Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [33]
These occult troubleshooters have already been described, in part. It’s tempting to think that Lord _____ would have arrived at the Abbey in the same blood-red hood he’d worn to Scarlette’s ball; and that the Countess, another attendee, would have arrived carrying her pipe. An ambitious, manipulative, somewhat vulgar but unquestionably seductive noblewoman, the Countess was known in society for her affiliations with both the more shadowy demi-reps and members of the royal family itself in the future, she was to have a long-lasting affair with the Prince of Wales. Though she never smoked it at respectable society balls – God forbid – when attending the more sinister functions she was usually seen with a pipe, filled with a noxious weed which certainly wasn’t tobacco. It was unladylike, but it was rumoured to induce celestial visions of some form. She despised Scarlette, despite receiving an invitation to the March ball, where many remarked that the blue smoke-rings from the pipe quite wilfully clashed with the colours of the House. (Aptly enough, the Countess was indeed one of the blue-and‐white Whig brigade.)
The ‘lost’ Masonic archive at Musselburgh, Scotland, claims that this seemingly ill-matched pair – who’d apparently worked together before – wasted no time in getting to the bottom of things. The terrified man at the Abbey was a member of the House of Lords, described only as the Marquis of M_____. Both the Lord’s Masonic lodge and the Countess’s inner circle would have known about the babewyn threat, but even they must have been surprised to learn that this Marquis had summoned the ape intentionally. The ritual of summoning is described by the Masons in detail, but it’s incredibly tedious and self-important, involving a variety of pseudo-mystical pentagrams and Greek incantations.
The reason for the Marquis’s attempt to call and bind the ape? Because, he said, he’d been told to. He was in the employ of a higher power. While Lord _____ ‘dispatched’ the babewyn, the Countess demanded to know who or what this power might have been, and with some reluctance the Marquis told her that he believed his employer to be working for the Service.
Wheels within wheels, then. The Countess was convinced that no agent of the Service would do something so risky, particularly not in the occult ‘hot zone’ of Westminster Abbey, whose western towers had after all been designed by the architect Hawksmoor as a monstrous satanic joke. Yet the ritual used to call the beast did seem to have the Service’s po-faced air about it. Both the Countess and the Lord must have realised the implication of this: that a Service ritualist, evidently a powerful and influential one at that, had acted alone for unknown reasons.
There were few things more dreaded then a rogue Serviceman. After all, master-agents were trained not just to be assassins but survivors of almost superhuman talent. Though the minor agents might have been little more than information-gatherers, the top men of the department were trained in all the arts of combat, subterfuge, psychology and mysticism. As disguise was an important element in fieldwork, it was a nigh-impossible task to even find a gifted Serviceman, let alone bring him down. Indeed, there’s some evidence that the great mystique of the Service was really just a control mechanism, a way of balancing the agents, convincing them that they were part of a greater daemonic whole and that to break away from the organisation was to invite the wrath of hell itself, or at least the wrath of True Government. Similar practices had been employed ever since Dee’s experiments with the Enochian language in Elizabethan times, a process best described in modern terms as ‘brainwashing