whigs were handed a garter, the traditional symbol of witchcraft recognised for over a hundred years.
But earlier, on April 3, the ‘synchronisation’ of Juliette was to be far more disturbing than a simple attendance at a society function. After Rebecca pointed out the nameless prostitute in the crowd, she and her associates followed the woman and her client into the Coffee-Shop, only to see them vanish through a rear door and into a small backstreet nearby. What’s most notable about all this is that, to the Doctor, the idea of chasing after a prostitute and her client was a perfectly straightforward task. The streets behind the shop were narrow, spaces between the rear walls of buildings rather than actual thoroughfares. Given the nature of the time, then, it’s entirely believable that a streetwalker might have taken her client there even in the afternoon. Few people would have passed by, and those that did would have been wont to turn a blind eye, especially if the gentleman were a gentleman.
It’s impossible to say exactly how many babewyns were sighted in London during the first two months of the Doctor’s war. Accounts are many, but as with the story of Anne-Belle Paley many of them are almost certainly folklore, older tales of escaped wild animals given a sexy new dimension by the rumours of what was happening on Henrietta Street. And the newspapers were hardly likely to report drunken tales of cannibal apes told by the ladies of Covent Garden, even if such tales were all the rage in coffee-houses. But the manifestation behind the Coffee-Shop, in which Juliette came face to face with the horror ahead for the first time, can’t have been the only such incident since the night of the ball. The only real description of the event comes from young Emily, and though she doesn’t name her source it’s easy to see that the story was related to her by Juliette:
Such horror! It was a thing, I am told, such as in any zoological garden, but if it had bin fed on raw meat or even (dare I say) human flesh. The ape had a bloody snout and jaws that mite have dripped the blood of its victims. There was spit around its mouth and it had claws that swung like blades. 0 my dear Lady, the face of the thing describ’d to me was enough to make me feel quite ill. It could have bitten a man in two, I’m told, but the worst thing was its family, for just as sure as it stood there in the alley there were a hundred others of its kine only waiting for there opportunity to make themselves known.
This may well all be exaggerated, but it makes a point. When Lisa-Beth had reported her own experience at her rooms, there had only been one babewyn, and it had been summoned (real or imagined) by the practice of black coffee. But two weeks later, things had worsened. As the prostitute behind the Coffee-Shop isn’t even named, she probably wasn’t known to anybody at the House and therefore would have most likely been a white coffee girl. Assuming the Doctor and friends had followed the woman and her client at speed, the encounter in the backstreet can hardly have begun by the time the creature appeared: Emily’s account suggests that it launched itself at ‘my friend’ (Juliette?) as soon as it had materialised, with the unfortunate prostitute and her client vanishing amidst a fury of screaming, ‘still unbraced’. It hadn’t been some obscure ritual that had called this beast forth, but a perfectly normal, if sordid, backstreet transaction.