Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [38]
Her task was made harder still by the fact that she had ethics. In this respect, Lisa-Beth was right: Scarlette was a relic of the old days, when women of surprising virtue had kept orderly disorderly Houses and thus become some of the wealthiest landowners in England. But the age of the pimp was coming. Organised men would ‘rescue’ poor young girls from the gutters, giving them food and clothing until the only way the girls could pay them back was by selling themselves, quite legally, into the men’s service. Scarlette would never have resorted to these methods, and as the women began to vanish around her she realised the extent of the difficulty.
Shortly after the arrival of Fitz and Anji, a meeting was held in the salon of the House with everyone in attendance. Fitz (dressed in ill-fitting knee-length socks and a waistcoat that was ten years out of fashion already) and Anji (in an old dress of Rebecca’s) looked thoroughly uncomfortable while Scarlette asked the women whether there was anything they wanted to say to her face. Nobody spoke, but a few stared down at their shoes. Even Juliette looked uncertain, perhaps still shaken by the visions she’d had on May Day. Lisa-Beth notes that Scarlette gave Juliette an awkward glance during the long silence, apparently knowing what was waking up inside the girl’s mind.
What was it that had caused the women to be drawn away from House and home? To understand that, it’s necessary to move outside the confines of London and focus on events unfolding in Cambridge, where those two ill-matched investigators – the Countess and the Lord – were continuing to follow up the trail of the Westminster affair.
Ways to Avoid Drowning
Cambridge had always had a morbid reputation, especially the ancient University. In the 1740s the notorious ‘Appalling Club’ had become extinct when its seven founder members had all been slain, one by one, the last few members apparently murdered in a sealed room by the ghosts of the earlier victims. Though all this had been smartly glossed over by the relevant authorities, and the alleged haunted area of the University had been hidden behind a hurriedly-constructed brick wall, Magdalene College was still something of a magnet for those with Masonic connections. If it happened once, went the argument, then how much else could we get away with there?
It was in a set of rooms at Magdalene that the unfortunate Marquis of M_____ was kept, following his discovery at Westminster. Though he wasn’t in prison under the law, as such, the Grand Lodge of Freemasonry had made it clear to him that he wasn’t expected to leave his rooms for fear that the Eye of the Great Architect would be on him. The Masonic sign of the Eye was even posted on his door. He was, in short, deliberately kept in a state of terror while the relevant authorities – as personified by Lord _____, who must surely have kept the red hood on throughout the interrogation – bled him for further information.
The Service also contributed to the interrogation, partly because it wanted to know everything that happened, partly because its archons must have felt shamed that one of their number had slipped through the grasp of the rat-catchers and caused this trouble. It’s from a combination of the Marquis’s statement and the Service’s files, then, that a picture of the frightened man’s mysterious employer emerges.
The agent in question had been indoctrinated into the Service in 1762, during the chaos of the Seven Years’ War, significantly the same year as the apogee of the Hellfire Club. The initiate had shown