Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [32]
The man on the bed was an agent of the Service, and Lisa-Beth had made the threat plain. If the Service continued to harass the House of Scarlette, then the sacred names would be distributed throughout Covent Garden and within a week every brothel-goer in central London would have these most secret words either written or tattooed on their chests. To the Service, symbols were power, none more so than the five Names of the Star which had been passed down by Dr Dee ten generations earlier. When written on the body, the words were intended to lend a great and holy strength to the Service’s men. And if such power – real or simply imagined – were to be given to all and sundry… as Scarlette said, they now had the Service ‘aux les couilles’.
Shortly afterwards the man was untied, and left to go on his way, picking up his clothes and (as Scarlette records, with her usual rude humour) ‘leaving the House with his tail between his legs’. Scarlette had always considered Lisa-Beth to be a mercenary, but Lisa-Beth knew which way the wind was blowing and by now had become convinced that the Doctor was their only hope of holding back the babewyns. Not only would this performance hopefully stay the Service’s hand, it might also be used as leverage, to ensure the Service’s attendance at the December wedding. The Doctor was said to be ‘delighted’ by this, although he confessed that Lisa-Beth’s methods left him rather puzzled.
Lisa-Beth had proved without doubt which side she was on. More importantly, she’d shown that in spite of insurmountable odds, in spite of public hostility, aristocratic apathy, and the distrust of the thirteen groups on the ‘red list’, the plans of Scarlette and the Doctor could be put into operation. The Service had been cowed, if not exactly brought to heel, and the House still had another seven months in which to bring the other groups around. By this one ritualistic, magical, symbolic act, Lisa-Beth – unlikeliest of soldiers – had proved the war to be worth fighting.
But at roughly the same time, several factors were continuing to complicate matters. Just two floors above, Juliette was showing a kind of initiative that might have both disturbed and appealed to the Doctor. And meanwhile, at Westminster, other events had been set in motion.
The Countess and the Lord
When it came to ritualists, there was no solid line between one lodge and another. The Masons had links with the Service, the Service had links with the Ministers, and the Ministers slept with the black coffee artistes in the bagnios. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that factions would overlap and supposed enemies would find themselves on the same side. Such is politics.
For example, on April 16 the watchmen in charge of the territory just north of the Thames found something suspicious in the inner grounds of Westminster Abbey. It happened in the shadows of the western towers, and the watch had to bring in lamps before they could make sense of the scene, but at the centre of it all was a well-dressed middle-aged man who seemed to be engaged in some form of satanic practice. A circle had been scratched into the stone path around the side of the Abbey building, and inside that circle – the reason the watch had been alerted in the first place – was some species of bloody-snouted ape. The ape was in a fury, tearing and clawing at the air, as if the circle were in some way keeping it confined. Its heavy forelimbs were bleeding, as though it had torn its fingers to shreds ripping at a wall that wasn’t there. The man, meanwhile, looked terrified when the watch appeared and began to blubber that none of this was his fault.
The watch knew when they were out of their depth, and via the ‘gentleman’s network’ of Westminster called in people more qualified. Masonic archives reveal that the first two ‘experts’ called in to attend the scene were Lord _____ and the Countess of Jersey (neither of them are named in the archives, but the Countess at least