Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [31]
Lisa-Beth, on the other hand, already knew that the Service was turning against the seraglios. She doubtless would have understood that the mood of the press was largely controlled by such cliques: in the single year from 1782-83, around £2,000 (a massive amount in eighteenth-century terms) was spent by agents of the government on bribes and pay-offs to newspaper editors. If the mood was changing, then it was with the consent, if not the actual backing, of the Service. Lisa-Beth’s solution to this was presented to the House on the night of April 10, the very same evening that Juliette and Emily observed time slow down in the upstairs boudoir.
Lisa-Beth had been given a room on the ground floor of the House, into which she’d moved most of the furnishings and effects from her old residence near the menagerie. On that night she’d been seen taking a client into her room, definitely not, records Scarlette, one of the House’s regulars. Apart from Katya, none of the other women were occupied on that evening. While Lisa-Beth attended to her gentleman, Scarlette, the Doctor, and some of the other women were in the main salon of the House, reclining on the red velvet chaise longues and engaging in the normal evening pursuits of cards and town gossip. The Doctor was apparently engrossed in a copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine, most particularly the science pages.
At around half past nine, Lisa-Beth walked out of her room and addressed all those gathered in the salon, telling them that there was something she thought they ought to see. Curious, the others followed her back to her room, the Doctor and Scarlette at the front of the party.
The gentleman client lay on Lisa-Beth’s bed, stripped to the pantaloons, his wrists and ankles tied to the bed’s four posts (bondage was as great a part of eighteenth-century prostitution as it would be in later centuries). There was a gag in the man’s mouth, and from the sweat on his face the gentleman in question was scared out of his wits. But most importantly, several words had been painted on to his chest in a thick red ink, words in an alphabet Scarlette didn’t recognise but which she later described as ‘almost Egyptian’.
All this was Lisa-Beth’s work. When Scarlette asked, reasonably, what on Earth she thought she was doing – and while the Doctor simply looked curious – Lisa-Beth moved to the end of the bed, extended a finger in the man’s direction, and spoke five simple words.
No record reveals these words. Whatever Lisa-Beth might have said, the effect on the man was immediate. His ‘eyes widened like billiard-balls’, and he immediately began to struggle (if one believes Lisa-Beth) or cry (if one believes Scarlette).
Even if the words themselves have been erased from history, their import is obvious. They were the five secret names of the Points of the Star, as represented by the Service’s star-shaped room. The five names were the most secret of secrets in government circles, and by using them in this context Lisa-Beth was demonstrating a very real power. In retrospect it’s clear what she’d been doing, since the beginning of the month. She’d been consorting with agents of the Service, indulging in black coffee with them, possibly even acting as a ‘priestess’ in their ceremonies. While the Service had believed her to be a mere woman of leisure, Lisa-Beth had carefully been digging out the Service’s secrets, either by unravelling the ceremonies or by using her extraordinary musculature to seduce the answers out of the five gentlemen of the Star Chamber. True, she’d passed on the secrets of the House, but while they’d gloated over this