Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [89]
This was where she suddenly stopped, much to Anji’s surprise. Anji saw no place to take cover, and so just stood still in the middle of the cobbled thoroughfare and waited. She realised that Juliette had stopped because something had caught her eye, and moments later the girl was moving again, heading for an unlit building on the far side of the street which Anji took to be a ‘dressmaker’s shop’ (although no such shop is known to have stood on the site at that point).
The shop was closed, naturally, but the darkness in the windows wasn’t just caused by the lack of light. They were covered on the inside by black, black satin and black cord, the frame strung with black paper blossoms. Though Anji knew nothing of the dream diary, the similarity to the decorations of the ‘black room’ is striking.
More striking still, something had been placed in the doorway of the shop as if to deliberately catch Juliette’s attention. At first, Anji took it to be a human figure, dressed all in black. Only as Juliette grew closer did Anji realise that it was a mannequin. A faceless dressmaker’s doll, and on it hung what was obviously intended to be a wedding dress. But the dress was all in black as well, from its veil to its train.
It was clearly designed to fit Juliette. Anji knew, of course, that Scarlette had ordered a dress for Juliette. But that had been a red dress. Just as the accounts are littered with references to the contrasting White Hart of alchemy and the Black Hart sought by Sabbath, the dress comes across as a counterpoint to the one Juliette was scheduled to wear on her wedding day. Anji reached the obvious conclusion, that this was something to do with the secret teachings of the tantrists, a dark underbelly of which the Doctor knew nothing. The Black House had clearly been put here for the sake of Juliette, by someone who already knew her night-time habits.
The truth of this became evident when, moments later, the door of the shop opened behind the dressmaker’s doll. Juliette stood frozen on the spot, while Anji did her best to shuffle back into the shadows. But the figure on the threshold wasn’t what either of them might have expected. Because standing there, surrounded by the black of the drapes, was a bright-eyed and auburn-haired individual whom Anji already knew by sight. Her name was Emily.
* * *
7
The World
The Blackest of Hearts and the Coldest of Feet
America. In just two short years, the word had come to mean so much.
As has already been mentioned, the Marquis de Sade was the first to describe America as some great amoral colossus, with its guns booming out to the world like thunder. But after 1780 the whole of the western hemisphere was beginning to feel uneasy. To the ritualists and the witch-courtesans of England, America was a gigantic black stain on the world map, a no-go area that might as well have had ‘here be tygers’ scrawled across its landmass. The very name made them think of the purges of Matthew Crane; of the witch-hunts of Salem, still influencing the country after all these years; of Paul Revere riding his famous horse (metaphorically, of course) over the bodies of marked Englishwomen; of blackened and bloodied trees, hung with the corpses of those sacrificed to the new world of Washington, Jefferson and Adams.
Yet anyone visiting Virginia in 1782, as summer turned to autumn, would have found quite a different scene. By this point the War of the Revolution was over in all but name. The skies over Virginia were as blue as they had been in the days of Columbus, and the only thing disturbing the earth was the rhythm of the slaves in the tobacco fields. The houses had been repainted, in purest Protestant white, as if each one were a prototype of the big pale house which would one day stand in Washington. The wind would blow through the