London

London

On a damp morning in early June 1814, Lady Honoria Lyndhurst appeared in the drawing room at Hartwell House in dove-grey silk, her voice calm but ironclad: “His Lordship requires your immediate presence at Ravenwood.” Within the hour, the investigators were conveyed to Ravenwood House, where Lord Percival Harcourt waited in his chamber beneath the public rooms. The name Giles Mercer — the actor consumed by the mirror at Drury Lane — had been traced back to a society in London: the Orphean Society at 43 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair. Two Order agents dispatched to investigate had gone silent. Sir Nathaniel Rooke, working under the alias Elias Harker, had vanished from his Limehouse lodgings. Imogen Bellamy, operating as Isabel Grey at the Royal Academy of Music, had not been heard from in ten days. The investigators were to find them, recover their findings, and finish what the agents had begun.

What followed was a two-week investigation across London’s social geography. At the Royal Academy of Music, Georgiana Wentworth confronted the registrar Phineas Lang directly, naming three dead students. The Charm roll failed. Lang’s warmth drained away: “Miss Wentworth, I beg you consider your tone. That is a grave accusation — and a distasteful one at that.” He retreated into bureaucratic defensiveness, though his discomfort betrayed that he suspected something was rotten. Through the Academy the investigators learned of Annika Laughton, a missing mezzo-soprano from Ely. To investigate Rooke’s Limehouse lodgings, the ladies exchanged their silk and muslin for coarse wool and worn shawls, muddied their hems, and carried baskets to pass as charwomen. Augustus Bolt donned a patched greatcoat, flat cap, and scuffed boots, slouching like a labourer. In Soho, the investigators found Clara Fen performing under the name “Anna” at The Laughing Fox coffeehouse and retrieved her songbook from Greaves and Sons pawnshop on Poland Street — a crucial piece of evidence connecting the Orphean Society’s vocal conditioning programme to student deaths.

The trail led to the Orphean Society Building itself. The investigators raided the sub-basement beneath 43 Grosvenor Street, taking out two guards — Walter Baines and Nathan Pryce — on their way in. They found Imogen Bellamy in the cells, weak but lucid. Father Jeremiah Creel, the mad priest in the adjacent cell, was found but deliberately left behind. Then Augustus Bolt entered the Catacoustic Chamber — the back room where the Choir Below were chained to the walls, emaciated, eyeless, their bodies twitching in arrhythmic convulsions as they hummed an endless tuneless song. Augustus killed them all. A mercy. He recovered a tome from the chamber and gave it to one of the ladies. Bellamy was taken to Hartwell House to recover under Order care. Clara Fen was also placed at Hartwell House for treatment.

The investigation next turned to Kensington Coach Stables, where the cult stored equipment and held prisoners for transport. The first attempt to break in failed — the group was chased off. On the second attempt, Augustus Bolt created a distraction at the front gate while Charlotte Thorne and another of the ladies crept in through the back. They observed the Society loading masks and ritual paraphernalia into carriages — the cult was preparing to depart for Stonehenge.

The investigators did not wait. They rode ahead of the cult’s procession to Salisbury, where they went to a local pub and recruited farmers willing to help assault the stone circle. Among the volunteers was a young man, barely more than a boy, who agreed without hesitation. The plan was a two-pronged assault: farmers from one end as a distraction, the investigators from the other. The farmers went in first.

At Stonehenge, on the night of June 12th, the cult erected tuning crucifixes along the solstice axis and lashed their prisoners to the X-shaped frames. Lady Octavia Danforth worked the crucifixes, sacrificing bound prisoners one by one, cutting throats and capturing dying sounds in resonance bowls as she worked her way toward Nathaniel Rooke. Streams of blood arced through the air from the victims toward the centre of the stone ring, where a summoning began to form — a servant of Yog Sothoth, vast luminous eyeballs pressing through reality. Dr Erasmus Hume sang the Canticle and lashed out at the investigators with razor spells; PCs took gunfire and at least one was slashed by Hume’s magic. Marina Garrick ended up directly beneath the forming summoning creature. As the two-pronged assault cut off the ritualists one by one — then Hume, then Danforth — the summoning lost coherence and collapsed, dripping acid onto Marina as it faded.

Most of the farmers died. The young boy died. Hume and Danforth were both killed. The investigators rescued Nathaniel Rooke from the tuning crucifix before Danforth could reach him. They claimed loot from the ritual site, including a tome. The original party — Marina Garrick, Emma Wentworth, Georgiana Wentworth, Charlotte Thorne, and Augustus Bolt — survived intact.

In the aftermath, the investigators were formally inducted into the Order of St Aelfric under Lord Percival Harcourt. Intelligence recovered from the cult — letters between Hume and his counterparts in Lyon, Vienna, and Venice — confirmed a global network. The road south beckoned, toward Lyon and the Société Harmonique de l’Aube.