Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [45]
Part of the Doctor’s rationale for sending Juliette with Fitz was that it could hardly have hurt her to spend more time with other human beings, or at least very minor elementals, before being permanently bound to him in December. Also, it gave him the opportunity to complete some tasks of his own. He’d already sent the invitation out to his ‘Family’, and now he was busy trying to find a priest who’d agree to the wedding ceremony – it was quite vital that the marriage should be legally binding, as well as symbolic – not to mention having to decide who was going to be his best man. If he saw any problems in Juliette spending so much time with Fitz, then he obviously didn’t let it bother him.
The Masonic Account
The chalk circle on the floor of the Cambridge rooms was drawn there mere days before Fitz’s visit. Those responsible were the Countess and the Lord.
On their last day of interrogating the Marquis of M_____, the two arcanists had finally cut through enough of the Marquis’s babble to uncover the reason he’d summoned an ape at Westminster. The ape wasn’t simply to have been called, it was to have been bound: the implication was that the Marquis had been attempting to gain control of the beast rather than just setting it free to cause havoc. When the Lord asked his contacts in the Grand Lodge to examine the ceremony, the Masons concluded that it had been phrased in Greek simply because the Marquis happened to be familiar with that language. In fact the ‘workings’ of the ritual were quite original and in no way ancient, the summoning designed for maximum efficiency… engineered, one might say.
Until recently, those tantrists who’d noticed the presence of the apes had concluded that some form of ‘natural’ phenomenon was the cause. No individual, as Scarlette herself pointed out, could possibly move the horizon and cause demons to appear in the world: even the summoning at Westminster would have seemed impractical, even silly, a few years earlier. Now the Countess and the Lord were faced with the possibility that the ape manifestations were an attack. Those who’d read the Kama Sutra in its Sanskrit form knew that the book was a manual of spells as much as it was a list of sexual tactics, and knew that (unlike the early English translation produced at Medmenham) the original continually hinted at the ‘demons’ which could be brought forth by malice or carelessness. Though Sabbath wasn’t believed to be vengeful – he was thought to have his own agenda, and to regard the Service as a trivial distraction rather than a sworn enemy – it must have worried many to think that the rogue agent might want to get his own back on those parties who had, on at least two occasions, tried to assassinate him.
As they moved through the halls of Cambridge, one with a crimson hood over his face and the other with her pipe still in her mouth, the Lord and the Countess must have asked themselves why apes, rather than any other kind of beast, should be anyone’s weapon of choice. But the details weren’t as important as the implications. Because if Sabbath was now capable of summoning and binding the demons, then anybody was.
There were protocols of the highest importance, amongst the Servicemen, amongst the Masons and amongst the various British witch-cults, forbidding any of their number to deliberately upset the balance of the ritualist community. Most of these protocols were utterly ignored when, in the middle of May, the Countess and the Lord transferred the Marquis of M_____ to the rooms which had once been occupied by Sabbath. It was a place of power, and if the two investigators wanted to see the beast tamed then this was the best place for it. The Service may have joined forces with the Lodge in this. The agents of the King had very little else to do, now that all British military operations in America had been officially suspended.
The Marquis was led into the old