Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [30]
‘I do love them [the Doctor and Scarlette] as much as I can. But I feel a great undertaking has been put before me… in which the world has never given me option. I would never wish to disappoint them.’
Her only confidante in these little ‘dabblings’ was Emily, who witnessed several of Juliette’s experiments in the top-floor room. Emily records that on two occasions, Juliette mixed a variety of esoteric materials in one of the Doctor’s glass beakers and surrounded it ‘with such a variety of strange devises’ (meaning occult charms rather than actual machines). The mixture of substances might sound scientific, in an amateur sense, but in fact Juliette’s aims were ritualistic. The experiments were always accompanied by a large amount of ceremony and incantation, and once Juliette even managed to get hold of Scarlette’s own personal totem – a piece of old, jagged glass, which Scarlette usually wore on a chain around her neck and to which she attributed great power (about which, more later) – to some effect. When the fumes from the combined chemicals filled Juliette’s room, both she and Emily seem to have been overcome by the noxious vapours. In Emily’s words:
There was such an air [i.e. gas] in the room that I feard I mite choke. But when my eyes started to water I heard a crack and I saw the glass jug from the cellar had broken open. But, o! The peeces did not fly at all directions or fall. I saw them hang in the air for a moment after the jug broke. I thought this mite be the water in my eyes, but my friend was staring at the glass in an intens manner and saying her charms under her breath, so I knew that it was she who held them in place. It lasted a second or little more before the peeces flew out.
Some might argue that this was a demonstration of the ‘potential’ which the Doctor saw in Juliette. However, it seems more likely that (as Emily herself considered) it was an effect of the fumes: noxious gases can indeed make time seem to slow down, under certain conditions. This doesn’t mean that Juliette’s experiment was worthless, though. She’d been told to maintain her virtue, and so had set about entering a state much like the Shaktyanda of the tantrists through chemical/alchemical means. She was trying to alter time, or at least her perception of time, and with remarkable success. It’s indeed lucky that this didn’t lead to an infestation of the ‘demons’ so feared by the Doctor.
(Incidentally, it shouldn’t be thought that Emily was just a giddy-headed, witless observer. When the artist Romney used the young Emily as a model for his painting of the mythical sorceress Circe, he portrayed her as a vivid, dark-eyed, secretive beauty. Perhaps there was more of a witch inside Emily than many of her friends suspected.)
Juliette’s restlessness was echoed not just amongst the other women of the House, but in London in general. Beginning in the spring of 1782, there was an increasing hostility in the public and the press towards the city’s prostitutes, an ill-feeling that seems hard to explain or justify. It’s as though London’s inhabitants noticed that something was wrong, even if they couldn’t say exactly what and were hardly likely to attach any credence to stories of ape-faced monsters. More and more, the women of the seraglios were blamed for bringing some terrible moral catastrophe down on the heads of the English. The subtext of the many editorials in the press was that some terrible darkness was waiting to engulf the city, a darkness that the houses of leisure could only worsen.
The women of the House were cursed, then. Rebecca might have blamed herself for this, as if her impure blood had somehow brought shame to Covent Garden. Scarlette might have seen it in more ritualistic terms. After all, the March ball had been designed as a kind of ritual, to bring together the women and make their resistance known: the decor of the ball