Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [67]
Of course, 1780 was also the year in which Sabbath had tried to seduce Scarlette, and very nearly succeeded. So, as she sought out Tula Lui, how did Scarlette see this sixteen-year‐old assassin? Did she see the girl as having taken the place Sabbath had marked out for Scarlette herself, and if so, was there a secret element of jealousy present?
It was on July 17, 1782, that Scarlette came the closest she ever came to meeting her ‘replacement’ face-to‐face. She and Lisa-Beth had taken an upstairs room in the region of the Place de Grève, the expense of which had caused some concern to Lisa-Beth. But Scarlette was determined to enjoy the sojourn. Paris, at the time, was a far less industrial city than any of those Scarlette knew: though the French winters were often murderously cold, in summer the skies were a pure and liquid blue that no resident of Covent Garden could have anticipated. Scarlette would spend great lengths of time by the (glassless) window, the shutters open, the sunlight streaming into the soft-wood interior of the building. Scarlette would take deep lungfuls of fresh air while Lisa-Beth would lie on the bed in the background, shaking her head and working on her journals.
In fact, Scarlette’s deep lungfuls of air can’t have been all that pleasant. A non-industrial city is, after all, a city of excrement rather than smog. But Scarlette had practical reasons for standing at the window as well, as she’d already located the third member of the Star Chamber, known in both women’s journals as ‘Johnny Lucifer-in‐Britches’. The room overlooked a thoroughfare between the man’s Parisian home and the wider street to the north, home to the region’s more tasteful boutiques. In the afternoons the man would often be seen strolling along the thoroughfare beneath the window, enjoying the sunshine and regularly being propositioned by the local harlots. Scarlette described them as ‘not at all up to scratch, when you think that this is supposed to be the ville d’amour’.
Whenever he passed by, Lisa-Beth would ask Scarlette whether they shouldn’t follow, in case Tula Lui was close. Scarlette would generally say no, claiming that she’d know, at a glance, when the man would be in danger. Lisa-Beth notes that Scarlette would often fiddle with the seams at the front of her red dress when she said it, as if reaching for the shard of glass that no longer hung there.
On July 17, things were different. On that day, records Scarlette, she ‘saw Johnny Lucifer-in‐Britches passing by and knew his life was in peril’. Exactly what this instinct might have been, Scarlette doesn’t say – no doubt she would have claimed that she could sense the closeness of a Mayakai – but Lisa-Beth was obviously convinced.
Scarlette’s instincts apparently weren’t good enough, though, because five minutes later ‘Johnny’ was as dead as his two comrades in London.
At the junction of the street to the north there was a butcher’s shop, owned by a notorious slaughterman named Brillot. Brillot had achieved some fame in the 1770s for his claim that he could prepare any animal for the table, no matter how small or paltry: the only meat he’d refuse to touch was horse, as he felt it was too ‘common’ and beneath his capabilities. This pride in his work would later rebound on Brillot and bring him close to a lynching when, during the French Revolution, the streets of Paris would fill up with human cadavers and the patently false