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By Root 387 0

skinny. Unlike Lisa-Beth, she was tall, and spindly rather than muscular. Her long hair was bunched at her neck, her lips were a tight little ‘w’‐shape, and resting on her (depressingly small) nose was a pair of spectacles. The fact that an obvious demi-rep might be wearing spectacles was surprising enough in itself, but the frames around the glass looked as light and as fine as cheese-wire. They rested halfway down the bridge of the nose, giving the woman a slightly upper class look that she obviously didn’t deserve. She turned to look at Lisa-Beth in a fairly unconcerned fashion, and that was when Lisa-Beth recognised her.

Her name’s Rebecca. She works at Scarlette’s House. The spectacles, something of a selling-point in the bagnio culture of Covent Garden, were said to be Italian: but then, everything fine and delicate and fragile-looking was said to be Italian.

Lisa-Beth narrowed her eyes.

‘What are you doing in my house?’ she asked.

Rebecca shrugged, and wrinkled her nose in a way that the majority of London’s gentlemen would have paid extra for. This irritated Lisa-Beth, not least because the gesture was so completely natural.

‘I think you should come and see Scarlette,’ said Rebecca. ‘Before you summon anything else.’

That was when the woman glanced at the bed. Which, in turn, was when Lisa-Beth realised what she’d been covering up with the sheet.

* * *

HISTORY

‘In its rites, representation of a deity in union with his consort was used to express this religious realisation… taken literally, it could lead to rejection of celibacy and ascetic morals.’

– Coilier’s Encyclopaedia, on the subject of tantra.

* * *

1

The House

The March Snow

It was, of course, in 1782 that the infamous Duchess of Devonshire made her comment about the ‘secret springs of events’, almost a whole year before she herself was to prevent the fall of the entire British administration simply by knowing how to flirt with the Prince of Wales properly. Had London society known the ‘causes little imagined’ behind the events of that year, then the Great Fireball of 1783 might have seemed like an even greater omen of doom. To understand the real history of the events leading up to the Siege of Henrietta Street, it’s probably best to start with the ball that was held there on March 20, 1782, long before the Siege itself: a ball which, incidentally, would see the society debut of a young lady who stood on the verge of a truly remarkable transformation.

Scarlette can’t have chosen the date of the ball by accident. It was effectively the day the British government fell, the day the old Prime Minister, wounded and shuffling after the defeat of the British army in Virginia, finally faced the House of Commons and announced that he had no option but to step down while he still had his sanity (unlike the King, some would have said, who’d done everything possible to keep the American War going even when it was clearly suicidal to do so… nonetheless, it’d be another six years before George III would lose his mind completely and attempt to throttle his own son over the dinner table). It snowed that March evening: spring was a colder time then. True, the ball must have been arranged well before Prime Minister North’s announcement, but predicting the end of British civilisation as the world knew it – because that final, crushing acknowledgement that the American colonists had won proved once and for all that the King’s power was no longer as absolute as history had believed – can’t have been hard. Particularly for a woman who claimed to have at least one visionary, one prophetess, under her roof.

So it seems likely that Scarlette planned the ball as a kind of funeral. The North administration had overseen the tea fiasco in Boston; the defeat of the British at the hands of General Washington; the banishment of all Scarlette’s ‘tribe’ from the Americas; and the death of the courtesan-cum‐sorceress colloquially known as ‘the Queen of New York State’. Scarlette must have intended the ball to bury all the memories of the previous twelve months.