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By Root 449 0

impression that the Doctor was unsure of his role in the struggle of Henrietta Street; that his new position, as House elemental and co-owner of a seraglio, was outside his usual frame of experience; that he was starting to feel unsure of the limits of his person. Scarlette states that he had no beard when he arrived in February, and it’s easy to feel that he grew it as a deliberate change, just to see whether he could. Described by many as a man of habit, the Doctor was starting to see some great and terrible change in the universe around him, just as the whole of London society was. He must have wondered whether he himself should be engulfed by that change, and being who he was he saw little difference between growing a beard and metamorphosising himself into energy.

And there were other matters playing on his mind, other ‘changes’ he knew had to be made.

On the same day as her society outing at St James’s, Lisa-Beth met once again with the mysterious R_____ at the Shakespeare’s Head. This time she was evidently more direct with him, and as she didn’t return to the House until the early hours in the morning it’s even possible she may have been paid to perform some black coffee act. There are many contemporary reports of peculiar rites in the ‘offices’ of the Service, in which a single woman would be hired to act as a priestess in a symbolic sacrificial ceremony, standing naked in a star-shaped chamber during a ridiculous-sounding rite designed to ‘bring vitality to the soil of Great Britain’. But at first she supplied R_____ with more information about the activities of the Doctor and Scarlette. Lisa-Beth told the agent that Juliette had been prepared for the ceremony to come, not just by her ‘blooding’ but in a more elaborate ceremony in which she was dressed and instructed by Scarlette herself. Lisa-Beth also revealed that the Doctor was making desperate moves to contact the more awkward names on the ‘red list’ of thirteen, something that apparently required the presence of what he called a ‘Tardis’ . And behind Scarlette’s back – perhaps more to spare her feelings than anything – the Doctor had asked the other women to gather any information they could about an individual called ‘Sabbath’ who’d been present at the Gordon Riots in 1780, or about the dying Polynesian tribe called the Mayakai.

So it was that all this information ended up in the files of the Service. But the information wasn’t all one-way. Lisa-Beth discovered much from agent R_____, including the fact that the five highest councillors of the Service had met to discuss the situation (no doubt in their star-shaped chamber), and that some of them were considering putting pressure on the watch to shut the House of Scarlette down. The King was in a precarious position, said the mandarins. His Majesty might not have known the first thing about demons, but the last thing he needed was some mad tart of a witch reminding people of the Hellfire Club and the excesses of the King’s old court. Certainly, nobody in the Service was paying the slightest bit of notice to the red envelope their agent had received at the ball. The invitation inside, said R_____, was clearly an irrelevant fancy on the part of either Scarlette or her pet elemental.

Naturally, by this time Rebecca knew all about the contents of the red envelopes. The message inside each one took the form of an invitation, and one copy still survives. The card on which the invitation is printed is black, the calligraphy a sombre red in colour. The only thing that immediately needs explaining about the invite is the name given to the Doctor: ‘Jack-of‐the-Moon’ or ‘Flighty Jack’ was a term used at the time to denote someone who dwelt on high-minded things at the expense of the everyday world, and there’s no reason to think that this was supposed to represent a real name (or even a nickname) for the Doctor. It’s also worth mentioning that the name ‘Vierge’ is also likely to be a false title used for the sake of convenience.

The card reads:

Your representative is cordially invited, on the first day of December,