Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [65]
‘Think of it as an initiation,’ Sabbath had said, probably with that famous half-smile. ‘If you don’t have the power to put your own House in order, then you can hardly have the power to save the whole of the world.’
So Scarlette’s departure to France came at a bad time. Worse, she left immediately before a ‘bloody weekend’. As has already been recorded, the women within the House had all become part of the same lunar cycle, including Anji and Juliette. There was a long weekend in every month in which ‘the House would bleed’, business would be suspended, and much chocolate would be drunk. Fires would be lit in every room after nightfall , the raw flames visible in the windows and making it clear to all passers-by that the building’s blood was up. The occupants of the House tended to shut themselves in their rooms during bloody weekends. The pianoforte in the salon seemed ill-fitting, somehow. Frequently, in the red-lined room on the second floor up, Juliette, Rebecca, Fitz and (sometimes) Anji would sit together around a fire in an incense-bowl that was the only source of light. Rebecca would tell ghost-stories about America, because, by definition, any story told about America was a ghost-story. Often Juliette would fall perfectly silent and stare either into the fire or just at the floorboards, leading Fitz (correctly, or not?) to conclude that she was becoming as sad as the House itself. On one occasion Juliette picked a card at random from a deck of cards, the first time she’d ever let Rebecca make an attempt at reading her fortune. Her future was the Knave of Hearts. Rebecca’s interpretation of this isn’t known.
What Fitz can’t have guessed, at least not in the summer, was that Juliette’s ‘rooting’ to the House was only the first step in a process by which she was to become linked to the planet.
There may have been an element of escape in Scarlette’s decision to go to Paris, but she had good reasons for being there. It had started the week after the Doctor had met Sabbath. A most notable body was found in London: a second turned up fifteen days later. The first body had been found dangling beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge, within sight of the spot where Sabbath’s initiation had taken place, the deceased’s intestines ripped from his body and hung around his neck. It was the traditional method of Masonic execution, for those who betrayed the Brotherhood. The second was found in the river itself, but two miles away from central London. Stones were found in his pockets, though some of the stones had come loose and allowed him to be caught up in the mooring-rope of a boat by the riverbank. The magistrate called to the scene noted the blackly comical detail that ‘a family of small shelled fish had made their home in the space of one nostril, and none who found the unfortunate had the stomach to evict them before burial’.
Both victims were members of the Service, and both belonged to the five-strong Council of the Star Chamber. These were big targets indeed. Although the Council was known in underworld circles to be the nominal leadership of the Service, the truth was that the real heads of the organisation were safely tucked away in obscure offices at Westminster. The five Councillors were purely symbolic figureheads, who carried the vestments of the Service’s occult heritage for all to see. Nonetheless, anybody who attacked the Council was making a bold gesture. When the still-new Prime Minister Rockingham dropped dead on the first day of July leaving the American peace negotiations at an uncertain point, some immediately assumed that it was part of a ruthless attack on the very foundations of the