Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [87]
It’s important to remember that Sabbath wasn’t a reactionary, because if anything he was quite the reverse. He was a progressive: so progressive that he didn’t even consider normal human concerns to be worth bothering with. His ship was a testament to the new industrialism, decades ahead of its time. On the other hand, in most of Europe there was a fashion for the philosophy known as ‘sensibility’. Thanks to writers like the late Rousseau, there was an increasing desire to return to a golden, mythical age of Eden. Sabbath would have been contemptuous of such trends, but a copy of Rousseau’s memoirs found its way into his library nonetheless. Sabbath must have been amused by the descriptions of the ‘morally pure’ author’s interest in masochism, his involvement in a scandalous society menage a trois, his massive paranoid streak and his tendency to call all his lovers ‘mother’. Such was the way of the morally pure.
But there was a definite edge of Rousseau-style ‘sensibility’ in the beliefs of Scarlette. Perhaps it’s not surprising, given her Hellfire upbringing, that she tended to look back to a golden age when courtesans were glamorous and the world rang with rumours of the Monks of Medmenham. It was a tendency that, intentionally or not, ended up being passed on to Juliette, the ‘Virgin of Spring’. Although back in London, Juliette was just starting to take steps which almost seemed deliberately planned to change that fate, or at least subvert it.
On August 21, Juliette climbed out of bed in the early hours of the morning and once again walked down into the salon. This time she was wide awake, and left her room by her own volition. This time she dressed, though only in her simplest clothes (no red or black), and quietly slipped out of the House.
She’d decided that she had business elsewhere. What she didn’t realise was that she’d been seen.
Anji had been distrustful of Juliette ever since May. Her suspicions, later recorded by Lisa-Beth, were further aroused after Katya’s argument with Scarlette. Anji noticed that following the argument, Juliette began to spend more and more time with Fitz: not simply talking, but communicating in a way that bordered on the flirtatious. This didn’t seem at all in character for Juliette, and Anji was apparently reminded of the way in which the women of the House would banter with their clients before discussing money.
Had Juliette been trying to seduce Fitz? It’s not impossible. However, it’s more likely that Juliette was testing out her social skills, seeing whether she could deal with men the way her elders in the House did. Fitz seems to have been quite uncomfortable with this new, laughing, tactile version of Juliette. It’s easy to get the impression that he liked the attention, but didn’t know what to do with it. Anji grew resentful, so it’s at least feasible she was jealous.
So Anji was awake and alert when Juliette had her ‘waking dream’, and followed the girl, at a discreet distance, as she left the House. And Anji later made one final significant observation about Juliette’s preparations. She noted that once Juliette had slipped on her shift in the moonlit bedroom, she took Scarlette’s glass charm from the dressing table to hang around her neck. Then she paused, took it off again, and put it back in its place.
The suggestion is that Juliette felt it was time for her to use her own weapons.
Anji was still following her, at half a street’s length, when Juliette arrived at Cranbourn Street. This was a street to the west of Covent Garden, which had no real reputation but was often haunted by drunks and other ‘gentlemen’ in the small hours of the morning. Anji watched as Juliette made her way down the cobbled streets, in the yellow light that must have filled the pavements from the few lamps still lit. There may have been prostitutes working on the street, though it was common in Covent Garden for women of the night to hunt in packs rather than alone, so they would have